Bruce Schneier recently wrote another essay on privacy for the BBC concentrating on how data seems to be the "pollution of the information age" and where this seems to be leading. "We're not going to stop the march of technology, just as we cannot un-invent the automobile or the coal furnace. We spent the industrial age relying on fossil fuels that polluted our air and transformed our climate. Now we are working to address the consequences. (While still using said fossil fuels, of course.) This time around, maybe we can be a little more proactive. Just as we look back at the beginning of the previous century and shake our heads at how people could ignore the pollution they caused, future generations will look back at us — living in the early decades of the information age — and judge our solutions to the proliferation of data."
Slashdot moderation provides the utopian method for making all information available while providing the facility for anyone to set their own threshold for what information they will actually see. Slashdot will be looked at by future generations and they will say "There is an information source that was ahead of its time!" Then they'll accidentally set their mod threshold to -1 and will immediately dig up Taco's corpse and beat it with a stick.
The problem is that nothing disappears. If you admitted back in 1999, while you were an idiot college student, that you "experimented" with marijuana, do you really want that Slashdot post to reappear in a year 2020 Google search when you're trying to run for the State Legislature or Congress?
There are drawbacks to keeping messages that we posted when we were still young & stupid. I still have Usenet posts from the year 1987 that still come back and haunt me. I was only 10-11 years old, but nobody reading those old posts know that. They identify those posts with the adult version of me, and assume I can't spell.
Imagine the backlash that might have occurred against Obama if we were able to find his old high school postings, wherein he admits he cheated on a test by copying from his neighbor. The web didn't exist when Obama was in high school, but eventually we will have presidents with decades-old online postings, and you can be sure FOX News, CNN, and all the rest will dig them up for all to see.
We had various and vociferous debates about which computer was better. He'd say the Atari has better graphics, and I'd argue the Commodore has a sound chip that can make realistic music. It got even worse when he upgraded to an ST and I to an Amiga. We just never saw eye-to-eye.
Of course now that Microsoft controls everything, we both are unhappy.
The problem is that nothing disappears. If you admitted back in 1999, while you were an idiot college student, that you "experimented" with marijuana, do you really want that Slashdot post to reappear in a year 2020 Google search when you're trying to run for the State Legislature or Congress?
Yes, because hopefully by 2020
a) the electorate will put more trust in candidates being open about past mistakes than those being most capable in cover-ups or spin doctor tactics
b) the electorate will realise we all have lived twenty to thirty immature years before reaching true adulthood
c) the electorate will not be so uptight about marijuana in the first place
Yes, because hopefully by 2020
a) the electorate will put more trust in candidates being open about past mistakes than those being most capable in cover-ups or spin doctor tactics
The problem is that nothing disappears. If you admitted back in 1999, while you were an idiot college student, that you "experimented" with marijuana, do you really want that Slashdot post to reappear in a year 2020 Google search when you're trying to run for the State Legislature or Congress?
Why would this be an issue? It hasn't been an issue for people running for President. Why should it be an issue for people running for Congress. So far it has only been an issue for people trying to get student loans or jobs at Best Buy.
Anything could be an issue. If your parents post baby pictures of your circumcision, baptism or Bar Mitzvah then this could certainly be an issue, although people may argue that it shouldn't be. Anything could be made into an issue. If you talk about politics or religion on
i smoked marijuana. why should i be ashamed of that? why must i pander to weakminded shrill people i don't even like whose opinions on making marijuana illegal i consider wrong?
furthermore, why should we pander to over judgmental assholes who would hold against somebody some indiscretion of their from high school?
i understand what i did in high school should not be held against me, you understand that, anyone of any moral integriy does too. in which case, who are we really trying to pander too? oh: weak min
Of course, we can all see that your caps lock and period keys are busted and you're too cheap to spring for a new keyboard. I'm sure somebody will try to use that against you now. You should have posted anonymously.
Not only that, but anything that anyone else has posted about you.
I once found a document that noted my (real) name and that I had been a member of an amateur rock group that had won a 1964 "battle of the bands" contest at my high school. The name of the city and state I lived in at the time was also in this document. Not hard for some prospective employer to determine my age (roughly) from that posting. When that information was "fresh," not even ARPANET existed (if memory serves) except, maybe, somwh
While I believe that "information wants to be free", that can have negative consequences as well. Just as we were forced (and it is true, we were) to regulate all kinds of physical businesses (power, chemical, the list is huge) so that they did not pollute us to death, it will probably be necessary to regulate information businesses in a like manner.
Problem here is that nobody does nor can have complete jurisdiction over the information. Don't like how the EU or US does privacy, want to run amuck and do whatever you want, there are plenty of eastern european countries as well as those in the far east or africa willing to turn a blind eye. So how exact do you propose to regulate something that transcends borders?
Problem here is that nobody does nor can have complete jurisdiction over the information. Don't like how the EU or US does privacy, want to run amuck and do whatever you want, there are plenty of eastern european countries as well as those in the far east or africa willing to turn a blind eye. So how exact do you propose to regulate something that transcends borders?
International pressure on the Swiss Bankers. Either that or explosives placed properly in the dead of night courtesy of the CIA may cause an avalanche.
Other countries have demanded -- and gotten -- extradition of people who broke their laws, over the Internet, from within the United States. What makes you think that if the United States had privacy laws, that others would not be subject to them? Of course there will probably always be somebody who will, or will try to, get away with it, but that is true of everything. Not all nations have extradition treaties with the U.S. and so on, of course.
We already to do a greater degree than most realize. Sure, there's HIPAA and others for data security that many folks know about. But there are other regulations on data quality, such as the U.S. postal service requiring a certain standard of data hygiene, called CASS certification [usps.gov], in order to do bulk mailings.
Yes but there are other kinds of information that are not properly regulated. Take for example the recent loss of data concerning millions of customers of a certain large bank, which was transporting that data to a backup facility in plain text on tape. Shouldn't the bank be held responsible for such gross negligence? Of course they should. But we won't get that without proper regulations.
GLBA covers the bank data fiasco you mention. What we don't have is an enforcement arm. Laws against rape and murder are fairly useless without cops on the street. Same goes for laws governing corporate conduct.
I doubt that regulation could stop the data from accumulating, after all many people want to have their data out there, twitter, facebook, blogs, youtube and all that stuff works by users publishing stuff on their own, not by evil companies collecting things behind your back, and those things will only grow when storage and bandwidth become less of an issue. I think what could need regulation is how that data is handled, just as you can't discriminate people due to their skin color, maybe one shouldn't be a
Look at what happens to people when the run for office. We found some pictures of Barack Obama when he did some joke modeling thing with one of his friends in college (or something like that).
Can you imagine if we had a searchable index of every single conversation a presidental or senatorial candidate had ever had? Imagine being in your 40s and having to account for a "private" conversation that you had 20 years ago at 2:00am when you were drunk. *shudder* Guys, this isn't some crazy whackjob ranting about the evil government. This is reality! My username can, with not a whole lot of work, be tied to me in real life. If somebody wanted to, they could go back through every single comment I had ever made on any message board or blog that I use this handle on.
Scary. Really really scary. My bet is that almost everybody is in this same boat. Google has made it TOO easy to find things.
That's not a problem becasue no one will care. IT's on thing to look at one person and see them do something 'wrong'. but when you look around and everyone is doing it, no one cares.
ITs not scary, and if you wanted a username that can't be traced back to you, you could do that.
Sure, I've dome some monster stupid stunts, but who cares?
Why you are right: nobody cares about things a random user on the internet does.
Why you are wrong: when "blhack" gets interesting in a social, political or whatever function, then this old, stale information will still be there. And you'd better believe 'they' will drag it out of the noise here.
Remedy: don't have your online presence be linked back to real life. Change usernames often (I once had an four digit/. account). And it helps to have a common name in real life. Hard to filter for the right John Smith, twinty years after the fact.
People won't care if you are up front about it. The politicians get in trouble when they get caught because they pretend to be virtuous.
Some real-life examples: o Arnold Schwarzenegger has done too many things to list, including steroid use. o George Bush was caught drunk driving o Barack Obama admits pot and cocaine use
Most people got into some kind of trouble as a kid, or at the very least made some bad judgments. The difference between scandal and a good story is how up front you are about it.
All people got into some kind of trouble as a kid, or at the very least made some bad judgments.
Fixed that for you. Everybody is human. We all make mistakes and we have to learn from them. Too many people get their "holier than thou" attitude (and this is EVERYBODY - religious or not, rich or not, whatever) and like to forget the things they've done and judge whoever it is on the chopping block.
While I know many people here tend to shy away from religion, there is an interesting story in the Bible where the prostitute was going to be stoned. The way the story goes (trying to cut down the size of m
> Hard to filter for the right JW Smythe, twenty years after the fact.
There, fixed that for you.:)
Aliases are a strange yet powerful thing. Mr. JW Smythe has been seen all across the Internet. There have been a few of us. What's funnier is, there are more people of my real name to be found. A search for me, as noted on my real birth certificate, find quite a few me's. Some are in the same city, but different addresses. Several are found in every state, including ones
Hopefully the end result in the future will be that no one is offended, embarrassed, or judgmental about this personal information being disclosed. If everyone's embarrassing moments are available for all to see, maybe we will stop acting with such contrived outrage at these incidents. Everyone does embarrassing things, lets stop judging others so harshly for them. If everyone knows everything about everyone, it is very hard to be hypocritical.
Now I know this is not the full answer; sometimes we keep thi
It might be possible to use Google to build a coincidental case that a certain handle belongs to a particular individual, but just as an IP address is not absolute proof of identity (i.e. the person getting the bill from the ISP is not necessarily the only one using the account) neither is a handle absolute proof that a particular individual was behind the posts. There will always be a certain amount of plausible deniability with these sorts of things provided that user(s) of the handle do not out their rea
I was with you through your point about pollution but why'd you have to go off the deep end with human-caused climate change?
That's like putting in a reference to a flat earth with the sun orbiting it within a 6,000 year old universe with dinosaur fossils and light from stars beyond 6,000 light-years away put in place to test the believers in an otherwise sane piece.
It's just sad to see an otherwise rational person give in to something that has issues with finding the SUVs used to get rid of the glaciers that used to cover a good chunk of the continent. Though eventually I'm sure they'll find those big ol' evil caveman coal fired powerplants that brought us out of the last ice age.
This time around, maybe we can be a little more proactive.
Different people will make same mistakes that our fathers did. They will learn from their mistakes, just as our fathers learned, but the next time around new people will make same mistakes again anyway.
...is not nearly as much of a problem as the proliferation of noise with respect to signal. In the end, whatever survives is whatever is dominant (ie: the most successful in the environment) which is not the same as whatever is actually useful. If noise is the dominant element, then noise is what will endure and the signal will die. It will be out-competed. Basic darwinism.
THIS is the pollution, not the persistence of information. There's probably not much more real information being produced now than there was at any time in the Age of Enlightenment, so it really doesn't matter if it persists. It'd be great if it persisted better. The problem is the creeping crud. This isn't about freedom to express oneself, since that is also information (sometimes too much information, in another sense of the term). Nobody claims a Nigerian scammer is expressing themselves. Well, if you DO claim that, I've a few billion in gold that could be yours if you just supply me with some information first.
When it comes to privacy, noise may be a solution rather than a problem. Vernor Vinge suggested that if the Net remembers everything about you, you should flood it with contradictory noise that provides plausible deniability about things that are actually true. Either that, or they'll have more evidence against you.
It ought to work this way, but the way our courts work today plausible deniability seems difficult to achieve. Flooding the Net with noise just gives more evidence for prosecutors and investigators to cherry pick from. In civil proceedings there is no such thing as beyond a reasonable doubt.
Even if you are changing ids and using anonymizers, we already have linguistic analysis software that can take samples of your writing and establish with some degree of confidence which ids are your aliases.
a) as little data as possible needs to be given up in the first place b) when possible, non-identifying data should be used b) data needs to be retained for as short of a time period as possible
As usual, these are precisely the things that will not be done, and will in fact be fought against by society at all levels. Because we're idiots.
And as usual, if we actually did those things, then we might have less law and more liberty. Oh the horror.
the internet is a series of servers and wires beyond your control. please note: BEYOND YOUR CONTROL. therefore, regardless of any law, written in bold 72 pt font in blood, no one can reasonably expect anything to be private on this system. buried in your deskdrawer, in your house, there you can find privacy. on the wide open internet, the very notion of privacy is philosophically impossible, like oil and water, the two concepts
furthermore, much of what people are shocked to find that the internet can know about them is detritus. pointless bits and pieces. in other words, no facts about yourself that anyone would consider seriously private in terms of anything that can damage you, unless you are some sort of hysteric. were it even to be found and associated with you, needle in a haystack this stuff is, the very effort that be mustered to even care is ridiculous. yeah, its "private" facts about you in that it is associated with you personally. but the to me the notion of privacy includes some sort of horrible damagin facts about you
and even beyond that, much of this detritus wouldn't exist without the internet in the first place. its not like you had some sort of private facts about yourself, then the internet came along and stole them from you. no, these random bits and pieces about your life only exist because YOU choose to go out on the internet and PUT it there
finally, it is entirely possible to manage your online identity in such a way that what goes on there, behind this moniker or on that site or in this newsgroup or on that facebook page or with that avatar or in that email: you consciously manage what is disclosed and what isn't under that rubrik. this really is nothing new or weird. people, in real life, long before the internet, often managed different parts of their identity in different social spheres of their life
in short, privacy on the internet is:
1. impossible. not legally impossible, but beyond that: philosophically impossible 2. pointless. mediocre bits of flotsam and jetsam where you have to be quite a hysterical person to even care that someone else knows this about you 3. native to the internet. without the internet, this detritus wouldn't exist in the first place. no privacy was "stolen" from you. its the same half-witted reasoning that calls file sharing "stealing" and "piracy". you PUT the information there, with your full conscious authorization of the implications involved 4. completely normal and in line with the entire human history of identity plasticity, manipulation, and management
in short, why the HELL do people get so worked up over this bullshit concept of privacy on the internet. there is none! just accept reality, move on
i honestly believe that kids in their teens, and younger, would find this entire conversation just plain weird. that if you grow up with the internet, this entire issue is beyond understanding, simply because what you do on the internet and privacy is i think natively understood by those who grow up with the internet to be disconnected concepts
tempest in a teapot. an absurd and pointless topic
Why do we need privacy? Invariably the reason seems to be: "I don't want others to know what I am doing".
Followed by: "because they might do something harmful to me because of it". (there is another argument as well, which I will cover after this one)
Actually, that last bit is NOT the way people usually say it, but I said it that way to make my point easier.
We know that in history there have been times that it was very bad to have certain people know something about you. Godwin be damned, but having people know your religion was not always something good. Nazi germany used "harmless" census data gathered earlier to exterminate those who to them had undesirable census data.
Privacy advocates would argue that if this census data had NOT contained religion, it would have been better, but would it? A similar bit of potential census data was used by another organization to hunt down those it found undesirable. The KKK. Skin color. That you can't keep private/hidden away. If you are black, you are black and it tends to be fairly noticable unless you want to go to the most extreme forms of privacy (burka).
Blacks being prosecuted by white racists did NOT benefit from the fact that the US did not collect skin color in its census data. So in this dark era of the previous century, privacy would not have protected those lynched in the US.
Would it have protected the jews in europe? Some, but not all. Those who hid away their religion, because they were only related to jews but not actually religious themselves or had learned not to be noticed might have had better changes. But any jew who practiced his/her faith would have been noticed regardless of census data and suffered the same fate.
The privacy advocates suffer from the fact that they are looking at the short term and only at information that can be hidden if you all wish to confirm to the majority world view. Take the constant cases of online communities banning homosexuals who dare to come out of the closet online. Recent example Xbox-live, banning a lesbian for daring to be a lesbian. As long as she blends in with the majority (or at least the mob) she was safe. Keep her sexuality private.
But is this what we want as a society?
Let me know make my point.
We would be better off in a society where we had no privacy but nobody was prosecuted for information about their person.
A jew in nazi germany would have been better off if the fact that a person was jewish did NOT matter. Well DUH you might say but think about it. If society doesn't judge you based on your sexuality then there is no reason for it to be private. Simple example: Blondes. We all know that blondes are dumb, ergo you might wish this information to be private so you are not judged on your hair color in your job application. Silly? Well there are experiments to just that with nationality in job applications to stop people being discriminated against based on where they were born. BUT place of birth needs ONLY be private IF you are judged on it. If there was no discrimination, there would be no need to keep things hidden.
So for instance the law against age limits in jobs and that you do NOT have to list your age on a resume is just a lazy privacy law against the real problem of age discrimination. If we got rid of age discrimination, we would I think have a better society then a society in which your age is private.
Why? Again, the xbox-live example or for that matter, the white black man, or the gentile jew. As long as the lesbian, the black person or the jew blend into the crowd, behave like the mob and don't stand out, they were somewhat safe. Until the mob decides that their behaviour ain't enough like the mob. Note that the lesbian might also wish to hide that she is a female on a gaming network.
Just how free is a society where you are allowed to be a different religion just as long as it isn't known by society?
Privacy laws like this are ONLY known as long as we allow society to discrimi
We can go on and on about wind power, or nuclear, or solar or whatever. So far, for all the wind power we can generate (and I've been to altamont - I've seen the towers) we have yet to have a windmill make a windmill. Because it can't. Energy is not materials, and technology is not energy. We have yet to see a set of solar panels build another set of solar panels.
I note that you have conveniently left out nuclear energy in your examples.
It's just that facts are facts. You can't live outside the laws of ther
Don't worry about a humungus pile of digital information. I would worry about keeping BASIC information, like how to make soap at home, and candles out of fat, and keeping it in a form that won't disappear when Microsoft deems it worthy of DRM.
If you're really worried about that, why don't you do some research and write a book on that stuff, and "print" it on something more durable than the typical book material. I bet you'd get a lot of buyers.
Now let's see.. clay tablets are probably the most enduring m
Remember... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Remember... (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Remember... (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is that nothing disappears. If you admitted back in 1999, while you were an idiot college student, that you "experimented" with marijuana, do you really want that Slashdot post to reappear in a year 2020 Google search when you're trying to run for the State Legislature or Congress?
There are drawbacks to keeping messages that we posted when we were still young & stupid. I still have Usenet posts from the year 1987 that still come back and haunt me. I was only 10-11 years old, but nobody reading those old posts know that. They identify those posts with the adult version of me, and assume I can't spell.
Imagine the backlash that might have occurred against Obama if we were able to find his old high school postings, wherein he admits he cheated on a test by copying from his neighbor. The web didn't exist when Obama was in high school, but eventually we will have presidents with decades-old online postings, and you can be sure FOX News, CNN, and all the rest will dig them up for all to see.
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Re:Remember... (Score:4, Insightful)
Unless it can be connected, say if he lists commander64_love@something.com on his Facebook profile.
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"commander64_love"
Is that commodore64_love's evil twin brother, who loves running Total Commander on a 64-bit PC?
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No my evil twin's name is atari800_love.
We had various and vociferous debates about which computer was better. He'd say the Atari has better graphics, and I'd argue the Commodore has a sound chip that can make realistic music. It got even worse when he upgraded to an ST and I to an Amiga. We just never saw eye-to-eye.
Of course now that Microsoft controls everything, we both are unhappy.
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The problem is that nothing disappears. If you admitted back in 1999, while you were an idiot college student, that you "experimented" with marijuana, do you really want that Slashdot post to reappear in a year 2020 Google search when you're trying to run for the State Legislature or Congress?
Yes, because hopefully by 2020
a) the electorate will put more trust in candidates being open about past mistakes than those being most capable in cover-ups or spin doctor tactics
b) the electorate will realise we all have lived twenty to thirty immature years before reaching true adulthood
c) the electorate will not be so uptight about marijuana in the first place
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Yes, because hopefully by 2020 a) the electorate will put more trust in candidates being open about past mistakes than those being most capable in cover-ups or spin doctor tactics
Ha! Oh boy, you really crack me up. Nice one!
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The problem is that nothing disappears. If you admitted back in 1999, while you were an idiot college student, that you "experimented" with marijuana, do you really want that Slashdot post to reappear in a year 2020 Google search when you're trying to run for the State Legislature or Congress?
Why would this be an issue? It hasn't been an issue for people running for President. Why should it be an issue for people running for Congress. So far it has only been an issue for people trying to get student loans or jobs at Best Buy.
Anything could be an issue. If your parents post baby pictures of your circumcision, baptism or Bar Mitzvah then this could certainly be an issue, although people may argue that it shouldn't be. Anything could be made into an issue. If you talk about politics or religion on
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I don't care if you are drunk, gay or a donkey. Would you marry me?
if there is nothing to be ashamed of, so what (Score:3, Interesting)
i smoked marijuana. why should i be ashamed of that? why must i pander to weakminded shrill people i don't even like whose opinions on making marijuana illegal i consider wrong?
furthermore, why should we pander to over judgmental assholes who would hold against somebody some indiscretion of their from high school?
i understand what i did in high school should not be held against me, you understand that, anyone of any moral integriy does too. in which case, who are we really trying to pander too? oh: weak min
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oh dear (Score:2)
grammar nazis know i've smoked pot
my life is ruined
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Once you understand his point, you'll understand the difference between being right and being true.
truth isn't always right.
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I once found a document that noted my (real) name and that I had been a member of an amateur rock group that had won a 1964 "battle of the bands" contest at my high school. The name of the city and state I lived in at the time was also in this document. Not hard for some prospective employer to determine my age (roughly) from that posting. When that information was "fresh," not even ARPANET existed (if memory serves) except, maybe, somwh
Regulation obviously needed. (Score:3)
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Problem here is that nobody does nor can have complete jurisdiction over the information. Don't like how the EU or US does privacy, want to run amuck and do whatever you want, there are plenty of eastern european countries as well as those in the far east or africa willing to turn a blind eye. So how exact do you propose to regulate something that transcends borders?
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Problem here is that nobody does nor can have complete jurisdiction over the information. Don't like how the EU or US does privacy, want to run amuck and do whatever you want, there are plenty of eastern european countries as well as those in the far east or africa willing to turn a blind eye. So how exact do you propose to regulate something that transcends borders?
International pressure on the Swiss Bankers. Either that or explosives placed properly in the dead of night courtesy of the CIA may cause an avalanche.
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Other countries have demanded -- and gotten -- extradition of people who broke their laws, over the Internet, from within the United States. What makes you think that if the United States had privacy laws, that others would not be subject to them? Of course there will probably always be somebody who will, or will try to, get away with it, but that is true of everything. Not all nations have extradition treaties with the U.S. and so on, of course.
But that
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Really? I thought the constitution forbade it. There's plenty of examples of it happening the other way round.
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We already to do a greater degree than most realize. Sure, there's HIPAA and others for data security that many folks know about. But there are other regulations on data quality, such as the U.S. postal service requiring a certain standard of data hygiene, called CASS certification [usps.gov], in order to do bulk mailings.
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GLBA covers the bank data fiasco you mention. What we don't have is an enforcement arm. Laws against rape and murder are fairly useless without cops on the street. Same goes for laws governing corporate conduct.
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I doubt that regulation could stop the data from accumulating, after all many people want to have their data out there, twitter, facebook, blogs, youtube and all that stuff works by users publishing stuff on their own, not by evil companies collecting things behind your back, and those things will only grow when storage and bandwidth become less of an issue. I think what could need regulation is how that data is handled, just as you can't discriminate people due to their skin color, maybe one shouldn't be a
scary (Score:5, Insightful)
Look at what happens to people when the run for office. We found some pictures of Barack Obama when he did some joke modeling thing with one of his friends in college (or something like that).
Can you imagine if we had a searchable index of every single conversation a presidental or senatorial candidate had ever had?
Imagine being in your 40s and having to account for a "private" conversation that you had 20 years ago at 2:00am when you were drunk.
*shudder*
Guys, this isn't some crazy whackjob ranting about the evil government. This is reality! My username can, with not a whole lot of work, be tied to me in real life. If somebody wanted to, they could go back through every single comment I had ever made on any message board or blog that I use this handle on.
Scary. Really really scary. My bet is that almost everybody is in this same boat. Google has made it TOO easy to find things.
Re:scary (Score:4, Insightful)
That's not a problem becasue no one will care. IT's on thing to look at one person and see them do something 'wrong'. but when you look around and everyone is doing it, no one cares.
ITs not scary, and if you wanted a username that can't be traced back to you, you could do that.
Sure, I've dome some monster stupid stunts, but who cares?
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Re:scary (Score:4, Interesting)
Why you are wrong: when "blhack" gets interesting in a social, political or whatever function, then this old, stale information will still be there. And you'd better believe 'they' will drag it out of the noise here.
Remedy: don't have your online presence be linked back to real life. Change usernames often (I once had an four digit
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People won't care if you are up front about it. The politicians get in trouble when they get caught because they pretend to be virtuous.
Some real-life examples:
o Arnold Schwarzenegger has done too many things to list, including steroid use.
o George Bush was caught drunk driving
o Barack Obama admits pot and cocaine use
Most people got into some kind of trouble as a kid, or at the very least made some bad judgments. The difference between scandal and a good story is how up front you are about it.
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All people got into some kind of trouble as a kid, or at the very least made some bad judgments.
Fixed that for you. Everybody is human. We all make mistakes and we have to learn from them. Too many people get their "holier than thou" attitude (and this is EVERYBODY - religious or not, rich or not, whatever) and like to forget the things they've done and judge whoever it is on the chopping block.
While I know many people here tend to shy away from religion, there is an interesting story in the Bible where the prostitute was going to be stoned. The way the story goes (trying to cut down the size of m
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> Hard to filter for the right JW Smythe, twenty years after the fact.
There, fixed that for you. :)
Aliases are a strange yet powerful thing. Mr. JW Smythe has been seen all across the Internet. There have been a few of us. What's funnier is, there are more people of my real name to be found. A search for me, as noted on my real birth certificate, find quite a few me's. Some are in the same city, but different addresses. Several are found in every state, including ones
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Hopefully the end result in the future will be that no one is offended, embarrassed, or judgmental about this personal information being disclosed. If everyone's embarrassing moments are available for all to see, maybe we will stop acting with such contrived outrage at these incidents. Everyone does embarrassing things, lets stop judging others so harshly for them. If everyone knows everything about everyone, it is very hard to be hypocritical.
Now I know this is not the full answer; sometimes we keep thi
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It is even more scary, just watch this video (Score:2)
PRIVACY IS DEAD - GET OVER IT Pt 01, with Steve Rambam. [youtube.com] on the last Hope conference.
I was with you... (Score:2, Flamebait)
I was with you through your point about pollution but why'd you have to go off the deep end with human-caused climate change?
That's like putting in a reference to a flat earth with the sun orbiting it within a 6,000 year old universe with dinosaur fossils and light from stars beyond 6,000 light-years away put in place to test the believers in an otherwise sane piece.
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Schnier vs Brin? (Score:4)
I want to see David Brin's response to this, in the light of The Transparent Society [davidbrin.com].
Not possible (Score:2, Insightful)
This time around, maybe we can be a little more proactive.
Different people will make same mistakes that our fathers did. They will learn from their mistakes, just as our fathers learned, but the next time around new people will make same mistakes again anyway.
The proliferation of data... (Score:5, Insightful)
...is not nearly as much of a problem as the proliferation of noise with respect to signal. In the end, whatever survives is whatever is dominant (ie: the most successful in the environment) which is not the same as whatever is actually useful. If noise is the dominant element, then noise is what will endure and the signal will die. It will be out-competed. Basic darwinism.
THIS is the pollution, not the persistence of information. There's probably not much more real information being produced now than there was at any time in the Age of Enlightenment, so it really doesn't matter if it persists. It'd be great if it persisted better. The problem is the creeping crud. This isn't about freedom to express oneself, since that is also information (sometimes too much information, in another sense of the term). Nobody claims a Nigerian scammer is expressing themselves. Well, if you DO claim that, I've a few billion in gold that could be yours if you just supply me with some information first.
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When it comes to privacy, noise may be a solution rather than a problem. Vernor Vinge suggested that if the Net remembers everything about you, you should flood it with contradictory noise that provides plausible deniability about things that are actually true. Either that, or they'll have more evidence against you.
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Even if you are changing ids and using anonymizers, we already have linguistic analysis software that can take samples of your writing and establish with some degree of confidence which ids are your aliases.
So I'm
a few things (Score:2, Interesting)
I can't read tfa at work.
A few things. Change the law such that:
a) as little data as possible needs to be given up in the first place
b) when possible, non-identifying data should be used
b) data needs to be retained for as short of a time period as possible
As usual, these are precisely the things that will not be done, and will in fact be fought against by society at all levels. Because we're idiots.
And as usual, if we actually did those things, then we might have less law and more liberty. Oh the horror.
i don't understand this shock about privacy (Score:3, Insightful)
the internet is a series of servers and wires beyond your control. please note: BEYOND YOUR CONTROL. therefore, regardless of any law, written in bold 72 pt font in blood, no one can reasonably expect anything to be private on this system. buried in your deskdrawer, in your house, there you can find privacy. on the wide open internet, the very notion of privacy is philosophically impossible, like oil and water, the two concepts
furthermore, much of what people are shocked to find that the internet can know about them is detritus. pointless bits and pieces. in other words, no facts about yourself that anyone would consider seriously private in terms of anything that can damage you, unless you are some sort of hysteric. were it even to be found and associated with you, needle in a haystack this stuff is, the very effort that be mustered to even care is ridiculous. yeah, its "private" facts about you in that it is associated with you personally. but the to me the notion of privacy includes some sort of horrible damagin facts about you
and even beyond that, much of this detritus wouldn't exist without the internet in the first place. its not like you had some sort of private facts about yourself, then the internet came along and stole them from you. no, these random bits and pieces about your life only exist because YOU choose to go out on the internet and PUT it there
finally, it is entirely possible to manage your online identity in such a way that what goes on there, behind this moniker or on that site or in this newsgroup or on that facebook page or with that avatar or in that email: you consciously manage what is disclosed and what isn't under that rubrik. this really is nothing new or weird. people, in real life, long before the internet, often managed different parts of their identity in different social spheres of their life
in short, privacy on the internet is:
1. impossible. not legally impossible, but beyond that: philosophically impossible
2. pointless. mediocre bits of flotsam and jetsam where you have to be quite a hysterical person to even care that someone else knows this about you
3. native to the internet. without the internet, this detritus wouldn't exist in the first place. no privacy was "stolen" from you. its the same half-witted reasoning that calls file sharing "stealing" and "piracy". you PUT the information there, with your full conscious authorization of the implications involved
4. completely normal and in line with the entire human history of identity plasticity, manipulation, and management
in short, why the HELL do people get so worked up over this bullshit concept of privacy on the internet. there is none! just accept reality, move on
i honestly believe that kids in their teens, and younger, would find this entire conversation just plain weird. that if you grow up with the internet, this entire issue is beyond understanding, simply because what you do on the internet and privacy is i think natively understood by those who grow up with the internet to be disconnected concepts
tempest in a teapot. an absurd and pointless topic
Maybe we can use it as a good thing instead. (Score:3, Insightful)
Why do we need privacy? Invariably the reason seems to be: "I don't want others to know what I am doing".
Followed by: "because they might do something harmful to me because of it". (there is another argument as well, which I will cover after this one)
Actually, that last bit is NOT the way people usually say it, but I said it that way to make my point easier.
We know that in history there have been times that it was very bad to have certain people know something about you. Godwin be damned, but having people know your religion was not always something good. Nazi germany used "harmless" census data gathered earlier to exterminate those who to them had undesirable census data.
Privacy advocates would argue that if this census data had NOT contained religion, it would have been better, but would it? A similar bit of potential census data was used by another organization to hunt down those it found undesirable. The KKK. Skin color. That you can't keep private/hidden away. If you are black, you are black and it tends to be fairly noticable unless you want to go to the most extreme forms of privacy (burka).
Blacks being prosecuted by white racists did NOT benefit from the fact that the US did not collect skin color in its census data. So in this dark era of the previous century, privacy would not have protected those lynched in the US.
Would it have protected the jews in europe? Some, but not all. Those who hid away their religion, because they were only related to jews but not actually religious themselves or had learned not to be noticed might have had better changes. But any jew who practiced his/her faith would have been noticed regardless of census data and suffered the same fate.
The privacy advocates suffer from the fact that they are looking at the short term and only at information that can be hidden if you all wish to confirm to the majority world view. Take the constant cases of online communities banning homosexuals who dare to come out of the closet online. Recent example Xbox-live, banning a lesbian for daring to be a lesbian. As long as she blends in with the majority (or at least the mob) she was safe. Keep her sexuality private.
But is this what we want as a society?
Let me know make my point.
We would be better off in a society where we had no privacy but nobody was prosecuted for information about their person.
A jew in nazi germany would have been better off if the fact that a person was jewish did NOT matter. Well DUH you might say but think about it. If society doesn't judge you based on your sexuality then there is no reason for it to be private. Simple example: Blondes. We all know that blondes are dumb, ergo you might wish this information to be private so you are not judged on your hair color in your job application. Silly? Well there are experiments to just that with nationality in job applications to stop people being discriminated against based on where they were born. BUT place of birth needs ONLY be private IF you are judged on it. If there was no discrimination, there would be no need to keep things hidden.
So for instance the law against age limits in jobs and that you do NOT have to list your age on a resume is just a lazy privacy law against the real problem of age discrimination. If we got rid of age discrimination, we would I think have a better society then a society in which your age is private.
Why? Again, the xbox-live example or for that matter, the white black man, or the gentile jew. As long as the lesbian, the black person or the jew blend into the crowd, behave like the mob and don't stand out, they were somewhat safe. Until the mob decides that their behaviour ain't enough like the mob. Note that the lesbian might also wish to hide that she is a female on a gaming network.
Just how free is a society where you are allowed to be a different religion just as long as it isn't known by society?
Privacy laws like this are ONLY known as long as we allow society to discrimi
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"..verge of big brother .."
AAAAAAHHHHHH!!!
Clearly you didn't understand the book.
A) Elected officials change.
B) If everyone has the information, then the information can not be redacted
C) With global information it is harder to lie to your people about who you ahve always been at war with(create tension with)
D) Our Cameras point both ways.
E) The technology that would be needed for 'big brother' is available to all, not controll be a government
F) I don't ahve to sneak away to some abandoned house with my lov
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Amen.
CC.
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I note that you have conveniently left out nuclear energy in your examples.
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If you're really worried about that, why don't you do some research and write a book on that stuff, and "print" it on something more durable than the typical book material. I bet you'd get a lot of buyers.
Now let's see.. clay tablets are probably the most enduring m