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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.
Noscript stopped Google Analytics a long time ago!
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?
People are not filming and recording you walk down the street (at least not all controlled by a single company, not in america). All the information in one place makes it easy to abuse. If you do a search you can easily find tales of IRS agents abusing their authority to look up info on celebrities, political candidates, and even their ex-wives. When you record, then people can use it later and yes they can eliminate the anonymousity later. But there are already addons like Noscript and Ghostery to stop Google from getting quite so thorough a record of you. Of course, chances are your ISP will still have a good record, but at least it is not one single company controlling all that privacy for everyone. Which severely limits the abuse potential
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
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
The term "machiavellian" is a cruel and unjust slander.
Niccolò Machiavelli was a profoundly moral man, well acquainted with -- and appalled by -- the amoral power politics of his age. When he wrote that a Prince should prefer to be feared, rather than loved, Machiavelli was not advancing a personal ideal: he was simply reporting how Princes actually behave in the real world.
-kgj
Use the NoScript add-on and mark google-analytics.com as Untrusted. Simple and done. Also works for any other tracking system that uses JavaScript.
My mind works like lightning. One brilliant flash and it is gone.
And idiots are people who think "paranoid" means "more concerned about privacy than I am".
IS THAT YOU ZUCK?
'Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.' - Mao Tse-tung
Instead of Privacy Machiavellis, we should have Privacy Goldilocks instead.
"This privacy options set is too big! This privacy options set is too small! This privacy options set is juuuuust right!"
I'm safe in the numbers, just like I'm anonymous when walking down a busy street. everyone can see me, but nobody cares.
Nobody cares until somebody has a reason to care. Say your future employer, or your insurance company, or your opponent's lawyers in a future lawsuit, or your spouse in divorce proceedings, or any malicious person who is trying to find any damaging information about you etc etc. To take it to the extreme, are you really comfortable with the idea of every detail of your life being recorded and permanently stored and made accessible to anybody who wants it, for any purpose, just because nobody has any interest to look at it right now?
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
I've been adding the following to my desktop computer host files for over a year to block google's tracking:
127.0.0.1 partner.googleadservices.com
127.0.0.1 google-analytics.com
127.0.0.1 ssl.google-analytics.com
127.0.0.1 googleadservices.com
127.0.0.1 googlesyndication.com
127.0.0.1 pagead2.googlesyndication.com
127.0.0.1 www.google-analytics.com
127.0.0.1 video-stats.video.google.com
127.0.0.1 wintricksbanner.googlepages.com
127.0.0.1 www-google-analytics.l.google.com
I trust that solution more than I do google's opt-out bs. If you want to get fancy, you can direct a lightweight web server like lighttpd to 404 the adservers to load your pages a bit faster (instead of letting them time out) and to keep logs of what adservers are trying to load.
Unless you consider "the government" to be a single company.
Fortunately they are poorly organized
I don't care if the advertisers think it's a benefit. It doesn't benefit me
If it'd FUD scare tactics, or lifestyle promotion trash, sure. If its informational, thats a whole nother matter.
I'm in the market for a vacuum cleaner. I'm pretty hot to get a Dyson at this time. The commercials suck. Mostly I want high suction and I am so thru with buying bags and filters.
I wouldn't mind some "targeted ads" on this topic.
Given the enormous amount of advertising money spent to reach people whom don't give a $#*!, you'd think amazon or something would set up a service where companies pay me money to examine their marketing crud, paid to me at time of sale on amazon. I'd sit there and watch an "electrolux" or whatever commercial for $1. And they'd probably pay me $1 since I'm hot to buy a vacuum cleaner, and amazon would only clear the money to me if I actually bought someones vacuum cleaner (not necessarily theirs). Essentially a reverse ebay auction, where the companies bid on me to get me to watch their ads, and I prove I'm serious by purchasing "someones" product.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Your stupidity doesn't excuse the practice.
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.
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.
If your information has no value - why is it being stored?
I'm safe in the numbers, just like I'm anonymous when walking down a busy street. everyone can see me, but nobody cares.
At one point, storage was expensive so one had to be somewhat selective in what information is kept; the vast majority was discarded. But we are now getting to a point that storage is so cheap that the threshold of value for any given piece of information is likely low enough to warrent saving anything that can be collected. But collecting information is only part of it. At one point, massive amounts of information would pose it's own problem - how to process it. There was safety in numbers - numerical anonymity. However, we are also at a point where processing power is so cheap that we can effectively chew through massive amounts of information and pull out interesting information that was either recorded or gleaned from patterns in what was recorded. In fact, in many cases, the more information you have to work with, the better. You may not be very interesting to anyone right now. But that doesn't mean you'll never be interesting to anyone ever. At that point, your recorded history will rise above the level of background noise and present itself as part of a valuable service.
You believe you are anonymous as you walk down the crowded street. But that is simply because most of us lack the resources to make use of what you're presenting to the public. A trained professional can determine various things based on your appearance. An informed individual can identify you by your face. A well-placed observer can track your behavior and piece together additional information on those patterns. Your anonymous persona slowly unravels and we have the beginnings of a movie script.
Of course, the physical world is (currently) hard to work with in this context. Yet it is often given this sort of treatment. Look up the US military's concept of Essential Elements of Friendly Information (and bask in the Cold War aura). Meanwhile, the digital world we interact with is created on information systems designed to do these very things with the data that we present to it.
What an idiotic logic. There in so “why you?”. It’s completely irrelevant. They don’t think why you. They simply index and analyze EVERYTHING. And yes, your personal life is important, since that is what marketing is interested in.
It’s not that your personal data is more interesting. It is that ALL personal data is more interesting. From everyone. At the same time!
You are not safe in numbers, since this is software that does not have to choose one fish in the swarm. It chooses them ALL.
Nobody on the street cares, because there is only so much a human can care about at the same time.
But a program can care about everything and everyone. At. the. same. time.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
For the past several years Facebook and Google have been consistently criticized for their poor records on privacy. Yet, these sites are still two of the most popular sites on the Internet. Why is that? Are people not aware of the privacy concerns? Or do they just not care?
I think they don't care. I think they know that they're are giving up a measure of their privacy. They think that the services and convenience that they get in return are worth it.
Want to change things? You can criticize Google and Facebook all you want. As long as people are willing to give up privacy to use their services, G and FB aren't going to change. If you want to change things, there are several options. None of them are easy.
1. Convince people that their privacy is worth enough that they shouldn't give it up to use FB/Google.
2. Offer equivalent services with better privacy protection.
3. Convince the government to regulate FB/Google, forcing them to offer better privacy protections.
As a small government conservative, #3 deeply offends me. If people don't value their privacy, then it takes a high level of arrogance to use the machines of government to force private companies to protect privacy anyway.
I don't think people are stupid. They can make rational decisions about their own privacy. They've made those decisions, and that's why Google and Facebook are so popular. Don't like what the people decided? Try to change their minds. But don't use the government to shove something down their throats that they clearly do not want.
If you had super powers, would you use them for good, or for awesome?