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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?"
- Shame people who are doing such activities.
- Convince others that what they are doing is a bad idea.
- When all else fails, get violent.
First, you stop asking sefl-defeating questions. The question is not "how do you protect privacy when its out of your control", it's "how do I control things in order to increase my privacy" You ask how to maintain your privacy when your friends all have cameras, why do you have friends that pull out a camera at the drop of a hat again? You ask about protecting personal data that's collected by banks and companies that have horrible IT, why are you doing business with them again? Your privacy is literally your own business, and if you don't mind it, someone else will.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you
Wow, I'd mod you even higher except the very second I hit this forum /. expired my damned mod points! Oh the humanity.
I'd expand on your answer. The truth is that the cat is out of the bag. We can't get this sort of privacy back. We probably can't ever get back the CERTAINTY of any sort of privacy. If there's advantage to be had, someone will listen. You will never be SURE that the NSA (which isn't going away) isn't or can't listen to you, get all your facebook data, etc. Even if it isn't them it could be SOMEONE. You can't ever truly know what software any modern computer is running for certain. You absolutely can't be sure that your SSL connections are secure, or that if you use Tor that someone is STILL not tracking you.
The truth is, we're better if we go with the flow and take control of the situation. Live more in the open. That's what we ARE going to do, but if we do it RIGHT then we put at least SOME controls on things. We need to insure that whatever the government knows, we know. If there isn't some absolute direct reason why given data should be hidden, then it should be open. All data about what people do should belong to the public. It should make the rules. I think we'll all find at that point we want to exercise restraint and life will be able to go on. The alternative is we fight for a losing cause, total privacy, and end up with all our data owned by corporations and stuck in Top Secret NSA vaults, and all these people just listening to everything without the slightest oversight.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
...you can't. That's what "out of your control" means.
Well actually, you can. The trick is to inject noise into the system, such that Google/Facebook's statistical classifiers and the such stop working.
For example, take pictures of yourself, and tag them using a stranger's name.
Or, take random pictures not featuring yourself, and tag them using your own name.
Perform fake google searches every day (search for stuff that you have no interest in whatsoever).
And so forth.
In fact, I see a business model here.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
You really believe you should have control over public facts about you? That you have the right to never be documented in public in any form? The ability to enforce your whims over your friends?
There are certain things you should control, and in the UK most of those are covered by the Data Protection Act. But I wouldn't ever consider that I have the right to never, ever be known, to disappear entirely while still in public or to control what my friends can and cannot say about me.
If you are in public, then you should expect to actually be publicly exposed in some ways and everyone should have the right to record you and your activities when you are in public. Private citizens should equally not be bound by laws meant for corporations, and should be able to record or disseminate any information they know about you. The law isn't there to enforce your perceived rights over whomever you decide to hang around with, or to fix your bad choice of friends.