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Report: Internet Users Feel Powerless To Protect Their Privacy From Corporations
Mark Wilson writes: A paper produced by a team at the University of Pennsylvania confirms something many people have probably thought true for some time: the notion that internet users are unhappy with the way their privacy is undermined by advertisers and online companies, yet feel there is nothing they can do about it. While marketing companies like to present an image of customers who are happy to hand over personal information in return for certain benefits, the truth is rather different. Rather than dedicating time and energy to trying to stop personal data from being exploited, people are instead taking it on the chin and accepting it as part and parcel of modern, online life. It's just the way things are.
Herman Munster at 1313 Mockingbird Lane is probably less than pleased with me though.
Everybody expect free services. Nobody want to pay for anything, and they all expect privacy. Maybe it's time to wake up. Facebook, Google, Amazon or Apple are not charities, they are for-profit companies. They must find way to monetize their users' data. At the same time, Facebook probably wouldn't have been if it had been paywall'ed.
If you want to preserve your privacy, then DON'T PUT PICTURES OF YOUR COCK ONLINE!
Somebody correct me if I'm wrong but I use Firefox with the following add-ons: AdBlock (no whitelist), Better Privacy, Google Analytics Opt Out, HTTPS-Everywhere, Noscript, Privacy Badger and Self-Destructing Cookies.
How are we supposed to know what add-ons you use?
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
Why would they feel powerless... When they are already essentially willingly giving out their personal information on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other social media services...
Internet users by the hundreds of millions give all their personal communications to online ad companies, including Google and Facebook. They have cheerfully gone from running their own mail programs to using Gmail or Ymail for everything. They gladly blab the private details of their lives, with photos, to Facebook and Twitter. They kept visiting signs once banner ads started... and then ran javascript from ad companies. They fall all over themselves every time there's a new service that vacuums up all their data, when there's no reason for that data to leave their own computer.
Sorry, internet users, but fuck you. The internet didn't used to be like this. You are the ones who supported turning the fucking thing from a true peer to peer network into a centralized, data-mined clusterfuck of overcommercialization and profiling. I don't want to hear how you don't like it. You made all the choices that led here.
OK, to be fair: not every last one of you. But enough that those who didn't were a rounding error and could be ignored.
So the Facebook generation that demands every online service be priced at how-fucking-dare-you-charge-me-for-this is now claiming there's nothing that can be done about the privacy they blindly signed away 473 EULAs ago.
Oh, that's rich.
Don't worry though. If you thought this was bad, I'm certain IoT will make these privacy concerns look like a 12-year old boy with a telescope.
It's one thing that your supermarket knows what food stuffs you bought recently. And a local sports store knows what socks & running shoes you bought recently. And a local electronics store knows what multimeter you bought the other day. But all these stores normally don't have that data from each other. They can't connect the dots, unless they are all part of the same company AND you used your frequent shopper card.
So each store only gets a limited 'view' of your habits. Only the place(s) where you buy food, might suspect your eating habits. Only that sports store might suspect your sports habits. Etc, etc. Okay, your bank may get a list of transactions at several places, but not get all details about what you bought or did at each place. This is how it is expected in the 'offline world'.
Online tracking might feed the data into a bigger mother company, advertisers that aggregate data, companies that 'voluntary share' some operational data, etc. Sure, there might be laws against some of that sharing. Sure, privacy policies may lead you to believe such things are out of the question. But can you rely on that? Are you sure?
If not, this allow painting a much more detailed picture about one's life. Would you want such a detailed picture to be painted? Would you even want the records to be kept that allows this to happen? For me personally it's "NO" for the most part, perhaps on the fence for a few aspects, and the word "creepy" comes to mind. Not exactly matching with what's already technically possible, and what some companies are known to be doing these days (yep FB comes to mind. But they're far from alone).
"How?"
Realize that the Internet is not the web. Install an ad/tracking blocker. Avoid, or delete your accounts on Facebook/Google/Apple/"social media". Pay for a domain(s), and use different email addresses for different accounts. Use a VPN. Regularly clear cookies in your browser. Vote for politicians who "get it," and truly understand the Internet, surveillance and privacy.
Donate to the the EFF.
There's more, which is left as an exercise for the reader.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
But those only work in FireFox. If you really want to increase your privacy, add those hostnames to your hosts file. Mine contains ~131k tracker/adserver hosts mapped to 0.0.0.0 (there's even about a dozen for facebook). This doesn't just drop the served mal-content, it prevents requests to those hosts at the system level for all browsers or other software.
As a consequence I rarely see any ads on the internet and my browser ad-blocking/privacy plugins have a very light workload.
Is the article implying that there IS a way to protect our privacy? How?
(1) Hack the company's servers
(2) Delete the data they have collected
(3) Hope the do not detect the intrusion before their rolling backups overwrite their pervious backups which include your data
(4) ???
(5) Profit!
Not that this is really recommended; they are bigger than you, legally speaking.
If you want to preserve your privacy, then DON'T PUT PICTURES OF YOUR COCK ONLINE!
As we discovered in the John Oliver interview with Edward Snowden, it's the NSA's job to put pictures of your cock online, not yours!
But you don't have to use Facebook... ...to be tracked.
You know all those "share via social media" buttons you see everywhere? Do you think they just exist to make it easy for users to repost content? No, they're for tracking anyone and everyone who goes to those sites (i.e., all) who don't have the trackers filtered through the likes of PrivacyBadger and ad-blockers.
And the ratio of users that use those is minuscule enough that the users of the blockers themselves (like me) can be tracked via browser fingerprinting ridiculously easily anyway.
The general population is powerless against the corporations unless they simply give up entirely and go dark. What a nifty fucking choice, eh?
Get down off your high-horse, Lord Farquaad.
--
BMO
I'm gonna summon APK, but blocking Facebook's tracking (and Google's, which is even more pervasive) is not difficult, at least for now. If hosts files and privacy-enhanced DNS servers are too much to ask, there are browser plugins. You mentioned some. My point is that the people who feel so powerless now are exactly the ones who got us into this mess, because they were and are so complacent about every invasion into their privacy if they can only avoid learning anything about anything. If people treated shoes like they treat computers, most people would have to buy shoes with Velcro fasteners because they wouldn't even consider learning how to tie a shoe.
Someone with a solution for your problem will be here shortly. Please hold.
It seems to me that the problem is that the user does not want put in the effort to learn about the tools and services they are using. It's conceived as overly complex, probably because of a combination of factors like zealots, technical jargon, corporate bullshit, etc. Even when it is not it's conceived as intrusive. The fact of the matter is that humans are stubborn creatures, and many humans think that when they graduate they don't have to learn anything new, ever. Most people don't have advanced degrees in economics and related fields to advertising, so they simply cannot comprehend how data mined they are being and why it is bad, often because off short-sightedness, "if you have nothing to hide .." comes to mind. Narcissism takes precedence to security with a lot of people, evidently, just look at facebook membership rates and the amount of facade-building (fake/phony/w/e) profiles with all kinds of information others with different frames of mind can use and abuse.
The only reasonably safe software is software you can and _do_ audit, where you can access source code to see what programmers have done. No closed source ecosystem can ever provide this. Stop putting everything in services, cloud, whatever and learn about the tools you are using, computers are good at numbers, so you can assume they can be useful to encrypt your stuff to keep it safe, too. RTFM.
You can do something. You can do many things. Turn on, tune in, drop out: Would you leave your laptop with a total stranger? No? Why would you leave your data with total strangers then?
$0.02
"To err is human, to forgive, beyond the scope of the Operating System"
Yes willingly, nobody has a fucking gun to your head to use this stuff, lack of willpower in a toy store is not "oppression".There's no trickery in any of this, you voluntarily (and often eagerly) sign up for a service and pay for what you use in either dollars, eyeballs, rabbit skins, whatever. Bitching about the privacy costs of of a FB account is like bitching about the electricity bill while sitting in an air-conditioned room, it will always be modded up because people hate paying bills.
Of course government spying is a whole different ball of wax, nobody signed up for that!
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
The list I use is the result of merging three separate adserver blacklists about a decade ago. It honestly doesn't require all that much maintenance... if I see an ad, I find the hostname it came from and add it to the hosts file. I think I've made 3 such edits in the past year or so.
Why is Acxiom never mention in privacy? They collect data on people independent of social media and independent of any consent or even knowledge they are being tracked. They have information on you even if you've never joined any social media site. They track your credit card purchases, everything you buy, and who knows what else, and they are selling the data to who knows who. They sound way more dangerous than FB and google combined.
Your use of the word "sheep" is the problem.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
I'd pay money for a Facebook or GMail that didn't sell/give my info to others. I can probably solve the second by running my own mail server, but I don't have the knowledge yet.
But, of course, if someone were to try to make Cashbook, they'd end up having the community split between themselves and Facebook. And who knows, Facebook might sue over a patent.
These methods are not effective, and ultimately they are doomed. The reasons are obvious:
1) Their incentive to track us is stronger than our incentive to resist.
2) Not enough people will do these things, so tracking will continue to be profitable, hence will continue to be done.
3) You have no moral nor legal right to privacy when engaging in business transactions.
4) Their lobbyists are better funded than yours.
You can create some friction by resisting, but mostly the only one feeling the heat will be you. Tracking is part of how the world works now. It is one of the many aspects of reality that we just have to accept. You can no more stop tracking than you can stop scientific progress or force a Republican to be reasonable.
The only problem I've run across in using your own domain for email is that some places won't accept an email address using an "unknown" domain when creating an account. Case in point, Guitar World magazine, apparently they'll only accept accounts with an email from an ISP, or from Yahoo, Hotmail, or Gmail. It took me a few attempts to figure that out, because they won't even tell you why they won't send a registration activation email to that address.
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
So, if you own company "joesguitarstore.com" and want to use your work email, you're screwed? Sounds like a company to not do business with, because they're obviously customer hostile.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
This post sounds plausible. However the combination of boldface, ALL CAPS, unnecessary exclamation points (!), and absolutisms ("...it's an undeniable fact") has my B.S. meter pegged.
Hey, Windows users, there is no such thing as "forward" slash, there is only slash and backslash.