The Privacy Paradox

Dekortage writes "The NYTimes has a piece up about the paradox of privacy: 'Normally sane people have inconsistent and contradictory impulses and opinions when it comes to their safeguarding their own private information.' More specifically, it's all how you ask: if you don't talk about privacy, people won't worry about it. In one survey, 'When the issue of confidentiality was raised, participants clammed up. For example, 25 percent of the students who were given a strong assurance of confidentiality admitted to having copied someone else's homework. Among those given no assurance of confidentiality, more than half admitted to it.'"

I don't understand why you object to surveillance.

[MichaelCrawford]

Surely if you've done nothing wrong, then you've got nothing to hide.

Re:Trust me

[trolltalk.com]

People are rightly suspicious when they hear someone state explicitly that they are not planning on doing something evil.

So it was a really dumb idea for a certain company to make their motto "do no evil" ...

It also begs the question* about doctors and "first, do no harm."

*(no, I'm not interested in little grammar hitlers starting a war over "begs the question". Put it in an ask slashdot - or better yet, get a life.)

Re:Trust me

[Swizec]

*(no, I'm not interested in little grammar hitlers starting a war over "begs the question". Put it in an ask slashdot - or better yet, get a life.)

What about the big grammar hitlers, can they help you out?

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Proof that people who copy homework are stupid

[evilandi]

Quite.

The survey simply proves that, people who copy others' homework, find it difficult to follow a chain of logic. I'm fairly sure we all knew that before the survey.

To summarise: "Stupid is as stupid does"

Use Simpler Language Next Time

[Cartan]

Most students probably didn't know what "confidentiality" means and played safe...

Re:Paranoia

[Xtravar]

You must be really fun to hang out with.

Re: Verb-Space

[Anonymous Coward]

what was that that mother always used to say?

Don't put salt in your eye.
Don't put salt in your eye.
Salt in your eye.
Put Salt in your eye.

Re:Trust me

[Firehed]

If you ask a girl out on a date she might say yes.

You seem to have forgotten to which website you're posting.

Re:Trolling

[Spy der Mann]

And how, exactly, does this improve on correctly using "prompt the question"?

I don't understand what "prompt the question" means. The first thing that comes to my mind is:

C:\>The question

Maybe I need to get out more often, sorry.

Re: Verb-Space

[ChuckSchwab]

As someone who's spent a lot of time denying the holocaust, I have to say that this rings true. So I'll probably switch to saying things like, "Jews were kept safe in Germany during the second world war."

Re:Paranoia

[arth1]

*smile*

Re: Verb-Space

[Hal_Porter]

It's also important in user interface design. One of my pet peeves is seeing something like:

[X] Disable the foo button

Why the hell not just invert the sense of the checkbox?

[ ] Enable the foo button

Ok, you win. How about we add another checkbox to disable negative sense [gotdotnet.com] checkboxes

[ ] Don't use negative sense checkboxes in Advanced Options.

When you clicked it it would look like this

[ ] Use negative sense checkboxes in Advanced Options.

All the other ones would toggle their checkedness and lose the Don't's and Disables in their captions.