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Cory Doctorow On Privacy and Oversharing
slash-sa writes with a link to an opinion piece from Cory Doctorow that begins: "The European Parliament is currently involved in a wrangle over the new General Data Protection Regulation. At stake are the future rules for online privacy, data mining, big data, governmental spying (by proxy), to name a few. Hundreds of amendments and proposals are on the table, including some that speak of relaxing the rules on sharing data that has been "anonymised" (had identifying information removed) or "pseudonymised" (had identifiers replaced with pseudonyms). This is, however, a very difficult business, with researchers showing how relatively simple techniques can be used to re-identify the data in large anonymised data sets, by picking out the elements of each record that make them unique."
Does every damn story on here have to be about Doctor Who? It's getting a bit much.
Cory's site has 7 tracking services that track you every time you logon to his site, and correlate with a multitude of sites that also track everywhere you go online. I would think if you're going to promote digital privacy, the first thing you would do is remove the four google tracking systems installed on your website.
moox. for a new generation.
A massive dataset for use in research, for one. Be that purely academic research, or statistical analysis for marketing usage.
What? You mean a writer on boing boing is a hypocrite when it comes to privacy and censorship issues? Shocking.......
I think a good first step would be to make life tougher for cyberbullies who post images and documents with the clear intention of destroying someone's reputation or making them the subject of ridicule. Whether such incidents would be sanctioned would depend on how public the documents were, whether the victim was a celebrity or public person (e.g. high-ranking government or corporate official), whether the victim knowingly participated in either the photographing or the posting of the images/documents, etc. The laws would have to be clearly defined.
If you overshare, then every script-kiddie on the planet will be able to hack your life.
No law available to our Fearless Leaders can prevent abuse of the system by our National Security Industry. Forget about any sort of reigning in of the God-given Rights of our Owners.
Vote as if it mattered. Ha-Haa!
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
...anyone who can bribe or impersonate a cop can access them...
What 'rules' are going to stop that?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
I think the problems with oversharing should be fixed if possible. Of course, some of the problems are more difficult or impossible to fix, but we should try to fix as many as we can.
It is worth noting that this topic is among the "codecision" matters for which the EU parliament has a word to say. But even in that case it is still long away from being a real parliament. The European Commission proposed the initial draft, and it can strip the amendment voted by the parliament (it already happened). Moreover the parliament will have to agree with the European council, which is made of member states' government representative, and acts as a upper house in the EU framework.
What?
Cool story bro!
Seriously, the only thing at all interesting in your post was the reference to your friend who got "mega busted" but you didn't even tell us what happened.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
I remember when facebook got big enough that I finally decided to create an account there. Not because I wanted to share private details of my life with my friends. Because the FB audience was big enough that I felt compelled to have some representation there. What my timeline displays is what I call a public profile. Think of it as the linked in for hobbies and vacation travel. Don't publish anything that wouldn't hold up in a criminal investigation. I'm not saying lie. Remember Andy Warhol's now famous "15 minutes of fame" quote? Well, famous people need a PR manager. In today's "15 minutes of fame" world, everyone needs their own DIY PR manager. Think like a PR manager before you post.
Cookies are managed by the user. Scripts that are written to replace rather than sit along side HTML are the problem. Scripts are managed, primarily, by tool-set developers. That makes the script monkeys the evil guys.
Why is anyone listening to this guy about anything? He's not an authority in any circle - he just curates odd content around the internet and he himself isn't all that bright.
The people with the data can make more money.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
Disclaimer: I am affiliated with one of the initiatives about to be mentioned.
While anonymization and pseudonymization can be broken with access to related datasets, secure computation is harder to break. There are various ongoing efforts like IBM's HElib (https://github.com/shaih/HElib) and Cybernetica's Sharemind (https://sharemind.cyber.ee) among many others. These tools allow you to build data analysis systems that will not see the data and will work nicely in an environment of distrust.
Some academic papers for the interested ones:
A paper on secure genomic studies - http://bioinformatics.oxfordjournals.org/content/29/7/886
A paper on secure financial reporting - http://eprint.iacr.org/2011/662.pdf (published at Financial Cryptography)
A thesis on the fundamentals of the approach - http://dspace.utlib.ee/dspace/bitstream/handle/10062/29041/bogdanov_dan_2.pdf?sequence=5
The technology is becoming more efficient and developer tools are being created (e.g., https://sharemind.cyber.ee). While they are still maturing, new and better versions will be popping up soon.
Hopefully, they will be here in time to still help us fix some of the privacy leaks.
Dan
NOTE: if you want to take information about me from someone else I gave my information to, then ASK ME. It will be under the same conditions as the other person: consideration for the use and/or the data remains mine, not yours.
Microsoft Disagrees.
In an open letter to Microsoft sent January 15, 2013, the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner questioned whether Microsoft was really committed to privacy, based on a series of privacy summits the company organized last November. Specifically, the OAIC expressed "reservations" about one of the "discussion topics" Microsoft encouraged attendees to discuss.
The meetings proposed rewriting the so-called "Collection Limitation Principle," which states: "There should be limits to the collection of personal data and any such data should be obtained by lawful and fair means and, where appropriate, with the knowledge or consent of the data subject."
The report published by Microsoft states this "discussion version" was used:
"Data should be obtained by lawful and fair means and in a transparent manner. Data should not be collected in a manner likely to cause unjustified harm to the individual unless required by law. 'Harm' may include more than physical injury."
The OAIC worried that the revised discussion version placed no limitations on the collection of personal data. And the report said as much:
"[T]he requirement in the original OECD principle that data be collected, 'when appropriate,' with the 'knowledge or consent of the data subject,' seems to ignore the reality of the extraordinary volume of data that is generated today through routine activities and transactions and near-ubiquitous sensors (such as surveillance cameras, location monitoring by smart phones, and embedded computers in cars and other devices). Often, knowledge or consent of data collection in these situations is either nonexistent or likely to be so vague as to be meaningless. No one suggested that knowledge is not important, or that consent may not be appropriate in some settings, but there seems a real risk that the 'where appropriate' exception could swallow the entire principle, given today’s technology landscape."
http://readwrite.com/2013/01/23/microsoft-crows-about-its-privacy-program-but-australia-has-deep-concerns#awesm=~oed5BqlgbBHZTp
The interesting point here, is that the wholedebate is just : The owners of some structures, some creepy sponsors or control freaks, and those on their paychecks (less than 1% of the population reweighted by the strength of their lobbies) vs. The Users (99% of the population; be serious, noboby likes to be followed, spyed on, to receive more junk publicity at least). Now lest's see what democracy is about... For me, the simple fact that it did manage to create a wrangle, points to a problem.
Cory Doctorow is a hypocritical self-congratulatory bigot.
He is a public figure. He does speak about these issues frequently and held various position in various organization about privacy and copyright issues. I'd say he is the closest thing we have to an expert on privacy from the societal perspective (instead of the technological one).
Personnaly, I like his writing style in novels. But I tend not to like his blog.