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Schneier On a Generation Gap In Privacy
goompaloompa writes "In the Japan Times, Bruce Schneier writes that a passing conversation online is not what it may seem and that maintaining your privacy is becoming even more difficult as social media and cloud computing become the norm. Furthermore, while users in Japan may think they are secure, their level of protection may vary when the computers that store their data are overseas. At the root of the problem is a new generation gap: old laws incapable of covering current-day scenarios. Quoting: 'Twenty years ago, if someone wanted to look through your correspondence, they had to break into your house. Now, they can just break into your ISP. Ten years ago, your voicemail was on an answering machine in your office; now it's on a computer owned by a telephone company. ... We need comprehensive data privacy laws, protecting our data and communications regardless of where it is stored or how it is processed. We need laws forcing companies to keep it private and delete it as soon as it is no longer needed, and laws giving us the right to delete our data from third-party sites. And we need international cooperation to ensure that companies cannot flaunt data privacy laws simply by moving themselves offshore."
We need comprehensive data privacy laws...forcing companies to keep it private and delete it as soon as it is no longer needed, and laws giving us the right to delete our data from third-party sites...We need international cooperation to ensure that companies cannot flaunt data privacy laws simply by moving themselves offshore."
Fat chance. Just don't write anything on the goddamn internet. Maybe you missed the memo, but MySpace and Facebook aren't cool anymore and Twitter only serves to further cheapen your existence. The internet fads will only devolve in content while they expand their data-mining capabilities. The only way that our leadership (and the corporations who own them) will fix the internet is if enough people get tired of it and withdraw altogether from its data-mining fast-food for the brain. Problem is that there are too many infantile latchkey kids out there who won't last 5 seconds without blinkenlights or deluding themselves into believing that others actually give a shit what they have to say.
My own online presence involves only downloading, passive viewing of news websites along with E-mail and trolling Slashdot, and what I write in the latter two are not personal or representative of my meatspace self. Fuck the internet. The meatspace reigns supreme.
Some 20 years from now, the confirmation hearings for supreme court justice nominations will get to be really interesting. Also the mud slinging and sliming and negative ads during election campaigns are going to be even more entertaining than it is now. We will be living in really interesting times.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Sorry, but that's the bottom line. Move your data to the cloud; kiss the privacy of that data goodbye. Move your voicemail to the phone company. Same issue. Get your code developed in [offshore country of your choice], you can rest assured that some of that code will go to a competitor in [insert country of choice].
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Anytime there's an entity between you and your data/property/money, etc. it's no longer really yours. You don't control it any longer.
Sometimes that doesn't matter. Sometimes it does. Big time. Plan accordingly.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
"Twenty years ago.... they had to break into your house. Now they can just break into your ISP". They make it sound like that's easier, as though they're getting into your shed. I had someone break into my house last year, and trust me, these Mensa candidates wouldn't have 'just broken into my ISP' instead. They could barely put together a sentence. If you've got an organization powerful enough after you that they can break into your ISP (which is for 99% of us a major corporation with serious security) the locks on your house weren't exactly a challenge anyway. I'm surprised Schneier is comparing two such flagrantly uncomparable things.
voicemail held by the phone company? only if you dont use an answering machine or you use their VM service. you CAN change your cellphones settings to ring your own VM system at home.
Email, use IMAP and yank it all from the servers. They cant read your email from 2 weeks ago if it's not there.
Also encrypt. It's not hard anymore.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
has lived their entire lives online, they twitter about their bowel movements... I don;t think they even think about privacy as being something desirable.
This space available.
Dammit, it's "flout", not "flaunt".
What we need are more clarity about laws regarding basic rights and their nemesis discrimination.
The average person in their average life does not need privacy. They need discretion from their peers and the public regarding their personal life and laws which protect their right to live how they choose without discrimination.
Yes I advocate transparency. The truth will set you free and all that...
The only people who *need* privacy are those who are a) doing something illegal or unethical and want to keep others from finding out or b) doing something competitive and want to keep their progress from their competition.
People in category (a) deserve no legal cover for their actions.
People in category (b) have a thing called security which they should implement to provide a deterrent to unwanted attention or disclosure.
Everyone else just needs to know that their insurance won't go up if they are found to practice aggressive sexual methods or that they suck at cooking and start fires on the range every other weekend trying to cook.
People will be better off when their neighbors know about their weird behavior and learn to accept it (just like those neighbors will be better off when you find out about their quirks). This is called living in a community and it's about time we got back to it instead of trying to live in isolated 'privacy' gardens where we think we're the only ones who have issues and everyone else's lives are perfect.
Think of all the anxiety and social problems this would prevent. It's hard to discriminate against some group of people when you find out that all of your friends are in that group.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
At least not for the last 433 years.
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/flaunt
* Main Entry: flaunt
* Pronunciation: \flont, flänt\
* Function: verb
* Etymology: perhaps of Scandinavian origin; akin to Old Norse flana to rush around
* Date: 1566
intransitive verb
1 : to display or obtrude oneself to public notice (a great flaunting crowd -- Charles Dickens)
2 : to wave or flutter showily (the flag flaunts in the breeze)
transitive verb
1 : to display ostentatiously or impudently : parade (flaunting his superiority)
2 : to treat contemptuously (flaunted the rules -- Louis Untermeyer)
synonyms
-- flaunt noun
-- flauntingly \flon-ti-l, flän-\ adverb
-- flaunty \-t\ adjective
usage
Although transitive sense 2 of flaunt undoubtedly arose from confusion with flout, the contexts in which it appears cannot be called substandard
(meting out punishment to the occasional mavericks who operate rigged games, tolerate rowdyism, or otherwise flaunt the law -- Oscar Lewis)
(observed with horror the flaunting of their authority in the suburbs, where men...put up buildings that had no place at all in a Christian commonwealth -- Marchette Chute)
(in our profession...very rarely do we publicly chastise a colleague who has flaunted our most basic principles -- R. T. Blackburn, AAUP Bulletin).
If you use it, however, you should be aware that many people will consider it a mistake.
Use of flout in the sense of flaunt 1 is found occasionally
("The proper pronunciation," the blonde said, flouting her refined upbringing, "is pree feeks" -- Mike Royko).
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
It's not that people are paranoid, but there are occasional events that are creepy, which point to a need for more privacy.
The one that was the tipping point for me actually happened to a co-worker: in the mid-late 90's he was taking AZT (yes, he had AIDS). The creepy part came shortly after getting his first AZT prescription filled...a few weeks after his first prescription he started getting mailed advertisements for graveyard plots. Yes, his pharmacy had sold the fact that he was taking AZT to a marketing company, who realized he was about to die & tried to sell him a grave. It's not that he was being targeted in any malicious way, but I think it's clear (at least, to me) that his privacy had been badly violated by his pharmacy.
That's the sort of thing I use as a model for privacy. In the intervening years, health data has been (somewhat) protected, but I think it's still a valid point for consideration: you may not think of your own information as important, but some of it can still be used to make some very creepy conclusions about you, and will be used in some very creepy ways if you're not careful.
Information wants to be free.
That tired old cliche is still around? You could as honestly say that information wants to be private, or information wants to be valuable.
When information isn't free, neither are you.
Free Martian Whores!
About nine years ago, when phones started to get GPS capability, I was asking people what they thought of having their location tracked. Older people were horrified. Teenagers wanted a live map with all their friends on it.
The cell phone industry was hesitant to roll out GPS-based people tracking applications for years. Helio was the first to really do it, with their "Buddy Beacon" system. (This only worked if both parties had a Helio phone, so it wasn't that useful given Helio's tiny market share.) Now it's a common phone capability.
IMHO, you're putting an unnecessary strain on the IMAP server of your ISP (70 seconds polling is really aggressive)... and it doesn't buy you any more confidentiality either. A "deleted" file on the IMAP server is merely unlinked, i.e. it is still present in the free blocks of said server, and can be reconstructed. Depending on the load of that server, deleted mails can remain readable many days, of not weeks and months after you've thought you deleted them.
Run your own mail server at home: it provides you with a lot more control and not just w.r.t. confidentiality. You can also fine-tune the anti-spam settings to your heart's desires. You may want to get your own domain and a static IP address though, but it's worth every penny.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
At my age, 20 years from now, I'll be in a nursing home being cared for by a younger generation of caretakers, who have never had privacy, or have any understanding of why old people (like me) seem to be obsessed with a need for privacy. "But Mr. Robertson the webcam in your bathroom is so the attendants can look after your safety. If you fall down we need to know about that."