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Consumers' Privacy Concerns Not Backed By Their Actions (betanews.com)
Ian Barker, writing for BetaNews: A large majority of people say they are concerned about their online privacy, but this is not reflected in their actions according to a new study. The survey from Blue Fountain Media reveals that 90 percent of respondents are very concerned about their internet privacy and 48 percent wish 'more was being done about it.' Yet despite this 60 percent of those polled happily download apps without reading terms and conditions, and close to 20 percent still download apps even when they have read the terms and don't like them. A third of those polled say they would delete an app that tracks their whereabouts, but 50 percent say whether they would do so depends how much they like the app. Interestingly less than 10 percent believe an app that tracks their location is actually useful to them.
It's up to the PRODUCERS of stuff to not be a bunch of fucking evil cunts.
Yet despite this 60 percent of those polled happily download apps without reading terms and conditions,
Yeah I can't afford to hire a lawyer for 5-9 hours every time I install an app
Which can be loosely translated as "I hear people are concerned about this, so I guess *I* should be concerned about this, but it's not really worth my time or trouble to bother ACTUALLY doing something about"....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
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Yeah, because that's what I do every time I install an application. I hire a lawyer and we read through the terms and conditions (That was copy and pasted from another application) together at $400 an hour.
How about not doing this crap in the first place and we wouldn't have to worry about it? The absurdity this has gotten to. Blame the consumer!
People are concerned about corruption in politics, yet keep electing the same sumbitches.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Buried in there was this nugget, paraphrased: Any pix you upload to FlightAware become their property.
I wonder how many planespotters using flightaware are aware of that.
I'll be *damned* if I ever upload anything to that "service." I'll gladly use it, but I will not contribute to it, not with those terms.
Read the shit, people. Don't be sheeple.
The "Civilized World" jumped the shark ca. 1973.
There is no technical reason why Linux or BSD couldn't also be a clusterfuck of privacy invasion. Mostly it isn't though. That's because of the culture behind the ecosystem. It is mostly used by technically literate people who don't tolerate scraping private data and sending it off to lordy knows where. (Yes it has happened now and then, but it's a rare exception, not the rule, and it is usually quickly stomped down by the community).
Contrast with phones. They are primarily used by technically clueless people. There is no reason the software couldn't also respect privacy rather than having calculators scraping people's address books and Facebook harvesting your real time location and biometrics. However the phone-using population simply accepts any amount of privacy clusterfuck you throw at them. They may grumble a little now and then, but they do not translate that to specific actions to stop using the offending software and drive it out of the ecosystem.
In the end, it's not the technology that matters the most. It's how likely the user base is to put up with being treated like lambs for the harvest. There is a degree of "herd immunity" like with vaccines: if most of the user base won't put up with shit, it helps protect a few who make bad choices. But if those who make bad choices become a majority, then the herd immunity is lost and the ecosystem goes to shit.
Thus in the end only a culture shift can fix the privacy clusterfuck that is phones, and increasingly desktop Windows too.
Why would you waste the time to do that? First, the odds of those T&C ever affecting you is about .0001%. Second, who knows what those long winded T&C even MEAN. Third, who even knows what would be legally enforceable by law anyways. I have way better ways to spend my time.
Oh, and those T&C needed to be ruled unenforceable by courts anyways. Seriously, if somewhere in there it says, "By using crappyapp 42, you are agreeing to pay us $100k", are courts REALLY going to make you fork over that money? No, so stop pretending that they mean anything.
Even if you are one of the people who acts to preserve their privacy, the people around you won't. They'll add all your contact info to their address book and then let a dozen apps scrape it which have NO need to. They'll upload your picture to FuckerbergBook and tag it with your name for biometric scraping.
Too many don't care. Those who do still get caught up in the data harvesting because of those who don't.
I have. I do it on regular basis. But they are long, dense legalese. It takes skill (a good grasp of English) and time, a lot of time, to read those. What I do not is that I know roughly what an EULA looks like and I scan paragraph headers and see if I see something I don't expect with CRTL-F. You can be privacy minded, and despair that EULA are too long and unreadable. My fucking work contract with NDA and privavcy signing was shorter and more understandable than all EULA I read up to now. Real contract like buying a flat was more understandable. Those EULA are NOT done so that the user can read. They are done so that at best the software maker just remove as much liability as possible, or do hide dirty shenanigan inside a dense text and pretend one agreed to it. That is why I fucking like GDPR. EULA or not, go fuck yourself, show me what you save, and you better delete it now that I refuse you keep it.
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It's not useful to me have an app that uses my CPU.
It's useful to me to have an app that loads web pages (a browser). Any app that's useful to me must use my CPU, of course.
It's the "why" that's useful to me, not the "how". Knowing my location is HOW a useful app tells me where to find inexpensive parking nearby.
In other words: People are ignorant morons who talk bullshit.
I guess they own their pictures now!
Maps have to track your location. Otherwise you can't say "Navigate to (some address)"
There is no reason your location has to leave the device.
Proof: I have a GPS device with no external connectivity except a USB cable. It doesn't even have the hardware to make a network connection. It still works fine as a mapping device. It knows my location: it just doesn't tell that to a hundred data brokers.
We shouldn't act like people are idiots for not reading something incredibly lengthy, wordy, and worded in such a way where they would not understand it, and instead point the finger, at least partially, at the people who insist on keeping these wordy EULAs without providing something that explains it in plain English?
If you believe in privacy, and believe you have "nothing to hide" at the same time, you're a goddammed idiot
Actually giving a shit about your privacy would more or less preclude owning a smart device, and most people aren't willing to forgo instant access to social media/other communications just because some nebulous entity may or may not be watching.
As for EULAs, there's always EULAlyzer to make reading more tolerable. But even when it turns up clauses that violate your rights odds are good you'll still use that software since that particular software does what you need that others won't and you're not in the mood to write up a new program specifically for whatever function it was.
Also, not all gym memberships are fully utilized.
yet continue to smoke/eat red meat/drink alcohol/not exercise, etc.
When I read FB TOS, similar wording was in there also. I didn't agree and so don't use FB.
Now some non-FB sites require FB login to use or even read; which TOS are being agreed to the non-FB site or FB , or both...what if they conflict.
None of that really matters as sites usually can change their TOS unilaterally and not much a single person can do about it.
Nice article
latestreport.xyz
No company should be exploiting that factfor personal gain, that's very weak sauce. If they don't stop, eventually the feds will force them to.
OK, I'll worry about this instead of Operation Crossfire Hurricane. Like the poll suggests, most people know 9-11 was an inside job, they just don't care.
AE911Truth org
That's like saying, "Patriots' Concerns About The Constitution, The Rule of Law, Limited Government, and Ethical Leadership Not Backed By Their Voting Records".
You are welcome on my lawn.
What kind of a stupid proxy is "Not reading terms and conditions" to "not caring about privacy"? How does reading 1000 words of legal junk help? It's not like there's a lot of active choice in the market for not having your data sucked up by some firm for reasons hither to unprofitable. You can barely buy a fridge without the TOS signing off your first born to some foreign Korean CEO.
If anything people concerned about the privacy are the ones who don't read TOS because they know what's in them and they know doing so is a waste of time.
90 percent of respondents are very concerned about their internet privacy and 48 percent wish 'more was being done about it.'
Which means they want someone else to do something about it.
I expect an even greater polarisation occurs with being overweight: 100% of people are concerned about it ... but what proportion are willing to do something themselves to fix it?
But anyone who relies on the output from a survey is either naive, negligent or is just using it to further their own desires.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
I'm worried about healthcare, wages, retirement when I either can't work or nobody'll hire me. I'm worried about school for my kids, especially college.
Surveillance is just a symptom of oppression. The root cause is always money. If you want to render it moot the solution is to make sure everybody (and I mean _everybody_, even lazy people and the ones you don't like) has access to food, shelter, healthcare, education & transportation (the latter being required to effectively access the former).
Until we end the rat race we're going to be vulnerable. You're not free as long as somebody controls access to the things you need to live.
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This whole article basically found out that ignorance doesn't equal compliance. You can't blame people for being ignorant if you haven't tried to educate them. Who goes out of their way to educate in the current state of things?
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Correlating whether or not one reads a EULA is not an effective metric.
Take an app which allows texting from a web browser. Both will need to have a clause like "we collect your text messages and contacts", because that's genuinely necessary for the service to be performed. However, if it's followed up with "we don't sell to third parties" isn't helpful - it still allows them to give the data away, or sell access to the data, or give the data to a shell company who then does the selling. Even if none of these happen, such a clause allows for the first party firm to do their own data mining and sell the results in aggregate. Then, if they do any of the above, and *those* companies get hacked, you can be certain that even if the app developer doesn't have an arbitration clause, it would be almost impossible to take legal action against the other company.
Location data is equally messy. The company with the most location data is Google itself, and unless you root, you're not stopping them from getting it with creepy accuracy even if the GPS is off. From there, apps requiring it are equally troubling. The EULA is a binary "use it or not". Most people would understandably let a navigation app use the GPS location in order to provide directions, but while Apple only allows apps to pull location data while an app is running, Android will happily let apps run a resident location scraper in the background without providing meaningful feedback to the end user.
Finally, the real metric of whether people are willing to do something about their privacy starts small - paid apps with no-data-mining guarantees, and free apps where users pay with privacy. See what wins. ...but nobody wants to do that.
How many people posting here work for a company that collects data from users?
Collecting private data and tracking users needs to be illegal, but too many people here, and too many shareholders of tech companies, will put their nice paychecks and Wall Street returns above common sense and Democracy.
For an immediate proof of that, just look at what people get elected to office in democracies. (Yes, the "leaders" in non-democracies are even worse, but that is besides the point.) As a consequence, most people do not even understand simple things, like practical privacy and that is why their actions and their desires diverge. That does not make their desires any less valid.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Politics without corruption is like sewage without E. Coli.
Regulation can force them to do it.
Yeah, it can. There's even a small chance it'll actually work as intended, at least for a little while...
When it comes to android apps, just get a firewall and block the apps wifi and cell access. I personally use NoRoot Firewall
https://play.google.com/store/...
You can easily block each app individually. The only thing is, you have stop the firewall to download something from the google store or use a browser. Then just restart it.
at least for a little while
As in, until AC wakes up?
When visiting slash sites recently, like slashdot or sourceforge, I'm forced to click "I agree" to some sort of privacy banner popping up. Maybe this is a result of my ip-adress being something european - I don't know. But it has to do something with this GDPR-thing, since this shitty banner came up when GDPR went active.
I have to ask this: what is this acceptance request good for?? Have I asked slashmedia anything when I call one of their pages? Do I want any warranties from them? Have I doubted any legal terms of their underlying contracts?
I don't get it.
I have some adblocking installed, I don't accept third party cookies per session, have "no tracking" active and all cookies are flushed anyway when closing the browser (which I do permanently when not using it). This and other settings and general online behaviour are my responsibilities. I have no interest in legal terms of slashmedia and others and I don't believe a single word from them, either. Why would I? So many clear signals of wrongdoing were sent by all parts of the industry over so many years - why should I trust anybody?
So when I do not trust slashmedia (or others) and slashmedia knows that and I don't want anything from their sites above handling web content by standard rules (i.e. don't track, wenn "do not track" is set) - what good is this acceptance banner for?
That consumers don't want so-called "net nutrality" and Trump is %100 right banning it.
The reality of human nature appears not to support the theory that our choices will generally reflect what we want, or what we think we want. For the advertising industry this finding is a great big DUHHH!!! It wouldn't be a multi-billion dollar industry if convincing people to act against their own interests didn't work. But for the rest of us this seems to be a startling revelation.
When we discuss and argue about how to handle behavior-driven problems like rampant obesity, consumer debt, diabetes, and social media addiction, somebody always plays the free will card - "Nobody's putting a gun to their heads!" But is "free will" the part where we rationally think about what we want out of life and what's best for us, without any extraneous influences? Or is it the part where images and sound bites hit our insecurities and cravings, and we override our rationality and click a BUY button or chug down a 48-oz soda?
Our laws and customs are based on the assumption that our everyday decisions are based on free will. But how realistic is that? Really, truly, how much are we free-willed beings and how much are we profit-generating stimulus-response drones? Because calling the latter state Freedom doesn't make it a good thing. If our normal, natural behavior is to let ourselves be taken advantage of, it seems like we need to change our environment so it works better for us. How can we do that?
It is hard to convince people to take precautions for a calamity that hasn't hurt them.
You would think that something like the equifax breach would make people worry but most people were probably unaffected.
Instead of fixing/preventing the problem, people would rather just buy insurance.
The problem with insurance is that it shields risk-takers from the full consequences of their risky behavior which takes away the incentive for them to reduce the risk.
Bad things eventually happen when you allow idiots to safely be idiots.
The housing crash wouldn't have happened if the government didn't shield lenders from the risk of making risky loans.
People you know are all sheeple. You want a tyrant, bitch to look after these snowflake sheeple. And wooo-hooo I bet that tryant has the same name as ... U-hoo-hoooo ! See ya bowser! I'd fuck your azzwhole so hard with a broomstik you'd think U spent the last year in SanFran.
They can't consent just by clicking.
It has to be an active consent with clear terms and clear choices and have a method allowing EU citizens to opt out.
Same technically is true of Canadian consumers. You can't infer active consent without active informed consent.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
It's called "Personal responsibility"
If you're so easily swayed by images and sound bytes that it's unrealistic for you to make your own damn decisions, or act in your own self interests, then maybe turn off the screens and decompress for a while.
When you give up your personal responsibility, you are a prisoner to those responsible for you.
If all it takes is marketing tricks to separate you from your own self interest, then the problem is your weak will.
Will is like a muscle. The more you use it, the stronger it gets.
You are being ripped off every second of every day, so that advertisers can help rip you off even more tomorrow.
Make it very clear what people are downloading and what data is being collected. Android has a very decent permissions system in the newer releases.
Make it easy for people to understand the privacy policy than send them a 80 pager. Make data anonymization the default law.
Everything else will fall in place.
classes and castes are created by the ruling class to divide the working class against each other so they can take everything for themselves while we're busy fighting among ourselves. This pattern is so common I don't understand why it's not talked about more. In America it's skin color. In India Caste. In Japan (where virtually everyone is visibly Japanese) they use the line of work your family does. There's always something they use to divide the working class into manageable groups.
Moreover, when everyone has the basics in life than nobody is under anybody's thumb. The ruling class have power because they decide who lives and who dies by deciding who eats, has shelter from the elements, medical care and information. Taking that power away from them by guaranteeing those things means real liberty. Again, you're not free if somebody controls your access to food, shelter, etc. Also you're not really free if they control other people's access to those things. That's because when those people get desperate enough they'll be mobilized against you. This is another pattern that we see over and over again and nobody talks about.
The way forward is to declare all human life sacred and all humans due a good life and then implement that.
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I realize they are talking about the majority of phone users, but if you are using a rooted phone and most of the tech oriented Roms, you can have your cake and eat it too. Lock down each app and security item granularly. Fuck what the app author wants. Fuck what the phone manufacturer wants. Its my phone and I'll be in control of my own security. Nothing pisses me off more than the scam that Google and device makers try to pull over on the public by not giving the owner of the device root. Heck most of the permissions in stock android are there to force you into the cloud, right down to the inability to back up your apps and data locally if you are using a stock device. Folder segregation in newer versions of android keep your own data locked out of your view so that you have to use cloud services to gain access to it.
Digital is, by definition, imperfect. Analog is the way to go.
This is a clear example of people wanting the bar to be set higher, so they can be lazy and not have to care so much about whether a particular app is dangerous from a privacy perspective.
don't underestimate the power of gerrymandering, voter suppression and our corrupt system (e.g. the Senate & the Electoral college, both systems designed to limit Democracy).
If there's a chink in the armor it's the primaries. The best bet is to get pro-worker progressives in by showing up at the Democratic primary. And yes, that means joining the Democratic party if you have to. Take it over from within and take it back from the corporatists. Use the structure they built to fix things.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Since when did the "terms and conditions" have anything to do with privacy? If information about you gets into the hands of one of these groups then it is no longer under your control and you have lost your privacy, period. If you care about privacy you are investing in hardware and software that allows you to manage data locally and to encrypt anything you would store online. This could mean buying a phone which is built to empower you in this way (e.g. Copperhead OS) or using an app which has a fundamentally more secure data model (e.g. OsmAnd+ which allows you to download map data for a whole country and then find places and plot routes locally).
If you think the terms and conditions are going to keep your personal information safe you are asking for trouble.
For me, things like privacy online feel like a prisoners dilemma.
If everybody works together and refuses services like that, it's best for everybody. But there are people who don't care, and then get the benefit of said services despite the invisible privacy issues.
And then the cascade starts, more and more people will want to accept since they also want to reap the benefit etc...
For me it doesn't indicate that the people don't care or want to do anything about it, but that it's practically impossible as a society to act properly on it. Everything will start with some people accepting everything, and if it's something good, the slippery slope starts and it'll leave the rest of society the choice of accepting the bads or being left behind on this nice new thing. And acting as if the choice to not participate is obvious.... i completely disagree (and how it is now pretty much proves that point).
May be !