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Privacy Machiavellis
Chris Jay Hoofnagle has a piece up at SFGate.com on what he calls the "privacy Machiavellis," which are exemplified by Google and Facebook. (The article is adapted from a longer treatment published last year, called "Beyond Google and Evil.") Hoofnagle heads the privacy foundation set up with money collected from settlements of privacy lawsuits against Facebook. From SFGate: "... you have no way to ask Google to stop this tracking. Instead, you can merely opt out of the targeted advertising — the product recommendations. Exercising your privacy options creates a worst-case-scenario outcome: If you opt out, you are still tracked, but you do not receive the putative benefit of targeted ads. An illusory opt-out system is just one of the increasingly sophisticated sleights of hand in the privacy world. Consider Facebook's privacy options. ... Facebook can proudly proclaim that it offers ... more than 100 [choices]. Therein lies the trick; by offering too many choices, individuals are likely to choose poorly, or not at all. Facebook benefits because poor choices or paralysis leads consumers to reveal more personal information. In any case, the fault is the consumer's, because, after all, they were given a choice. Reader Kilrah_il sends word that Google has just released a tool that could alleviate some of the above worries: it stops tracking by Google Analytics for users of IE7+, Firefox 3.5+, and Chrome 4+. Perhaps Hoofnagle will comment on it here or elsewhere.
An illusory opt-out system ... Therein lies the trick; by offering too many choices,
Of course, you can exercise the one opt-out system that works - don't use their services. Nobody is holding a gun to your head. It is like buying a car, but not wanting to pay the price. The price of working with Google and Facebook is not dollars, but your data.
Google's price/benefit is right for me, so I use it. Facebook's is not, so I don't.
Paranoids are people who think they are much more important than they really are.
I have no fear of my privacy being violated by Google because I don't see any reason why someone should be particularly interested about me. In Google's eyes I'm just a statistic. My personal data is no more important to anyone than the data about millions of other consumers.
I'm safe in the numbers, just like I'm anonymous when walking down a busy street. everyone can see me, but nobody cares.
Facebook can proudly proclaim that it offers ... more than 100 [choices]. Therein lies the trick; by offering too many choices, individuals are likely to choose poorly, or not at all.
First it's not enough privacy options. Now it's too many privacy options. Tomorrow when they get the unspoken mythical number correct, we'll bitch about the default settings. Then someone will come on Slashdot and say that his Linux servers were rooted and we'll say that it's because all the idiots of the world use out of the box settings and don't change the default passwords. Granted, your average facebooker shouldn't have to have the wherewithal to set up a Linux server but I think this Google/Facebook privacy complaining thing is getting a little old. Especially when both named parties are suddenly doing quite a bit to make users happy now that it's becoming important to consumers. To complain that they give us too many options now is just ... just ...
... little more ... little more ... little more ... too much, take it back.
Sherry Bobbins: Would you like some pepper on your food, Bart?
Bart Simpson: Sure
My work here is dung.
An illusory opt-out system . . . Therein lies the trick; by offering too many choices, individuals are likely to choose poorly, or not at all.
So....is Facebook a better metaphor for capitalism or democracy?
Google has just released a tool that could alleviate some of the above worries: it stops tracking by Google Analytics
Sounds great, I've always wanted a way to block that "google-analytics" I keep seeing on my NoScript blocked list.
I can't complain much though- there's an important difference between going to a third party (NoScript) to block Google, and Google offering a solution themselves.
My webcomic
When Google literally drives down private streets to photograph people's houses -- how do you hide from them?
Ted Kaczynski may have been a murderous thug, but maybe he wasn't crazy.
Sorry, but the "if you don't like it don't use it" idea is just ignorant of reality.
A huge share (if not 100%) of the websites you visit embed Google Analytics or some other tracker, and they don't notify you much less ask for your permission. You never even get to make the choice not to be tracked. And technical jiujitsu like this FF addon only half-@ss solves the problem some of the time.
Oh, and the "I don't care if I'm tracked so you shouldn't care either" argument is even sadder.
Let this be a lesson to all those who fear the opinion of history: don't write a book advocating a position that is not yours if you don't want to be remembered for holding that position.
Qxe4
Unfortunately ignorance like that works in the favor of companies like Facebook. No, it's not enough to not put your own information into Facebook. You may choose not to use it, but others will, and they'll fill it up with your information that you don't want on there.
I do if they said they would protect my privacy. Or unilaterally change the terms of the agreement retroactively. Allowing an opt out does not fix it. "Yes those changing room videos are now public. But you can opt out! Simply send us a notarized letter with the a copy of your birth certificate, the signatures of your mother, father and attending doctor and we will promptly re-hide it. Hurry before one of our partners decides they could make money with a 'Best of' anthology."
Given Zuck's previous business decisions I have my doubts if they even respect your attempts to protect yourself by deleting items when you ask - or simply hide it in their databases for their own potential personal use later. Thats certainly the methodology of a 'normal' account closure.
there is a fake me out there, with a fake name, a fake birthday, a fake home address, a fake mother's maiden name, a fake birth city, fake likes and dislikes, etc. every time i am asked for this info online, i consistently and continually use the fake alter ego
this is the future of privacy: aliases
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
How obtuse you are. I have tried to trick out my girlfriends facebook privacy settings, but it seems there is always another page somewhere that you have to hunt for. Also, there is no quick and easy way to opt out of everything. You have to go to every app, every website that has a facebook tie in, every picture gallery, etc and change them ALL manually to opt out of "sharing my information with anyone who asks" mode.
Its complete bullshit. sure, you can go into your filesystem ACLs and hand edit every file to have the correct permissions. No one does this however, and thats why you can apply permissions/acls RECURSIVELY from parent. What I would want for her is a big button that opts out of EVERYTHING. Add to that a nice concise privacy page. Note how i said PAGE, not pageS spread across the entirety on the site. Then I would say, add as many fiddily little options as you want. So long as the giant opt out button still works for them all, and when they add new features, they don't opt you in automatically, as is currently the case.
I have always hated facebook, but I didnt know the true hate till i went to ehow.com - or any number of a growing pool of "facebook connect" sites, and saw a picture of my girlfriend on there with the option to leave a comment about the site.
What the fucking fuck! i still havent been able to turn that "feature" off yet, because i cant find the damn option! Aparently, if you have logged onto facebook (that day?), you are automatically "connected" to a host of other sites. So now i have to go to facebook and make sure my gf is logged out, every time i use the computer.
Perhaps you could think of it as akin to a program which has zillions of undocumented commands. Amazingly powerful and yet completely useless at the same time. Sure some people have cracked the correct syntax to get facebook to perform the stop-auto-tie-in-to-all-garbage-sites option, but why the fuck should it be so hard?
There is only one answer and one alone - deliberate obscurification and mis direction. It is the same answer as to why everything is opt OUT instead of opt IN on facebook. They rely on people being too lazy, confused and stupid to care.
So stop apologizing for what is at best bad UI design, and at worst willful obscurification that leads too (surprise!), expanded profits for facebook.
As a potential lottery winner, I totally support tax cuts for the wealthy
Supplying useful web services to a large number of people costs real money; it's not free. And there are no successful companies or corporations that give these services away for free - they get paid for them, and they're paid very well.
So when you see a great new free web service you need to stop and think - it's not free, someone is paying for it and that someone is almost always the users. If you don't see the price tag then you don't want to play their game. In most cases, this benevolent company giving you a free service is building up user profiles that they sell to marketing companies. If you're big like Facebook or Google, you've got millions of those profiles and they're very detailed and also very valuable. But nobody ever thinks about this when they happily give up all kinds of personal info as they register for their free account.
Google is pretty transparent about this stuff: they use the profile data to serve targeted ads and advertisers pay them a premium price for those ads. This wouldn't work without the information about you that Google has amassed but it's the source of all of their financial might. Who do you think pays Facebook's bills? That's right, and that's why their privacy options don't include any that would prevent them - and their "affiliates" - from collecting your personal data.
That personal information is valuable and it's yours - and you give it away. Those corporations thank you for your generosity! Here's a tip for further study: view the mandatory privacy policy at any major web site; they'll tell you (sort of) what kind of data they collect - then promise to keep it safe and only give it to the government upon request and to their affiliates and/or third parties that supply some kind of service to the company. So what is an affiliate? Could one of them be the marketing clearinghouse that buys your personal profile? Could one be an Indian call center that will resell the data to anyone with the price? Could one of them be the guy with the CC skimmer? You'll never know; you'll just look at the privacy policy and say "that's cool" and click OK.
You may have noticed that when ad blocking software is discussed it's the small websites that whine and cry about the loss of revenue. The big corporate sites only report what the small sites say because it serves to preserve the legend. Banner adds are small beans - but live and verified profiles are big money.