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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
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.
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
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.
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