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."

Comments

was just going to Facebook to post about this!

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

The US needs real consumer protection laws

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

It was for the bulk of human history, too

[argStyopa]

"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.

Re:It was for the bulk of human history, too

[phorm]

We had more privacy simply because information was limited by a lack of technology. Pre-internet, you could often move away from your past, your drinking escapades weren't posted on somebody's Facebook feed, and when the government wanted to watch you, it required a certain degree of manpower and physical retention that meant it generally wasn't worth it for trivial details.

Re:Moving to a future where you pay for freedom

[serviscope_minor]

People willingly give up their privacy for convenience. e.g. Letting Google see all their emails because they don't want to go through the trouble of setting up and running their own mail server.

But what's the point in setting up my own server? About 75% of the people I email use gmail, so even if I set up my own server, I still suffer google's creepy mail-stalking whether I like it or not.