Slashdot Mirror
'We Didn't Lose Control Of Our Personal Data -- It Was Stolen From Us By People Farmers' (ar.al)
Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the worldwide web, wrote an open-letter over the weekend to mark the 28th anniversary of his invention. In his letter, he shared three worrisome things that happened over the last twelve months. In his letter, Berners-Lee pointed out three things that occurred over the past 12 months that has him worried: we do not assume control of our personal data anymore; how easy it is for misinformation to spread on the web; and lack of transparency on political advertising on the web. Cyborg rights activist Aral Balkan wrote a piece yesterday arguing that perhaps Berners-Lee is being modest about the things that concern him. From the article: It's important to note that these (those three worrisome things) are not trends and that they've been in the making for far longer than twelve months. They are symptoms that are inextricably linked to the core nature of the Web as it exists within the greater socio-technological system we live under today that we call Surveillance Capitalism. Tim says we've "lost control of our personal data." This is not entirely accurate. We didn't lose control; it was stolen from us by Silicon Valley. It is stolen from you every day by people farmers; the Googles and the Facebooks of the world. It is stolen from you by an industry of data brokers, the publishing behavioural advertising industry ("adtech"), and a long tail of Silicon Valley startups hungry for an exit to one of the more established players or looking to compete with them to own a share of you. The elephants in the room -- Google and Facebook -- stand silently in the wings, unmentioned except as allies later on in the letter where they're portrayed trying to "combat the problem" of misinformation. Is it perhaps foolish to expect anything more when Google is one of the biggest contributors to recent web standards at the W3C and when Google and Facebook both help fund the Web Foundation? Let me state it plainly: Google and Facebook are not allies in our fight for an equitable future -- they are the enemy. These platform monopolies are factory farms for human beings; farming us for every gram of insight they can extract. If, as Tim states, the core challenge for the Web today is combating people farming, and if we know who the people farmers are, shouldn't we be strongly regulating them to curb their abuses?
NM
What's the case for trusting big anything else?
The less data we put out there, the less they can steal. That, and proxies.
When I was a little kid I left my bike out and it got stolen. So I never did that again. That strategy worked.
Bought. Silicon valley bought the data from us. For the most part every company that is collecting data on users made this clear in their terms of services. In the vast majority of these cases the product they are supplying is also free and thus paid for through the collection of data.
Furthermore, users don't care. Providing the data is anonymised and the value of what they are receiving is worth the cost of the data users will continue to use it as a barter.
The government steals data. We have no contract with them to provide it and we are unaware they are collecting it. Silicon valley trades services and features in exchange for data.
This story was posted earlier today by someone else.
Editor! Editor!
Letter spacing strikes again!
Pirates take Corporate data claim it's fair.
Corporations take data, pirates claim it's not fair.
Let's call it like it is, there are no rights in life.
>We didn't lose control; it was stolen from us by Silicon Valley
>Let me state it plainly: Google and Facebook are not allies in our fight for an equitable future -- they are the enemy.
>These platform monopolies are factory farms for human beings; farming us for every gram of insight they can extract.
The whole problem with the internet - the whole problem with our very language is... hyperbole!
'We Didn't Lose Control Of Our Personal Data -- It Was Stolen From Us By People Famers'
It's "Farmers" you incompetent twats. Can someone please replace the editors with scripts already? It'd be more effective.
Most of the quotes in TFS are the words of the blogger Aral Balkin. That's a big difference, b/c it would seem Mr. Berners-Lee would be unlikely to speak in such an inflammatory manner.
Not saying that Mr. Balkin is wrong, but I tend to think in terms of inevitability, economic forces, etc. The same ones that have caused social upheavals since the start of the Industrial Revolution.
WE give it away freely.
This should be obvious,
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
The day a person was first hired to be a "Cyborg rights activist"
BlameBillCosby.com
Doesn't the First and Fourth Amendment already do a decent job of regulating those people? We surrender a lot of our own personal data willingly just by our use of the internet. I'm not sure we need more regulations that protect people from themselves.
It was 'bought' from the native American for a pile of beads. The fact that the actual value was of the exchange was inequitable and one of the parties in the contract didn't even understand what property ownership meant, is of course irrelevant? Isn't it?
The fact the native Americans believed you could no more own the land then the sky really has no bearing on weather or not they contractually obligated themselves or the other party was being honest about the value of the exchange?
A very similar situation here, the customer basically doesn't understand what they are giving away or what it's value is, so to them they are seemingly 'getting something for free'.
âoeTolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons.
I read headline as, "Personal Data Stolen By Farmers Insurance."
... or explain what a 'Famer' is.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Albania is not a stout source of anything close to soundness. Just say NO to Albanian disinformation. Goodgle, and Facebook, exist for you, to serve you. And we ask for so little in return.
Preaching about privacy is nice and all, but reeks of hypocrisy when the preacher has no qualms whatsoever with embracing DRM on the web and making up excuses for it.
DRM ultimately also hurts your privacy because it requires your machine to conspire against you and keep things hidden from you, or to poke holes through your OS to gain privileged access not usually granted to applications (like some game DRM like Starforce). DRM does not work unless your system actively undermines your freedoms, like for example, video DRM doesn't work unless the system prevents user access to the framebuffer.
Tim is a hypocrite. If he was for privacy he wouldn't have embraced DRM.
No. Those amendments regulate the federal government; a strong argument can be (and has been) made that the amendments in the bill of rights also regulate the state governments via the auspices of the 14th amendment; but these amendments are not directed at and do not regulate the citizens or the businesses the citizens own.
IOW, for Facebook and Google... no.
And of course, there's the whole issue that the government does its very best to work around those amendments nearly every chance it gets. So they don't regulate the government very well, either.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
We didn't lose control; it was stolen from us
The WWW never provided a way to control our personal data. Its goal was to make all information available everywhere.
Facebook CEO Called Trusting Users Dumb Fucks
Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard
Zuck: Just ask.
Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
[Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?
Zuck: People just submitted it.
Zuck: I don't know why.
Zuck: They "trust me"
Zuck: Dumb fucks.
I think it's even worse than just plain old garden-variety theft of our personal information. There has also been for some time now a systematic indoctrination of the general public, the younger generation in particular, that the desire for 'privacy' is either a symptom of some sort of mental illness, or evidence of criminal intent, and that 'sharing' of everything with everyone (even if you've never met them in person, only ever online) via so-called 'social media' is what's normal and natural. Then there's the fact that ubiquitos mobile devices (smartphones, tablets, etc) lack what I'd consider even a basic level of data security, as well as 'apps' intentionally harvesting data (GPS coordinates, browsing habits, etc) without the knowledge of the end-user. Add to all this the harvesting of all Internet traffic of individual users by ISPs and wireless companies, plus actual criminals and criminal organizations actively exploiting security holes and weaknesses to outright steal people's identity and banking data, both over the Internet, and in real life via hardware devices like card skimmers (both activities are, relatively speaking, rampant). No one is particularly interested in fixing any of these situations, either, because actually giving people the means by which to secure their digital devices and their personal data to a reasonable degree would mean the end of the monetization of end-user data by so-called 'people farmers'. Of course none of this even begins to touch on what 'law enforcement' agencies and 'government intelligence' agencies are getting out of this Wild West of Internet data rustling; they all have every reason, in their natural mode of over-reaching and obsessive need to control everything and everyone, to allow it all to continue, because it makes it that much easier for them to grab any and all data on any and all persons they care to. Meanwhile it's only the ever-thinner patina of actual rule of law and basic human and civil rights that keep all of this in check to any extent -- and those aspects of our society are weakening, especially in the most recent major change in our socio-political landscape here in the United States. At this point in time, the only way to protect yourself at all from further intrusions is to leave the Internet behind entirely and go back to the old ways of doing things: write paper checks for your bills, pay cash for everything, use a landline phone, stay off the Internet entirely, or just stop having Internet access altogether. Of course the situation has degenerated to the point already where if you 'go off the grid' like that, you raise all sorts of red flags, sparking even more intrusions of your privacy, as our so-called 'law enforcement' investigates you for suspected terrorism. All in all it's a dark time we're currently living in, and I'm afraid it's going to get darker before it gets better. The only advice I can give anyone is to hold on; these things tend to go in cycles. Eventually, there will be a revolution of sorts, and reforms to roll back all the intrusions into people's lives. The younger generation may, for the moment, believe that 'privacy' is some sort of sickness, but as they get older, they'll understand what it is they gave away -- and they might well fight to get it back, if not for themselves, then for the next generation.
Prove him wrong or stfu. Or enjoy that whoosh.
The value you get from stopping people from knowing that information is that you can then exchange that info for something else. The value you get from stopping people from getting access to x, be it land, or something you made, or whatever is that you can then charge for obtaining that x.
Their statement sounds a lot like a Trump tweet.
It's axiomatic. Here, have a queef.
You all agreed to use these services and volunteered your information. Nobody is forcing any of you to do these things. If you don't like it then stop.
Twinstiq, game news
We traded our privacy and personal information for "free" content. In the early days of the web, we wanted Social Media, but we didn't want to pay a subscription for it. We said we were okay with advertising, even targeted advertising, to pay for their services. We wanted a web of free content and told them to figure out how to make money on it. So they grasped at the one thing they could find, our identities as consumers, and it was so lucrative, it re-shaped the way the web operates.
Oh, this has been going on for much longer than Google and Facebook had even existed. Loyalty points cards, Newspaper readership lists, etc.
The only thing that's change is the sheer scope, both in terms of number of people, and the varying kinds of data being amassed.
And the single biggest factor in this is no one else but the average person. The average person doesn't *care* that their personal data is being hoarded. They don't *care* that their privacy is being obliterated. Hell, if anything, they're *encouraging* it because of the whole "Only criminals have something to hide" attitude. If not that, then they can be very easily swayed to give up their data for minor benefits like saving a couple percent on a given purchase, etc.
IMO the defining moment was when Snowden made his revelations public. What was the response? Worse than no change. The people who were already concerned about their privacy had their fears validated, but everyone else simply didn't care. But a sizeable percentage honestly believes to this day that Snowden was in the wrong for doing what he did, and not the agencies for unlawfully collecting and hoarding all that data. The same people that scream "No big guvmint!" are somehow perfectly satisfied to have every subtle aspect of their daily lives recorded and analyzed by not just the government but by countless corporations as well.
The majority of the citizenry either doesn't care, or actually wants this to happen. The few who can (even if just vaguely) see the direction all this is going, are already taking what limited steps they can by closing social media accounts, etc. (For all the good that does at this point. :P) . But we're basically screwed, and those who don't want it are being dragged into it kicking and screaming by the majority who happily do.
I just don't agree. It's not stolen... it's bought. In exchange for your expecting to have a reactive/personal experience online. Especially for free.
We can fix it, it just takes some guts - and regulations.
The following laws would work:
1) Any service that tracks private information, must, by law offer a more expensive version that does not retain said information beyond minimum neccessary billing information. They can price it however they like - as long as at least 10% of their customers agree to pay that price. Should they mistakenly track said information, they owe their victims ten times whatever they were charged, dating from the time they began tracking to the time they cut the check. This includes social networking sites.
2) If you pay for no tracking, then the company can not give out ANY information to a government or other official without a warrant (note warrant, not subpoena). We have the right to privacy from the government unless they can demonstrate a valid need to a judge.
3) By law, no information inputed electronically that is not essential to the service, can be 'mandatory'. No requiring people to give you their phone number unless your service needs to call them. No gender request unless it is a dating app, no address unless you are mailing them something. You can ask, but you can not require. People leave information blank on paper all the time, deal with empty fields.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Tim says we've "lost control of our personal data." This is not entirely accurate. We didn't lose control; it was stolen from us by Silicon Valley. It is stolen from you every day by people farmers;
Rubbish!
People gave it freely. They do not (still) consider it to have any value - maybe because a lot of it is completely fictitious. Whether that turns out to be mistaken or not has yet to be determined. Apart from the few cases where there has been actual theft, everyone who filled in their personal details for access to social media sites did so without duress. The overwhelming majority seem to have gone far beyond volunteering the bare minimum and some of the stuff that people post is startling in its intimacy.
It could be argued that "the people" don't understand what their personal data means. Why others want it and how it will be used. There is some small truth in that. However, website accounts can be closed, new ones opened. Email addresses are easily changed and online personas bear little resemblance to the actual people they purport to represent.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
We can feed the monster to suit our needs. Why not feed it things we want to be known for and also include lots of bullsh*t .Post the word diaper shoes Kardashian Hillary trumpydoo puppies kittens Kim Jung etc.. the populace can say thank you, but stop sucking my life data . Here is what I want to know about
Time for a new Political party in the US (or two!) One is off the rails Other cant pony up a leader.
We have met the primitive tribe, and they are us.
We've all seen stories of how primitive tribes get sugar, or whiskey, or drugs, or other trappings of modern society and proceed to ruin themselves even more than we do because they're not accustomed to those things.
Submitted for your consideration, that this time the tribe is us, and we have done it to ourselves.
Imagine if Mars had a slightly more advanced civilization than Earth, and they contacted us in 1950. Let's say they had no interest in hostility, but gave us the technology they had been using for a few hundred years.
Reports in the Martian media would be full of our foibles--of how accidents went up due to texting, of the spying, of the fake news, of the conspiracy mongering. They would be wondering if it had been a good idea to give us their tech.
'tis the Martian's burden, I suppose.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Here's my farm right here!
I'mk a typo farmer, MUTHAFUKKA!!!!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
People will compromise with them, and the compromise will be to put them in charge of us.
I don't see any non-radical solution to these problems.
If the elephants are standing in the wings, are they really "in the room?" Not so sure about that being silent, either.
And there's no such thing as "anonymised" data.
We have developers and data modelers like any tech industry. We get the mythical "anonymised" data and then use our vast repositories to match it right back to you. It's not even particularly difficult. They just include some "anonymous" information about you. So now we only have to check your data against the repository of data that we know about for a few hundred or a couple of thousand people and figure out which one is you. How many people in a given ZIP+4 are 38 years old, have a 36 year old spouse, have a car loan from 2012, have 3 kids between the ages of 3 and 7, moved to their current home in 2011 which has a value of $235k, prefer Gain over Tide detergent, use a Microsoft email account, have a college degree, 2 credit cards, and make $98k per year?
All of that is anonymous data. But matching it back to you is not rocket science. Never believe anything you ever read about anonymous data.
I get that companies are _trying_ to monetize all of this data, but I don't see how they are succeeding except for marketing me things I already want anyway. I get the desire for privacy, but most people are like everyone else and there isn't actually isn't anything titillating or interesting about their lives (they are all special snowflakes like every other special snowflake). So it isn't privacy that is the core issue, it is protecting people who are different and are persecuted for being different from having their differences mined and made available for institutional abuses (e.g. health issues, non-mainstream sexual proclivities or gender, eccentric political beliefs, etc).
So I don't care personally that amazon knows what I want to buy - that's no secret, I'm boring - but if someone has to buy stuff that could be used to tell they have an expensive medical condition, and then they don't get a job because the US health care system ties health care to employment - that's a problem and I'm all for paying for a little privacy to help them (although even then, fixing the health care system would be preferable - the only reason we need privacy is because of other problems, not because anyone should be ashamed of or have to defend who or what they are).
Maybe I'm naive, but it seems like having a world where locks are currently used to protect us from thieves doesn't mean locks are desirable, it means we need to figure out and fix the reasons why people steal. Privacy is the same, it exists now for protection from abuse, not because it is inherently desirable.
It's not the data that I supply on the site that bothers me, I tend to watch that I'm not posting anything that I value as secret. It's the other data they're collecting through little 1px GIF's, like buttons, or other people's posts that has me the most concerned. Where's the ToS on that?
It doesn't help that the non-free services became so degraded that they weren't worth paying for.
ISP email: Full of SPAM, crappy low limits, and - guess what - they're likely spying on your too!
All those "free" sites that survived on ads etc. Yeah they even went to selling your information or dropping you with spyware/malware, etc, or they're gone completely.
It's not that people don't care, it's that there isn't much in the way of alternatives. Hell, the US Gov is happily changing laws so that your mobile carrier or ISP can slurp and sell data from the services you're paying quite a bit for.
Given away. It is BS to say the use of personal information as currency is "clearly stated" in the terms of service. The Big Five make ZERO effort to ensure users have read and understand how they are paying for the services they offer for "free". They write long form legalese, and they present a little Web link labelled " as have read the terms of service" next to a checkbox in the sign up and there is no mechanism whatsoever to ensure a person has read it.
It is partly our fault for lying by checking the box without following the link, but companies do the absolute minimum required to inform users. They in fact go out of their way to hide their terms.
It's as if a store leaves their stuff on a shelf, without price tags, but a sign saying "take and enjoy!" with fine print saying "you agree to the terms of the agreement available at the customer service desk" underneath. Then when they get home they discover their bank account cleaned out. They go back to the store and they say sorry you agreed to the terms by taking the stuff. It's not our fault you didn't go to customer service desk to get the 5 page agreement stating we have full access to your bank account and can take whatever you want and that we do not take returns.
The point is they are using their services as bait, and their behaviour wouldn't be tolerated when the currency is cash and the product is tangible. Society does not yet appear to value personal information like cash. People give it freely, corporations leverage it however they please without regard to consequences and governments forcefully take whatever they want to further their agendas. Perhaps one day we will live in a Roddenberry style economy without cash and the new currency will be information and it will be valued and respected accordingly, but we are far from that point right now.
That would be me. Planted the north fourtay with mi-lennial twee tars. Hybrid ya know. They is comin right along. Put in genex eye-pods down along the creek. Not doin so good theyah. I bleve it is one them "bandwidth" issues I read bout. My wife says til it under and go back to ethanol corn holers.
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
What many people forget is that when the internet was young we stored so little on the internet. We did not have the complex accounts with personal information. maybe we had a couple of sign ins for things but we didn't have the Amazon's, the banking, the types of critical information stored online on some server. Now because of users being lazy almost every site they do business with keeps their personal information, banking is done online, along with bills and so much of what we purchase. We have multiple social accounts, probably some accounts we never even use and never deleted. Actually, does anything ever really get deleted?
All this was a ripe field for the picking for information stealers. It's not about better protection, its about having a smaller footprint online.
Cosmo: I might even be able to crash the whole damn system. Destroy all records of ownership. Think of it, Marty: no more rich people, no more poor people, everybody's the same. Isn't that what we said we always wanted?
Martin Bishop: Cos, you haven't gone crazy on me, have you?
Or a more recent example, trolltrace.com
As a potential lottery winner, I totally support tax cuts for the wealthy
This article itself is a perfect example of misinformation through misrepresentation. The title is a unattributed quote and the first three sentences only mention Tim Burners-Lee. Its misleading. The article should first state its a quote from Aral Balkan and then explain its a reaction to Burners-Lee. In its current form it implies that Tim Burners-Lee said, 'We Didn't Lose Control Of Our Personal Data -- It Was Stolen From Us By People Farmers' which he didn't.
Since dataminers can profile a person from their internet footprint, what can they do with that data? First and foremost the data has been collected to manipulate the target through targeted messaging. Initially it was to boost sales. Now it is being used for monetary gain through political influence by the clients of Cambridge Analytica https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/feb/26/robert-mercer-breitbart-war-on-media-steve-bannon-donald-trump-nigel-farage . It seems quite clear that the users and funding agents of Cambridge Analytica's services intend to gain world domination through targeted manipulation of large groups of individuals. If there is any great argument for privacy, it is to be free of malicious manipulation by others.
developerWorks: That was another question I was going to ask: Are there some negative things that have been unleashed that really demand an attention level from us that's different from things in the past? And I think you've started to speak to that right there. Are there other issues like that surrounding this technology that we need to really be alert to?
Berners-Lee: There have been all kinds of things which have ... I suppose which have worried us, and some of it still does. I think if you go to a person in the street, in fact, the consortium staff once went out into the streets of Cambridge and just interviewed people to see what they thought about the Internet randomly, and I suppose you had to pick one thing, they said, "Spam. Get rid of spam."
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/podcast/dwi/cm-int082206txt.html
spam = new angry ad
the data wasn't "stolen", it was freely given away-promises of freebies, promises of convenience, promises of entertaining web surveys, all sorts of places where people handed over their info without bothering to think about how it could be aggregated or who they were giving it to. Anyone who told of metadata, who warned of what would happen, was called "paranoid", "killjoy" or other derisive terms by people who'd spam social media with everything they did, where they did it, when and with whom, including video and pictures, for the sake of a discount on future sales or even some ephemeral "likes".
to claim "stolen" is not only ignoring the personal responsibility, but actively refusing to accept ones own involvement. Placing the blame elsewhere instead of where it belongs, and having to give up those benefits and "likes".
Now everyone wants "convenience" in IoT crapware and most are those claiming their personal info was "stolen" by Evil Capitalist Pigs, whose only real crime was allowing people to do what they were dumb enough to want, even demand, the ability to do.
"if you're not paying, YOU are the product". that's nothing new.