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Just How Much Privacy Do We Have?
stuffman64 writes: "Popular Science is running an excellent article on just how private our daily lives are. The article chronicles a typical day of a make-believe Graphics Designer from Chicago. Throughout his day, he unwittingly supplies companies with information that can potentially be used against him. And with GPS-enabled cell phones just starting to hit the market, our privacy can only continue to deteriorate from here. A must read."
In North Dakota where, we had a total of 5 murders last year, they are installing cameras all over, privacy is gone in public. Noone really even put up a fuss either, strange. On a good note we just approved a law preventing all banks from selling any of your information. First in the nation from what I understand, to be approved in a proposition.
It's not the OS it's the user that sucks. If it's user friendly, you get stupider people. - clinko
People who are paranoid about getting GPSes in cellphones must not realize how small most cells are: if your cellphone is turned on, its location can already be determined to within a pretty small area: a quarter mile or less inside cities.
I should have included this in my original post, but PopSci also has a good article about the E911 GPS service in their most recent issue. I thought I saw it on their site, but apparently it is not there.
Here is another feature which links to a website that can map out a route in Manhattan to avoid its 2400 or so security cameras watching your every move. If you happened to read the article, a link to this also appears to the right.
By now you would think I work for Popular Science. I have no job. I employ my University with a $24,000 per year salary.
--- At my sig, unleash hell.
--Mark withdraws $100 at his bank's ATM machine.
Big suprise. Guess what that black dome is above it. I'll give you a clue, the sticker that says "Camera" is right... Also, I'd expect the bank to keep the records for at least 10 years (census data/back taxes).
--Mark enters his office building and takes the elevator to 5. (cameras..)
Guess how much theft happens in places like that... They're just defending against that. And if trust between your employer is an issue, you can always get a different job. Just be glad they dont lock the fire doors like they did in the early 1900's.
--Mark writes a friend: "No raise. My boss is a liar."
Unless you're using heavy encryption AND sending to a secure source (someone who wont blab), he's an IDIOT. I'd laugh and then find a different way to fire/lay him off.
--Mark IMs his girlfriend: "Don't worry about last night. I'll get tested. Love you."
Anybody's who heard of DSniff wont be saying stuff like this over ANY network.
--Mark deletes a file containing freelance work he did for a competitor.
We've went over this in every major publication. This should NOT be new material. And figuring the crowd is the SciAM subscribers (me), I'd figure the average computer security like this would be common knowledge.
--Mark calls a friend from the street at his lunch break. "Dude, she wants me to get an AIDS test," he confides.
We know that cell phones are NOT safe. They're broadcast devices. Even during 9-11, some senator said that getting cell records were trivial at best.
--Almost home, Mark stops to buy deodorant and toilet paper; the card saves him 36 cents.
Dead horse. I simply state that I will fill in fake info if you give me one. I then take one, scribble through it, use it, and then toss it on the ground. Stores are pulling this shit, so I do the same.
--Mark shows his driver's license to enter his favorite bar.
I'd demand to talk to the bar manager, demand to know why he thinks he has the right to STEAL my information. If he doesnt let me in, I go elsewhere and LET both bars know that.
A lot of this "information stealing" is the cost of life in this type of society. Much of that data is useless. Simply, use your head. If it seems weird (like idiots who want to pre-approve you for a cred card) TELL EM' NO!
There was as time when records were paper and travelled as fast as someone could transport them. A person with the right papers were whomever they claimed to be. Times change, photographic identification becomes the norm, information is swapped between law enforcement agencies, spammers and multinationals and yet, with the right preperation, you are whomever you claim to be.
...) identity and allow it to gradually accumulate data trails until it ceases to be useful. Then abandon it.
Sure we face increasing ease of date transfer and collection, there are moves afoot to use various biometrics to identify you, but your fingerprints and DNA have been doing just that for some time. This is just a matter of degree.
Decide your level of privacy and choose your degree of paranoia. If your persona is clean, then what does it matter if your eating habits trigger an increased surveillance by the FBI - they will get bored soon enough.
If you are planning something that requires a degree of secrecy, then apply the appropriate levels of paranoia, develop a secondary (tertiary
The increase in data accumulation just makes it that much easier to assemble what appears to be a sufficient amount of 'mass' to demonstrate a persona's legitimacy.
Students have been producing fake ID since they were introduced to get around the invasion of 'privacy' that is associated with demanding their age; take similar steps if warranted, or accept the inevitability of a trend that has been in force for several centuries.
I want to be able to withhold information to myself, that much is sure. Maybe Ive scribbled an equation to some new form of energy on a piece of paper. No one or government has a right to that except me. But the rest of it, like the GPS enabled phones... Okay, so 20 years from now the "government" can take over some cell phone company and tell where everyone on a cell phone is standing. Then the "government" can build a massive database of EVERYONE's web traffic, and see that 2/3 the country visits porno sites, then the "government" builds a database and see's that you've flown from Floria to New Hampshire 5 times this year! For all 300 million citizens of America. NOW what? So how does that bring about the destruction of our world? Does the "government" (the same one you see made of honest NYC Firemen, and young Marines that were the friends and family you grew up with, the same American's that will remove Bill Maher from TV just because he thought for himself and said "running airplanes into buildings isn't cowardly" (ie, we are overly-politically correct), these same people are going to up and one day decide "okay, everyone who's looked at a porno website and eaten vanilla ice cream in the last 30 days, you're all getting baked in an oven." When does this happen? And what purpose does it serve? I think everyone looks at Nazi Germany and thinks that if we get GPS cellphones that's the next logical step. The world is a different place now. The bright light of the media is "EVERYWHERE" and loves stories and exploitations. If the "government" wants to single out a group of people based on information, say, religious preference, they can just go to all the churches of one kind with a pickup truck and take them away. It isn't going to start or stop with GPS cellphones. Again, I want privacy, I expect privacy "for those things I have made or do on my own in my own private home". Why do we expect privacy when dealing with the outside world? You're on tape going in to K-Mart, every CC purchase you make is logged. If you call customer service at your electric company the call is taped. You have decided you want to deal with the public. You will realize there will be records of it. How much privacy do you think there is in a 25 person african village? How about a small midwestern town? Stop expecting privacy when using services provided by someone other than yourself.
I'm Rick James with mod points biatch!
"I'm one of those believers that if you don't have anything to hide, you wouldn't be concerned about privacy."
I won't spend a lot of time pounding on the fact that you are posting under an alias, rather than yor real name, though I will mention it. 8-).
My problem is not that I'm afraid for my actions to be publically recorded, but that I might be victimized by the local government. For example, if I kiss my date good night at her door, and there's an ordinance against PDA (Public Display of Affection), then I'm ticketed an fined.
It's not so much the good laws as the bad laws that you want to avoid.
I guess if you want to get technical, I'm for "hiding" from bad laws.
-- Terry
Can someone government or otherwise spy on you. Of course they could if they really wanted. But why would they bother. Lets face it, in the grand scheme of things most of you just are not that important. In spite of you bloated sense of ego the US Government the FBI and Homeland Security don't revolve around Slashdot posters, linux users and people who have decss.
The lack of privacy is disturbing, but it wouldn't be as bad if I could at least access all the information people are collecting about me. For example, I'd actually be curious to see what I buy at the grocery store (and maybe the time of day, season, etc. when I buy it) over a 6-month period.
the truth of the matter is that you have EXACTLY as much privacy as you want. The popular science article made a lot of assumptions. If you're that paranoid,
1) Dont use ATMS
2) work where there isn't tight security
3) dont write personal email or send IMs from work
4) keep your files where they belong
5) go to a doctor that does not share medical information
6) dont use a discount card
7)Dont let them scan your license
8)Dont use an I-pass or a GPS.
9)For god sakes dont use a cell phone.
People selling your information are not people that you cant live without. (the medical community being a notable exception) You dont have to move to Montana or become a recluse to maintain your privacy. We sometimes assume that these things are needed to maintain a life, but they are not. A combination of lifestyle and policy can keep you out of the system.
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
I think it's a mistake to approach the problem in terms of minimizing the footprint you leave. Why set yourself up in opposition to the system when you can utilize it's own methods to protect yourself?
For instance, why not use a grocery card with purchases that you would *want* people to see, like that you buy lots of broccoli and juice? In the worst case scenario, if an insurance company ever saw those records they'd believe you had lower cancer risk. Pay in cash for things you want them *not* to see, such as the bag of chocolates, smokes and double bottle of cheap red wine.
Put books on gardening and cooking on your credit card bill, pay in cash for books on hacking.
Use an ordinary mobile phone except for when you truly *need* privacy, and for god's sake turn it off when you cross state lines to buy grass!
Set up email accounts in several different classes: One that you *want* identified with you for legitimate personal/professional contact; one for questionable personal use (e.g., dirty jokes) that you access through a proxy server; one as a throwaway that you don't really care about, say for registration sites. And don't mix them up!
The point is to understand the system well enough to *purposely shape* the profile that's built of you rather than eliminating it all together. The latter option is becoming increasingly unrealistic.
1) Ok, so wow, they don't know what you buy, but at any one point you have hundreds of dollars on your person at a given time, and if you either get robbed or drop your wallet, well, you are pretty well screwed. An alternative is to make your purchases at the most generic place you can when you buy something. For example, knowing you bought something at a general store is not very informative as opposed to a purchase at a games store.
2) Never signed up for a prepay cell phone, this may be a good strategy, again, paying in cash may not buy you much though.
3) Also a fine point for the paranoid, but I'm not sure all these huge companies are all trading personal information so that any email address can be tracked down to someone.
4) Now this is just damn stupid. This is like telling someone to send all important information on a post card instead of in an envelope. Sure, an encrypted email may raise a flag somewhere, but if you use good encryption and use it for as much of your email as possible, pretty much no one short of the NSA is going to decipher your mail and after the NSA wastes enough time deciphering "Hello, how have you been?" messages, they may decide they are not worth the trouble. And if you believe they will try to read each and every encrypted email even if history shows all to be benign in your case, they would probably be reading your plaintext mail, especially if it happened to contain a few keywords.
5) Alternatively I would say feed the personal information out with bogus data, better yet get your friends to do the same and swap cards ever so often. That way you save money and provide no personal information.
6) If a local grocer or market exists, then yes, this is a nice thing to do, for more reasons than just protecting personal information. In fact, if your sole goal is protection of private informaiton this is not a good strategy. The better strategy would be to cycle your shopping among different stores and have those stores be far away, just because you aren't being electronically tracked does not mean other people can't look and see what you buy. If you are going to be paranoid, might as well be extremely paranoid.
I'm not that protective of my information, I really don't have anything to hide from the NSA. Encrypted email may set off flags, but I don't give a damn, I don't trust post cards and so I don't trust email, and if the NSA knows I'm telling my friend he can come over this weekend, I don't care.
I like protecting what I can from common eyes, but do not obssess over whether executives at Food Lion know I bought beef last week, or even that my bank knows I bought something expensive from an electronics store a while back. Protecting privacy is all good, but there is a point where the inconveniences are just overboard to protect data that no one is really interested in anyway, or at least data that can't really be used against you.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
So your idea is to get rid of privacy altogether? I certainly wouldnt want to live in such a country where no one has any secrets or privacy. That would be one huge step toward a 1984ish world.
How would you enforce such a law? Would you watch the populace constantly? Would you deploy a ThoughtPolice? Or would you simply rely on everyone to make their secrets public?
Asking everyone to make their secrets public wouldnt change anything. The people who really have something to hide obviously wouldnt comply - and those who do comply would only have that used against them.
Watching the populaces every move (even in their own homes), would be a huge invasion of privacy. Furthermore, it would not uncover everyones secrets. This would be a huge disappointment in the name of freedom - it would be Big Brother run amuck. The same goes if you were to deploy the ThoughtPolice.
There is no way to enforce such a wild idea, and it could only result in further abuse of power by the goverment.