Slashdot Mirror
'Why Data, Not Privacy, Is the Real Danger' (nbcnews.com)
"While it's creepy to imagine companies are listening in to your conversations, it's perhaps more creepy that they can predict what you're talking about without actually listening," writes an NBC News technology correspondent, arguing that data, not privacy, is the real danger.
Your data -- the abstract portrait of who you are, and, more importantly, of who you are compared to other people -- is your real vulnerability when it comes to the companies that make money offering ostensibly free services to millions of people. Not because your data will compromise your personal identity. But because it will compromise your personal autonomy. "Privacy as we normally think of it doesn't matter," said Aza Raskin, co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology [and a former Mozilla team leader]. "What these companies are doing is building little models, little avatars, little voodoo dolls of you. Your doll sits in the cloud, and they'll throw 100,000 videos at it to see what's effective to get you to stick around, or what ad with what messaging is uniquely good at getting you to do something...."
With 2.3 billion users, "Facebook has one of these models for one out of every four humans on earth. Every country, culture, behavior type, socio-economic background," said Raskin. With those models, and endless simulations, the company can predict your interests and intentions before you even know them.... Without having to attach your name or address to your data profile, a company can nonetheless compare you to other people who have exhibited similar online behavior...
A professor at Columbia law school decries the concentrated power of social media as "a single point of failure for democracy." But the article also warns about the dangers of health-related data collected from smartwatches. "How will people accidentally cursed with the wrong data profile get affordable insurance?"
With 2.3 billion users, "Facebook has one of these models for one out of every four humans on earth. Every country, culture, behavior type, socio-economic background," said Raskin. With those models, and endless simulations, the company can predict your interests and intentions before you even know them.... Without having to attach your name or address to your data profile, a company can nonetheless compare you to other people who have exhibited similar online behavior...
A professor at Columbia law school decries the concentrated power of social media as "a single point of failure for democracy." But the article also warns about the dangers of health-related data collected from smartwatches. "How will people accidentally cursed with the wrong data profile get affordable insurance?"
"How will people accidentally cursed with the wrong data profile get affordable insurance?"
Unless you are lucky enough to work for one of the few companies who provide their employees with decent health insurance, or you were lucky enough to be born into a wealthy family, there is no such thing as "affordable insurance", so it's really not a problem.
"then do not do those things"
Do you tell homeless people to "just get a job"?
Do you tell cancer patients to "just stop having cancer"?
I bet you're one of those people.
What nonsense, privacy and data are linked in every way possible. We ought to be teaching people to limit the amount of data or maybe even salt it so its less valuable.
My favorite relative quote I first saw here on slashdot is : "When information is power, privacy is freedom." forget the source or history on that one but its great.
both misuse of collected data and privacy violations are symptoms of large problems with wealth inequality. Folks aren't mining your data and invading your privacy for fun (outside of 4chaners and internet trolls), they're doing it so they can monopolize everything and get away with it.
Basically, I've got bigger fish to fry. I lack consistent access to healthcare, I can't pay for my kid's education (and it's fucked up I have to pay for it given that she's gonna use that education to spend the next 50 years working her ass off), my wages are about 20% less than they were before the 2008 market crash and the powers that be like it that way and are busy gearing up for the next recession. These are the problems that keep me up at night, not Facebook figuring out that I like Transformers more than GI Joe.
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There's really not much that is going to help you anyway and your concern might need to be boring to death anyone that looks at your life.
Unfortunately, radical transparency is only a viable solution to the societal problems caused by reducing privacy if you live in a world where everyone who will ever make a decision that affects you is a reasonable, fair, trustworthy person.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Oh yes!
Hookers! Porn! Blow! Cheetos!
Where is my wallet?
I got a date with you, sin city!
Autocorrect cannot even properly fixed words typed on phones... yet these companies can predict what I'm saying!? HA!
I'll tell you that I think social media could get rid of their fake news issue if they just stopped allowing sharing of links and any non-original images (i.e., what the kids now call memes). That would remove incentive for companies to create click-bait and sort of demonetize the thing to begin with and at minimum it would make it much harder for stupid stuff to circulate.
The dark underbelly of the internet pejoratively calls people who have no self and only react to external stimuli "NPCs", non-player characters. They are the real danger. While algorithms can to some extent predict the masses under certain circumstances, they can hardly predict individual people who can and do think for themselves. But people who need external stimuli for everything they do are predictable and easily manipulated. They are the target demographic of every dictator and every multinational corporation. They've been propped up to react with outrage towards anyone who challenges their opinion with facts. They have been immunized against reason.
"If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear." - Bascially you're pretending you have nothing you'd like to keep private. OTHERWISE YOU'D POST YOUR NAME AND ADDRESS AND MOTHER'S FAVORITE SEX POSITION.
Declare private data to be IP and copyrighted by the entity creating the IP.
Calculate the value of the IP by examining the revenue generated from it.
Pay royalties to the owners of the private IP whenever and wherever the data is used/reused, in perpetuity.
For those who don't wish to sell their IP, allow them to opt out. Any private IP harvested will be theft.
I have to think of everything and stuff.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
No. I do not generally talk to homeless people or cancer patients.
For this reason, God sends them a powerful delusion(operation of wandering)(planet) so that they will believe the lie.
Mystery Red of the Great American Eclipse
It has blood on it!
ABCNews: Eclipse makes pendulum wander
Data is going to replace oil as the most important commodity of the world. We're going to shift from the petrodollar to the datadollar--or perhaps some other data currency...
If stores could sell me exactly what I'd be happy with, ads I see would be truly relevant, and news sites would show me news I'm interested in, that would be very helpful.
I have been listening to this fear mongering over data for well over a decade, yet I still have never seen an Internet shop or any other website that could generate useful recommendations with all that data. Internet ads also continue to be mostly completely irrelevant. And sure, they might get better at it one day, but so what? They show you ads that are relevant to you?
I am far more concerned about the control those company have about the communication and the money flow, than the data they get by snooping on that traffic. Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Youtube, Patreon and Co. have shown that they have absolutely no scruples when it comes to cutting out unwanted people.
The risk isn't that they can look into your address book or bank account, but that they can delete it whenever they want.
When people empowered by government (empowered by the thugs and guns of government) use these profiling and prediction tools, it's called "Minority Report"!
It's not data or the privacy aspect, but it's the assumptions made based on incomplete models.
Unfortunately, there are not enough data points, or rather it is currently impossible to collect and make use of enough data points to create an accurate model to predict/depict a person's actions, thoughts, intent, and whether or not they do something.
Also unfortunate is that people are being prosecuted based on assumptions, not actual evidence.
"Personally, I accept that the data will be used against me in some way." That makes you part of the apologist "there should be no privacy and it's not worth fighting for" problem. I do not accept the scope or breadth of all data collection.
Conflating "some" with "anything goes" is retarded.
The summary asked "How will people accidentally cursed with the wrong data profile get affordable insurance?"
Answer : Move to Canada. We pay our taxes and the provincial governments provide health care. No middle men. The doctors, nurses and administrators all get paid ultimately by the provincial governments, depending on which province you live in. No external investors wanting big profits. Health care in Canada is (mostly) self-invested by the tax-paying citizens. Even non-citizens and people who are too poor to pay taxes get the same health care as the rest of us. Sure, there are things that can be improved in our system, but one thing is paramount -- no middle men who exist just to get profits out of the system. Some Americans call it "socialism". I have never met an American who really understood socialism. Whatever you want to call it, it works.
As for privacy, that is another problem, caused, I suspect, mostly by big American companies. I wish they would all stay away from my country.
You missed an important point in TFS. It was right at the end, so you probably couldn't see it from up on your high horse:
"How will people accidentally cursed with the wrong data profile get affordable insurance?"
The first sentence of your post is flawed, because it assumes that Your Data and My Data are correct, and can't be manipulated. Frankly, that is naive and foolish, and exactly why we need to discuss the issues of how data is collected and who or what has access to it.
Only crack the nuts that crack. You don't put the ones that don't crack in the sack.
This is the relevant part:
Your data -- the abstract portrait of who you are, and, more importantly, of who you are compared to other people -- is your real vulnerability when it comes to the companies that make money offering ostensibly free services to millions of people. Not because your data will compromise your personal identity. But because it will compromise your personal autonomy. "Privacy as we normally think of it doesn't matter," said Aza Raskin, co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology [and a former Mozilla team leader]. "What these companies are doing is building little models, little avatars, little voodoo dolls of you. Your doll sits in the cloud, and they'll throw 100,000 videos at it to see what's effective to get you to stick around, or what ad with what messaging is uniquely good at getting you to do something...."
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
An example of misuse of data with the correct data profile is marking up insurances based on the browser you like to use. So the issue is not even the wrong data, but the way even your political and ideological decisions impact on the availability of affordable care or opportunity of living in your own home, assuming you live in these societies where these kinds of problems are not minimized yet.
homeless people and cancer patients have enough shit to worry about
You want to foil these nosy corporate assholes? Use an Adblocker 100% of the time (I recommend uBlock Origin), NoScript, and most of all, a well-practiced lack of attention for any and all ads that can't be handled by the above. Additionally, either clear your cookies when you close your browser, or use an add-on that clears cookies not whitelisted. You don't have to be subjected to ads, and you can train yourself to let them roll off your forebrain like water off a duck's back and not make their way into your memory.
Of course you should also do everything you can to reduce your digital footprint as much as possible: do not use your real name online, ever. Stay away from so-called 'social media' (which is just a honeytrap for your very-much-personal data anyway; be 'social' for real with people you care to stay in touch with). Don't send anything sensitive in email or even text messages, always assume it's compromised. Don't use 'The Cloud' to store anything for any reason, assume it's compromised and being sifted through, regardless of what they tell you; keep your own data on storage devices you own and physically control. Don't allow people to post pictures of you online, ever; easier by the way to not allow people to take pictures of you in the first place. Don't use a smartphone; they're close to impossible to keep secure, and are easily compromised (documentably so, and if you don't believe that then you're not paying attention). At the very least, limit smartphone internet access as much as possible, and never for anything personally sensitive, always assume your wireless company is snooping into everything you use it for. I'd recommend using a VPN as much as possible except for the fact that you can't necessarily trust VPN providers any more than you can trust wireless companies and ISPs. Likewise I'd recommend using TOR as much as possible, but there's evidence to suggest TOR is compromised, or at least is easily compromised; if you do use TOR, be aware of what country the exit node resides in, and keep changing it until it comes up in a country that (at least theoretically) has laws respecting peoples' privacy (i.e. Russia or Ukraine are bad choices, for instance).
I think the above gives you the general idea. The 'Information Age' has given way to the 'Age of Snooping'. You're right to be paranoid, because someone is indeed watching you, more likely many 'someones'. The only way to 100% protect your privacy anymore is to never use the internet and not have a telephone of any kind (including a landline); i.e. have zero digital footprint. It's possible to live that way but very difficult. The best most of us can do is be vigilant and careful about what we do and say online. Some may say 'The damage is already done, there's no point in trying anymore', but that's nonsense, if you start paying attention and limiting your digital footprint as much as posssible today, after a while all the data that's been collected on you will 'go stale' and predictions of what you might do and say will become less accurate as more time passes. Do yourself a solid and work to make their data on you less accurate.
Sure. As much as accepting that whether it rains or not is beyond my control means I am promoting flooding.
as they do actual, regular users of the site. thanks to siphoning-off contacts and other data from phones, tags on photos, tracking icons virtually everywhere, etc.. and pieces filled-in from public (and not-so-public) databases they've bought. the so-called 'shadow profile' is very much a real thing, and very much a violation of those persons' privacy.
No. My data are what they are and are a reflection of me.
If someone associates your data with me, that does not make it my data. That makes it your data being misapplied. That may hurt you. It may hurt me.
As for people being denied insurance due to issues with data quality...not much I can do about it. If it happens to me, well, I guess I will just show up at the ER and skip out on a big assed bill.
That is fine, so long as they disclose what they are doing. I will use the most advantages browser. They all suck anyway.
How did they get all this data of yours. Oh, because of a complete lack of privacy in modern computing that allows companies to scoop up every little detail about you and what you do.
companies have invaded all aspects of the globalized Corporatocracy.
And even Canada has plenty of the more troubling aspects of American society, like comprehensive biometric profiles, surveillance, and pro-copyright legislation that is bad for the privacy, security, and public benefit of the populace.
Fundamentally to recover what has been lost worldwide, the Berne Convention needs to be overturned, or dramatically scaled back to no more than 35 years of copyright (with 7 year renewal periods), drm needs to be outlawed, and either physical media or a physical license placard needs to be available and transferrable for all products, physical or virtual.
Biometric profiles need to be radically scaled back to a facial record and maybe a dental record, with no DNA samples taken except during a trial and only permanently recorded into a database upon successful conviction of the accused party and promptly deleted if overturned on appeal or when evidence comes to light they were falsely accused and convicted.
OK, now I'm convinced you're just a troll. Have a nice day!
Only crack the nuts that crack. You don't put the ones that don't crack in the sack.
I didn't make it through college. A bad up bringing left me with sever self esteem issues I didn't clear up until around 2005. Then a couple family members got sick and I spent the next 3 years dealing with that. Then the entire US economy crashed and I was dealing with that. Now I'm old and my career has peeked. Why hire me in my 40s w/o a degree when you can have an H1-B in their 20s that can pull 70 hour work weeks for less pay?
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They wouldn't have data on us if we had proper privacy.
See there? People can manipulate their own data to achieve an outcome too.
You're saying there's no way to prevent data collection, right there, by comparing it to THE RAIN, the weather, which we can't stop. I'm saying you're an idiot for pretending there's no possible controls on data collection regimes.
And the more you apologize for it and pretend it's inevitable, the more self-reinforcing that idiocy becomes. See : Ajit Pai
an advanced degree. Otherwise they won't have you. If sick folks could move to Canada they'd have around 29 million US Healthcare refugees (based on the number of uninsured).
My personal favorite example of cluelessness was when Sarah Palin (a right wing American politician who champions the Free Market), in an effort to show people how poor she was talked about how she couldn't afford medical care for her kids and had to take them across the border into Canada.
And by all accounts the story worked with her base. None of them saw the hypocrisy with using socialized medicine for yourself and fighting tooth and nail to keep it from happening in your home country. A few in he far left press (Vox, Motherjones) called her out, that was it. That's what we're up against over here.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
"What these companies are doing is building little models, little avatars, little voodoo dolls of you. Your doll sits in the cloud, and they'll throw 100,000 videos at it to see what's effective to get you to stick around, or what ad with what messaging is uniquely good at getting you to do something...."
And if the answer is "nothing", then what's the threat?
You're a moron. You're trying to appear not to be. The fact that it's not working is proof enough.
They probably avoid you more than you avoid them, you're stupid AF and apologize for dumb things as if you advocate for them.
Big Words, Anonymous Coward.
I did not say there are no possible controls.
I said *I* have no possible controls, other than not to engage in whatever activity results in the generation of the data.
I suppose I could exercise some less than legal possible controls too, so you do have me on that point.
Data and privacy are inextricably linked, geniuses. Without privacy violations there would be no 'data'. How the f*** do you think anyone gets the data in the first place? Good grief, the 21st century is a depressing place.
Dont have a network in your own name.
Use a VPN.
Pack out searching for unrelated topics.
Need a smartphone for work? Only use it for work.
Need a smartphone to be contacted outside work? Use it only for that.
Email? Use your ISP email for short messages with not content or context.
Pay for an email service.
Talk to people on the phone. Stay away for free internet "services". Your content is the product sold.
Don't use social media.
Enjoy the internet but don't keep adding anything about yourself to free sites and free services.
Want to look up something that's related to health, education, health topics that have technical terminology?
Use a different computer system not part of your CC, bank, accounts.
Its all in the metadata and content thats sold. Their encryption keeps it safe until the content is all plain text and sold on.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
If Facebook knows me better than I know myself they should make decisions for me, because they will do a better job
Actively pollute the models with disinformation. Its an old trick that works really well. I sign up for ar15 raffles and support gun law nazis. My data is worthless.
Ah ok... so in this article 'privacy' actually means specific pieces of identifiable data that relate to you. I thought they were talking about, y'know, ... privacy.
There are already numerous things that won't work without a Facebook or Google login. When it gets to the point where those without one start (or refusing to provide one) get stupidly bad insurance quotes or get denied some important (rather than just possibly desirable) service because no Facebook or Twitter we have a real problem - and that's almost certainly coming within a decade at most.
One interesting such existing tie (though not to social media) is Social Security and IRS not validating a personal account (required for doing many things related to benefits and tax prep) unless you grant them access to your credit bureau account/credit report - despite the well-known insecurity and lack of authority of the credit bureaus wrt proof of identity.
I give lots of data, none of it particularly accurate, or quality data.
I search for male things, female things, gay things, straight things, queer things, bi things.
I read left things, right things, middle things.
I post left things, right things, middle things.
I search about my homelands from Saudi Arabia, and Israel, and Germany.
I change my browser every other day.
I have at least 3 different birthdays.
I can be male, female, trans, bi, etc.
good luck building a profile on that.
and when I really want to get work done, I use a VPN, paid from a gift card purchased with cash, and 3 different vpn providers.
"I suppose I could exercise some less than legal possible controls too, so you do have me on that point." Pfft lol I do very much doubt it ^^
In this lies an over abundance of trust that the data profile they've built of you, is actually a reflection of you, and not some random stranger, or family member, or simply incorrectly categorized and mislabeled data.
Humans are error prone, and imperfect. Subsequently, whatever they design and build is going to be error prone, and imperfect, though the goal is to achieve a lesser degree of error.
If privacy is "not important", then what is important is the validity of the data. (Or potentially the lack there of, if you want to throw big data off your scent,...).
Say a person commented on you saying "his pipes don't work". Now is that data going to reflect on your ability to procreate, or your being inconvenienced with a higher cost of living than one would normally assume. So what would big data prescribe, a doctor, or a plumber, or a gas heating repairman? And don't tell me that big data AI/analytics isn't prone to similar errors or isn't trained on bad data sets.
There is also the matter of data interpretation. The data while not guaranteed to be right, can be right and the use and application of that data, the interpretation of that data, can be wrong. Machine Learning can be trained on data sets that miscategorize information.
A lot of web sites' comment sections rely on Disqus. I haven't looked into Disqus, but if they are like any other of the platforms, they accumulate all the comments a user makes across all the websites that that user logs into on Disqus. How long before Disqus is bought by one of the big 5? Then all those users' comments are linked back to FB or or something else.
"To stop the terrorists."
They define privacy as "your first and last name, your Social Security number, your online credentials". That's data actually, identifying data. Privacy, as was figured out as early as 1890, is the right to be let alone. What they describe in the article, companies analyzing and targeting you, is a privacy violation because those companies are not letting you alone. It doesn't stop being a privacy violation if they don't know your identity. They describe why privacy matters without realizing it's privacy they're writing about.
what happens to people who totally opt out? don't participate? don't have a profile in this system? are we free? marginalized? do we care? the system of data collection assumes you participate - so the only way to win is not to play
In my case - and I'm not unique - I click on many different things and will study many different things. I need serendipity to build the overview of life that my mind craves. This sometimes makes it funny to see the "targeted ads" that show up for me. But those ads can be a problem if they represent a model of me and they think they actually know who and what I am and what I want. They are constructing fixed, erroneous, models of people for their own convenience. They are making assumptions about people that are wrong and potentially dangerous and their assumptions do not change in time as people do.
E Proelio Veritas.
"That is fine, so long as they disclose what they are doing"
Yes, but how would you go about achieving that.
If transparency is good doesn't it have to apply to every individual and entity.
That is some of the stuff protected by the German data protection laws, which arose from a court case about a census, and privacy was the central argument. That was before Google and Facebook, I believe.