Slashdot Mirror
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!'"
Yeah no photos of me ... no Facebook account!
... 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
...masturbates to the thought of attaching your name to your every click. Film at eleven.
What Schmidt actually meant was "True transparency and anonymity on the Internet will become a thing of the past because we here at Google can make a bundle by eliminating it. Advertisers, governments, you want it, we got it!"
I am officially gone from
He wants to know who you are for marketing and advertising purposes to increase corporate profits. The rest is the usual FUD. That is all.
--jdp Maintainer of VisEmacs
What worries me isn't his opinion, or what he thinks is coming. What worries me is his lack of resistance to it and his acceptance of "oh well, that's how it's going, that's what we'll do".
This seeming blazay attitude, coupled with his comments a while back where he said something like "People only need privacy when they're doing something they shouldn't be" really worries me, since he commands a lot of power and sway online. Eric, imagine if someone posted a video of you taking a dump and posted it on youtube, your views on privacy and "I have nothing to hide" might change...
He's probably right in that every government will want online identity, of course they would. But it's up to us to battle for "what is right" and we always hoped Google would help us. If he just rolls over and accepts it, that's terrible for us.
I have been very very careful about my identity on the internet. My user name is a random collection of letters and gives no hint of the hostels and room numbers I had in my college years.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
"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.
He is right. I do not like it, but he is right.
Just because you are paranoid does not mean that no-one is out to get you.
What about 99% of the population who won't take the time to carefully maintain pseudo anonymous identities?
Fuck 'em. It's their complacency and ignorance that has put us in this situation, and is forcing their betters to waste inordinate amounts of their time developing cryptographic and other methods of protecting the privacy they should be able to enjoy be default.
They get exactly what they deserve.
Everyone loves gmail & google apps. But it came out early on that google had no respect for people's privacy. I've avoided every on-line product of theirs besides google search & earth.
There's been a war regarding privacy for a long time. Now days in the legal system it's all 'think of the children and this will help stop terrorists' on the internet it's all 'Look at these awesome features you can get if you just give us all your personal info and colonic map.' Everyone wants to make the idea of privacy seem like you're trying to hide something but that's nothing further than the truth. You let the government in you let them compile huge dossiers on you (more so than they do now) and all you do is hand them everything they need. Because there is no telling what it looks like you do to an outside person or what they can make it look like you do in a Court room. It's the same reason why my lawyer always tells me to never speak to the cops, you never know what some casual thing you say will be used to hang you, or in this thing casual thing you do. Bottom line is you can have my privacy when you come and take it from me, and I won't let it go with out a fight.
And Google wonders why nobody wants to join their social network? Schmidt makes Zuckerberg look good.
I'm going to send Eric Schmidt 14 pictures of my ass.
Jealously hoarding mod points since 2007.
No I don't.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Are there FBI agents trolling through this discussion waiting to pounce on the GNAA?
This is slashdot. They'd need a steamroller.
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
No. People can type things in.
nope. it won't be a hyperlink to your profile, but someone can type your name.
It is one of the reasons they will give.
Anti-Social Behavior Order . Governments consider it their business to deal with all behavior.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
is that the privacy battle has been lost and lost comprehensively. For the average person doing average things it effectively no longer exists. Sure, there are ways round it, but you are just not going to get most people to use them, most of the time. I don't think here is a way to put the genie back in the bottle, so we need to instead think of how we can live with it. The problem is not so much that privacy dissapears, but that it is asymmetric. Corporations and governments know a lot more about us than we do about them. Google could start by publishing minutes of ALL their meetings, salaries of all their employees etc, Similarly the balance of Freedom of Information to Security in government needs to change. I don't see why people in positions to affect markets or pass legislation should have any expectation of privacy AT ALL while they are in those positions. Lets stick 24 hour live feeds on all legislators and executives and really live in a post privacy world.
This is America, we don't stand for no frilly French accents in our words, only "Freedom Letters".
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.
No, we changed the spelling. Do stop reading books and keep up!
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Cookies can be exchanged with others or - better still - edited at random. Those cryptic hashes are unreadable anyway so why not replace them with some other random string every time a site or time limit is crossed?
More problematic are sites which use other sites for eg. authentication. When they say you can use your Google username to login just don't. Run your own OpenID server and be creative with the accounts you create on it.
Flash and its ilk can be used to track you as well. This is made harder by making its configuration directory read-only - so it can not store its own 'cookies' (which are more like wedding pies given their size).
I've seen reports on the Chromium and Google Chrome browsers - and maybe others? - which claim they can send a UUID. If this is true - I have not verified the claim which might be nothing more than fear mongering - that code is ripe for some creative editing, if one UUID per browser is good then one per request is even better.
More ideas?
--frank[at]unternet.org
I won't take any bets on anyone finding you with "just" your name. That depends on who is looking, how many resources they can spend on the matter, and how dedicated they are.
But, the thing is, they don't HAVE to just go with your name. You know someone on Facebook - Mama, sister, brother, the geek in the marching band - SOMEONE. Most likely, you know half a dozen people or more. When one of them posted your photo(s) some of the other saw them, and commented. The IP address of each commenter is available, as well as that of the poster. If Uncle Sam, or a hacker, wants to find you, all the data needed is either available online, or avaialable by means of an interview with each of the people who publicly acknowledged that they know you.
Even without interviews, the feds could come to the hometown of all these people who know you, and just keep their eyes and ears open.
Hell, we have the basis on which to build another epic tale of adventure, as our young hero fruitlessly attempts to elude BIG BROTHER!! All we need to decide, is whether we'll have Elves, Dragons, Aliens, or Angels in the story. Crap - let's have them ALL!!
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Facebook isn't really the area of new risk. The area that's going to see the most impact if his prediction of "Internet Passports" is that of whistle-blowers, the non-violent but anti-establishment types, and of course the "criminal class", the never-to-be-forgiven felons, sex offenders and so on who are already locked out (by policy) of Facebook; people who are criminal by law such as adult drug users or polygamists who are actually engaged in consensual, informed, adult activities (which, IMHO, makes the government the actual criminal entity.) And I've probably forgotten some important other classes of people who need anonymity in order to pursue even normal Internet activity -- certainly if they're going to speak their minds in a hostile environment, whatever the current public opinion of them is. For some people, simply being atheist is enough to earn them severe censure in their own communities. Who are we to say they *must* be outed?
I really don't think it's a good idea to support repressive ideas like Schmidt's. Anonymity is what enables many of the "squeaky wheels" in the system; lose it, and you force those people truly underground, making even the act of speaking anonymously on the Internet a crime, instead of just a choice.
This is really a highly repressive idea -- it's not going too far to call it evil, frankly. An "Internet Passport" would be a very bad thing for the tatters of liberty and freedom we have left in the USA. For countries that have even less freedom, the Internet is the single gateway to freedom of expression that depends upon anonymity. Anonymous voices from repressive countries bring the world's attention to the plight of various individuals and classes; they really do make a difference. Should those people need an "Internet passport", their ability to speak out will be outright amputated.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
We might not be able to keep our information off of the internet, but how about poisoning the well? Put up pictures of yourself on flickr, facebook, etc labelled as being somebody else. Buy unusual things, subscribe to contradictory news feeds. Open a fake facebook account and post status reports of you doing things you'd never do. Everyone knows that you can't trust what you read on the Internet; governments and corporations should be taught the same lesson?
Dude, this is mind-bogglingly dumb. Sure, you have the right to go die in a ditch. You also have the right to stop eating and starve, or the right to hold your breath until you pass out. Practically speaking, though, no one chooses to die in a ditch, starve, or pass out (with certain minor exceptions, and in those cases I doubt you really care what the government has to say about it anyway). What drives me crazy about libertarianism is that they prioritize the "freedom" to do something absolutely no one wants to do over the freedom of access to things people actually do want - like health care.
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.
Have they ever taken your picture? If so, you probably do have Facebook photos.