Data Miners Scraping Away Our Privacy 142
Presto Vivace writes "Twig, writing for Corrente, reports on data scrapers. They are not looking for passwords and such; scrapers are looking at blogs and forums searching for material relevant to their corporate clients. We are assured that the information is 'anonymized' to protect the identities of forum participants. However, a tool called PeekYou permits users to connect online names with real world identities. No worries, though — if you have a week to spare, you can opt-out of some of the larger data banks."
Shrug. (Score:3, Interesting)
The biggest issue with information on the internet has always been how to separate the crap from the good stuff. The fact that they're gathering data is uninteresting: what I'd be interested in is their signal-to-noise ratio.
Hope you don't have a common name (Score:4, Interesting)
If "Bob Smith" is a registered sex offender in a large urban area, another Bob Smith in the same area might have some difficulty getting hired for a job. Perhaps the scrapers might see some revenue in selling "whitelist" services.
if you want it to be private (Score:3, Interesting)
go walk on a beach so the directional microphones can't pick up what you say through the surf noise
but if you want it to be public, post it on the internet
because as the other story from yesterday about the government spying on facebook shows: you are in the absurd scenario of trusting the GOVERNMENT to make rules, and you are trusting the GOVERNMENT to enforce rules, about what? about what you put in wide open view on a public internet. to me, that expectation of yours is insane
why are you trusting the government to do this? even if they had the intent and the enforcement capacity to do so, you honestly think they will do a capable job? with what? the corporate subcontractors with the financial involvement with the corporations who are after your data? pffft
and say the government fails to protect your data. ok, they sue and prosecute the offending corporations. but your info is already in the database. the database that is now mirrored 50 times by 25 different entities! once it gets on the internet, IT NEVER DIES. so please, get real: if you don't want it to get in a database, DON'T PUT IT ON THE FREAKING INTERNET
it is that simple. all other point of views are, frankly, a form of absurdity in which
1. you distrust corporations and governments with your private info,
2. so you put that private info on a public internet,
3. trusting corporations and governments to keep that info safe from
4. the same corporations and governments!
(smacks forehead)
i have a hen house. to protect that hen house from the wolf in the woods, i will hire the wolf in the woods to guard the hen house. wtf?!
Re:It's not privacy, it's obscurity (Score:2, Interesting)
I don't know how to stop the government, other than by enforcing Amendment 10 (the US was never granted permission to spy, therefore it should not do it).
As for corporations, I'd like to see all their licenses revoked, and reverted to proprietorships where a sole person(s) is the owner and therefore directly accountable for his actions. I no longer believe in the concept of limited liability. The owners need to held to account for their actions, including jail time for invasion of privacy or abuse of customers/employees.
Re:It's not privacy, it's obscurity (Score:3, Interesting)
a bit like copying music (Score:2, Interesting)
Copying music wasn't much of an issue until it became not only trivial to do but also trivial to share.
Once upon a time a third party would have had real work to do to find out how much I pay in property taxes, for example.
Yeah, it's public information, but it wasn't trivial to get.
I want accessibility of information about me to help me and make my life easier.
I don't want easy access to _my_ information to make it easy for other people to make my life more difficult.
Signal to noise ratio?? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Public exposure (Score:5, Interesting)
You missed something else: you get privacy protection in public places through publicy. Although everyone can see what you are doing, you are also protected because you can see what everyone else is doing. In physical public space, it is very hard for casual stalker to stalk anyone exactly because the stalker himself don't have privacy in public space. If someone stalks you, he can be spotted easily by you or people around you and get his reputation ruined.
CCTV invades people's privacy by introducing asymmetry in publicy: Anyone including the CCTV can see you, but you can't see the person watching you behind the CCTV. This can actually be solved by increasing the public visibility of the watchers, for the watchers to be watched. If the security room itself has CCTV so that everyone else can see what the watchers are doing, we'll get back the publicy symmetry and get protected.
The same can be said to public photography including smart phone cameras and street view. Traditionally, camera was large so the photographer had increased public visibility when taking photograph. Smart phones break the publicy symmetry by making it not obvious that someone is taking a photograph. To protect our privacy on being photographed, we need to increase the publicy of the photographer to make his action of taking photograph obvious. This is why making rules like the Camera Phone Predator Attack Alert Act is better than making laws that prohibit people to take photograph in public. Though, I'll not comment on whether we really need a law to enforce this, but having a rule at least allows ethical photographers to play nice with public photography.
Google street view is just a form of intensive photography, but we can't really define how much photos taken are considered too much and thus illegal. But what we can do is to increase the publicy of the street view vehicle, so that people can notice the vehicle more easily and avoid being photographed. For example, the street view vehicle can be painted bright color, install flashing light bar, or even make noise and warning before photographing, depending on how much we're willing to trade off between visibility and annoyance. But what about those stuff that you can't move such as buildings? Well, the same as basic photography, if you refuse to move away things that you don't want to be photographed even after the photographer give full notice in public space, then the photographer has full right and to take the photograph ethically without your consent.
You said that looking into your house from places higher than your fence is illegal, what about if I view it through a nearby multi-story apartment? If I stay at the fourth floor of the apartment and I look at your two-story house through my window, does it consider illegal? How about the children who look into your house when they are in school bus going home? You made the assumption that the world is full of low density residence where there is no higher ground or public places that are higher than one story, but that is really the minority rather than norm. If seeing your house through fence is considered privacy invasive, then today we won't have skycrappers and multistory apartment that allow us to look through any window over the next block.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSqyEXLkrZ0 [youtube.com]
Re:It's not privacy, it's obscurity (Score:3, Interesting)
If you don't want them to do something nefarious with your info, don't give it to them. There is no need for some government entity to impose rules to protect you.
Where do you draw the line?
When facebook retro-actively changes what they promise to do and not do with the information people give them?
What about say, a store, quietly installing a system to read and record the license plate of every car that enters their parking lot?
Or when an entire industry becomes so used to routine privacy violations that even walk-in medical clinics refuse service to cash-only patients who won't disclose their name, address, etc?
Re:pollute the data stream (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:It's not privacy, it's obscurity (Score:2, Interesting)
No, the problem is very much the people compiling and selling this information.
I am the author of my life; the information these leeches are compiling about me is a derivative work. Commercial use of such data (outside of fair use considerations) is a violation of my Subjectright [wearcam.org].
The fact that part of the performance of the artistic work that is my life takes place in public is irrelevant -- if I perform a song or poem in public, I do not thereby place it in the public domain.
The appearance of the front of my house is a personal artistic expression. It should be understood to be covered by copyright. A random tourist taking a photo is fair use; someone taking a photo to use for commercial purposes, is not.
Re:It's not privacy, it's obscurity (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:It's not privacy, it's obscurity (Score:5, Interesting)
'I don't know how to stop the government, other than by enforcing Amendment 10 (the US was never granted permission to spy, therefore it should not do it).'
The problem here is that other parts of the Constitution have been interpreted as trumping the 10th amendment. The commerce clause for example has not been interpreted as written or intended since FDR days. This alone has made the federal government all powerful.