An Epidemic of Snooping

Travoltus writes "Privacy advocates are frequently confronted with the rhetorical question, 'If you don't have anything to hide, you don't have a good reason to worry about losing your privacy, right?' This AP story uncovers a vast, distributed, decentralized epidemic of snooping into databases of personal information by workers at major utilities, the IRS, and other large organizations. In a number of cases these incidents have led to real harm. One striking example involves now ex-Mayor of Milwaukee Marvin Pratt, who had a pattern of being late paying his heating bills. This fact was leaked to the media by a utility worker and may have led to Pratt's losing a bid for re-election. As one can imagine, the harm becomes much greater when this same snooping is done by Government officials to deal with political enemies, or by corporations to uncover whistleblowers."

Comments

Q&A

[calebt3]

How's this for an answer:
I do have stuff to hide. It's just not illegal stuff.

Re:Q&A

[MindKata]

"A truly privacy-free world would be better for the person in question"

That's true only in a utopian world of total equality. But it has two major problems. First the world doesn't work like that, its got a hierarchy. Secondly, a lot of people in power would consider this kind of open, flat, everyone equal, utopian world, as their idea of a dystopia, not a utopia. They want power. They don't want it flat and open. They want to be higher up than others. They want to be the centre of attention. They want more money than others. They want more power than others.

So that kind of totally open world is a scifi only utopian world, that cannot ever exist in a world that has some people who also seek power and that will never change. Plus these people who seek power ultimately make the rules, so they will not allow it to go that far, where everyone becomes equal.

Political ideologies are ultimately driven by the psychology of personality types, as with all human patterns of behaviour. These personality types will continue to exist, regardless of how technology evolves in the future. So the personality types will shape what technology is allowed or disallowed and how it is used.

I am sadly convinced however that Big Brother in becoming inevitable. Too many people want the power it gives over others. Its becoming a scramble for who can grab as much of that new power faster than others. The examples of Google's chess moves show this to be true. Google's "do no harm" PR smoke screen marketing theme is sounding more hollow, every new move Google makes. Their goal is to become some kind of marketing version of Big Brother, but with the total knowledge they are building up, they will also have immense political power as well. Google data mine everything they have. Each new chess move of Google reminds me of the saying "The road to hell is paved with good intentions". Google is becoming Big Brother. Yet few people seem to be able to see its slowly happening.

Given the kinds of personalities that can easily dominate in corporations, its hardly surprising.
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=448546&cid=22377974

So I think the question is becoming not if we will have a Big Brother, but what the form of that Big Brother will take. Google definitely are becoming a marketing Big Brother and others are racing to try to grab some of what Google are grabbing for themselves. Then again, its not simply just marketing products. Marketing of anything can be helped with market research. So selling ideas just as selling products is still selling. So marketing a product or marketing a political ideology using these kinds of new technologies is going to happen, regardless of what that ideology the people want to market. The more market research that can be grabbed, the more power it gives to the people with that knowledge

Knowledge mining is the new gold rush and with it brings power over others. Its the nature of the game. But that has existed in some form, for centuries. But now we have the ability to monitor and mine everything people are interested in and what their thoughts are when they for example post emails etc... Not only that, the Internet is a growing database of these ideas on blogs etc... Give it say another decade or two and imagine what kinds of data mining can be done on archived data, to work out what people think thought out their lives.

Its like the old saying, "Knowledge is power".

Easy Answer

[SRA8]

A co-workers once made the same statement to me regarding warrantless wiretapping -- why hide anything if you are not guilty. The response is simple:
- Do you have a daughter?
- Would you mind preparing a binder with photos of her, along with all her diary entries, emails and phone conversations and sending a copy to every police officer in the city?

This will shut up most people. -----------
/. Mathematics:
+1 Insightful for encouraging killing of Muslims
-1 Troll for Muslims responding to such messages

Re:Easy Answer

[X0563511]

We can sure try!

People are stupid!

Re:Easy Answer

[dgatwood]

Yes, it does. The original logical fallacy is that if you have nothing to hide, you should not worry about snooping. The reason it is a fallacy---the reasons we should all worry about snooping are:

1. Bad people can get the information. Even relatively trustworthy businesses have their information stolen by hackers, etc. Can we really trust the police to do a better job at information security than major internet stores? I don't think so. Some bad person snags a copy of that information, and suddenly this person's daughter has a stalker.
2. Information can be embarrassing if seen by others even if it is not anything illegal. The things this person's daughter keeps in her diary aren't embarrassing as long as the only people who see them are her friends, but if some perv read her diary while... doing that which shall not be named... every night, that would be completely different. She'd be horrified at the very thought.

The point was that it's not about whether you trust the police to do the right thing and not abuse the information. It's about whether you trust the police to have the most private information about yourself---information that could be extremely embarrassing or even dangerous if leaked more broadly. And of course, if you have a clue, the answer is no. People have to earn that sort of trust, and they have to earn it as individuals. Granting that level of trust blindly to any group of people, including the police, is foolish.

There's a couple of reasons.

[thezig2]

First, things that are legal are not always socially acceptable. Your weekend bar escapades and porn habits are probably quite legal, but it may not be in your best interests for the outside world to know about your attraction to midget transvestites.

Secondly, and more importantly, things that are legal and/or acceptable now might not be in the future. Look at drug use, for example. There was no point in hiding it back in the 70's, because "everybody did it", and now it's coming back to haunt people (like politicians). People shouldn't be scrutinized because they have the brains to foresee that stuff they're doing today might bite them in the ass later.