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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.
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.
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.
I guess they own their pictures now!
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
I guess it's time to start using aliases all the time.
Also, not all gym memberships are fully utilized.
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.
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.
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...
Actually giving a shit about your privacy would more or less preclude owning a smart device
Exactly.
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's because so much stuff makes money from literally being advertising outlets. That means showing ads that aren't yours, or selling customer data to other people who want to show ads. There is an amazingly huge amount of economic activity related to advertising, enough so that I wonder if someday the economic activity from advertising will outstrip that of manufacturing. It's a screwed up system.d
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.
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.
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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).