The Privacy Paradox 146
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.'"
Hmm (Score:5, Interesting)
From that little extract in the summary about students, is that proof of people not caring about privacy unless someone mentions it, or proof that students these days are a bit thick and don't really think ahead or about what they're saying?
(NOTE: I'm actually a student myself and I'm inclined to believe the latter).
Same as with any chore (Score:5, Interesting)
Talk to people about dieting or brushing teeth and they might do it in immediate future. Privacy is a chore that can cause quite a bit of inconvenience. Damage from it being breeched only happens rarely and takes a lot of time to manifest itself.
two fears compounded? (Score:3, Interesting)
If not given the assurance people think only about the bad outcome caused by their confession, when given the assurance they actually compound two fears, the fear of bad outcome and the fear of having the promise broken.
Telephone privacy (Score:3, Interesting)
Verb-Space (Score:5, Interesting)
There was a study or two a little while ago that mentioned that the mind has trouble with negative constructions over time.
"Your data is safe with me. That's right, I am not going to *broadcast your data all over the internet where all the world can see it, reverse engineer your life, and tag it in the southeastern dialect of Klingon attached to a mashup of Steve Ballmer and Jack Thompson. Nosirree, I promise to take good care of you and not *rip your life to shreds and offer your data as bait to the CIA, or Viacom."
The mind melts and forgets it is in "reversal mode", and becomes exhausted from the scare words.
Don't think of an elephant! (Score:2, Interesting)
You're absolutely right about this. It's the "don't think of an elephant" argument (which I learned about from a book of the same name by cognitive linguist George Lakoff).
Negative constructions reinforce the positive mental frame that contains them. When Nixon said "I am not a crook", he guaranteed that everyone would think of him as a crook. Saying "we will not violate your privacy" makes people think that you might violate their privacy.
Re:Paranoia (Score:5, Interesting)
I think we're pre-programmed to trust and assist everyone in our tribe by default, and distrust anyone not of our tribe. The problem is that this doesn't work well anymore, since we don't know everyone in our tribe. It's likely quite useful when you hunt wildebeest, but not as useful when you work for a hospital, protecting patient records.
Most of us don't think of trust at all, but assign perceived trustworthiness automatically, and only by being reminded of trust do we pay it any thought.
Social engineering takes advantage of this. You get the victim to draw the conclusion (without being told -- it has to be subconscious) that you belong to the same work tribe as them, and thus trust becomes implicit.
Some warning signs that you may be subjected to social engineering:
- The person starts using your first name without you having ever met.
- The person refers to an authority figure in a jocular/friendly way, in order to make you draw the conclusion that the authority figure knows and trusts this person.
- They will try to appeal to your vanity. E.g. they may imply that they called YOU because you're so friendly and helpful. Ask yourself whether, if it really was this urgent, they would be calling you instead of those whose job it is to deal with this sort of situation. If you believe for one second that it's because of your demeanor, you're not only stupid but vain too.
- They mention a common foe. "You know how accounting is..." Yeah, everyone knows that accounting are bastards to anyone not in accounting, in every company in every country. That doesn't lend credence to you being on the same side.
- They mention an interest of yours. "I had planned to take my son fishing this weekend, but I guess I'll be working, trying to fix this". Why would they tell that to a stranger? (Especially if you have a sticker saying "BITE MY BASS" on your car.)
- If face to face, the person smiles a lot. Nothing disarms suspicion as easily as a smile.
And yeah, cops learn this, and with time become pretty good at it too.
My main advice is to never trust a person who smiles. Ever. That invariably means they want something. Yes, this includes loved ones too; what they want might be something you're willing to give, but they're still unconsciously trying to lower your defense by smiling. A smile is always a mechanism to disarm the one who sees it.
Re:People are accustomed to bait-and-switch langua (Score:3, Interesting)
You're absolutely right about this (I tried to mod you up, but my points had timed out). Watch any advertisement on TV and while the voice over is promising one thing, the 6 point type scrolling at the bottom is "clarifying" and negating the points-- or, in the words of Tom Waits, "the large print giveth, and the small print taketh away." I've noticed even my children no longer trust the words "cheap," and worse, "free," and assume any ad using those words is for something that costs a lot. Perhaps the researchers have discovered something about the way we interpret language in an age of letter-of-the-law linguistics.
Re:People are accustomed to bait-and-switch langua (Score:3, Interesting)
http://www.studentsfororwell.org/ [studentsfororwell.org]
The US has always been the land of the free*.
* Subject to terms and conditions, offer not valid where inapplicable.
Re:Out of sight, Out of Mind (Score:3, Interesting)
Not quite everything. For instance, any YouTube videos that I watched at work (assuming from the moment that I regularly clear cookies) could have been watched by anyone else at the same office; no one has the data to distinguish them, as the office router doesn't keep NAT logs and YouTube sees only the one address. Anything done on a sanitized account used on an open wireless access point is going to be extremely hard to tie to you, particularly if you're careful to always use bogus MAC addresses.
But the point in general is true. Once your data is out on the Internet, you can't trust any intermediary and you can rarely trust the other party. Encryption solves the problem of the intermediaries for the content (presuming the other party will use it too), but doesn't prevent traffic analysis. The only way to ensure it what you are doing NOT discoverable is to enter the internet at a point where you cannot be identified, and make sure you give away no identifying information during the session.
This result has been in observed other fields (Score:3, Interesting)
This result (of people caring more about something once it's been mentioned) has been observed in economic experiments measuring people's willingness to accept, for example, the construction of a new dangerous waste management facility in their municipality.
When presented with the scenario, "The Federal and Local Governments have agreed that the construction of this facility is necessary, and should be constructed here", about 50% of people voted for the plant. When the scenario was modified to, "The Federal and Local Governments have agreed that the construction of this facility is necessary, and should be constructed here. Each resident will receive 500 Francs per year as compensation.", the rate of acceptance fell to about 20%.
Totally counter-intuitive: same scenario, better conditions, less acceptance. It wasn't a strategic decision about trying exhort more money, but rather, the fact that money was offered prompted the residents to think, "Hang on – if they're willing to compensate me for this, it MUST be dangerous. Bugger this!*"
The same effect looks to be at work in this experiment: presented with the offer of confidentiality, the subjects are prompted to reconsider how sensitive this information actually is, and come to the conclusion that if MUST be sensitive if people feel it necessary to promise not to reveal it to anyone else.
*I'm paraphrasing, obviously. I'm not sure even the French would give answers like that on surveys!