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Internet of Things Demands New Social Contract To Protect Privacy
chicksdaddy writes "Changes brought about by the Internet of Things demands the creation of a whole new social contract to enshrine the right to privacy and prevent the creation of technology-fueled Orwellian surveillance states in which individual privacy protections take a back seat to security and 'control.' That, according to an opinion piece penned by the head of the European Commission's Knowledge Sharing Unit. Gérald Santucci argues that technology advances, including the advent of wearable technology and the combination of inexpensive, remote sensors and Big Data analytics threaten to undermine long-held notions like personal privacy and the rights of individuals."
I reserve the right to disable the network connection and recording capabilities of any device in a public space with sensors capable of detecting or inferring my presence.
It's getting pretty hard to be an anonymous member of an unpopular minority these days.
Hell, it took me thirty seconds to figure out how to prove someone plays D&D using Find My Friends and one flaky and/or gullible friend to expose location data. And zero budget. When all your crap is posting to Facebook on your behalf
Maybe "we" need more than platitudes. Maybe "we" need an original thought instead of bloated, vomit-inducing bureaucrat speak.
But "we" definitely need to find a new hair stylist, Mr. Santucci.
I think of all the current political terms out there, "social contract" has to be one of the most worthless. It's a "contract" that you "agree" with by not trying to destroy society hard enough. It doesn't actually exist in any concrete form. And the terms of the supposed contract mean whatever the speaker feels they mean at the moment.
We need to be much less tolerant of things that "phone home" to some headquarters. Or accept remote patches. We now have to assume that anything with a remote patch capability can be exploited.
You might think open source would be better. It's not. Even the Mozilla Foundation has become squishy-soft on enforcing their own privacy rules. Check out BlockSite, a Firefox add-on which used to just block requested sites. It was bought up by a company called WIPS, which buys up abandoned apps and puts in back-door tracking of every site visited. After a year of pressure from WIPS, Jorge Villalobos at Mozilla caved in and let them install tracking in an existing add-on and auto update it.
For Linux, Ubuntu pushes an awful lot of updates to supposedly "stable" versions. Is there a back door in there? Is anybody looking?
Globalisation
revolutions
intellectual framework
socio-economic system
intellectual framework (twice!)
paradigm
diverse
at stake
data driven
personal data
(he almost said corporation. But avoided it with company.)
The paragraph (now guess what it means!):
Driven by globalisation and technological revolutions, the world is changing fast but the intellectual framework that continues to inspire the current institutions surrounding our socio - economic system dates back to the agricultural and first in dustrial revolutions and the pioneering works of Thomas Hobbes (the “Leviathan” – 1651), Adam Smith (the “invisible hand” – 1776) and David Ricardo (“value comes from labour” – 1817). It is time we realise that a new intellectual framework, a new paradigm, is needed if we are to grasp the diverse complex issues at stake. The idea of connected devices of all sorts chatting away to one another is certainly attractive - most people want to enjoy the new, exciting services that a data - driven future can provide, but at the same time they do not trust companies and governments as regards the collection and processing of personal data.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
The parent's suggestion is quite similar in concept to the very popular electronic gadget TV-B-Gone which turns off TVs.
"Copyright on My Personal Information, Data and Meta-data"
All rights reserved
No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form
without the prior permission of the publisher (myself),
nor circulated in any form without a similar condition
being imposed on any subsequent purchaser/user.
"My Personal Data"
~name
~address
~phone
~credit card details
~past purchases
~browsing history
~emails
~various meta-data
~location data
~log of events of your life
You would have to have your terms of use of personal data
very visible and present it to sites before you use their sites.
Now you hold all this data and anyone wishing to use your data asks permission
and you grant permission with whatever restrictions you want.
Using various websites usually allows them to commandeer your data
through their legal terms of use.
Whose legal rights would come first ???
Hopefully yours as you are the primary owner of the data.
Your data and meta-data is valuable,
now you can make money from its use,
or not as you see fit.
Now you never have to fill in a web form again.
A web site is given access for a restricted time
with restrictions on dissemination
to a restricted subset of your data as you see fit.
Go well
Don't connect your lightbulb to the internet.
I have been wondering about this re my utility meters. Currently my teleswitch (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleswitch) enabled electricity meter is read a few times a year, and these readings are clearly the properly of my provider. However in an IOT world my electricity consumption would be continuously available as part of maximising use of solar or off peak rates etc. But who owns my consumption data? No doubt my provider, who owns the meter, would find somebody to sell it to and equally, various 'security' agencies would insist they had to have full access to it. I am sure that careful examination it of could reveal tons of personal info.
And to demonstrate European commitment to privacy, the plane of Bolivian President Evo Morales was refused permission to fly through the airspace of Spain, France, Portugal and Italy. The plane was later grounded for 13 hours and searched by Austrian police in Vienna. All in pursuit of that terrorist Edward Snowden. Clearly these were the first steps towards "the creation of a whole new social contract to enshrine the right to privacy and prevent the creation of technology-fueled Orwellian surveillance states in which individual privacy protections take a back seat to security and control."
OK, here's a radical thought for you: perhaps we don't need 'an internet of things'?
As it turns out, we also don't need to post our entire lives on Facebook or Twitter or whatever other "social network" is trendy right now. Nor is it necessary to supply them with metadata on every uploaded photo. I don't use these kinds of networks, and amazingly I haven't died yet, and neither has my social life. It'd be nice if they weren't so easily able to capture data about me anyway by encouraging people who know me to supply it against my will, though; there's something very shady about that kind of behaviour.
Something I've heard a lot recently that's interesting is that the younger generation are actually much less likely to use some of these tools, Facebook in particular, or at least to use it in the manner it wants (real name etc.). This is one of my few comforting thoughts when considering privacy in the age of modern communication and surveillance technologies: the idea that future generations will grow up without appreciating the value of privacy seems to be overstated.
A less comforting thought is that they might not get a choice anyway. If devices that have no need for this kind of intrusive technology start incorporating it routinely, you can't opt out without giving up a huge amount of quality of life. Worse, many useful tools can inherently be abused to track people: think of monitoring personal location via mobile phone connections or card payments or smartcards used to pay for public transport, or recording vehicle movements via ANPR cameras and automated systems for tolls etc.
IMNSHO, we need much stronger laws to prevent repurposing of these kinds of data or retaining it any longer than strictly necessary. I think a big part of the problem is that so many people don't even realise what can be done today and how much is being stored routinely without any good reason that there isn't enough political will to drive change, even though if you told people what was happening they might well object.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
As it turns out, there are many things we don't need to do, but that are nice to do nonetheless. Sharing one's life with one's friends via Facebook falls into that category.