Slashdot Mirror
Give Up the Fight For Personal Privacy?
KlaymenDK writes "Over the last decade or so, I have strived to maintain my privacy. I have uninstalled Windows, told my friends 'sorry' when they wanted me to join Facebook, had a fight with my brother when he wanted to move the family email hosting to Gmail, and generally held back on my personal information online. But since, amongst all of my friends, I am the only one doing this, it may well be that my battle is lost already. Worse, I'm really putting myself out of the loop, and it is starting to look like self-flagellation. Indeed, it is a common occurrence that my wife or friends will strike up a conversation based on something from their Facebook 'wall' (whatever that is). Becoming ever more unconnected with my friends, live or online, is ultimately harming my social relations. I am seriously considering throwing in the towel and signing up for Gmail, Facebook, the lot. If 'they' have my soul already, I might as well reap the benefits of this newfangled, privacy-less, AJAX-2.0 world. It doesn't really matter if it was me or my friends selling me out. Or does it? I'd love to hear your thoughts on the matter. How many Windows-eschewing users are not also eschewing the social networking services and all the other 2.0 supersites with their dubious end-user license agreements?"
I'm a Windows-eschewing user who has embraced all things Google...Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar (my wife keeps it up to date, which prevents "You didn't tell me we had plans on Friday!" moments). I also have Facebook, Friendster, and LinkedIn profiles.
It's funny, I went out of my way to keep my social networking site profiles generic (no pictures, no personal info, no personal statements, no likes/dislikes, etc.), and only really used them so that, when friends sent me links saying "Dude, check out this chick I work with" or "Look what this guy we went to high school with us up to now", I could see who they were talking about.
But what I found out is that, if you know people who have profiles, and those people own digital cameras, and you've ever appeared in any of their pictures, there is a chance that your privacy has already gone up in smoke. Facebook as a very irritating feature called "tagging"...Jenny, an avid Facebook user, takes a picture of their friends Bob, Susan and Mike. Jenny then uploads that picture to her Facebook profile and "tags" that picture with the names of all the people in it. If any of those people have Facebook profiles, their names in that tag will link to them. So in this case, this picture would be tagged with Bob, Susan and Mike. Congratulations, your face is now on the web, and has a name attached to it. This tagging feature is optional, but I've found that it seems to be quite popular.
So despite my efforts to keep my image & life details to myself, this has been undermined many times over by Facebook fanatics who have tagged pictures of me, and have added "helpful" details about how the picture was taken at my wife's cousin's wedding, complete with dates & locations.
Your privacy is gone, my friend. You might as well suck it up & try to look at the silver lining: it is sorta fun to make contact with old classmates and to laugh at ex-girlfriends who've really let themselves go.
Just once I'd like someone to call me 'Sir' without adding 'You're making a scene.'
I basically made a facebook account so I could remove tags.
I have no applications installed. Installing ONE removes your opt-out.
Science-fiction author David Brin got quite a bit of attention here on Slashdot when he began talking some years ago about how one cannot preserve privacy in the modern world, and that what we have to do instead is adapt to people knowing so much about us. See his book The Transparent Society .
I'm not sure what the motivation is here. Either "privacy" is some sort of religious thing for you, in which case giving up Facebook is a small price to pay, or it's a pragmatic matter, in which case you can make a decision about what the pros and cons are for you instead of asking us.
If you're asking whether I personally am impressed by someone bragging about how he refuses to use Facebook or GMail: it impresses me about as much as someone who brags about not having heard of some television show.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
I'm a privacy guy, too, or at least I was until things like Facebook and blogs come around.
Now, instead of trying to keep everything secret, I think it's easier to assume that everything is known. Some things simply have access controls to modify them or see extended information or are otherwise secured by information that assuredly only I know: passphrases (not passwords).
There's also a key element here: I don't do anything illegal and I'm honest with friends and family. One might say, "What happens when you do?" to which I will reply, "Then I guess I'm going to jail like I should." If someone comes to me with beef about something I wrote, then it's up to me to defend my position.
If I want to pass or store information securely, I'll use PGP or other virtually impenetrable encryption with good secret key protection practices, such as keeping them in my head.
Colin Dean Go a year without DRM
This is a bit over the top. On Facebook, for example, you can restrict practically any information you put into it. Now, Facebook themselves could technically do what they wanted with it, but if you're worried about the information getting out to the internet as a whole, you just go into your preferences and tell it what to make public, friends-only, completely private, or what-have-you, and they'll restrict it as appropriate. Just because most people don't enable this restriction doesn't mean it's not there.
If you're worried about Facebook selling your information to other entities, etc., take a look at Facebook's privacy policy, which states pretty clearly what they will and will not do with your information.
I have a feeling, though, that you've already made your decision and just want to hear from others who feel as you do.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
For years I swore that I'd never get a cell phone. I held out admirably until about 2003/04 or thereabouts, but I had to succumb. The reason was that everyone else had one, and social etiquette had moved on to the point where it was considered rude not to call in certain situations, not to return a call promptly, and social events were being organised and plans adjusted with such speed that it was all but impossible to be kept in the loop with a landline and payphones alone.
It's similar to how there are people who live in rural or suburban areas who would probably love to be able to live without a car, but a lot of the infrastructure and social norms that would have made that feasible in the past are no longer around.
Society expects you to be able to have personal mobility and instant availability for communication, and it works on the assumption that you do.
Judging by the experience posted, it looks like some people are holding back on the social networking thing and finding it difficult because of peer pressure pushing them into it. Interesting how society forces a body to conform.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
So, you don't want anything posted on places like Facebook, showing a list of your friends along with articles you have written, journal entries, ties to items you have posted about, etc. But, you have no problem with the same on Slashdot?
Four friends listed
A page filled with your posts to submitted articles
Three journal entries
Three fans
I know some people on Facebook that maintain some privacy: one never fills in all the fields or puts in erroneous information, one puts her middle name as her last name and posts an avatar instead of a photo.
Click here or here.
Add photos that you aren't in and tag them as you.
Then add backstory for them.
This photo was taken at my sister's friend's cousin's lesbian wedding in Monaco. That's me on lead guitar.
Since you cannot always hide information. You can always try to obscure the facts with the fallacies.
Because some of us that hated High School just as much as you did in High School actually managed to make friends in college. It's a great way to keep in touch with people. The "People you may know" has found some long lost friends of mine.
Yes you enter the argument of "If they were that good of friends I would still talk to them". Adult life (marriage, kids, family, work) leaves little time sometimes for other stuff. It's nice to catch up even once a month with a friend.
Oh wait. Nevermind, we all just get wasted and show pictures. I don't have any pictures of kids or sports. My mom (!) isn't on facebook. I don't send her messages now and again. Nope. All drunken photos from Last Wednesday.
I fail to see what Windows has to do with your mini-rant. As a long-time Linux user, I'll shake my tiny fist along with you and tilt at all the windmills I come across, but how have you given up your privacy by using a certain operating system?
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
You won't give close friends the ability to post on your wall, yet you have no problem letting the whole world know that you were listening to elvis 2 hours ago?
i consider privacy to include my password to my bank account, what my girlfirend looks like naked, and the details of how i lost my virginity, and a few other things
i don't really consider anything that goes on in gmail, in windows, or on facebook to equate to my privacy. who does? this information is mined in order to display ads in a side panel on my pc? ok. and your point?
if you consider that sort of pointless uninteresting minutae of your life to be in the realm of your "privacy" then i and many other people think you are being rather precious and overly dramatic about your life. its really just not that interesting, or worth protecting. most of us have some ability to gauge exactly how absolutely interesting segments of our daily lives and our social circle is, egomaniacs amongst us notwithstanding, and we find it to be rather common and not valuable. precious in total, to ourselves, because it is our lives, but not inherently precious as some sort of vital aspect of humanity. and we know this. and there is no cognitive dissonance about this observation. only within our own personal perspective does this minutiae have value, and in no other persecptive is it even possible to have value. so there is no need to protect anything
take for example a series of snapshots of a trip to disney world. to the person in those snapshots, they are probably more valuable than the mona lisa. but to most everyone else, they are utterly uninteresting. but, and here's the important part: the person in those snapshots KNOWS they are valuable only to him, such that exposure of those pictures to random people he will never know has no context to his life. it cannot hurt him, their reaction. even if he knew someone was looking at his private pictures and was laughing at them: so what? how can that hurt you? how can it wound you? its completely without relevancy to who and what is important to you, so laugh away. the context in which they laugh has no leverage over your personal life, becuase the judgments being made against you are being made within frameworks that have no impact on how you live your life or how you judge your life, or anyone important to you judges your life
this level of security about one's personal life is not bizarre, its normal. i am aware there are probably brittle insecure people out there who instead would be hurt and wounded by this scenario. and? its not like their reaction is valid. its only their distorted sense of what they attach their ego to that gives them pain. yes, they are in pain, but according to any coherent sense of morality, no valid reason can be formulated that justifies their pain. their reaction has no valid real context to their lives, despite their false impression that it does. their own misplaced sense of perspective is the source of their pain, not anything that anyone has impositioned them with an abridgement of their "privacy"
and this is not even something new to the world of the internet. all of us, thorughout all time periods and cultures, have been exposed to judgments about our personal lives by "outsiders". if i go to japan, and i laugh at what japanese people eat, does that hurt the japanese people's feelings? will it change what they eat? is my laughter valid to them in some way? doe sit have any context in their lives? what if a child laughed at my hairdo? or, if i am a teenager, what if an adult tut tutted at my clothing. has my personal space been judged or hurt in any context that is valid and you would take into consideration in changing your personal life?
its not that people are radically unconcerned about their privacy. its that some people consider things to be "private" and worthy of radical defense that most of us view as completely pointless effluvia. go ahead, make fun of it, expose it to the world. its me, its my personality. and?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
"There's also a key element here: I don't do anything illegal and I'm honest with friends and family. One might say, "What happens when you do?" to which I will reply, "Then I guess I'm going to jail like I should." If someone comes to me with beef about something I wrote, then it's up to me to defend my position."
There is a problem with this position.
You are making the assumption that nothing will happen in the future to make currently acceptable, moral, lawful behavior illegal.
If the law changes in such a way as to be tyrannical and you have allowed no possibility for revolt without getting caught you have sealed your fate long before the tyranny came to pass.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
At some point, you have to find the balance between protecting your personal information and actually being able to interact with other people.
Consider the chance that your life will be somehow ruined by some comment you post on Facebook. It's very low, I think. Now consider how bad you're making life for yourself by refusing to communicate in order to avoid this risk. Is it really worth it?
I, for one, think the benefit I gain from Web 2.0 sites is generally worth the risk.
Short Version: No one is going to pay attention to you unless to invite that attention.
Computers are stupid. The volume of data you're worried about is mind boggling huge. Your google search history is tucked in there with billions on billions of other web requests. If you don't keep cookies between sessions then your thousands of individual search histories are tucked in there with billions of other web requests. This is far too complex for a computer to solve. Someone would have to specifically focus on you to assemble anything useful.
This is the case with just about everything. The volume of data is so large that unless you're doing something to stand out the fact that they have some of your information is meaningless.
If you're doing something to stand out then people will focus on you. That's when things get dicey. Until then you just get lost in the crowd.
Here's what you should ask yourself. Why the fuck would anyone bother with you? I'm not being mean. Seriously who would give a fuck about your web history? Most privacy concerns are simply ego. You're really not as important as you think you are.
You also fail to mention a lot of things. Do you have cable? Do you have your own internet? Do you only use cash? Do you drive on toll roads? The fact that you focus online and not on some of the worse real world things makes worry about you.
If you don't pay for literally _everything_ in cash you're giving away infinitely more intimate information than you'll ever find on facebook.
Do you have a cable box? If so you're entire viewing history ever may be available.
Your entire web history goes through your ISPs servers. Trivial to log. Are you using an encrypted pipe to a proxy? Do you control that proxy? Physically?
if you drive on toll roads there may be a record of all your travels. If you use a transponder to auto pay tolls then there must be.
I find being offended by me offensive.
I decided quite a while ago that resistance was futile. Most details don't really matter, but it might be prudent to think about what would happen if you ever wanted to run for office or if the political winds shifted further to the right.
As for me, though, this is not a problem, because I love my country and especially that wonderful President of ours. God has truly blessed us to give us such intelligent, caring, and well-groomed leaders. My goal in life is to someday meet one of them so that I can adore him in person.
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
Actually, KlaymenDK, the hardcore privacy nut that posted this Your Rights Online submission, prefers 80s music, as you can see by browsing thousands of songs he has listened to recently.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
Because you can do a little at a time, when you have the time (10 free minutes. Let's see what my college buddy did today)
Because its really not that much work (you make it sound like it takes hours and hours)
Because there is an entire social norm set up around calling people that doesn't necessarily fit into a person's schedule. (why do you think people spend 2 minutes sending a text message that would have taken 20 seconds to call and say). This is doubly true for far-flung friends that you haven't talked to in a while.
Because you can't show someone pictures of your trip to Spain over the phone.
Because reconnecting with lost friends is both fun and difficult. "YAY! I found you. Do we have anything to talk about now, or are we just warm memories from days gone by"
Because of any number of other reasons that make perfect sense to the person doing it. If they don't make sense to you, well, that's completely irrelevant. It's not about you.
I resisted Facebook for a long time. As a high school teacher, my profile is completely private and a religiously de-tag myself on people's albums. I joined it this summer at the urging of a friend, and have really enjoyed being able to reconnect with far-flung friends. It's a poor surrogate for that shared experience that underlays many friendships, but it is better than nothing when someone is several time zones away.
privacy isn't about keeping secrets, keeping yourself isolated, but instead about having the power to decide who has access to things you would rather keep "private". very few people keep everything private, in fact most humans, social creatures that we are, need to share otherwise private things with trusted friends and family.
there came a point for me when I realized that the benefits of sharing day to day details of my life with my "friends" outweighed my anxiety over sharing them. to share the types of details that tools like fb allow previously required constant, repetitive physical contact (i.e. being in high school), but online i've strengthened valued social bonds that were very tenuous before due to geography or passage of time (and contrary to popular opinion, you can simply reject those who you would have rejected by not associating with before)
if you have balanced social life you will likely find some use for fb etc, in terms that it increases potential social encounters.
however if you are socially insecure in some way you may
a) become overly dependent of online social tools as a means of reassuring yourself that you are socially relevant
or
b) avoid them all like the plague despite the fact that all your friends are organizing their social lives there (thus reducing your opportunities for social contact and feeding a self fulfilling "bah i'm better than them anyways" attitude)
the main problem with most social web tools is that there is a lack of transparency over how they handle your information on the backend (fb for example, sure you can pretty closely control how your friends see your data, but what about all those annoying apps and fb the company itself? how can i know, in detail, what they're gonna do with my info? heck, it's not even crystal clear who has access to what info wrt applications)
l4h
80's music seems appropriate for a 34y/o, but I wonder if it distracts him when he's concentrating on a board game or working on his 2004 VW Golf in his Copenhagen, Denmark, garage.
I hate to use a slashdot meme, and I'm not making the argument that just because something has no apperant real ramifications, it's not a serious issue, but what's so bad about pictures of you being online? You already have your images taken hundreds of times a week, anytime you walk past a bank, into almost any store, whenever you use an ATM.
If you're not famous, the only people who are interested in pictures of you on vacation are people you already know. The one real concern I've seen is if someone posts a picture of you drinking and a prospective employer sees it. That is a concern, and a reason to detag a photo of yourself drinking. Of course, it's an extremely stupid employer who is concerned about that type of thing in the first place, and I maintain that you're better off not working there, but I also realize it's unfortunately not always that simple.
I feel like I'm missing something. Is it more than just the principle of your right to privacy and not looking bad to future employers?
Is that true, or merely an assertion?
I ask, because if Sue posts a picture she took, to her site, and your face is in it and linked to your profile ... then they are holding the information that Sue gave them (legitimately) and the fact that you're incidentally in it is irrelevant to your personal stuff. Because, it's now her personal stuff as well.
In a wired universe, it can get a little more indirect in terms of if it's "your" information or not.
I'm just not sure most privacy laws would be strong enough to cover this case, and it might come down to a matter of whose informed consent is needed. And, moreover, what is the threshold at which Facebook gets to say they acted in good faith and be absolutely correct about it.
Heck, as an avid photographer, I would say that if I took a photo of a crowd or in public, and you were in it (butt naked, vomiting, and with someone other than your wife) then I just have to say ... don't do things in public you might not want seen or photographed. Posting it to Facebook all nicely tagged with metadata and cross-referenced with your friends ... well, that's just asking for it.
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
I almost wish a few people who still value privacy would start filing formal complaints with the appropriate courts/regulatory authorities, so social networking sites get the message that they only get to collect data with people's informed consent.
That just brings us right back to the questions posted in this writeup. Taking legal action is just going to alienate your Facebook using friends even more.
What I find the most ironic, is that in the earlyish days of the web (and before that, USENET), I was an active participant in online communities. For that, I would often be labeled as an anti-social dork. But today, I'm labeled an anti-social dork because I don't participate in most online communities. Sigh.
... and then they built the supercollider.