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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."
Google is not in e-mail advertising business. If you got any ads from maps visit, they would be the usual ones in your search results or banners on 3rd party sites (which do not get access to your e-mail or other identity info). Either you shared your e-mail in some other context related to the event, or your browser and/or mobile device are infected by keylogging/location logging malware.
You should get even more paranoid about your privacy!
Many of us have been warning about that trend for decades, to be ignored by the vast majority who do not mind a world with not a single shred of privacy. "What do you have to hide?" they ask.
Those of us who don't want to live in that world sadly have little choice. It's increasingly hard to avoid it, try as you might. You can wall yourself off, refuse to use the privacy-invading tech that everyone else favors, but at the cost of being increasingly cut off from mainstream society and even your own friends who no longer use any non-corporatized online communication. "Why use email when there's Facebook? Dude, get with the times! Nobody's on email man!"
People appear to hate the idea of the original internet: open standards with communications that were not monitized or centrally controlled. They much prefer that it be replaced with proprietary services, closed non-interacting protocols, and corporate-censored for-profit services that monitize everything they do. Thereby, the rest of us are forced to watch the internet we knew and loved be dragged in a direction we hate to see. It feels like destroying everything that made it great. In fact, destroying the very things that allowed it to become as world-changing as it did.
And I say that as somebody who was not young when it was arpanet and Vaxen. Rips out my heart to see what's happened to the place since then. Improvement, good. Development without wisdom, not so much.
Just because you are paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you. But in this case, the author kinda is paranoid. He could use a course on web browsers and email.
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.
It sounds like the author is alleging that Google gave his email address and marketing information to spammers. Is that true? Considering I have a gmail account that receives no spam at all, I think a more believable explanation is that he dropped his business card into a box somewhere, or signed-up on a list. In reality, 100% of my spam comes to the email address I have registered to my domain. My personal email gets nothing because I don't give it out.
Some people receive almost no spam. Other people get a 200:1 ratio of spam to real emails. Having done tech support, I can tell you by talking to someone for 5 minutes how much spam they get. Do they click on ads? Do they sign-up for stuff and give out their email? Do they play the lottery? Then they are in the high spam category. I bet a reporter is one of those people who gives out his contact information to absolutely everyone.
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.
Unless he created a dedicated email address specifically for the AA membership, he has no evidence of this. Again, more likely, he enaged in networking.
I don't even want to consider his example where his bluetooth somethingorother was transcribing his words and turning that into spam. That one is technically possible, but we just aren't there... yet.
With those complaints registered, many of the anecdotes in the story do make sense. A Google search triggered targeted ads on YouTube. Well yeah, Google owns both sites. This is one of the reasons people feared Google Plus: it was just *too* well integrated. I am just surprised that this is news to people at all. What do you think is in that 35 page license you clicked "accept" to in order to play that free Facebook game? Why do you think that flashlight app needs access to your contact list and the internet?
What exactly is there to be worried about?
The main takeaway, to me at least, is that very personal information of yours is not as personal as you think it is anymore. Do your google searches indicate that you've been diagnosed with an STD? Do they infer that you're a frequent marijuana user? Do your posts reveal that you're paranoid about your lover cheating on you? Do they flag you for an NSA interesting persons list?
Your searches reveal information about your interests, and they are most definitely recorded in order to advertise to you. As we have learned with the OPM, or with Ashley Madison, or with one of the many other thousands of instances of data theft, much of your information is unprotected. It can be used to blackmail you, to out you as a minority or stereotype, and to reveal your (mildly or severely) illegal activities.
You may think that you're a moral person, but most people have character traits that give them shame.
What exactly is there to be worried about?
Depends on what you own or are trying to hide... For most of us it's "Not much" and "Not Much" which gives you the answer you seek.
I have zero to hide from anyone.Yet, I value my privacy very much. Your statement is fail.
Those don't help much. Paying for something doesn't do anything to guarantee you aren't being "spied" on.
The better goal is to become a low-value target and increase the cost of marketing to you. Use ad blocking, and when you do see ads, just click on them. Click around on the site a little bit, and happily close the tab and get on with your life. Try to do so while reciting how much you hate advertising scum and all kinds of negative thoughts while on the advertiser's pages to make sure any association with their brand is negative.
Focus on the ad block though. If they can't display an ad to you you don't have much value to them.
Or soiled reputation. What happens when instead of getting help at an AA meeting, you are sponsoring someone you know and become a second line for someone else in the group and all this makes it look like you are the alcoholic when a job does a security and background check before they hire you. Or what about the same and your new girlfriend checks to see what kind of creep you might be and dumps you.
It can be problematic in several ways. If the info is being sold to advertisers, there is nothing stopping it from being sold to the investigation company or even law enforcement (who would likely had otherwise needed a warrant )
That's like keeping your front door wide-open and putting a sign in your yard that reads 'Steal my shit' then getting mad when you're robbed.
The fallacy here is that we're all low-value targets. Those ads you're avoiding are costing something tenths or hundredths of a penny. They really don't give a crap if a handful of people ignore them or try to game it or whatever.
All this shit is based on scale. If they advertise to 1,000,000 people and only 0.1% even pay any attention, that's still 1,000 people viewing their products and likely 10 or 20 that buy something -- which more than recoups the cost of those 999,000 "wasted" ads.
Tack on to that the fact that your connections and other such metadata are just as important as your browsing history. If they notice you've been looking at cars for example, they might send ads to your wife with more "girly" models or something.
You can go ahead and do everything in your power to reduce the visible impact to yourself (adblock and such) but don't mistake that for being immune to the disease -- you're only hiding the most obvious results of the data collection, not stopping the collection itself.
The only way to avoid all of these privacy breaches is stop using technology. Of any kind. No bank cards, no credit cards, no grocery store discount cards, no accounts on any websites. Hell probably don't even want an internet connection since that IP address is traceable in theory. Perhaps if you take a laptop with you and only use free public wifi and remember to re-image the device between usages so there's no possibility of leftover tracking data.. then maybe you can do something in near-complete privacy. Oh. And you probably shouldn't have any friends either in case they decide to post something about you on their wall/blog/whatever.
It's not simply about shame. Less than a century ago the world tore itself apart because a single trait was vilified, hunted, and slaughtered. We like to think that we've moved forward and are past such things but they are never far off. Donald Trump has more in common with Hitler than the founding fathers, yet he's the fore runner in the US Republican nomination. All it takes is a failing economy & desperate people to begin the cycle of hate. It might be gays in the US, Muslims in the EU, the poor in Canada, etc. Maybe it doesn't go to the lengths that Hitler did, maybe it only excludes certain classes of people from being able to attain a reasonable life. Alcoholic/Drug user? Excluded from working. Gay? Excluded from society. Criminal? Excluded from both. The biggest thing in immediate danger with the loss of privacy is opportunity. You must conform publicly in every way to the definition of the ideal or face ridicule, ostracization, or limitation. Privacy is liberty. Liberty to explore your boundaries, interests, and desires. Liberty to fix your mistakes, change your mind, & move forward in life without being restrained by your past choices. Without privacy none of that is possible.
in my country, my sexuality is a death sentence. So yes, I have quite a lot to hide.
I don't see how any of those arguments follow from one another. Ultimately it comes down to forgiveness and personal choice, doesn't it? We must all allow the liberties to OTHERS that we expect for ourselves. I don't see how privacy has anything to do with liberty, it simply removes the ability for those opposed to freedom to hide their oppressive tendencies.
Our history as humans is littered with examples. Women hiding behind male names to express their liberty in books. Irish hiding their ancestry to have the liberty to use services. Jews hiding their religion to avoid being rounded up and shipped to concentration camps.
How do you forgive someone for being Black or Muslim? Can you forgive a convicted child molester who has supposedly paid their debt to society?
Those are extreme examples to be sure but small ones happen every day. An alcoholic passed over for promotion despite 3 decades of sobriety, a teacher fired for taking part in a porno while in college, a politician forced to resign over an internet post taken out of context before they were in political life - all of these things are real events that would not have happened had their privacy been respected. The politician used a pseudonym, the teacher a stage name, the alcoholic attended meetings. All actions that had clear intent to remain anonymous and private under "private in public" doctrine (a foreign concept to Americans but well entrenched in other countries). The liberty to change, experiment, and speak all wrapped up in information that was intended to remain private and limited current/future opportunity for these individuals. Others who look at their situations and are influenced not to exercise their liberty for fear of loosing their opportunities leads to a society that is free in nothing but language.
Also, please don't mistake me. Actions have consequences (like the child molester going to jail), that is without question. Private actions, especially private in public actions, (like participating in a demonstration or shopping at certain stores or internet commenting) are very different and need protection.
It's not simply about shame...
Let's also not forget that in the U.S., it is against the law to track someone who is under 13 years old. But only maybe 1 in 1000 trackers really knows or cares about age. So many trackers in the U.S. are violating the law thousands or even millions of times a day.
And I, for one, object to that. I agree that children should not be tracked. Something must be done.
My own position, and the position EFF has (finally!) adopted is: tracking by opt-in only!
It is the only remaining viable way to protect privacy (and children).
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.
This is just a bunch of 3rd and 4th -party hearsay that Trump may have had a book of Hitler's speeches. It in no way supports your assertion that "Donald Trump has more in common with Hitler..." at all.
No, it's a first party witness (Ivana Trump) making a statement to Vanity Fair. Yes, it was re-reported by Business Insider making that particular article a 3rd party but the original statement is true as far as anyone can know.
This, of course, is just more of what I assumed you really meant, which that Trump is a racist and a misogynist, which is simply what the political class (especially on the left, and this guy is very far left) say about Trump. Sure, you can mischaracterize statements from anyone and claim they are racist, it happens all the time, but it's just hyperbole. This guy didn't really even try to demonstrate any commonalities between Trump and Hitler (except, as I pointed out, hair), rather he used Hitler's election to drum up additional hatred for Republicans in his leftist audience. You can find articles doing that all the time. In fact, I can find lots of similar articles using the same rhetoric about Bush W. and even Mitt Romney.
"Laziness is a trait in the blacks. ... Black guys counting my money! I hate it" - Trump
"China is killing us. They’ve taken so much of our wealth. They’ve taken our jobs. They’ve taken our business, they’ve taken our manufacturing, [audience member screams out “our land”] Our land? The way they’re going they’ll have that pretty soon.Think about it, we have rebuilt China — somebody said to me “that’s a harsh statement” — it’s the greatest theft in the history of the United States." - Trump
"When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people." - Trump
Hitler propaganda, bolstered by his "cabal" or not, preyed on such themes as the "lazy" Jews were stealing from "hardworking" German people. The blacks, the Jews, the Bolsheviks were to blame for all of "normal German's" issues. Much like Trump blames the Chinese, the Mexicans, the "Blacks", etc.
I'm not going to convince you but for most people it's plain as day that he uses the language of hate and fear to gain popularity. Win or lose he demonstrates how easily large portions of the population are swayed by the politics of blame and how large that population is.
The problem is that you never know what things people know about you today will be seen as illegal/immoral tomorrow. For example, few people would expect something as innocent as providing your religion on census forms could lead to your death later, but for millions, it did.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
What exactly is there to be worried about?
Depends on what you own or are trying to hide... For most of us it's "Not much" and "Not Much" which gives you the answer you seek.
The thing you will want to hide is the thing you didn't know you should have kept hidden.
Privacy is not a fixed thing. There are shades of privacy...
This is what shits me about privacy legislation, it is too black and white (either private in your home behind the curtains, or it public - hey you're on public property I have the right to record you and publish whatever you are doing to millions of eyes and ears). Actually even private is no longer private apparently.
Where is the granularity? I'd like to see some sort of localised expectation of privacy, eg if I walk down the street in my undies, I don't care if the neighbours see me, but does that give someone the right to put on TV? If I have a picnic in the public park with my mistress, should that be allowed to be put on TV?
It seems that the notion that you are in public doesn't appreciate that public in your local area is not the same as public globally.
We shouldn't be so willing, as a species, to sell our privacy in return for services. People know Facebook etc are mining everything they put into the platform, they just don't care enough and would stop using the site if it started charging in return for stopping the mining. You can blame companies like Facebook all you like, but as long as the only businesses that succeed are the ones that don't charge users and instead make money by selling the users (as advertising viewers or data directly) it'll keep happening.
You're a Dutch heterosexual?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
There's a pretty clear difference between raising up anger against people in power at the top of the system, and attacking the "other" because of inherent "otherness". Bernie is mad about people who have amassed so much wealth and power that they make the rules that govern them. Hitler didn't just want the rich and powerful Jews to suffer for his hatreds, he wanted to kill every single one of them.
Bernie just wants the super rich to pay some fucking taxes and not have the power to override the rest of the people.