Slashdot Mirror
Schneier: The Internet Is a Surveillance State
An anonymous reader writes "Bruce Schneier has written a blunt article in CNN about the state of privacy on the internet. Quoting: 'The Internet is a surveillance state. Whether we admit it to ourselves or not, and whether we like it or not, we're being tracked all the time. Google tracks us, both on its pages and on other pages it has access to. Facebook does the same; it even tracks non-Facebook users. Apple tracks us on our iPhones and iPads. One reporter used a tool called Collusion to track who was tracking him; 105 companies tracked his Internet use during one 36-hour period. ... This is ubiquitous surveillance: All of us being watched, all the time, and that data being stored forever. This is what a surveillance state looks like, and it's efficient beyond the wildest dreams of George Orwell. Sure, we can take measures to prevent this. We can limit what we search on Google from our iPhones, and instead use computer web browsers that allow us to delete cookies. We can use an alias on Facebook. We can turn our cell phones off and spend cash. But increasingly, none of it matters. There are simply too many ways to be tracked."
use tor
cbf'd posting as anon-coward as even slashdot isn't anonymous...
Does it go on forever?
Slashdot now uses Google APIs.
And sadly most of us contributed to this. Either actively by working on some piece of technology that is enabling this, or passively by sacrificing our privacy for our convenience.
How sad it is to realize that the technology that we so much love and spend our lives working on is helping the state and big corps to spy on us.
Ghostery is a good start.
Something I wrote a couple years ago: http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/dtd/-The-need-for-FOSS-intelligence-tools-for-sensemaking-etc.-/76207-8319
"Now, there are many people out there (including computer scientists) who may raise legitimate concerns about privacy or other important issues in regards to any system that can support the intelligence community (as well as civilian needs). As I see it, there is a race going on. The race is between two trends. On the one hand, the internet can be used to profile and round up dissenters to the scarcity-based economic status quo (thus legitimate worries about privacy and something like TIA). On the other hand, the internet can be used to change the status quo in various ways (better designs, better science, stronger social networks advocating for some healthy mix of a basic income, a gift economy, democratic resource-based planning, improved local subsistence, etc., all supported by better structured arguments like with the Genoa II approach) to the point where there is abundance for all and rounding up dissenters to mainstream economics is a non-issue because material abundance is everywhere. So, as Bucky Fuller said, whether is will be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race to the very end. While I can't guarantee success at the second option of using the internet for abundance for all, I can guarantee that if we do nothing, the first option of using the internet to round up dissenters (or really, anybody who is different, like was done using IBM computers in WWII Germany) will probably prevail. So, I feel the global public really needs access to these sorts of sensemaking tools in an open source way, and the way to use them is not so much to "fight back" as to "transform and/or transcend the system". As Bucky Fuller said, you never change thing by fighting the old paradigm directly; you change things by inventing a new way that makes the old paradigm obsolete."
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
While the W3C is always keen to push all kinds of new fancy unnecessary technology, they never cared much about security. Privacy and security should become an important part in web standard design.
There are simply too many ways to be tracked."
There always have been. We're social creatures. Try living in total isolation from society in, say, the 1800s. It was hard to completely disappear even then. Someone always knew your whereabouts even then. That's the reality of social existance. Schneier has long had a problem of being too conventional -- he sees what is, not what can be. The problem isn't that we can be tracked, the problem is who is doing the tracking, and the length of time that data is stored, and to what purpose it is put.
These are things that can be resolved through responsible legislation and public education. The fact that so far, it has been highly irresponsible legislation due in part to a total lack of education, and in part due to rampant greed, is a social problem.
The problem is social. The solution must be as well. Schneier is quite correct in his characterization of how things are now. He is not correct in concluding this is how it must remain.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
If you don't want to be on the grid.
1: Don't use the internet. Rather that be e-mail, web pages, internet bank.
2: Don't use mobile phone of any type. Dumb-phones can be tracked just as easy as smartphones.
3: Don't use credit or debit card of any type. Since most of us need bank account. Get one that is not connected to any debit or credit card. Pay cash only. But be advised that still leaves you up to tracking. Since all stores and banks have security cameras that can be used to track you if needed.
4: Don't buy electricity or anything off companies. This is hard to avoid.
5: Live remote and not connected to anything. Then you might avoid being on the grid 99,95% of the time. I do think it is close to impossible to fall 100% of the grid due to the nature of the modern world.
The other option is to mix in with the grid in such a way that you don't get detected. That however does not matter if the authorities are tracking you activity. Since one spot (or "unit" as they prefer to call it) can be tracked easy if needed. Be that over banks, phone or internet. They got the hardware for this ability about 13 years ago. It has only been growing since then.
Not AC, since it would not have mattered anyway.
I agree with this because people traveling without cell phones and paying cash tend to be the minority, meaning that anonymizing efforts often end up doing the opposite. Another good quote from the article:
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
I can't see Schneier as a Libertarian since he states in the article that "Fixing this requires strong government will...". No Libertarian would suggest such a fix, which I imply to mean that this issue goes beyond Libertarians.
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
up vote a million times!!!!
NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER GIVE UP! "No limitations, no boundaries, there is no reason for them."
It's my understanding that tracking is done by cookies. I delete all cookies 2-3 times a day, and always after logging out of Google (which I rarely log in to) and Facebook. The only downside is that I have to log in to again to certain sites but that is easy because of OS X's built-in password manager.
if we go 'off the grid': that's a special qualification. bottom line: do the very least 'on the grid' and most of everything else off. throw the dogs off.
"...We can turn our cell phones off and spend cash. But increasingly, none of it matters. There are simply too many ways to be tracked."
Actually, the larger issue is there are simply far too many people who don't give a shit about privacy anymore.
How do you think we got to this point.
In the UK you can demand that a company gives you all the data that it has on you, they must do so within 40 days. There is a statutory maximum charge of £10, it will probably cost them a lot more than that. The amount that they would have to supply would grow every year. It might be reasonable to ask once a year; this might encourage them to purge their data and only keep recent stuff ... but this would only have an effect if enough people did this.
There was an EU idea of the right to be forgotten, I don't know where that went.
I liked it so much I liked it. ...ooops...
Google isn't tracking me when I VPN into my employer's network. Facebook isn't gathering personal data when I ssh to my server.
As has been said, TANSTAAFL, so don't expect "free" service to not track you.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
One technique is to spread it around. Use DuckDuckGo or Yandex for search. Use independent e-mail services. If you must do social networking, use low-volume third-layer sites. Remember that Google is now one database; your gmail and youtube use are correlated. Whenever possible use companies based outside the US. Google (USA) will tell the FBI; Yandex (Russia) will not. Sure, any fact about you is in some database. But don't let all those facts get into a single database.
That was my thought as well.. sometimes it comes down to personal awareness of the tools you are using. If you only read books from the library... surprise, they can track your reading habits. Personally, my rule of thumb is don't do anything online you wouldn't want people to know about... Yes, I'm a geek, and I also like sex, and porn... If drugs were legal, I'd be inclined to partake on occasion. I do have a couple drinks about a dozen times a year.
... you can even set your browser to clear private data on close. Disable flash and silverlight, and you've closed the gap to outside storage/tracking. The problem is that cookies and JavaScript have good purposes, and a handful of organizations abuse them... That doesn't mean that they shouldn't be allowed.
I think what it comes down to is how private do you want to be.. there are ways to accomplish this. Most browsers allow for a "clean" or "incognito" session that doesn't carry forward cookies/data
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
In my opinion, we are selling out future generations for a few dollars savings and a fart app.
You think that companies knowing what you want makes things better for you. I say it mostly doesn't now and it certainly won't in the future. Companies are tracking us very, very effectively. Soon they will know such things like "89% of males of XX age asked about this" so they will show you that even if *you* haven't thought about. It is narrowing your choices, not expanding them. In the future, companies will know things like "most people can be made to do X if you repeatedly tell them Y". How will they know these things? By tracking millions of people for decades, that's how. Statistically speaking, companies will know what you can be made to do during each period of your life and they will narrow the choices for you so that you will likely arrive at the decision they want you to.
And you will think it is all your choices and your freewill but in the end there will not be such things.
I just don't have the browser save anything anymore at close. No cache, no cookies, no login credentials, no history, nothing.
Not even IndexedDB? If not, then how do you plan to use web applications' offline modes?
What about counter-intelligence tools? Actively distorting the surveillance data being gathered to render it unreliable.
For example: at present we delete cookies. What if we swapped them. Now a cookie doesn't have specific information about one person, it has a mishmash of unreliable data from a dozen.
When is the legal system going to catch up? (I know. Stupid question.) Years ago I didn't sign up for Facebook because it was pretty clear there were zero protections for my rights to my data or my privacy. I'll wait till there's some laws so which reduce the chance of being screwed over, I thought. Won't take long, I thought.
Well I'm still waiting. And when it comes up, I see more and more people who've convinced themselves this is just the modern world and there's nothing to be done about it. (Read: nothing they need to do about it.) Like epine's brilliant comment said in the Google Glass thread, it's the pragmatism of the damned.
I am probably the lone wolf (in particular on slashdot) when it comes to being apathetic towards this sort of thing, but I don't see the point in being alarmist without documenting something specific. Near as I can tell it is a sophisticated way to to online advertising, not profiling for the KGB. This whole "tracking is Orwellian" thing, well please, what specifically are they doing with this information that is Orwellian? If they are tracking me for advertising purposes (which they most certainly are) what could possibly be more pedestrian and less alarming than that?. All it means is that there are occasionally ads that I care about (though still remarkably few at that).
And yes, there is potential to do something evil, but potential is not the same as doing. If it was we would all be in jail.
Speak about yourself. My credit card company has a very incomplete picture about me. It knows some of my travels, but that's mostly it. It doesn't know what I bought at the groceries (or where I buy). It doesn't know if I've been to a pharmacy last year, and if so, how often. It doesn't know which books I read, or if I read books at all. It doesn't know which clothes I wear. It doesn't even know about the computer I'm typing this comment on.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
I have already written off true anonymity (years ago).
When I am in public, at work, or with friends and family, I am constrained to behave myself. There may be different rules in different contexts, but there are always rules. Some written, some not.
The Internet gave an illusion of a "rule free" context, and look what happened.
That vacation is over. Time to behave like a grown-up.
"For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong."
-H. L. Mencken
...transform and/or transcend the system"...
The 'system' being biological instinct, 'desires of the flesh', as some religions put it. Presently everything that motivates us is subservient to that.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
We should have known the Internet was going to become a surveillance state the day we turned the whole thing over to corporate control.
I'm trying to think...was there a lot of tracking and surveillance back before the Internet became the world's shopping mall? I remember using the Internet back then, and I don't recall a lot of trackers.
Personally, I preferred the old non-commercial Internet. It was more fun. There was no Netflix or Amazon, but there was also nobody crawling up my ass. I would trade Facebook for Usenet in a hot second.
But I don't despair. I'm confident that people will innovate for privacy again.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Great, now the ads on the sites you visit are going to show you ads for motherboards and CPU upgrades that you want, instead of pink mascara that you don't want.
If they knew what I actually wanted, instead of feeding me more about something I already bought, that might be cool.
Anyhow, yes, we are being tracked, and it is inherent in the nature of the network. The Internet is not a place for Libertarian ideals. The key is of course, to avoid doing illegal activities on the internet. Most anything that will get you busted in the outside world will result in the same thing here.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
This would not have happened before the Eternal September. People knew enough to steer the internet away from this fate.
After the legions of clueless descended on the net, it was game over.
Another part of the solution is to put sand in the cogs of the machine by overfeeding the system with false and exagurate information.
Make software that disturb the patterns, data on itself is not that much interesting even when analized by machines, they only get meaning when people do cultural patern matching.
When I said that I got modded a troll.
:|
When schnieder says it, it is brilliant
slashdot troll = you make a compelling argument I do not like the implications of.
There certainly is a lot of truth to your point. To broaden it out a bit, here is something I wrote years ago: ... I agree with the sentiment of the Einstein quote [That we should approach the universe with compassion], but that sentiment itself is only part of a larger difficult-to-easily-resolve situation. It become more the Yin/Yang or Meshwork/Hierarchy situation I see when I look out my home office window into a forest. On the surface it is a lovely scene of trees as part of a forest. Still, I try to see *both* the peaceful majesty of the trees and how these large trees are brutally shading out of existence saplings which are would-be competitors (even shading out their own children). Yet, even as big trees shade out some of their own children, they also put massive resources into creating a next generation, one of which will indeed likely someday replace them when they fall. I try to remember there is both an unseen silent chemical war going on out there where plants produce defense compounds they secrete in the soil to inhibit the growth of other plant species (or insects or fungi) as a vile act of territoriality and often expansionism, and yet also the result is a good spacing of biomass to near optimally convert sunlight to living matter and resist and recover from wind and ice damage. I try to recall that there is the most brutal of competition between species of plants and animals and fungi and so on over water, nutrients (including from eating other creatures), sunlight, and space, while at the same time each bacterial colony or multicellular organism (like a large Pine tree) is a marvel of cooperation towards some implicitly shared purpose. I see the awesome result of both simplicity and complexity in the organizational structure of all these organisms and their DNA, RNA, and so on, adapted so well in most cases to the current state of such a complex web of being. Yet I can only guess the tiniest fraction of what suffering that selective shaping through variation and selection must have entailed for untold numbers of creatures over billions of years. To be truthful, I can actually *really* see none of that right now as it is dark outside this early near Winter Solstice time (and an icy rain is falling) beyond perhaps a silhouette outline, so I must remember and imagine it, perhaps as Einstein suggests as an "optical delusion of [my] consciousness". :-) :-) The best I feel we can hope for is balance (like Ursula K. Le Guin's writings):
http://www.pdfernhout.net/a-rant-on-financial-obesity-and-Project-Virgle.html
"
So much for "world peace" when even the tranquil seeming forests have so much Yin-Yang complexity going on within and around the trees.
http://www.ursulakleguin.com/
or maybe, transcendence to some form of universe certainly way beyond our present understanding; example, with its own flaws:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Metamorphosis_of_Prime_Intellect
But still, no matter what examples the universes sets before us, or in what proportion, as *ethical* and *spiritual* beings, we humans can choose a different way, and at least approximate world peace among ourselves as best we can. Something I learned from an old and wise biologist (Larry Slobodkin) who studied both philosophy and nature."
So, we can make choices, as sentient creatures, about how we want to live. The current laws of physics may constrain those choices, but we can still make choices as individuals and collectives. How do we want to live? How can we shape our rules, norms, prices, and architecture to influence that behavior? (Lawrence Lessig's point in "Code 2.0").
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Speak about yourself. My credit card company has a very incomplete picture about me. It knows some of my travels, but that's mostly it. It doesn't know what I bought at the groceries (or where I buy). It doesn't know if I've been to a pharmacy last year, and if so, how often. It doesn't know which books I read, or if I read books at all. It doesn't know which clothes I wear. It doesn't even know about the computer I'm typing this comment on.
Women must flock to you to give you babies!
All joking aside, My credit card company "knows" that I stop at McDonald's for breakfast a few times a week, Denny's about oncenevery three weeks, and Saturday mornings have a club meeting at the local Eat n' Park. Other times at a local diner. I buy gasoline with a different card that gives me a 5 cent discount, at a Convennience store in two different nearby cities that give a 3 cent discount. They also know if they were really interested was that I like highly hopped beer, and really hot chicken wings. I use EBay to buy electronic goodies, and vacation in Cape May, New Jersey. I also do surf fishing and ride a motorcycle. They can probably tell how long my Driveway is and how long my sidewalks are by comparing the number of ice storms in my area and comparing that to how much de-icing salt I buy
All findable by my credit card purchases. I suspect that they are a lot more interested in that I pay my card off every month.
But the issue is that so fucking what - I don't care. I'll tell people in a minute about all this stuff. I suppose that people can be shocked about all this, but it only makes sense that it can happen. Wired phones are of course trackable. Cell phones are inherently trackable just by the nature of the service. If you have a GPS that gets traffic updates, it is trackable, though with more difficulty. It is inherent in the process, so the way out of it is to not participate. As far as I am concerend, the "tracking" is just as likely to exonerate me as convict me - though I'm generally a straight arrow type. If I was a suspect in a crime I didn't commit, that Gas station or restaurant receipt might just help with an alibi. So it is a null issue. So I'm not quite ready to move to a compound in Idaho and sleep with a loaded .45 under my pillow quite yet.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
It's not just the internet that is a surveillance state. It is everything, or at least soon will be.
Despite what people think the problem is not tracking, cookies and the like. They just make the loss of your `privacy' easier but it was inevitable. The real problem is intelligent algorithms that are able to mine data and reach conclusions about you. Even if every single tracking product online was eliminated companies would easily find a way to correlate your activity. Measure the time between mouseclicks or your typing patterns and note the IP it is from. Now take that information and correlate it with information from other companies.
The existence of gait-tracking algorithms is a perfect example of what is going on. It's not that we are losing privacy, i.e., information that we literally kept private. Rather, it is that information we unworriedly disclose in public (be it our gait or the time at which we type in various characters to a website) turns out to provide far more information to a sufficiently intelligent algorithm than we ever expected. Soon enough our walks and choices in the physical world will be tracked just as thoroughly.
The genie can't be put back in the bottle. Are choices are to either eliminate free speech and regulate the ability of individuals to freely share information they observe in public or on their websites, pretend the problem doesn't exist by banning anyone from revealing the results of their intelligent data mining relegating this information to powerful corporations and governments or accepting the facts and modifying society to live with this problem. Societies with limited space have done this for hundreds of years and they grow to be tolerant of the little idiosyncrasies they inevitably see in their neighbor's lives.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
If the internet is a surveillance state, please reply to this post with my full real name, and all aliases.
I use my shopper id at my grocery store to get a small discount. So the store knows how much milk, flour, etc that I buy. I'm not seeing an issue there.
To take it a step further, I used to have a regular Friday night out at a particular bar. The waitress got to know me and bring me my favorite drink shortly after I walked in. Not a problem.
How about social engineering, in it's older form. Supposedly, back in the late 1800's or early 1900's, corporations wanted to sell more breakfast cereal. Prior to that time, people typically ate meat, beans, and eggs for breakfast. Maybe fried corn cakes or hot cakes. Corporations wanted to sell cereal. So they advertised all the benefits of cereal, especially the vitamin content, blah blah blah.
And, corporations were successful in selling the American public on breakfast cereal.
The social engineering hasn't ended of course. We simply accept it as normal that corporations spend fortunes everyday, indoctrinating kids that they should be eating whichever brand and style of cereal the commercials tell them to eat.
So - what's next on the agenda? And, what happens to people who resist such engineering? Do we become some kind of outcast? Outlaws? Outright criminals, because we choose not to be manipulated?
You need to look at the best case scenario, as well as the worst case scenario, and try to figure out what might happen as compared to what will happen.
Tracking. Why should I permit people to track my actions, so that they can better indoctrinate me? I don't WANT to be brainwashed, thank you very much.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
It was inevitable I suppose. The fuck-knows-how-many dollars spent on advertising and marketing and consumer focus were going to be spent somewhere. As a result, the last few years people have been flocking to build sites whose entire business model was developed in order to provide data and information in exchange for it.
Inevitably, there is a push for more information. What your real name is. Your DOB. Where you work or live. What your favourite place to eat is. What you like. Even where you are at any moment.
(It follows that government either already is or will be a customer.)
I do wonder if there is a speculative bubble forming around the market for that particular business model. How much of what is gathered can actually be used? How much is it actually worth?
I suspect that is the escape. If the bubble bursts and the data isn't profitable enough then the intrusion should subside dramatically.
"One reporter used a tool called Collusion to track who was tracking him; 105 companies tracked his Internet use during one 36-hour period"
I ran it on the Guardian, makes me wonder why a 'centre-left' newspaper spends so much effort in tracking what sites its readers visit online.
Collusion report on the Guardian : ajax.googleapis.com, chartbeat.com, cloudfront.net, criteo.com, doubleclick.net, guim.co.uk, imrworldwide.com, optimizely.com, outbrain.com, quantserve.com, scorechartresearch.com, wunderloop.net
AccountKiller
Some people think "free market capitalism" is a libertarian ideal. And a "free market" (as defined by economics, not the anti-government loons) requires significant government effort to maintain.
Learn to love Alaska
While your methods for living off the grid are valid, in this day and age living in a way that you described :D
:D
.you . . spawn of Ted Kaczynski . . . you
will quickly put you at the top of a surveillance list. Ultimately putting you right back in the spotlight you're
trying so hard to avoid
Why ?
Because only terrorists apparently have any need for privacy
OMGHESPAYINGWITHCASH!!!! Call the FBI !!
What do you mean you don't have a Facebook / Twitter account ?
No cell phone you pinko-commie ?
You .
*chuckle*
You can ignore all the scholarly anarchocapitalists and call them "not economists" but that doesn't mean they're not real.
Yes, the current methods of dispute resolution require a government, but that's begging the question.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I recall in Dune people ended up violently dumping computers, maybe he was onto something.
The proposed role of government for libertarians is almost solely dispute resolution, so I fail to see how your clarification is anything other than redundant.
Learn to love Alaska
Google Analytics, DoubleClick, and Scorecard Research are tracking this web page. The irony meter just exploded!
No, the internet is not the surveillance state. Unlike the state it is based on voluntary arrangements. In particular this means that it is subject to competition, unlike government's monopoly on power. Neither Google, Apple or even ISPs (despite their collusion with municipal governments) can tax you or force you to use their product. You can even create your own network (physical or logical).
Because of competition, I am confident that a reasonable trade-off will emerge in terms of features and costs. Competitive pressure will lead to experimentation and improvement. There are privacy-sensitive options available already, and other ones will develop where there is demand.
That said, it is worrying how the actual state has been trying to turn this into its own surveillance tool. See latest 29C3 talks on government forcing telecoms to record traffic for the NSA and other agencies. But such use of power needs to be properly attributed, it is the fault of the state, not that of the internet. It is important to distinguish the cancer from the healthy organs.
These comments are mine; I do not speak for my employer.
It's poisoned data. Since it has become virtually impossible to leave no trace and not be tracked, make sure you poison their data pool enough to make the data useless. It's a bit like buying condoms and dog food and making the analyst at your local store freak out.
Also, you can use the data hunger of companies to your advantage. If you dig through the net by my real name, I seem to be rubbing shoulders with the greatest of the industry. Schneier is actually one of them. I have met him briefly, but we're nowhere near the seemingly constant exchange of ideas you'd think we have when you start data mining on me. When preparing for a job interview, rest assured people will start digging through facebook and google to find out what they can about you, and make sure that they find what they're supposed to find. Worked for me pretty well so far.
As for the rest, like I said, make sure the data that can be gathered about you makes no sense. Disinformation is the name of the game, once it becomes impossible to tell truth from lie, the whole data mining effort goes to waste.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Actually a pretty good idea for a browser plug-in. Something that keeps hitting random pages and discards them instead of showing them, all done in the background while you do your regular surfing.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I am not sure Libertarians would agree. I think strong government is to be desired. Big != strong.
I take my children to see Madonna(..), but I never for once ever thought I was in the same business.Chris Rea.
You spammed your business, good for you. Now what does that have to do with surveillance?
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
It goes well beyond any specific products. The selling of consumerism as a way of life is a real phenomenon that can be traced back to Edward Bernays and his work for the federal government. His work is chronicled in the BBC series "Century Of The Self".
Outstanding link. It explains so much. And, it kinda helps me to understand why I find marketing so distasteful. The rat bastards are manipulating me with every advertisement. I hate being manipulated . . .
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Add false data to the databases.
Create false identities, not just anonymous ones. Don't allow facebook, etc. to interlink.
Script this, add plugins for browsers to do this.
In shops, use discount cards with cash, and swap the cards regularly with friends.
Poisoning the databases, especially for "non-legal" transactions (i.e. don't lie when buying on the internet, but give as little
away as possible, and don't use real identities where monetary transactions are not involved - don't commit fraud)
means the existing data collected elsewhere is not trustworthy. It devalues the whole point of data harvesting and data mining,
much better than hiding data alone.
It also still allows the "correct" (non-evil) functioning of the system. Looking up my real name give my real details, when it matters,
allowing the site to interact with me the way it was advertised to. Searching for all "X" in the data give 90% garbage, and so mining
becomes pointless. Deal with customers properly.
Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist
My life is far too inane to share like that, but anyone seriously analyzing my information would realize that it was costing far more than it was benefiting them.
Advertisers beware!
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
I just integrated a windows box with all the download services switched off. Major improvement, runs as well as Linux but with real Radeon drivers. :) (Unfortunately, my life is so bush-league that I actually have time to check in manually every fortnight.) Every once in a while, wuaserv switches itself on for something, and I don't believe it can be arsed to switch itself back off. I too, find it distressing when "my" machine starts grinding away at its own little side jobs.
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
"Web application" with an "offline mode"?? People actually use those?!?!
Gmail has an offline mode, for instance. And as Chrome OS and Firefox OS grow more popular, more web applications are likely to adopt manifests and IndexedDB as a way of working offline.
shipments off world.
I expect to be transported in the first load, it's in my genes.
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
Yes, i use google. Yes, i use andorid. Yes, i shop at amazon.
However i use VPNs, the private mode of my browser, and local storage for many things. I strictly separate between social networks with real name (google plus, xing) which i use for business communication and keeping contact with real friends and social networks for telling my opinion freely (even if i have only a single identity there). I never mention my real identity on the latter ones and i never mention my alias (drolli) on the first ones. I regularly verify that searching with trivial methods will not link my identities, and i have no indication that google managed to do so. I can extrapolate whenever they get a new information about me when the contacts they suggest me on google plus get more targeted.
I use google maps, but turn it off when i consider it important.
So: You have control over what you put into the internet. But if you consider a the "one size fits all" approach that everything about you is stored at facebook and you don't distinct in you life whom you want to tell what, good luck. "Oh its so convenient" is not a good staring point for all of this, i fear.
You descend from a long line of telephone sanitizers, eh?
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
The problem isn't lack of privacy, the problem is unbalanced power. You have no way to perform this sort of data analysis, only Big Gov/Corp can. It's like how banks are Too Big To Fail, but we let individual homeowners default on their mortgage and lose their homes. Read "The Shockwave Rider" someday - people knew this in the 70's.
To all above, All very good points. Definitely the key is to be boring enough to not get that three billion dollar treatment. Whether your on, off, halfway on-off the grid. I'm totally agreed there. If I went missing tomorrow, no one would care except my immediate family and they probably wouldn't even be able to get a chopper to fly around looking for me if they couldn't even give a location were I said I would be.
The point I was trying to make, in a technical sense, someone can find you if they really want to and have enough resources, those cases are pretty rare ;p
Would you rather use an offline web application, or would you rather not be able to use the application at all because it was developed as a native application for a platform other than yours?
You claim that offline access to webmail is unnecessary because you have a native MUA. So what native application connects to discussion boards now that ISPs no longer offer Usenet servers with even the text groups? And how do you plan on using a native application if it is made for a platform other than yours?
Because the vast amount of information they get about us, is so overwhelming that they don't have the power to sift out actual useful information.
Let's say for arguments sake, Google knows everything about you, it knows where you like to surf, it knows what you like to eat, read, watch...even what underwear you wear.
But this isn't public information. It may get...once hacked, but still - all of this information must be categorized, analyzed, sorted in order to be at all useful. So many cookies, so many websites, so many systems - it may sound easy, but it's far more difficult to make sense out of than you MAY want to think. Sure - if an employee of a certain company that shall remain nameless here, has it in for you - it's very easy to get dirty information on you, that's not the problem - the problem is in how you USE that information, not an easy thing to do without involving yourself in pretty hefty lawbreaking criminal activity.
I may know SHITLOADS of information about most of my neighbors, but alas...I can't really do anything about it, yes, I may eyeball my suspicious neighbor once in a while, freaking him out into the clueless oblivion in the land of paranoia...but that's all I can do, and not even that is legal. I am not allowed to browse information about him that can compromise his human rights, the same goes for our beloved military, yes they do it...the gov. do it, even the police do it - but very little come out of it, except they've got "their eyes on you".
And thus come my conclusion, want to know a little dirty secret?
I bet you do - and the neighbor is just as dirty as you. We can't arrest the entire population.
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
Sure, the waitress knew that you were at that bar every Friday, and what your favourite drink was. Possibly the cashier at your favourite grocery shop knows what you usually buy at that grocery shop. And there's probably some gas station which knows quite well how much gas you need. That's not a big problem because everyone only gets a little bit of the big picture, and it's unlikely that e.g. the waitress will sell her knowledge to anyone.
To make a car analogy: Few people will see a problem if someone is driving behind them on the highway for a few miles. However if the same car is following them every time they are driving somewhere to whereever they drive, most people would see a problem. And if they know that there's someone in the car who collects all the movement data and sells it to anyone paying enough, very few people would accept that.
What advertising companies do is exactly that, just that there's no observing person or car involved, making it practical to follow many people around, while most of them won't even notice it.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Well, I was thinking something beyond simple search engine poisoning. Like, say, if you open a page it automatically sends requests to similar pages, or even opens completely unrelated pages from time to time, with falsified referrer, to render tracking cookies useless.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
What may be increasingly more relevant than the tracking (which has been going on for years) would be what part of the social aggregate you fall into when your data is examined.
How are we categorized?
What it says about you is more important today than keeping them from following you.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
I've never personally used a 'web application,' I go to the website.
By "web application", I was referring to form-driven websites that store information or perform calculations on the users' behalf. This is as opposed to sites based on more static "documents", such as a blog, for which the only thing needed for offline support is an Atom feed of newly published documents. For example, a webmail or forum or online social network is a "web application", as is something like Google Docs.
After all, Google wants you to be online all the time so they can track you and serve you ads, right?
Chrome OS comes on laptops. I use a laptop while riding transit to and from work, and there's no Internet access on the bus except for (luxury priced) cellular Internet.
First he suggests Apple is tracking its users when it just neglected to encrypt location cache data on the devices and their backups (fixed about 2 years ago). And then he suggests you cannot delete cookies on mobile Safari when it actually has all the usual options (it has private mode also). Not nice at all. And quite irrelevant to his subject.
Then enjoy your higher than average premiums. I'd rather pay cash and leave Allstate guessing.
I have no idea what you are talking about.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
The thing that really gets me is how the hippies explicitly turned their backs on consumerism, and then corporations reformulate their propaganda efforts in the 70s and win them over.
The other Adam Curtis documentaries are also quite eye-opening...
In The Mayfair Set he shows how in the 80s vulture capitalists transformed pension funds into ravenous dissolvers of the western industrial base that created them.
with enough government and corporate encroachment, the state could decide (or be used by corporate interest) that based on the amount of flour, sugar, and milk you buy, you are 'at risk' for xyz medical reasons and then up your 'obamacare' payments (or inform your insurance agent) accordingly.. of course, it doesn't matter that you didn't necessarily consume all of those products yourself, or in an unhealthy way, but annoying details like this never deter the ideologically motivated stats nerds and their political overlords.
This SHOULD concern you. It should concern all of us.
Just wanted to thank you for the encouragement, bbelt, which contributed to my submitting this entry to the current Knight News Challenge on Open Government:
https://www.newschallenge.org/open/open-government/submission/civic-sensemaking-by-working-with-stories-using-rakontu/
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.