Slashdot Mirror
Data Miners Scraping Away Our Privacy
Presto Vivace writes "Twig, writing for Corrente, reports on data scrapers. They are not looking for passwords and such; scrapers are looking at blogs and forums searching for material relevant to their corporate clients. We are assured that the information is 'anonymized' to protect the identities of forum participants. However, a tool called PeekYou permits users to connect online names with real world identities. No worries, though — if you have a week to spare, you can opt-out of some of the larger data banks."
The biggest issue with information on the internet has always been how to separate the crap from the good stuff. The fact that they're gathering data is uninteresting: what I'd be interested in is their signal-to-noise ratio.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
If "Bob Smith" is a registered sex offender in a large urban area, another Bob Smith in the same area might have some difficulty getting hired for a job. Perhaps the scrapers might see some revenue in selling "whitelist" services.
I'm sure "SlashdotMedia" will improve on all the wonders that Dice Holdings blessed us all with
go walk on a beach so the directional microphones can't pick up what you say through the surf noise
but if you want it to be public, post it on the internet
because as the other story from yesterday about the government spying on facebook shows: you are in the absurd scenario of trusting the GOVERNMENT to make rules, and you are trusting the GOVERNMENT to enforce rules, about what? about what you put in wide open view on a public internet. to me, that expectation of yours is insane
why are you trusting the government to do this? even if they had the intent and the enforcement capacity to do so, you honestly think they will do a capable job? with what? the corporate subcontractors with the financial involvement with the corporations who are after your data? pffft
and say the government fails to protect your data. ok, they sue and prosecute the offending corporations. but your info is already in the database. the database that is now mirrored 50 times by 25 different entities! once it gets on the internet, IT NEVER DIES. so please, get real: if you don't want it to get in a database, DON'T PUT IT ON THE FREAKING INTERNET
it is that simple. all other point of views are, frankly, a form of absurdity in which
1. you distrust corporations and governments with your private info,
2. so you put that private info on a public internet,
3. trusting corporations and governments to keep that info safe from
4. the same corporations and governments!
(smacks forehead)
i have a hen house. to protect that hen house from the wolf in the woods, i will hire the wolf in the woods to guard the hen house. wtf?!
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I don't know how to stop the government, other than by enforcing Amendment 10 (the US was never granted permission to spy, therefore it should not do it).
As for corporations, I'd like to see all their licenses revoked, and reverted to proprietorships where a sole person(s) is the owner and therefore directly accountable for his actions. I no longer believe in the concept of limited liability. The owners need to held to account for their actions, including jail time for invasion of privacy or abuse of customers/employees.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
I'm with you on disbanding corporations and restructuring the system, holding people accountable for their actions, except that the same argument applies: the general population needs to wake up before that can happen.
Palm trees and 8
Copying music wasn't much of an issue until it became not only trivial to do but also trivial to share.
Once upon a time a third party would have had real work to do to find out how much I pay in property taxes, for example.
Yeah, it's public information, but it wasn't trivial to get.
I want accessibility of information about me to help me and make my life easier.
I don't want easy access to _my_ information to make it easy for other people to make my life more difficult.
"Shrug?" You obviously haven't been burned. I was foolish enough to send emails to a mailing list for a chronic medical condition under my real name, and now if you search for it you get all those stupid sites with misspelled URLs that show the searchable full text. The list admin went bonkers hiring lawyers and everyone unsubscribed in a hurry. I guess people do visit those sites if they're looking at it from the perspective of a signal to noise ratio.
You missed something else: you get privacy protection in public places through publicy. Although everyone can see what you are doing, you are also protected because you can see what everyone else is doing. In physical public space, it is very hard for casual stalker to stalk anyone exactly because the stalker himself don't have privacy in public space. If someone stalks you, he can be spotted easily by you or people around you and get his reputation ruined.
CCTV invades people's privacy by introducing asymmetry in publicy: Anyone including the CCTV can see you, but you can't see the person watching you behind the CCTV. This can actually be solved by increasing the public visibility of the watchers, for the watchers to be watched. If the security room itself has CCTV so that everyone else can see what the watchers are doing, we'll get back the publicy symmetry and get protected.
The same can be said to public photography including smart phone cameras and street view. Traditionally, camera was large so the photographer had increased public visibility when taking photograph. Smart phones break the publicy symmetry by making it not obvious that someone is taking a photograph. To protect our privacy on being photographed, we need to increase the publicy of the photographer to make his action of taking photograph obvious. This is why making rules like the Camera Phone Predator Attack Alert Act is better than making laws that prohibit people to take photograph in public. Though, I'll not comment on whether we really need a law to enforce this, but having a rule at least allows ethical photographers to play nice with public photography.
Google street view is just a form of intensive photography, but we can't really define how much photos taken are considered too much and thus illegal. But what we can do is to increase the publicy of the street view vehicle, so that people can notice the vehicle more easily and avoid being photographed. For example, the street view vehicle can be painted bright color, install flashing light bar, or even make noise and warning before photographing, depending on how much we're willing to trade off between visibility and annoyance. But what about those stuff that you can't move such as buildings? Well, the same as basic photography, if you refuse to move away things that you don't want to be photographed even after the photographer give full notice in public space, then the photographer has full right and to take the photograph ethically without your consent.
You said that looking into your house from places higher than your fence is illegal, what about if I view it through a nearby multi-story apartment? If I stay at the fourth floor of the apartment and I look at your two-story house through my window, does it consider illegal? How about the children who look into your house when they are in school bus going home? You made the assumption that the world is full of low density residence where there is no higher ground or public places that are higher than one story, but that is really the minority rather than norm. If seeing your house through fence is considered privacy invasive, then today we won't have skycrappers and multistory apartment that allow us to look through any window over the next block.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSqyEXLkrZ0
If you don't want them to do something nefarious with your info, don't give it to them. There is no need for some government entity to impose rules to protect you.
Where do you draw the line?
When facebook retro-actively changes what they promise to do and not do with the information people give them?
What about say, a store, quietly installing a system to read and record the license plate of every car that enters their parking lot?
Or when an entire industry becomes so used to routine privacy violations that even walk-in medical clinics refuse service to cash-only patients who won't disclose their name, address, etc?
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
i recently had the opportunity to fill out a 100 page consumer trends survey for a reward of $30. there was something like 1000 questions all on a scale of 1 (i don't use these products) to 10 (i always use these products), and they ask for your personal description and address presumably to help the product companies determine how to improve/personalize their advertisement barrage or improve availability of their products. i ended up circling random numbers the entire survey, made up a random description of myself and provided a phony address and got it done in under an hour (probably would have taken more than a day if taken seriously). i felt very good about providing useless crap data to my corporate overlords and taking $30 from them.
No, the problem is very much the people compiling and selling this information.
I am the author of my life; the information these leeches are compiling about me is a derivative work. Commercial use of such data (outside of fair use considerations) is a violation of my Subjectright.
The fact that part of the performance of the artistic work that is my life takes place in public is irrelevant -- if I perform a song or poem in public, I do not thereby place it in the public domain.
The appearance of the front of my house is a personal artistic expression. It should be understood to be covered by copyright. A random tourist taking a photo is fair use; someone taking a photo to use for commercial purposes, is not.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
All of this is just a bandaid to the eventual and inevitable obscelesence of "name" identities. Pretty soon: the government is going to have to allow you to use crypto-signed aliases to identify yourself. By allowing you to challenge response hash a query: you can create disposable identities. Just like SSL certificates, except the social security administration will be the signing body.
'I don't know how to stop the government, other than by enforcing Amendment 10 (the US was never granted permission to spy, therefore it should not do it).'
The problem here is that other parts of the Constitution have been interpreted as trumping the 10th amendment. The commerce clause for example has not been interpreted as written or intended since FDR days. This alone has made the federal government all powerful.