Slashdot Mirror
Berners-Lee: You've Got Our Data, Show Restraint
itwbennett writes "Your browsing behavior may reveal more personal information than you'd tell your own mother. Which is why Tim Berners-Lee is urging technology companies to 'show more restraint' in how they use the information they hoover up. 'We're moving towards a world in which people agree not to use information for particular purposes. It's not whether you can get my information, it's when you've got it, what you promise not to do with it,' said Berners-Lee, speaking out against the U.K.'s proposal to allow government intelligence to monitor digital communications."
Isn't that like asking a lion not to eat us?
Every end has half a stick.
Inventor of the World Wide Web AND a comedian.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
'hoover' in this context means 'vacuum', or more commonly 'suck'.
It is, however, incorrect usage to say that "subby's writing skills for an international audience really hoover'.
Tim Berners-Lee is urging technology companies to 'show more restraint' in how they use the information they hoover up. ... It's not whether you can get my information, it's when you've got it, what you promise not to do with it.
That's hilarious. Oh Tim you're such a dreamer - or whatever you've been smoking must be great.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
do not trust the internet, treat it like a criminal or like holding a poisonous snake, = you got learn to use the internet without letting the internet use you.
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Tim Berners-Lee: "It's not whether you can get my information, it's when you've got it, what you promise not to do with it"
Speak for yourself. For me, it most certainly IS whether they can get it in the first place. Then again, I'm the kind of person that fixes the root of the problem, rather than dick around with the symptoms.
If he seriously believes such restraint will occur he would lose my respect.
How naive!
Lately, I have been noticing my "targeted" ads while surfing around the web and am getting a little creeped out. I bought a couch a few weeks back online and I am seeing ads for furniture companies all the time. If my search results and ads are tailored specifically for me, how do I get exposed to new things?
Seems like it will pigeon hole the entire internet into blues records, Linux, Old Vespa Scooters, and furniture ads. It's like having an obsessed girlfriend getting you a bunch of stuff just because you may have mentioned it one time in passing.
Flexible bare-metal recovery for Linux/UNIX
He might actually be able to convince a few people today, while most of the industry players are still run by their founders.
However, a day will come when the new media companies are a few management generations removed from that, and are just sociopathic earnings machines like every other corporation. Expecting them to show "restraint" that doesn't help their own bottom line at that point is just naieve.
So perhaps even if they do show restraint now, that just postphones the problem and luls the rest of us into a false sense of security.
, promises....... ( sing along with me ) ! ...
mean NOTHING. ( see Politician )
Yours In Ulyanovsk,
K. Trout, PatRIOT
America and the UK are total surveillance states at this point, and that's not debatable.
Some years back, a poster or commenter in the United Kingdom named Dan, suggested that the social singularity had been achieved, that the economic elites had become so powerful, and their power wielded so subtly and covertly, that few realized just how easily the populace was being manipulated.
A peek behind the curtain, at the inner working of the Koch brothers, their astroturfing, their political and media manipulation, was long in coming; from their Liberty Lobby reaching widespread circulation in 1960, to the present, is a very lengthy period. Little traction was achieved when, at the beginning of the Bush administration, we tried to publicize that President Bush’s sister was Mrs. Koch, and that Dick Cheney’s godson, D.G. Gribbin IV, was a Koch company employee, and the Kochs aren’t even at the top of the power pyramid!
Today we are assaulted by the usual political theater on taxes; the so-called media babbling about a “broken tax code” --- obfuscating the obvious truth of a tax code designed to favor the super-rich while discriminating against the workers and the poor.
When the IRS tax rule 401(a)(5) states: “A classification shall not be considered discriminatory merely because it is limited to salaries or clerical employees” --- the intent should be obvious.
When private equity firms – private banks such as Fortress and the Blackstone Group – go public, yet continue to pay the lower capital gains tax rate (when they do actually pay taxes), instead of the higher corporate tax rate which they should be paying, the absolute corruption should be obvious.
Confused and ignorant people, people who are used to being classified as “consumers” and are bewildered as to what true citizenship means, sincerely believe themselves to be team members, either on the Blue Team (the democratic wing of the Bankster Party) or the Red Team (the republican wing of the Bankster Party) --- wallowing within the political theater of the absurd!
When several economists from Goldman Sachs were quoted in a New York Times article (Aug. 28, 2006) explaining the obvious:
“The most important contributor to higher profit margins over the past five years has been a decline in labor’s share of national income”
they were blithely repeating the number one commandment and strategy of the plutocrats, or the Transnational Capitalist Class; namely, absolute wealth transfer so they could realize the greatest concentration of wealth imaginable!
What has occurred with each successful presidential administration since Reagan?
Has economic inequality and the concentration of wealth decreased or increased during each administration, from Reagan to Obama’s?
Increased ! ! !
What is the oldest and largest private bank in America?
Brown Brothers Harriman.
Someone connected with them has been in a senior power position in America for thirty-some years: either a Bush in the presidency or vice-presidency (effectively the presidency under Reagan), or Alan Greenspan at the Federal Reserve.
And where did Brown Brothers’ wealth originate from prior to their merger with Harriman?
Slavery and the slave trade, of course.
Harriman was responsible for bringing over boatloads of Chinese scab workers during the late 1800s and early 1900s to undercut the American gandy dancers (white, black, Japanese and immigrant gandy dancers), working the majority of them (the Chinese workers) literally to death!
Today, they offshore jobs to China, offshore technology to China and offshore investment (and foreign aid) t
Install this on your Firefox browser. Things will look a bit creepier after that.
I'm using "TrackerBlock" and it doesn't stop it all.
In the good ol' US of A, a company can bend over backwards to in fact do no evil with the personal data they collect. But, if they go Chapter 7 bankruptcy (the full monty), the court is under no obligation to care. They view marketable data as just another asset to be sold off to satisfy creditors... even Scientology.
Given the current Congress, I think the easiest (but by no means best) first step towards better privacy protection would be some tweaks to Title 11 of the United States Code.
Luke, help me take this mask off
You'll have better luck telling a fat kid to show restraint at a buffet.
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
...lives on Idealist Island.
I think the time for "telling" (really "suggesting") ended years ago. And more and more it's looking like the time for acting has passed us by.
Tim Berners-Lee: "Please show restraint with everyone's personal data."
Shareholders: "Please find a way to monetize everyone's personal data as quickly as possible to increase our share price."
Guess which one the CEO is going to listen to?
I am officially gone from
I've had good success with my clients and their developers limiting the data they keep by focusing on their potential legal liability should the data leak (internal or external) and/or be misused. The less data you have, and the less sensitive that data, the lower the cost of any data leak.
As Mr Miyagi said "Best defense, no be there."
And while storage is cheap, there is a cost to maintaining data, and that's not insignificant. Keep only what you need, or it's probable that you'll need. Throw everything else away.
When dealing with governments, or corrupt individuals/companies, those arguments may not work as well.
make imaginary.friends COUNT=100 VISIBLE=false
""Your browsing behavior may reveal more personal information than you'd tell your own mother. Which is why Tim Berners-Lee is urging technology companies to 'show more restraint' in how they use the information they hoover up."
Use Tor. All I am to these websites is just another exit node up one day and down the next.
Use SSL during Tor sessions, the exit nodes are free to sniff my encrypted traffic.
With The Tor Browser Bundles, it's easier than ever to download, install, configure, and use Tor.
Everyone should do it.
in the past it would have been just a customer list. but a lot more now. the new owners may have different intentions. imagine what tottering yahoo must have.
After seeing what utter assholes like Vic Gundotra have planned for future Google products I'm not touching another Google url with a 10ft pole. I care about my privacy so I block FB and Google with noscript and ghostery.
--
Fuck Sundar Pichai in the ass!
Call me Luddite, call me an old fogey, hell, call me Aunt Mable and dress me up in a nice billowy dress. What has happened here is we have a generation of internet crack babies. We all know there is no chance in hell that everything we do on the internet, and on our nifty phones is not databased for sale and control of us. The issue is that we (as a group) simply can not put down the crack pipe. We wont. We dont care if you strip us down and shove a data tracker striaght up our ass, just give me more internet. And dont bogart the bandwidth. The answer is to abstain. The reality is we are way too far down this addiction to stop.
More precisely, you're the kind of person who wants to fix the root of the problem.
The evaporation of privacy is inexorable, it is something you can only impede, not forestall.
Great, work on impeding it. But recognize that long-term solutions require working with the whole system.
Why don't we all just run a script that robotically goes various locations and dilutes the wonderfully tasty datastream that we contribute to the ether.
While the data we share by visiting places is donated automatically, the glue we enter in voluntarily is up to us. Does facebook need to know I am 35? or am I 21? or 75? All of a sudden I am feeing 120! See what ads come then!
Yes, but how about a matching love-seat, end-table, or coffee table?
Last time I replaced my couch, the coffee-table had to go (new couch was a recliner, but the leg-rest and coffee table had to compete on the same space).
If I'd been given an ad for a good end-table or shorter coffee-table, it might have been a sale.
...if you assume everyone's an asshole, and work out your expectations from that, than to assume people are reasonable, intelligent, and caring and go from there.
Sorry, it's why the US Constitution has been largely a success - it assumed politicians are greedy, selfish, power-hungry bastards. Our fault if we couldn't follow what it told us and let them take more power anyway.
-Styopa
Bwuahahaha...
Sorry... allow me... I'll just need a minute...
Seriously? Asking for restraint? Tim, you are talking to corporations as if they were human beings. Now this might be news, but they aren't. A corporation does not have morals, values, ethics or anything like it. They sometimes fool us into believing they have, because we interact with them through humans (CEO, employees, etc.) or something made up to appear human (advertisement, PR spokesmen, marketing people in general), but the simple fact remains that they aren't.
A shark will always be a shark, and a rabbit can't help being a rabbit - and corporations are corporations. Don't confuse them for humans, don't treat them like humans, don't anthropomorphise them.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
I know none of us have them. But, hypothetically, if we did then when we find a good cheap MP3 player it is possible we might want to buy a few more pairs of them that the kids will go through in the next few weeks or at most months.
Hypothetically.
I come here for the love