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."

Comments

It's not privacy, it's obscurity

[quietwalker]

If it's posted in a public space - it's not private
If it's accessible via public records - it's not private
If it occurs in a public forum - it's not private
If, for legal reasons, it must be disclosed in public - it's not private ... and so on.

If someone were to compile that set of information in an easy-to-read for, complete with a table of contents and nice index, that is also not invasion of privacy.
Using a computer to do the heavy lifting and reducing the time required to match everything together is also not invasion of privacy.

Listen, if you're talking about the privacy of your public information, and you're threatened by search engines, you are relying on security through obscurity. At least the people here on slashdot should recognize the follow of that.

Re:It's not privacy, it's obscurity

[betterunixthanunix]

I think the real issue here is that we need to rethink our notions of "privacy." It used to be that having a normal social life meant that outside of your social circle, you had a measure of privacy -- someone would have to actually be part of your social circle to learn about you. That is no longer true, but we still have not quite caught up with that new reality.

Re:It's not privacy, it's obscurity

[hedwards]

Or perhaps we need to rethink the ways that we regulate companies. There is an adjustment that needs to be made to our thinking, but that's mainly because of blackmail and possible random chance.

What you're suggesting is that just because corporations now have the affordable tools necessary to spy on us constantly that we should deal with it and they should be allowed to do it. Which is complete bullshit.

The real answer is requiring companies to ask permission and bar them from trying to compel people to give them the permission. It's one thing to require a drug test and background check for a job, but it's quite another to include in that background check data scraping off the net.

Re:It's not privacy, it's obscurity

[schwit1]

'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.

"Opt out"

[betterunixthanunix]

It is a bit unnerving to think of "opting out" of something that I never consented to in any form. I am going to guess that most people are not even aware of these companies.

Yes, I know, "Don't post data about yourself online!" That is not really the answer when most people think that Facebook is the way to be social. I do not have a Facebook profile, and I stay off of other social networking websites too; I am not going to pretend for a moment, though, that I am even close to representative of the norm. It is easy to make fun of all those "fools" out there who are undermining their own privacy, but in the end, that is not going to solve the problem, and eventually even people who want to have privacy will find that it is not possible to do so.

Re:"Opt out"

[Osgeld]

YES I personally hate opt out schemes, I dont mind that my public data is public, but I hate being signed up for all sorts of BS and then being told its my responsibility to go to a billion different "services" to tell them no

Re:Data miners can't to this unilaterally

[Anonymous Coward]

It takes your help. It is not like they are sneaking into my house and going through my underwear.

Not sure you should be making those kind of assumptions.

Re:Opt-IN should ALWAYS be the default

[Anonymous Coward]

The Direct Marketing Association in the U.S. has a lot more money than you do. They won't permit opt-in.

Public exposure

[SmallFurryCreature]

If I flash my privates in house but have the curtains open and so anyone from the street can see, I cannot complain about people looking and might indeed be arrested myself.

If I do the same in a house seperated from the road by a high fence and you put a ladder on the street and use nightvision goggles to look at my dangler, YOU are going to be arrested.

What is privacy? Is it the absolute letter of the law OR does EXPECTATION of privacy come into play?

You can follow me night and day. BUT that is very expensive and so you don't. So my actions in public are private simply because logging them would be far to costly. So I have come to expect that my actions in public are not constantly logged. Should this now change just because it has become possible to log them all? Should it be legal to record my every movement just because total CCTV surveilance has become feasable?

I do NOT know the answer to this question. On the one hand, I think that if you misbehave in public you should not have the right to complain "but I didn't expect anyone to catch me, so I should be free" BUT I also think that private companies being able to trace everyone constantly would be a REALLY bad idea.

If I ask on a forum about a health issue, should my insurance company be able to use this? I think not. Sure, if I am breaking the law, making false claims. But to deny people access because they think they might have a probem? No, that is going way to far.

Privacy is about more then things being recorded, it is about the idea that NOT everyone should constantly want to check up on everyone else. Just because I wrote a poem to a girl does NOT mean it has to be recorded by every private company in the world and be sold to the highest bidder.

Re:Public exposure

[crf00]

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

Re:if you want it to be private

[hedwards]

It's not that simple. The problem is that I can control what I put on the internet, but I have no control over what others put on the net. I learned that the hard way when TD Ameritrade lost my contact information to spammers.

Re:PeekYou fail

[Chrisq]

Funny, I just got ready to type in my name, finished the first name, and then thought, "Hey... wait a second..." and then closed the window.

Don't worry. I typed in your name and came up with a number of hits,

Dont opt out

[digitallife]

I have no doubt that 'opting out' causes the problem to get dramatically worse, as the companies use the additional details (you have to fax your drivers licens to the first one on the list) to increase the value of your portfolio and sell it off to a bunch of other databases while they are 'removing' you from their own. They probably don't even bother removing you from theirs, because honestly what consequences are they going to suffer?

pollute the data stream

[Tumbleweed]

There's only two ways to fight this - one is to push for data privacy laws, and the other is to pollute the data stream. When you're asked for a name, address, phone number or birthdate on a web site or form, lie. Just flat out lie. If you live on a town that borders another state (I'm originally from Kansas City, MO), say on forms you live on the other side of the border. Mixing states REALLY confuses data aggregators. The more information you get into the data stream that is fucked up, the harder it is to put it back together in an accurate way.

Make throwaway email addresses at gmail or wherever on a regular basis to use for all this, btw. And keep using DIFFERENT fake data, too, otherwise it will still be a consistent identity of sorts, and will probably eventually be tracked back to you. And don't ever put any real data in Facebook, etc., or put a link between your Facebook account and anything else. Social networking sites are by far the biggest leakers of personal data.

I have a mailbox at a local UPS store where I have everything sent.

Signal to noise ratio??

[MillionthMonkey]

"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.