The Value Of Privacy

This FTC release details what can happen to web sites that collect infomation about underage users without parental consent. "The FTC charged Monarch Services, Inc. and Girls Life, Inc., operators of www.girlslife.com; Bigmailbox.com, Inc., and Nolan Quan, operators of www.bigmailbox.com; and Looksmart Ltd., operator of www.insidetheweb.com with illegally collecting personally identifying information from children under 13 years of age without parental consent, in violation of the COPPA Rule." For collecting things like name and age (and in the case of the BigMailbox.com, making the info available to a 3rd party), the three companies were fined a sum of 100,000 dollars. You might like to read more on COPPA as well, and then the Center for Media Education's report on COPPA. In related news, Spain imposed a fine on Microsoft for violating Spanish laws on data-transfer, for transfering employee information from servers in Spain to the U.S.

Comments

Privacy is free...

[b0r1s]

but violating it is obviously expensive...

Consider this:

It takes no money to encrypt an email.

It takes no money to use ssh/openssh.

It takes no money to disable cookies.

It takes no money NOT to buy something online.

It takes no money NOT to fill in forms.


Privacy is free... violating someone else's privacy is what gets expensive.

Which would you rather have?

[FastT]

Which world you rather live in:

1. A world in which goverment and corporations have all the cameras, and give privacy "guarantees" to the private citizens they monitor, or
2. A world in which everyone has a camera, including private citizens, to watch anyone or anything they wish, at any time, including someone watching them.

Of course, option (2) is the death of privacy as we know it, but option (1) is the death of privacy, period.

The core problem with privacy protection as people conceive it today is that it has to grapple with a fundamental inequality between the observer and the observed. It tries to correct for this inequality by extracting flimsy promises to maintain equality, usually backed with only the carrot of being labeled Good, and the stick of being labeled Bad. The problem is that the ones with the information are inherently amoral; they have no sense of right and wrong.

The primary thing that seems to have kept amoral entities from perform immoral acts in the past is that there has been at least some barrier, some extra work, involved in doing so. With ever accelerating technology, these barriers are now crumbling with exponential speed, making it easier and easier to not only intentionally, but unintentionally, perform immoral acts involving the breach of privacy. When it becomes as easy to correllate people with their detailed demographic information by doing a simple table join, what coropration or government will realistically be able to resist?

Instead, why not base the idea of privacy protection on equality between parties, a fundamental check and balance system which is self-correcting? Sure, this may make you feel like you're living in the Big Brother house, except that now, you get to do the same to Big Brother. Why should we settle for any less?

Hahaha

[amirboy2]

My 9 year old brother was filling out a form for a membership at geocities the other day and he entered 9 for his age. When he hit submit, he got the following error:

You are too young to fill out this form, please try again