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If You're Not Paranoid About Your Privacy, You're Crazy (theatlantic.com)
Muad'Dave writes: Here's an interesting article at The Atlantic about the prevalence of surveillance and the recent uptick in 'deja-vu' moments where devices seemingly hear your conversations and then attempt to market to you. From the article: "One night the previous summer, I’d driven to meet a friend at an art gallery in Hollywood, my first visit to a gallery in years. The next morning, in my inbox, several spam e-mails urged me to invest in art. That was an easy one to figure out: I’d typed the name of the gallery into Google Maps. Another simple one to trace was the stream of invitations to drug and alcohol rehab centers that I’d been getting ever since I’d consulted an online calendar of Los Angeles–area Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. Since membership in AA is supposed to be confidential, these emails irked me. Their presumptuous, heart-to-heart tone bugged me too. Was I tired of my misery and hopelessness? Hadn’t I caused my loved ones enough pain? Some of these disconcerting prompts were harder to explain. For example, the appearance on my Facebook page, under the heading “People You May Know,” of a California musician whom I’d bumped into six or seven times at AA meetings in a private home. In accordance with AA custom, he had never told me his last name nor inquired about mine. And as far as I knew, we had just one friend in common, a notably solitary older novelist who avoided computers altogether. I did some research in an online technology forum and learned that by entering my number into his smartphone’s address book (compiling phone lists to use in times of trouble is an AA ritual), the musician had probably triggered the program that placed his full name and photo on my page."
In every example given, initial worst assumptions give way to mundane explanations. What exactly is there to be worried about?
Hmm. I don't know.
Ad networks, tracking, cookies, etc, allow even disparate ad companies to deduce information about an individual user without having to resort to the "sell your information to spammers" mantra. Google doesn't sell your information to spammers, they instead provide detailed demographic information for better ad targeting. So you add that data to referring URL information on sites that track user movements across the web, the cookies created at the various sites, etc; and you have a pretty good idea of who a person is and what their interests, habits, and proclivities are. There's no doubt that Google has this information, and they likely aren't the only ones. Do a search on something like "how can I better target my advertising online" and behold the cesspool that we've built.
The issue's not whether you're paranoid,... the issue is whether you're paranoid enough.
BTW - uMatrix reports that Slashdot works with the following advertising/tracking networks: Google Analytics, Google Ad Services, Google Tag Services, RPX Now/Janrain, and Taboola. There's also ntv.io, I'm unable to quickly find what that is.
I'm sorry, but your opinion seems to be wrong.
My first run-in with online privacy happened in the late 1990's when a persistent troll found personal info on me and broadcast it all over discussion boards in an attempt to embarrass me into silence.
I realized after the "breach" it's easy to leave inadvertent clues. Somebody with enough patience and persistence can put these clues together to dig around in search engines for personal info and your online trail.
And there are plenty of freaks out there who make the Interwebs their sadism engine. It's their only "power" in life.
I'm much more careful about "crossing topics" now. For example, if I'm on a board about pets, I don't talk about IT and vice versa. But, that's probably still not enough as one tends have certain phrasing patterns that leave sufficient clues for "statistical linking". Most trolls probably don't go that far or are not smart enough, but you never know. They may have a script-buddy to barter for zombie PC time or something.
Table-ized A.I.
Agree. I've been around computing since 1976 and the intertubes since it moved steadily out of academia into the 'world'. I've proposed a couple of times, half seriously, that we just choose another couple of ports and 'leave' the 2015 web to Coca-Cola, Facebook [of which many people believe that IS the web] etc. etc.
I've noticed that every commercial web 'strategy' tries to maximise supplied user information. For example, I don't want to reveal my mobile number [it's usually switched off or in the kitchen drawer anyway, I'm old] so I put 99999 etc. in that field, unless I feel it's really necessary. I tick/untick the 'supply information to third parties and receive offers from third parties boxes'. I am on the mail preference list and telephone preference list in the UK, very little or no junk mail or robocalls. I'm with a cooperative that supplies telephone and broadband, not one of the big commercials. I've started using a lot of cash again, just to annoy anything that's datamining my shopping habits.
I'm aware that all this is somewhat quixotic and minimal, but it's better than inaction.
One last thing join where something = something-else is a powerful enemy, phone number, email address etc. and we don't really know who's doing that, on which set of databases and where. But 'they' [I don't necessarily mean NSA, could be Walmart, ASDA in the UK] are doing it. Maximise shareholder value baby and fuck your bratty whiny protests about 'privacy'.
On y va, qui mal y pense!