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Survey Shows Support For New Privacy Laws
GovTechGuy writes "Two-thirds of consumers want the government to safeguard their privacy online and 81 percent want to add their names to a Do Not Track list, according to a May poll released Tuesday by Consumers Union. In addition, over 80 percent of respondents were concerned that companies may be sharing their personal information with third parties without their permission. The survey's release comes just one day before a Senate Commerce Committee hearing where lawmakers will hear testimony on three data privacy bills currently in front of the Senate."
How many corporations are behind this? That's the only question that counts.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Did you know that Osama Bin Laden also wanted to be on the 'Do Not Track' list?
Much(highly personalized) love,
-American Advertising Federation
I think online security is a much bigger problem than 3rd party cookies ( what the do not track bill goes after ) .. Are the stores you're shopping at secure? Is your credit card number getting stolen? These are the real problems.. not that easy to solve with a new law.
It seems technically infeasible to maintain such a list, plus how can they keep track of you being on the list?
I feel like the poll question was 'Do you want a way to prevent keeping track of everything about you and preventing that information to be used fort sending junk mail?
...and 99.999% of people asked if life is sacred, the answer was "yes." (81% followed up to ask "whose life?")
Probably not, Because such a list should at least identify you. I find such a list just too stupid for words, because you first have to be identified to be looked up on the list, while I don't want to be identified at all.
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
Retards?
It's encouraging that this has even made a blip on the public radar, but unfortunately, a public clueless enough to think that a "Do Not Track" list would help the situation is also clueless enough to immediately forget about this issue after seeing the latest high-budget presentation on the mass media about the current political candidates.
What percentage of the 81% have given permission when they clicked "Accept" without reading terms and conditions.
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
I'd volunteer to be put on a list of "false positives", records that I'd bought everything from women's shoes to AC/DC videos. Nature rarely designs invisibility, but camouflage is everywhere. If enough people got on a false positive list, creating false cookies and records and interests, wouldn't that have the same effect as privacy? And wouldn't it be cheaper? Seems like you could even have a program running silently in another browser clicking on interest in new cars, home mortgages, health care, etc. and it would confuse the hell out of the data collectors.
Gently reply
"Two-thirds of consumers want the government to safeguard their privacy..." In other news, two-thirds of consumers don't mind if the government tracks them, as long as evil corporations don't.
"companies may be sharing their personal information with third parties without their permission. "
SONY is not the only company to have "shared" your data.
Good try, but False Positives are deadly. Reason: you can't deny them!
"Retroworks is a terrorist! Prove you're not." The whole Security Theater adventure is fueled by false positives.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Sure it might sound good to consumers/public, but it'll never work. 99% of the population has no clue how the internet works. Even China fails to censor everything they would like to censor with their "great firewall". Even if some plan was put into place, there are too many vested interests in information for our government to effectively put systems/regulations into place that would work. It's pretty obvious at this point that our government is pretty ineffectual with just about everything. It would be better to run an education campaign explaining to the dumb masses that "nothing is safe" on the internet, it's a game of acceptable risks - it's the wild west, deal with it.
Instead of setting up the rules such that I have to opt out of every stupid scheme someone sets up, reverse the situation such that I must opt in if I feel there is benefit.
Oh yeah, that makes far too much sense.
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How are they going to implement this scheme.? Put everyone's name and information on a list then distribute it to Internet companies?
People will have to identify themselves first for this thing to work which defeats the purpose.
The level of tracking that advertisements and such take isn't really personally identifiable information -- they don't try to take your identity but more keep tabs on what other websites you've visited that have ads. If a company collects data from you, it should be, at the very least, for some sort of technical purpose like showing relevant ads based on the "Likes" you have on facebook.
That said, I wouldn't want anyone selling this kind of information to data miners for the pure purpose of stalking your online life. What's the point of privacy settings if they're just going ignore it and sell all your data to any company that shows up on the front door with cash? And, if they were to sell it after you gave them permission to, you should also be notified when and to whom your information was sold to.
They really should also mandate the company reveal the technical process in which they process your information internally. Important details include the storage of passwords (plaintext/hashes/salted hashes/algorithm/etc), if encryption of data is used at all, how keys are stored for encryption if used (Are they stored on client software? On the server? Are the keys on the server accessible by the admin or are they encrypted using your password? What kind of keys are they?), how long collected data is stored, and how can they use it?
There's a lot of "should"s in here, but at the end of it all, it's probably safe to assume that the corporations selling data to data mining companies will put up quite a fight.
You can get a survey to get any result - Check a href="http://users.aims.ac.za/~mackay/probability/survey.html"
If your survey question is "Do you support Privacy Laws" - the answer will be Yes. "Do you want the Govt to prevent terrorism or protect the children" - the answer will again be Yes.
If we make having my personal information illegal, only outlaws will have my personal information. Wait a minute...
Link to the Yes Minister dialogue
It should have read 81 percent want to add their names to a list of people who do not want their names added to lists.
Obviously it should be opt-in but our 'representatives' don't care what we want so they're having a laugh at our expense.
So I would be giving my personal information to the government so that I could have more privacy? Like the government doesn't know enough about me already.
be added to the NSA's "What are you hiding?" surveillance list.
"Two-thirds of consumers want the government to ..."
The easiest way to legally protect your personal info is to get congress to pass a law to make personally identifiable info joint property between the the person who is identified and the collector of the info.
Then, the holder of personal info will need your explicit consent in order to legally sell your info. You would need to voluntarily sell your ownership interest in the info to loose legal control of it. All of the normal property laws would take effect.