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The Privacy Paradox
Dekortage writes
"The NYTimes has a piece up about the paradox of privacy: 'Normally sane people have inconsistent and contradictory impulses and opinions when it comes to their safeguarding their own private information.' More specifically, it's all how you ask: if you don't talk about privacy, people won't worry about it. In one survey, 'When the issue of confidentiality was raised, participants clammed up. For example, 25 percent of the students who were given a strong assurance of confidentiality admitted to having copied someone else's homework. Among those given no assurance of confidentiality, more than half admitted to it.'"
From that little extract in the summary about students, is that proof of people not caring about privacy unless someone mentions it, or proof that students these days are a bit thick and don't really think ahead or about what they're saying?
(NOTE: I'm actually a student myself and I'm inclined to believe the latter).
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
Talk to people about dieting or brushing teeth and they might do it in immediate future. Privacy is a chore that can cause quite a bit of inconvenience. Damage from it being breeched only happens rarely and takes a lot of time to manifest itself.
There's no paradox at all. If you ask a girl out on a date she might say yes. Promising that you are not going to cut her up into little pieces and eat her raw over the next 2 weeks does not improve your chances. People are rightly suspicious when they hear someone state explicitly that they are not planning on doing something evil. Economists are always coming out with nonsense like this.
http://rareformnewmedia.com/
Surely if you've done nothing wrong, then you've got nothing to hide.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
... so the correlationisnotcausation tag is misleading. I assume they ran an experiment and randomly assigned half the students to the "mention confidentiality" treatment, half to the control. So there's no way (except an extraordinary fluke) for anything but the treatment to explain the big difference in honesty.
Most people forget that rule most of the time, to their eventual detriment. On July 3rd, a judge ordered Google to hand over log records containing user-identifiable data on every YouTube video ever downloaded. Did you ever think your YouTube habits would become publicly available? Read Rule #1 above. 'Nuf said.
Is anyone terribly surprised? How we answer questions depends on how the question is asked. Specifically, we try to read social cues as to how the information will be received. Ask someone a personal question in a context that makes them think their answer will garner praise, and they'll answer much more readily than in a situation where it's implied the answer will lead people to condemn them.
I remember in college a bunch of people were taking purity tests, and one girl took the test and scored on the relatively pure end of the spectrum, and seemed proud of that. When everyone was much more impressed with people who scored incredibly impure, she took the test again and managed to get a much different score.
If not given the assurance people think only about the bad outcome caused by their confession, when given the assurance they actually compound two fears, the fear of bad outcome and the fear of having the promise broken.
"It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities." -- Prof. Dumbledore
At least in Italy, for the sake of privacy, you cannot know from your telco the exact phone numbers that have been dialed from YOUR own phone.
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
Why bother if you can just copy the test itself?
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
There was a study or two a little while ago that mentioned that the mind has trouble with negative constructions over time.
"Your data is safe with me. That's right, I am not going to *broadcast your data all over the internet where all the world can see it, reverse engineer your life, and tag it in the southeastern dialect of Klingon attached to a mashup of Steve Ballmer and Jack Thompson. Nosirree, I promise to take good care of you and not *rip your life to shreds and offer your data as bait to the CIA, or Viacom."
The mind melts and forgets it is in "reversal mode", and becomes exhausted from the scare words.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
We live in a world today where pretty much anything that a government or a private entity tells you is more or less the opposite of reality.
People are accustomed to seeing legislation such as the "Defense of Marriage Act", which attacks and limits people's right to marry... the "Patriot Act", which exploits patriotism toward ends which no patriot could support... etc. How many Congressional bills DON'T have a name that is 180-degrees opposite from the bill's contents?
People are accustomed to private sector speech meaning its exact opposite as well. You never see a food company describe its product as "gourmet" unless it isn't. "Employee Rights" policies are generally about limiting employee rights. More relevant here, anyone who has even glanced at a "Privacy Policy" from their bank or other business institution knows that it really deals with how little privacy you have, and the hoops they make you jump through even to protect that.
Where's the "paradox" here? We have grown accustomed to any language about our "rights" actually being a bait-and-switch. So, yes... when we hear assurances that our privacy is safeguarded, we assume that you wouldn't even have brought it up unless it wasn't.
Quite.
The survey simply proves that, people who copy others' homework, find it difficult to follow a chain of logic. I'm fairly sure we all knew that before the survey.
To summarise: "Stupid is as stupid does"
Andrew Oakley - www.aoakley.com
Who do they resell their data to?
I don't know and it doesn't affect my privacy.
What has access to their system? Is every single tech person they employ trustworthy?
I don't know and it doesn't affect my privacy.
Is their security good enough?
Yes, in the sense that even no security on their end would be "good enough".
Who is middle man to your TCP transmitions?
I assume my ISP and maybe the NSA.
Do you trust your ISP?
No.
Do you login outside your PC? Can you trust those computers?
I don't have to trust them. When I do use another computer, I use an OTP.
Who else has access to your PC? Who can hack your PC?
Doesn't matter; they can't do anything with it.
Basically, you're asking all the wrong questions. If you have to rely on your ISP to be trustworthy or your computer not getting stolen, you have already lost.
Most students probably didn't know what "confidentiality" means and played safe...
"Don't ask for whom the ^G tolls."
Incorrect. GP is making a good point and staying very much on topic doing so:
He uses the term incorrectly, but since most people would understand what he means, normally they would let it pass without notice. However, since he points out that he is not interested in responders mentioning the incorrectness, responders will instantly point it out. This relates to TFA (I'm not sure he realized it himself).
Don't be crazy anymore!
You're absolutely right about this. It's the "don't think of an elephant" argument (which I learned about from a book of the same name by cognitive linguist George Lakoff).
Negative constructions reinforce the positive mental frame that contains them. When Nixon said "I am not a crook", he guaranteed that everyone would think of him as a crook. Saying "we will not violate your privacy" makes people think that you might violate their privacy.
No jokes, please
I wonder how much this applies to E-commerce sites in regards to the ever prominent "Conversion Rate" metric. Many conversion rate analysts will say that plastering your privacy policies, showing security badges and offering a constant affirmation of your trustworthiness is paramount to convincing people they can and should buy from you. Could this actually, in some cases, be hurting your overall goal of getting people to open up their wallets to you? Raises my eyebrow for sure.
I think we're pre-programmed to trust and assist everyone in our tribe by default, and distrust anyone not of our tribe. The problem is that this doesn't work well anymore, since we don't know everyone in our tribe. It's likely quite useful when you hunt wildebeest, but not as useful when you work for a hospital, protecting patient records.
Most of us don't think of trust at all, but assign perceived trustworthiness automatically, and only by being reminded of trust do we pay it any thought.
Social engineering takes advantage of this. You get the victim to draw the conclusion (without being told -- it has to be subconscious) that you belong to the same work tribe as them, and thus trust becomes implicit.
Some warning signs that you may be subjected to social engineering:
- The person starts using your first name without you having ever met.
- The person refers to an authority figure in a jocular/friendly way, in order to make you draw the conclusion that the authority figure knows and trusts this person.
- They will try to appeal to your vanity. E.g. they may imply that they called YOU because you're so friendly and helpful. Ask yourself whether, if it really was this urgent, they would be calling you instead of those whose job it is to deal with this sort of situation. If you believe for one second that it's because of your demeanor, you're not only stupid but vain too.
- They mention a common foe. "You know how accounting is..." Yeah, everyone knows that accounting are bastards to anyone not in accounting, in every company in every country. That doesn't lend credence to you being on the same side.
- They mention an interest of yours. "I had planned to take my son fishing this weekend, but I guess I'll be working, trying to fix this". Why would they tell that to a stranger? (Especially if you have a sticker saying "BITE MY BASS" on your car.)
- If face to face, the person smiles a lot. Nothing disarms suspicion as easily as a smile.
And yeah, cops learn this, and with time become pretty good at it too.
My main advice is to never trust a person who smiles. Ever. That invariably means they want something. Yes, this includes loved ones too; what they want might be something you're willing to give, but they're still unconsciously trying to lower your defense by smiling. A smile is always a mechanism to disarm the one who sees it.
You must be really fun to hang out with.
Buckle your ROFL belt, we're in for some LOLs.
And how, exactly, does this improve on correctly using "prompt the question"?
I don't understand what "prompt the question" means. The first thing that comes to my mind is:
C:\>The question
Maybe I need to get out more often, sorry.
You're absolutely right about this (I tried to mod you up, but my points had timed out). Watch any advertisement on TV and while the voice over is promising one thing, the 6 point type scrolling at the bottom is "clarifying" and negating the points-- or, in the words of Tom Waits, "the large print giveth, and the small print taketh away." I've noticed even my children no longer trust the words "cheap," and worse, "free," and assume any ad using those words is for something that costs a lot. Perhaps the researchers have discovered something about the way we interpret language in an age of letter-of-the-law linguistics.
Everything I've ever learned the hard way was based on a statistically invalid sample.
http://www.studentsfororwell.org/
The US has always been the land of the free*.
* Subject to terms and conditions, offer not valid where inapplicable.
I can throw myself at the ground, and miss.
I can't see the advantage because it deprives us of the original meaning, for which there is no good synonym.
Regards,
--
*Art
*smile*
You are exactly right. And this brings up an awkward situation: I'm gay, and sometimes after talking with someone extensively online, the person finds it necessary to tell me about his girlfriend a lot and tell me that if we meet it's not a date and he doesn't want to have sex with me, and then I have to reassure him about it. So then I feel like we're both engaging in this form of lying, because we're both thinking about the topic of sex with each other. But I guess since they initially brought it up, they're totally gay. Thanks.
This result (of people caring more about something once it's been mentioned) has been observed in economic experiments measuring people's willingness to accept, for example, the construction of a new dangerous waste management facility in their municipality.
When presented with the scenario, "The Federal and Local Governments have agreed that the construction of this facility is necessary, and should be constructed here", about 50% of people voted for the plant. When the scenario was modified to, "The Federal and Local Governments have agreed that the construction of this facility is necessary, and should be constructed here. Each resident will receive 500 Francs per year as compensation.", the rate of acceptance fell to about 20%.
Totally counter-intuitive: same scenario, better conditions, less acceptance. It wasn't a strategic decision about trying exhort more money, but rather, the fact that money was offered prompted the residents to think, "Hang on – if they're willing to compensate me for this, it MUST be dangerous. Bugger this!*"
The same effect looks to be at work in this experiment: presented with the offer of confidentiality, the subjects are prompted to reconsider how sensitive this information actually is, and come to the conclusion that if MUST be sensitive if people feel it necessary to promise not to reveal it to anyone else.
*I'm paraphrasing, obviously. I'm not sure even the French would give answers like that on surveys!
Antiquis temporibus, nati tibi similes in rupibus ventosissimis exponebantur ad necem.