Slashdot Mirror
"Reality Mining" Resets the Privacy Debate
An anonymous reader sends us to the NYTimes for a sobering look at the frontiers of "collective intelligence," also called in the article "reality mining." These techniques go several steps beyond the pedestrian version of "data mining" with which the Pentagon and/or DHS have been flirting. The article profiles projects at MIT, UCLA, Google, and elsewhere in networked sensor research and other forms of collective intelligence. "About 100 students at MIT agreed to completely give away their privacy to get a free smartphone. 'Now, when he dials another student, researchers know. When he sends an e-mail or text message, they also know. When he listens to music, they know the song. Every moment he has his Windows Mobile smartphone with him, they know where he is, and who's nearby.' ... Indeed, some collective-intelligence researchers argue that strong concerns about privacy rights are a relatively recent phenomenon in human history. ... 'For most of human history, people have lived in small tribes where everything they did was known by everyone they knew,' Dr. Malone said. 'In some sense we're becoming a global village. Privacy may turn out to have become an anomaly.'"
I'd do it for a sony experia x1, or htc touch pro. If it became too obtrusive, I could always buy my own phone and walk away from it. I doubt I would. Of course, if this were forced on me, I would effect armed resistance. But for a free sweet phone.....
--why?
Isn't territorial behaviour a precursor to privacy? I mean, the idea of "Stay out of my room, I'm getting dressed" can't be that far off "Stay out of my burrow or I bite you, you strange animal"
Honestly, there is very little I do or say that I care if it's kept private. What I do in the bedroom? No, really I don't care. I'm not particularly attractive with my balding head and too-large belly, but if someone really wants to watch that, it's kind of their problem.
In theory the government could use data mining to distort reality and accuse someone falsely of some crime, but really, if the government is to the point that they want to go out of their way to accuse people, there are lots of tried and tested methods that have been used throughout history. Privacy or lack of privacy is not going to make a bit of difference in whom the government arrests or kills.
If someone DOES want to kill me, having that kind of information would be helpful, but realistically, if someone wants to kill me, there are so many opportunities to kill me that just by following me around a bit they will have no problem finding a time to knock me off. Hit men have been doing their jobs for millennia, without modern technology.
The point of all this is, some people worry too much about their privacy.
Qxe4
Nobody thinks twice about talking on their phone in public. Anyone can listen in if they wish, but they usually don't. It's not privacy that most people have issue with, it's being singled out.
As has been said many times, it's not a problem so long as everyone is treated the same way. General trends and statistics are fine, it's being the focus of attention of Big Brother that gets creepy.
The fact that no one understands you doesn't mean you're an artist.
And I've been working so hard to be like everybody else.
Faith: n. -- That human impulse that drives them to steal appliances when the power goes out
How much bandwidth / txtes does this use?
It would be nice if myspace/facebook & other social networking sites offered some information to new users educating them on what they are really getting themselves into. I don't think most young people have a real sense of what online privacy even is or why it is important.
How do they feel about people outside their "tribe" knowing this stuff? I know a lot of people who share pretty personal stuff on LJ but locked to friends, but I wouldn't claim to know them that well.
I also wonder how his behaviour might be different if he didn't know he was being watched.
If the world is becoming a 'global village', who is the village idiot?
Oh, sweet irony.
If privacy is a recent phenomenon (arguable), then is it a coincidence that "global scale" governments are also a recent phenomenon?
For human society to be anything resembling healthy, governments must totally without privacy, and people must the right to privacy.
Privacy is about secret information, and secrets are a source of power. There must be a balance of power. We already know the result if there isn't, and the problem only gets worse with increasing technology.
Now get the fuck off my lawn.
Bullshit.
First of all, "history" post-dates civilization. People have been gathering into villages, larger than small tribes, for longer than we've known how to write. So, no, we haven't lived in small tribes for most of human history. Most of us have been living in agricultural villages for all of human history - those few who still maintained a hunter-gatherer lifestyle didn't get recorded and are ahistorical.
Anyway. For most of human existence, to get privacy all you had to do was walk away a bit. If I wanted to have a private conversation with you, walking for twenty minutes out of the campsite or village would do it. And what went on in another hut or teepee was not your business; spying was non-trivial.
This idea that privacy is a temporary anomaly is a bullshit justification by lovers of a surveillance society.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Privacy may turn out to have become an anomaly.
Ridiculous. If this were true, why didn't everyone in those old-school villages live in the same big hut? Likewise with animal homes. As some poster above said, territoriality, and hence privacy, is inherent to all life above a certain intelligence threshold.
Though, as in all things, there are exceptions to prove the rule. Like dirty hippies.
Not going to happen. The social networking sites are financially fuelled by people's private info. They won't discourage people from giving up as much as possible.
We all have secrets, but it can only be a good thing when people screw up their careers/lives because they gave too much away on facebook. In a Darwinian sense I mean.
'For most of human history, people have lived in small tribes where everything they did was known by everyone they knew,'
Bad analogy. People in someone's physical neighbourhood would know what the person was doing. Go to another village, and the first village would not know. Take a would alone in the forest, and noone would know exactly where you'd been. Now we have an omniscient observer who knows everything we do all of the time, even if s/he is not physically around, or even unknown to us.
And even more dangerous, this flood of information is used to draw conclusions from...
-peter
Thereby making George W. Bush the global village idiot! Come on you knew someone would say it!
in a medium sized village during my youth. Maybe I am just generalizing based on my experience in this one village, but what they claim is a big exaggeration. Sure you will hear about who is going out with who or who is cheating on their husband or wife but you won't know how many phone calls someone makes a day or what channel he watches on TV or listens on the radio. There is an unwritten treshold of 'decency' where as long as what you do is not over this decency threshold, no one will take notice, hence the gossips about infidelity etc. So, no, we are not returning to norm with regards to privacy.
100 Students gave away their privacy to get a cell phone that probably isn't an open operating system.
All the talk is corporations need to keep their secrets, but the people don't need privacy.
I would buy the exact same smartphone model at Best Browse, then return it the next day with the other phone given to me by the researchers.
Free phone... and some other sap gets monitored!
'For most of human history, people have lived in small tribes where everything they did was known by everyone they knew...' The key is 'everyone they knew'. That is, they knew everything about everyone who knew everything about them. With the 'global village', people I don't know can know everything about me; but I can't know everything about anyone else, including them. So, I don't know their motives or intentions with respect to the info they have about me. So, I don't want them having that info about me.
that Dr. Malone masturbates while looking at a mirror? What about privacy now, good professor? Hmmmm?
Sorry about the failure to close the blockquote.
What do you think it takes to jailbreak those phones?
EVERY culture is "really fucked up" when compared to any other culture ... based upon the bias of the person doing the comparing.
You can find single examples to demonstrate that claim ... but you cannot find multiple examples in a single ancient culture to support it. Again, depending upon the bias of the person doing the comparing.
Culture X was more enlightened regarding Y than modern cultures ... but less enlightened regarding A, B, C and D.
Our tribal ancestors lived before the days of intense government and corporate information gathering. Had one of the villagers been an FBI agent or a Walmart VP of marketing, they might have acted quite differently
Airplane Photos, Airline News, Planespotting Guides
It's okay to have the information open ... as long as the information is not used in any way that you disapprove of.
The problem is that once the information is open, you no longer control it. You do NOT have a say in how it will be used.
If it is used in some way that you do not want it to be used, sucks to be you. That is why privacy is important.
'For most of human history, people have lived in small tribes where everything they did was known by everyone they knew,' Dr. Malone said. 'In some sense we're becoming a global village. Privacy may turn out to have become an anomaly.'"
Well, hats off to for completely misunderstanding previous societies.
Yes, before the telegraph we didn't have good comms. Messages took days, even weeks to be conveyed. Then they took a few minutes.
Now they are almost instant.
That is nothing to do with previous village societies where small groups of people would know everything about everyone else in the same small group.
The state still knew NOTHING about those people.
And industry and commerce and marketing groups and political pressure groups knew NOTHING about these people.
Its a totally different ball game. To compare the old "I know everyone in my street" mentality to global gropu associations is grossly ignorant. They are not comparable.
Therefore the privacy implications are completely different.
Stephen, can't be bothered to login.
You make excellent points.
But for a free sweet phone.....
How about a sweet, sweet FREE Motorola DynaTAC 8000X?
It is revolutionary. It has:
It is so superior, it has been specially highlighted by Richard Frenkel, Head of System Development at Bell Laboratories, as "a triumph".
How about it?
So, 100 college students have enough intelligence get into MIT, but these same 100 college students dont have enough common sense to realize/care they are giving up their privacy.
I expected more, for some reason, from those going to MIT.
Reminds me of a movie quote, "So this is how Democracy dies... to thunderous applause."
In those cases where they did all live in one big hut ... why did they choose that? What were their circumstances?
When those circumstances changed, did their choice of living space change?
I think that most of those situations came about because of a few circumstances.
#1. It's easier to heat one big hut with everyone in it during the winter.
#2. It's easier to defend one big hut from the enemy tribes.
#3. It's easier to re-build one big hut when the weather knocks it down.
And even in those cases, while it might have been one big hut, that hut was sectioned off into personal/family territories.
I've got nothing to hide.
But the Government shouldn't be looking either.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
What measures are being taken to ensure that the privacy of others who communicate with these students isn't being compromised? Are they having the students tell everyone they communicate with, "Hey, I'm in this data gathering study, so everything you send to my phone is going to be collected for study?"
If they're not doing the above, how are the students any different from the informants employed by the East German STASI?
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
You can download the entire data set, which has had some data removed.
It's mostly cellular phone transactions. Your cellphone provider and NSA already have this data.
But privacy does fluctuate. One can imagine kids having the ability to venture to play whatever games kids play with no one the wiser. This was even possible 30 years ago, before parents started putting cameras in the kids rooms. On can imagine reading a book and no one knew you ever read it, which changed when library records become public information. Thinking this is a recent innovation, even in evolutionary terms, is,to me, naive.
The argument now is really what is the marginal benefit of privacy, or, to put another way, are you willing to go onto big brother, have all your movements, nude body, and sex acts, filmed for the possibility of a prize and 5 minutes of fame. Maybe privacy is not worth even that much.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Nice. False dichotomy followed up with an insistence that people who don't share your viewpoint should be killed. You are in every possible way 100% identical to those you claim to oppose. Just like them, you hate (and therefore fear) freedom.
And no, I'm not anti-privacy in the least, though you'll lie and claim that I am.
> For most of human history, people have lived in small tribes where everything they did was known by everyone they knew,'
> Dr. Malone said. 'In some sense we're becoming a global village. Privacy may turn out to have become an anomaly.
There's huge difference. In the tribal setting, a small group of people knew everything about each other, but that small group of people had to deal with the consequences of misusing that trust because they lived and died based on the strength of their community.
In the global village, people are numbers with attributes associated with them. You're free to misuse this lack of privacy without bearing the consequences or even seeing the faces of the people whose lives you hurt or even destroy.
I can't remember who it was who said, "Privacy is dead, get over it". I have come to believe this is true (I didn't say I like that fact, however; it's just a reality) Having said that, I think that the whole debate over privacy as it is usually framed misses an important point. It's not what information you have that's important; it's what you choose to do about it. If the FBI keeps a secret dossier on me, that's not necessarily bad. If they use it to prevent me from flying or freeze my accounts because the agent assigned to my case disagrees with my political views, that's different. Abuse of information always should be punished.
Given that there's so little privacy around, why not also require those who collect information to leave an audit trail indicating from where they received the information and to whom they gave it?
How do they feel about people outside their "tribe" knowing this stuff? I know a lot of people who share pretty personal stuff on LJ but locked to friends, but I wouldn't claim to know them that well.
People have a very different emotional reaction between, "Oh, all my friends found out about it," and "Oh, everyone in town found out about it," and "Oh, crap, it's all over the internet and the news now. I will forever be known as 'the Noodle Guy'" (to quasi-steal from Calvin & Hobbes).
Some things you can live down because everybody knows you. Other things you can't because that's all most people know about you. It's the difference between having no privacy between peers and being infamous in the community.
Also, privacy gives people a chance to redeem themselves or start their lives over if things get really bad. When some incident becomes enshrined on the internet or in the news for all to find when searching for your name, your job prospects and love life can be ruined forever in a way that wasn't possible when you could just pack up and leave for somewhere where people didn't know all your past sins.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
"Not going to happen. The social networking sites are financially fuelled by people's private info. They won't discourage people from giving up as much as possible."
Yeah. When I read the GP's post it reminded me of an article that I read the other day about various parental organizations petitioning toy manufacturers asking them not to market their products directly to children as much this holiday season. Both made me think the same thing ... "yeah and I want a pony".
You're right, I won't use carp like that. I prefer trout.
Dr. Malone can certainly rationalize with the best of them, can't he? He's attempting to equate two radically different states:
The former sounds rather socialistic, while the latter screams "Big Brother".
Dr. Malone is a corporate Big Brother sell-out trying desperately to justify his sell-out-ishness for the sake of his own fame and fortune.
BTW, as an aside, have you heard about the now-ubiquitous cameras in the U.K. and the accusations that it creates a Big Brother environment, similar to the latter state above? I have a solution to morph that into the former: the U.K. should make the output of all the cameras available to EVERYONE via the 'Net, and take away law enforcement's exclusive privilege to them; law enforcement then takes action when a CITIZEN reports something they are observing. It would be like a local/regional/global Neighborhood Watch, Internet Age style.
It's not the technology that is bad: it's who employs it and how. I have no problem with an absence of "privacy", as long as it's not a lop-sided absence that benefits some at the expense of others. When corporate CEOs are willing to share all THEIR private activities with me and everyone else, then I'll consider allowing them insider knowledge of what I'm on about.
How do you get to be a doctor by spewing out crap like this? Far from actual justification, it's quite a poor analogy, even on Slashdot.
If you were to go back in time and join a tribal village, everyone else may know everything you do, but you also know everything they do. However in today's world, corporations and governments want to know everything about the populace but keep their own activities a closely-guarded secret.
In tribal communities, knowledge of others' activities is balanced. In "civilized society," the distribution of knowledge (not to mention money and power) is extremely lopsided. Those in power want to keep it that way. If everyone knew about all of their activities, they wouldn't be able to retain their power for very long.
I would actually be in favor of a surveillance state if (and *only* if) the camera points both ways. They get to see what goes on through cameras on our streets and outside every home and we get to see everything that goes on around every police car and inside every government meeting. But since that's never going to happen, the only sensible thing to do is fight for no cameras at all, losing battle though it may be.
Ridiculous, sorry.
Some people have a metabolism which lends itself to storing energy as fat more readily. So you could say that some people put on weight easier (or even far easier) than others- but to say they have no control over their weight?
I might be able to accept that someone would have a psychological reason, rather than physiological reason, for an inability to control their weight. But that shouldn't be a free pass to discounted health care- if you can't control your weight, either accept you'll have a reduced quality of life and increased health care payments... or do something about it, including getting treatment.
To pull out the ever-present car analogy, that's like saying because driving very fast gives me great pleasure, I have no control over my speed. I'm blameless! Blameless I say! *zoom*...
Check out my sci-fi book "Lacuna" at http://goo.gl/MVxX8
Maybe those 100 just were a bit of exhibitionists.
I'd be filming me jacking off and making Goatse-like photos or use it as a "toilet cam" and send all this to a fake or prank contacts all day long, if I knew someone had to watch me and I would get a free and expensive electronics device for it to tinker with. ;)
As a software developer I can use it test my mobile phone software on it. And for the real real calls, I'd use my old mobile phone.
But maybe I'm just a bit evil and sexually dirty sometimes. O:-)
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
For most of human history, people have lived in small tribes where everything they did was known by everyone they knew.
I have been reading a book on Irish history. Apparently, so much as looking into someone's house required a payment of their honor price (eraic). IIRC that's the same as if you were to kill them, or at least a serious crime. This is revisionism.
Why not send out experimental drugs for me to try for merchandise based on open access to my complete DNA code. Why not stake the cops out to look for crimes I MIGHT commit based on all my other behaviors?
What business do you have keeping information from the rest of society which could be used for a social good? Do you really think you live in some kind of vacuum where only you the individual matters?
How about if all these 'evil' insurance companies can drastically reduce the overall cost of health care to a point where it saves a large number of lives? Is it ethical for you to want to withhold that information simply because it benefits you personally to do so?
Human society is more than the sum of the individuals which make it up, and the interests of that society are more than the sum of the interests of its individual members.
Not that I think we should mindlessly surrender all privacy, but to insist on mindlessly guarding everything about ourselves we are paying a price, and that price may well be higher than the price of openness. It may also be a lot higher than we think it is. Seems to me the issue bears a lot more study.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
Data Collection of unknown, implicit, and/or explicit activities/processes without theft/collection of personal identity/data is not an invasion of Personal Privacy.
Discovery, collection, aggregation, analysis... of unknown, implicit, and/or explicit activities/processes and relationships is the technology equivalent of creating a yellow-pages phone book, travel guides, college science and engineering text books, creating an organizational chart.... Knowing something is done is not the same as knowing someone (by name/ID) did something.
I agree, anything like a white-pages phone book would be an invasion of privacy.
Knowing by personal name/ID while tracking/collecting unknown, implicit, and/or explicit activities/processes will always be an invasion of "reasonable to expect personal privacy".
IOW/IMO: What should require a legal warrant is the question. If there is a personal privacy invasion, then put the SOBs in jail and shut down the business with court orders.
Also IMO, If enemy/crime/corruption... discovery... of ... activities/processes and relationships is required by the Government/People; AND racial/cultural and individuals' names/information are not the basis for initiating crime/corruption... discovery, then use of the unbiased discovered information/data about a specific corporatist, politician, clergy, gangster... criminal activities/processes and relationships should (as always) be usable for grand jury reviews and legal warrants allowing further investigation of the individuals discovered by applied technology crime investigation. IOW: Prove a crime was/is being committed, and then prove (+forensics) who done it is the same old flat-foot/field agent method that has always been legal and Constitutional. It ain't entrapment and it ain't invasion of privacy.
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
Does this apply to politicians, wealthy people and corporations?
What I fear is that for regular people there will be no privacy but government, corporations and wealthy people will keep working in secrecy and that is too big an asymmetry. They would know everything about us and we would now nothing relevant about them. This would allow them to control our lives completely.
If there is going to be no privacy, lets start with full transparency from government actions, and that means everything, and full disclosure of every financial transaction from wealthy individuals and corporations. And no, terrorism is not a excuse to keep important information from taxpayers.
If they have nothing to hide, they shouldn't mind. Isn't that what they say to us?
When his defense asked, "Which computer has Jon Johansen trespassed upon?" the answer was: "His own."
Look up the historical records of how "social good" is defined. You'll find everything from slavery to genocide.
See above. Individuals throughout history have opposed the "social good" of the time and we regard them as selfless heroes now.
It is the choice of the individual. Not the society.
I worked for an insurance company. They aren't doing it because they think they're improving society.
They're doing it because the owners believe they, personally, can turn a profit. And they believe that the more information they can collect, the greater their profit (and the smaller their losses) will be.
Don't confuse "economical" with "good".
Yes, of course it is.
Again, look up slavery and genocide.
It "may well be" ... but if you study history you'll see that the opposite seems to be the norm.
The more privacy the population has, the more "Free" that society is.
The less privacy the population has, the less "Free" that society is.
"For most of human history, people have lived in small tribes where everything they did was known by everyone they knew..."
That may have been true in the most general terms...who's dating who, which cop has a drinking problem, whatever. But this kind of eyes-in-your-bedroom tracking of everything you watch, everywhere you go and even, potentially, every product in a store your gaze lingers on, is unprecedented.
Even in small villages, there are doors and drapes, and while your close friends would know you intimately, the owner of the local store would not.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
In addition to the obvious, there is a more insidious second order effect that professional social engineers (madison avenue, politicians, con artists, etc.) will have the feedback to really fine tune their approach. It will be a focus group of 100% accuracy.
"Intelligence is like four wheel drive, it gets you stuck in more remote places" --Garrison Kiellor
So you don't think that health care should include mental health?
I've got nothing to hide. But the Government shouldn't be looking either.
Exactly.
Not News: I'm an emotional person. Also Not News: This is an emotional subject. Deal with it, as I'm not going to apologize for being emotional about it.
...but they said they already know what happens on Slashdot.
Repton.
They say that only an experienced wizard can do the tengu shuffle.
>For most of human history, people have lived in >small tribes where everything they did was known >by everyone they knew
even if that was true, people could, with varying degrees of inconvenience, pick up and move to the next village over if their situation became untenable. Nowadays, the nearest escape from the global village is the moon, and it's a tad more difficult to move there.
I cannot exercise. At all. There's a physical reason, one that robs me of the control of my limbs and sense of balance when I try to.
Obviously, I'm overweight.
And it's my fault?
That is to say there should naturally be study and debate about what is or isn't going to benefit us all. I don't claim the case is made for providing insurance companies with that kind of information, just that it seems such a case could be made and that itself has ethical implications. We should study it.
Suspicion is all well and good too, but there has to be some reasonable point at which we are willing to admit the case is made. There may also be perfectly feasible ways to navigate between the extremes of totally trusting commercial entities and simply not collecting data at all. The most straightforward of which would be a real national health care system (at least WRT the case as it relates to health care).
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
The problem is that once the information is open, you no longer control it. You do NOT have a say in how it will be used.
I'd much rather have control over my information, just the same way I dislike DRM because I prefer to have control over the DVDs I buy.
Not having a right to privacy would suck just as much as not having the right to buy property, or not having the right to work. It would make you more of a sucker, who is less in control of his own life, and who is more dependent on the goodwill of those who are more powerful than you.
On the other hand, I think the right to privacy could be revocable. For example, if someone has committed a *major* crime, I think it would be fair to openly strip them and their associates of the right to privacy for an appropriate number of years, so that additional crimes from that general group of people can be better prevented.
In that sense, what has been done to these MIT students should be a prophylactic punishment that is reserved for individuals who are highly likely to commit serious crimes. Call it the 24-hour virtual citizen's watch.
Its as simple as that. It is morally bankrupt and I have to say I see your position as both simplistic in the extreme and grossly myopic.
Nobody is claiming insurance companies aren't operating for profit, of course they are. So what? It is simply irrelevant. You have cast the whole question into some sort of zero sum equation where if they gain you loose. You'll have to do better than that.
I also disagree that privacy and freedom are inextricably entwined in such a way that a simplistic "if we have less privacy we have less freedom" is a justifiable position. Prove it.
If your theory of ethical behavior is nothing more than you blindly maximizing your own selfish interests then I pity you friend.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
These are MIT students, not the local community college kids. Ever notice the great lengths they have gone through just for kicks?
Any bets on how long it took before a "workaround" was found to keep some or all calls from being in the database?
Even such low tech behavior such as, "Let's swap phones for when you want to make long distance calls, and I want to call someone privately" would work. But I'd expect a more imaginative solution.
Try doing it sober instead ;)
I will give up my privacy the moment everyone else does it. But if I am asked to give up my privacy while others retain it, then it's a screw up.
...who finds the term 'reality mining' to be so incredibly redundant, retarded and a perfect sign of the times, as to how fucking clueless, stupid and moronic humans en mass have become?
The act of simply being fucking alive, is 'reality mining'!!!
Sometimes I wish we would just wipe ourselves out before we get any fucking stupider as a species.
This term even beats the once champion of fucking dumbness term 'podcast'
There is no proof outside of mathematics.
Instead, I'll reference history. Read up on the totalitarian societies and the amount of spying they did on their citizens and how much information the citizens had to provide.
You can believe whatever you want.
But until you can provide at least one counter-example all you're doing is denying the historical facts.
Oh yeah, the old "I don't see anything here, so there must be nothing here" argument.
Just because you do not care about your own privacy does not imply in any way that everyone else who does care is nuts and "overly concerned".
It just says a lot about your imagination.
The thing about living in a tribe is that for everyone that has full knowledge about your life, you all do.
I would be glad to give away my privacy to every company which would also send me back all the details about their employees life.
Seriously, you wanna know who I email, what I did at 9h12 PM yesterday or what my favorite music is, fine, as long as I get the same info from all your employees that might be in contact with my information.
That is the way it was working in a tribe. Nowaday, companies wants unidirectional access to private information. Then, you gotta pay me enough to make me want to give up my privacy!
"Deal with it". Please. Like your whining hypocrisy is some Harsh Reality That I Must Face or something.
You were not merely "being emotional", and you know it. You were raging impotently at the inescapable fact that people are free to hold views you don't like, and that you will never, under any circumstances, be able to do anything about it. You meant every stupid, petty, ineptly-stated word you said. You want no one to be free, and it makes you shriek with indignant rage that we have it.
We have a constitution that strictly states our right of privacy. Anyone who doesn't think so, is less than American. Most governmental agencies and offices are subject to public scrutiny, except in the case of Secrets, which are used throughout our National history as security, whether militarily, or scientifically, etc. Other than that, most politicians can not hide from the scrutinizing eyes of our Public Interest. Don't give away your rights because you don't care about your own privacy. Yet don't be alarmed at an experiment like this one with the smart phones. This is for the benefit of science. People signed a waiver, meaning they don't mind being scrutinized. Butt - If you catch them buggers checking out your Buttocks, making sure your butt talks. report the jerks, and make sure they don't do again without a warrant, or without your knowledge, save for the fine line of National Security. GBA.
Attempts to have disclosure of information from the former to the latter exist (eg google "freedom of information", "open government" or "corporate disclosue") but they are usually weak, because of the laziness of members of the latter.
-- the only thing we have to fear is really scary things
In some sense, privacy concerns ARE new. That's because in the small town/tribal village, you knew everything about everyone who knew everything about you. If you felt it necessary, any one of those somebodies could be within punching distance in just a few minutes. If you did feel that need, your odds of anything beyond an informal "don't do that again" warning as a result (or getting your own nose flattened) were small.
The people you didn't know much about (in the next town over) knew very little about you. When a stranger came to town, information sharing would be limited until people got to know him a bit through careful mutual disclosures.
Gossip while always existing has always been looked at a bit sideways. The recipients of gossip generally had a decent context to weigh that information against (that is, they knew you).
Today's privacy concerns are about faceless corporations and government agencies you may not have even heard of knowing everything about you and you don't even know they exist. They tend to violate the unwritten rules of careful mutual disclosure by disclosing nothing while gathering everything they can about you.
Much of the corporate information gathering, particularly credit agency's really amounts to gossip, but the recipients (companies doing a credit check) have NO context to judge it by. In fact, they aren't interested in anything but the gossip even when context is freely offered.
Secretive people have never been trusted with personal information. People who are both secretive AND nosy have often been despised.
While the idea of the transparent society somewhat addresses the issues, most would still find that creepy just because most people don't have a massive data mining system and could never keep track of all of the corporate and government entities who were watching them. It would actually make the gossip problem worse since there would be far too much available information on far too many entities to possibly 'get to know' all of them.
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'For most of human history, people have lived in small tribes where everything they did was known by everyone they knew,' Dr. Malone said. 'In some sense we're becoming a global village. Privacy may turn out to have become an anomaly.'
"""
But, even in those tribe people can "get away." As in, there always have been ways to get some privacy and there always have been things that are just private. And that in which is public, is spread by those that wish to spread it (or someone not respecting others wishes). Even if recently in human history terms, it has been a fair while that we've had actual privacy. Go home and no-one knows what you're watching on TV, what internet sites you're going to, etc. Out in public, people don't know who you're meeting with unless they know you and see you or hear about it from someone that knows about the meeting.
This sort of non-privacy that people think that is inevitable is actually preventable. Just don't network the databases, don't allow companies, etc to get away with obtaining too much info about you and don't allow the government to create a pervasive and invasive surveillance system. There's no actual benefit to them either. That is unless one considers citizens the enemy against government.
I for one believe that we have become accustomed to our privacy. That this notion of, "who cares about it" is nothing but people being stupid and not realising the ramifications of it. Because, they haven't been bitten on the as because of it yet. Just ask anybody that has been/is a victim of identity theft and they'll tell you just how important privacy is. In other words, for the commoners to believe that not having privacy is a problem they'll (or someone they're close to) have to be affected by that in a drastic way. Otherwise there is no hope.
The above post and its ilk are why I browse with flamebait at +2, just so the mods are aware.
Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite (TM)
privacy rights are a relatively recent phenomenon
Maybe, yet exploitation of people's privacy didn't take long to develop either. For people to give up privacy, they have to have complete trust towards fellow people and towards authority. What do you think the ever raising concern about privacy rights show about that trust ?
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
In a little tribe everyone knows everyone else's business. Today, people I know nothing about know all kinds of stuff about my business. To the extent that knowledge is power these strangers have a great deal of power over me (and hundreds of millions, if not billions of people like me) that is not reciprocal. That is both unprecedented in human history and very scary. It doesn't seem like a problem right now because it's not being overtly abused, but we're gonna be a very unhappy planet the next time someone decides to eradicate a huge swath of "undesirables" of one sort or another and they have this kind of information at their fingertips.
To the author:-
All Your Personal Account Details, any Industrial Secrets & Military Secrets?
I could make a "bomb" (pun intented) or create Global Havoc!
There is a time & a place to share information & it should always be under the control of the Prime possessor of the information!
If I remember correctly there might of been the exposition of points of view of reality from the witches in Salem that made them 'appear' to be evil. However, maybe they just took a different understanding of the actions of everything around them.
Are we possibly seeing the new realm of those who unexceptable to express their points of view being targeted by a corporation. Rings of the current situation of the practice of psychiatric medicine. Cage and study deviation from the mean as opposed to allow the innate human ability which almost everyone possesses to discover for themselves. Even the crazies.
As most locales are already incorporated areas of government,
Just don't talk about your reality.
....is from people like this doctor who are utterly convinced of their point of view, and fail to see what others think of his reality, all while he is in the power to further his view unabated in the echalons of what is considered higher learning.
When those who claim to further the knowledge of mankind are given influence like this, without having anyone around to question their views, bad things can happen.
"Privacy may turn out to have become an anomaly."
Ah, the passive voice. Perhaps a rephrase will shed some light:
'Our actions may make privacy an anomaly'.
But of course, put like that, the good Doctor has a responsibility...
So I'll grant that the notion of privacy is relatively new. But, on the same time scale, democracy is a new-fangled idea too. They go hand in hand.
Although I suspect that military secrecy is highly overrated myself. In my experience in the defense industry what I observed was that secrecy was mainly a way of hiding greed and corruption. The projects I worked on weren't secret because it served any military purpose, they were secret because they were a giant waste of money.
Granted, if you want to fight a war, then you would pretty much require operational level military secrecy. So, hmmm, that might lead me to conclude that war in an open society is pretty much impossible. Can't really exactly see that as a disadvantage myself... ;)
Disparity of power could be an issue. In my mind that is an argument for 'no half measures'. What I fear most is that by resisting openness tooth and nail we set the stage for exactly that scenario. The powerful will still gather massive amounts of information about the rest of us, but if we force them to do it covertly, and don't give ourselves the right to do the same back to them, then we've lost. Privacy IMHO IS dead, that isn't an issue anymore. The technology exists to learn virtually anything about anyone, and that technology WILL be used. It is useless to fight the hopeless battle of trying to undo that or deny its use to the powerful. The only question left open is whether or not the rest of us also get access. If we ourselves resist that, then we're our own worst enemies.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
In small tribes, "everyone you know" also lacks privacy. They know where you live, but you also know where they live. If they harm you, all your mutual friends/relatives will punish or shun them.
Where is that accountability in the "global village?" And how is "everybody watches everybody" the same as "a few powerful, anonymous people watch everybody?"
If the President of your country and the CEO of your ISP and the managers of your insurance company don't publish all of their own private info, it isn't equitable to let them publish yours.
And it's my fault?
Are you trying other methods? Did you check your doctor for the stomach-reducing procedure. Have you thought about total control of your diet to not gain weight?
You don't WANT any of that? Then yes, it is your fault and your only
--- "When you gotta do something wrong. You gotta do it right. (Fighter)"
Are there no exercises that you can do from a sitting or lying position?
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
Well, eat less then!
People gain weight when they burn less calories than they consume. If you want to lose weight, do more exercise or stop cramming as many cakes into your face.
Exactly the same goes for fat shites who claim "its my glands"[1] or other such bollocks. Eat less and your "glands" won't have the fat or calories about to make you put on weight.
[1] You'll often hear this phrase from fat sweaty idiots, who spent their school years in McDonlads rather than in lessons. It can also be phrased something like "a metabolism which lends itself to storing energy as fat more readily", but at the end of the day that's the same bullshit but using bigger words.
Ok, so now somebody is trying to condition us to think that the concept of privacy isn't even real? They can kiss my private ass.....
Its one thing to have your actions known by your family and friends, its another to have a corporation or government tracking you non-stop.
In a small community the "trackers" also have to live up to scrutiny and their use of the data they collect is also monitored. That changes when the trackers are virtually anonymous and their behavior and use of the data can be exploitative (as it always seems to be exploitative when the government is tracking us).
Corporate exploitation of data is a slightly different beast. On one hand it can lead to higher satisfaction of the consumer.
Maybe. Maybe not. Doesn't matter, though: Fault is irrelevant.
You, in being overweight, are a greater risk to insure; statistically, you're more likely to require health care (and, likely, more expensive care) over your lifetime, when compared to your seemingly-same-but-slender self from the parallel universe.
Welcome to the world of insurance, atax.
One man's constant is another man's variable.
In small villages, people not only knew you, you knew them. You were all in it together, and the tribe made sure that everybody functioned as a unit. Being cast out likely meant death, so everybody cooperated because they were all subject to the same constraints on survival.
Do you know George W. Bush or Barack Obama or the people they are beholden to? Are they operating on the same principles and under the same constraints that you are?
Thought not.
The only way the world can get rid of privacy concerns is to get rid of the ability of the state to coerce people for its own reasons - which means get rid of the state.
None of this is relevant anyway - within fifty years, Transhumans will eradicate the state and probably a significant percentage of the human population.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Suffice it to say that we live within a system where personal information can be used to exploit individuals; so long as this remains the case, concerns regarding personal privacy will be legitimate. Arguing that strong concerns with privacy rights is a recent development is besides the point. Personal privacy, given the world we live in, is simply a necessary evil.
All limbs. For quite a while. And a head-splitting headache. It wouldn't help. Waiting for surgery to fix the problem. Maybe.
On the upside I have no need to pay health insurance - I live in one of those socialist countries, off government welfare. True, in my shape I'd probably be dying already in the US, seeing I haven't been exactly free of expensive medical procedures thus far and I've got plenty more coming. Europe. 3
OK, I thought the problem was loss of balance or control, clearly it's something more profound.
It sounds like a very unpleasant solution and I hope your surgery works out.
However your case is very far from the norm. The vast majority of overweight people are physically capable of eliminating and preventing their condition even if they may be mentally incapable.
But it is still good to keep in mind that not everybody is like that, and some people truly do have a real physical condition such as yours.
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
Straw man arguments are lies.