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.

Comments

Machiavellis indeed

[homer_s]

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.

Re:Machiavellis indeed

[postbigbang]

Nicely stated.

Yet civilians still need protection from things they don't understand. We do have a choice. We can and do opt out. But even black-belt geeks that desire privacy have a hard time figuring this stuff out. It's like the 32 page credit card agreement conundrum. Simple protection of the innocent demands safety for them. We're supposed to be the 'good guys'. Good guys help protect those that can't protect themselves, not leave them to the wolves. There is evil in such trickery.

Re:Machiavellis indeed

[Miros]

That makes sense in an opt-in framework, but not in an opt-out framework.

Re:Machiavellis indeed

[Anonymous Coward]

To the people who mod this insightful. Go fuck yourself.

Are you saying that because I'm not a lawyer...because I was *only* reading at a 12th grade level at age 8...that I should:

    - not be able to purchase a car?
    - not be able to buy internet service?
    - never own a home?
    - have to spend days researching my new apartment complex to see which terms of the lease count, and which are merely unenforceable?
    - not even be able to *use* the average operating system, save a BSD licensed one? I'm sorry--The GPL contains terms of the art that require a subtle and nuanced understanding to even start to comprehend. Don't get me started on windows licensing agreements...
    - not be able to own phone service
    - not be able to participate meaningfully in social life because many services are only available with a credit card or bank account, each coming with their own 10-20 pages of small print which make liberal use of terms of the art.

No. That's a load of shit. In point of fact, 99% of the world probably outright *IGNORES* the legalese that occurs in day to day life. And if there was any justice--juries and judges would throw it out for exactly that reason. The reasonable, ethical, responsible expectation is the doctrine of first sale and nothing more. No loss of rights, no restrictions on what you can do with it, how or when.

And the same goes for marketers. Privacy information is provided in a complicated, convoluted manner to hide the plain and simple fact that their agreements amount to "once you give us the data, we can do what we damned well please with it, as long as it isn't illegal (and if the law changes, we will do it)"

Participating in society in a routine and typical basis should require no more legal comprehension than is typical. And if that means that I "have to understand" my cellphone agreement--it should be nullified and unenforceable.

The ridiculous attitude that "You don't have to do X, so I can ask for anything I damned well please for it, collude with others to ask for it, and no, you aren't free to compete because I have a revolving door patent agreement updated every year, but never filed--and I enjoy my monopoly agreements on service with local governments" needs to be set on fire and shot at a social level.

Not . It's not over till it's burned alive.

Noscript

[Anonymous Coward]

Noscript stopped Google Analytics a long time ago!

Re:Too Many? Seriously?

[citylivin]

"Tomorrow when they get the unspoken mythical number correct"

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.

Re:memorize a fake person

[Kittenman]

But .... isn't this like saying that the "Iliad" wasn't written by Homer, but another Greek of the same name?

If the fake-you does the stuff you do and you get targeted for it, then the fake-you is you. You just appear to be someone differently named on the internet.