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Privacy: the 21st Century's Newest Luxury Item
chicksdaddy writes: There is a report today on the 21st century's newest luxury item: online privacy The Christian Science Monitor writes about the growing market for premium privacy protection tools available to tech-savvy consumers with the desire for online anonymity — and the means to pay for it.
The piece profiles new tools from companies like Abine that deliver everything from self-destructing e-mail messages to the 21st century's equivalent of Kleenex: one-off "throwaway" online identities to keep advertisers, merchants and government snoops at bay. Privacy experts, however, doubt that the new tools will tip the scales of online privacy in favor of consumers and away from governments and advertisers. "Consumers really don't have a fighting chance," says Andrea Matwyshyn of Princeton University. "Technology moves entirely too fast."
She and others see the need for both bigger fixes and the level of Internet infrastructure and law. "As a consumer protection matter, there needs to be a floor," she said. "Just as there are laws protecting renters from substandard housing, or car buyers from 'lemons,' there need to be regulations that create a buffer between consumers and companies."
The piece profiles new tools from companies like Abine that deliver everything from self-destructing e-mail messages to the 21st century's equivalent of Kleenex: one-off "throwaway" online identities to keep advertisers, merchants and government snoops at bay. Privacy experts, however, doubt that the new tools will tip the scales of online privacy in favor of consumers and away from governments and advertisers. "Consumers really don't have a fighting chance," says Andrea Matwyshyn of Princeton University. "Technology moves entirely too fast."
She and others see the need for both bigger fixes and the level of Internet infrastructure and law. "As a consumer protection matter, there needs to be a floor," she said. "Just as there are laws protecting renters from substandard housing, or car buyers from 'lemons,' there need to be regulations that create a buffer between consumers and companies."
to the oft heard refrain of the power class "if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to worry about".
Weird that the rich would have ... something to worry about.
Since work no longer relates to wealth, the psychopaths in charge are right to be afraid.
As long as the government's privacy policies and legislation remain as badly broken as they are, what happens in the commercial sector isn't of much significance.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
What a coincidence: I was just logging onto post about our lack of privacy!
Seriously, we don't have privacy any more because most people don't give a shit about it. They support the most privacy invading companies like FB and Google, they keep voting for the same privacy invading political parties, they keep buying even single player games that spy on their playing behaviors, they keep acting in all ways consistent with giving their privacy away like it means nothing. Some of us were screaming from the rooftops that this was a bad idea and maybe we shouldn't support those things with our purchasing dollars, but nobody listened, and now we have TVs that record everything that happens in your living room and sends it off to be stored on who knows who's server farm. Soon it'll be video from inside your house if it isn't already. And you can be sure the NSA wants its hands all over that shit.
No, we don't fucking deserve privacy, because at every step of the way, we gave it away with nary a thought to where that road was going to lead. Now we're down that road a ways, and we're getting exactly what it was clear we were going to get.
Making it illegal won't help, it'll just move it overseas. The only way to fix it is to let it become SO bad that even Joe Sixpack revolts. So bring it, I say. Let it happen. Embrace the Orwell. Only in getting worse, can it get better.
People seem rather keen to rush towards a future where you pay - either in money or time or experience - for more freedom. Either freedom of privacy, or simply ability (like paying more to avoid internet content blocks).
Happily for most here we have both the technical ability and the funds needed to have "real" digital freedom. But it would be nicer if more of us were more self-aware we have freedoms others do not, and support more efforts to ensure more non-technical users can enjoy the same freedom. Because we understand better what is being lost, we have a duty to call out when we see digital freedoms being taken away from those who do not realize what they are losing.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The US needs real consumer protection and data privacy laws, and enforcement actions to back them up. It's been left up to the free market to sort out, and the situation has gotten entirely out of fucking control.
Check out all these slimeballs scrambling to profit every time you click on a web page. Gathering your data, selling it amongst themselves and to the highest bidders, handing it to the NSA under the table. Your insurance company knows you visited marlboro.com to request a free deck of cards even though you've never smoked in your life. Target knows your daughter is pregnant before she tells anyone. Companies like ChoicePoint and Axciom, who you've never even done any business with, have enormous amounts of data about you, it's the only reason those companies exist. It goes on.
We've left this situation unregulated for long enough, we need real consumer protection legislation with teeth.
IT'S TIME FOR REAL PRIVACY LAWS IN AMERICA.
goddamn, I thought Taco was inept.
What the fuck is with these constant fuckups with the site the last week?!!!
Pass a federal law that stipulates the following...
1. All programs that deal with user activity data and/or PII must have a privacy policy in a centralized location, prominent on the company's web site.
2. They must be written to the 9th grade reading level and all industry terms must be defined in as close to 9th grade reading level language as possible.
3. Failure to publish a good faith attempt of a privacy policy within one business week of publishing production code is a civil offense with strict liability.
4. Failure to comply within 90 business days is a misdemeanor.
5. A pattern of three or more intentional failures within a five year period is a class E federal felony (1 to 5 years prison).
6. When done to facilitate other classes of crime, it becomes a class D federal felony (5 to 10 years in prison).
Or where you pay for an illusion of privacy
You can pay (through time spent) for real privacy through verification of all network traffic on your network.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
You don't need your TV to monitor your conversation so that you get even less exercise than pressing a button.
You don't need a smartphone if all you do is listen to music and get bus times and stock quotes and news briefs.
Embrace Dumbness. Reject Smart Technology.
Besides, we're already recording you and using your cell and phone and Net providers to track you. Don't help us even more.
This includes answering those stupid FB polls that just let us collect more data on you.
Rip FB out of your phone.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
To beat these fuckers you MUST do TWO things...
1) Use Anonymous Networks and crypto everywhere by default such as I2P, Tor, Pond, GnuNet, Phantom, CJDNS, gnupg, etc... it's easy, fun and cool :-)
2) Become politically active so that you get the laws written that YOU want, instead of getting the laws THEY want.
If you want to win, YOU MUST DO BOTH.
If you cheap out on either one of them you will lose.
Do you want a government that has the power and resources to "solve problems" or "take care of [insert your pet cause/group here]"? Such a government WILL abuse that power. Anyone who thinks otherwise is a fool.
Or do you want your privacy and a government that doesn't have the power to oppress you?
You can't have Obamacare without the NSA.
You: I have both the technical ability and the funds needed to have "real" digital freedom.
Coercive authority: Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons.
Take a wild guess who wins this battle. (The "puny weapons" are just a cynical metaphor for the power of coercion.)
"She'll get years for that. Off switches are illegal!"
then the "floor" she asks for will move too fast as well; with or without law.
This site uses five or more tracking cookies. What the heck? Why pretend to be friendly to users and still use methods to spy on ones visitors?
A luxury is something you can obtain.
Think about it: if you have accounts on any website that offers it for "free", and that includes Slashdot, ANYTHING you post on them, any email you send through GMail, or Yahoo, or MSN/Hotmail, any photo you post on Facebook, any tweet you send, from the moment it hits the site and regardless of "privacy" settings, belongs to the company that owns the service. You're not a valued client to them for the simple reason that you're not paying out of your pocket for the service. What you're *giving* these companies is something far more valuable: your personal data. This they use to target ads, to collect statistical data, and yes, to track you as an individual through trackable crumbs left on your computer and through your online accounts.
Don't take my word for it, have a proper read through the terms and conditions on these sites. Somewhere in there, in not so many words, hidden in among the boilerplate, is the phrase, "WE OWN YOUR DATA".
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
fuck all that shit, if you want privacy online, DO SHIT OFFLINE.
Anyone else remember way back when we actually had to go face to face for human interaction because international calls cost a fucking fortune? Facebook has killed not only the art of conversation, but it has also seriously harmed the human psyche in terms of our ABILITY to socialise in what scant twenty years ago would have been considered normal modes of interaction.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
Abine Inc., 280 Summer Street, Boston, MA 02210. Then what? Remember Lavabit.
Anyone else remember way back when we actually had to go face to face for human interaction because international calls cost a fucking fortune?
Yeah, because international face to face meetings were so much cheaper than a phone call.
'Privacy' is not an item, as little as 'safety' is an item'
"Privacy" as formulated in 2015 is frankly a fairly modern concept. As much as people seem to assert "we used to have privacy" I suspect it was about as real as the 'Father Knows Best' prototypical TV family - ie not really.
For the bulk of human existence, we have lived in small family or clan groups. This meant that everyone not only knew everything about you, but (usually) everything about everyone you were related to, and your ancestors. Had a crazy g'great grandfather that got caught cheating on his wife? Everyone knows, and likely expects that you're not terribly faithful either. Mother was a drunk? Everyone knows, and expects you're probably a drunk too. You said bad things about the clan chief, odds are eventually he knew. You were not only responsible for what you said or believed, you were frequently called to account for it (fairly or not).
Privacy - the very concept of anonymity - was extraordinarily limited until literacy was widespread, and even then the idea that you'd write something and nobody knew who wrote it was ridiculous really until the printing press, and even then the number of people involved meant your risk of discovery probably was a steeper curve than your audience breadth until the modern era, and small-shop copy machines/mimeographs.
-Styopa
This is well-meaning but actually a mistake, for it reinforces this power imbalance between two types of actors, (big) "companies" and (small) "consumers" where you could work on balancing the imbalance instead.
How? By working on systems that allow for everyone to be a first-class citizen within the system, having different capabilities arise from the relationships between actors rather than from their entry point to the system. As an example, classic big corp "identity" systems provide for exactly one identity per actor and moreover know two classes of citizen: Those that "provide identitiy", and those that get identified. This is wrong.
A proper system only provides for, essentially, transporting actors' identity claims that can then be backed by any other actor, making everyone a first-class actor. The truth of such claims then depends on the veracity of the backing to the claims.
Meaning that a passport's identity claim is only valid when backed by a recognised government (rather its avatar, if you will, within such a system), but that you only get access to Auntie Bee's party if your identity claim is backed by someone she recognises. To the system, it makes no difference. To its users, it makes quite a lot of difference. Moreover, the system only says that the claims aren't forged, whether they're any good otherwise is up to the users. And that's exactly how the division of labour for using such a system should be.
This is entirely different from the usual way, and also why, say, something like NSTIC is really a government control vehicle: It makes most ordinary users second-class citizens, and doesn't allow for multiple identities, quite unlike how most people live their daily lives. That last bit might surprise you, but it is true. You have multiple identities for all that they quite often share names. Your identity toward your spouse is quite different from your identity toward your workplace, at least for most of us, for example. Or if you're in school, your identity toward your teachers is different from your identity toward your friends. In some cases the differences can become extreme enough that you really don't want one group to even know about your identity toward another. If we're allowing the one identity per person model to become dominant, you'll get to learn the hard way just how oppressive having (to have) a facebook profile can become.
The thing is that the internet allows us to build such first-class-citizen-only systems, and moreover that we can put "zero-knowledge proofs" right at the hearts of such systems, thereby providing systems with reasonable to good privacy yet that are hard to abuse. That way, even the smallest party can deal with the largest parties on a virtually (oh the meta) equal footing. This means you don't have to fool around with laws that then need enforcement. The protection is built right into the system.
We could have this. Now that I told you, all we need is to build it.
Was your iPhone 6+ in his asshole already?
attack them with loads of false data. Make their data worthless and they will have to adapt. Hopefully by moving towards strong user privacy and consent policies.
Nah, we don't share so we don't cross contaminate each other.
FTFY.
...or they can track the initial visit to a high quality proxy being run by a reputable person or company, perhaps in another country if that's what it takes.
The idea that only regulations and government can solve problems is corrosive.
uh... whoosh?
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
One thing cool about the rich, not all of them are very smart. Business in the snake oil trade is always very good. These are the same people who buy "unbreakable DRM" also, right? What the hell, let's milk 'em for all they got.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Don't forget that this knowledge was mutual: Everyone else knew everything about you, and you, about them just as much. Since knowledge is power, both sides knowing everything balances the power in the relationship. This gets harder in cities, and now with the internet much harder still. Thus we have information asymmetry and therefore a power imbalance. The simple fix is to make sure both sides know nothing, hence privacy.
It's a challenge because lots of previous assumptions will have to be revisited, processes amended to work without assumptions you know much of anything about the other party. Note that lots of fraud hinges on passing false required information as true. Make the same process not require the information at all, and the fraud becomes impossible because meaningless. So yes, the visibility of privacy as a concept has increased massively, mostly because the need for it have also has become so much more visible, and pressing.
If you have a name like Ichabod Rumpelstiltskin you will find it hard to hide on the internet. Change it to John or Mary Smith and you will be difficult to pinpoint. Change it to common words and searching you out will be nearly impossible. Consider words like 'and', 'the', 'if', or 'swell'. You could start a baseball team and call it Who's On First. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
...omphaloskepsis often...
and the ultra poor.
When I read the title I was thinking of cameras and such - until I read all the cyberprivacy stuff.
It seems to apply to that too.
Since poor people need to go through public places to get to food stores, private, they need to go through 2 sets of cameras.
"You have no expection of privacy in public," and, "It's private so they can do whatever they want," statements are used.
A poor person can't hire someone else and must go themselves and hence be caught on camera.
Why don't you guys have friends or journals?
For example: iptables -I OUTPUT -d 31.13.93.0/24 -j REJECT