Have We Lost Our Privacy To the Internet?

An anonymous reader writes "An article in the Guardian, penned by Joss Wright and Tom Chatfield, discusses whether we — as in Internet users in general — are, or indeed are not, giving away way too much information about ourselves to large Corporations that profit handsomely from mining the info. The article talks about how contemporary internet companies — perhaps predictably — are run with a 'privacy is dead' motto. It considers what implications having all your private data out on the internet — where it can be seen, searched, shared, retransmitted, perhaps archived forever without your consent — has for the 'future of our society' (by which the authors presumably mean the society of the UK). The (rather long) article ends by mentioning that Gmail scans your email, that Facebook apps frequently send your private data right to the app developer, that iPhones are known to log your geographic location, and that some smartphone apps read your address book and messages, then dial home to transmit this info to the company that developed the app."

Comments

What I find especially funny

[gelfling]

Is that these same companies use that information to turn right around and give it organizations like the MPAA/RIAA or the police who then use it to sue you or arrest you or worse. We here think of privacy as a convenience but in most of the world, it's a matter of life and death. Evident Wikileaks moral monster Julian Assange and his factotum Israel Shamir (not his real name, he's in reality a Swedish neo Nazi named Jöran Jermas) who freely shared names of political dissidents with the secret service of Belarus, commonly called Europe's last dictatorship, in order to 'disappear' people. BTW if you're not convinced that Julian Assange works for Russian FSB you're delusional.

Long live freedom.

Re:To give away or not to give away our privacy

[RKBA]

I'm old enough to remember when the United States had a Constitution too.