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Software And The Death of Privacy
"I am not the first to point out that capitalism, having defeated communism, now seems about to do the same to democracy. The market is doing splendidly, yet we are not."
--- Ian Frazier, "On the Rez."
All week, we visit Web sites, Weblogs, mailing lists; we download software, buy books, check out movie reviews, visit news sites, order vitamins and DVDs; download MP3s; go to chat rooms; check in on ICQ, AIM. Each time, some program is tracking our every move, compiling elaborate marketing profiles, often collating the information with vast databases and selling the resulting information without our knowledge.
Privacy, as most of us have come to understand the idea, is over.
Except to the Unabomber or to a handful of Luddites living in the desert, the idea that we can keep our personal, financial and other information from corporations and governments is as outdated as the idea that the movie industry can jail all the people helping themselves to DeCSS software.
A growing array of software makes much of our individual behavior trackable - what we buy, what we read, where we visit, how we get our information. Companies that produce and deliver banner ads can track your clicks from site to site across the Web. They can cross-reference your personal ID with records listing your name, address, telephone number, e-mail, purchasing and browsing habits.
Amazon.com has pioneered recognition software programs that compile individuals' tastes and choices over time, a technology that's been adopted by supermarkets and hardware stores, who recognize us the minute they swipe our credit cards or take our telephone numbers.
ISPs (like AOL) and portals and search engines can record which chat rooms you enter, what news pages you read, what pages you've bookmarked.
Most Americans have no idea that marketers can store their user IDs in cookie files and track their movements so precisely and comprehensively. Were a government to attempt this, politicians and civil libertarians would explode in righteous fury. But when done this gradually, technologically, out of sight and in incremental, software-driven steps, it simply creates an astonishing new social reality: Those of us who go online regularly (this year, that will be more than 130 million people) no longer have a voluntarily zone of privacy.
None of us any longer has any clear idea just how much personal information about us has been gathered, or who might have acquired or stored it. Nor is it possible to imagine all the future circumstances - applying for jobs, graduate school or government grants; fending off a lawsuit, running for political office; tangling with a law enforcement agency or court - in which this information might haunt us or be wielded against us. In the name of marketing and writing cool software, we've voluntarily surrendered one of the most important human rights. (See USA Today story on DoubleClick, Web-tracking and Slashdot.)
No national politician has made the death of privacy a major political issue, nor is any congressional committee investigating it. The truth is, it's no longer an issue; privacy in the traditional sense doesn't exist anymore. In a world where we're all increasingly dependent on networked computing for work, banking, music, movies, research and personal communications, it's unlikely ever to return.
Privacy has historically been considered a fundamental element of individual liberty. Thomas Jefferson argued repeatedly that privacy from governmental or other intrusion into personal lives (he had British soldiers in mind) was a basic human right. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas wrote that "the right to be left alone is the beginning of all freedom." Said political philosopher Jean Cohen: "A constitutionally protected right to privacy is indispensable to any modern conception of freedom."
The death of privacy has been so relentless, indirect and unintended, however, as to have gone virtually unnoticed. Reporters routinely pry into the most intimate details of the lives of public figures. Computers were collecting personal data on individuals even before the Net and the Web. Spy satellites overhead collect pinpoint photographs; government technicians pull cell and wireless calls out of the air; and police forces can even trace our auto trips as we pass through digitalized toll booths.
Since the use of the Net and Web is, increasingly, no longer an option but a necessity, we surrender our privacy --- usually unknowingly. Every time we go online, some marketer learns a bit more about us or our families.
According to the Interagency Financial Institution Web Site Privacy Survey, conducted by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), all of the 50 largest financial institutions online collect three or more pieces of personal or demographic information about users. The FDIC says that only eight of the 50 largest institutions meet minimal privacy data standards. That is, they fail to explain what data is being collected, allow consumers to opt out, permit access to the information, provide secure storage for the data, and provide customers a way to contact the company regarding privacy issues.
Last week, American Demographics magazine reported that new "data-mining" tools being deployed in food markets are promising to track frequent-shopper behavior both in and out of the store. The magazine reported that 46% of Americans now "swipe and save", that is, they use frequent shopper cards and programs. These digital cards are used to store customer gender, identify and age, and preferences in everything from hygiene products to junk food. They are then sold or traded for information from databases gathered by other businesses. In this way, companies can gather increasingly detailed portraits of almost everyone who uses a bank, credit or other money card, all now digitalized.
In his book "Code; and Other Laws of Cyberspace," Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Lessig argues that the Internet will be regulated shortly, but not in the way we've feared. "Left to itself, cyberspace will become a perfect tool of control, not by the government, but by software programmers helping to track our every move."
Important aspects of privacy will be erased, he warns. Password - driven software will one day demand payment for every individual reader action, from copying a paragraph to reading something more than once. Free browsing, sharing and quoting from online works will be eliminated. This will also, Lessig warns, inhibit free speech. Once Net users realize that companies like America Online can trace their movements and tailor on-screen advertising to match their habits, people will increasingly be conscious of what they say and where they say it.
If so, the future Lessig foresees will catch most Netizens (including this one) off-guard, especially the belief that copyright and intellectual property can't really be preserved as the Net and the Web grow. We haven't come to grips with the idea that the technologies most of us see as liberating are destroying our privacy.
With the collapse of Communism, which featured powerful stage agencies like the KGB and the Stasi which gathered vast amounts of personal data on citizens, the idea of brutally repressive political systems already seems remote. For better or worse, national politicians in the United States bitterly compete with one another to see who can define government in the cheapest and narrowest way. Marketers are taking advantage of this comparatively benign political period to take until-recently unimaginable liberties with our personal freedoms. So far, the corporations collecting this information have seemed relatively discreet, especially compared to brutal governments. If you pay careful attention to the Spam you get online, it's sometimes possible to see who's collecting just what kind of information about you.
And increasingly, even these image-conscious companies show their teeth. Free music sites are being shut down; a Norwegian teenager gets hauled off to the police station for allegedly violating restrictions on DVD programming code.
As for governments, the geeks and nerds who've grown up on the Net have encountered almost comically clueless ones. When it comes to repression - as in the Communications Decency Acts and Congressional votes requiring the Ten Commandments in schools - our government has been about as knowing and menacing as the Three Stooges. It's easy to understand why people struggle to take it seriously. But that hasn't always been the case. Personal privacy is a monumental safeguard against abuse of governmental authority. The distance between corporate and government computers is a very short one.
For a malevolent government - the kind Jefferson worried about, and the reason the Bill of Rights was crafted in the first place - it would be radically simple to figure out who the "troublemakers" are, what forbidden books they bought, or what politically unacceptable movies they viewed (they wouldn't have to go much further than AOL/Time-Warner). Access to this kind of information ought not be passed around among corporations. If citizens wish to give up their privacy, they obviously have the right to do so. But they ought to be given a choice. Shockingly, it's already too late for that.
This issue now permeates almost every level of American society. In the name or preventing violence, schools use computer software programs to gather information on potentially "violent" students, kids that teachers find disturbing or alarming. No one knows where this data goes - presumably to law enforcement authorities, where it remains in secret digital files for life.
The tragedy of technology is that we refuse, as a society, to consider its implications, from fertility drugs and genetic research to artificial intelligence to supercomputing.
While our political, educational and media institutions focus obsessively on exaggerated or meaningless issues like the spread of sexual imagery, or invoke the undocumented specter of media violence, larger and more fundamental issues like the loss of privacy go largely undiscussed.
Thus hard-won values slip away without much national discussion or debate. This genie is probably never going back into the bottle. Given the epidemic spread of data-tracking software, it's hard to imagine we'll ever have "the right to be left alone" again.
Esther Dyson isn't the most popular person among a lot groups on the net but she does have a lot to say on this topic. Her big idea about privacy on the net is to turn it into a commodity, something that has value to you and to corporations. The only way I see that we can keep our information private is to make it more valuable to a company not to sell our data that to sell it. Companies that are responsible with our data should be rewarded for it, those that flagrantly sell us out to other companies should be punished by fines ( government intervention!) or by losing sales. Contrary to what a lot of people believe, corporations don't have any agenda when collecting our data than making money. If they can make money by customizing our "experience," they'll do it. If they can make money by selling our data, they'll do that too. The only thing that will stop the collection/selling of data we don't want them to have is to make it financially bad for them to do so.
I haven't seen any companies willing to publish what they do with our data, perhaps that should be the law? Any ideas?
Premature, for sound-bite effect.
Privacy CAN exist on the Internet, as it stands. It's very, very easy.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Every TV show I watch is recorded and sent back to AT&T.
The company I work for knows when I come in and when I leave.
My bank knows where I go when I leave town.
The phone company knows who my friends are and where they live.
If I had a cellphone, like everyone else in this city seems to, the phone company would know where I was at all times.
If I used a cable-modem, they would know which websites I visited and when.
Privacy isn't dead?
-Mars
The problem is: how many net users fall under the definition of "knowledgeable"?
We Slashdot users have a sort of tunnel vision in this subject, because most of us know what cookies are for, how can they be used, etc., so we tend to see this as less of a problem than what it actually is. But go out and ask the average citizen who just installed AOL and "just wants to use this net stuff". Their browsers have cookies activated, and they don't even know it. Nor they care. And they are currently the majority of the users.
And the same could be applied to many other technologies that one couldn't even imagine (not just cookies), over which we have much less control. For example, cell phones. (Disgression: some years ago the chechenian leader Dudayev (sp?) was killed by a russian missile while talking on a cell phone with Moscow authorities to discuss a possible peace treaty. When it happened, most media published that Dudayev had been traced "thanks to his cell phone"... and yet nobody made a big deal about it. Every newspaper seemed to treat the fact that They can trace you thanks to a cell phone as something completely natural. If that's what you can expect from the media that is supposedly responsable of educating the public...)
Isn't that rather inconsiderate towards the person running the FTP server? They would like to know your address so that they can contact you if you're hogging bandwidth or otherwise messing up the server for other users. You could create a new address just for this purpose, of course. But realistically, how many FTP sites are collecting addresses for spam or marketing anyway?
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
The fact that companies don't get info on us 100 per cent correctly is besides the point. For one thing, they're getting better all the time. Does their info have to be 100 per cent correct before it becomes a problem?
Knowledgeable people shouldn't have to take steps to protect privacy that is constitutionally guaranteed them...And people who are not knowledgeable, which is still most Americans when it comes to the Net, have no way of protecting themselves. I think we can do a lot about it, BTW.But that's not for me to dictate.
jonkatz@slashdot.org
The idea expressed above, that we can all protect our privacy if only we wish it to be so, is definitely junior high level..But I love the name Captain Obvious. It works.
jonkatz@slashdot.org
after an incident w/ a rental apt where, naturally, the owners can snoop around your privates - I had to buy a house, you can have all the privacy you want, pull the shades, don't create any unusual outside spectacles and your all set. The 'online' world may be different but you just have to be careful what you do online just like you would in a public park or mall, email is like having a conversation in a pub that can be overheard, unless you use the Cone of Silence
Agent 32
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Technology is a tool. And its becoming an ever increasingly powerful tool. Yes, the corporations are using it to their ends, often times illegal and constricting. But we have been able to use it to ours as well.
DeCSS - Sure, there was a biased and illegal interpretation of law to suit the MPAA. But did that mean an end to its dissemination? No, in fact, it had quite the opposite effect. This was due to the net and the power of one in this medium.
Technology will always be used for a variety of purposes, only some of which will be good, only some of which you will enjoy or approve of. But technology will always be in your hands as well. If there was ever a time when a single person, or a small active group could have a wide impact and audience, IT IS NOW. And this will only increase.
MAKE YOURSELF HEARD
The key to this new power and influence IS the individual. Dont wait for a non profit organization with your beliefs to crop up, fighting for freedom or against corporate or government ills. Start a list serv, make a site, sign petitions, search the web for resources that you could contribute to.
If you want to see change happen, the web is the best place to start. It is your information resource, and your medium to communicate with millions on a level basis.
Wake up people, not only has government and corporate power increased. Yours has too.
Use it.
I've been thinking about reviewing Database Nation for Slashdot, along with Whit Diffie and Susan Landau's Privacy on the Line, which I consider mandatory reading. If someone else reviews them here before me, that would be fine.
One important book which was ahead of its time is Oscar Gandy's The Panoptic Sort (Westview Press 1993). This is also well worth reading as a socio/political overview of these issues. The Panopticon, as you'll recall, was Jeremy Bentham's notion of a circular prison with a central guard tower from which all activity in every cell could be watched constantly.
Gandy writes:
The panoptic sort is the name I have assigned to the complex technology that involves the collection, processing, and sharing of information about individuals and groups that is generated through their daily lives as citizens, employees, and consumers and is used to coordinate and control their access to the goods and services that define life in the modern capitalist economy.
The panoptic sort is a system of disciplinary surveillance that is widespread but continues to expand its reach. The operation of the panoptic system is guided by a generalized concern with rationalization of social, economic, and political systems. The panoptic sort is a difference machine that sorts individuals into categories and classes on the basis of routine measurements. It is a discriminatory technology that allocates options and opportunities on the basis of those measures and the administrative models that they inform . . . The panoptic sort is a system of actions that governs other actions. The panoptic sort is a system of power.
This is only the general thesis of the book; Gandy goes well beyond the usual ivory-tower theorizing to talk about practicalities in government and commercial use of databases and other technology. It's a useful companion to the books by Garkinfel and Diffie and Landau, who unfortunately seem unaware of Gandy's pioneering analysis.
-------
Bill Gates Is My Evil Twin.
...long before software began to hasten its death.
The death of privacy has been so relentless, indirect and unintended, however, as to have gone virtually unnoticed. Reporters routinely pry into the most intimate details of the lives of public figures.
That's right. And reporters were prying into those most intimate details long before there were computers or the web or to make their job easier.
Economic reality, not software, has made possible the death or privacy. If something - say f'rinstance the intimate details of peoples' lives - become valuable, people, governments, and corporations will try to obtain it, and then use or sell it. In the past, one had to be famous before details of ones private life became valuable. But the privacy-killing forces were still at work. They've just grown to the point where they affect damn near anyone who buys or sells anything.
This may be true in the US, but in some other countries privacy is still respected (like countries in the European Union.)
There are several fundemental differences in the cultural environment between the US and Europe that contributed to the demise of privacy:
* US = extreme paranoia by the government that extremist states will attack (Iraq, Cuba, etc.) This has contributed to the lack of strong encryption here
* US = no clearly defined constitutional right to privacy
Unless these are changed I feel that the US may become the most restrictive country in the world.
US businesses that currently accept chip and PIN/signature
This is all good advice in general, but a lot of it is irrelevant to the ways that modern corporations keep tabs on us. Encrypting all of your data -- via PGP, IPsec, SSH, or what-have-you -- is a smart thing to do but doesn't really interfere with the traffic that marketers watch. It doesn't alter your demographic profile or your click-through trail.
Moreover, marketers are already using other tricks to find out who you are. DoubleClick tracks you with a cookie every time you load one of their images. You don't even need to click through the ads for them to know who you are.
A modified list, focusing on how to stay anonymous to corporate interests:
It's not actually that easy. It is often difficult to get information that you need by registering a user account on a vendor's web site, or creating a big pile of cookies, or running some JavaScript applet, or doing something else to give up your identity. Tools like Cookie Monster and JunkBusters make it easier. But it's not easy.
The lack of privacy is not so much a problem as is it's nasty brother; identity theft.
If you ever wanted to make somones life living hell, steal their identity, raun up a bunch of bills and then watch them squirm the rest of their life.
This has happened to people all over the United States and they are having a terrible time try to put their lives back together...
Years ago 60 Minutes did a story about privacy.
They got a man and wife to give all their cancelled checks for one year to a private investigator.
The PI loved it, he wished he could get that detailed information on all cases.
Does your bank return cancelled checks?
Corporations may mostly be treated as themselves people, but I have to agree with most of the logic that dictates that result -- there are practical and sensible reasons why corporations should have things like standing to sue and pay taxes and the like, and there is actually plenty of English precedent stemming from partnership law in doing so -- indeed, after all, in a sense, the first European settlers of the Americas were corporations). While corporations are especially moneyed, they don't in fact vote, and if the rest of voting America lets themselves get ridden roughshod, that's something within their power to change. Privacy violations are wrong whether committed by individuals or groups of individuals.
And at least corporations are composed of actual people. As for the personification of natural features, who is to say whether it would actually level the playing field away from corporations? Who is to say whether the marsh would or would not rather be developed into a condominium? Surely the marsh can't speak for itself, and why should we favor the opinion of the environmentalists over the developers? Why should we assume that the marsh would favor preservation instead of development? Perhaps the marsh sees development in the same way a human child sees accademic development; surely we shouldn't let children remain ignorant, so why not marshes? Maybe they don't like being so smelly.
My belabored point there is that changing the principles of standing according to Douglas's proposal wouldn't actually benefit the legal system any. We'd just be back to square one where we try to figure out which of two competing human interests should be favored.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
I don't expect Katz to get things like this correct, but the quote that he mistakenly attributes to Justice Douglas ought to be correctly attributed to Justice Brandeis (in Olmstead v. US):
The protection guaranteed by the Amendments is much broader in scope. The makers of our Constitution undertook to secure conditions favorable to the pursuit of happiness. They recognized the significance of man's spiritual nature, of his feelings and of his intellect. They knew that only a part of the pain, pleasure and satisfactions of life are to be found in material things. They sought to protect Americans in their beliefs, their thoughts, their emotions and their sensations. They conferred, as against the Government, the right to be let alone -- the most prehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men. To protect that right, every unjustifiable intrusion by the Government upon the privacy of the individual, whatever the means employed, must be deemed a violation of the Fourth Amendment.
Yes, Douglas used Olmstead to support his landmark Griswold v. Connecticut decision, but to allow that fact to transfer the authorship of this quote would be the same as allowing me to usurp Neil Armstrong's "giant leap for mankind" quote by quoting him when I myself step onto the moon decades later (what an interesting prospect!).
As for Douglas, while I appreciate many of his authored or concurring decisions, there were times when he behaved either repugnantly (Hirabayashi v. US: Japanese-American internment camps are A-OK!) or terminably sillily (Sierra Club v. Morton: Rivers and streams and mountains ought to have standing conferred onto them so that they themselves can sue people in court -- the ultimate (and misguided) form of personification).
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
John Walker's UnicardUnicard: Ubiquitous Computation, Global Connectivity, and the End of Privacy discusses how a variety of technological trends are converging to make possible a world in which privacy no longer exists. It argues that in most cases privacy is not taken away from individuals by governments and corporations, but is rather willingly relinquished in exchange for convenience and/or perceived security, and that the apparent benefits of these new technologies will be so compelling that resisting their adoption, or demanding that they are implemented in an inherently secure manner, will be a difficult challenge.
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
That wasn't a troll, it was a simple statement of fact. I saw the expression on the Andover.net executives as the Slashdot AC's were being discussed at a 'Linux Publicity' session at The Bazaar. They were basically gritting their teeth in support of CT&&Hemos. Kind of like "Why, oh why oh why do we let CT&&Hemos put up with these assholes?"
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
209.207.224.40 - - [2/Feb/2000:13:33:59 -0500] "GET /pr0n/favicon.ico HTTP/1.1" 404 217
I can track that IP address, and know who bookmarked the pr0n.
Mr. Pierce said it wasn't easy, I think that his point is that it's possible. If there's demand, the market will make privacy easier. I think that there's demand and investors seem to agree. A good thing, IMO, because I strongly doubt that regulators would also agree.
:)
Professor David Post wrote "What Larry Doesn't Get: A Libertarian Response to Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace" just recently. It's quite a good read*.
While it hasn't gotten nearly the net.hype Professor Lessig's work did (Post is not from Hahvahd, after all, I think he's from Temple) but I think it's well-done. (I'd be interested in any Lessig rebuttals to that Post rebuttal, though.)
JMR
* I assume that my mention of the dreaded "L. word" will cause downward moderation, and I also don't care.
Try e-gold - (contact me). I'm NOT e-
Yes; that's one reason we have an advanced civilization and they had a primitive one.
What we do need is reciprocal transparency - we need to know what corporations, governments, and the Men In Black are up to.
Sure, and I need a warp-speed runabout that fits in a parking space, a couple of babes Jello-wrestling for my affections, and the missing lines of Coleridge's "Kubla Khan". That doesn't mean that I base my plans around the expectation of getting them.
Get out there and videotape someone important.
Enjoy the resulting harassment, problems at work, tax audits, etc. resulting from the inevitable government abuse of the information-gathering capabilities you endorse.
And for a more interesting view on privacy, check out David Brin's The Transparent Society - worth a million Katz articles.
Only if you're one of the many on Slashdot (not quite including myself) who considers Katz articles to be worthless if not downright detrimental.
As was pointed out at great length and detail in previous /. threads, Brin displayed profound clue deprivation concerning counter-surveillance tech and the unwillingness of governments to abide by the laws they make for the rest of us.
/.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
They've done a good job of camoflaging their prisons.
/.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
People want the freedom to engage in any peaceful (definition: not infringing upon the rights of others) activities, privacy, and security. There is nothing at all contradictory about this; for obvious reasons, non-peaceful activities are inherently non-private, as the victim (or his friends) will find out about them from their direct impact.
This somebody moderated up as "insightful"?
/.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
This is a tired, tired, old rant and it isn't even that old. The simple fact is that there are all sorts of ways to avoid the tracking activities that commercial web sites foist on their "visitors". A entirely new wave of agent-based applications is about to hit the marketplace and all of the schemes and plans that the advertisers have constructed around Web browsers is about to get tossed out the window.
Anyone that thinks the net has stopped evolving and the Web browser is the pinnacle of the information food chain is sorely mistaken. The economics of the entire Internet are about to be upset radically by software that puts end users back in control of the information flow on the net. Until now, they've only had meager tools like Web browsers to work with. Once everyones' desktop includes some peer to peer software, strong agent capabilities, and richer media formats, the whole click and surf metaphor will be dead. And it'll take all the spammers, advertisers, profilers, and cookie vendors along with it.
Just wait and see. And in the meantime, please stop playing this broken "privacy-is-dead" record. It's simply feel-good fear mongering on your part, since it isn't really true.
Shut up and eat your vegetables!!!
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Do you really think that all these companies are dumb enough to spend millions on advertizing that doesn't influence buying? Forget it. The ad companies even have a target demographic for people who think they're too smart for advertizing to affect them.
We are programed by our genes and by our environment, nothing else. Every bit of information that goes into your mind programs it a little bit. You have the opportunity to choose your programming; choose carefully.
Suggested further reading: Adbusters.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
The military-industrial complex has grown into the government-megacorporate complex. It's getting impossible to tell where one ends and the other starts.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
The Risks Digest frequently covers issues related to this. The latest issue contains a brief comment on Simson Garfinkel's new book, Database Nation: The Death of Privacy in the 21st Century published by O'Reilly & Associates. The PRIVACY Forum is also an excellent resource on issues of privacy and technology.
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Sure, companies have made an attempt to track us, but it is quite obvious that they haven't gotten things 100% correct, or else they'd know not to target me with ads about stuff I don't want. ^_^
Incidentally, that is why I always deny a cookie when I don't know what it is for, especially when it is obviously coming from the Add Banner Script.
There are steps a knowledgeble person can take to prevent too much information, besides what we wish to give, out. Also, Doubleclick looks like it might be about to face several lawsuits for invasion of privacy.
Our privacy is still protected, if we are willing to stand up and fight for it.
This "woe is us, we can't do jack about it" from Katz is exactly the wrong attitude to have. We need to actively fight it by doing everything in our power to shield ourselves. Not whining about it.
"You ever have that feeling where you're not sure if you're dreaming or awake?"
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
Would there be a way that a large bunch of people could set up automatic ways of dumping so much noise into the marketing databases that it would make keeping such databases worthless?
Of course, the really potentially damaging databases are the ones which the government keeps on you (and seems to be willing to make available to anybody that asks). I guess the only recourse for that is legal.
> Perhaps a start is to not do business online
> with companies that don't have clearly stated
> privacy policies...
And what exactly does that mean?
Anyone can write up a privacy policy. noone
is ever going to say in big letters "Give us
your buisness and we will resell your information"
The question is whether they do it or not. If
I do buisness with companies X Y Z and then
suiddenly start getting adds in the mail from
company W...how do I know who spilled the beans?
Recently I discovered that my own bank is selling
my contact info. i found out when due to a mixup
at the bank, my fathers mailing adress got changed
to be the same as mine (dunno how they did that)
and I started getting his account statments.
Shortly after..,.I began recieving credit card
advertisments in his name, at my adress.
Now I am sure that if I call my bank they will
have a "privacy statment" and will swear that they
do not sell the names of their customers. However,
I KNOW they do.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
> As to my store club cards - I've got the cards,
> but I don't fill out the applications
I don't even bother...
lately when I goto the store (Star Market usullay)
when the cashier asks if I have a card...I say
no...
then she picks up her own card and scans it!
Has happend several times from several cashiers.
I don't know if they are suposed to do it but...
they do.
I get the savings...they don't get my name.
oh...and I pay in cash.
-Steve
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
The transition from loss of privacy to impacting your life is a process:
1) Someone must gather information about you. The fourth amendment used to have some meaning here, but fear of crime, drugs, terrorism, Russians, not collecting taxes, etc. has given the government much more power to investigate, track, search, and seize. Also, passive surveillance in the name of safety, productivity, and marketing has become part of the landscape, online or not. We must assert the right to not be recorded or reviewed by *anyone* without our *uncoerced* permission or a warrant.
2) This information must have the potential of affecting how you live your life. Your phone number and email address don't really count. Your buying habits, credit history, social security number, salary, medical history, and day-to-day movements certainly do. We must assert our right to withhold information that is not required to do the business at hand.
3) Someone with the power to use the information to impact your life must obtain it. What is most infuriating is the literally hundreds of dollars paid for information about me, that is never paid to me, and worse, is paid to those who I entrust to keep it private (the state DMV, my bank, my credit card provider, etc.) We must assert our right to dictate how information about us is stored and distributed.
4) There must be an opportunity for the information-holder to wield their power. The ability of an employer to review credit history or medical history is rife with potential abuses, and irrelevant to a fair hiring decision. Similarly, if I'm not relying on them for financing, why should a car dealer or realtor or furniture sales clerk have access to my credit history? We must assert our right to decide who has access to our information.
5) The information must be wielded. The horror stories of identity theft, credit bureau errors, and discrimination demonstrate that great damage can be done to our lives for little reason, and without our even understanding why. We must also assert our right to challenge the information and the decisions that result.
Unfortunately, we are usually too unaware and apathetic to keep these rights from being abused.
Fortunately, some law does exist for each of these rights, but is spottily enforced, and often inadequate.
"You can't get something for nothing." - my grandfather, on the stock market and Reaganomics.
I fight back! I don't recieve targeted junk dead-tree mail because I don't own any "club" cards, Air Miles(tm), discount cards or such. I don't fill in store surveys or questionaires no matter the incentive!
My web browsers do not accept cookies, and Cookie Monster helps me with that. Personally, I have no traceable web presence. However, there are always sites that require a username/e-mail address.
For those the answer is simple - I lie! For other sites that require a valid e-mail account, I have throw-away e-mail accounts on Hotmail, Hushmail or Yahoo.
And I check! Regularly, I go to search sites and look myself up. If I find myself, I contact the place where my info originated and ask them to remove it! - this only happened to me once!
When all else fails, I make someone up! My imaginary invisible friend has a web presence! Look him up sometime!
"History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme." Mark Twain
The folks in the /. community know these impacts because the majority of our lives surround technology in one way or another and we protect ourselves to a degree. But to the average Joe on the street, they really have no idea. And Jon hits on the fact that it is already too late to correct the direction we are heading. I wouldn't want to slow down technilogical advances in any way, however I am disheartened with the lack of ethics and uses of some of our technilogical advances. so I guess we take the good with the bad. Sort of like the firearms analogy; The gun doesn't kill a person, the person firing the gun does. So are guns bad? Is technology advancement?
Never knock on Death's door:
More race stuff in one place,
than any one place on the net.
Its pretty funny that over half of the American population does not use the internet... but somehow it is a necessity. Even by Katz's estimate only 130 million Americans will use the 'net this year --- still less then half of America's 272,639,608 people (CIA World Factbook). For the majority of Americans, and the vast majority of human beings, the internet is NOT a necessity.
We can only hope that some day this technology can be used justly, for the benefit of ALL people --- not just the rich among us. Justice should be as much of a concern as privacy, if not more.
These people are not the only people in this world who we need to worry about. For instance I attend a state funded university, which, unknown to us, was selling the personal data they had on us, which is quite a lot. Until recently, and maybe still, telemarkerters would buy lists of data off of the DMV. What these two examples point out is that no matter how closely we guard our data people will still get it.
This means that if we want to protect our privacy then we need to take action. Contact our legistlatures and demand that they pass laws protecting our privacy, let others know how their privacy is being sold off. Thomas Jefferson and his contemporaries started a war to protect our freedoms, and it we must keep fighting to keep them.
-Hephaestus_Lee
"[Y]our wise men don't know how it feels to be thick as a brick." -- Ian Anderson
You can either have
(1) Freedom to do whatever you want, subject to the visibility and scrutiny of others (no privacy)
(2) Freedom to do whatever you want in complete privacy, with the risk of people using the combination to commit crime and take advatange of you
or
(3) No freedom whatsoever, total privacy, and total security. (Anyone caught doing something wrong is punished)
For those of you who say learn the technology tell me you already knew about the Reliant Digital Intercept System being sold to law enforement agencies by Comverse Infosys. This thing has the ability to monitor multiple simultaneous voice conversations and automatically flag and record only "interesting" calls, based on voice recognition and pattern matching. Pretty scary!
Just my $.02...
(Note: There are no x's in my email address.)
Most of these users have little or no idea that they are constantly being tracked and audited for their usage patterns and choices. In my office, one user mentioned that they'd heard about some company called 'Double-sumthin' that was collecting user information through web-ads. When I gave this person a layman's explanation of what was happening, they were utterly indignant and several people in surrounding cubicles stuck their noses. All of them were upset, and immediatly asked me to turn off these 'cookies' on their machines, and I've already heard from another department's MIS staff that there have been complaints from users. However, these people are not about to reduce their ease-of-use online to deny marketing weasels their statistics. If we really want to limit the ability to track usage and patterns on a user-by-user level, we need to eliminate the ability to do so at a network wide level. Intel's GUID implementation is a dangerous tool, if not a downright immoral one. Double-Click's recent admission that they have been stockpiling user data just underscores the need for an accepted 'minimal level of anonymity'.
Not just for those of us who know enough of what goes on 'under-the-hood' but for anyone who mistakenly believes that they are free to use the internet without undue invasion of their privacy.
Well, that's a rant...
"If I wanted your input on my pet project, I'd stick my hand up your ass and use you like a sock-puppet." - Muse