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Did We Lose the Privacy War?
eihab writes "I've been a fanatic about my online privacy for the last few years. I've been using NoScript and blocking Google Analytics, disabling third-party cookies, encrypting IM and doing everything in my power to keep data-miners at bay. Recently, I've been feeling like I'm just doing too much and still losing! No matter what I do, I know that there's a weak link somewhere, be it my ISP, Flash cookies, etc. I've recently gotten AT&T U-Verse, who, according to their privacy statement, will be monitoring my TV watching habits for advertisement purposes. I'm extremely annoyed by that, yet I love the service so much and I don't think I can cancel it. I just can't take this anymore. I have nothing to hide, but I do not want to be profiled and become member #5534289 in a database somewhere that records everything I do. I know I'm not that interesting to anyone, but the idea of someone being able to pull up everything about me with a simple SQL SELECT statement and a couple of JOINS makes me cringe. One of the reasons I hate data mining is that data security is not understood and almost non-existent at a lot of places. Case in point: I changed my life insurance two years ago, and the medical firm that conducted my health screening was broken into and computers with non-encrypted hard drives and patients' data were stolen. That medical firm didn't really need my SSN, but then again neither did AT&T when I signed up for U-Verse. Am I just too paranoid? Is privacy dead? Should I just give up and accept the fact that privacy is not the norm anymore (like Facebook's founder recently said) or should I keep fighting the good fight for my privacy?"
War? I'd say we're Poland and we got blitzkrieg'd.
A war implies you put up a fight. They control the media,
the lawmakers, the government.
Damn...If it wasn't so private maybe I'd have heard about it and fought...
Sig Follows: "Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself." -- Mark Twain
I am member #5534289 you insensitive clod!
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I do not want to be profiled and become member #5534289
#6: I am not a number, I am a FREE MAN!
#2: Ha ha ha ha ha!
Free Martian Whores!
You're 823684
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
Everyone needs a hobby. If you enjoy playing cloak and dagger, then let that be your hobby. Otherwise invest your time in more worthwhile endeavors.
Better known as 318230.
You are agreeing to give up your privacy. You are not losing - you surrendered.
Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
yes, we did
I never understood why people didn't want to be catalogued. I think life would be lovely if everywhere I went, everyone knew what I wanted.
That can't *possibly* be a bad thing!
There is nothing you can do to preserve your privacy while remaining in society. Privacy is dead and gone. The best thing you can do is work for a company which gathers private information on the richest and most powerful. If you don't want to help reduce privacy, then you are part of the problem and that is why you are being watched.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vsxxsrn2Tfs
Yes, and your curiosity has been noted, eihab, along with your IP address, computer make and model, geographic location, blood type, next of kin...
I'm extremely annoyed by that, yet I love the service so much and I don't think I can cancel it.
Then you answered your own question. If you continue to use the service, you're giving them positive reinforcement that their activities are acceptable.
It seems that the only solution is to add so much noise that data miners will have a really hard time filtering out the real data.
Here is a start.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
Ubiquitous surveillance, body scanners, HD spy satellites ... this is where we are today. In a few years, tiny remote controlled insects could broadcast video and sound from virtually any private place, catching our most intimate moments. Eventually, if and when we learn to read thoughts, no one will have any secrets left.
Given how interconnected our world is, if you want to participate, you have to do it in public. You have to connect to someone else's machine, hook up to someone else's fiber, talk to someone who you can't immediately trust, and you have to do it in the open.
That is to say, SSL, TOR, NoFlash, NoScript etc, still don't have a place in our lives as geeks. Just, forget privacy.
Besides, I think we live in a world where we have obscurity through density, instead of obscurity through privacy. Billions of people on this earth, nearly a billion of them connected to the 'net. Embrace it. Eventually, if enough personal data gets out there, it may become worthless to mine it due to the sheer volume available.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
You're worried that people might know what TV channels you're watching? Why? I don't think that was a problem which the people originally started worrying about what people knew about them were concerned with.
Every time you take some action to protect your privacy, someone does a +1 on your suspectability index in their database.
Birth is the leading cause of death.
Privacy is dead, but the way things are going everything that really matters will be censored anyways. Things are going the wrong way for the internet these days...
I used to be a bit anal about my online presence, but relaxed after I saw the amount of data mining done that the end user does not have control over. I decided that while I will still opt-out where and when I can, but there is no way to prevent a lot of the data mining unless I am willing to give up a lot of creature comforts and live off the grid in a cave.
Whoa there dude! Check your keyboard, somebody might have slipped you a Dvorak.
If there is a privacy war it is a war of one. You know the chef is poisoning the soup but you find it too delicious to stop eating.
Cancel your cable. War won.
You will have to unplug, my friend. Even then privacy will become increasingly difficult as passive tracking becomes more advanced (cameras, RFID scanners+IDs, etc.). Life as a hermit is about it, then.
If you really want to have privacy in the digital age the only winning move is not to play. The people in control of things want to endlessly analyze every single thing they can in order to better control and shape society to their will and it is too easy to get that data through computers.
See: The Trap
If you have something that you dont want anyone to know, maybe you shouldnt be doing it in the first place -Eric Schmidt
Why do you want all that privacy online?
What makes it so different from real life?
Do you go everywhere with gloves or cleaning your finger prints?
Do you clean your foot steps?
Do you erase the memories of people you meet or anyone you cross on the street?
What is all this privacy you want and for what reason?
"I've recently gotten AT&T U-Verse, who, according to their privacy statement, will be monitoring my TV watching habits for advertisement purposes. I'm extremely annoyed by that, yet I love the service so much and I don't think I can cancel it."
There wasn't a war to lose, you surrendered before it even started. You are Czechoslovakia in 1938. You sound paranoid about your online privacy but yet you remain online, a system that wasn't designed with privacy in mind, all the things you are doing still leave traces, server logs, etc.
You can agree not to give the companies your social security number - at least here in Canada. There is some law regarding that information only be required to do credit checks, otherwise a company can't NOT give you service based on you retaining your info.
You will have to give them some other piece of Identifying information though, but it doesn't have to be permanent. Usually an address works - my ISP and Mobile phone (as thats the only services I purchase) don't have any information on me besides my phone number (obviously), my address, my name, and I thiiiiink my Date of Birth, but I might have actually retained that.
Anyways, as for paranoia, if you've got nothing to hide than I don't see why anything makes you cringe. I've got things to hide and I still don't worry about it. I know if you enter my full name in Google you'll get a page and a half on just me - My Facebook Profile, some news article clippings of me, sites I've visitted. Microsoft Outlook support forums had quite a few, by the way. Why I registered with my real name is beyond me, but whatever.
What it boils down to is what you need versus what you want. Some providers want to be able to give you certain services on the basis that they can sell ads targetted directly at you. If you don't want that, don't sign up for it, simple as that. Don't put anything online that you don't want found. If you steer clear of Social networking sites like Facebook, you can expect a reasonable level of privacy.
This amazing new drug from Pfizer called !Prozac, pronounced Not-Prozac. It has the complete opposite effect on a human body. !Prozac, when ingested by a normal human being, it will trigger multiple-personality-disorder. Now you can use one identity for your normal law-abiding activities without any concern about privacy and data mining etc. Then you can use the other identity for nefarious, criminal and/or shameful activities. Infact the other identify can ingest another dose of !Prozac and create another personality. Recursively! Your criminal personality A does not have to know what your shameful personality B is doing. Just look at the hoops people are willing to jump through just to get prOn!
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
It's probably a good fight to fight, but remember it'll keep getting harder. I was connected via VPN last night (all IP connectivity except the VPN itself runs over the VPN) from a hotel. Pulled up Google Maps to look up some local destinations. It offered me the option to use Firefox's location services. Curious, I let it, and despite being logged in via VPN, it accurately pulled up my location to within a few hundred feet. Still not exactly sure what it's doing to figure that out, but boy, that's scary...
SSN is short for Schutzstaffel Number
You still have your privacy. You still have your own personality, your own thoughts, your own opinions, your own emotions, etc. These are yours to have and keep and no one can ever take them from you. No one can ever invade them or inspect them without you first giving them away.
If you choose to use a service offered by Company-X, then you must agree to their terms. If they want to monitor how you use their service, so be it. And if you don't like that, then you can either switch services or drop off the grid entirely.
Am I just too paranoid?
Yes.
Look... not to be a spoil sport, but who cares? So you don't have any privacy... is it costing you money? Is it costing you jobs? Is it harming you? The alternative is to go "off the grid"... and you *can* do that if it's worth it to you. It's not to me. So just accept that companies will look over your shoulder and don't do stuff that you're going to be ashamed of, counting on the fact that the law of averages will shield you. This is no different, really, than living in a small town.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
Sure they can see what you are watching but they don't care about you or what you watch. You are only one in millions. They are interested in the overall trends of what the millions are watching. So relax, you're just one grain of sand on the beach.
Unless of course you have a vengeful ex somewhere.
"The ferrets, they're every where I tell you!"
Welcome to 1984. You really have only two choices: 1) Create a persona, an alter ego, that isn't really you, and maximized it's visibility to advertisers, aggregators and data miners, or 2) Go completely off the GRID. You will find option 2 very onerous but the most safe option. Option 1 is not too hard as long as you can play that role all the time and with everyone. I suppose the real bender with this option is realizing at some point you become your alter ego and then what? Did I mention this here red pill in my hand?
Be More, Be Manly, The Manly Geek Ubergeek Extraordinaire Blogger: www.manlygeek.com/blog Podcaster: podcast.man
I know I'm not that interesting to anyone, but the idea of someone being able to pull up everything about me with a simple SQL SELECT statement and a couple of JOINS makes me cringe.
Actually, we've written a stored procedure to determine whether or not you're interesting.
EXECUTE IS_INTERESTING(5534289);
Very interesting indeed.
Take off every 'sig' for great justice.
You have no privacy, none. Any hacker, any private investigator, any stalker, can access your data from thousands of private or public databases. If you are jewish then the neo-nazi's probably already know where you live. If you voted for Bush the lefties already know who you are and where you live. If you disagree with how I think on privacy, I could find out where you live.
And nothing stops me from creating a huge list of names and addresses, putting it into a database, and selling this list to advertises so they can spam you. And nothing stops anyone from selling your health records to the nazi's, the mafia, the street gang, the Republicans. So if you are a gay homosexual you can expect that your medical records will be accessed. If you are Barack Obama then you can expect your cellphone records to be accessed http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-10104997-83.html
The far right, those people who vote for Sarah Palin and who have all those guns and bibles, those people who don't believe in evolution, they know where you live and they know everything about you because you added a Republican to your facebook page. And if you added a liberal then you can expect that those global warming crazies and anti-globalists will know where to find you and all your vulnerabilities.
So why don't you have a right to privacy? You don't have a right to privacy because your life just isn't important to the government. The government knows that most Americans are dumb breeders who will pop out babies just like the Octomom. If you die the Octomom will have another baby and replace you. Corporations don't see you as anything more than consumers. And political parties only care about you when you think like they do and are willing to serve their special interests.
Face it, you aren't all that and nobody is protecting you or your privacy.
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Set "MoreNotes"='Ask Slashdot: Did We Lose the Privacy War? on Tuesday February 16, @11:44AM
Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday February 16, @11:44AM
from the no,-now-finish-your-cheerios-and-straighten-your-shirt dept.
background: url(//a.fsdn.com/sd/topics/topicprivacy.gif); width:71px; height:53px; privacy
eihab writes "I've been a fanatic about my online privacy for the last few years. I've been using NoScript and blocking Google Analytics, disabling third-party cookies, encrypting IM and doing everything in my power to keep data-miners at bay. Recently, I've been feeling like I'm just doing too much and still losing! No matter what I do, I know that there's a weak link somewhere, be it my ISP, Flash cookies, etc. I've recently gotten AT&T U-Verse, who, according to their privacy statement, will be monitoring my TV watching habits for advertisement purposes. I'm extremely annoyed by that, yet I love the service so much and I don't think I can cancel it. I just can't take this anymore. I have nothing to hide, but I do not want to be profiled and become member #5534289 in a database somewhere that records everything I do. I know I'm not that interesting to anyone, but the idea of someone being able to pull up everything about me with a simple SQL SELECT statement and a couple of JOINS makes me cringe. One of the reasons I hate data mining is that data security is not understood and almost non-existent at a lot of places. Case in point: I changed my life insurance two years ago, and the medical firm that conducted my health screening was broken into and computers with non-encrypted hard drives and patients' data were stolen. That medical firm didn't really need my SSN, but then again neither did AT&T when I signed up for U-Verse. Am I just too paranoid? Is privacy dead? Should I just give up and accept the fact that privacy is not the norm anymore (like Facebook's founder recently said) or should I keep fighting the good fight for my privacy?"'
Close record.
Create job "MineSoulskill5534289" "Compare record Soulskill5534289 against all known databases".
Queueing job "MineSoulskill5534289". Monitor job queue for job status.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Thank you for being a loyal AT&T U-verse customer! We have received your email and have created a trouble ticket for you automatically by monitoring your web postings. Please submit both a fresh semen sample and a two day old fecal sample so our customer service reps can verify your information and begin to investigate the issue.
Thank you. AT&T Customer Service.
Services like U-Verse will monitor everything you do. use alternate services.
The idea privacy is dead is nonsense - as for face-book its next to impossible to tell if the data stored is genuine or not.
In terms of companies demanding your SSN: well there is nothing you can do about that, but you can limit its effects with lifestyle changes including:
- Discuise your finantial activities by not using your credit card,
- I'm fairly sure you can request the destruction of your medical records - and keep a copy yourself (don't quote me on this)
By adopting habbits like that, even having your SSN would give no more personal information about you than your address and place of work - which even the post office knows.
There are lots of other things you can do - but point is its entirely possible to lead a completely private life - its just not very convenient.
Privacy.... in the U.S.A.?
You're surely kidding.
Yours In Minsk,
K. Trout
Some people just don't care about privacy. A good example shown by http://pleaserobme.com/
It's not the war of privacy- it's the war of privacy vs. convenience.
Facebook lets me keep in touch and aware of what my friends are doing. On the other hand, photos of me doing something that may reflect poorly on myself to an employer or other friends. I have pretty strict privacy settings on Facebook, but the reality is that something bad could easily be associated with my profile and seen by many before I could get it pulled.
On the other hand, if I didn't share quite a bit of personal info on Facebook, I wouldn't even be aware when I was tagged in a photo.
Today, people are accepting convenience at the sacrifice of some privacy. It's nice when I can call up the cable company and have them able to see what services I have, that I'm paying the bill, and the modem has the wrong DOCSIS file. On the other hand, I'm in a database that is easier to access than ever. I accept the sacrifice for convenience when I have to work with the cable company.
Or credit cards. The majority of my purchases are now associated with my SSN in a database. The ability to track my spending and have some degree of purchase security is worth the sacrifice for me, so I choose to use electronic payment.
So did we lose, giving up so much? On one hand, there are plenty of alternatives- I can buy online with a Visa Gift Card, registered to whatever name and address and purchased in cash. I can buy in cash in person. On the other hand, it's virtually impossible NOT to be in a database- even if you were to forego electricity, television, cable, etc., you'd still be in a government tax database. Someone I know got a letter last year saying "an IRS employee with your and a couple million other taxpayer documents, including your taxpayer ID number, full name, and address, lost their laptop. We'll try not to let it happen again. Here's a year of credit monitoring from one of the three bureaus, then you're on your own. Seeya!"
So, yes, to some degree we lost. It's hard to avoid changes that the rest of society is fine with. Living like a hermit in a powerless shack in the woods is still possible, but for the average person, it definitely has been eroded.
I'm extremely annoyed by that, yet I love the service so much and I don't think I can cancel it.
...you just answered your own question.
If you interact with anyone who does not value privacy then your efforts are wasted. They can also expose your data. This is how facebook is able to know who your friends are even if you've never had a facebook account, or given them a single piece of data: they can mine the contact lists of people who have willingly exposed theirs. If you appear on any of them, facebook can start building a profile of you.
Unless you're living without human contact, you will be profiled in a database somewhere.
I think that is the sad point and perfidity of it:
to this point in time, there is no obvious evil company or government that forces us to hand over our private data.
They do not invade our houses anymore, or intercept our mails without us knowing.
No: this days they offer us a big deal of convenience and comfort - just for that little bit of information about us.
And if you are not too deep into it you might speak to yourself: why not ? no big deal.
This for sure is a reason why the law-situation today kind of misses the point. The whole background of privacy protection was to protect you from evil companies and governments that are trying to steal your private data one way or the other. It is very hard to justify laws against people giving up their privacy on free will ( more or less )
Not that most of the politicians seem to understand the topic.
A few weeks ago I had an interesting discussion with a guy who is in that kind of business - acquiring and consolidating data from different sources to provide them to other companies for marketing purposes. And I was really blown away by what these guys are doing. I thought I was paranoid - but I still have been magnitudes to naive I think.
btw: It may not even save you to not give any of your data away. Might be enough to live in the neibourhood of people who do - you will be thrown into the same bag - and treated acordingly.
Does AT&T really need your SSN? (Legally?)
If not...why are you giving them your ACTUAL SSN? Give them a fake one. 593-22-8846
Medical screener gets 593-22-6648
Here are the advantages... :-)
Tracking becomes impossible.
If it becomes public, who cares?
Legally speaking...oops, sorry, I made a mistake. Dyslexia and all.
And no, neither of those are mine. :-)
If you can neither accept being the statistics (and you seem to admit, that you can't put together a rational explanation for your aversion), nor avoid it, try screwing them up...
I share the same syndrome as you (although, perhaps, to a lesser degree), so this is, what I do:
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
The thing that bugs me about being endlessly monitored and categorized is that it's never used to make my life better. It's only ever done to help some random corporation improve their profits by some fraction of a percentage.
If being tracked watching a TV show for a full season resulted in them going "hey, thanks for being a loyal viewer, have this X as a token of our appreciation", I wouldn't complain so much. It wouldn't necessarily have to be a material bonus, in this day and age they could simply grant access to some kind of insider info website. The possibilities are only limited by imagination.
But no. Everything I do gets dumped into a database and sold to the highest bidder. It serves no purpose but to try and get more money out of my wallet. Or if the government is involved, measure my odds of being a terrorist.
I can understand concerns about privacy when it comes to web browsing, but I don't get the fear about TV watching being tracked. I can't count the number of good TV shows that have been canceled because of bad ratings. Before Tivo existed, every time one of the shows I liked was canceled I wished that the TV network was tracking MY viewing habits instead of the unwashed masses who appear to like reality TV. Ever since I've had Tivo I always record all the shows I like and I'm happy that Tivo is collecting that information. Sometimes I even record and play back reruns (with the TV off) to positively affect the data for the shows I like.
The root of the problem isn't so much what they know about you. It's how much they know about you, relative to what you're allowed to know about those who collect your personally-identifiable information. There is no apparent way to naturally keep companies, or for that matter, governments, in check with respect to information asymmetry without relevant laws and enforcement.
Halfway off topic...
Anyone know anything about Clear, the company trying to promote 4G WiMax for home internet and phone use? They seem to be advertising reasonable rates, and I would love to dump AT&T for my home phone and internet service as protest against their data sharing.
Who owns them? Anyone have experience with the quality of their service? How much do they tack on in other fees and such that don't appear until the first bill?
(Rates seem to be about the same for home use, but with Clear service would be faster, I could also buy service for my laptop to use anywhere in town with faster service and a rate better than AT&T Wireless or any other cell provider.)
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
The division between the "public" and the "private" only matters when there is a world of hidden "private" lives (from which the public is excluded) and your public life (with private excluded) has to circulate within and be measured against other public lives (with private excluded).
Once everyone's private becomes public, your own private is no more embarrassing or important than the "private" of most other people.
The same thing applies to thinks like identity theft. The more these things become regarded as "public" rather than private, the more identity theft (a) will happen in volume and (b) will be commonly understood and mitigated through tools and common forms of recourse as a "regular" thing, and others won't hold you nearly so responsible for it.
The reason, in other words, that privacy seems critical is that you assume that you're being marked by and held responsible for everything in your "private" world at a much deeper level than whatever is in your "public" world. Meanwhile, however, the rest of the world continues to increasingly dissolve the "private" into the public, with the inevitable shift that the "private" will be less and less something that people will be marked and/or held responsible for.
Once your boss has a Facebook profile with pictures of their drunken weekend, and friends you with it, your own photos aren't so embarassing.
Once the bank has so much identity theft going on that it's considered a cost of business and made easily reversible, your responsibility for protecting these "identity" records is diminished, as are any consequences of failing to do so.
You've mistaken privacy as an inherent value and end in itself, rather than the means to an end (social success). Increasingly, social success lies along the very opposite path: being as open, public, and omni-visible/trackable as possible.
So hold on to your privacy if you really love it, but realize that society is going to reward you for it less and less, and in fact may even punish you for it relative to much less private others.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
The best reply in this thread ... "The only way to win the war is not to play." Sounds like it came from the movie War Games. That poster was correct, you must drop off the grid, the net, the planet. Of course if the black hats developed sufficient "counter measures" that we could all employ, perhaps we could pollute the data pool to the point that it became worthless.
http://xkcd.com/327/
just legally change your name to something similar
Leviticus 20:13:
"If a man lies with a man...They must be put to death."
If you are gay, and a jew, and you voted for Obama.... it's only a matter of time before the Christians who take Leviticus seriously find out where you live.
Temkin's u-verse tip... Turn off the TV using the native remote. The box stays on, and continues to stream for hours. It eventually turns off after a timeout of roughly 6 hours. But they can never be certain where I stopped watching. Just adds a little noise to their data.
... from the intellectuals of yore:
The intensity and complexity of life, attendant upon advancing civilization, have rendered necessary some retreat from the world, and man, under the refining influence of culture, has become more sensitive to publicity, so that solitude and privacy have become more essential to the individual; but modern enterprise and invention have, through invasions upon his privacy, subjected him to mental pain and distress, far greater than could be inflicted by mere bodily injury.
— "The Right to Privacy", Warren and Brandeis, Harvard Law Review, Vol. IV, December 15, 1890.
I don't know about you guys but the best privacy I've found on the internet has more to do with no one really caring who you are, in which case I would prefer to be a number. Generally the internet, and media, and advertising may want to target you, but so far I'm just a number in all that data, and there isn't THAT much information publicly available on me, and to top it off, there is no reason to be interested in me. Just blend in with the crowd and your privacy is protected through obscurity.
Sensors became better and better and unless you sit in an adiabatic room, we can get a lot about your state of body and mind.
As we approaching the singlularity, we even can predict your behaviour and then we can replicate you in our computers.
Privacy is a nebulous concept, and it's possible that in some cases, we give up privacy, and in others, we don't. It's not necessarily a binary on/off thing that you either have or you don't. I don't believe that people who say that privacy is dead are correct; or if they are, it's a very narrow view of privacy. You still don't have people watching you in the shower, for example. (Hopefully...)
Check out Daniel Solove's work- here's a good start.
"I've got nothing to hide" and other misunderstandings of privacy
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=998565&rec=1&srcabs=667622
He's got some other interesting articles on the subject there, and some interesting books as well.
There are still things you can fight for to protect privacy, even if you are giving up some facets. You can fight against ubiquitous surveillance, and continue to do the things that you're doing to protect your privacy. You can help make threats to privacy transparent, for example, by supporting groups like EFF.
That medical firm didn't really need my SSN
Yeah, they did - unless they don't mind being paid. Trust me on this: your doctor couldn't give two whits less what ID# they use for you. The problem is that all government agencies and (to the best of my knowledge) all insurance companies use your SSN as a primary key, and unless the doctor collects the information, they're not getting paid beyond whatever you give them at the time of service.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Leviticus 20:13:
"If a man lies with a man...They must be put to death."
This quote represents the mindset of a segment of the population. If they find out you have sex in a way they disagree with, they'd have no problem killing you and everyone like you, essentially genocide is made easier now that all the people who want to do it know exactly where the jews live, the gays, the blacks, and the liberals. Good luck staying alive if you are a minority.
I think it's a money and politics issue, at the end of the day. As our privacy is slowly eroded over time, it becomes more and more necessary to find out who is lobbying our government to gain access to the information we are trying to keep private, and find out who in our government is capitulating to said lobbyists, so that come re-election time, we can vote 'em out. My $.02.
.... and you'll be a happier person.
The two rules for success are:
1) Never tell them everything you know.
What little privacy you DO have can always be taken from you by force.
_ ...or corporations like Google that completely foul up a new feature and accidentally expose everyone's contact list to each other.
Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence.
I bet if I pay someone they could tell me whether you are or aren't.
Thats where this is going.
Privacy is an illusion at best. At worst, it is an unachievable ideal that can never be attained.
What we should be doing is making sure that people's information and identity and personal security are paramount in governmental roles.
The problem is that progressive governance is opposite this. Government intrusion into every sector of a person's life is gaining all sorts of leverage into a person's private life.
And as we expand government's role into intruding into peoples lives under the guise of "poor, oppressed, needy or weak".
You were worried by Darth Cheney and rightly so, but are you worried about the Health Care bill, which will probably affect more people than anything Darth Cheney could dream up?
Of course, if you are willing to give up freedom for security, you will no doubt get neither. And this applies to all those programs from both (R) and (D).
Privacy is an illusion, because people are so willing to give it up for so little in return.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
You aren't important to government -- until they want something from you. That means hassle at the least, gross injustice at the worst. Common sense tells me to avoid this situation, not simply for the sake of privacy, but as a basic rule of dealing with government. Don't give them an ounce more information than they require by law, or you're going to regret it somewhere down the line.
Moreover, I would automatically distrust any individual who proclaims "you have no privacy, get over it". Exactly what is your agenda? To convince people that privacy is dead? How does that benefit you, unless you have some agenda you're not telling us? What exactly is the reason for your crusade against privacy?
Let's call a spade a spade here: privacy is built-in to human culture. It's part of being human, and I'll be damned if some random nutcase on a soapbox going to tell me to abandon my natural human desire for privacy.
Making sure their data is a mixed bag of garbage is a better plan then hiding from them and trying to prevent your data from being collected.
For ages our privacy was protected only by the others' ability to remember. A human being can only remember so many faces and facts about other people (and himself, for that matter)...
Written records reduced the privacy immensely. Computers made the next giant leap. The only thing we can do is legislate, what the computers are allowed to memorize, but those would be merely human (as opposed to physical) laws and have serious limitations. Legal pitfalls will abound — an Evil Corporation may lease a server in a foreign locale to keep your data, for example. WikiLeaks has shown the ways around various attempts to close access to information.
Information wants to be free. Does not it?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Privacy has been bad for the internet. There, I said it.
The net circa 1995-2004 or so, being anonymous was trivial to achieve. And what did it result in? A putrid culture of hacking, piracy, foul language and lack of manners, incessant and destructive celebrity gossip, porn up the wazoo, and more piracy.
The net is a cesspool, the Chinese are running around jiggling everybody's locks, and allowing comments at the end of online newspaper articles has revealed a deeply divided America, Europe and World. Sport just makes it worse, the Olympics don't bring humanity together, it divides it further.
You all have Big Brother because the collective WE have been such asswipes about the net as a medium. My concluding evidence for my argument: Youtube comments.
See who I am? There are other people who do. Anonymous Coward is a lie.
What it sounds like you want is to have it both ways - connectivity AND privacy.
I'd say that's what we all want, but I think we've come to the realization that it's not possible. If you want privacy, unplug. If you want connectivity, you pay in part by giving up your privacy, just like you do when you walk around in a public area.
It seems most people have found that the middle ground is acceptable, though. We don't need to be Shadowrunners, at least not yet.
Am I just too paranoid? Is privacy dead? Should I just give up and accept the fact that privacy is not the norm anymore
You know, I'm really not sure that privacy was ever really the norm...
Sure, for a while there we had a reasonable expectation of privacy. And I think that was probably a good thing. But I also think that was largely an aberration.
Look back a few hundred years... We were living in relatively small, tightly-knit groups. Fine, maybe some guy on the other side of the planet couldn't Google you and come up with your life history... But it wasn't like you were keeping a whole lot of secrets from your neighbors either.
As it is, I think privacy is probably dead and buried at this point. But I'm not sure that it will matter too much to your average human being.
At this point I don't think there's any going back to a time before tracking cookies and data mining and whatever else. The fact that you bought an inflatable sheep is going to be logged somewhere... And some advertising robot somewhere is going to dig up that bit of information... And some night when you're staying at a hotel on a business trip the DVR will helpfully suggest Barnyard Bondage III for your viewing pleasure. And I don't think this is going to go away. It's just far too pervasive, and far too useful. Not just to businesses either... If I'm going to be served ads, I'd rather they're actually relevant.
But I don't think you're going to see a whole lot of social impact from this. I don't think you'll see prospective employers digging through your Amazon purchase history. Largely because that's a double-edged blade. I'm sure there'll be various laws, regulations, and taboos developed to protect your privacy in social situations - because folks aren't going to want you to dig up their skeletons any more than you want them digging up yours.
Government will, of course, abuse anything and everything it can. This information will be used for profiling or something. But it isn't like that isn't happening already.
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
Yes. Yes we are.
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
1> Unplug everything and I mean everything.
...
2> Pay cash for everything.
3> When you pay cash, don't tell them where you live. Use a made up zip code.
4>
5> Private!
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
Privacy was always a goner if we were going to take the bait of better connectivity and information that we hoped might enable us to improve the world.
The Black Swan for those of us encultured by the optimism of the 'sixties, was a resurgent authoritarian rump, led by a lost generation with more fears of hippies than of fascists. The rump steamrolled any notion of "Law as last resort" and degraded the once honourable notion of justice into demands for pro-active revenge against any perceived difference or insult. Meanwhile we gained reason and capacity to skew the population age curve and stretch consumer economics so far that children became major investments, too precious and too miss-perceived as reflecting on their parenting not to be smothered in over-protection from testing boundaries and learning about risk and responsibility.
So we finish up with the nanny-state left wanting to equally privilege any group of muddled thinkers and the intellectually-challenged right wanting to foist their ever-narrowing "values" on everybody else. And we too often feel constrained that they can so easily track us dissenters down and find some pointless law to trip us with whenever we stir too hard.
25 years ago I had a placeholder for a chapter that has never been written: "No Secrets (...) And No Need For Secrets," but even then it was 25 years too late.
-- Our systemic servants do not good masters make.
Lets think back in the 1800's.
You went to the store the store keeper knew who you are and what you bought. Then they would gossip about you to the rest of the neighbors. If you tried to be a tight lip and more independent the more interested people would be in getting information about you. The more open you were the better others will treat you the more privet they will mistrust you more and not get any favors.
So except for a select/join you will need to go to the person who did that, and they will say joe smith.
We never had true privacy
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Privacy is overrated. I think it's hilarious when public celebrities say "we expect people to respect our privacy during these difficult times". They certainly were happy to enjoy the benefits of public life, well lack of privacy is the price. Likewise with the internet and open availability of information. It's great that we're all sharing and all kinds of information is out in the open, but it also means a lack of privacy. You take the good with the bad. You can't have you cake and eat it too.
FYI man, alright. You could sit at home, and do like absolutely nothing, and your name goes through like 17 computers a day. 1984? Yeah right, man. That's a typo. Orwell is here now. He's livin' large. We have no names, man. No names. We are nameless!
-Cereal Killer
There was no war. The anti-privacy-fuck fairy visited us all very quietly over the last 20 years and screwed us slowly.
Actually, it all started with the social security number and people's insistence that it be used as an identification number for "everything." There was a good fight when that was coming about and while opponents were successful in getting the FEDERAL government to write legislation restricting the use of SSNs for anything other than for social security accounting purposes (you can request a tax payer ID number from the IRS which looks exactly like a SSN) pretty much everyone else is free to abuse the numbers as they see fit.
Here's the problem as I see it.
Big business had a major stumbling block under "the old system." The old system was the one without a credit reporting system. They used credit references submitted by the applicant. This meant that the system could not be automated and at most would have to be processed through a clearing house with real people making requests and issuing reports. This was EXPENSIVE and time consuming, not to mention error prone and pretty easy to work around. This was a stumbling block because it effectively limited how much and how quickly they could grow their business, merge with other businesses or any of the things that happened a lot during the 80's with all those corporate take-overs.
But the very moment the database of consumers was created using the SSN as the key field, the big business stumbling block was removed. As a bonus, with the clever renaming of "fraud" to "identity theft" they were able to shift the burden away from themselves and onto the innocent heads of the consumers who are in no way responsible for the mishandling of their personal data and are in no way capable of controlling the data that is used to identify them.
The syntax error was a missing who. Here I add it and bracket a noun clause: "I don't think [knowledge of TV habits] was a problem which { the people who originally started worrying about what people knew about them } were concerned with." A couple optimizer passes result in this partial rewording of Threni's post:
You're worried that people might know what TV channels you're watching? Why? True, some people worry about what people know about them, but I don't think most of them are so concerned with TV habits.
I want the cable company monitoring my television viewing habits. That's how they know to make more shows that I want to see. I also want them to advertise stuff I actually want to buy.
I don't approve of all monitoring, to be sure. I believe in privacy for most things, but some monitoring has tangible benefits for me.
I would naturally prefer to have to opt in, though.
When offering up "private" information, behave like your average corporate CEO and lie like a carpet.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
* AT&T reserves the right to analyze your fecal matter for purposes of improving your targeted advertising experience; also your semen for purposes of improving your targeted adult advertising experience. Thanks again for choosing AT&T.
When you choose to interact with others privacy is off the table by definition. All that can really be private is that which is kept only between yours ears and in no way uttered to another human being. For whatever reasons we have a segment of the population, each with their own definition of privacy, ranting about the ability of others to know something about them. Yet they are the ones that choose to live within society and communicate with others in a thousand different ways.
Think about it. If you buy a home in a neighborhood where homes always cost about $500,000 then you have announced to the world that your earnings or holdings are greater than most peoples. In other words simple observation will tend to reveal everything about you that anyone would likely want to know. And that information, even though you do not like it being collected, will not harm you. At most it will reveal the truth about you and that actually should be a goal for all of us. The truth will set you free.
tinfoil hat on! I have been wearing mine now for some years and I feel that it has helped. I now only use /b/ and still feel inadequate.
"The laws of science be a harsh mistress." --Bender
I've recently gotten AT&T U-Verse, who, according to their privacy statement, will be monitoring my TV watching habits
I want media companies to know what shows I watch, because I want them to keep showing shows that I like to watch. I like privacy, I think privacy is important, but fear that privacy advocates will take so many actions to make "good" media unprofitable, it will only push us toward a future with nothing but American Idol spin-offs.
so somebody knows all the tv shows you watch. ok, so fucking what?
the question is not that somebody has profiled your viewing habits, but that you consider such effluvia about you to be some sort of vital intrinsic part of your identity, worth protecting, worth fighting for, or worth even caring about
i don't know about you, but when making a list of private facts about my identity, what i watch on tv doesn't even remotely enter the realm of relevancy. and no i'm not some "i don't watch tv" weirdo, i watch a lot of tv
i just don't care if anyone knows what i watch, because i don't particularly consider that information about myself remotely valuable or interesting
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I am number #5534289 in a database somewhere you insensitive clod.
But here, only #1118589.
1984 was not supposed to be an instruction manual.
" I know I'm not that interesting to anyone, but the idea of someone being able to pull up everything about me with a simple SQL SELECT statement and a couple of JOINS makes me cringe. "
Lame.
Obviously they need to ask thier DBAs to setup a VIEW for that...
----- The internet has given everyone the ability to have their voice heard equally as loud.. even if they shouldn't be
the author of this news item has just copypasted the ending of george orwells famous book "1984"
If you are worried about being nothing but a select statement there are always alternatives. http://xkcd.com/327/
Apparently you can.
As far as I know, the only people who need your SSN is the government. If anyone else asks for it the answer is "No.". Now there are some companies who need it in order to process through to a government agency, like medical business needing to redeem government funding to cover your medical costs. But that's for the government. Anyone that isn't getting money for you from the government does not need your SSN.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
Please submit both a fresh semen sample and a two day old fecal sample so our customer service reps can verify your information and begin to investigate the issue.
I am a constipated woman, you insensitive clod!
I get very little junk mail and very few promotional calls. This despite living in a good neighborhood in Silicon Valley.
It may be because I don't have any debt. The big source of personal data is credit-reporting agencies, and since I have nothing but a bank credit card, they don't know much about me. I've obtained a copy of my credit report; they see my bank credit card and my cash bank account only. They have no info about brokerage accounts and mutual funds.
I use a local ISP, Sonic, for DSL. They don't seem to give out any info about their customers. I don't have TV cable. I don't have any "affinity cards", other then a Costco membership. I belong to a few organizations, none of which seem to send junk mail. I have AdBlock and FlashBlock installed in Firefox.
But I make no attempt to hide. My phone number is listed (and on the Do Not Call list). I'm registered to vote. My web sites have valid, non-anonymous WHOIS information. Yet I get almost no targeted advertising.
So I think that much of the targeted information is coming via credit-reporting agencies.
Spend less than you earn, and life will be good to you.
I disagree. Data mining needs only to find the few important pieces among the noise to serve a certain purpose. And if you pair BOTH a computer AND a data pattern expert, then no one is "truly safe".
But there's a large middle ground of "relative safety" that works enough of the time. Stay off of named pics. Sculpt what your name produces in a boring search. Use screen handles. I like to say anyone smart can unravel my info in an hour, but that's an hour GoogleMonkeys and BoredHRreps won't spend.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
A tiny segment of the population.
Exodus 20:13
Deuteronomy 5:17
"You shall not murder."
That outweighs Leviticus.
Indeed in the UK unless your one of very few organisations you are not ment/allowed to use NI numbers to identify individuals - i seem to recall this as part of BT's data standards.
That's where the second amendment comes in.
Even the government (except in EXTREMELY backwards areas) will most likely accept a self-defense plea from a minority, even if it's a minority that the prevailing government doesn't care for.
I was looking to switch gyms, and when I went to tour a new one that opened up they wouldn't take me around the place unless i filled out a questionaire with my name, address, phone, and email. I'm perfectly willing to give them that info (minus email) if i sign up, but I made a stand on principle and asked them why they needed all that info just to show me the place. after he insisted that i couldn't tour the gym without it, i decided they didn't need my business and left, with them looking at me like i'm stupid...
An I.T. motto in the hands of an idiot is a dangerous thing...
On the Internet, everyone knows you are a dog.
Squirrel!
just vote for the "Death Penalty for CEOs of companies that lose your SSN when they didn't need it anyway" party. Problem solved.
There are several things that need to be protected, but beyond that, much of it is not important.
From a legal standpoint, there is your financial and identifying information, which is typically anything you would need to give a company that is going to be billing you on an ongoing basis, or any information that the government uses to identify you. Off the top of my head, that would be your Name, Address, Social Insurance Number (or SSN for the americans), Health Card number, credit card numbers, drivers licence, and passport. This means online banking, purchasing, and government services MUST be secure, no exceptions. You lose this, you lose the war. However, most companies that demand this will get it. If you do not believe me, just go ahead and try to get cable TV without giving a name or address.
Nearly as important is personal information. This is your political beliefs, sexual orientation, who your sleeping with, what kind of porn you like, what drug abuse issues / habits you have or had in the past, what god your worship, what you really think of your dick headed boss, who you talk to / e-mail, and who your friends are. Pre internet, these things would only be known to those you personally knew, and to those who cared enough to stalk you obsessively. With social networking and things existing on the internet forever, it is possible that what you make public knowledge will now be trivially easy to find out and use against you. As a civilization, we are still figuring out what the real impact of this may be. In general, these things are very much worth protecting.
Now, what the original poster mentions is something I am not entirely sure is important, your general consumer habits. What does it really matter if your tv company is monitoring your TV watching habits for advertisement purposes? I look forward to the day when I can watch tv and either avoid all commercials, or at least not have to watch commercials for tampons, womens cosmetics, reverse mortgages, beer, american political ads, baseball, nascar, football, or any other products I never use. There are many details about my personal life that have only marginal consequence. My choice of bank, internet provider, shoes, clothes, which Videogames, TV shows and movies I enjoy, whether I prefer Burger king or McDonalds or Wendy's, and how often I purchase Pay Per View events are not the sort of thing that can cause me problems. As long as those companies keep my purchasing info secure, it is mostly not important. And if they keep specifically identifying information about me seperate, then it is a total non issue.
END COMMUNICATION
You can't hide from Big Brother, but you can confuse the hell out of him.
Do this by behaving inconsistently, in ways that complicate spammeisters from slotting your into a standard bucket.
Leave the TV tuner box set to a channel you hate (e.g. Country Music TV, Fox News, MSNBC, TLC, Family Channel) and then turn off the set. Choose a different odious channel each time. Or choose channels randomly.
Lie on the shopper discount card questionaires. In time, most places will disambiguate you (if you use a credit card), but your misbehavior will probably flag you as a spoil sport who won't be receptive to spam.
Even if this stuff doesn't protect you, it'll make you feel like you're taking arms against being stamped, indexed, briefed, and debriefed.
"I know I'm not that interesting to anyone ..."
None of us are, except to friends, family and ourselves (and sometimes not even that or to them). But in this case you are interesting, to the company and their advertisers that is. Otherwise they wouldn't bother logging your viewing habbits. I doubt there is that much you can do about it except to feed a lot of extra info into the system to obscure your real viewing preferences. So just leave the telly on 24/7 and randomly pick programs to show when you are not watching something yourself. The drawback is that you'll probably get some pretty weird ads showing up when you are actually watching. That plus the extra power consumption = electricity bill so it might not be worth it.
http://www.theonion.com/content/video/google_opt_out_feature_lets_users
Quite a bit of countries do not guarantee your privacy by law.
In the Netherlands the constitution guarantees your privacy, and especially emails are protected by our constitution (after all, they're a form of a letter).
Depending on your jurisdiction, you could fix the situation by taking various judicial actions. In some countries you aren't protected and you're indeed lost.
Consider yourself lost if you live in the UK, U.S.A. or China (among others).
Oh, and get a tech savvy lawyer, he might be able to help you. Those people consider privacy holy and will do anything in their power to fix your problem if you give them a target and weapons.
What google analytics is doing might be highly illegal in some countries.
I hate to tell you this, but you are being monitored way more than you are expressing here, there are a LOT of pictures and videos from you, recorded phone calls, GPS tracks deducted from your IPs, and the list just goes on.
Don't mind a lot about people knowing about you, or seeing you, mind about misusage, fight the people that does wrong, not the people that does.
I'm positive, don't belive me look at my karma
The fallacy is that you must have exactly one identity online, linked to your real identity offline.
In fact, there are relatively few transactions on the web (or anywhere else) where I am a customer where the vendor needs to be able to link to my real world identity. She may need to learn that a payment has been authorized, or that I am the person who submitted a blog post so I can edit it; but she does not need to know my social security number or mother's maiden name.
Once in a while you need to establish a one-to-one identity with a real person, such as to prevent money laundering or in an election. But for most of us those are the exception, not the rule.
As long as the marketing folks get us (and our government/bank/ISP) to believe we need to establish that one-to-one identity every single time we participate in any sort of interaction with anyone at all, yes, we have lost. And all in the name of them being able to call me at dinner time to try to sell me something, or send me a bunch of "credit card pre-approved" mails, or whatever. Or for some overly-paternalistic government bureaucrat wanting to make sure I get caught if I say a dirty word or look at a dirty picture online.
Please folks (even you folks in Germany!) please resist the temptation to think that one-to-one identity is the only way to go. It's not.
... you already surrendered your privacy. So shut up and like it, little cog. And remember, uncle state and brother commerce know what's best for you.
If not, well, you just admitted you are obviously a criminal AND a terrorist. Please report to the nearest secret prison soonest, citizen.
I consider Privacy a basic Human Right. Nothing more, nothing less. I dont want
any one spying on any of us IRL just as i dont want any one spying on us online.
For example, as Google want to know everything about us and consider privacy dead.
Then why cant we know everything about Google?! Where they live. What they do.
Who they talk to. What they say. What they think, oppinions, feelings etc etc!
Btw, only blocking 3rdPartyCookies still allows 1stPartyCookies. I've been testing
which Cookies i can live without for half a year now.
1. First i erased all cookies to begin with a clean slate.
2. Then i tried surfing with AllCookiesOff, i found for example that Youtube auto-login
require Google 1st and 3rd -Cookies and Youtube Cookies. So i told Opera 'Site Preferences'
to allow all cookies for those sites.
And Google SearchPreferences cookie (NoWebHistory NoAutoSuggest NoFilter). And a few more sites.
But then i quickly exited Opera and saved a copy of my cookies.dat
3. I edited my Opera.lnk to reset new cookies to make it much hard to track me. /d /c start /min cmd /d /c copy /y %ProgramFiles%\Opera\profile\cookies0.dat %ProgramFiles%\Opera\profile\cookies4.dat & start %ProgramFiles%\Opera\Opera.exe
%windir%\system32\cmd.exe
(9.27, newer Opera still too ugly)
I also did one for my Iron browser.
4. Now i enjoy faster and safer browsing. With suprisingly few problems.
5. Btw, this blocks FlashCookies. No problems.
rd /s /q "%AppData%\Adobe" /s /q "%AppData%\Macromedia" /y NUL "%AppData%\Adobe\Flash Player" /y NUL "%AppData%\Macromedia\Flash Player" /y NUL "%UserProfile%\..\Default User\Application Data\Adobe\Flash Player" /y NUL "%UserProfile%\..\Default User\Application Data\Macromedia\Flash Player"
rd
md "%AppData%\Adobe"
md "%AppData%\Macromedia"
copy
copy
md "%UserProfile%\..\Default User\Application Data\Adobe"
md "%UserProfile%\..\Default User\Application Data\Macromedia"
copy
copy
In fact, I've wired some extra money to that Swiss Bank account you don't know your wife knows about, just to help!!
Pug
An Invisible Entity of Vast Power whose existence must be taken on faith alone: Liberal Media
20 Minutes into the Future....
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
People who don't opt in, aren't having that problem.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I'm as big a privacy advocate as you'll find. But my main concern has always been that I want my private life
to remain private to other humans, so that they could not exploit it for personal gain. Nowadays, there is so
much information on so many people that I don't expect to get singled out in this regard. If the details of
my private life are only available to and processed by machines, then it's not nearly as big a deal.
Problems occur when that information is available to humans. that is where I draw the line.
It's simple as that. They don't NEED your SSN - that is only used to bring up your credit score and they will offer you services accordingly. I have opened bank accounts with invalid SSN's, non-existing phone numbers and bad addresses. They usually go get the manager or another senior member and all they say is: can't find a credit history on you, we will only give you $300 limit on your credit cards. Some banks (Bank of America) and companies (Geico, AllState) will simply refuse service saying you don't have a long enough credit history but there are others that will accept you.
Then again, those are the only institutions that ask for your SSN. You can get most membership/discount cards with completely bogus information. They don't require the information but the drone at the front office doesn't know that and probably not even the manager at the store. Once you get to their legal department they will say, that's ok.
I found all this out because for a while I didn't have an SSN number (resident alien). I even got a drivers license without a valid SSN. Usually all they require is an extra proof of identification or a bill sent to the address you specified.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
But what ticks me off is that corporations are making bucketloads of money from information that belongs to me, at the same time as corporations are doing everything in their power to prevent me from using the information that belongs to them. All I want is some fundamental fairness. Part of the problem is that I cannot purchase some products and services with money alone; I am forced to fork over information in addition to money. On the other hand they make it as hard as possible, sometimes they make it illegal, for me to use products and services I payed for in any way I see fit - you know, as if what I purchased was actually my property. What's more, we have indeed lost this battle when most people here say "it's over - get used to it." It's *my* privacy you're selling for your own convenience, punk!
Really? Do they use a keypad?
To automatically get rid of these use the BetterPrivacy add-on.
Awesome image! In the future, every day I'll shit in a bowl in the morning. In the evening, I'll take the three-day-old bowl and flush it, clean it out, and prepare it for tomorrow.
All so I can have more expedient customer service.
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
No you aren't paranoid.
AT&T has a horrible record when it comes to privacy, especially with illegal wiretaps, so much so that the AT&T logo should be changed to "Your world wiretapped." There was a PBS NOVA special about this, and the CIA has intentionally placed their wiretapping boxes inside AT&T's San Francisco building they will intercept DOMESTIC calls. They don't care about the legality of what they are doing and were said to actually listen to domestic calls between citizens because they were unable to separate them from the international calls. This could have easily been avoided had they placed their system in San Luis Obispo.
Basically there is a lot of money floating around to incentivise such activities. Here in Boston, homeland security helped pay for the T (bus/train) turnstile upgrades to 'Charlie' cards (RFID) so that people can be more easily tracked.
Personally what scares most is capability to abuse privacy and ability to use peoples own gizmos against them regardless of which if any actual violations occur in the real world. The only way to win is to make or force core infustructure design choices which lack the capacity to circumvent privacy.
Technology can also help enforce privacy just as much as it can help to take it away.
I remember reading about data transmitted by the tivo years ago back when most were connected via modem.. it was really pretty sick.. the syslog data sent to their servers included event information on every key press of the remote.
Pound for pound the modern cell phone is the most egregious offender in terms of capability. The radio layer of all cell phones (Including your favorite linux fanboy smart phones) is totally propritary - the majority of handsets allow the radio images to be flashed over the air by push from the provider. This means even if your phone has no back doors to spy on you via open mic or enabling the camera without your knowledge an update can be sent without your approval to enable all of that and more. Obviously the major problem with cell phones is the ability to track your every move..again for me its not about what is being done in terms of recording activities its what *CAN* be done.
>"That medical firm didn't really need my SSN, but then again neither did AT&T when I signed up for U-Verse. Am I just too paranoid? Is privacy dead?"
In such an environment the only real solution (assuming reform is impossible) is to maintain multiple identities in such a way as to buy a measure of privacy in leveraging the greater degrees of freedom afforded by said multiple identities.
Maybe we're not seeing the forest for the trees. While we are concerned about Facebook-Myspace-Buzz "automatic" sharing of friends and followers being an invasion of privacy and ad-driven power grab for your personal communication transaction metadata, maybe we ought, instead, to be concerned with designing a careful architecture of our stable of personal sock puppets.
- dredeyedick
(or is it?) :-|
Privacy is dead, said by Anonymous a name known to everyone...
It serves no purpose but to try and get more money out of my wallet.
I don't know about you, but I only buy something if its probable value to me is greater than its price. If they're getting more money out of my wallet, that probably means I'm getting more value. There's nothing wrong with that.
What's so evil about targeted advertising? It's win-win if you make rational decisions. Yeah, it sucks for someone who buys anything that's shiny, but what else is new?
I started taking care with my online info about 12 years ago. I've only posted my photo once since then, and operate under the assumption that if I post something to the internet, everything from same pseudonym is known by someone, or will be, so if I post my name one place, my hometown in another, my job in another, I assume someone could add them up.
Sadly though, the war is won in the minds of the people. Quite literally, a story about citywide CCTV will come up and if I speak against it, I'll have kids around 20 and younger saying "the only reason you'd mind this is if you have something to hide! It's public, so there's no expectation of privacy, so it's ok to have cameras everywhere all the time!" They never seem to get that
A) That's more like an immortal never-sleeping policeman waiting outside your home, following you everywhere, and then parking himself and waiting when you go back inside.
B) Anyone with a net connection can find hundreds or thousands of cases of police abuse of citizens, even if you only count surveillance cases.
My big conspiracy theory is still that privacy was accidentally surrendered. Everyone has cel phones. Everyone's phone has a camera. EXIF data saves the time a photo was taken. More cam-phone pics are being hosted on servers or uploaded to social sites instead of on the camera. More phones are incorporating GPS receivers and geotagging pics. Off the shelf software can identify people's faces. Even without the PATRIOT act, search warrants are seldom declined. SO, WHEN YOU PUT ALL OF THAT TOGETHER... with current, non-theoretical technology in use today, if someone gets a warrant so search a photo host or a Facebook server, assuming the pics are geotagged, they can run a few scripts and know
- Whose pics are on the server
- Where you were
- When you were there
- Who you were with
- With enough pics, what your habits are, and who you tend to associate with
- Who's a friend of a friend
- Who took photos of police (illegal in many places in the Western world now!)
All without installing a single camera or deciding to follow a single person - because the camera is in each of our hands.
Hi.
You didnt loose youre privacy. All you have done is ripped off all the other people that provide you content by disallowing them any form of profit with the scripts.
Why not rather next time turn of your script blocling things when they rightfully deserve the money....
Oh wait... your privacy.
Oh wait... your american right?
This is going to be the minority view here on Slashdot, but it must be said. I personally wish the marketers had much more information about me, so they wouldn't do such a bad job of targeting. Here are some examples:
My ideal situation would be a public persona that is highly detailed and non-private, plus an ability to step into anonymity if I wanted to. I.e., I'm happy with the grocery store knowing everything about my purchasing behavior because of their loyalty card -- and selling/giving that information to anyone else that could use it to more accurately target me -- but I also like to have the option of purchasing with cash if I choose to.
"That medical firm didn't really need my SSN, but then again neither did AT&T when I signed up for U-Verse"
You're right. They didn't. So why did you give it to them? You aren't required to give out your SSN to anyone but certain government agencies and your employer for tax purposes. Credit checks can be run without a social. Television can certainly be delivered without it. It's really crazy that people run around scared of identity theft, and then give out their SSN to the cable guy.
"I disagree with you" does not equal "flamebait."
I am not sure what you hope to achieve online that you haven't already lost offline.
We are tracked by an seemingly innumerable amount of sources: credit history, social security company, banks, credit card usage, stores, cell phone relationship to cell towers, land line and cell calling records, etc - I've have even read stories that cash can be tracked via the chain of bank who issued it to the person who spends or transfers it. And what about private and public security cams? Practically every store you enter into tracks you at least by a method of tracking IP addresses.
[quote]
I'm extremely annoyed by that, yet I love the service so much and I don't think I can cancel it. I just can't take this anymore.
[/quote]
There's your problem. You are prepared to put up with this (so, apparently you *can* take it anymore).
Until more people "vote with their feet" (V.I Lenin) this won't go away.
Here's an interesting article about how facebook, plaxo, linkedin, and google share your data: http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/software/soa/Google-Facebook-share-data-with-Plaxo-LinkedIn/0,130061733,339284989,00.htm
Two things sort of on topic: first, I remember that AT&T U-Verse had some issues in one of the states due to its privacy policy (want to say that it was WI and there was a big deal with that a couple years ago). Second, according to what they use in the training materials, they do indeed need to have your SSN due to government regulations (same reasons why you're supposed to have a physical address and not just a P.O. box for things like credit cards and cell phones). That being said, I see exactly where you're coming from and am afraid of losing what little privacy we have left. There's also the little cameras that Comcast at least was thinking about putting inside their set-top boxes along with "body recognition software" to further data-mine what you watch. I remember that that was a selling point for U-Verse when that was leaked from Comcast.
Privacy is an illusion. Internet Privacy doubly so. Avoiding a technology doesn't preserve privacy, it just makes you feel like you are immune. Even if you don't have a Facebook account, people who know you are posting pictures of you.
We never showed up...
If we had, you can be sure we'd know of at least one case, just one battle, in which we had traded shots...
No, we're looking at people saying they're fighting, but we're NOT taking to the streets demanding privacy back.
We're also NOT promising any politician touching our personal privacy "You'll never work in politics in this country again" and making it stick...
It's like an appendix, we're just hoping the operation to get rid of it won't be too painful.
Slashdot is not your therapist. If it were, you'd probably have more problems after you left.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
Be sure to lie whenever you can get away with it. When subscribing to magazines, spell your first name slightly differently on every subscription form. Every time someone wants household income, check a different level. If your address or phone number isn't important to what your filling out, change a couple of numbers. Of course, don't be an idiot and screw up something that might void a warranty or get you into legal trouble, but if some nosey organization is just asking for information, give 'em some. Just make it the wrong information. Depending on the situation, your lies may be little ones or totally outrageous. Data mining is here to stay, but if enough people start lying to information gatherers, the data mined will be worthless. Oh yeah, the election day exit polls? Always tell 'em you voted for the other candidate :)
i understand what you are saying: that just because i don't care about it, doesn't mean everyone doesn't care about it
except we're not talking about say, my habits in the bedroom. in other words, a subject matter most anyone would want to keep private. we're talking about something that most people genuinely do not care about
so the issue is you are working uphill: there is no massive outcry here, no one is going to attempt to change the laws of the land or help you do that, because no one cares. such that you are in for a very lonely, very long, certain to fail effort to keep something private that no one really considers private. rather, i will openly question your rationale for considering this data about you so important to you, and ask you to just get the fuck over it. i openly and genuinely challenge you to provide with the world with a logical basis for why this data about you is so damn important for you to keep private
if it were something genuinely embarrassing that were being revealed, i would side with you. but as it is, its your tv watching habits, which i just don't fucking care about, and no one else cares about, and so you are going to have hard time convincing anyone else to care as well
perhaps you should reconsider on what basis you value these pointless details of your life. simply do not see any grounds to get worried or to agitate for change. tempest in a teapot
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The short answer is yes, the privacy war has been lost. The Slashdotters who respond with more technical suggestions, or chide the original poster for trading security for convenience, are missing the real point. Human beings are social beings to the core; cutting oneself off from society is not an option, and participation in society means divulging personal information, intentionally and unintentionally. We have a problem that organizations have made an enormous leap in their ability to accumulate and mine that information, and no one is so technically adept that they can out-think every such organization. As one of my instructors put it, unplugging a computer is not a guarantee of security, because an unplugged computer is a "denial of service."
Most people have just given up trying.
We need new social rules. I think the most pressing problem is that individuals are nearly totally exposed, but large institutions are not. The first thing we should do is demand more visibility on the part of large corporate institutions, whether "private" corporations or government entities. The second, which will take time, is to think through and create new social norms, about what should and should not be public knowledge about an individual.
If you are a stay at home, mummy loving, instruction obeying, cud chewing milch cow then I don't suppose you'd have anything to worry about. Indeed, to you it would be a hobby. You probably feel safer knowing your place. Good for you.
For anyone who might have a bit of spark in their character and an unwillingness to obey just because someone says so, it might be a serious issue.
Yawn. Excuse me, I have more cows to milk.
or your info is not private
simple as that. no legal or moral arguments are involved, its beyond that level of consideration
if you walk down the street, you don't have any privacy, right? i mean, in terms of people know you are walking down the street: you are in public. there is no rational expectation of privacy for you to expect when doing that, correct?
so now you know why a billion trillion government laws will never change the fact that if you type "i like otter porn" in google on an open wire leading out of your house, you've just freely chosen to make that info not private, as if you freely chose to walk down the street: its an open wire. whose listening in? your isp? google? hackers? why do you expect WHAT YOU PUT ON AN OPEN WIRE to have the same level of protection as what you do in behind a closed door? it simply makes no rational sense. and the question is completely beyond the realm of social policy, legality, or morality. its simply logistical pat and simple fact
there is a difference between the government or google looking in the window or setting up cameras in your bedroom to watch what you do with otters (not ok), and you, for some reason, expecting the same level of privacy when YOU PUT THE INFO OUT ON AN OPEN LINE LEADING OUT OF YOUR HOUSE DIRECTLY CONSCIOUSLY POINTED AT GOOGLE
there is this psychological disconnect that goes on with the internet: people do it in their homes, so they think of it as "private". when, unlike what you do in the bedroom or the bathroom, there is a wire leading out of your house that you FREELY AND VOLUNTARILY provide information to
simple inescapable truth: if you want something to stay private KEEP IT PRIVATE. sharing info with a corporate entity is something you CHOOSE to do. and no law is going to undisclose what you have FREELY chosen to disclose to a second party. its a question completely beyond governmental policy and legality and cuts to impossible expectations on your part
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The Internet has never been private. If a packet leaves your computer, it can be seen at several points on the way to its destination. However, in the early days, there were virtually no organizations that had the CPU or storage capacity to log and report on every packet going through those routers, every firewall session, every web server hit, and so on, unless they were targeting your IP for some specific reason. The organizations that may have had that much bandwidth available had other uses for it.
Given the advances in computer hardware, it is much easier for companies to log and report on every hit to their web server, every session through their firewall, etc. With how much faster networks have gotten, it's probably still not feasible to log every packet, but it is feasible to inspect packets to look for specific types of sessions, and to log packets from sessions of interest. I work at a company that makes a network appliance that does something along those lines, and it's pretty easy. We can even monitor your Skype traffic (not listen to your calls, just see who you're chatting with).
If you want privacy that badly, give up the Internet, your cell phone, your GPS, your credit cards, and so on. Technology has made monitoring too easy for organizations to resist, and some organizations have found uses for it they never dreamed of in the first place, and they will be very unwilling to give it up.
We cannot buy our security, our freedom from the threats the internet by committing an immorality so great as saying to a billion human beings now enslaved behind the facebook curtain, "Give up your dreams of freedom because to save our own skins, we're willing to make a deal with your slave masters." Alexander Hamilton said, "A nation which can prefer disgrace to danger is prepared for a master, and deserves one." Now let's set the record straight. There's no argument over the choice between peace and war, but there's only one guaranteed way you can have peace—and you can have it in the next second—surrender.
Admittedly, there's a risk in any course we follow other than this, but every lesson of history tells us that the greater risk lies in appeasement, and this is the specter our well-meaning liberal friends refuse to face—that their policy of accommodation is appeasement, and it gives no choice between peace and war, only between fight or surrender. If we continue to accommodate, continue to back and retreat, eventually we have to face the final demand—the ultimatum. And what then—when Zuckerberg has told his people he knows what our answer will be? He has told them that we're retreating under the pressure, and someday when the time comes to deliver the final ultimatum, our surrender will be voluntary, because by that time we will have been weakened from within spiritually, morally, and economically. He believes this because from our side he's heard voices pleading for "pics at any price" or "better Reddit than dead," or as one commentator put it, he'd rather "die than not have pictures of kittens available 24-7." And therein lies the road to war, because those voices don't speak for the rest of us.
Losing privacy is losing individuality.
The fake glasses with the nose and bushy eyebrows yet?
There is another way for companies to track you that deleting your cookies won't fix. Using Flash based Locally Stored Objects.
Brin has already written on this topic multiple times. Harrison, Stainless Steel Rat ftw, also used to talk about how this would happen. I'd like to think Asimov would have seen this but it was before his time. But I bet had you told Issac how the internet and IT was going to work he would have figured it out too.
We are going to lose the privacy wars but I hope that we will win a few things back because of it. Like a bit more transparency at the higher levels. (Yes the higher levels will do more to fight it but having been a part of the hacker sect for a bit I know they will fight the good fight, yo ho ho and bottle of rum.)
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
What part of that don't privacy advocates understand? The way to fight back against corporate and government tracking of individuals is not to try to prevent it, but completely circumvent it by turning the cameras and databases against the very ones who currently control them. Anonymous, Wikileaks, other groups are already proving that it's the most effective use of technology available to the general public. Cell phone cameras and secret document liberators (hackers in news-speak) will always have the advantage of numbers against a controlling elite, and they are recognized by governments as the powerful subversive forces that they are. It's obviously not a terrorist threat to take pictures of cops or government buildings or landmarks, but it is certainly a threat to a police state relying on its asymmetric use of monitoring technology. Documenting the wrongdoing of official government actions is the biggest threat to those corrupt governments, and it has them running scared. The ultimate win for individual freedom would be for every aspect of human life to be laid open to full examination by anyone who cares to look. Your neighbor doesn't like what you do in your bedroom? Tough; who's going to listen to him when they hear what he has to say about other people behind closed doors, or the racist decisions he makes as a manager, or more likely simply the hypocrisy he practices in his own bedroom? The only thing to fear from a fully public society is narrow minds and the vast majority of them will be exposed as hypocrites and nothing more. The rest will adapt or go form their own tiny closed societies and stop bothering everyone else.
The comments about the GP sacrificing his privacy for entertainment conveinience got me thinking a little bit....even making this sacrifices what is the best way to go about them? Is it better to give a few companies access to a whole lot of information or is it better to give a bunch of companies little pieces of your information?
For instance, you can have AT&T Uverse TV, AT&T Internet, AT&T Home Phone, AT&T Wireless Internet, and AT&T Cellular Service. From there you can use Google Search, Google Docs, Google Maps, Google Mail, Google Buzz, Google Finance, Google Health, and Google Wave. (If you are concerned about your privacy, you probably aren't using things like Google health, but you get the idea). Combined, AT&T and Google will know just about everything about your life. Alternatively, you can use DirectTV, Time Warner cable internet, AT&T Home phone, Verizon Wireless internet, and US Cellular phone service. From there you can use Bing Search, Google Docs, Mapquest, Facebook, and Quickbooks. Each of these companies knows a little slice about your life.
By limiting the number of companies with information about yourself, you are taking away several possible breaches/misuse of your data. If one of those two ARE breached/misuse your information.....it is going to be really big. On the other hand, by diversifying you increase the risk that your data will be misused, but any single instance is going to be less severe than if they had ALL of your data.
A good "Real Life" parallel is how you interact with your friends. Do you have 1 or 2 people that are your closest confidants that know just about every dirty little secret of your life, or do you have the friend you tell sexual secrets about, the friend you discuss your finances with, the friend you confide your insecurities and weaknesses in, the friend that you talk to about your health problems, and the friend that you express your concerns about all of your other friends to?
You could always change your first name to Robert'); DROP TABLE Users;
What I want to know is why the OP and other privacy nuts care so much if AT&T knows what you watch on TV. Who gives a crap?
All 99.99% of data mining is used for is to target advertising to groups. Do you consider yourself a mindless zombie that buys anything advertised to him? No? Then what do you care what advertising is shoved down your pipe?
Frankly I could give two craps what ads they think may or may not appeal to me, because none of them will sway my opinion more than my own research. As such, I could also give two craps if they want to track my habits to kingdom come to feed me such ads.
Really, the behavior of your mundane day to day life is of no value to anyone but advertisers. And unless you let those ads run your life, you should not let you tinfoil hat paranoia do it either.
we need to keep the guns out of the hands of minorities.
I joined a gym recently (Quick! Dataminers! Add this info you my profile!) and there was two questions on the standard A.S.L being:
Age: _____ D.O.B __/__/____
So, I filled in the Age and left DOB blank.
The woman asked me for my DOB and I asked her why it was required. Being a gym, she repeated the litenay of 'if you are, for example, over a certain age we will need to take this into account' to which I responded:
"Great. I've given you my age. It's nowhere near 16 or 60. Why do you need my date of birth?"
Answer: "For the computer"
So I asked if it is required. She said she can enter zeros. I warmly thanked her very much.
No argument. No discussion.
Ok. It REALLY helped that when the 'gym consultant' (WHY is this required?) sat down to 'discuss' joining the gym the first thing said was 'It is REALLY hard to join this gym'... so she went into the 'I'm about to lose customers' mode.
---
Don't give up. Don't give in. Know where the line in the sand is. Push them back across it when they put their toe over. Be prepared to chop off that toe or walk away if required.
You have a sick, twisted mind. Please subscribe me to your newsletter.
"I've been a fanatic about my online privacy for the last few years. I've been using NoScript and blocking Google Analytics, disabling third-party cookies, encrypting IM and doing everything in my power to keep data-miners at bay. Recently, I've been feeling like I'm just doing too much and still losing! No matter what I do, I know that there's a weak link somewhere, be it my ISP, Flash cookies, etc.
Heh, Adblock and NoScript are musts for me too, but I also forge all referrers to be the root of the site I am surfing (no need for sites to know how I found them). I reject all cookies, and for sites that need cookies I allow them for session only. I send my web searches through TOR (though Google block a lot of TOR exit nodes, so Scroogle SSL via TOR is needed most of the time). I don't have Flash installed, and find that not to be a problem. There are methods for downloading videos and music obscured by flash anyway, and once you've seen 1 flash game, you've seen them all. Or if you ever used an 8-bit computer, you have played games better than anything a flash developer will churn out.
I turn off all auto-update checking in applications, and do not install applications that phone home. (Spyware has been totally legitimised through claiming to check for updates, and things that would never have been acceptable 10 years ago are common place these days).
I rarely give websites real data any more. If I want to make a post on a site, I will sign up a throw away account - email provided by mailinator.com, the username is a munge of the keyboard, and the password is password. If someone gets into the account and starts shitting all over the site, well, if webmasters didn't try and violate privacy at every turn maybe they would be treated with respect. (Cue the whingeing bloggers, who claim not to violate user privacy, whilst at the same time having the likes of Google Analytics on their Wordpress hosted blog).
And if a site wants an email address, but doesn't verify the address, I use postmaster@site.tld.
I urge others to do the same. If you care about privacy, or just don't care about corporations, fucking with their data is probably the best attack. Make things uneconomical, and the practices stop.
I've recently gotten AT&T U-Verse, who, according to their privacy statement, will be monitoring my TV watching habits for advertisement purposes. I'm extremely annoyed by that, yet I love the service so much and I don't think I can cancel it.
It's things like this where you need to either stop being a brainless consumer, or purposefully poison their data.
I know it fucking sucks that these companies offer their way, or the highway, and that the barrier to entry to these industries is so high there is no way anyone (especially not a non-datarapist) can even try to think about becoming a competitor.
So fuck off the service where one company is the gatekeeper of all data that goes in and out of your house, and torrent the TV and films you are interested in (you don't think Netflix ignore the data they have on people?).
Or, if you really want to pay for adverts, fuck with their data. Operate a TOR exit node, and QOS it so it doesn't effect your 'net usage. You could run a web proxy on the exit too, that modifies all web browser fingerprints to match yours. I know your question says they monitor TV habits, but it won't be long before they are shamelessly monitoring internet usage too (though the likes of Google already are). It might be worth formally notifying your ISP (with a hand written letter) that you are going to be running a TOR exit node, and that if they get the government coming bitching then it is probably a TOR user. At least then you might have some recourse against your ISP if they just mindlessly hand over your name/address to the feds.
I haven't had cable TV for a long time now, but back when I did it did occur to me that the cable company could probably tell everything I did with the
It is difficult to battle this problem when so many others don't seem to understand or care about it, but I say: Fight the good fight! I disagree with your use of the term "data mining", though. "Data mining" is a sophisticated statistical analysis of data (see, for instance: http://matlabdatamining.blogspot.com/), whereas what I think you're talking about is "data snooping" or "data theft".
We lost the privacy war years ago. There is no - I repeat no - privacy on the web. So get over it. If you want privacy, do these things: don't give your ssn to anyone except irs and ssa for any reason; stay off the web; get an anonymous cell phone and cancel your landline phone; don't use credit or debit cards, pay all your bills in cash; have all your mail delivered to a po box. Don't tell anyone where you live and have at least one ghost address. And most importantly, read JJ Luna's book on the subject of privacy.
put it this way: woman walks naked down the street, and everyone who walks by her, she expects them not to see her
sound reasonable?
that's the essence of your "noble" fight
simple: if you want something private DON'T TYPE IT INTO GOOGLE. if you don't want to be seen naked, DON'T WALK DOWN THE STREET NAKED
do you understand me yet?
i EXACTLY agree with you that we shouldn't barricade in our homes... by coming to the simple realization and acceptance of the fact that when you go into public, pointless information about you is made public. in other words, to go into public, to not barricade yourself in your house, you can:
a. expect the government to give you vast protections concerning the abuse of the random pointless bits of info about you on the street (where you are, what you're wearing, the expression on your face, etc.). stuff no one really cares about and the government in no way can protect you from
b. expect of simple reality that merely existing leads to you leaking random detritus and fluff about you. issues of "privacy" that have no value to you, and you have concluded shouldn't bother you. issues of "privacy" that are inevitably disclosed as a simple matter of living your life, and in no way compromise weaken or embarrass you
feel me now?
some people DO barricade themselves as shut ins. not because the uberoverlords are compiling your ultimate subjugation, but because they suffer from mental illness levels of anxiety and paranoia. all i'm asking you is to accept that to worry about some of the random fluff that is disclosed about your life, simply as an act of living to your life, is harmless and inevitable, unless you want to admit to mental illness, extreme anxiety about being violated over pointless info about you that simply leaks out as a simple exertion of living a normal life
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I guess you're all grown up now, secure and confident in your own unique identity. I think it's safe to say, you would not be the person you are now if you had not been able to privately explore the things you used to be ashamed of.
It isn't that we have less privacy. It is that the information about us is now much more accessible. Computers and databases along with marketing droids and NSA/CIA/KGB(homeland security) needs demand that as much data be compiled as possible for use by whomever wants it for a price. In the past compiling such huge databases just wasn't practical. It wasn't because the data wasn't out there but it was in the form of paper in files but not on computer media. Now everything is digitized and available at a moments notice.
If you want privacy, or at least more of it there are steps you can take which make personal data harder to get in the first place but unless you live in a cave in the middle of the desert with no communication or interaction with other humans you will never achieve total privacy.
That's where the law comes into effect.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
If you can't stop them watching you, your only resort is to jam them with useless and misleading information. So instead of poking their noses into your legitimate purposeful activities, they'll then be forced to spend time analysing why you're seen on surveillance cameras every Saturday at 3.15pm looking into the window of Erotic Cakes.
If you are so worried about privacy then why did you go with AT&T? WTF guy the biggest violator of privacy laws and you giving them money? IF you were so concerned about privacy then why did you sign with them? The best way to fight assholes like AT&T is with your wallet and here you are feeding the monster. People like you are the reason this problem is so bad.
there ARE cameras everywhere. i live in times square. there are probably video logs of me coming and going in every direction i've ever gone in the last 4 years
who fucking cares? what the hell are they going to do with this info? how can it be used to hurt me? in what way does this info damage me or could possibly damage me? i await your "minority report" style fantasy sequences
if you want to win this fight, you are going to have to convince me and the other 99% of the population that just doesn't fucking care. you haven't convinced me. so you, and you're 100 paranoid schizophrenic friends are all alone in a sea of ten million of us who have better things to worry about. not because we don;t care about our privacy, but because some details about our lives that are "private" are perfectly pointless and useless. the cameras in times square are not pointed at my bathroom or my bedroom
"1984" is a vaguely amusing piece of fiction. not the fucking future. get a life, realize real life is not a b-level high anxiety hollywood movie. no one fucking cares about this info about you, and no one fucking cares that someone has this info about them, because the info is useless. the info will not be abused because it can't be abused: there's no coherent way to abuse it in any coherent way which coherently hurts you
there you go: your high anixety is met with pure and simple ambivalence. good luck in trying to scare us all with your paranoia. we understand the ramifications and the implications. we're completely unimpressed. welcome to the reality of our horrible future: an uncaring populace
how can we not see senator palpatine and agent smith are right around the corner!?
pfffffft
fucking fanboys with too much fiction and not enough reality
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Live someplace else. For all the liberty and freedom Americans scream about in an abstract way, they seem to have very little in real life.
Take Canada for instance, we have some great Privacy Laws. Government might have a bit more access, but they also have to follow some pretty strict rules (unless you just paranoid about government conspiracy or something, in which case see a doctor). People can collect all sorts of information, and use it. They can't share it or release it however without your express permission.
I would take government collecting information over a corporation any day of the week. Government has oversight, and accountability. Corporations try to make as much profit as quickly as possible.
Anyway in Canada you have protections, and if you think someone is infringing your privacy you can take them to court. The courts have also been pro-privacy and punish those who don't follow the rules severely. Bottom line anyway is that you don't have to provide your information, you can choose to not use the service if you don't like their privacy policy. Having said that, in Canada at least, a company can do or say whatever it likes on paper, or how it collects the information, it does not however excuse them from the actual law. Just like I can't make a contract with someone to murder them, and then when I am in court go, "hey look, no its OK, I have this contract, where the user said it was OK if I murdered him!". Doesn't work that way. We also have "Privacy Commissioners" in Canada you can send your complaint to for them to make a ruling on. They interpret the law, and the courts generally confer/agree with their findings (though not always).
However when it comes to privacy across political boundries it gets a bit tricky. The US Patriot Act caused some "difficulties" in that it basically allows for the sharing of personal information, and the US and Canadian government come into contact frequently and share information. Over the internet across multiple countries, where cyberspace may only be defined by where the physical servers exist it becomes ever more tricky. What are the privacy laws there? What if the servers span several areas with different laws? Google and Facebook surely fall into this category. Look at online gambling for instance. In most of the USA it is illegal. Guess how many people do it? A lot. All the servers are located in Europe or in some Native reserve which are exempt. It is kind of funny now many States are looking to legalize it now, not because they believe it is morally acceptable, but because they know there is little they can do about it, and they what their cut of the tax revenue. However the usual rule for a company is (like Google found out) you have to follow whatever laws exist in the country you do buisness in. So bottom line it comes down to your country having the laws to protect you, and you yourself being aware and making the right decisions about your own information and what you wish to share.
Should I just give up and accept the fact that privacy is not the norm anymore or should I keep fighting the good fight for my privacy?"
Alliance Commander: "Seems odd you'd name your ship after a battle you were on the wrong side of."
Mal: "May have been the losing side. Still not convinced it was the wrong one."