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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.
- 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
The premise of the question implies "How can I keep doing everything I'm doing right now but 100% maintain my privacy?". That's a dumb question. Look at the assumptions--how do you maintain your privacy when all your friends take pictures of you all the time and share them online? Gee whiz, how about asking your friends not to take pictures of you? Or consider whether being a socialite and a party animal is compatible with your aim of privacy? How about when personal data are stored by banks? Maybe you should consider reducing the amount of data you give to banks to begin with. Airports? Consider not flying.
The problem is that making these lifestyle changes actually involve giving things up, which no one wants to do. If you want a quiet, private, contemplative life lived independent of others then make such a life for yourself. If you want to be an interconnected urbanite who takes full advantage of globally connecting technologies, there's going to be a degree of privacy loss.
I like privacy and I donate to the EFF and I'm for reforming all of the above scenarios to give users more control of their privacy. But given that those reforms haven't happened and the problem is getting worse, at some point you have to change your own behaviour and consider if the goodies you get exceed the value of the privacy you're losing.
How Do You Protect Your Privacy When It's Out of Your Control?
You give it up with a smile and don't, or you hire lawyers.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
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.
Indeed. It reminds me of the reported fear of photographs shown by various primitive peoples, fearing that it was taking away their souls.
Fundamentally it's a fear of change. The new seems scary to some. People born to it will just see it as the way things ought to be. Till they in turn get scared by some new technology that arrives in their lifetime.
Oh, one more thing.
If you can't make money fighting the system, you certainly could make some by maintaining all of these electronic / computer gizmos.
Again, you folks just have to start looking at the bright side of things.
After all, nothing from nothing....
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Change your name to John or Jane Smith. If someone tries to search for your info, they will be literally flooded with false positives. Sometimes I wish I had a common name like that.
There were some things that stayed scary even when they don't change for centuries. Nobody gets accustomed to the Spanish Inquisition.
Most of the submitter's issues stem from inadequecies in the law. Drones, CCTV etc. can't really be fought with technological measures. Outlawing invasive behaviours (or having strict rules over their use) seems the only option.
Yes, our technology enables easy mass surveillance. Does that mean we simply accept it? Do we accept a future where those with the most technology and money simply do whatever the fuck they want? That seems to be the conclusion of a lot of people.
It's a long shot, especially when government seems so authoritarian and adversarial to the populace, but I'd suggest it to be the only solution.
One option I've heard is a property right, such as ownership (similar to copyright) of personal information. Joe "owns" his name &* address, and he'll loan a copy to Time Magazine for the purpose of delivering the periodical he has paid for. Any other use of Joe's information by Time Magazine is a violation, unless Joe & Time have come to some other agreement. This is very similar to copyright, so let's just call it personal copyright.
Copyright might be too blunt an instrument though, because remedies mostly involve (expensive) civil suits. A number of European governments passed legislation called Fair Information Practices. These laws basically say that personal information can only be used for the purpose for which it was given, and cannot be repurposed without consent of the person involved. Probably the governments involved have given themselves a loophole for national security, but I haven't investigated the details. This option reduces the cost to the individual, and makes it the job of the government to enforce the law. I see this as a benefit, though some may not.
Writing Fair Information Practices into law would probably explode the business models of the currently most successful tech companies in the USA, so maybe there's a way to ease into the laws and allow the tech companies time to adjust their business methods...
--- Often in error; never in doubt!
And for the TSA, lead condoms with scrotum wings.
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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.
The problem is that the phone companies believe that those call records are made on their systems and belong to them. The credit card companies own the transaction records between you and some merchants. Just because your name is in it, they don't believe that it is your information or that you have any control over it. Copyright does not apply to facts and its tough to draw a line anywhere over what should be private.
Fundamentally it's a fear of change.
Not all change is for the better, and some things are worth fearing. Ironically, the best lessons about the future dangers of this kind of technology can be found in history.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I know it's difficult when there are so many people who don't give one tenth of one fuck about anyone but themselves, but build a better society, one in which we aren't all looking up each other's arseholes with flashlights unless we're doing a rectal examination. Do anything you can to make the world a better place, and that will have the long-term effects of reducing surveillance.
You also have to convince at least two other people to do the same, if you really want this to take off... And them, as well, and so on. Eventually, that requirement can be eliminated.
Now, if we can just agree on what we should do...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"