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How to Convince Non-IT Friends that Privacy Matters?
mmtux writes:
"As technology becomes more advanced, I am increasingly worried about privacy in all aspects of my life. Unfortunately, whenever I attempt to discuss the matter with my friends, they show little understanding and write me off as a hyper-neurotic IT student. They say they simply don't care that the data they share on social networks may be accessible by others, that some laws passed by governments today might be privacy-infringing and dangerous, or that they shouldn't use on-line banking without a virus scanner and a firewall. Have you ever attempted to discuss data security and privacy concerns with a friend who isn't tech-savvy? How do you convince the average modern user that they should think about their privacy and the privacy of others when turning on their computer?"
I try to convince them that they should be pushing to have this data made open to everyone rather than allowing the data to be kept as a private resource for the use of a few. And I try to make them understand that the Trusted Computing threat, which is all about remote censorship, is a real danger to them that can't really be effectively fought while the illusion of privacy maintained by obscurity is allowed to continue to exist.
And to Captain Splendid and his friends, who will surely once more come along asking why I don't publish my home address and phone number here so he can come stare at me, it's because in the presence of rampant hypocracy that thrives untroubled by the transparency I hope to see one day, singling myself out makes me vulnerable in a way that systematic transparency would not. There is a difference between negotiating a unilateral disarming, which is how I view this effort, and throwing down your guns first and getting shot in the head, which is what you're suggesting I should do.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
I generally remind them that privacy is not just from the government, but is a matter of having some control over who knows what about your life. You may not be ashamed about your partying, for example, but that doesn't mean that you want employers or parents to know too much about it -- definitely not to find out about it without you having the excuse to explain that you're careful and responsible. Political beliefs are also important, whether to avoid arguments with family members who disagree, or to avoid reprisals from a boss whose political persuasions are opposite yours ("If he has enough money to donate to that campaign, clearly he doesn't need a raise!"), or even from a government whose views you oppose.
And there are lots of personal details we're not ashamed of that we nevertheless would like to not be public. Vacation plans ought to be private from stalkers, ex-girlfriends, that really annoying friend from college who lives one town over from the hotel, etc. My sex life is nothing to be ashamed of, but nobody but my partner has any right to know about it.
Ultimately, privacy is not about secrecy, it's about personal sovereignty: who gets to say what people have what information about my life?
No, because in the case of privacy, people are constantly trying to pry into each other's business. Speaking personally, I have had it confirmed at least once that an email sent to me had been maliciously faked in order to manipulate me, and I have had some circumstantial evidence that someone was reading email conversations I had with someone else. I've been approached by people who know that I am a programmer, and want to know if I could "hack into" someone else' email account so that they could read through it. This stuff isn't about the boogeyman government, it is about ordinary people who actually do have no respect for the privacy of others.
Here's another angle to consider: sometimes, a message is easily misinterpreted when read by an uninformed party. When I was in Junior High School, I was once accused of plotting to blow up the school because of a note I had written to a friend, which had been misread by a teacher who found it after class. It isn't so uncommon. There are a dozen different situations like this, where some message is ambiguous and should only be read by someone who is fully informed on the context.
Palm trees and 8
In this case we are talking about 2-3 different things:
First, the problem of formerly private information that your friends have willingly made public, either because of convienience (information given to a website that they use for shopping) or on a social networking website.
Second, the private information that they are unwittingly making public, or leaving themselves at risk of making it public.
Third, that governments may be helping themselves to information thought to be private.
The first is a cultural difference, the third is out of your control, and the second is the really important one. You aren't going to win the debate on the first one. We've seen this debate before, on anonymity for BBS users, later on the rise of cookies. On one side were the forces of good, arguing that these changes were very real invasions of privacy and made your computer do things you didn't know it was doing and wouldn't want it to do if you did know. On the other side was convenience. It sucks to have to log in to slashdot every time I open a new browser window. It's kind of nice that Amazon can make recommendations to me. Cookies let that happen and the public debate, for what it was worth was won pretty handily. Now, that doesn't mean that companies started using cookies as an outgrowth of the democratic will of internet users. It just means that the level of outrage was muted over cookies enough for image conscious companies to get by with using them.
the same thing is going on w/ facebook/myspace/etc. The tables may turn on them (and will probably turn on facebook soonish), but for now we like the fact that others can see our name/face/job/school more than we dislike that these things are no longer private. Part of that outlook comes from the fact that we are limited in imagination. We see facebook one screen at a time. We can't look at people who aren't in our group (I think, haven't used it in a while). It takes a non-trivial amount of time to look through information. Consequently, we see that as the ONLY way to grab data from facebook. We don't connect (or at least the non-IT ppl) the fact that someone broke down anon/aggregate survey data from aol and netflix to get private information automatically. We don't think about scraping programs that read sites like myspace/facebook and correlate names and zipcodes with other sources of inoformation on the web.
The last part of this failure of imagination is that there is a cost to privacy. If I want my personal information to be private wholly from facebook, I can't be on facebook. Relatively speaking, that is a large cost. There is no 'maximum privacy' level for facebook where you can post pics of you and your friends and make comments and it won't be recorded somewhere. That product doesn't exist.
Ok. I won't touch on the third point because that is a flame war waiting to happen. Needless to say, it is out of your direct control.
The second point. My advice is be direct when the situation calls for it, but don't bother when it doesn't. If you are out at a baseball game, don't strike up a conversation like "Gee bob, I noticed that your password for your computer is 1 2 3 4 5 and that you sure do have an awful lot of sensitive info on there. Don't you think that you ought to change that?".
And then just tell them to get a mac. If they aren't security conscious enough to get a virus scanner while running windows then they really should be using an OS that does everything for them.
Attacking your friend's accounts is a good way to lose your friends. Most people don't take very kindly to that sort of practical demonstration without first giving their permission.
Palm trees and 8
Start by explaining a real-world current personal problem. (I do not crack so showing his bank balance is not possible.)
A friend loves his wireless laptop. We encrypted router communication at both homes. Explaining why encryption is needed led to an explanation of the dangers of handling financial transactions while wandering NYC -- that any open router could record everything including passwords and perform man-in-the-middle attacks to bypass SSL. Anybody willing to capture his information could; expecting those people not to use the information maliciously seems silly.
Once those dangers were understood, my friend was eager to hear about more insidious problems such as government policies (telecommunication recording), other insecure devices (iPhone), and deliberately open websites (Facebook).
I spend my life entertaining my brain.
There was a brief window of history between urbanization and computerization when real anonymity existed; that's closed and we're returning to the way humans have always lived.
Not to quibble, but before censuses and technology humans were generally anonymous up until the 1870s (varying country by country). Sure you knew your neighbors, but it wasn't quite hard to move to another town and change your name or publish works anonymously without a good way to track you. Many great works were actually published anonymously over the centuries that were often critiques of the powers that be or society in times when their life or limb was threatened.
The internet has provided some persons a way to speak out since anonymity has been repressed by the powers that being during the 20th century in many totalitarian governments.
Secondly, it isn't far fetched that someone given what you buy at a grocery store could target you in someway or another. They wouldn't do it on an individual basis but imagine if a "pro-dolphin" group saw that you were buying tuna from a questionable company and then targeted you by exposing you name on a list on their website.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
I was sued in federal court for violating someone's right to privacy (06-cv-01164, D. Minn). I posted their photo on my website, and they sued to get it removed and get damages. I represented myself, had a trial Nov. 5th, and the verdict was issued last Friday. I won. Yes, I demonize the person who sued me over his exaggerated privacy concerns, which led to a baseless federal lawsuit that tried to quash my free speech rights. Their exaggerated privacy concerns were not harmless.
I've posted about this litigation on Slashdot before, but the verdict is in now so here's the URL again: Gregerson v. Vilana
The plus side of sharing private info on the web: I got to know my wife only after seeing her photo on her geocities page, scoping her out to see what the stranger from the other side of the world, who emailed me asking for a .pdf file, looked like (her formal writing style made her seem middle-aged, but her photo showed she was actually much younger, and we started corresponding).
I posted my own medical information online 10 years ago, which has since helped other patients. I posted info about my late brother's illness, also to help other patients, which it seems to have done. If you reply to this post and attack me over my health problems, or my deceased brother's illness, I don't think that exposes me as a bad person -- it exposes you as a jerk. If you won't hire me because of these things, I -- me, personally -- am OK with that.
www.cgstock.com
Even better:
Ask them if such cameras can be fed straight to their insurance companies. Most people will write off things about random strangers, 1984 style government stuff, etc, as paranoid. If you can get them in the "It could raise you insurance rates..." angle, though, they listen much more often.
Direct financial motivation usually works better than theoretical effects...
Ce n'est pas une signature automatique.
Google around for the Slashdot story on the FBI using the purchase of falafel as an indicator of terrorist intent. There was a serious proposal put forth by law enforcement to datamine for people who bought falafel (and presumably no pork and no alcohol :) at the Wrong Sorts Of Grocery Stores, and to feed that list into some other datamining operation, presumably because people with those dietary choices are more likely to be terrorists than us beer-and-bratwurst types.
Ask the descendants of Japanese WW2 internees. Both Japanese immigrants and American citizens, whose only crime was being "of Japanese descent" were rounded up, sent to camps in the middle of nowhere, and their homes and fishing boats were sold at sub-foreclosure prices. The data used to figure out whom to round up came from the Census.
The only thing that separates those two programmes is the whim of a Congressman and the stroke of a pen.
Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
Speaking of which, there are still a few old fogies from Europe who never had trouble remembering the past, because they had funny numeric tattoos that remind them of it. Most of them lived like you did -- freely practising their religion (and buying wine, but not pork), proudly sleeping around with whoever they liked, being active in some of the new political movements of their day, and it's not Godwinning the thread when you're pointing out that the "open culture" of which you speak made it a lot easier, once the Weimar Republic fell, for its replacement government to figure out who should get a yellow star, a pink triangle, or a red triangle to wear.
Against the "I have nothing to fear because I have nothing to hide"-like arguments I always say that you don't know what you would want to have kept hidden in, say, 10 or 20 years from now.
Before WW2 the European Jews used the same argument that anyone was allowed to know they were Jewish when they allowed the registration of their religion. They were (sort of) right then, but we all know what happened in WW2, where the nazis made 'good' use of this registration.
You do not know who will use your data for what purposes. I read once that for every proposed law, before accepting it, one should imagine what his worst enemy would be able to do with it if he (the enemy) got the power. Wise words, in my opinion.
What person will donate an airborne act of love?
While I agree in general, there's more to be considered than just "we're IT, so we care more." Privacy doesn't exist solely in the IT world; for most people, the majority of the privacy that they get isn't from their IT policies, it's from their home's walls, the blinds on their windows and the door on the bathroom. Likewise, most identity theft comes from dumpster diving and other traditional means, with online identity theft actually going down. If you use that as a metric of privacy (the important data not getting into the wrong hands), then that would indicate that IT privacy is actually getting better than other areas.
What this actually means is that people are more used to dealing with privacy than other areas. Everyone in the world cares about privacy to one extent or another, and it's practically (if not literally) an instinct since we're taught it from birth, which puts advocates of online privacy in a better position than a fitness nut or a dentist. We can draw real, direct analogies between facebook's policies and brick and mortar company's policies. If my credit card offers me double rewards at a coffee house, should that coffee house get my address, full name, mother's maiden name and social security number just for having that relationship with my card company? Should the guy who sets up a chess game in a cafe get all the personal information of the people they play against?
Privacy isn't new, and it's problems aren't unique to IT. All we need to do is put the issues in plain terms and let people make their own decisions.
Daniel Solove, an associate professor of law at George Washington University Law School, has a good paper on this subject titled, "I've Got Nothing To Hide" and other Misunderstandings of Privacy (http://www.scribd.com/doc/187371/-Ive-Got-Nothing-To-Hide-and-other-Misunderstandings-of-Privacy).