Slashdot Mirror
Obama's Privacy Bill of Rights: Just a Beginning
jfruh writes "Last night the White House hastily arranged a phone conference at which a 'Privacy Bill of Rights' was announced. It's an important document, not least because it affirms the idea that our data belongs to us, not to companies that happen to collect it. But it has a number of shortcomings, not least among them the companies aren't required to respect the rules laid out."
Privacy Bill of Suggestions
In this country, that's progress. However, we are still woefully lacking compared to the EU, where privacy is taken very seriously and most industries are required to disclose any and all personal data held and delete it upon request. And I'm not talking the "We just hid it from our homepage" delete either, but a bona fide "We don't have it anymore, anywhere, and if we do we could be sued for a very large amount of money."
It's stuff like this that has firmly convinced me that while the US might have been the origination point of the internet, it is no longer a leader, or even in the race, when it comes to either innovation or culture. My country's only political agenda is its GDP. It will do so even if it means feeding its own citizens to the wolves in the process... Anything to make a buck.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
The era of massive data mining is beginning. http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-target-figured-out-a-teen-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-father-did/ And that's just your groceries, not your online behavior, which likely contains a lot more hidden clues.
When companies can decide to track and analyze your behavior in any way they want to, reasonably accurately predict things such as pregnancies, marriages, divorces, etc., and use it to their advantage, intentionally disguising all this from you... it's borderline absurd to say "people should just keep their secrets secret".
It's true that it's arguable whether this sort of behavior should be regulated (It's not "evil" that they just look what you've bought and try to predict your interests based on that) and if we decide to regulate it, we'll face a lot of problems... But it's quite odd to say that there shouldn't be a lot of public discourse around this subject (It's relevant to a lot of people and we already have some laws about ethical advertising and for a good reason) and just silly to say that people should take personal responsibility about how data miners figure out things they've never told anyone.