Slashdot Mirror
Are We Living in a World Where You Can't Opt Out of Data Sharing? (fivethirtyeight.com)
Long-time Slashdot reader Mr_Blank quotes the senior science writer at FiveThirtyEight on a new type of privacy violation:
It's what happens when one person's voluntary disclosure of personal information exposes the personal information of others who had no say in the matter. Your choices didn't cause the breach. Your choices can't prevent it, either. Welcome to a world where you can't opt out of sharing, even if you didn't opt in... We all saw this in action in the recent Cambridge Analytica scandal. The "privacy of the commons" is how the 270,000 Facebook users who actually downloaded the "thisisyourdigitallife" app turned into as many as 87 million users whose data ended up in the hands of a political marketing firm.
Much of the narrative surrounding that scandal has focused on what individuals should be doing to protect themselves. But that idea that privacy is all about your individual decisions is part of the problem, said Julie Cohen, a technology and law professor at Georgetown University. "There's a lot of burden being put on individuals to have an understanding and mastery of something that's so complex that it would be impossible for them to do what they need to do," she said...
[E]xperts say these examples show that we need to think about online privacy less as a personal issue and more as a systemic one. Our digital commons is set up to encourage companies and governments to violate your privacy. If you live in a swamp and an alligator attacks you, do you blame yourself for being a slow swimmer? Or do you blame the swamp for forcing you to hang out with alligators? There isn't yet a clear answer for what the U.S. should do. Almost all of our privacy law and policy is framed around the idea of privacy as a personal choice, Cohen said. The result: very little regulation addressing what data can be collected, how it should be protected, or what can be done with it.
Much of the narrative surrounding that scandal has focused on what individuals should be doing to protect themselves. But that idea that privacy is all about your individual decisions is part of the problem, said Julie Cohen, a technology and law professor at Georgetown University. "There's a lot of burden being put on individuals to have an understanding and mastery of something that's so complex that it would be impossible for them to do what they need to do," she said...
[E]xperts say these examples show that we need to think about online privacy less as a personal issue and more as a systemic one. Our digital commons is set up to encourage companies and governments to violate your privacy. If you live in a swamp and an alligator attacks you, do you blame yourself for being a slow swimmer? Or do you blame the swamp for forcing you to hang out with alligators? There isn't yet a clear answer for what the U.S. should do. Almost all of our privacy law and policy is framed around the idea of privacy as a personal choice, Cohen said. The result: very little regulation addressing what data can be collected, how it should be protected, or what can be done with it.
That's all I have to say. Anonymous
If you want real protection, you're gonna have to change the way records are made and kept public. FB is an easy target (and Slashdot stories in the past few months show how obsessed people are with FB, but not anyone else), but it's not as big of a deal as large aggregating data companies like LexisNexis. And where do they get the bulk of their data? Public records.
Mortgage records, public housing data, court records, public directories, etc. They've got other stuff, of course, but the public stuff are all the things that can really screw with you (compared to your advertising preferences, which is the bulk of what FB, Twitter and others deal in). But anyone interested can do the same as those companies do, with just a visit to the local courthouse or library.
The problem here, however, is that public records are important for everyone. It's good and important to know who owns property. It's good to know who's involved in a court case, who's been sued, and who owns a business. So do we limit this information? Or somehow limit how it's collected? Are there free speech issues involved if individuals are allowed to access public information, but companies can't? Does the answer to that question change when it's the private companies that make the data useful to the public (because otherwise, it's hard to get at, all in one place)?
There are a lot of questions, and the answers are never as easy as "just stop sharing things" or "Make Facebook stop". Living in a large society necessitates having public records easily available, for the sake of all of us. And feeling high and mighty because you don't use Facebook is just fooling yourself. This is a complex issue, and we'll need to decide what we want to give up for the sake of the privacy we think we need/deserve.
We've lived in this world since we learned to speak. People could always tell other about you, spreading gossip and rumours — some accurate, some libellous. Government agencies, private detectives, and organizations like the Inquisition have also kept files on people.
The "new" thing here is that computers are used, which provides for actual accuracy of the information and vastly expands the scale...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.