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?"

Comments

When it's out of your control

[Kohath]

...you can't. That's what "out of your control" means.

Re:When it's out of your control

[postbigbang]

You can go to insane lengths, but it will make you insane.

Diligence, tenacity, questioning authority, using pseudonyms, alternate identities (within legal contraints), and being sensible can be rewarding.

I'm betting your browser doesn't have NoScript or Ghostery.... and your phone is an Apple (some say less tracking, others don't) or an Android (just email your every waking moment to Google and friends) and you can mod both phones to be less tracking.

Take a deep breath, acknowledge that they track you, then do what you can to stop it. Question the need for SocSec, phone #s, addresses, at each and every turn. Don't use barcode store cards-- or use someone else's. Pay cash for top-up charge cards, and use them once.

Steal This Book and other tomes (which you'll steal or pay cash for) are great guides to anonymity. Think about them. Don't go crazy.

Re:When it's out of your control

[StripedCow]

...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.

Re:When it's out of your control

[nospam007]

"Perform fake google searches every day (search for stuff that you have no interest in whatsoever)."

There's even an extension for that..
http://cs.nyu.edu/trackmenot/

Re:When it's out of your control

[postbigbang]

IMHO, privacy is a part of dignity, a human rather then corporate/political quality. To value dignity is important for people, and corporations/politicos have no need for dignity. The value is important, and it is fought in many marketing memes, PR, and values-- where the almighty currency rules.

Re:When it's out of your control

[Kjella]

The truth is, we're better if we go with the flow and take control of the situation. Live more in the open. (...) All data about what people do should belong to the public.

You're part of the "we" that like to dictate for everyone else. No, all data about what I do should belong to me. My life is my own and in general it's nobody else's business, I accept that in certain ways aspects of my life is in less than perfect secrecy because it happens in public or around other people or with private or public institutions but my bank account is a private matter between the bank and me. My pay check is a private matter between my employer and me. Where my cell phone is located is a private matter between the cell phone company and me. Life is full of small compartmentalized exchanges of information which together make up the bulk of what we consider privacy. Having sex isn't "private" because those you have sex with can tell other people about it, but I think most would consider an organized collection of that information was an invasion of privacy.

I'm not interested in living my life "fully in the open" as long as there as busybodies, bigots, rumormongers, besserwissers, peer pressure and so on. It's human nature to meddle in things that are none of their business, even if the NSA was wiped off the face of the earth I'd still want my privacy. Apparently you totally disagree since you want to go in that direction anyway, good for you. Put up webcams and broadcast your life to the world if you want, just don't drag me into it. Don't pretend it's something I want to, should have to or need to. And if you want to share video from a private establishment using Google Glass and is asked to leave, please make a scene so I can cheer when they throw you out. The NSA, well we might not win that fight but everyone with total access is a worse nightmare than just the NSA.

It's debatable that you can

[astralagos]

About 20 years ago, I worked for a private detective firm. At the time, I could call up a consultant who given a couple of pieces of information (name and address), would produce for me a complete dossier on a person - their social security number, credit history, vehicular records, neighbors, etc. This was, at the time, a few hundred bucks and a few days of work. Companies such as spokeo now offer to tell you all that information for about 15 bucks.

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.

Re:Not privacy

[elwinc]

Sounds like we need to talk about what privacy really is. A good definition of privacy is "control of your personal information" (probably from This paper.) Of course, keeping personal information entirely secret is the best means of control, but in the modern world, complete secrecy is getting more and more impractical. So what else could we do?

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...

Tinfoil Hats

[fred911]

And for the TSA, lead condoms with scrotum wings.