Snowden: 'The Central Problem of the Future' Is Control of User Data (techcrunch.com)

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey interviewed Edward Snowden via Periscope about the wide world of technology. The NSA whistleblower "discussed the data that many online companies continue to collect about their users, creating a 'quantified world' -- and more opportunities for government surveillance," reports TechCrunch. Snowden said, "If you are being tracked, this is something you should agree to, this is something you should understand, this is something you should be aware of and can change at any time." TechCrunch reports: Snowden acknowledged that there's a distinction between collecting the content of your communication (i.e., what you said during a phone call) and the metadata (information like who you called and how long it lasted). For some, surveillance that just collects metadata might seem less alarming, but in Snowden's view, "That metadata is in many cases much more dangerous and much more intrusive, because it can be understood at scale." He added that we currently face unprecedented perils because of all the data that's now available -- in the past, there was no way for the government to get a list of all the magazines you'd read, or every book you'd checked out from the library. "[In the past,] your beliefs, your future, your hopes, your dreams belonged to you," Snowden said. "Increasingly, these things belong to companies, and these companies can share them however they want, without a lot of oversight." He wasn't arguing that companies shouldn't collect user data at all, but rather that "the people who need to be in control of that are the users." "This is the central problem of the future, is how do we return control of our identities to the people themselves?" Snowden said.

Comments

I can think of bigger central problems

[Anonymous Coward]

Pandemics
Civil and international war
The ongoing islamisation of the population
Pollution and the depletion of natural resources, including fossil fuels
Science denial
Donald Trump
The collapse of the European Union
America's sovereign debt

All of these things concern me more than control of my personal data.
Yes, control of my personal data concerns me - particularly my genome and corporations' attempts to patent something that is inherintly part of me and which they didn't invent. But the above issues are bigger problems.

Re:I can think of bigger central problems

[Bongo]

I gather originally, group-think and group-identity around a common myth, is what allowed disparate tribes to unite. Islam is just version 3 after Christianity (v2) and Judaism (v1) and Zoroaster (v0). But because group identity is exactly what you want when fighting a war, it is always inherently weaponisable. Which is perhaps why modern people find religion and ideology inherently scary. Because they are.

The saving grace is that most people, whatever their inherited cultural differences, tend to just want to get on with their lives. And the general movement is towards greater empathy, because humanity does grow, and stats that, there are currently fewer wars overall than in previous times, are to be taken seriously. But that's no consolation to anyone currently unlucky enough to be in the middle of one.

Religions are scary. That's why everyone has to insist that they are all of peace. Because we really need everyone to not feel threatened. Because you don't want to help anyone activate the red button to weaponise them any further.

The Middle East is unfortunately still "developing" and doesn't really have a lot of stable nation states. They have a very difficult transition. And they are actively weaponising religion. But that doesn't mean that the the millions of people who are part of those groups culturally, are intent on any of that crap themselves.

Re:I can think of bigger central problems

[EmeraldBot]

Aaaaaaargh I'm an idiot, I should have checked the preview more carefully. Here's the ending of my second paragraph, and my sincere apologies for not having caught that.

"...but for all the people who are afraid that of muslims, if you really are against what you perceive as a culture of barbaric cultural practices, I sure hope you're leading a progressive movement within one of these churches, assuming you're a member. The alternative is that you are, at best, a misinformed hypocrite, which I'm afraid the vast majority seem to be."

Furthermore, I screwed up the first link. Rather than linking to this webpage itself (duh), it's supposed to go here.

Re: I can think of bigger central problems

[rickb928]

Equal?

Do you mean 'equivalent'?

Even then, they are not.

Islam has various sects with beliefs along a spectrum of 'peace be upon you' to 'surrender or die'. And these sects vary on the topic of secular rule, from an opinion of no opinion to an opinion of absolute religious rule in all of life, for everyone. The most radical Islamic beliefs are either nonviolent and benevolent, or committed to rule by the sword and global domination in the name of their god. We tend to consider the most violent sects as 'radical', failing to also recognize the other extreme. 'Militant' doesn't even describe the violent extremists adequately. But we recognize them.

Buddhism is commonly thought of as a religion, but I'm not sure it isn't better described as a philosophy. And widely misunderstood. But it is not reliant on belief in a deity. Not very religious. Not totally nonviolent, but if you've angered an observant Buddhist, you've done something I think of as wrong.

Hinduism, being a collection of beliefs with commonalities, does rely on deities, but even within that collective there is some discord. Not a monolith, but common enough to be named. Sadly, they sometimes fight among each other.

Christianity is described as a collective group of beliefs encompassing Catholicism, Protestantism, Eastern Orthodoxies, Mormon, and a variety of others. Some of those I named I do not grant as actually 'Christian', but they self-identify as such, and I won't exclude them for the purposes of this discussion. Violent Christianity is, to me, almost an oxymoron, but I'm prejudiced. I cannot easily identify a Christian nation today, which is not a problem I seek to address.

Judaism also is composed of various sects, ranging from very relaxed observance to strict, widely considered archaic, practices. And it is not now practiced as historically required by the most ancient beliefs. It is also probably the most persecuted, subjectively yes.

Equal? Hardly. Equivalent? More accurate but still not 100%. To indict religion as a destructive force is, in my mind, a shallow and incomplete understanding of the dynamic. If you include Communism as a religion, you then encompass the best and worst of humanity. You need not hang the motivation for evil on philosophy.

Or, as my good friend reminds me, the best of humans are, at best, human.

A new reality

[Bongo]

Technology has often caused people's minds to change and develop. For example, the popular novel, and the stories, may have been the big thing which increased people's empathy for others in that period in history. Knowledge (awareness) is often transformative (for the mind).

So is this new world all about "companies controlling the info", or is it that there's so many organisations collecting information that, come 2050, everyone will wake up in the morning knowing what every politician had for breakfast that day and who they are meeting? Will we browse the supermarket aisles and, instead of seeing simple labels like "organic", we'll actually see the whole production chain history of that product?

And what will that kind of awareness do to the development of the human mind? We may look back at today's age and wonder in amazement at how simple-minded all our news and views about the world were. It may mean the end of ideologies and most religions. We're only just beginning.

Re:Disagree...

[AHuxley]

Once a gov and mil starts spying on their own people legally the dynamic changes.
A gov has to find people with the tested intellectual disposition who really enjoy spying domestically with no court oversight.
To hand them the keys to junk cryptography and then collect it all.
Most governments who try that then face data walking out as staff contact the press or have to have massive internal oversight to try and prevent staff misuse of access. Staff cults, faiths, politics then surface deep within trusted areas.
Good staff who know they are not trusted don't preform that well and walk out. The ranks become filled with staff who hide their true interests to advance.
Foreign governments move in with offers of friendship, support, cash, understanding in a frenzy of recruitment. Digital tracking is sold as perfection but the more skilled humans spies always get in.
Even the contractor buddy system starts to break down as the teams influence each other and total corruption sets in.
The classic East German issue has not been solved. How to have informants and undercover officers working on groups of 5-10 protesters, spying and reporting on each other, creating vast amounts of files on other deep cover informants. Given the US love of agencies reporting only to to mil, police and different sections of the US gov domestic collection becomes vast with a lot of duplication. Great for contractors and overtime but not much use for what govs crave.
The more domestic data thats created, the more informants that are needed and have to keep their cover and so create more data to collect.