What theft would you be referring to, exactly? The cell phone was left unattended at a bar, and while the engineer who left it unattended may be incompetent, that does not mean that the person who retrieved it is guilty of thievery. This sounds like another case of Apple bullying journalists who obtain information about upcoming product releases to me, although it appears that some sort of political pressure was exerted this time (i.e. Apple pressured the police to seize this journalist's equipment).
Undoubtedly, it will be more successful. I think people suffer from mass amnesia -- nobody seems to remember that they used to be careful about giving out their real name on the Internet. Few will notice that the latest erosion of privacy is actually built on dozens of other incidents.
Actually, there is another category: the uninformed. A lot of people really do not keep up with the latest decisions Facebook is making with regard to personal privacy, or are even aware that Facebook can, at any time, reveal their data. I am referring, of course, to the same sort of people who are not sure what a web browser is or which browser they are using -- which appears to be the overwhelming majority.
The truth is, even if an individual never forget an insignificant detail, that individual is still not likely to have the resources to store and analyze the level of information about you and your habits, and the people you associate with, that an organization like Google has.
I have a lot of complaints about this current administration, but I'll give them credit where it is due. This is a good move, and I hope to see similar actions in the future.
No, but you can a different law for corporations than you do for individuals, and that is exactly what we have in this country. Or did you forget that Google is a corporation, not just a group of people?
No, Google might be able to take publicly available information, and use it to determine something you might have wanted to keep private. That includes seemingly insignificant details like MAC addresses. Anything they collect could, when combined with their vast database of other trends and habits, reveal private details of your life.
Yes, individual photographers are free to take pictures in public. That right was not granted with the intention of having a massive, international company go around photographing everyone and publishing those photographs for the entire world to see. In fact, despite the fact that you may photograph anyone in public, you do not have the right to use those photographs for certain purposes -- for example, you cannot use those photographs in an advertisement without first getting the permission of the person you photographed.
People do not go out in public with the expectation that photographs of them are going to be returned as part of a search result, and they really should not have to.
Except that it is not a crime to be "likely" to attack someone, and there are a lot of people who move to a new town to escape someone they believe is "likely" to attack them (think witness protection program). Do you really think a person who is certain harm may come to them, but who has no legal basis for pressing assault or harassment charges, should just sit around waiting until a crime is actually committed? Yes, believe it or not, these case do exist, they are not so uncommon, and when someone moves to a new town to escape danger they perceived in their old town, they should not have to stay indoors for the rest of their lives just because Google is sending a surveillance vans around the country.
Right, because someone who is watering their lawn should expect a van to roll through their neighborhood, photograph them, and without informing them, post that photograph on the Internet. If someone wants privacy, I suppose you think they should sacrifice seeing the light of day and just stay hidden in a bunker for the rest of their life.
As I noted elsewhere, it would not take much for Google to include a feature in Chrome that reported internal network details to Google services, which could then simply match those details to this database. Informed people would probably avoid Chrome, but most people are not "informed" about the technical workings of computer networks.
The problem is that it is possible to extract private details of a person's life from a large database of public details. Yes, Google is prying -- not directly, but indirectly, by collecting and analyzing these details.
Even small details like MAC addresses may ultimately reveal a lot of private data about a person, particularly combined with other information (such as its geographic location?). No, nobody expects every single detail of their life to be private; at the same time, many of us do have secrets and private details of our lives which we never broadcast, but which may be revealed by the sort of activity that companies like Google are engaged in.
Except that we must rethink our expectations of privacy. Nobody has ever expected everything they do to be private, but a lot of people are surprised to learn that some aspect of their life which is not public may be revealed by seemingly unimportant aspects that are public. The well known example of determining sexual orientation from a person's "friend list" on Facebook is a good example -- public information can be used to reveal information that a person may be actively trying to keep private.
Yes, in a technical sense, this data is all public. It used to be the case that we knew we could separate our public lives from our private lives, but efforts like this undermine our ability to assume such a separation.
Perhaps they will just wait until you use some program they wrote (a web browser?) that has a feature which forwards the BSSID you are connected to whenever you log in to a Google server. Considering how few people would have the technical skill to remove such a thing from Chrome, or to install Chromium, or to even understand what that means, I would guess they could get away with it.
Also, they probably record the numeric SSID of the AP, which should be unique (although I have seen MAC addresses that are not, and I doubt manufacturers are so careful with SSIDs).
The problem is that it is so large, well organized, and that they have the capability to process the information in large quantities. A single person who happens to see some minute public detail of your life is probably going to forget it within an hour, but Google is collecting vast amounts of data for analysis. The situation changes when an "army of men with clipboards" is roaming around, then bringing their data back and combining it all. The odds are stacked against an individual who might want to keep certain details of their life private when an organization as large as Google is trying to pry their lives open.
The privacy concern is that Google is building a massive database of SSIDs -- this is not the same as your neighbors being able to see your SSID, this is a corporation with global reach.
This is the same sort of problem that we complain about when a company collects little bits of information that you leak in public, and builds a dossier on you. Yes, the information is technically public, but the fact that it is being assembled en masse is the problem. It is impossible to hide ever detail of your life from view, but when such a large database is built up, it reveals a lot about a person, potentially including things they did not want revealed.
Perhaps you are not familiar with gangs? Some gangs are based on distrust, but many are based on a very high level of trust and commitment to helping out other members of the gang. I know this to be particularly true among many motorcycle gangs, where members often must earn the trust of the other members during a probation period, and once in the gang the trust is implicit, and if one member asks for help from other members, he can expect to get that help, even when it is risky or illegal.
Perhaps things have changed in this century, but that is my understanding of the state of affairs in the 70s and 80s.
Perhaps a better way to state it is that we are careening toward a police state. A greater percentage of our population is in prison now than 100 years ago, and it is becoming harder and harder to be a law abiding citizen. More and more activities are not only being made illegal, but being declared criminal (in the legal sense).
The result seems pretty obvious: the police will be able to legally arrest and imprison anyone, even people who are not doing any harm to anyone at all (even themselves).
I wish I shared your optimism about libre software, but things seem to be working out a little differently. Many people are focused on the price aspect of the majority of libre software projects, and think that it is a sign of success when Microsoft started offering a no-cost version of Visual Studio, despite the fact that it remained proprietary. Libre software remains in minority use, except in a few extreme cases (Apache, Firefox, etc.). Software as a service is more popular than ever, yet AGPL (or similarly) licensed SaaS projects are very rare.
Ultimately, though, the problem is the people themselves. Most computer users do not even bother to read the licenses they agree to, let alone to be informed on what sort of software is actually out there. A few weeks ago, someone told me that Red Hat sells proprietary software, and they did not believe me when I said that you can download all the source code to RHEL, JBoss, or any other RH product from their FTP server -- and this was in a computer science department. If we cannot even expect CS students who are weeks away from graduating to be informed on these matters, I cannot fathom how we can expect the general public to be informed.
From where I sit, things are getting less and less free/open all the time. People have become conditioned to the point where they no longer perceive that they are being restricted by software vendors, even while those restrictions steadily increase. Schools seem willing to rid themselves of used textbook markets, trialing devices like Kindle without out any regard for the students' ability to access textbooks (or whether those textbooks will even remain on students' kindles -- Amazon has yet to remove the ability to remotely delete books). Businesses, especially small businesses, continue to use proprietary software. The general public does not even question the ridiculous tactics proprietary vendors are pulling, certainly not when it comes to trendy gadgets and websites (the hundreds of thousands of people who complain about Facebook even time they do something stupid are not deleting their accounts, and they are nothing but background noise compared to the hundreds of millions of Facebook users).
The fight for openness and liberty is far from won.
Computers are the primary mode of communication for the general public, and the iPhone is a computer, and sales of the iPhone have been growing. The GP's point was that Apple is marketing their devices to non-technical computer users, which is the overwhelming majority of people, at least here in America. My point was that I do not want to live in a world in which Apple, given its current behavior, is successful in that venture (and it seems likely that they will be, given their performance in the market; worse, other computer makers seem poised to copy their tactics).
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What theft would you be referring to, exactly? The cell phone was left unattended at a bar, and while the engineer who left it unattended may be incompetent, that does not mean that the person who retrieved it is guilty of thievery. This sounds like another case of Apple bullying journalists who obtain information about upcoming product releases to me, although it appears that some sort of political pressure was exerted this time (i.e. Apple pressured the police to seize this journalist's equipment).
Undoubtedly, it will be more successful. I think people suffer from mass amnesia -- nobody seems to remember that they used to be careful about giving out their real name on the Internet. Few will notice that the latest erosion of privacy is actually built on dozens of other incidents.
Actually, there is another category: the uninformed. A lot of people really do not keep up with the latest decisions Facebook is making with regard to personal privacy, or are even aware that Facebook can, at any time, reveal their data. I am referring, of course, to the same sort of people who are not sure what a web browser is or which browser they are using -- which appears to be the overwhelming majority.
The truth is, even if an individual never forget an insignificant detail, that individual is still not likely to have the resources to store and analyze the level of information about you and your habits, and the people you associate with, that an organization like Google has.
I have a lot of complaints about this current administration, but I'll give them credit where it is due. This is a good move, and I hope to see similar actions in the future.
No, but you can a different law for corporations than you do for individuals, and that is exactly what we have in this country. Or did you forget that Google is a corporation, not just a group of people?
No, Google might be able to take publicly available information, and use it to determine something you might have wanted to keep private. That includes seemingly insignificant details like MAC addresses. Anything they collect could, when combined with their vast database of other trends and habits, reveal private details of your life.
Yes, individual photographers are free to take pictures in public. That right was not granted with the intention of having a massive, international company go around photographing everyone and publishing those photographs for the entire world to see. In fact, despite the fact that you may photograph anyone in public, you do not have the right to use those photographs for certain purposes -- for example, you cannot use those photographs in an advertisement without first getting the permission of the person you photographed.
People do not go out in public with the expectation that photographs of them are going to be returned as part of a search result, and they really should not have to.
Except that it is not a crime to be "likely" to attack someone, and there are a lot of people who move to a new town to escape someone they believe is "likely" to attack them (think witness protection program). Do you really think a person who is certain harm may come to them, but who has no legal basis for pressing assault or harassment charges, should just sit around waiting until a crime is actually committed? Yes, believe it or not, these case do exist, they are not so uncommon, and when someone moves to a new town to escape danger they perceived in their old town, they should not have to stay indoors for the rest of their lives just because Google is sending a surveillance vans around the country.
Right, because someone who is watering their lawn should expect a van to roll through their neighborhood, photograph them, and without informing them, post that photograph on the Internet. If someone wants privacy, I suppose you think they should sacrifice seeing the light of day and just stay hidden in a bunker for the rest of their life.
As I noted elsewhere, it would not take much for Google to include a feature in Chrome that reported internal network details to Google services, which could then simply match those details to this database. Informed people would probably avoid Chrome, but most people are not "informed" about the technical workings of computer networks.
So you basically dismiss the very concept of someone needing (let alone simply wanting) privacy?
The problem is that it is possible to extract private details of a person's life from a large database of public details. Yes, Google is prying -- not directly, but indirectly, by collecting and analyzing these details.
Even small details like MAC addresses may ultimately reveal a lot of private data about a person, particularly combined with other information (such as its geographic location?). No, nobody expects every single detail of their life to be private; at the same time, many of us do have secrets and private details of our lives which we never broadcast, but which may be revealed by the sort of activity that companies like Google are engaged in.
Except that we must rethink our expectations of privacy. Nobody has ever expected everything they do to be private, but a lot of people are surprised to learn that some aspect of their life which is not public may be revealed by seemingly unimportant aspects that are public. The well known example of determining sexual orientation from a person's "friend list" on Facebook is a good example -- public information can be used to reveal information that a person may be actively trying to keep private.
Yes, in a technical sense, this data is all public. It used to be the case that we knew we could separate our public lives from our private lives, but efforts like this undermine our ability to assume such a separation.
Perhaps they will just wait until you use some program they wrote (a web browser?) that has a feature which forwards the BSSID you are connected to whenever you log in to a Google server. Considering how few people would have the technical skill to remove such a thing from Chrome, or to install Chromium, or to even understand what that means, I would guess they could get away with it.
Also, they probably record the numeric SSID of the AP, which should be unique (although I have seen MAC addresses that are not, and I doubt manufacturers are so careful with SSIDs).
The problem is that it is so large, well organized, and that they have the capability to process the information in large quantities. A single person who happens to see some minute public detail of your life is probably going to forget it within an hour, but Google is collecting vast amounts of data for analysis. The situation changes when an "army of men with clipboards" is roaming around, then bringing their data back and combining it all. The odds are stacked against an individual who might want to keep certain details of their life private when an organization as large as Google is trying to pry their lives open.
The privacy concern is that Google is building a massive database of SSIDs -- this is not the same as your neighbors being able to see your SSID, this is a corporation with global reach.
This is the same sort of problem that we complain about when a company collects little bits of information that you leak in public, and builds a dossier on you. Yes, the information is technically public, but the fact that it is being assembled en masse is the problem. It is impossible to hide ever detail of your life from view, but when such a large database is built up, it reveals a lot about a person, potentially including things they did not want revealed.
That is truly scary. I am at a loss for words -- a citizen was killed, and there cannot be public scrutiny over what happened?
Perhaps you are not familiar with gangs? Some gangs are based on distrust, but many are based on a very high level of trust and commitment to helping out other members of the gang. I know this to be particularly true among many motorcycle gangs, where members often must earn the trust of the other members during a probation period, and once in the gang the trust is implicit, and if one member asks for help from other members, he can expect to get that help, even when it is risky or illegal.
Perhaps things have changed in this century, but that is my understanding of the state of affairs in the 70s and 80s.
More likely, they are scrambling to get those documents reclassified as "security sensitive."
So, you are saying that it is smart for people to abandon their civil rights? Really? This is how democracy is transformed into tyranny.
Perhaps a better way to state it is that we are careening toward a police state. A greater percentage of our population is in prison now than 100 years ago, and it is becoming harder and harder to be a law abiding citizen. More and more activities are not only being made illegal, but being declared criminal (in the legal sense).
The result seems pretty obvious: the police will be able to legally arrest and imprison anyone, even people who are not doing any harm to anyone at all (even themselves).
I wish I shared your optimism about libre software, but things seem to be working out a little differently. Many people are focused on the price aspect of the majority of libre software projects, and think that it is a sign of success when Microsoft started offering a no-cost version of Visual Studio, despite the fact that it remained proprietary. Libre software remains in minority use, except in a few extreme cases (Apache, Firefox, etc.). Software as a service is more popular than ever, yet AGPL (or similarly) licensed SaaS projects are very rare.
Ultimately, though, the problem is the people themselves. Most computer users do not even bother to read the licenses they agree to, let alone to be informed on what sort of software is actually out there. A few weeks ago, someone told me that Red Hat sells proprietary software, and they did not believe me when I said that you can download all the source code to RHEL, JBoss, or any other RH product from their FTP server -- and this was in a computer science department. If we cannot even expect CS students who are weeks away from graduating to be informed on these matters, I cannot fathom how we can expect the general public to be informed.
From where I sit, things are getting less and less free/open all the time. People have become conditioned to the point where they no longer perceive that they are being restricted by software vendors, even while those restrictions steadily increase. Schools seem willing to rid themselves of used textbook markets, trialing devices like Kindle without out any regard for the students' ability to access textbooks (or whether those textbooks will even remain on students' kindles -- Amazon has yet to remove the ability to remotely delete books). Businesses, especially small businesses, continue to use proprietary software. The general public does not even question the ridiculous tactics proprietary vendors are pulling, certainly not when it comes to trendy gadgets and websites (the hundreds of thousands of people who complain about Facebook even time they do something stupid are not deleting their accounts, and they are nothing but background noise compared to the hundreds of millions of Facebook users).
The fight for openness and liberty is far from won.
"game consoles, which are computers"
Fixed that for you.
Computers are the primary mode of communication for the general public, and the iPhone is a computer, and sales of the iPhone have been growing. The GP's point was that Apple is marketing their devices to non-technical computer users, which is the overwhelming majority of people, at least here in America. My point was that I do not want to live in a world in which Apple, given its current behavior, is successful in that venture (and it seems likely that they will be, given their performance in the market; worse, other computer makers seem poised to copy their tactics).