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Privacy Policies Only as Good as the People Enforcing Them
Techdirt is reporting that while we all know privacy policies may not matter much in the grand scheme of things, a recent study shows that it may be even worse than originally surmised. It seems that the real issue is with who has access to personal data and what they are able to do with it. "of course, it's not just the people reading the policies that don't seem to understand them -- it's those in charge of living up to and enforcing the policies. A new study surveyed a bunch of executives, including both marketing execs and those in charge of enforcing the privacy policy, and quickly discovered that marketers have a very different concept of 'privacy' than privacy officers. Not surprisingly, they don't see anything wrong with sharing all sorts of data that seems to horrify privacy officers."
What Privacy Policy?
Survey statistics from the real article:
Those numbers just back up what we all believed anyway, right? I mean, is this really news? Or just news with different numbers?
The strength of a chain is only that of it's weakest link. We recently had a proposal to implement NAC and they're constantly tightening policies. Most solutions however are easily circumvented and rendered incapacitated by only one person or device.
As usual, the problem with computer and/or network security is not necessarily the computer (unless you're running Windows) but the people sitting in front of it.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
A system is only as good as the people that control it.
I would have never come to that conclusion without this article.
Really, in all seriousness, is this actually a surprise?
You mad
I, for one, would seriously like to see a survey conducted across a wide ranges of job types and industries, polling employees about how compotent they feel they are at their job. I get the feeling a rather large number of people are just desk-fillers, who happened to be able get through the interview process, only to realize they have no idea what they're doing. And the same people have bosses who are just as incompotent, so everybody keeps their job.
Privacy only as good as the people taked to enforce it? And how is this news, hmmmm?
I mean, I once heard of a farmer who gave the keys to the henhouse to a fox. And, guess what? The next day: no more chicken! What a surprise!
In other news, people with matches put more things on fire, and war is dangerous business for just about everyone, including puppies and cute little kids.
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
Any policy is only as good as the people enforcing them.
See: US Constitution, Antitrust Law, the Tax Code
Water is wet. Shit stinks. Money is nice to have. Details at 11.
Seriously. Google the phrase "except as allowed by law", you will find tons of privacy policies that look like this "BlahCo does not share your data except as allowed by law".
Oh great! They won't break the law. That's comforting. Thanks for spending money telling me how you won't do anything to break the law. You'll just distribute my info to anyone to whom it is legal to do so.
How about "BlahCo will not share your data except as REQUIRED by law." Oh no, that would stop their marketing efforts....
i hope they didn't spend too much money figuring this out.
Aren't any policies or laws only as good as the people enforcing them?
There are some companies, that just plain lie. In one such instance, Deniro Marketing, they were provided a unique e-mail address, and now that e-mail address is getting spam for drugs, enhancement products, stock tips, etc.
I have had other companies (versuslaw.com) try to claim that "you must have been infected with a virus that distributed your address book." Of course, I run OS/2 and Post Road Mailer. Nobody writes virii for OS/2 and Post Road Mailer does not run scripts or anything else. Of course, I had another company blame it on their fulfillment people.
Fight Spammers!
No surprise. Privacy policies are really there to cover the corporation's assets, though they also function nicely as a platform for lawsuits.
There is a thick gray line for what falls under protecting privacy and sharing critical information.
Giving an email adress for some may not seem like critical information that will violate a persons privacy, while to others it would be like a crime against humanity and all that is decent. Or you can go more to the middle, like the information that TiVo collects, while it is not accoated to any particular person however their viewing habits are monitored and tracked and used for advertisers, to but a little green thumb next to stuff you may be interested in. Or to see that you actually do watch that show that in public your vietemently deny ever seeing. Perhaps it could go one step further of using your system ID left join to user names of system IDs name and adresses.... All information falls on the sliding scale. If you are a good data miner and have the access you can figure out most anything.
Eg. a normal Slashdot post. you have the user name. Then you can see all the posts the person posts in the past. For example you can probably search all my posts and find my Real Name and my Current address. As looking at pages I have linked to areas of interests I talked about with some authority on, or if I had a home page setup people would see my home page... Then you may cross reference my login name with other sites and see other interests I may have or it could be someone else with the same handle however it could be a clue, further on. Then finding my name and location my may find where they work and most likely their resume if they are looking for a job......
Now I would prefer that you didn't do such as I would feel it would be a violation of my privacy. However there is a lot of information that can be gathered from a person today.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Marketers are rewarded for increasing sales / revenue / market share and so would view anything that can do that as a good thing to do.
Privacy officers, OTOH, are trying to protect customer data and so have a different outlook and reward structure.
My point - this is why strategies (Financial / Customer / Process) need to be articulated at the C level and reviewed and outcomes monitored on a regular basis - so everyone is on the same page.
What really bothered me was this:
And in 2005, data broker Choicepoint sold more than 145,000 individuals' personal data to Nigerian scammers it believed were legitimate marketers.
In another ongoing case, Ponemon founder Larry Ponemon says he is consulting with a major financial institution currently being investigated by several states' attorneys general in a major data breach attributed to an e-mail marketing partner. The company, Ponemon says, gave data from six million customer accounts to a marketing firm in Southeast Asia, where it was eventually posted to a Central Asian site dealing in black-market credit card numbers.
As criminals grow in sophistication and are able to co-opt crocked government officials you'll probably see more off this - why phish when you can buy the data you need outright?
Setup a shell company, buy the data you want and go to town (and anywhere else you want) on somebody else's dime. Off course, as corporate losses mount from such fraud the corporations will push for tighter controls simply because it starts to hit them in the wallet.
I had someone charge airline tickets on my card - I had flight numbers, ticket numbers and names and could not get the airline to cancel the tickets; even after I told them it was fraud and the charges were disputed. Right now fraud is just a cost of doing business I guess.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Thanks for the article captain obvious :)
who is modding this crap as interesting?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Thanks for the insight. Now THIS is why I read Slashdot!
Just like the cake ... it is a lie
Just like a spoon ... there is no privacy
Let just microchip everyone with the Mark of the Beast and be done with it already. Sheesh.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
I was surprised to find my own company shared email addresses. I created an account for my companies website with my work email address... When I began being spammed with viagra ads and ways to play poker legally I was shocked. When I asked my director about this, they said they knew of nothing about it and would look into it. a couple weeks later I was informed they found the issue and it should be resolved.... What does that mean? I may never know.
Weather due to change within 24 hours! Sun expected to rise in east!! Horny dolphins shock whale-watchers with aquatic orgy!!!
@Slashdot editors: Slow news day?
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
who is modding this crap as interesting?
It's those damn moderator-robots, of course!
(Which I'm told are the robust, self-controlled pinnacles of Slashdot moderating who will never fail us.)
From the TechDirt discussion:
If corporate Amerika treated my "intellectual 'property'" (i.e. my personal identity, beginning with my email address, which I'll point out that they pay me NOthing for, but rather obtain by extortion: "you must surrender an email addres to register to use this website"!) as MY PRIVATE PROPERTY, maybe I would feel more inclined to treat their "intellectual 'property'" (i.e. music and movies _I_'ve paid money to them to use!) with a little bit more respect.
As it stands now, what's good for the goose is good for the gander, and just as they see nothing wrong with sharing "my" email address with their "coroporate partners and marketing associates", I find nothing wrong with sharing "their" music and movies with my family and friends.
Exceeding the recommended torque is not recommended.
Is this a subtle way of announcing that Fark ran out of Obvious tags?
Until it changes without notice to read "we'll do whatever we want" and they still have all your data you gave them under the previous policy.
So even a great policy doesn't really mean jack, if you don't trust the people and the company. And not just now, you have to trust everybody who might ever have access to that data in the future!
I'd like to extend my most sincere congratulations to Commander Obvious on his promotion to Captain.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
Oh! I love it when you talk all statistical and scientific to me! Giving me the hope of REAL data... but alas you dash my hopes...
Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what your country did to you
The only way to "try" and maintain your privacy is to NOT give away things like your name, e-mail address, phone numbers, etc. That still won't ensure privacy, as this article proves, but you don't need to make it any easier for them. Given most of you aren't willing to go to the extremes required to maintain your privacy yourselves, you should just expect your privacy to be violated. How many of you screaming "privacy!" right now have unlisted phone numbers, for example?
. . . in this little gem from the Forbes article:
Translation:
I'm not tense. I'm just terribly, terribly, alert.
A classic example of this is Ameritrade.
I set up an account with them, using a single-purpose email address, amtdcrowell06 at lightandmatter.com. Notice the amtd on the front, which was a unique prefix I chose just for use with them. I started getting spam like crazy. Strangely enough, the spam was all about stocks -- pump-and-dump stuff. Ameritrade tried to blame it on a virus, which wasn't very plausible, since I was running FreeBSD, postfix, and mutt. They tried to blame it on a brute force or dictionary attack, which also wasn't very plausible -- the prefix doesn't really consist of dictionary words, and 13 characters, consisting of a mixture of letters and digits, gives a total of 10^20 possible addresses that would have had to be checked by brute force. I wouldn't have minded if it was a myspace account or something, but these were people who had large amounts of my money. I migrated my account to scottrade. Years later the news broke that ameritrade had leaked tons of email addresses. They blamed it on some unknown insider. Since people had been telling them about the problem for years, you'd think they'd have clued in a lot earlier. It's amazing how bad an internet-based company can be at the internet thing. If any slashdotters are using ameritrade, you might want to think about switching to some other company. (Ameritrade's web interface also had some functionality that didn't work properly in Firefox on Linux.) You can transfer your portfolio from one company to another without having to pay capital gains, and without incurring transaction costs.
Find free books.
Not for spam delivery. Spam bounces, yes, but even that's rare.
The vast majority of the no-such-account spam to my mail server is to fragments of Usenet user IDs, old accounts, and so on. The only cluster of dictionary attacks are bounces from spam with my domain forged as the sender... and most of that is things like "DeloresrecessPayton" and "tanyaarentcouch", not credible user names. The top non-real accounts it's hitting are "pklss05", "zurw9t5", and "v72u6d1"... of the couple of thousand spams a day that get through my first level filters, there's only about 10 addresses that have two-digit counts, and they're all message-IDs like that.
SOE employee tells, SOE volunteer about a customer complaining about the SOE volunteer's behavior... SOE Volunteer uses access given to SOE Volunteer to look up Customers personal information and SOE actually Telephones Customer to warn them not to be complaining about them. - http://n3rfed.blogs.com/n3rfed/2005/07/this_update_is_.html
Thanks to eating disorders most chicks are reasonably good looking these days.
I mean there's Green Peace for the planet, Human Rights Watch for human rights...etc.
If there has ever been a need in need of invention this is it, internet users would like to go to one big third party and check out whether or not Facebook will give their information to say, my insurance company when I fake getting a Tattoo infection.
I seriously think as a business this would be a very lucrative industry, at the same time I for one wouldn't mind entering Wakoopa in the search engine of this company's website.
It's perfectly legal, but what if they change the terms for say, one hour, sell their entire customer database, then change it back? Unless you're refreshing that page 24-7, you will be screwed. Remember when Yahoo did this?
I'm not tense. I'm just terribly, terribly, alert.
I knew this a while ago. In a fit of stupidity, several years ago, I decided to join Canada's NDP, and I was dumb enough to give them my email address. What ensued has been very educational about the position privacy concerns really occupy in Canada. Not only do they use a huge variety of spam-filter evasion techniques on their missives, but they blatantly ignore their own privacy policy, to the point of ridiculing their own members when they ask about it. Now, I shouldn't have expected a lot from a political party, but it seems interesting that the people who demand that others obey privacy rules (to the point of creating laws to compel people to do so) would have such a disdain for them. If they won't follow it, what possible incentive does anyone else have to waste any effort doing so?
Stasis is death. Embrace change.
that people who read Forbes don't like the violation. We know it's wrong and the public is catching up. That's good news.