Taking Back Control of Your Data, With Fine Grained, Explicit Permissions

BrokenHalo writes with a story at New Scientist outlining one approach to reclaiming your online privacy: a software gatekeeper (described in detail in a paper from last year) from two MIT developers. "Developers Sandy Pentland and Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye claim OpenPDS (PDF) disrupts what NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden called the 'architecture of oppression,' by letting users see and control any third-party requests for their information – whether that's from the NSA or Google. Among other things, the Personal Data Store includes a mechanism for fine-grained management of permissions for sharing of data. Personally, I'm not convinced that what the NSA demands outright to be shared is as relevant as what they surreptitiously take without asking."

Comments

Oh the naivete!!

[fustakrakich]

How many times do you people need to be told? If it's on a network, any network, it is out of your control! You really think you can stop the NSA, Google, or any of them?

More useful

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

Instead of a gatekeeper, I'd rather have a layer of software that automatically lies about myself (such as always giving my name as "John Doe" or my GPS location as being somewhere in the open desert near Timbuktu or something), so that not only the data hoarders don't get my personal information, but their data pool gets polluted. Bad data is much more of a problem to them than no data at all.

Re:More useful

[Tom]

Depends on what they are using it for. If the purpose is individual identification, the data doesn't have to be correct, just unique. If they want to track you, behavior is more important than data, and so on.

But in general, I agree. When those "bonus card" systems for the supermarket etc. came to Europe, I was the guy at the CCCamp to propose everyone in the room stand up and exchange their cards with someone else at random.

But life is turning into a cyberpunk story in one important regard: The vast majority of the population doesn't know nor care about fighting this crap. Those of us who do, we are very few. We are the 1% in this aspect. Your and my data polluting doesn't change a thing in the big picture.

And that's where you are right on the money: If someone came up with a device that does that automatically, and had some other benefit related to this feature so it is of interest to grandma to use it, then you'd have ruined the current Internet top dogs business model in one brave stroke.

Re:A little misleading

[icebike]

You are missing the fact that the the summary, the article, and the so called detail description give not a single
clue about how it works, or even precisely what it does.

One would have to assume its some sort of elaborate ruse to see if they can sucker more people into handing over more data by offering a nebulously described so called private data gatekeeper as a free app. Undomesticated equines could not drag me to installing that app.

Re:Needs to be an appliance..

[xtal]

It's quite easy to monitor all traffic.

Monitoring is not the same thing as analyzing.. but I am quite certain I know where my packets are headed - at least when they're sent from my gateway. That's how the internet works.