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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?"
Delete his/her desktop shortcuts, so they will think a virus ate them.
Showing him his bank balance might work...
rj
You may be conflating too many issues. There's a huge difference between warning people about info-stealing malware and saying "zomg ur real name is online!" Remember that most people still have the attitude that they have nothing to hide and so nothing to fear.
I say focus on the most critical issues, like not clicking stupid links, using IE, or falling prey to phishers. Nobody wants his bank account emptied.
Btw, don't forget to post the links to us.
You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. -- Harlan Ellison
Seriously... Google them. Or somebody else at random. Show them how much information about them is already out there, and how easy it is to find. That'll convince them pretty quickly that they need to safeguard their information.
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
A lot of people are pretty self-righteous and tend to remark snidely "Why do you need privacy if you've got nothing to hide?" What are you supposed to say to someone that seems pretty opposed to privacy... they don't even care about your privacy much less their own. Now that 'terrorism' is a buzzword, people are even demonizing those who even bring up privacy as a concern.
Twinstiq, game news
for most people all you will do is alienate them from you if you lecture them.
it's like warning a girl that her new boyfriend is an @sshole.
tell her once, but after that she just has to learn on her own.
most people just don't care until it bites them.
I've discovered that most people generally get really annoyed when you play the devil's advocate, poking holes in logically fallacious arguments. Also, people don't like being told what to do. In my opinion, a healthy sense of caution is good, and I've made more progress trying to inform people instead of telling them what they ought to do. If they don't want to take any action, well... It's their loss, in the end for the most part.
Of course, if they have access to something you'd rather keep private (such as documents, photos, conversations, etc.) then you're kind of at a loss there...
Food for thought: when we get all riled up about privacy, are we any better than the crazies who rail about pedophiles on the internet and make it seem like there are bogeymen around every corner?
Sometimes I wonder if I think too much.
i find that after a person is a victim of identity theft, they are far more likely to take privacy seriously.
As a true friend, the best thing you can do to encourage friends to take privacy seriously is steal their credit card info, buy yourself lots of nice things, steal some deeds and sell their house and cars. Sell their personal info to advertising companies, and send any material that documents your friends doing some suspicious or potentially illegal activity to the local authorities.
a few years later when they get out of jail and get their financial life back together, they won't take privacy for granted ever again.
Of course, there is no reason to let your friends know that it was you, who so lovingly taught them this valuable life lesson.
-I only code in BASIC.-
Email. Everyone uses it. Or some variation of it, such as SMS for the younger crowd.
Point out to your non-IT friends that sending an "email" is NOT like sending a "letter". It is like sending a "postcard". Any number of people you might not know can see the entire contents of your message along the way -- plus they can keep a copy of each and every one of those messages forever.
To take the analogy further, if they really want their "email" to be in an "envelope", use encryption!
@HbFyo0$k8 tH!$
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
Don't be helpful, be available.
If your friends want your expertise they will come to you and ask. If you offer it unasked-for, they will probably never ask and will go to someone else.
Probably better to talk to them about your other mutual interests. That way you get to keep your friends...
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?
You ask a good question...
No one really wants to be 'that guy' in the circle of friends. You know, the one that's always soapboxing about some sort of social injustice, evil corporations, or whatever. However, that's more or less what you need to do, because people MUST understand what is at stake when our rights to privacy are taken away.
Now, you can help your friends understand how their privacy is seriously at risk without being an asshole. It just takes time, and perseverance. I have alot of friends who have very uninformed political opinions. It's rude to just lecture them every time the subject comes up, but there's nothing wrong with speaking the truth to your friends in a palatable, positive way.
The more you mention issues of privacy, and the more well-informed YOU are about the issue, the more it will create top of mind awareness for them. In time, they will see your point. They will encounter a loss of privacy in their own lives, and because you were such a well informed friend, they will have the ability to make the mental connection. You really are doing them a favor.
Thank you Dave Raggett
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?
If they won't listen, they may need to learn the hard way, when they lose money or friends from being free with their personal information. I remember my first year in college, I knew a couple of my fellow freshmen who learned to lock their dorm room doors when their stuff was stolen. They learned the expensive way not to trust everyone.
Accentuate the positive, don't waste your mod points on the negative.
If you want to convince people then you have to provide examples that they can relate to.
I suggest you gather up a number of different examples (as no single one will appeal to everyone). Once you have some you can provide your IT lite friends with relevant examples that they can relate to.
Wardish
Ward
. Silence! Be thankful thy species is unpalatable! .
You're a complete asshole who is missing the point, yet some idiot mod will see your low userID number and automatically mod you up.
We'd have that real anonynimity still, if people gave a damn about it and valued it instead of pissing it away for the sake of convenience. And no, this is not how humans have always lived. For most of human history, it used to be that knowing very much about somebody was a difficult and expensive undertaking, as you would have had to actually physically observe them and follow them around and investigate them. It was something you did not do without a reason. Electronic transactions plus modern databases mean that this has become far easier and therefore more widespread. A few companies have more market control and a few governments have more power, but the average individual has nothing good to show for this. That is the problem, and you are in denial.
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
I've tried to point out problems to several people (the ones with Post-It notes with their passwords on screen corners or under keyboards). They don't want to take the time to learn enough and make a method for keeping things "straight". They just want things "to work, like the TV".
I've pointed out to one friend that letting people use your account on your Mac will eventually cause problems (half a dozen teenage grandkids = reinstall the OS after God knows what was done). She wasn't interested in setting up a Guest account.
I've pointed out to one friend that with 3 late grade school kids he needs parental control software on his Dell to keep the kids in line (at least a bit), but that fell on deaf ears. I pointed out his home PC was a part of a Botnet (3 gradeschool kids on the machine, so no wonder). I specifically noted that means virtually anything on that machine including passwords he types is known to the person who controls the BotNet including any financial or work docs (he's a lawyer). He said he would fix it, but 9 months later, it is obvious nothing changed, except... they found the kids surfing porn.
I mentioned that the "Near Zero" time for a busy person to fix "the problems" is a MacMini for around $600, and they can still run Windows XP if they want. No change observed.
I simply have no answer for dumb human habits used by smart people. They are good friends, so I don't say anything more.
Perhaps you should reserve this opening statement for something less preposterously moronic than "For most of human history, it used to be that knowing very much about somebody was a difficult and expensive undertaking, as you would have had to actually physically observe them and follow them around and investigate them."
Before the rise of large cities and mass transportation, it was an expensive luxury to live in a way where you *didn't* know the intimate details of your neighbors' lives. You didn't have to follow them around -- there was no place for them to go!
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
and see if you can find something about them(hopefully without paying) that they haven't shared with you. Something like, "Oh, so your (mother/brother/sister) was born in xxxx" or "Your middle name is Tiffany"? Or you could just show them that site. Scariest site on the internet if you ask me(well, aside from vomit porn)
Monstar L
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.
Today you are lucky to be able to lose yourself anywhere, be able to have a private conversation in any convenient location. Most of the time you will be caught on tape at least coming and going. This loss of privacy is accepted for obvious reasons.
So, when asked about privacy I wonder what they are talking about. Is it the people who put every detail of their lives on Facebook, then whine when those details are exploited? Is it those people who use the services of google, like gmail, with no worry that such mail may be used for profit? Or the people who send unencrypted email? Or the identity thieve issue, which is not so much a technology issue, as a going through people's garbage issue.
Basically privacy is a compromise. To get people hyper-concerned about privacy, they have to give up some luxuries they have become accustomed to. For people who will support torture to prevent a 1 in 10,000 million chance they might die in a terrorist attack, it seems like a deal that is unlikely to be closed.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Talk to a dentist. You'll hear a whole lot about how important it is to floss your teeth for 15 minutes a day. A fitness nut will tell you how you need to exercise an hour and a half a day. The house painter told me I should wash the house once every 3 months to preserve the paint. A mechanic friend told me to check my car's oil every week. etc etc.
Most people just don't have the time/energy to do everything they're told so they ignore most advise.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Sometimes it's not even "for the sake of convenience" - many of us, especially prolific bloggers, enjoy sharing our ideas, identity, and intimate details of our lives as a form of self-expression. Not only are we not trying to obscure information, we're broadcasting things to the world that would cause previous generations to blush, and are eager to continue to push those boundaries. The type of strong privacy some people advocate is an alien concept to us.
Knowing where I am, who I'm with, what I'm doing, what I think about that, etc. is something that I don't mind the general public knowing most of the time. Being contactable for all that time via IM/phone/whatever is generally kosher too (although of course I'd rather not be contacted by marketers for any of this - would like advertisements and marketing banned).
I realise that not everyone is part of this new "open subculture", and that the deep privacy advocates certainly exist in fair numbers, but I'm not alone.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
STOP READING MY THOUGHTS. Ugh. I'm having this same problem.
In summary, the Pennsylvania Department of Education now requires all student-teachers-to-be to get fingerprinted to have their federal criminal records checked. Previously, PDE required only state checks, but then it realized that a criminal could come in from out of state.
The problem with this fingerprinting process isn't the FBI, which expunges the fingerprints immediately after delivering the results of the check. The problem is with Cogent, the company that actually performs the fingerprinting and sends off the prints to be checked by the FBI. Afterwards, Cogent keeps the prints on file (on paper or electronically, I'm not sure) for at least one year.
I was in dialog with PDE regarding this, and I seem to have been dismissed as a crazy. I simply don't want my fingerprints anywhere where anyone but me can get to them, unless I have been convicted of a crime, which I have not, nor have I ever even been inside a police station or barely even talked to a cop.
I asked PDE what my recourse is, and it gave me a non-answer. I've deferred my question to my program chair, who will probably take it to the department chair. I hope to be either exempted from the fingerprinting requirement or have a special agreement constructed with Cogent saying that it will expunge my records immediately after submitting them to the FBI.
Colin Dean Go a year without DRM
~~~
I consider myself to have a reasonable technical knowledge (e.g. I've just written a telnet client from scratch in c++) and I don't use a virus scanner when online banking or at any other time; they're a complete waste of space.
For now you can get by without a virus scanner if you're using OS X or another of the Unices but one is needed for online banking using Windows, even Vista with it's nagware notices. Many will turn off the "Need your permission to continue" prompts. And with today's hdds approaching terabyte sizes space isn't nearly as much of a concern as it used to be. I've got a 500 GB external hdd I can stick in one of my pants' or shorts' pockets. And I used to use a cassette tape for storage.
FalconShould there be a Law?
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 agree. There's a whole generation growing up knowing everyhing about their peers. This is not bad at all.. and in many ways is much more healthy than the insular 'omg he knows where I shop!' mentality of the older generation.
This is entirely different to government/corporate interference/monitoring which *is* a debate that society needs to have. To try to conflate the issues is to make yourself out to seem to be a complete nutter.
The operative phrase here:"most of the time". We are not discussing selective privacy here. We are not talking about something you have voluntarily posted on your blog. We are talking about information you have explicitly not made public and may very well not want others to use against you. This is not information you chose to share. This is information someone else has chosen to collect/use/share without your knowledge or consent. Please bear this in mind when talking about your "open subculture" and the people who you believe are not in it!
Sorry, but both halves of this are wrong. One, you have no idea what life in a village is like, and two, when everyone you know knows everything about you that you don't go to elaborate lengths to conceal, it's irrelevant that there aren't millions of other people for them to know about as well.
(It's relevant for other discussions we could have; it's certainly not relevant to the original AC's view of the world.)
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Your comment conjured up a little mind movie: 2 techie guys driving around the neighborhood on a Sunday afternoon, wearing their dark slacks, white shirts and ties. They ring the doorbell. "Hi - would you happen to have a few minutes to talk about the importance of information security and privacy?"
Dark Reflection
I'm often floored at how much information people post on Facebook, Myspace, etc. I'm one of those weirdos that uses a screen name for everything and only a few people in the world know who I really am from my screen name.
I use decent passwords, and keep info that could be used to harm me to a minimum. I don't put a message up on Facebook saying how excited I am to have just bought a $750,000 new house and $37,500 new car or and here is my address and the key is under the doormat.
This was my boss's and her children's attitude prior to my employment. I'm the IT guy so of course I ended up fixing their PC when it got riddled with spyware/virii/worms/etc. When they asked me what those programs did I put the fear of God into them. I had them so scared they were on the phone changing bank passwords, switching from using "1132" as a password to something 16 digits long, deleting more private info off of places like Facebook etc.
Yes I stretched the truth about the dangers of the apps they had managed to be infected with but they are a hell of a lot better now. They shred mail and those fracking "you've been pre-approved!" credit offers.
They didn't get burned but I made them think like they narrowly dodged a bullet and they are better for it.
I assume you also get an hour of exercise per day, eat no more than X grams of saturated fats every day, don't eat any trans fat or HFCS, eat a good 25g of fiber every day, floss your teeth twice a day and go to the dentist every few months, rotate your mattress on time, etc etc etc? If not, maybe you should stop to admire how pretty your glass house is before you pick up that rock...
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
If they don't get it after you explain that, walk away, as you are never going to convince them.
I think you may misunderstand a few things. I am a fanatical "private folk type", so I will attempt to speak as one to you.
What you are saying about information not being owned is not entirely accurate. Some information can clearly be "owned". If you have your ear up to a doorway and are eavesdropping on 2 people having a "private" conversation, was that information ever intended for you? Are you correct in disseminating the information to others? Clearly not.
So privacy is important. So is anonymity. They both have important places in our society. For those that choose to be free with information regarding them personally and their actions with others, that is a personal decision. It is neither right, nor wrong. We all are desirous at some point of sharing information with other people, as that is a human quality. What I would find wrong, is one person making that decision for another, or even making a judgment about it.
As for your example about circles of friends and events, I would actually propose that those people are being unreasonable. The fact is that the vast majority of information out there is "owned" in a partnership if you will. If I am at a party with a dozen other guests, I cannot reasonably expect all of them to make my presence, or any of my actions, private from all outside parties. If there was a picture taken of me, I agreed to be in that photograph. So even though I am a privacy "freak" if you will, I do recognize that my actions with others, and especially in public, cannot always be private, and that I certainly do not "own" 100% of it. That would be presumptive and arrogant.
Your examples about advertisements fall under a different area of "privacy". There is a difference between wanting your own thoughts, feelings, actions, property, etc. private and wishing for peaceful enjoyment of your own personal space. So it is not so much "privacy" as it is "give me my space". Kind of like being at the beach in public, but not wanting to be bothered by a traveling salesman wanting to sell you a vacuum.
Now when it comes to advertisements that are targeting you based on personal information and information collected from other companies, even I would say you have little recourse. When you engage in a business transaction with another company, I feel that they have just as much right to the "information" present in this mutual transaction as you do. There are reasonable expectations of what is done with that, and even contracts that outline the specific terms of its use. So I would say it is Caveat Emptor. You need to know the business that you are dealing with, just as you should know the individuals that you are dealing with.
I am not sure the original poster was intending to force his, or my, level of privacy on everyone. I think what he was asking was how best to explain the possible benefits of privacy, and the consequences of not having it.
I personally, will turn off my music when rolling down my windows on my car. That is how private of a person I am. I can go into detail, about just how private, but at its extreme I obfuscate information present in government databases with outright lies. That is a personal decision, and I do not believe everyone needs to be like me.
What I am concerned about with Privacy, and Anonymity, which the two are often confused, is that there may not be a choice. I think the pendulum has swung the other way, and that people are not getting the privacy they expect, or even understand. So although you may want to live out in the open free, with no boundaries on the information ever present, ever flowing around you, that is a choice you have made. I would hope you not think me oppressive or wrong, that I desire the exact opposite for myself.
So I think the real goal of the poster was to attempt to explain to people that they are not receiving the privacy that they are choosing.
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.
is either already knowledgeable enough to take care of themselves, or completely ignorant. There seems to be little middle ground, because those that consider their personal information valuable take steps to protect it, learn what they need to learn in order to accomplish that. They ask questions like, "I understand I need a firewall, can you recommend a good one?" or "I'm looking to get a wireless setup at home ... how do I configure it so it's more secure?" I can deal with people like that. They're willing to learn.
... but I always come back to find the firewall turned off because "Facebook stopped working and I thought it might be the firewall" or "this game I got off the Internet kept throwing up little windows saying 'this program is trying to access the Internet' and I got tired of clicking Allow." Gagh. That's not even counting the utter inability of these people to take even the slightest precautions when it comes to email. It's not like they haven't been told, in no uncertain terms, what they need to do to keep their data safe. They just refuse to do it ... and when something bad happens to them I just shrug. An "I told you so" just isn't worth the effort.
Then there are the clueless ones, those who agree that privacy and security are important, but simply refuse to see their friendly personal computer as a potential threat in that regard. Just can't see it. Sure, I've set up security for people, done my best to keep them from screwing up too much, tried to educate them a little
It's very frustrating: you just want to smack them with a cluebat, you really do. I guess I'll just have to get used to willful ignorance. Might as well wish that SUV drivers would stop being four-wheeled sociopathic assholes. I don't see either situation improving any time soon.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Does privacy matter? The poster presumes it does, but somehow is unable to think of any reasons. If privacy REALLY mattered to him, he could think of reasons why it mattered and then tell them.
What I think is that the poster is one of those people who latch onto an idea without ever fully realising why. Instead of just flapping out that privacy is important and then wondering why nobody seems to "get it" is useless. First ask yourselve why YOUR privacy is so damned important, then you will have the answer you can tell to others.
But don't just take a position and then look for arguments to convince others. That works for a debating club where you are given a topic, not for persuading people to do something you care about.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
The point is, not everyone wants to be so open as you have chosen to be and they should not be forced to do so. That is all. To disagree with me on this subject means that either a) you think that everyone does want to be as open are you are, or b) you think that people who don't want to be so open should be forced to do so anyway. The point is, what you want for your own life and whether or not you can understand why somebody wants something different is completely irrelevant, and the attitude of "what's good enough for me should be good enough for everybody" hints at a certain arrogance, especially when you think this is about whether or not information can be owned. It's not necessary for information to be owned to respect when people want to be left alone and to recognize their right to make that choice.
Personally, I have yet to ever receive a single benefit of any kind from a stranger who knew (or thought they knew) anything about me that I did not personally disclose to them. If you feel that this has benefitted you, then goody for you; I for one feel fulfilled in my life without the recognition and admiration of a bunch of complete strangers, most of whom I will never meet, and I really question the motives of someone who thinks they need that kind of attention. Personally, I think there's something unhealthy about it, and most people I have met who needed the admiration of strangers were terrified of real, personal intimacy due to various insecurities (most were children of divorce). If you don't have this need for attention from strangers, then you gain nothing from having everyone know your business and now it will either accomplish nothing or will make it much easier for someone with ill intent to cause damage. I consider it unwise for me to do something that has no chance of benefitting me and does have a chance of harming me. Simple.
"Proprietary" is a mischaracterization really, as I never claimed information could be owned in the same sense that you can own a car. That some of your friends feel that way is great; don't lump me with them because our beliefs sound superficially similar. This isn't isolated information for the sake of truth; it's about my life (which most certainly is mine) and whether random people have a legitimate claim to it. That the claim in question is informational in nature is irrelevant to this idea; on the same basis and for the same reasons, I would oppose anyone who thought they could help themselves to my time or my labor against my will (that's the key here) as well.
What I am saying is really a simple thing. If I want you to know something about me, I will tell you. If you don't like that I haven't told you something about me and you take it upon yourself to pry into my business against my will (again that's the key here), then I'm going to treat you like any other intruder and within the limits of the law, I am going to find a way to stop you. Consider it from the opposite viewpoint: if someone wants you to leave them alone and stay out of their affairs, as evidenced by the fact that either t
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
I would interpret that to mean that you need to choose your advice carefully. The best thing my dental hygienist ever said to me was, 'Floss while you're watching TV.' It was a perfectly simple and eminently practical piece of advice, and made me a flosser for the first time in my life.
<obShamelessSelfPromotion>I've been writing a series of columns about the issue of online privacy in a local weekly newspaper. Living as I do in a developing nation, I need to put things as simply as possible. Here are the last three:
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
Oh, btw I've also been using the same passwords for 16 years.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
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).
Ask them if they use envelopes when they mail out bills or other correspondence. "Of course I do!" will usually be the response. Then ask them if they'd mind if you listened in while they talked on the phone or in person to their doctor or lawyer or spouse or significant other. "That's none of your business!" will again be the usual response. "But why? If you're not concerned about privacy, why should you care about other people seeing what bills you pay, what you write or say to your lawyer or doctor or spouse or lover?"
-- Ed Carp, N7EKG erc@pobox.com PGP KeyID: 0x0BD32C9B What I'm up to: http://intuitives.mine.nu
I actually had made plans with a group of students at the university to go around my city to various high schools, giving physics demonstrations and talking about what sort of jobs are available in science. There was also talk of a mentoring sort of thing for students interested in science but that do not have the resources to learn more. It made me feel good, I was going to be volunteering to help my community! Exciting.
I inquired about how to contact teachers to do these demonstrations in science classes, and was told I could set up a meeting with this one outreach program representative. No big deal I thought. We made the appointment and I met with her. Well, I was given an hour-long meeting on how to fill out a stack of papers about who I was, what organization I was with, who authorized me, what I wanted to do, where I wanted to do it, what days of the week I proposed to give these presentations. It included authorizations for background checks at both the state and federal levels. Finally when I thought it was all over, she hands me a fingerprinting kit and says I have to go on my own time to a local company, get fingerprinted, and wait to get verified before I can finally start.
My group gave up our plans for demonstrations and meet a scientist day right after she left. That is completely ridiculous, a huge intrusion into our lives that doesn't need to exist. We work for the university physics department, you can verify that, what else do you really need to know? We wanted to come talk to a class during school hours about physics; it's not like I was planning "Physics Sleepover! No Parents Allowed!".
The hardest trick about informing the non technologically minded about the risks and the things that they should 'not do' and the few bits of software they should install (which they can get for free and only need to install once), is not to scare them of using the Internet. Generally I find helping them install the security software (firewall, antivirus, antispyware software and of course a few firefox add-ons) and providing a simple explanation about what the software does and combining it with the warnings about what they should not do, helps to balance things out.
Add to that a warning about the vagaries of M$ software, and a quick introduction to the salient parts of M$'s non-warranty warranty 'er' eula, and why it is much better to use a non-M$ product when connecting to the internet or when attempting to secure that connection.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Thing is though that they are paranoid for all the wrong reasons. Mostly fearmongering out of various news outlets about THE DANGERS!!! OF THE INTARWEB!!! (okay okay... exaggerated but hey).
Fact remains that they might be paranoid about privacy on facebook and so on, but due to their misdirected paranoia, they're also the sheep that will gladly vote for a bill to just monitor everyone and make sure that their precious offspring won't lose their privacy, conveniently forgetting that big brother watching you equates to the same thing.
But at least seemingly Big Brother has a nice hat, so that makes it okay...
There is no sig...
i find that after a person is a victim of identity theft, they are far more likely to take privacy seriously.
A good friend of mine used to never wear his helmet when we'd go mountain bike riding. I tried in earnest twice to convince him that he was really pushing his luck. He continued to ride sans helmet. Then one day as we were riding home, he hit some railroad tracks at an angle and went down hard. On his head.
It took a while for the ambulance to arrive. The pool of blood around his head was fairly expansive. He got a serious concussion. Not good.
He now rides with his helmet.
As others have suggested, sometimes people won't figure things out until they feel the pain. But just as important is the net effect of seeing other people getting hurt. The bike helmet trend didn't take off until people realized that a lot of people were getting injured or killed on bikes, and that many of those incidents could be mitigated through the use of helmets.
There was a painful outcome, an easy solution to reduce the probability of the painful outcome. Right now online privacy is not seen as a threat because hardly anyone actually knows someone else who has been bitten by lax online privacy. But that's starting to change, slowly. Now what we need is an easy (for those people in the world who are not inherently fascinated by computers and privacy) mechanism for managing online privacy. I don't expect the latter to come into being any time soon, given the political climate in the United States, where there's simply too much money telling the government to look the other way as companies gobble up more and more personal data.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ