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Ask Slashdot: How Do You Protect Your Privacy When It's Out of Your Control?
An anonymous reader writes "A week ago, Slashdot was asked, "How do you protect your privacy?" The question named many different ways privacy is difficult to secure these days, but almost all of the answers focused on encrypting internet traffic. But what can you do about your image being captured by friends and strangers' cameras (not to mention drones, police cameras, security cameras, etc.)? How about when your personal data is stored by banks and healthcare companies and their IT department sucks? Heck; off-the-shelf tech can see you through your walls. Airport security sniffs your skin. There are countless other ways info on you can be collected that has nothing to do with your internet hygiene. Forget the NSA; how do you protect your privacy from all these others? Can you?"
...you can't. That's what "out of your control" means.
I don't believe that technological privacy is achievable, and I'm skeptical that it's valuable. Whether cryptography actually works (an interesting mathematical question in itself), cryptosystems fail fairly often. Even when they do work, to truly be untraceable or private with them you have to effectively opt out of commerce. Don't logon to anything when you're using Tor, kids; also, don't use Google, since they can always watch your referer tags and see 3/4 of your pages that way. The problem with privacy as we normally talk about it is that it is extremely fragile -- what we've historically taken as 'privacy' was really laziness -- going back to my example from the detective firm above, all this information was already there, it was just split into a couple of dozen different archives and databases. Beforehand, it took time and effort, so you had privacy because unless something was really important, it wasn't worth the effort of searching. Now, it's very easy to record and archive, and we've been focused for many years on making recording and archiving easier, and we elect to be recorded and archived in order to participate with other people -- bank won't serve you if you're wearing a ski mask, visit vegas and you'll see that any table game has very specific gestures and rules to make what you're doing camera-friendly, want a loan you need to have a credit rating.
So, privacy has to be implemented, which means its going to be a combination of legal, technical and social elements. Technical in the same sense as breaking and entering -- the definition of B&E is that the breaker has to make -an- effort, regardless of how trivial. Lifting a latch is considered B&E, and similarly you need some indication that you're trying to achieve privacy. Legal in the sense of limiting the consequence when your privacy is breached.
There's something to be said for blending into the background, being "down in the noise", not being whomever they're looking for. Pay cash when possible. (It's still allowed, although maybe not for too much longer.) Be less distinctive in appearance. Build up a really boring persona. Don't make it worth anyone's time to follow you.
Practice safe computing. I think this is probably more important than CCTVs everywhere. Don't open or click on anything unless you know exactly what it is. If you must do porn or warez, do it on a virtual machine, not the same one on which you do your banking and pay your utilities.
Beware of social engineering. It works so well that I would be really surprised if it were not used as a surveillance tactic.
But in general, just be uninteresting.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.