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Privacy Behaviors Changed Little After Snowden
An anonymous reader writes: An article in Communications of the ACM takes a look at how Edward Snowden's revelations about government surveillance have changed privacy behaviors across the world. The results are fairly disappointing. While the news that intelligence agencies were trawling data from everyday citizens sparked an interest in privacy, it was small, and faded quickly. Even through media coverage has continued for a long time after the initial reports, public interest dropped back to earlier levels long ago. The initial interest spike was notably less than for other major news events. Privacy-enhancing behaviors experienced a small surge, but that too failed to impart any long-term momentum. The author notes that the spike in interest "following the removal of privacy-enhancing functions in Facebook, Android, and Gmail" was stronger than the reaction to the government's privacy-eroding actions.
The state, which was formerly the institution from the people for the people, is now an institution to protect property and economic interests. Therefore, it must spy on us so unrest can be contained. However, this only works as long as the unrest (towards the owners) does not include 10-15% of the population. Therefore, you need media and companies which provide us with products and dreams. And to be able to perfectly match our dreams and needs you need information on us. Therefore, the companies spy on us too. Isn't that wonderful.
Of course the problem with this characterization is it somehow implies that this is something only people with mental illness believe.
The reality is, it is now an objective fact that it is true.
But for some reason this fact hasn't sunk in, and people keep acting like it's solely for paranoids and other crazy people to be concerned about.
And that's simply not true.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
The problem is that they don't notice their privacy being compromised during the daily use of the service. Maybe they will see some tailored advertisements but that's it. If they would get a detailed report about what information is pulled from their messages and how it is used, then maybe they would change their minds about using the service. All the datamining happens quietly in the background. It's a discreet man-in-the-middle operation.
It's too damn complicated for level 1 techs, let alone end users and the general public, to attempt to opt of surveillance, or even intelligently express their dissatisfaction with government and corporate policies.
Politicians don't care and corporations do. These policies will persist until people's lives are strongly negatively affected. Will it require significant damage as a result of foreign powers hacking into the industrial grid? Probably. God knows we aren't in the streets protesting TSA security theater, and its difficult to get more privacy invasive than seeing folks naked.
Hoist Number One and Number Six.
Just suppose that following Snowden a large percentage of the population decided to significantly increase the security of the internet use. This would force the NSA et al to increase power of their automated collection systems to compensate and those of us already taking enhanced security measures would lose out. If the populous does nothing then the NSA can just continue as they were. ..... Nothing! (or at least nothing interesting to the NSA). He has wasted considerable time, his apple has gone brown and he has nothing to show for it. I am just as iritated as before, but now he is iritated as well.
Of course, one could argue that this lack of popular action simply makes security concious users stand out in the eyes of the NSA and attracts special attention. But perhaps this is also a good thing. Allow me to explain:
I start with the precept that the NSA will be able to gain access to practically everything I do online (and probably offline) no matter what I do. Given this, I would far rather be a special case. Imagine somone at NSA HQ clicking the "Collect and analyse all internet traffic from the UK" icon. Their computers hoover up some vast number of terabytes including mine and finds little of interest. The operative takes another bite from his apple and clicks the next icon "Collect and analyse all.....". My data has been spied on and I am iritated, but unless he finds a rotten bit of apple he isn't.
Now imagine that my security is rather better than most. The operative clicks the icon, but gets an error saying "Data from Huskydog not available". Gosh, thinks the operative, someone hiding their information, I must have stumbled upon an Al-Qaeda sleeper cell. He puts down his apple and starts to dig deeper. Eventually, after some time and effort he breaks in and
So, given that we wish to iritate the NSA (and that is probably we worst we can hope to do to them) perhaps the best solution is to have a significant number of special cases which stand out from the easy to access heard and thus require special time consuming efforts to spy on but with nothing to show for it in the end.