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Guilty By Association
dmf writes "News.com is running a little piece about Microsoft's forays into researching aspects of social computing. With AOL Buddy Lists, Yahoo Messenger, Friendster, and other mappable relationship environments, is it possible the information will soon be used against you? Scenarios such as governments tracking private citizens, investigating terrorist links, political groups finding potential donor lists, marketing departments finding affinity groups, and other easily imagined data mining opportunities could open the doors for information abuse and misinterpretation of individual ties. What implications can it bring in the future of the personal life?"
You mean like this? Won't be long before /. is mined for this data, regardless of what the robots.txt file says about it.
All I can say is that if you transmit private information over an insecure channel, you should not be surprised at the results.
www.timcoleman.com is a total waste of your time. Never go there.
That is why you don't put REAL personal info in your $CHAT_PROGRAM profile. As long as it thinks that I was born on 1/1/1900 and live on 123 main st. Beverly Hills 90210, I'm not worried about data mining. :)
SCO.com uses Linux
My AIM (err iChat) buddy list has a decent sized section of casual aquaintences. They're people who I game with, used to work with or met at conventions. If one of them does something nasty are the Feds going to come knocking on my door asking questions?
I know my chats are fully logged already and never discuss anything even semi-private over IM. But the concept of guilt by association on an electronic level is simply frightening.
-Rusty the paranoid
The Master (Angelo Rossitto) in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, "Not shit, energy!"
one of the idiots who bother to fill in your phone number, birth date, street address and SSN in your AIM profile you get what you deserve.
Support the First Amendment. Read at -1
Yeah, but while i'm out here, i'm using all mod points you couldn't get :)
That's why there should be privacy laws saying that information is non-usable unless explicitly permitted. Right now, it's bass-ackwards.
I think you need to have some faith that the Judicial branch will see through a charge built on "Guilt by Assocation". There is excellent case law that shows how unsuccessful a prosecutor will be in building a case in this manner.
The bigger question is, should the government be allowed to mine this data to look for individuals to put under surveillance. What are the criteria here?
The only historical model we have of this type of thing is landline phone taps. Again, the Judicial system had to get involved -- in the form of a judge or grand jury. Today, the scope of opportunity is so much greater than just telephone lines.
I personally think we need more policymaking and caselaw in the area of government-commercial database relationships. It will come, but only after the government oversteps its bounds a few times and gets its foot chopped off by a successful lawsuit.
Not to troll, but if somone like the NSA wants to find out who you're talking to, they will. Get over it or don't use digital communications. Once one has made the decision to use digital communications then having the computer notice who someone prefers to talk to most and then prioritizing based on that seems like a good thing to me. One of my major bones with major chat clients is that there's no way to assign a priority to people -- maybe I don't give a damn if my gaming partner wants to talk to me right now but I do care if someone wants to contact me about a homework assignment. It's too gross of a generalization to say that I'm either willing to talk to everybody or to nobody. Generating ways of automatically handling this is good.
Mod this up. I think we have a responsibility to try to "poision" their databases by submitting as much false information as possible. Every time they ask for your information, give them a different answer! If 90% of the information submitted is false, then their databases are basically useless for data mining right?
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
This is, of course, the optimal state for things. If everybody is a criminal, the police can arrest anybody, because they can always find a law the person has broken. Even now it is getting that way. There are over 3,000,000 federal laws, not to mention state laws and local laws. Are you SURE you havn't broken any?
For example, purchaced a sex toy of some form? They're available everywhere, but it is illegal to sell them. The fact that the law isn't regularly enforced doesn't change the fact that you can go to jail for working in an adult store. Then there are the crazy state and city laws like "You can't kiss on Sundays" and "You cannot sell yo-yo's on Sundays" and "No more than 3 women can live under the same roof" and "It is illegal to drink a beer immediatly after having sex." and "A husband cannot have sex with his wife if he has eaten garlic or anchovis. If she requests it, he is legally obligated to brush his teeth"
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
...Al Qaeda is registered on terrorister.com somewhere. To be honest, I'm not so paranoid about my information being gathered. I expect it, and in a wired society, where money is falling out of use, and being replaced by electronic transactions the only difference between an 'honest' corporation and an 'dishonest' one is who admits they're selling your information and one who lies about it. When you pay for that porn DVD with your ATM card, it's inevitable, despite any legal safeguard, privacy policy, or semantic assurance this information will be leaked, stolen, or sold.
What do I do mind, however, is that this information would be used against me in a legal or civil manner. In the world we live, we have to accept that we're going to have collotoral damage on our privacy, but we DO NOT have to accept it's use against us.
Should "accidentally" gathered information should not be admissible in a court of law. Companies that violate stated privacy policies on their own websites should be financially liable for these transgressions.
Our Constitution provides us with some of these protections, but not all. Take this matter seriously, and ask the person you vote for, before you vote, what they think.
Less Talk, More Beer.
Yeah? "Scary"... I would've used another word: "boring".
>>> Only a court can imprison me and take my freedom, so that's my only worry.
When you don't get that choice job - they don't tell you why. Refused for a home loan? Oportunities never found.
Increased scrutiny by law enforcement and tax authorites.
Ask Steve Jackson about what can be done aside from inprisonment and lost freedom. (for those who have not
heard the story.. Steve Jackson is the author of the GURPs role playing system. GURPS has a base rule set and then add ons for different genra of scenerio, like Science Fiction or Western or Spy.. He was working on a Cyberpunk add on when the FBI came along. If I remember correctly one of his employees was associated with a hacker. The FBI accused Steve of authoring a hacker training book and took all his computers..
Everything from your NYC Metrocards, to the discount cards you get at the local grocery store. Everything from your Email accounts, to your cell phone habits. I didn't believe it until he proved it. He was able to take someones first and last name, approximate age, and in return give me their home address, childrens names, home mortgage amount, bank used, cell number, parents address, university, major, where he went on vacation, how long he was gone, spending habits, etc. etc. It was scary stuff. Scary.
If you buy your metrocard with cash, there's no way to track you. Also, you say you didn't believe it until he proved it, and then list items which are unrelated to what you claim he proved.
Isn't this why freedom of association is important?
If you can't communicate freely, you have no freedom.
Technology has marched on, and the world has changed (again).
All the trends in technology over the last 10 years say that privacy as we have known it, is headed for extinction. Cameras that get smaller and smaller, remote controlled robots, hacking into wireless LANs, PLUS all the electronic interactions (like RFID) that are coming, PLUS computers getting cheaper by the day... This all adds up to privacy basically being impossible.
Proprietary software is doomed, because the Internet made the level of interactivity that open-source software needs possible. For exactly the same reasons that the medieval guilds (with their proprietary methods for things like ironsmithing and glassblowing) were doomed once the movable-type printing press was invented, proprietary software cannot compete. In the near term (5-10 years), it will still have a solid space in niche markets, but I'm not even sure that will last. It certainly isn't going to last in mainstream software arenas like OSes and databases.
But that same increase in processing power and decrease in communication delay means that doing things like examining every electronic transaction that someone performs (and building a detailed profile of their life from it), is not only beginning to be possible, it's very nearly inevitable. Even the most paranoid of you out there (and on Slashdot, the percentage of paranoids is a good bit higher than average) would not want the sort of draconian methods that would be required to prevent it. (No computers and no networks, for instance.)
The proper solution, I think, is to change our culture, so that it doesn't matter that someone knows the kinks in my soul.
I am mostly connected to reality, so I'm not holding my breath on this cultural shift, but I really only see three possibilities:
We turn Luddite and roll back the clock technologically. (Not likely to happen voluntarily by most of this audience, but some of the non-technical types turning Luddite IS all too possible.)
Privacy gets moved to the same status as apprenticeship - it's something that existed historically, and it's occasionally useful for analogies, but it's not part of anybody's life anymore. This could either go the Japanese route (I believe the usual phrase is something like "Nakedness is frequently seen and never noticed." In other words, commenting on someone's quirks is far more shameful than having said quirks to begin with.), or simply an open acceptance that other people do things differently than you.
The third possibility is the one that worries me. That's a totalitarian society (probably theocratic) that uses this information to control people to a degree that has heretofore been unbelievable. I don't think such a state would last very long at all, but the creation and destruction of it would get really, really ugly.
The US is the only culture I have extensive first-hand experience with. I would strongly prefer to see us go to option 2B (taking the attitude that you can live your life any way you want as long as you don't hurt me).
That fits wonderfully with our stated national beliefs. It's an absolutely lousy fit with what our behavior says we believe. The behavior (IMO) says we urgently want #3.
That's the big reason the 3rd option worries me. I can very easily see a theocratic state as an intermediate step to the live-and-let-live one. If anyone has any practical, pragmatic suggestions for how to create such a cultural shift (one suitable for a total absence of privacy), speak up now, because the situation could get critical within 10 years, and is almost guaranteed to get critcal in 20.
At any rate, I'm not convinced the US military hierarchy is all that secretive. I know from serving in the Air Force that Base commanders and people of similar importance have their names and likeness plastered all over the place. Figuring out who's in charge of what is an unusually simple process (with the exception of special forces, but still not impossible).
I'm more concerned about how accessible personal information is on pretty much everyone, particularly important people in the afore mentioned hierarchy. Since 9/11 there's been amplified security, but suicide bombing a general's house is no less dificult(hence our fear of terrorism).
This is a helluva good point. I'll take it a step further: DMV records, Local law enforcement files, IRS databases, Social Security information, Credit History. All these are fairly independant systems with little pieces of data about an individual. Consilidate them into one huge data warehouse and its a Business Intelligence persons dream. Every queryable piece of info about a person instantly accessible. Thankfully, all these systems are so tied to their respective beurocracies that they will never integrate. If they did, its hello 1984 with random retinal scanners a la Minority Report.
This occurs despite explicit promises to the electorate when the tax file number was introduced, that it would NEVER be used for this sort of purpose.
Add to this the ability to track online activity by merging on:
"Privacy" guarantees are torn down at the merest suggestion of higher purposes, and data is then freely shared. This can have excellent results: attacking paedophile rings. But it can also have wider, less salubrious results, when blind application of some new hysteria and a couple of incidental "hits" on the database scan sucks innocents into a nightmare.
Disk is cheap too. A startling amount of on-line activity is routinely recorded. The very first internet sourced "crack" can still be viewed, keystroke for keystroke...
In a world where paediatricians have been attacked by mobs and hospitalised following newspaper campaigns against paedophiles, where 20 year olds are exposed in "underage drinking scandals", where unfair or incorrect criminal convictions occur, where a data-entry glitch can destroy an innocent person's credit record with no timely hope of appeal against suddenly foreclosed mortgage, where a country parson on holiday is interred as a terrorist suspect based on rigorous computer screening, where political correctness is a moving feast and the witch hunt du jour dominates reasoned thought: it's perhaps a good idea to keep as much off the computer as possible, let alone the wider internet.
--
Sal
Writings: saltation.blogspot.com
Wravings: go-blog-go.blogspot.com
Just be careful what you write and always assume all on-line content is available for government mining operations. This isn't hard, folks.
Vote in November. You won't regret it.
Treat communications you make over the public internet as though they were publicly recorded statements. Why, because for all intensive purposes, that's what your communications over IM and friendster like channels really is. The only problem here is people getting the mistaken impression that such communications are completely anonymous and not traceable. Correct people's mistaken images, the technology isn't the problem.
-There are no easy engineering fixes to social problems.
All that information just sits there, festering, usable by the cop who thinks you look like the guy that knocked up his daughter, or the DA a couple of dozen arrests short for his run on the Governer's office, or the malicious hacker who's parking place you took.
What implications can it bring in the future of the personal life?
oh, how about a two sided coin where people fear to meet different people (or even take out library books, apparently), and corruption becomes rampant due to that lever. you know: a kafka nightmare.
the thing i don't get in america is you had a real taste of how easily things slide to a bizarre level with your mccarthy witch hunts, which the vast majority of your citizens are quite ignorant of. seriously; i like you guys but i don't get that part. there's a deep "i was just being a good american" reaction to what you did in that era. the lesson wasn't learned in general society at all, and that's very worrying.
Looks like we finally have the global village everyone was raving about twenty years ago. Welcome to our little town, where everyone knows your name....and your age, and your birthdate, and your favorite foods, and your last girlfriend, and why she dumped you, and all your weird little habits, ad nauseum.
It's just like living in East Jesus, North Dakota, pop. 450...except now you have a chance to be famous for fifteen minutes.
What's the big deal? The more things change, the more they stay the same...
So, that's a real brief primer on anonymity, and the fact that you have little or no anonymity. If you don't like the way the country's going, get out and vote in the next election.
And you would you recommend voting for? I don't remember any platforms mentioning the protection of privacy, especially if it shields all our supposed "terrorists" in hiding.
Myself, I'll assume that I'm too boring to be on anyone's hit list. Another advantage of being a computer scientist. :-)