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Google CEO Schmidt Predicts End of Online Anonymity
Andorin writes "A tweet from the EFF pointed me to a short article detailing part of Eric Schmidt's speech to the Techonomy conference in Lake Tahoe on August 4. According to Schmidt, true transparency and anonymity on the Internet will become a thing of the past because of the need to combat criminal and 'anti-social' behavior. 'Governments will demand it,' he says, referring to full accountability and a 'name service for people,' possibly hinting towards mandatory Internet passports. The CEO of Google also made a couple of somewhat creepy references to the availability of information: 'If I look at enough of your messaging and your location, and use artificial intelligence, we can predict where you are going to go ... show us 14 photos of yourself and we can identify who you are. You think you don't have 14 photos of yourself on the internet? You've got Facebook photos!'"
... will just fight back. The idea they can end internet anonymity is bullshit, programmers and smart people can always way's to game the system.
I suspect that entire subnets of the Internet will be encrypted and continue to allow anonymity. Not to mention, there is always your public library or Internet cafe. It's not like spies will stop using the Internet, so "solutions" to this problem will inevitably surface.
Remember to maintain your supply of
"show us 14 photos of yourself and we can identify who you are"
I highly doubt that. I assume we're talking about a globally unique identification of a single individual. I call crap, given that we can't even do that with anything at all - fingerprints, DNA, or anything else. No biometric is that good. And, besides, if you have 14 photos of me, you know who I am anyway - I'm the guy who's in the photo. It doesn't exactly prove much at all, or help you out unless the photo shows me doing something illegal and I need to be traced. I *guarantee* you that other humans will catch me from my photo in a newspaper before any computer-based system does, and probably with much smaller margins of error.
And 14 photos is a HELL of a lot. And it depends on their quality, and your clothing, and the lighting, and the angles, and the focus, and anything obscuring the picture, and the resolution. Otherwise you're magical "14 photos" system could be used on 14 frames of any CCTV footage and instantly pinpoint the criminal. See what a ridiculous assertion that is?
If there is a problem with online banking, why not put all the banks in a different net, accessible only to identified persons? Putting all the websites in an ID-net, for the problem of just one small segment of the whole net, seems a bit of an overkill.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
Ever had a driver's license or other photo ID?
Maybe he lives in New Hampshire and exercised his right to have them delete the photo out of DMVs database after printing his license?
Gods, why can't all the states be that progressive.....
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Performing a Google image search for my name (which is pretty unique, I'm really the only person on the internet with my first/last name combo), and I get a lot of anime character images. And on facebook, well, they'll think I look like my cat. So, unless you "play by the rules", it's unlikely they are going to be able to *really* identify you.
As for the whole privacy issue: I would suggest that someone start a website ala Wikileaks, where they publish everything known about every corporation, and make that publically accessible. If I want to know the BP CEO's home address, how much he makes, his social security number, yadda yadda, then perhaps there will be more concern over privacy.
The only way to win is to turn it around. If citizens can't have privacy, then neither should corporations or governments. We should be working hard to open up these areas. Right now corporations have a powerful position because they are essentially running the government, and they know more about us then we do about them. But it's time we turned the tables on them and re-took control.
When people fear their government, there is opression, but when government fears the people, there is freedom.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
All positive rights infringe on individual liberty.
Real rights are universal, meaning there is on logical contradiction if all people exercise the right.
Speech is like that. My having the right to say what I want does not prevent someone else from saying what they want.
A "right" to be guaranteed food, for example, is not. Under this model if don't have food then my right is being violated and the only way to correct this is to have food taken away from someone else. This is not a universal right because clearly not everybody in the world can have the right to have someone else's food.
Positive rights define two classes of people: people who are entitled to receive something from someone else, and another class of people who are required to produce a surplus in order to satisfy the first group. There's a name for this kind of arrangement but I'll let you figure that out on your own.
I totally understand this way of looking at it, because emotionally, that's how I see it too. But rationally, it's wrong/impractical. The doomed will take you down with them, or at least make things more difficult for people who are trying to do the right thing. You will get what they deserve.
Take email privacy, for example. This is ludicrously easy problem to solve. We aren't waiting for any tech to show up; we have it right now and have had it for a couple decades, yet its usage is rare. None of my "geek" friends will bother with PGP. In terms of technical ability and understanding, I really am talking about the top 1% of the population, but "top 1%" isn't enough if it doesn't include the will. Shit, look at how people on Slashdot (a population that maybe isn't the top 1%, but certainly in the upper portion compared to the average person) talk about webmail (especially Google's) as though it's a good thing rather than a stupid thing. You can give up and throw all these people into the "Doomed" category, but if you do that, then who is left to talk to? There's no one to have a private conversation with, or to even sign your keys to WoT through and authenticate the people you do want to talk to.
Network effects end up putting us all in the same boat. You don't have to save everyone, but saving 1% isn't nearly enough. My estimate is that when someone asks, "What do we do about the 75% of the population who doesn't care?" then you can say "fuck 'em."
Time to start uploading pictures of other people with a dummy account and tagging them as yourself. If you can't get lost in the system, might as well try to get lost in the noise.