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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.
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.
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.
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!
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.