Did We Lose the Privacy War? 521
Posted
by
Soulskill
from the no-now-finish-your-cheerios-and-straighten-your-shirt dept.
from the no-now-finish-your-cheerios-and-straighten-your-shirt dept.
eihab writes "I've been a fanatic about my online privacy for the last few years. I've been using NoScript and blocking Google Analytics, disabling third-party cookies, encrypting IM and doing everything in my power to keep data-miners at bay. Recently, I've been feeling like I'm just doing too much and still losing! No matter what I do, I know that there's a weak link somewhere, be it my ISP, Flash cookies, etc. I've recently gotten AT&T U-Verse, who, according to their privacy statement, will be monitoring my TV watching habits for advertisement purposes. I'm extremely annoyed by that, yet I love the service so much and I don't think I can cancel it. I just can't take this anymore. I have nothing to hide, but I do not want to be profiled and become member #5534289 in a database somewhere that records everything I do. I know I'm not that interesting to anyone, but the idea of someone being able to pull up everything about me with a simple SQL SELECT statement and a couple of JOINS makes me cringe. One of the reasons I hate data mining is that data security is not understood and almost non-existent at a lot of places. Case in point: I changed my life insurance two years ago, and the medical firm that conducted my health screening was broken into and computers with non-encrypted hard drives and patients' data were stolen. That medical firm didn't really need my SSN, but then again neither did AT&T when I signed up for U-Verse. Am I just too paranoid? Is privacy dead? Should I just give up and accept the fact that privacy is not the norm anymore (like Facebook's founder recently said) or should I keep fighting the good fight for my privacy?"
Hobby (Score:3, Insightful)
Everyone needs a hobby. If you enjoy playing cloak and dagger, then let that be your hobby. Otherwise invest your time in more worthwhile endeavors.
You surrendered. (Score:5, Insightful)
You are agreeing to give up your privacy. You are not losing - you surrendered.
answered your own question (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm extremely annoyed by that, yet I love the service so much and I don't think I can cancel it.
Then you answered your own question. If you continue to use the service, you're giving them positive reinforcement that their activities are acceptable.
solution: add noise (Score:5, Insightful)
It seems that the only solution is to add so much noise that data miners will have a really hard time filtering out the real data.
Here [nyu.edu] is a start.
Re:Err no (Score:2, Insightful)
Do. The. Research. Yourself. Then start to understand the problem.
Just Because You're Paranoid... (Score:3, Insightful)
OP, show some backbone (Score:5, Insightful)
If there is a privacy war it is a war of one. You know the chef is poisoning the soup but you find it too delicious to stop eating.
Cancel your cable. War won.
Good privacy is really difficult (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:You surrendered. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Inherent privacy is dead. (Score:5, Insightful)
So what we have in lieu of privacy is occasional access to anonymity. You can maintain that anonymity for a little more of your life for a little more effort, but maintaining it 24/7 for everything you do is increasingly difficult.
Yes you can win the privacy war (Score:1, Insightful)
Services like U-Verse will monitor everything you do. use alternate services.
The idea privacy is dead is nonsense - as for face-book its next to impossible to tell if the data stored is genuine or not.
In terms of companies demanding your SSN: well there is nothing you can do about that, but you can limit its effects with lifestyle changes including:
- Discuise your finantial activities by not using your credit card,
- I'm fairly sure you can request the destruction of your medical records - and keep a copy yourself (don't quote me on this)
By adopting habbits like that, even having your SSN would give no more personal information about you than your address and place of work - which even the post office knows.
There are lots of other things you can do - but point is its entirely possible to lead a completely private life - its just not very convenient.
Re:Inherent privacy is dead. (Score:5, Insightful)
Speak for yourself, not all geeks share your defeatism.
Re:OP, show some backbone (Score:0, Insightful)
I canceled my TV service 6 months ago and haven't looked back.
Re:Hobby (Score:1, Insightful)
Yeah how dare anyone think they have a right to a sphere of privacy as guaranteed in the 4th amendment? After all *anything* done by the free market is a-OK right net.libertarians.hypocrties
I mean hey if corporate data miners behave like the Stasi why should I complain, just grin and bear it the market has spoken and human rights don't apply in the private spehere, right?
The offensive part. (Score:5, Insightful)
The thing that bugs me about being endlessly monitored and categorized is that it's never used to make my life better. It's only ever done to help some random corporation improve their profits by some fraction of a percentage.
If being tracked watching a TV show for a full season resulted in them going "hey, thanks for being a loyal viewer, have this X as a token of our appreciation", I wouldn't complain so much. It wouldn't necessarily have to be a material bonus, in this day and age they could simply grant access to some kind of insider info website. The possibilities are only limited by imagination.
But no. Everything I do gets dumped into a database and sold to the highest bidder. It serves no purpose but to try and get more money out of my wallet. Or if the government is involved, measure my odds of being a terrorist.
Re:You surrendered. (Score:1, Insightful)
You are agreeing to give up your privacy. You are not losing - you surrendered.
I don't think this is the problem. The problem isn't that people are using systems that disregard privacy, the problem is that people are designing them. This is why the war on privacy is necessarily the war on open source: Open source software doesn't invade your privacy. Firefox lets you automatically delete cookies, Flash doesn't. Asterisk lets you control what your phone switch is recording about you, AT&T doesn't. On and on.
So if you don't like how the world is going, build a different one.
Re:Stop stressing (Score:2, Insightful)
don't do stuff that you're going to be ashamed of
This is very good advice. Online and offline. Be proud of your actions and don't be afraid to put your name on them.
I know this isn't possible in all parts of the world. But the real problem in that case isn't lack of privacy.
Re:Inherent privacy is dead. (Score:5, Insightful)
Besides, I think we live in a world where we have obscurity through density, instead of obscurity through privacy. Billions of people on this earth, nearly a billion of them connected to the 'net. Embrace it. Eventually, if enough personal data gets out there, it may become worthless to mine it due to the sheer volume available.
Panopticlick [eff.org] wants to disagree [eff.org].
That, and "billions" / "sheer volume" are meaningless in the face of computers processing billions of cycles a second. The whole point of data mining is software can find neat correlations and connections that a human never could. You are not hidden in the billion bits of data.
Re:Inherent privacy is dead. (Score:4, Insightful)
Besides, I think we live in a world where we have obscurity through density, instead of obscurity through privacy. Billions of people on this earth, nearly a billion of them connected to the 'net. Embrace it. Eventually, if enough personal data gets out there, it may become worthless to mine it due to the sheer volume available.
Sure. Until someone uses that to steal your identity, and all of a sudden you will need to prove to N different government, banking and credit institutions that you are not a fraudster.
Re:Err no (Score:3, Insightful)
Most other countries didn't even have a blitzkrieg, people did an Anschluss instead.
Re:Err no (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe not, but they were so opportunistic in exploiting them that they might as well have caused them. They want you to win the war on terror by being afraid.
Re:Yes you can win the privacy war (Score:3, Insightful)
What little privacy you DO have can always be taken from you by force.
_ ...or corporations like Google that completely foul up a new feature and accidentally expose everyone's contact list to each other.
Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence.
Computers are the weapon... (Score:5, Insightful)
For ages our privacy was protected only by the others' ability to remember. A human being can only remember so many faces and facts about other people (and himself, for that matter)...
Written records reduced the privacy immensely. Computers made the next giant leap. The only thing we can do is legislate, what the computers are allowed to memorize, but those would be merely human (as opposed to physical) laws and have serious limitations. Legal pitfalls will abound — an Evil Corporation may lease a server in a foreign locale [huffingtonpost.com] to keep your data, for example. WikiLeaks has shown the ways around various attempts to close access to information.
Information wants to be free. Does not it?
Re:You surrendered. (Score:5, Insightful)
As an alien living in this US, I find this SSN situation ridiculous. Everybody is going to say that you should not give your SSN to ANYBODY. Yet everybody is asking for it...
It seems to me that people are schizophrenic about SSN number. Is it a public unique identifier of a tax payer or a secret information ?
Re:Accept and enjoy! (Score:3, Insightful)
And if you just buy their product, there won't be any public evidence of your little problem.
Re:You insensitive clod! (Score:5, Insightful)
Would have been better if you'd actually used his slashdot ID instead of the message number, but you get a few points for at least trying to make the obvious joke.
Just call me uh, Clem.
Re:You surrendered. (Score:5, Insightful)
Its not like there are not alternative ways to get your media, TV shows, movies or otherwise.
Indeed. Most 'media providers' on the net certainly don't seem to be asking for SSN...
And in cases where it's hard to avoid some tracking, like social networking sites, just sprinkle freely with sockpuppet identities to screw with the tracking. If you're worried about leakage between browser profiles or users, create virtual machines to run multiple virtual identities. Create your own happy little multiple-personality collective.
Those with the idea that they want to track 'everything' often seem to miss how much crap 'everything' actually contains. And while they can attempt to record as much as they can, they can neither make you tell the truth, nor the whole truth, nor shut you up once you wander off into fantasyland.
And hey, best of all, polluting the data really seems to piss the data mining junkies off.
are you the tv shows you watch? (Score:3, Insightful)
so somebody knows all the tv shows you watch. ok, so fucking what?
the question is not that somebody has profiled your viewing habits, but that you consider such effluvia about you to be some sort of vital intrinsic part of your identity, worth protecting, worth fighting for, or worth even caring about
i don't know about you, but when making a list of private facts about my identity, what i watch on tv doesn't even remotely enter the realm of relevancy. and no i'm not some "i don't watch tv" weirdo, i watch a lot of tv
i just don't care if anyone knows what i watch, because i don't particularly consider that information about myself remotely valuable or interesting
Re:Hobby (Score:2, Insightful)
The right to privacy doesn't mean that nobody will ever know who you are, what you do or where you go, it means that that knowledge won't be actively sought or abused without strong legal cause.
Fighting the war in the way OP has chosen to isn't fighting for people to respect your privacy, it's fighting for them not to have a choice. I put virtually no effort into remaining anonymous or hiding my digital footprints, yet oddly enough I've never had the secret police bust down my door, or had any clear reason to believe that my privacy has been violated.
I also happen to believe that anything I do online, by nature of the internet, is public, and accordingly I choose not to put most of the details of my life onto it.
Re:You surrendered. (Score:3, Insightful)
>Is it a public unique identifier of a tax payer or a secret information ?
Both, unfortunately
Re:Err no (Score:1, Insightful)
Why the old money ought to be singled out (and I am hearing your point about new money) is that the old money folks have been executing a very long term plan for hundreds of years now -- and that plan is accumulate all the power you possibly can, and let go of as little power as possible. Though their influence may have been slightly diluted in modern times, they still have more experience in playing the hegemony game than their new money cousins.
Re:There was a war? (Score:2, Insightful)
Damn...If it wasn't so private maybe I'd have heard about it and fought...
Is there a "war" we haven't lost lately? We lost the War on Freedom when the terrorists got a standing army posted in all the airports checking all the shampoo bottles for size and taking fingerprints. We lost the War on Human Dignity when it became routine to have one's shoes and underwear snooped in order to travel. We lost the War on Peace of Mind when it became impossible to know if your name didn't match any one of countless badly-kept lists. We lost the War on Accountability when the telco's were given immunity from prosecution when then handed over data to government agencies who didn't have proper authoritzation. We lost the War on Moral Superiority when we stooped to using the same barbaric tactics that we derided our enemies for using. We lost the War on Rule of Law when terrorists stopped being criminals and became Enemy Combatants in an army that exists more as an attitude than an actual country we could invade, bomb the hell out of, and exchange prisoners with.
We lost the War on Innocence when we started routinely prosecuting murderous children as adult murderers, and others as sexual predators for sending pictures over their cellphones. We lost the War on Common Sense when we started sending kids off to jail for sharing aspirin tablets and bringing miniature toy weapons to school. We lost the War on Civility when political discourse degenerated into win-at-all-costs partisan battles fought on the air and in the houses of government where opponents are demonized and the faults of "our team" were defended against all reason. We lost the War on Political Solutions when gridlock became the norm and it was no longer acceptable to repair bad laws over time instead of blocking all legislation - good, bad, and indifferent - at the source. We lost the War on Intelligence when education became standardized tests, scientists were expected to promote or refrain from hindering political agendas and it was more important to be able to "have a beer" with leaders than that they should have enough intellect to lead wisely.
You name it, we lost it.
I sympathize (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Hobby (Score:5, Insightful)
I put virtually no effort into remaining anonymous or hiding my digital footprints, yet oddly enough I've never had the secret police bust down my door, or had any clear reason to believe that my privacy has been violated.
This just means you're an average Joe that makes no attempt to disturb the status quo, has no real power or influence and has nothing anybody in a position of power wants.
Re:Hobby (Score:5, Insightful)
"or had any clear reason to believe that my privacy has been violated."
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Your statement seems to be almost the corollary to statements like "If you don't have anything to hide what are you worried about?" I would also suggest that you're not looking at the bigger picture.
"I also happen to believe that anything I do online, by nature of the internet, is public, and accordingly I choose not to put most of the details of my life onto it."
What is preventing your friends from doing that for you? If I have an Android phone, and I have your contact info, along with perhaps your birth date, address, email, an ID picture of you, and some other interesting details in your contact, now I've given that data to Google, haven't I? What contract or understanding do you have with Google to govern how that data is being used and protected?
Re:Money out of your wallet needn't be a bad thing (Score:1, Insightful)
What's so evil about targeted advertising?
Assuming advertising is benign is pretty dumb, but as you[1] clearly don't know:
Adverts are designed to convince you to make a decision that is in the best interest of the advertiser. This may not be in your best interests, and rarely is. And they try very hard to convince you, using the teaching of psychologists, psychiatrists, sociologists, etc., to get into your head more effectively.
The truly effective adverts are the ones that manipulate your decision making processes without you even realising they are doing it. Just think how many jingles you can remember from your youth. Now if they have stuck, what else has over the years?
When you are exposed to vast ranges of adverts, you can easily spot the attempts at manipulation, but if adverts were more relevant to the viewer (i.e. targeted) then you would be less likely to notice how insidious adverts are, and hence they will be more effective at parting you from your cash.
Now, that cash could be used to buy more nutritious food, or better housing, it could be used to buy extra education for your kids, etc., rather than being spent on some shiny gadget that you don't actually need.
"Good" and "evil" are just human-made labels for things, and don't exist (just like "luck" - that is a label for a fortuitous event), and from different points of view the same thing can be both good and evil. As far as an advertiser is concerned, adverts increase business, so are good. But from my point of view, the attempts to manipulate me into buying something I don't need is pretty evil.
So don't judge things on a good/evil scale, because once you decide something isn't evil it must be good. That is a fallacy.
[1] That sounds pretty troll-y, but it is aimed at both you, dlenmn, and the advertising industry apologists who have shit all over this discussion, and who are willing to give away everyone else's privacy when they give away their own.
Re:use SSL (Score:3, Insightful)
I voluntarily gave my SSN to my cable company so they could run a credit check to see if I would pay my bills. I guess I should have no expectation that they won't sell that information on the open market.
Maybe if my ISP has the horsepower, they could start decrypting my SSL streams and snoop out my medical history, selling that information to those marketing cures, literature, insurance, etc.
While I'm running this to its logical conclusion... maybe leaving a window in your house unlocked should be a good enough excuse for someone to break in? Maybe a woman's dressing sexy is her just asking to get raped. I just don't buy that "tough shit, anything goes, use SSL or else, barricade yourself in your home" line of reasoning. We should expect better of our society and codify those expectations into laws where possible.
With the power and ubiquity of computers in our society, companies can completely blow away any traditional notions of privacy. Just because they can do something doesn't mean that they should or that it should even be legal.
Sorry, but my stance will always be to fight tooth and nail for freedom and privacy of the individual. There are plenty of malicious, greedy, and stupid forces that act to erode those things. I'll oppose them, tyvm.
Data Rape (Score:1, Insightful)
"I've been a fanatic about my online privacy for the last few years. I've been using NoScript and blocking Google Analytics, disabling third-party cookies, encrypting IM and doing everything in my power to keep data-miners at bay. Recently, I've been feeling like I'm just doing too much and still losing! No matter what I do, I know that there's a weak link somewhere, be it my ISP, Flash cookies, etc.
Heh, Adblock and NoScript are musts for me too, but I also forge all referrers to be the root of the site I am surfing (no need for sites to know how I found them). I reject all cookies, and for sites that need cookies I allow them for session only. I send my web searches through TOR (though Google block a lot of TOR exit nodes, so Scroogle SSL via TOR is needed most of the time). I don't have Flash installed, and find that not to be a problem. There are methods for downloading videos and music obscured by flash anyway, and once you've seen 1 flash game, you've seen them all. Or if you ever used an 8-bit computer, you have played games better than anything a flash developer will churn out.
I turn off all auto-update checking in applications, and do not install applications that phone home. (Spyware has been totally legitimised through claiming to check for updates, and things that would never have been acceptable 10 years ago are common place these days).
I rarely give websites real data any more. If I want to make a post on a site, I will sign up a throw away account - email provided by mailinator.com, the username is a munge of the keyboard, and the password is password. If someone gets into the account and starts shitting all over the site, well, if webmasters didn't try and violate privacy at every turn maybe they would be treated with respect. (Cue the whingeing bloggers, who claim not to violate user privacy, whilst at the same time having the likes of Google Analytics on their Wordpress hosted blog).
And if a site wants an email address, but doesn't verify the address, I use postmaster@site.tld.
I urge others to do the same. If you care about privacy, or just don't care about corporations, fucking with their data is probably the best attack. Make things uneconomical, and the practices stop.
I've recently gotten AT&T U-Verse, who, according to their privacy statement, will be monitoring my TV watching habits for advertisement purposes. I'm extremely annoyed by that, yet I love the service so much and I don't think I can cancel it.
It's things like this where you need to either stop being a brainless consumer, or purposefully poison their data.
I know it fucking sucks that these companies offer their way, or the highway, and that the barrier to entry to these industries is so high there is no way anyone (especially not a non-datarapist) can even try to think about becoming a competitor.
So fuck off the service where one company is the gatekeeper of all data that goes in and out of your house, and torrent the TV and films you are interested in (you don't think Netflix ignore the data they have on people?).
Or, if you really want to pay for adverts, fuck with their data. Operate a TOR exit node, and QOS it so it doesn't effect your 'net usage. You could run a web proxy on the exit too, that modifies all web browser fingerprints to match yours. I know your question says they monitor TV habits, but it won't be long before they are shamelessly monitoring internet usage too (though the likes of Google already are). It might be worth formally notifying your ISP (with a hand written letter) that you are going to be running a TOR exit node, and that if they get the government coming bitching then it is probably a TOR user. At least then you might have some recourse against your ISP if they just mindlessly hand over your name/address to the feds.
I haven't had cable TV for a long time now, but back when I did it did occur to me that the cable company could probably tell everything I did with the