The Eroded Self

The New York Times Magazine ran a lengthy story today titled The Eroded Self . The author chronicles a wide assortment of privacy abuses, and has a very thoughtful treatment of the harm that is caused when every move you make is scanned, analyzed and permanently recorded.

Comments

URL without Login

[Rabenwolf]

Get the story without logging in at http://partners.nytimes.com/library/magazine/home/ 20000430mag-internetprivacy.html.

Re:URL without Login

[phil reed]

Or, log in with username cypherpunk, password cypherpunk.

Whenever you come across a site that wants a login ID, use that combo and let everybody know.


...phil

Permanent record

[www.sorehands.com]

Remember in school, if you did something real bad it would be on your permanent record.

Now everything will be on your permanent record.

Remember...

[InfinityWpi]

...you can't be arrested for thinking something, but writing about it in a text file on your own personal computer means it can be used as evidence against you... and don't forget, the government can't tell the different between a sci-fi game sourcebook and a plot to destroy the world's computers...

OOG STRESS IMPORTANCE OF PRIVACY!!!

[OOG_THE_CAVEMAN]

OOG LIVE IN CAVE MANY YEARS AS METHOD OF KEEPING PRIVACY FROM OUTSIDE WORLD!!! BUT NOW OOG FIND SELF THREATENED BY TRACKING TECHNOLOGY AND LIKE!!! OOG ESPECIALLY SICK OF ACTIONS SUCH AS DOUBLECLICK AND OTHER SUCH ADVERTISING FIRMS TRYING TO COLLECT DATA FOR GREEDY MARKETING REASONS!!! OOG PRAY THAT SOCIETY DONT EVOLVE INTO ORWELIAN NIGHTMARE DOMINATED BY MONITORING!!! OOG THINK LARGE EFFORT NEED CONTINUOUSLY PLACED ON KEEPING INTERNET SECURE FOR USERS AND FIGHT EFFORTS OF OBNOXIOUS PRIVACY INVADING COMPANIES AND SOFTWARE!!! OOG MAY NOT DO BAD THING ON COMPUTER, BUT OOG DESERVE RIGHT TO SELECTIVELY CHOOSE WHAT DATA ABOUT OOG TO RELEASE FOR PUBLIC CONUSUMPTION!!!

Re:OOG STRESS IMPORTANCE OF PRIVACY!!!

[Signal 11]

Look OOG, you're getting tiresome now. The first time, you were funny. The second time, you were just like all the other trolls here.

Since when is imitating AOLers funny?!

Re:OOG STRESS IMPORTANCE OF PRIVACY!!!

[Danse]

It may be wearing thin for you, but some people still like it apparently. Maybe they don't read /. as often as you, and therefore haven't seen as many of his posts. Maybe it's something else. Either way, it will eventually wear thin on everyone. Change takes a bit of time, but that may be a good thing. Otherwise we probably have too few people deciding what is worth seeing.

This is truer than you may think

[Junks Jerzey]

It's typical to do web searches and deja.com searches on all technical job applicants. More than anything, this turns up flame wars the person may have been involved in or really stupid activities ("Got any warez?"). People when tend to get in raving Usenet battles about OpenGL vs. Direct3D, Linux vs. Windows, Windows vs. Macintosh, GeForce vs. Voodoo, Athlon vs. Pentium, etc., are people you don't want to have to work with every day. In general, someone who fits the fan-boy personality has two strikes against him, as unfair as that may seem.

Re:This is truer than you may think

[jamienk]

I used to hang out on a newsgroup about a rock band I liked a lot. One of the members of the band would post occasionally. I did a usenet search on his email to see what he had written earlier. While purusing the results, I found that he had, very early (like 1995), used a different email for his REPLY TO. I did a search on that email address and found that he had "anonymously" posted to a bunch of other newsgroups about WAREZ, SERIALZ, etc., and that he had discussed suicidal thoughts and VERY personal stuff about his relationship with his wife.

I felt excited and guilty reading this stuff. I hadn't set out to really investigate him, and I'm not nearly adept enough to search in tricky ways.

Monica Lewinsky's complaints unjustified

[ivan37]

Ok, sure - the special prosecutor found her love letters, but is it any different than if she didn't have a computer? They would have checked her trash can and found the same love letter drafts if she had written them on paper instead of the computer. Sure, the trash would have been taken out faster than the mail message in her case, but I think computer illiteracy also played a part - I have a feeling she "deleted it" but didn't remove it from her trash or deleted folder. It is unjustified of her to whine about computer privacy when the same things that happened to her could have easily happened if computers were taken out of the picture.
Yes, there are still many other problems with computer privacy that are still to be addressed. The article is good about going over these. I am just saying that what happened to her isn't anything new and that for the NY Times to use her situation as a simile isn't very good writing when you really look at it.

Re:Monica Lewinsky's complaints unjustified

[panda]

Trouble is, most people think that if they put it in the Trash (on the Mac) or the Recycle Bin (on 'doze) and then empty the Trash or the Recycle Bin, that the data is gone. It isn't. The bits are still hanging around on your machine in many cases, with the space they occupy simply marked as free. To eliminate the data permanently from your disk you need to use something to write gibberish over the file before you delete it. When someone recovers the file from your drive later, all they get is gibberish.

*NIX systems have this problem, too, but not as bad. There's often so much going on on a *NIX system that free space gets reused rather quickly. I'd still be paranoid and use a file shredding utility if I thought that I was facing prosecution or a lawsuit.

And they're not even doing anything useful

[Tony Hammitt]

Imagine the following:

I personally am waiting for the day when everyone is wearing/is implanted with a medical status recording device. Until then, we can only guess what the affect of drugs and hormones is on the body. Of course, then everyone will know what you are doing at all times, just by reading the tape.

It could even be combined with a GPS tracking system so it can call an ambulance if you have a heart attack or stroke. But it would also let someone somewhere know all of your movements. Imagine getting a speeding ticket through the mail because your personal GPS tracker said you were speeding...

The invasion of privacy is bad now, but it will only get worse. Right now it is expensive to store all of that data, but that's getting cheaper all of the time. It's expensive to build such devices, but will Nanotech change that?

Just what is it that we're all doing anyway? Are we, the geeks, responsible for our own torment because we made it possible? Where do we draw the line?

Perhaps someone will mark the end of the Dark Ages as when, in the presence of overwhelming technology, we have a society that doesn't spy on itself all of the time.

Re:And they're not even doing anything useful

[panda]

I choose to live and die free as free as a man that has to pay taxes and abide laws can be.

That's the trouble. You abide by laws and pay your taxes. Following their silly laws and paying your taxes only encourages them to think that you're going along with the program. When they make it a law to say you have to have the surveillance gizmo installed in your body, will you go along with that law, too? All the data, and by your own admission, suggest that you will.

You see where this is going don't you? You said you'd oppose this, but you also said that you obey the laws. So, which is it?

So here I am, advocating lawlessness again, and with Uncle Sam watching, too. I should be more careful in the future.... :-)

Re:And they're not even doing anything useful

[roman_mir]

So what, I should go and kill people?
You know what, I don't do that kind of crap, even if there were no laws about it.
However on the Internet the difference between the right and wrong is blurred and the anonymity of this structure makes people believe that they will not be held responsible, it is security by obscurity so to speak.
I find myself downloading pirated mp3's, videos and applications, I copy software, music and books all this is against the law (copyright mostly.) I pay my taxes and I don't go into killing sprees, should I do otherwise I would spend the rest of my days in a prison.

So what I am saying is that most people abide the law in a sense of not murdering anybody, not hurting or harassing people (lawyers excepted.)

That is where the sentence that you copied from my first post came from.

However, in order to be freer than I was in my home country I have left and came to Canada to gain more freedoms, by this I have expressed my unwillingness to cooperate with basic dictatorship. Have you ever opposed your government? (I don't mean not coming to the election.)

I was actively opposing Intel who tried to install PSN in their processors, and many people did, and look, PSN is gone. It's not there, body. So we can do something right?

This is the point, even if your government tries to control you by means that are accessible to them (and most governments try and do that) it does not last forever. USSR did not last forever and it was controlling their citizens in the worst possible way. Attempts like those crash under its own weight over time. Peoples' attitudes change, what used to be normal becomes unacceptible over time. For hundreds of years Church controlled people in weird ways. They controlled all you did not leaving a single activity to a chance, not even your sex life. And what now? Most people I know are atheists. No one gives a shit about Church anymore.

You can not lie to all people all the time.

Re:And they're not even doing anything useful

[roman_mir]

Yes, I am very sorry for not living up to your expectations, Anonymous Coward.

Re:And they're not even doing anything useful

[panda]

You can not lie to all people all the time.

Yes, you can, but it doesn't mean that they believe you! Even if they don't believe you, that doesn't mean that they're going to do anything about it.

Look, you said you obeyed the law. I took that unqualified statement to mean that you obeyed all of the laws. You also said that you pay taxes. Well, apart from obeying the law, what does that have to do with anything?

You mention about attitudes changing. Yes, that's very true. You say that what was once acceptable becomes unacceptable. Well, the flip side is also true: what was once unacceptable can become acceptable, particularly over time. People can become accustomed to pain and they learn to ignore it. So, yeah, you start by sticking cameras on ATMs for public protection. Then, cameras on stop lights, stop signs and at street corners. Next, on street lights in all neighborhoods. Next, on people's lawns to monitor their front doors, and finally in their homes. Each gradual step conditions one to expect less and less at each turn.

The Internet and technology have not changed the landscape of privacy and the erosion of privacy. They have merely accelerated the rate of that change.

Now, you can ask yourself what kind of world you want to live in. You can ask yourself what's truly important. I don't personally see the erosion of privacy as that great a problem in and of itself. There are larger forces at work, and the erosion of personal privacy is just part of a larger conflict that is going on in the world today. There is a struggle going on for control, not just of our personal space and privacy, but of the flow of information, ideas and all communication. Just take a deep look at what is happening on the Internet, with the Napster and DeCSS lawsuits, the protests in Seattle last December and the protests of the IMF in Washington. Think of those events and many others in light of the megamergers of mega media giants. Follow the money, see who's behind all these corps. Look at how they make political contributions and follow the bills through Congress to the President's signature, all the way to enforcement and incarceration.

There is one side of capitalism that sees nothing but the profit motive and people are just another resource to exploit, for their labor, for the information that you can get about them and sell, and for the money that they have to spend as consumers. Marx was right about one thing: when taken to the extreme, capitalism is a dehumanizing and alienating system. (NOTE: I said he was right about one thing, not everyhting.)

Privacy is dead: welcome to the Internet

[Anonymous Coward]

Welcome to the Internet, the free-information Utopia imagined by writers such as Jon Katz. There are no boundaries, no walls, no way to contain the flow of information, including anything about your life: purchases, consumer preferences, physical address, etc.

While many thinkers have hearlded the dawning of this new information age as a way of having open access to art, history, science, the media, government, and other sources, they have in general failed to imagine the "negative" aspects of this openness: that wants you get it going, nothing can stop it. Further, you're the next target.

Now, you might be like me, an ordinary guy, just sitting at the computer, eating a Cadbury bar and drinking water, not thinking about your privacy, but at any given moment, you're information is being traded behind your back by any number of coporations, banks, government agencies, and private citizens. But should you be concerned?

Looking out the window, I see no black helicopters flying overhead. No g-men are breaking down my door to arrest me for having bootleg CDs. In fact, my life is no different than before. Sure, I get spam, sometimes, and tagreted banner ads, but spam gets deleted and I can just use IJB anyway. If these are you biggest problems, consider yourself lucky.

Personally, I think the privacy freaks have it all wrong. With the Internet, all digital material, including your personal info, can't be contained. So what if advertisers know that you're a raving Linux zealot? Isn't it their business to know how to offer you consumer goods targeted at tech-savvy buyers? As far as I'm concerned, the Internet and capitalism go hand-in-hand, and this exchange of information will help capitalism, which will in turn help out the Internet far more than government robots like Gore or George "there ought to be limits to freedom" Bush. Your privacy is long gone, but right now we can at least enjoy the benefits that it brings, as long as the U.S. government doesn't screw something up (I'm speaking as and for USians now).

So you have a choice: you can either accept your loss of privacy and get the great economic and technological benefits that it brings, or attempt to cripple the system with laws, which won't bring back your lost privacy anyway. Remember, it was us, the geeks, who wanted free information. This is our reward. Let's use it wisely.

Re:Privacy is dead: welcome to the Internet

[IO ERROR]

Remember, it was us, the geeks, who wanted free information.

Speak for yourself. All I wanted was source code and better quality programs than the infinite monkeys at infinite compilers are generating up in Redmond.

This is our reward.

If this is a reward, I don't even want to think about the punishment!
---

Re:Privacy is dead: welcome to the Internet

[npsimons]

i wholeheartedly agree! i've been thinking about this subject for some time myself and i keep asking myself "if openness in software leads to better software, wouldn't openness in other areas lead to those areas improving?" Think about it: what if we knew _everything_ that our politicians and public servants did? No more wondering what the NSA is doing behind our back.

What if everything _we_ did was open to scrutiny not just by police and judges and juries, but the entire world? Much less crime, that's for sure. i seem to remember a story a while back about a city where they had cameras installed to watch for crime, but _anyone_ was allowed to watch the output of the cameras, not just the police. This led to the crime rate going down immensely.

In any interpersonal relationship, openness and honesty are what keep the relationship going. If you don't let the other person know how you feel, or you lie to them in some other way, that relationship will not last very long, and it won't be very enjoyable for either person.

i'm beginning to think that privacy is just a made up thing like intellectual property. Natural law doesn't guarantee us privacy any more than it guarantees that we have the right to copyright a work of art or patent an algorithm.

Double click

[jamienk]

Ironic how the NY Time article on the web has a Double-click banner.

reciprocal transparency

[geekpress]

The article is available without registration at: pa rtners.nytimes.com.

The real battle with privacy, as the article points out, is getting people to realize that they really don't have enough. People presume that their e-mail is "secure enough" without really thinking who could intercept it or how embarassing it might be for their boss to read the joke they just forwarded about the transgender trapeze artists.

(The company my father works for has said to its employees: "Don't do anything that you wouldn't want to see printed on the front page of the newspaper." Perhaps people should apply that same principle to their e-mail.)

The article doesn't touch upon another future possibility: that if no one has privacy (including government, corporations, and the rich), then privacy itself loses much of its value. In a world like in Halprin's The Truth Machine, I would not care if all my secrets were out, because everyone else's secrets would be similarly exposed. (That would be the death of the tabloids, and not a moment too soon!)

-- Diana Hsieh

The Greatest Thing About This Article...

[mochaone]

is that I found out there is a site called www.disgruntledhousewife.com and they have this thing called a dick list !! Even being a guy, this is some funny ass stuff. I give women props. They always find a way to commiserate with each other and put down those of us (speaking generally here...) who are dicks.

Bravo, women !

Socialist trap.

[Hobbex]

I thought that it was a very good article, and that the author put his finger on many of the important issues, and why privacy IS important. However, he goes completely off the track at the end when he starts babbeling stuff like this:

"Moreover, many people seem happy to waive their privacy rights in exchange for free stuff. There is now a cottage industry of companies with names like Free PC, Dash.com and Gator.com that offer their users product discounts, giveaways or even cash in exchange for permission to track, record and profile every move they make, and to bombard them with targeted ads on the basis of their proclivities. This is about as rational as allowing a camera into your bedroom in exchange for a free toaster. But as Monica Lewinsky discovered, it's easy to forget why privacy is important until information you care about is taken out of context, and by that point, it's usually too late."

With this, he is falling right into the most dangerous of socialist ideas: that that we, who know better, should by law protect the common man from his own stupidity. I find such thinking arrogant, disgusting, and a much bigger threat to freedom (witness what past implementation of socialism accomplished) then anything Doubleclick does with my cookies. You can't, and shouldn't, save sane adults from themselves. If somebody wants to screw up there life by selling their privacy and integrity for a free buck, they should be allowed to do so.

I am not a rightwing conservative (I consider myself a pragmatic radical), but if this writer thinks that the way to save society for the future is to further dilute the individuals freedom and responsibility to make his own descisions, then I couldn't disagree more. It is only by learning to protect our own privacy and freedom that we can find a future where we are not the food to governments and corporations.

-
We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.

Re:Socialist trap.

[psychonaut]

With this, he is falling right into the most dangerous of socialist ideas: that that we, who know better, should by law protect the common man from his own stupidity. I find such thinking arrogant, disgusting, and a much bigger threat to freedom (witness what past implementation of socialism accomplished) then anything Doubleclick does with my cookies.

Socialism oppressing freedom? You must mean Stalinism. Socialism is an egalitarian, democratic system, and has never been implemented. Next time, get your terminology straight.

Regards,

When marketing data becomes a Biography

[Money__]

It's not uncommon for little tidbits to collect about you as you live your life. Some information is useless, some of it is priceless to the right person. The cost of collecting and maintaining these little tidbits have continued to fall (have you priced hard drives lately?).

As the tools required to keep this data become cheaper, and the laws to prevent it's proliforation are not put in place, these tidbits grow into a complete biography.

Look at the example below and ask yourself: where would you draw the line?

John Smith resides at 123 Elm street.
and he has 48% equity in his house.
and is married with 2 kids.
and he wears 34/32 size pants.
(usually dockers from WalMart).
and he likes renting movies from blockbuster.
and his youngest just got out of a drug rehab.
and he likes those little bite sized carrots.
and his favorite search phrase is "married and flirting"
and his wife spends $150 a month at victorias secret.
and she likes bottled water.
and spends $45 a month on duracell bateries.
and her favorite search phrase is "hot wax"
and his oldest daughter is on the honor roll and she had an abortion last summer.
etc..etc..

So where would you draw the line? Do have any way of knowing if a lists such as this exists? If so, what are your rights?

I would put forth that collecting such extensive and detailed information amounts to writing a biography about me and my life. Like a snapshot, this biography should be the copyright of the individual.
___

Re:When marketing data becomes a Biography

[fluxrad]

that list has been around for quite some time...but it's not owned by DoubleClick. It's owned by the FBI.

Side note: Privacy is still around. I find it surprising that many of the /. posters who pride themselves on technical knowledge and internet savvy have a very narrow field of total vision. So, about %10 of the WORLD'S population is "on line" - do you honestly think the other %90 give a shit about privacy on the internet? The list you provided is honestly not there yet. At best, advertisers have a collection of Income, Children, # Of computers owned, etc. etc. but they don't have any info that wasn't voluntarily given. They're advertisers...not PI's. (Don't ask how i know ;-)



FluX
After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network

Re:When marketing data becomes a Biography

[ruin]

Look at the example below and ask yourself: where would you draw the line?

John Smith resides at 123 Elm street.
and he has 48% equity in his house.
and is married with 2 kids.
and he wears 34/32 size pants.
(usually dockers from WalMart).
...

Personally I have no problem with any of the items on the list being public information, but then, I may be odd in that respect. The big deal about privacy rights, as far as I can figure out, is that they be egalitarian. Where society gets into trouble is when one person's level of privacy is greater than another's. Suppose I know this information about John Smith -- that's all very well and good, but by right, John should be able to look up what kind of pants *I* wear as well.

Of course, what people want is to have their information secret and other people's public -- it gives you a sort of power over other people. In my mind, we could alleviate some of this disparity by working towards there being *less* privacy in society. More information would be public, and even better, it would be *understood* to be public. What we have now is the understanding that information is private, but with information being collected in secret, and available to those who have the money, influence, or position to investigate them.

On a related note, something I've been thinking about is the US Census. The information on those forms is public, right? Is the government going to put up a web site where you can look at other people's census forms? On the other hand, if they're not, and the information is in fact private information, then what right did the government have to ask for it?

--

Use cypherpunks:cypherpunks login

[Anonymous Coward]

It was gone for a while, but now it's back.

Guess it beats thousands of new accounts for asdfjlei1223 with full name Richard Fitzwell every single time slashdot refers to a story....

So they're just letting it stay.
------------------------------------------------ --
CHANGE OF SUBJECT
------------------------------------------------ --

Does anybody here think that all this stuff about privacy is kind of like the Underpants Gnomes from South Park? I mean, yeah, like the NYT says, it's not an accurate picture of the person, it's just disconnected information that they're collecting ..... almost as if they walked into your bedroom and carried off your underpants while singing happy Underpants Gnome songs.

But, as the Gnome explained in his slide show, "Step 1: Collect Underpants. Step 2: ?
Step 3: Profit!", they really don't have the slightest clue how to profit from this stuff. If your liquor cabinet causes you to see TV ads for AA, how will this profit anybody? You'll be fucking PISSED OFF AT AA!

Yeah, they're provoking us, they're pissing us off hardcore. Well, that isn't going to get them profit! Do you see dairy farmers just going out there and randomly hitting their cows with baseball bats? Hell no! Those cows are PROFIT CENTERS! They should just keep showing us formulaic sitcoms to calm us down. Much better for the taste and quantity of said lactic product, eh?

And the other motive - policing us, making us act morally and ethically at work, at home, every time we converse - spying on us won't help. Now I'm not a fighting man, and most Nerds (TM) aren't
either, but still one punch can kill. Better yet, a rock. Nothing will stop crime so long as you can bash somebodies head in with a rock.

So they're doing all this stuff for NOTHING

"McFry! We have been monitoling your tlansmissions McFry! You're FILED!"

Startling Revalations

[fluxrad]

Dear lord! i shudder to think of what we might discover about ourselves, our neighbors, and our fellow humans if privacy disappears totally! We might find startling things like:

1) Guys masturbate....frequently!

2) Guys look at pr0n on the net....frequently!

3) The vast majority of non quadropalegic (sp?) people LOVE to have sex....as well as some of the quadropalegic ones to.

4) They'll find out who REALLY was downloading all those damned Dr. Dre mp3's. We really need to get to the bottom of that! If not for ourselves....for our children!!!!

5) Natalie Portman herself is actually behind all of the "hot grits" propaganda on /.




FluX
After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network

Consequences

[retep]

This sort of practice is some of the worst stuff that you can do. The problem with all of this data collection isn't always what they get right, it's what they get wrong. Just imagine the fallout you would get if someone with the same name as you, not very unlikely, was mistaken for you? Sure you can compare email addresses etc. But why would you want to trust that the people doing these sorts of searches will get it right? Stuff like this is just plain dangerous...

You leave trails everywhere...

[retep]

I recently did a search for my own name, email addresses and website. Sure enough I found stuff from as long ago as 1995, almost (by a few months) as long as I've been using the net. Even though I didn't know about USENET etc. then I still had left a single entry in a long forgotten, but still running, guestbook. 5 years later it was one of the first things that I found.

Re:You leave trails everywhere...

[gwalla]

I just did a search on my own name, and found out that I'm an aviator, author, and humorist. That page, as well as several others with additional evidence, showed up in both AltaVista and Google, so it must be true! Amnesia is the only possible explanation for my unawareness of this obvious fact.

Seriously, though, this just shows that it's fairly easy to get bogus information when trying to pull it together from several sources. Lack of privacy is bad enough, but the possibility of having one's reputation warped by a false positive identification may be even worse. Remember the Harry Buttle / Harry Tuttle mixup in "Brazil"?

BTW, I also found a bunch of old emails I'd sent to the www-style@w3.org mailing list as archived on the W3C's site.

---
Zardoz has spoken!

Re:You leave trails everywhere...

[LilBlackKittie]

You register a domain-name, and your billing address (for some databases at least - things are beginning to change now) go into the searchable WHOIS database.

Anything that you leave traces of your IP address will (if a static IP) be traceable to you directly through another WHOIS lookup. If dynamic then you know what country, what ISP and (depending on the ISP's policy/naming system/size) what region the person lives in.

You post anything to any of thousands of newsgroups (even FidoNet EchoMail groups, as I found when I did a search for my name and came across posts from '95 in WinNT Virus Scanner groups) and you leave a fingerprint of your style of writing.

You or your parents writes a book, and suddenly your surname appears in dozens of places, and a pretty good idea of what you (or your parents) do is available to anyone who goes looking.

You publish a paper to do with anything in the computing field, and your name will be mentioned on dozens of computing research/teaching sites around the world.

I've managed to (by simply typing my [rather rare] surname) find out my parents' occupations, that I used to run a BBS on FidoNet, that I used to be a technical admin for a chat site, countless photographs of myself (after searching for the nick I used on that chat site) from "meetups" that some of the people from the chat site would go to. I've found myself on a good deal of University websites through various societies that I am in (so you can tell what University I am in, what interests I have outside my subject, who I am associated with). You can finger our University mail server (from inside the University) to find out when I last checked for mail there (and if I used telnet, where I last logged in from). I'm probably mentioned in other people's websites (which I have no control over, but they feel the need to talk about me because I'm a "friend" or "associate"), have probably posted to a few guestbooks (under one of a number of aliases, but it would be possible to trace them down to me, if you were to try hard enough).

It's very difficult to not leave a trail of documents that are all linked in some way. And if somehow one of those documents can be traced back to you, they all can be. Eeks!

-- Maz
Scared...

Blocking ads, cookies, etc..

[gammatron]

The Proxomitron is a personal web proxy that is super configurable and can block out most banner ads, cookies, pop-up windows, and tons more... this is a great way to foil most tracking networks with minimal effort, and its more extensible than most ad-blocking software and techniques.

--

Re:WE WONT STAND FOR THIS!

[Anonymous Elf]

Because /. doesn't want anonymous posting but they want encourage anonymous moderation. They are very much like the governemnt. After all, the state doesn't like anonymous communication, but it is more than happy to encourage anonymous phone calls and informants.

It is all about control. Uncle Sam wants it, and so does slashdot. Moderators would think twice before marking shit down if everyone saw their decision.

All in all, anonymous moderation is far more cowardly than anonymous posting.

I hate to be the one to break this to you...

[Raymond Luxury Yacht]

...and all the rest of you lot who feel the need to insult, abuse, and otherwise defame Malda and slashdot.

Ready?

If you don't like it... if you hate it so very much... don't read it. Bog off. Go the smeg away. Ye gods, why whinge on about how bad /. is and what a gimp Rob is? Why not just visit the other sites out there that offer what this site does and shut the hell up!?? I mean, I hate "Baywatch", so I just don't watch it. Is the concept of "if you don't like it don't go there" so vastly difficult to comprehend that you can't understand that if you no longer like the site you don't have to go to it?

Then again... what do I know? I'm going back to sculpting my earwax.

Re:Progressive GIF, data density

[Money__]

Just one small example to help put this into perspective. I'm sure you've all watched a progressivly interlaced jpg or gif image across the net. When you first start loading a progressive jpg, you can make out colors and perhaps a general theme, but no detail. As the image completes it's second pass, the theme becomes a little more clear and some of the detail becomes readable. On the last pass, the image becomes crisp and clear.

The density of the data being collected about you is similar. As the bariers to collection are lowered and the costs of maintenance keep falling, a complete picture of you and your life comes into being. Slowly, week by week, the density of data grows into a complete bio on you and the life that you thought was your own.

All I'm abdicating is a law that asks the keepers of this data to seek the informed consent of the people before adding the data to the picture.
___

Privacy is dead: enter the Phoenix

[LoonXTall]

So you have a choice: you can either accept your loss of privacy and get the great economic and technological benefits that it brings, or attempt to cripple the system with laws, which won't bring back your lost privacy anyway.

I. What are the great economic benefits of losing my privacy? The granting of the ability to someone I got in a flame war with to open a fraudulent credit card account with my name and address? Or is it granting the right to advertising companies to follow me like a hound? Offhand, I can't remember the title, but I read a story once where a guy's supermarket sent him tons of e-mail, reminding him to restock certain goods, advising him to stop buying so much aspirin and go see a doctor, etc. Is that what you want your Inbox to look like? More spam? So much for the economic benefits... what about the technological ones? I'm not about to trade privacy for goods and services. As I mentioned above, the less traceable I am to megacorporations, the less traceable I am to my enemies. I suspect they may even be the same party....

II. Laws don't cripple the system. The lawyers that try to twist their meaning for their clients' ends do. The system tried to retain its integrity by getting wordy and specific, which left gaping loopholes and strange logic as goofy and error-prone as indirectly recursive functions.

III. Laws may not be able to bring back lost privacy, but they can make it illegal to further erode that privacy. And they give an avenue of attack if an artificial person sells you. Provided they don't become prey to what I mentioned in part II. If you want to see a broken/stupid law, go read COPPA.

If information wants to be free, then we must actively combat letting harmful information out of the cage. Indeed, censor it. Or do we wish to let the darkness freely roam the land? The ability to make bombs confers power... power that is as blind to its consequences as greed is to those it treads on. "Human resources" takes on a sinister new meaning.

Disclaimer: I am not anti-capitalist, anti-US, or pro-political correctness. I choose to exercise thought in determining policy on a particular situation. Saying how to make bombs and saying "Personnel" are quite different, and should be given different rules of censorship.

-- LoonXTall

Re:Privacy is dead: enter the Phoenix

[bnenning]

Your sig is rather ironic. You believe that information about explosives (such as might be found in a chemistry textbook) are dangerous and should be banned. The MPAA believes that the DeCSS source is dangerous and should be banned. What makes you more qualified than them to determine what should be legal? Once you open the door to censorship of information it is very difficult to close.

A few linux trix

[argoff]

since removed stuff still remains on your hard drive, you can do this to get rid of most of the xtra stuff

dd if=/dev/zero of=/filesys/GARBO
sync; rm /filesys/GARBO
this will temporarly fill up the fs, but get rid of most the crap.
Of course this is vulnerable to taking apart the hard drive and using sensitive detection, you could try this
dd if=/dev/random of=/filesys/GARBO; sync; rm GARBO
a slightly less secure, but much faster and probably just as reliable:
dd if=/dev/urandom of=/filesys/GARBO; sync; rm GARBO
another thing I personally like to do since I don't have many important stored cookies is:
cd .netscape; rm cookies ; rm history.dat ; ln -s /dev/null cookies; ln -s /dev/null history.dat
this isn't really totally secure, but limits it quite a bit.
another nice little one is:
echo 127.0.0.1 ad.preferences.net >> /etc/hosts
there are also ipchains plugins and lists with many more ad hosts out there.
chattr -s filename on some implementations of linux will zero out the file when it's deleted.

Slander by abbreviation ASSUMES prejudice

[redelm]

One of the key points of this article is about having one juicy nugget taken out of context, amounting to slander/libel. Well, this has always happened. Electronics has just made the process much easier both by making the searching easier, and giving much more material to search.

Ultimately, this can only be worrysome if the nugget receiver is prone to prejudice. For to make an important decision based on a small anecdote is judging without sufficient information--prejudice. But many people certainly are. How do you protect yourself against them?

The author clearly would like to deprive them of information by erecting privacy walls. What they don't have, they cannot misuse. Even if this were possible, there will always be something that can be misused. I do not think this is a good solution. How do you protect yourself against the irrationality of others? No-way.

My preference is to educate people to be more critical of their info sources and more open/tolerant of the reported subjects. Having seen the insides of some media stories and seen the resulting bletcherous reportage, my eyes are wide open. I view network TV and mainstream print about the same as I view USENET. Often mistaken, ignorant, posturing or incomplete, but not always.

how ironic

[spatula]

Does anyone else find it ironic that you have to register your email address, country, zip code, age, sex, and household income before you can read an article about privacy abuses?

Oh the irony

[Miskatonic]

We should beware our personal info being tracked electronically--or so says the article (until someone found a nologin URL) on the website that requires you to log in to read most of their stories. So we're getting a future where in order to learn about privacy, you can compromise your privacy in the process. Hmmm...

I hope everyone got a good chuckle out the bit on crypto products, particularly the quote about, "You can trust us, because we don't expect you to trust us." Thanks, but I'll trust you as soon as you open your source code to peer review. Curiously, programs like PGP and GPG, which meet this critera, go unmentioned.

BTW, I'll re-post a URL that somebody posted in regards to a banner ad privacy article several weeks ago, because I think it's relevant to this and worth reading.

http://www.tiac.net/users/smiths/privacy/banads.ht m

Static IP Addresses

[LordSaxman]

At PSU for the last 4 years I've had a static IP address... and a search on Altavista for 'userid.rh.psu.edu' brought up a shocking number of webpage statistics pages.

For ease of use I've always prefered static IP, but to maximze privacy it seems like we'd all want dynamic addresses without name resolution.

So then

[/]

There is some information I don't want anyone to have, because it is never relevent except for nefarious purposes. Race, for example. What we need is more effective means of poisoning such personal records with deliberately false information, but as with all such things, the bad guys tend to stay one step ahead of the evolving techniques of the good guys.

At least one thing is clear: Slashdot's AC trolls have successfully cast doubt on everyone's sexual orientation and excluded Slashdot as a source for such information.

Re:Freedom from Privacy

[radja]

I don't entirely agree with you. I think in the case of a president, his presidency should be completely open. After all, a president is in the employ of the people. But there should be a distinction between Bill Clinton and president clinton. The man is not defined by his job, nor should he be. It's nobody's business if Bill C. likes to tie up Hillary to their kingsize bed over the weekends (purely fictional, don't go flaming me for that now :) that is his business (and Hillary's).

//rdj

But look at what you are getting

[GrouchoMarx]

First off, I agree that it is disgraceful what corporations can do these days in terms of violating your privacy. Dominicks Food Stores requires your drivers liscence number and phone number in order to accept a check. The CIA can't get that information about you without a warrant. What's wrong with this picture?

However, having data about you available by some means other than face to face does have its advantages, if used wisely . I, for one, do not catagorically object to data about me being known, only known by certain agencies. For example:

• You are in a car accident. You are severely injured, and loosing blood. The police and parametics arrive on the scene. First thing they do is run your Universal ID card through their wireless device (while loading you onto a stretcher, of course). In 30 seconds, from the Central Medical Database, they learn that you are type B-Negative blood, and call ahead for the hospital to have some standing by when you get there. They also learn that you are alergic to certain medications, and make sure not to give those to you. They also determine that you are taking a medication for high blood pressure, which can conflict with other medications used in emergency rooms. They avoid those, too.
• Your 8 year old son is kidnapped, and taken out of the state and held for ransom. Fortunately, he have a sub-dermal ID chip, which the FBI uses to track his location via GPS. They manage to locate him to within 2 meters, and he is rescued before he is severely beaten/abused/raped/killed. The kidnappers are arrested and charged with kidnapping, and no one has to pay a ransom.
• Your credit card number is stolen. Before you are able to cancel it, the bank picks up on the fact that the charge just made on it is seven times what you have ever charged before, and far over your limit. They have a complete record of your credit history, for their card as well as others, so they can flag this information quite easily. They call you to confirm the charges, and you tell them that the card was stolen. You pay no obscene bills.
• You have a Bluetooth transmitter in your Palm X (or whatever they're going to call their new models). When you approach the private parking garage by your office, you drive up to the gate and it opens for you. You don't have to swipe a card or pull out change or even stop the car, because the gate can see you coming 30 feet away.
• You are receiving threatening phone calls from a stalker. You call the phone company, who tells you the phone number of the person who just called you (kept in their permanent log database, of course). You call the police, who run that number through their database and get an address for the person. He/she is arrested for stalking, and you sleep soundly that night.

All of the above scenarios require databases of personal information, or some sort of digitally encoded tracking system. Is there the potential for abuse of any of the above databases? Of course there is. There's also potential for the abuse of the light bulb, but I don't think anyone here would object to everyone having a dozen or so light bulbs in their house. (Great torture devices, all that heat and light...) Marketing data is a stickier issue, because it's benefits are inherently tied to a supply-side capitalist "Market." But that's not grounds to discount all data collection entirely.

Being cataloged has its advantages. Don't dismiss them simply because there are disadvantages as well. There are plenty of disadvantages to computers in general, carpal tunnel chief among them. Notice everyone who is reading this post believes the benefits outweigh the disadvantages.

--GrouchoMarx

The real problem

[speek]

happens when you're information is "out there" and you don't have legal access to it. Take credit reports. YOu can't legally get all the information about you without help from a lawyer. Ironically, others frequently can get this info.

The problem here is, what happens when they've got it wrong? What happens when reports about you have it down that you're a convicted felon, but you aren't? Can you fix it? Without consulting a lawyer, you won't find out, first of all. Secondly, once you do find out, you may discover that this information has been sold, copied, propagated to thousands of data-collecting organizations. You may find it's impossible to track it all down and fix it. It's effectively permanent.

Note: I didn't make any of that up. It has already happened to a man in Florida.

Re:What if browsers changed the way cookies work?

[radja]

I am using opera, which does just that. Just don't visit pages with java, it tends to crash a bit...

//rdj