Your Privacy Is a Sci-Fi Fantasy 195
snydeq writes "Deep End's Paul Venezia discusses the 'sci-fi fantasy' that is privacy in the digital era. 'The assault on personal privacy has ramped up significantly in the past few years. From warrantless GPS tracking to ISP packet inspection, it seems that everyone wants to get in on the booming business of clandestine snooping — even blatant prying, if you consider reports of employers demanding Facebook passwords prior to making hiring decisions,' Venezia writes. 'What happened? Did the rules change? What is it about digital information that's convinced some people this is OK? Maybe the right to privacy we were told so much about has simply become old-fashioned, a barrier to progress.'"
Please RTFA (Score:3)
Re:Please RTFA (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Please RTFA (Score:2)
Cute, a simple ring cypher where a=n, and I'm sorry, with the NSA looking up your skirt 24/7 even outlaws won't have privacy.
Re:Please RTFA (Score:3)
Re:Please RTFA (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Please RTFA (Score:2)
The problem is... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The problem is... (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem is that far to many people look about as far ahead as a goldfish. "Sure I will give you access to all my facebook data for a cheap beer..." And that makes it had for the rest of us with a clue.
Nothing hard there, they can have access to my Facebook data (I haven't logged in in over a year, and my 5 friends are more random than telling), I get a free beer and they get.... less than they expected, from me.
Idiots have been bragging about their crimes forever, most mob busts were based on (unintentional) confessions.
Re:The problem is... (Score:2)
Most of my facebook User info is fake. Wrong birthday. Wrong location. Wrong employment. Only my name and schools are correct (so friends can find me).
There are certain suspicious people (Alexjones fans) who have accused me of being a fake person, a government or corporate spy, and so on. I can see why they think that since most of my data says things like, "Worked at Hari Seldon's Foundation" and similar nonsense. And yet these Alexjones people should know better than anyone..... putting your real data online is unwise.
Re:The problem is... (Score:4, Insightful)
No. There will ALWAYS be pretty stupid people. ALWAYS. This is why being a conman is illegal for a wide variety of reasons. Taking advantage of stupid people is the problem and it is THE FEW who take advantage of the man. It is unreasonable to blame the masses for the deeds of the few.
The problem is, in fact, the few. This is true because it is more convenient and it is true because when the flaw is a fact of human nature, the best course of action is to compensate for it rather than to "wish really hard" that human nature will change or that somehow a darwinistic evolution will occur across humanity and people will magically get smarter.
Re:The problem is... (Score:4, Interesting)
This is why being a conman is illegal for a wide variety of reasons. Taking advantage of stupid people is the problem and it is THE FEW who take advantage of the man.
Most modern cons (as opposed to simple fraud) work better against average-to-smart people. Stupid people tend to follow simple rules (like don't give money to strangers just because they say stuff). But a smart person can be tricked by giving him the idea that he's outsmarting some third party, which is why there are a lot of cons of the "let's you and I put one over on Bob" variety.
Re:The problem is... (Score:2)
As the multitude of shows based around grifters like to say - you can't con an honest man. As a general rule, most cons only seem to work against people who would be prepared to take an unfair advantage over others.
Re:The problem is... (Score:2)
Sure I will give you access to all my facebook data for a cheap beer...
Why are you assuming that my facebook data is not worth a cheap beer, to me? A transaction in which I gain something of value to me, in return for something of value to the other person, which I value less than the goods I receive is the fundamental bedrock of economics.
Re:The problem is... (Score:5, Insightful)
Not quite. There are some things which aren't meant for you to be traded, even if you'd really like that beer. You can't sell your kids for a beer, for example. Even though they're your kids, and you should be able to do with them what you like in general, it's not in society's interest to let you do that. I like to think that letting you sell your privacy for a free beer is not in society's interest either.
Comment removed (Score:2)
Re:The problem is... (Score:2)
Or, to paraphrase in a manner that applies to everything from politics to "light" beer:
Everybody gets what the majority deserves.
Re:The problem is... (Score:3)
I randomly disable and enable my FB account. Drives people nuts. And if someone wants a password for a deactivated account, more power to them. I'd like to see them try and force me to open an account. "We won't hire you unless you have a FB account." Yeah, nothing illegal there, bucko.
Re:The problem is... (Score:5, Insightful)
And why do you have a clue?
Why is it such a bad thing for them to want a cheap beer in return by giving them information on their life?
Why is that bad? Why are you projecting YOUR opinion on others on what they can and can't do with their personal information?
So what if they have access to said information, its not going to change their life in any way. In fact, it is very likely going to get BETTER.
They might get more cheap beers. They bar might bring in a different kind of beer because so many of their fans like said beer.
And in turn, they now get better business, people get to have a better time.
Everybody wins. Except from you of course, "the cool kid".
Unless the guy behind the bar is REALLY A SERIAL KILLER! OH THE HORROR.
Considering your post, you already don't have the slightest "clue". If you did, you wouldn't even be on here or even living in society.
Sorry to interrupt your rant, but it is NOT okay if "your" data, that you are willing to pimp out so freely, includes any information about me.
Facebook is not a personal diary app. It is wholly and completely dependent upon interconnections between people. If you prostitute your info out to all and sundry, how can I prevent mine from getting shoveled along with it, other than de-friending your ass? And even then, my past comment history, photos of me, etc., etc. remain for the data miners to chortle over...
I just hope all your FB 'friends' know about your personal data hygiene policies...
Also, I appreciate the irony...AC. You'll throw the curtains wide open for a crack at a free beer, but cower behind the drapes when it comes time to take a stand on an issue. Nice priorities there.
Re:The problem is... (Score:3)
That is entirely your fault for having the wrong friends. Not my fault at all.
What about the other people who have access (sysops, friends of friends, friends of friends who are enemies with your friends etc)? so the only friends worth having are those who will keep your info private? it's just not a reasonable expectation when using a site like facebook, no matter how conscientious they are. the only choice is to not use it, but even then if someone who does is friends with you and dumps his entire camera to facebook.... this is why privacy is important, and should be a right if the law says it isn't. if that makes certain things more expensive, so be it. I'd rather pay in cash than in personal sanity/reputation because some info gleaned from my life was taken out of context and used as a weapon to stick it to me.. the data is there forever, and it WILL be taken out of context if you ever do become interesting enough to components of society who have the power to make your life miserable.
Personally I don't become friends with people who are scared of the sky because it can see them.
ad hominem.
I have always been honest with everyone I have ever known. I have no reason to hide behind some bullshit "public persona" or such other nonsense. It is all lies, fake and wrong, plain and simple.
yeah great, the whole nothing to hide excuse. hello, mcfly! people using the info aren't going to be rational, they're trying to 'win'. you may think your info is innocuous and you are just oh so innocent that no one could ever find fault, but this is wrong.. someone WILL find fault with you if they want, and the more info they have, the easier it gets.
If you post with your account, you null your moderation ability for that particular article.
At least, it was like that last I checked.
interesting, so you can be anonymous when it suits your interest, but when someone else does it, they have something to hide..ookay.
Equally this doesn't apply to me either way.
I don't haphazardly go around clicking on free deals or other such nonsense on Facebook. In fact, I blocked the feeds of everyone and all applications the instant I added anyone.
oh yeah, and if the info doesn't show up in pretty CSS, it must be inaccessible to those who really want it, now, or in the future? buddy, on facebook, you are the whore being pimped. just because you chose to wear the panties instead of the thong, doesn't mean you aren't still whored out..
Assumptions, as always, are the finest here on Slashdot. See First post for even more fine meta on Slashdot.
Of course it gets marked flamebait despite being absolutely true as of recent times. Another reason I choose not to register. No better than Reddit groupthink.
if there's groupthink around here, it's those apologetics whose arguments boil down to 'because it's just the way it is, so get used to it because it's the way it is and that makes it ok...', looping like a badly configured soundcard.
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depends on what you call privacy (Score:2)
Re:depends on what you call privacy (Score:3)
What makes you think the services you pay for aren't collecting and selling your info too?
Re:depends on what you call privacy (Score:5, Insightful)
Is that their own problem? I suppose. One way to look at it is "evolution in action"... the unaware will be preyed upon. But I think there is a place in society for protecting the innocent from active predators, which are what these companies really are.
I am not an advocate of laws that are intended to protect us from ourselves. But to protect people from others who actively seek to intrude and invade? Sure, no problem.
Re:depends on what you call privacy (Score:2)
Is there such a thing as paid web email?
Re:depends on what you call privacy (Score:2)
Re:depends on what you call privacy (Score:2)
Oh right. Or spamcop.net. I used to visit them all the time but haven't lately. Maybe it's time to open an account.
Re:depends on what you call privacy (Score:2)
I never understood why people pay for e-mail from a random company instead of using free alternatives. Let alone, how these can be designed to guarantee privacy with anything more of an insurance than pure lip service. Unencrypted e-mail is like postcards anyways, so why bother.
Re:depends on what you call privacy (Score:2)
If you leave your car in a free parking zone, and there's a guy there hiding a tracking device on the more expensive cars, that's ok right cause it's free and you expect that.
If you let your kids go to the local playground and there's a guy there asking them questions about where they live, and when you go to work, that's ok right cause it's free and you expect that.
I guess you think that the word free is like a magic incantation that makes everything ok.
Re:depends on what you call privacy (Score:5, Insightful)
If you pay for it but it's in the contract are they 'free' to monitor your every internet reaction. See the way you react to adds, which generate a positive reaction and which do not. Conduct experiments trialling different styles of adds to see which more effectively manipulate your choices. Test to see if targeting influential people in your life can get them to motivate your decisions. See which lies are the most effective in tricky you about the veracity of adds. See if exposure to actions on the web can influence your choices. See if distortions about your actions on the web can influence your choice. Conduct continual experiments and trials whilst you are connected to the internet upon an automated basis. Target you whole family in a similar fashion especially minors. Target you with automated forum responses to question and challenge your beliefs. Target you social connections with automated responses designed to manipulate your choices. Use your image and voice in product recommendations for free. Use all content you have generated for free. Create man in the middle distortions in your social contacts.
Are you 'free' to harangue your local representatives to enact legislation to ban all that activity. The legislate the only personal data that companies are allowed to keep is what is required for account keeping purposes. That when this data is no longer required for account keeping purposes it is destroyed. That companies are permanently banned from collating and data mining personal data. That 100% truth is required in all advertising regardless of delivery method and that all false product associations are banned.
It's new, the old car analogies don't apply (Score:4, Insightful)
Wiretapping laws came about because wiretapping was seen as an invasion of privacy, you were in effect joining a real-time conversation that would not normally be recorded.
All digital communication is inherently recorded, so in some twisted sense it's more like dumpster diving and less like wiretapping to snoop in e-mail.
Similarly for GPS tracking, that's just like old-school tailing a car, but cheaper and more clandestine - what's not to like?
The rules need to be rewritten, give it 30 or 40 years and it should settle down, it's all still very new - judicial time runs much slower than internet time.
Re:It's new, the old car analogies don't apply (Score:5, Insightful)
All digital communication is inherently recorded, so in some twisted sense it's more like dumpster diving and less like wiretapping to snoop in e-mail.
No, it's more like your mail carrier reading your snail-mail.
Which is also an illegal invasion of privacy.
The rules don't need to be re-written. The old ones work just fine as long as we don't throw out all reason as soon as "on a computer" is added.
Re:It's new, the old car analogies don't apply (Score:4, Insightful)
All digital communication is inherently recorded, so in some twisted sense it's more like dumpster diving and less like wiretapping to snoop in e-mail.
No, it's more like your mail carrier reading your snail-mail.
Which is also an illegal invasion of privacy.
The rules don't need to be re-written. The old ones work just fine as long as we don't throw out all reason as soon as "on a computer" is added.
When I started using e-mail (early 1990s), I and everyone I e-mailed with understood that e-mail is not a sealed letter, it is a post card, if you want a sealed letter, you need to use crypto - even ROT-13 is some measure of privacy. It seemed reasonable enough, the BBSs I used (and ran) in the 1980s were open like that and you could pretty much assume that the sysop knew everything you typed, including your password.
Even in the mid 1990s, ISP e-mail was handled on systems that pretty much resembled BBSs, my first dialup ISP was a couple of servers in some guy's garage. It rapidly grew into mass virtual machines in clusters on server farms, but the lack of privacy implications remain - if somebody wants to look, it's all too easy to do.
Re:It's new, the old car analogies don't apply (Score:3)
When I started using e-mail (early 1990s), I and everyone I e-mailed with understood that e-mail is not a sealed letter, it is a post card,
Not exactly. It's more like a letter with a very thin envelope. It takes a minimal amount of effort to read, but it can't just land in front of you so you read it on accident. A mail server admin still has to intentionally read the email.
You have a legal expectation of privacy for a letter. This is separate from how easily your privacy could be illegally violated.
Re:It's new, the old car analogies don't apply (Score:2)
When I started using e-mail (early 1990s), I and everyone I e-mailed with understood that e-mail is not a sealed letter, it is a post card,
Not exactly. It's more like a letter with a very thin envelope. It takes a minimal amount of effort to read, but it can't just land in front of you so you read it on accident. A mail server admin still has to intentionally read the email.
You have a legal expectation of privacy for a letter. This is separate from how easily your privacy could be illegally violated.
The BBS system I ran in 1985 echoed every single character typed by the user to the server screen, passwords and all. Most BBS software was like that at the time. Modern e-mail moves by in such torrential floods that you might expect some privacy from the sheer volume of other mail moving along with yours, but at any number of points along the way, the stream of characters that is your e-mail can be displayed "for diagnostic purposes" by the simplest of equipment or software.
If you want a thin envelope, use encryption - something based on AACS [wikipedia.org] would make a humorous political statement, most famously illegal to decrypt, but most 8 year olds who know how to use Google can figure it out.
Re:It's new, the old car analogies don't apply (Score:2)
For example, *I* don't have a Gmail account or any direct service agreement with Google, but if I send an email to any one person with a Gmail address (and who doesn't know somebody like that?), then *my* privacy is breached automatically once the message arrives. And with email redirection services, this can happen even if I'm not sending directly to a gmail.com address.
The cloud is a clusterfuck of privacy abuses that no single individual can protect himself from.
Re:It's new, the old car analogies don't apply (Score:2)
Yes, but I'd be surprised if it weren't completely legal for the government to read your postcards: after all, if you wanted it private you'd have put it in an envelope.
Privacy is a social agreement (Score:2)
The rules don't need to be re-written. The old ones work just fine as long as we don't throw out all reason as soon as "on a computer" is added.
The thing is, the old ones don't work just fine. If you pause to consider why privacy matters, the implications of actions that might have been seen as acceptable or a minor social faux pas twenty years ago could be profound today, and it is the implications that we really care about, not the actions themselves.
For example, consider Google's Street View project. When the privacy debate around their data collection flared up, some people defended them on the grounds that the cars were only driving down the street and photographing things any passer-by could see from a public place. Leaving aside the fact that this turned out not to be true, there are still many practical differences between the two scenarios.
For one thing, the individual in the street can themselves be seen. Being in a public place is a two-way deal, and if you're going around peering in through people's windows, you're going to attract unwelcome attention.
Even if you do, your presence is temporary. What you see isn't being recorded for all time, and certainly not in a searchable form or a way that can easily be corrolated with many other data sources.
Anything seen is seen by one private individual, not a vasty corporation with potentially a global audience.
Even if we accept as reasonable an individual taking a photograph in a public place that potentially diminishes someone else's privacy, perhaps because the latter person wasn't the subject of the photo and appeared in the background only coincidentally, such photos are still typically only for private, personal use, not being collected by a commercial entity that exists only to exploit anything it can for profit.
And finally, building on that idea of corrolating data from different sources, we get the kicker: one individual walking down the street can only see as much as, well, one individual walking down the street. This fundamentally and naturally limits the implications of anything they might see or do, even if their actions are unpleasant. Google, on the other hand, have vast resources and were conducting systematic surveillance on a national and even international scale.
Many of these distinctions also apply in other controversial privacy cases today, even those that aren't based on direct physical observation: mass surveillance by the state, for example, or the kind of insidious data mining operations going on at places like Facebook.
In short, privacy today needs to take into account not just the scale of any one "invasion", but the cumulative effect of all "invasions". In a world where the Internet provides quick and easy communication of any information from anyone to everyone, where some organisations have resources so vast that they didn't realise downloading that Internet was meant to be a joke, and where data storage and mining capabilities allow the co-ordination and interpretation of thousands of data points about any given individual in an instant, that means minor invasions are a much bigger deal than they used to be.
There is no reason we should tolerate this, and arguing the inevitability of technological progress is a weak straw man. Technology is neutral, and it's how we choose to use it that matters. After all, the technology has long existed for someone to kill you before you even heard the shot, yet we don't see an epidemic of sniper murders, because murder is wrong and (almost) everyone accepts that. For those whose values are incompatible with that societal norm, there are rules and penalties to act as a further deterrent. The same goes for any crime; absolute prevention is very rarely possible, but between the moral standards of the general population and imposing laws on disproportionately powerful entities like governments and megacorps we keep unwelcome behaviour in check.
The problem with privacy is just that it's
Re:Privacy is a social agreement (Score:4, Insightful)
"Anything seen is seen by one private individual, not a vasty corporation with potentially a global audience.
Even if we accept as reasonable an individual taking a photograph in a public place that potentially diminishes someone else's privacy, perhaps because the latter person wasn't the subject of the photo and appeared in the background only coincidentally, such photos are still typically only for private, personal use, not being collected by a commercial entity that exists only to exploit anything it can for profit."
And how is this different from take a public picture of somebody, then putting it on the cover of a national magazine? See, we already had rules about that, and they cover situations like this just fine.
Similar things can be said about the rest of this. There really isn't anything new here, and if you think there is, then you don't know your history very well. Many of the very same copyright issues that are being slammed around right now, for example, were hashed out in public and in court -- some real knock-down, dragouts as they say -- well over 100 years ago. People keep saying that things are different now, but if they read the actual court decisions from back then, they just might change their minds.
Re:Privacy is a social agreement (Score:2)
The problem with your argument is that you are making the classic mistake of thinking that ANY of these things are new issues.
I would argue exactly the opposite: the changes enabled by modern technology mean we have not just a quantitative but a qualitative difference in the impact of small but no-longer-isolated observations. This does raise new fundamentally questions about what practical actions are consistent with any given moral position on privacy.
And how is this different from take a public picture of somebody, then putting it on the cover of a national magazine? See, we already had rules about that, and they cover situations like this just fine.
For one thing, not everywhere has the same rules about that. Please don't project your local legal system onto the rest of the world. Of all things, privacy is surely one of the most variable between jurisdictions in terms of legal protections.
For another thing, I think there is again a qualitative difference between appearing on a magazine cover, which is a relatively rare event and is by its nature a very public observation usually made by well-established professional media organisations, and the kind of back office data-mining operations that let anonymous observers look up all kinds of information about all kinds of subjects without the subjects even knowing.
There really isn't anything new here, and if you think there is, then you don't know your history very well.
Perhaps, but at least I understand that copyright and privacy have absolutely nothing to do with each other, aside from both being in conflict with absolute freedom of expression. It is strange that someone so keen to appeal to century-old court decisions apparently does not...
Re:Privacy is a social agreement (Score:2)
But you have already made that argument, or close enough. Repeating it does not make it more valid.
"This does raise new fundamentally questions about what practical actions are consistent with any given moral position on privacy."
I disagree completely. What "fundamentally new questions"? If you would be more specific, I could probably show you that those questions really aren't new, at all.
"For one thing, not everywhere has the same rules about that. Please don't project your local legal system onto the rest of the world. Of all things, privacy is surely one of the most variable between jurisdictions in terms of legal protections."
Okay, I apologize for assuming you were talking about the United States. But if that's a problem, then you are guilty of the same thing: talking about issues that only exist in your part of the world, wherever that is.
"For another thing, I think there is again a qualitative difference between appearing on a magazine cover, which is a relatively rare event and is by its nature a very public observation usually made by well-established professional media organisations, and the kind of back office data-mining operations that let anonymous observers look up all kinds of information about all kinds of subjects without the subjects even knowing."
Whatever you might think about it, my point was that (here in the US anyway), there need be no new LEGAL issues raised. They both involve pictures taken in public of (I was presuming) everyday people, and displaying them to audiences of millions. Where is there any kind of legal difference between them? Both rest on a desire (or not) for privacy. I fail to see how showing a picture to millions of people on the internet is very different from showing a picture to millions of people on a magazine cover or on TV. And yes, we have laws to cover that. I really don't see how you think this is somehow "new". There have been not just still cameras but video cameras in public settings now for well over 100 years. You honestly think that issues of this kind haven't come up in the courts before???
"Perhaps, but at least I understand that copyright and privacy have absolutely nothing to do with each other, aside from both being in conflict with absolute freedom of expression. It is strange that someone so keen to appeal to century-old court decisions apparently does not..."
I only used copyright as an example of a similar issue. I was not equating copyright with privacy, although I suppose I can see how you might have thought that was what I meant. But no; it was only intended as another -- different -- example of how a great many people mistakenly think that modern fights over issues are somehow "new". On the contrary, I repeat: most of these issues have been hashed out not just once, but many times, in the courts over the past century or two. It would benefit a lot of people to pick up some history books from time to time. With the internet now here and well established, it is easier now then ever before to look things up.
Re:Privacy is a social agreement (Score:2)
Please don't get hung up on the specific example I gave. It was only an example of a more general point: because we now have much easier abilities to store, search and corrolate large numbers of small facts, and to make the results widely and instantly available with little cost, allowing the collection of any small fact about an individual may contribute to a much more severe loss of privacy than it ever could before those technologies existed.
Street View is just one case, in that for example if I know your address there is now a good chance I can quickly and anonymously find out your vehicle and registration details, because that outdoor photography has been systematically collected, is now searchable on-line, and is now available to the entire world.
The issue of recorded and searchable data is far broader, though. Consider that if one person is standing next to you while you pay in a shop, they probably aren't going to rob you later. Even if they happen to glance in your direction as you type the PIN to authorise a card payment, they probably can't see your card number or the security digits on the back. On the other hand, someone standing there with a video recording device requires only that in handling your card you momentarily expose both sides of it to reveal the numbers required to make an on-line payment. Someone who could follow you around with a recording device could probably collect many other relevant details for security checks based on address and the like as well.
That only sounds far-fetched because the effort for someone to do this when they have to be physically present for an extended period of time is prohibitive and the risk of being detected is quite high. There is a natural limit that contains the damage any one rogue individual can cause in both scale and number of victims.
On the other hand, today we have public safety CCTV cameras watching you as you go around the city. Here in the UK, we have a scary number of CCTV cameras watching you just about any other time these days, too, with very little regulation of how the footage is stored or used. We have increasingly accurate image processing software for things like facial recognition and OCR, so a momentary disclosure recorded in public can then be processed at length in private later. Payments are being made increasingly using cards that are inherently traceable and with no physical presence required to deter fraud, and as was widely reported a few days ago, shops data mining this sort of information can now predict very personal matters like pregnancy more accurately than family members and close friends. Obviously unless you're going around buying pregnancy testing kits, no-one observing a single purchase in a store could do that. To make life even easier for would-be fraudsters, millions of kids have even helpfully told Facebook the once-personal information that banks are going to use to identify them via security questions when they grow up: mother's maiden name, first pet, first school, and so on.
The sheer volume of information about you that is out there today and available to mine is staggering. Anyone able to obtain and corrolate even a tiny fraction of it could be a threat to you through obvious things like identity theft or even physical actions like robbery or kidnapping, and through more subtle things like red flagging your job application or bumping up your insurance premium because you hung around with people who are known to engage in "inappropriate activities". And in practice they would be almost unstoppable and unaccountable for doing these latter things, even if they resulted in discrimination that would otherwise be illegal or at least generally considered unethical, because how will you ever know you're being screwed that way to do anything about it? Of course there is also the whole creepy advertising thing, but that's hardly even on the scale as far as the consequences of lost privacy go IMHO.
None of this was possible before the era of the Internet and the mass surveillance da
Re:Privacy is a social agreement (Score:2)
"Please don't get hung up on the specific example I gave. It was only an example of a more general point: because we now have much easier abilities to store, search and corrolate large numbers of small facts, and to make the results widely and instantly available with little cost, allowing the collection of any small fact about an individual may contribute to a much more severe loss of privacy than it ever could before those technologies existed.
Street View is just one case, in that for example if I know your address there is now a good chance I can quickly and anonymously find out your vehicle and registration details, because that outdoor photography has been systematically collected, is now searchable on-line, and is now available to the entire world."
Since you put it THAT way, I grant you that this specific example might represent something different. It may be true that mass access to what was commonly thought of as "public" information -- when aggregated -- could endanger privacy in ways that were not before. I can see that.
"On the other hand, someone standing there with a video recording device requires only that in handling your card you momentarily expose both sides of it to reveal the numbers required to make an on-line payment. Someone who could follow you around with a recording device could probably collect many other relevant details for security checks based on address and the like as well."
So what? This brings up the point I made before: the fact that it is theoretically possible does not make it okay or condoned by society. This is a perfect example. In my state, just such activity falls under "surveillance" laws and is already illegal.
"That only sounds far-fetched because the effort for someone to do this when they have to be physically present for an extended period of time is prohibitive and the risk of being detected is quite high. There is a natural limit that contains the damage any one rogue individual can cause in both scale and number of victims."
No, it sounds farfetched because anybody here caught doing it would spend time in a state prison. Of course again I mean the US, my particular state. It may well be different elsewhere. I do understand that.
"On the other hand, today we have public safety CCTV cameras watching you as you go around the city. Here in the UK, we have a scary number of CCTV cameras watching you just about any other time these days, too, with very little regulation of how the footage is stored or used."
Yes, especially there, by my understanding, and in a few other places. Fortunately so far we have not been so inundated with intrusive cameras, though they have been increasing somewhat. I have personally tried to help resist this trend, using statistics from places like London as examples, which should warn us not to follow the same path.
Please don't misunderstand me. I do agree that our privacy is being assaulted, from many directions. But at least here in the United States, the problem has resulted from the deliberate relaxation of laws that already existed, rather than a lack of them to begin with. And I have no love for the politicians who sold us out.
Re:Privacy is a social agreement (Score:2)
"I would argue exactly the opposite: the changes enabled by modern technology mean we have not just a quantitative but a qualitative difference in the impact of small but no-longer-isolated observations."
But you have already made that argument, or close enough. Repeating it does not make it more valid.
Re:Privacy is a social agreement (Score:2)
No, I haven't, at least not live. But that's not really the point, because the dubious thing here isn't the Street View car itself, it's the fact that the Street View system lets other people see things without ever physically being present at all.
Re:Privacy is a social agreement (Score:2)
No, I haven't, at least not live. But that's not really the point, because the dubious thing here isn't the Street View car itself, it's the fact that the Street View system lets other people see things without ever physically being present at all.
Maybe I'm a voyeur at heart, but I think that's a good thing. I used to do my own drive-by scouting for various reasons (potential real-estate purchase, for one) and I always will get "ground truth" before closing a deal, but Street View allows me to do a quick scout of more, and more diverse, territory in less time, burning less fuel.
If you're upset about "people seeing things," be upset about the tax collectors that have been flying at low altitude over your home for the last 50 years taking "tax assessment photographs," which have always been available for public viewing at the assessors office, long before the internet.
Re:It's new, the old car analogies don't apply (Score:3)
"All digital communication is inherently recorded, so in some twisted sense it's more like dumpster diving and less like wiretapping to snoop in e-mail."
Not at all. First, it isn't "inherently recorded", any more than your snail mail is "inherently copied" when it is put in a bin at the post office. It is quite possible to relay things like email, and even put them in temporary storage, waiting for the email client to pick them up, without "recording" them in any other sense. When my email client gets my mail, it is deleted from anywhere else.
Now, having said that, you are your own worst enemy if you use the IMAP email protocol, rather than the older POP3, because IMAP inherently does put your email in control of the server, and by default keeps copies of the emails on the server, even those that are "deleted". You can change those settings, but most people don't.
To sum it up: there is no real sense in which electronic communications are "inherently recorded" by any middleman, at all, any more than a telephone conversation, unless you count temporary storage, which should be set up as just that... temporary, and wiped when a file is deleted.
"Similarly for GPS tracking, that's just like old-school tailing a car, but cheaper and more clandestine - what's not to like?"
And this is yet another false argument. GPS tracking is, indeed, inherently worse and more intrusive than an "old-school tail", in several ways. Thankfully the courts, unlike you, have recognized this fact.
The rules don't need to be rewritten at all. In fact they continued to work fine, right up until people started messing with them just before the turn of the century, giving "authorities" more control. THAT is the problem here, not the technologies.
None of the basic issues have changed. Emails need be no different from telephone conversations. Nor internet sessions. ISPs could (and should) operate like common carriers, such as the old-school telephone companies. That would solve much, right there. Many of these privacy issues would disappear overnight.
Re:It's new, the old car analogies don't apply (Score:2)
To sum it up: there is no real sense in which electronic communications are "inherently recorded" by any middleman, at all, any more than a telephone conversation, unless you count temporary storage, which should be set up as just that... temporary, and wiped when a file is deleted.
You haven't been reading the news? The NSA is already setting up a datacentre to record all of that traffic. Add to that, they don't believe they have "intercepted" that data unless and until an NSA drone actually accesses that data. They're lobbying Congress for approval, last I heard.
Re:It's new, the old car analogies don't apply (Score:2)
Re:It's new, the old car analogies don't apply (Score:2)
"All digital communication is inherently recorded, so in some twisted sense it's more like dumpster diving and less like wiretapping to snoop in e-mail."
Not at all. First, it isn't "inherently recorded", any more than your snail mail is "inherently copied" when it is put in a bin at the post office.
Maybe not necessary, but as it has always been implemented, SMTP, IMAP, POP and otherwise, it is stored on each server while they wait to copy it to the next server, and it is stored for a long time on the receiving server waiting for the final (usually human) recipient to acknowledge receipt and request deletion - I have always set my clients to automatically delete received messages after 15 days, during which time, I assume that my ISP is backing the, almost always unencrypted, e-mail up on their disaster recovery system.
To sum it up: there is no real sense in which electronic communications are "inherently recorded" by any middleman, at all, any more than a telephone conversation, unless you count temporary storage, which should be set up as just that... temporary, and wiped when a file is deleted.
Have a look through: RFC5321 [ietf.org] and predecessors, those are the rules your e-mail travels under, whether or not they should be amended to ensure privacy is another debate, this is the way things have worked in e-mail for 30 years. Nothing guarantees privacy, an obliquely related quote from the transport standard:
Know anybody who uses digital signatures or PGP in regular e-mail conversations? I know exactly one, a geek celebrity who presumably doesn't want people making up quotes attributed to him.
"Similarly for GPS tracking, that's just like old-school tailing a car, but cheaper and more clandestine - what's not to like?"
And this is yet another false argument. GPS tracking is, indeed, inherently worse and more intrusive than an "old-school tail", in several ways. Thankfully the courts, unlike you, have recognized this fact.
If you didn't recognize the sarcasm, I apologize... "What's not to like" comes from the perspective of people who "do" law enforcement, and, thankfully, in January of this year, SCOTUS came out on our side [thehill.com] for once.
None of the basic issues have changed. Emails need be no different from telephone conversations. Nor internet sessions. ISPs could (and should) operate like common carriers, such as the old-school telephone companies. That would solve much, right there. Many of these privacy issues would disappear overnight.
Old school telephone lines could be, and were regularly, tapped, with and without warrants - information gained from a warrantless wiretap can not be used to prosecute nor get a warrant, but it certainly did happen. Open and publicly auditable police protection isn't likely to come about any time soon, we certainly have never had it in the past.
E-mail needs to grow up, I use G-mail because it serves my needs, and my needs do not include private e-mail conversation.
What I find horrifying is the security theater that goes around supposedly "sensitive" information handling. Footers on unencrypted e-mails instructing the recipient to de
Re:It's new, the old car analogies don't apply (Score:2)
"Maybe not necessary, but as it has always been implemented, SMTP, IMAP, POP and otherwise, it is stored on each server while they wait to copy it to the next server, and it is stored for a long time on the receiving server waiting for the final (usually human) recipient to acknowledge receipt and request deletion - I have always set my clients to automatically delete received messages after 15 days, during which time, I assume that my ISP is backing the, almost always unencrypted, e-mail up on their disaster recovery system."
But this is transient storage, just as the mail bin is, in my example. There is nothing about recording copies that is "inherent" in this technology. The kind of recording you are talking about requires a copy, such as in a database somewhere. None of the technologies we are talking about require copies in order to operate.
"... during which time, I assume that my ISP is backing the, almost always unencrypted, e-mail up on their disaster recovery system."
Depends on your ISP, but probably not. Besides, if you are using an email account that is given to you by your ISP, you're kind of asking for trouble, aren't you?
"Know anybody who uses digital signatures or PGP in regular e-mail conversations? I know exactly one, a geek celebrity who presumably doesn't want people making up quotes attributed to him."
That's a straw-man argument. Let's remember what my post was about: somebody said that "recording" was "inherent" in the technology, and I pointed out that it wasn't. Your statement about the RFC changes that not one bit. The fact that I might leave my door unlocked does not mean that burglary is "inherent" in door locks. The fact that my emails may not be secure does not mean that somebody else has the right to copy them. Paper email is not "secure" in that sense either; yet people expect it to get from one end to the other without somebody reading it.
"Old school telephone lines could be, and were regularly, tapped, with and without warrants..."
That still doesn't mean that tapping is "inherent" in the technology. On the contrary... somebody has to either get a warrant or break the law to install a tap. Again, there is nothing "inherent" there. And that's what I was saying when I mentioned common carriers. If the FCC could classify ISPs as common carriers under Part II, (as they have long wanted to do but Big Cable lobbied congress), then interception of your email would be covered by the same kind of laws as tapping your telephone. Big win.
"E-mail needs to grow up, I use G-mail because it serves my needs, and my needs do not include private e-mail conversation."
Back to what I was saying before: so what? You have a right to expect your communications to NOT be copied by third parties. Just like you have historically had a right to have a private telephone conversation without third parties tapping in. The fact that it's theoretically possible does NOT make it okay. You are giving me the impression that you are just throwing your hands up in the air and saying "F*k it, they're bigger than me, so I give up." Pardon me if I don't follow your example.
"Your privacy will get respected when you start standing up for it..."
Precisely my point. But you haven't been giving the impression that you're standing up. Rather, that you're giving in.
Comment removed (Score:2)
Comment removed (Score:2)
Re:It's new, the old car analogies don't apply (Score:2)
This is yet again a case of lawmakers completely forgetting old rules just because something happens in a new medium.
Would you get away with having someone stand 1 foot away from a private conversation? then why do you think you should get away with listening in on their phone line? what's the difference?
Can you get away with opening people's physical mail? what makes email any different? (and every other online service is either like a bulletin board everyone can read, which is fair game to all, or like private physical mail to select people which is not. There really isn't any in between.)
GPS tracking, sure, no problem, as long as you don't touch the car in any way to do it (if you attach something to my car, 1) I can do whatever I want with it, 2) I can charge you with vandalism/trespass/etc)
The rules ARE being re-written, but that's the last thing that SHOULD happen. people need to stop writing completely new laws just because the same activity happens in a new medium, the old laws should be just fine, interpret them in their original intent.
There would be a huge public outcry if these new laws allowed opening everyone's physical mail and wiretapping every person's phone conversations, but for some reason just because it happens "on the internet" people don't fight back. THIS is what needs to change, not the laws themselves.
Re:It's new, the old car analogies don't apply (Score:2)
The rules need to be rewritten, give it 30 or 40 years and it should settle down, it's all still very new - judicial time runs much slower than internet time.
As a person born and grown under the communist regimes in East Europe, I cannot stop but wonder just how will it settle down in 30-40 years time... it's not like it cannot evolve in the unpleasant direction much faster than 30 years (except USSR, the rest of the countries in Eastern Europe had the regime imposed to them in a matter of 10-12 years. Imagine if US of A would start muscling the world in this direction... for the sake of the children, against terrorists and to protect their entertainment industry... it's not like UK or Australia haven't already fallen into the pattern).
Re:It's new, the old car analogies don't apply (Score:2)
it's not like it cannot evolve in the unpleasant direction much faster than 30 years
True, hopefully the US has enough checks and balances to reverse the unpleasant direction (which I feel we have been moving slowly in for 30 years now) before it gets too bad.
Re:It's new, the old car analogies don't apply (Score:2)
it's not like it cannot evolve in the unpleasant direction much faster than 30 years
True, hopefully the US has enough checks and balances to reverse the unpleasant direction (which I feel we have been moving slowly in for 30 years now) before it gets too bad.
This [slashdot.org] doesn't seem in any way as a step (no matter how small or slow) in the right direction.
Re:It's new, the old car analogies don't apply (Score:2)
no they don't.. the old ones just need to be applied, the 'on the internet' suffix does not justify a rewrite.
Re:It's new, the old car analogies don't apply (Score:3)
"The problem is not that we have too few laws, it is that most people still think about things as if they were in the mid-20th century. "
I wish that was the case. No, the problem is that as soon as "but on a computer" or "but in the Internet" is thrown into the equation people magically tend to go into dummy mode.
"People have no clue how email works, so they assume it is like a faster version of postal mail."
No, the problem is that people do NOT assume that e-mail is like a faster version of postal mail. Because if they really assumed e-mail being much like postal mail only faster, do you really think they would allow for government to sneek into e-mail without a warrant? If they thougth it worked like postal mail, do you think they'd allow for an employer to gain the right to read correspondence explicity directed to your personal address?
Facebook: do you see people allowing employers to sneek into their family photo albums?
Software: do you see people allowing new cars being sold without legal guarantee?
Computers: do you see people allowing the employer to sneek into the personaly assigned closet without a very strong reason?
Re:It's new, the old car analogies don't apply (Score:2)
I suspect some of the most secure servers out there are run privately, from dorm rooms, etc. Of course, we don't know about them because they're, well, private.
Maybe after 10 or 20 years of GeoCities/MySpace/Facebook, somebody will launch a similar useful site with real security and privacy built into it from the start - the trick will be getting investors to believe that the business model can work, since everything that's made big visible money on the Internet so far has depended on insane traffic volumes driving advertising revenue. The private site will, by design, carry much less traffic and grow much more slowly.
Re:It's new, the old car analogies don't apply (Score:2)
Making it difficult to run a server out of their garage or dormroom... Well, don't laws also make it harder for someone to run a simple mom & pop store that sells widgets in a small town, and make it harder to hire someone to clean your house since you need to withhold taxes, etc? Why should digital enterprises get a free pass on all this stuff?
Re:It's new, the old car analogies don't apply (Score:2)
Now, I just know that someone will jump in and talk about how this is all just the natural order of things, how computers are "growing up" and becoming more organized and how we must follow the same pattern that we always follow and how people are not generally capable of figuring out how to use PGP or OTR or ABP...
I think the year was 1997 or so, I got the idea that e-mail clients sucked and I could do better. Automatically displayed photo attachments were the latest gee-whiz feature. I bought a (physical) book on SMTP protocol, and promptly got distracted by something else...
At the time, I thought a popular, free, e-mail client with easy to use built-in support for PGP, might just gain enough traction to offer a "freemium" version like Eudora was doing. Who knows, if I had actually delivered it, I could have changed the world. It's still out there, up for grabs, IMHO most e-mail software still sucks. Today I'd go at it with Qt - a nice slick Quick interface, cross platform at launch. All I need is about $2M in funding and I think it's got a chance - think Kickstarter can swing that? /jest
Good quote from the article.. (Score:2)
In an effort to find the needle, we're burning down the haystack.
I might add that burning down a haystack to find a needle in it not only destroys the hay, but makes the needle useless..
Re:Good quote from the article.. (Score:3)
In an effort to find the needle, we're burning down the haystack.
I might add that burning down a haystack to find a needle in it not only destroys the hay, but makes the needle useless..
Useless, or harmless? There are those who would see the disempowered needle as a victory (they don't care about hay, anyway.)
They've always been spying on us (Score:2)
It's just that in the past that information was in different locations, like the phone book (name, address, phone) or state government (birthdate, annual income), or federal government (SS number, lifetime income). Companies have always sought to find information on us, from Arbitron measuring how many people listened local stations, to Nielsen adding PeopleMeters to boxes. Now Google and Facebook are doing the same, but more directly through the net.
Re:They've always been spying on us (Score:2)
I disagree. This is pervasive only due to advertising. If you put aside the requirements of advertising, you'll find that companies have very little need for information about their customers, basically they just need enough to make a transaction work, an address only if something must be sent or delivered, and credit card data if it's not going to be a cash transaction.
So the evil ultimately resides in the needs of advertising, and the solution lies in making companies accountable for their activities.
Re:They've always been spying on us (Score:2)
I disagree. This is pervasive only due to advertising. If you put aside the requirements of advertising, you'll find that companies have very little need for information about their customers, basically they just need enough to make a transaction work, an address only if something must be sent or delivered, and credit card data if it's not going to be a cash transaction.
So the evil ultimately resides in the needs of advertising, and the solution lies in making companies accountable for their activities.
I disagree. This is pervasive only due to advertising. If you put aside the requirements of advertising, you'll find that companies have very little need for information about their customers, basically they just need enough to make a transaction work, an address only if something must be sent or delivered, and credit card data if it's not going to be a cash transaction.
So the evil ultimately resides in the needs of advertising, and the solution lies in making companies accountable for their activities.
I worked for a company that made a very technically complex product, it cost, all told, $600 to make, and sold for $15K, yet, the company barely broke even. Why? Because it cost $14,400 per device to successfully market and sell one - they sold tens of thousands per year, shipped a FedEx truck full of promotional materials out every single day, and had hundreds of sales reps beating the bushes to find "the next customer."
For many companies "advertising" and potential customer information are simply, everything.
Re:They've always been spying on us (Score:2)
"This is pervasive only due to advertising."
Not advertising but marketing. Forget about advertising and companies still will want to know what's the average income of your neighborhood, if there's a majority of any ethnic, if they are young or old, how many children on average, if they have degrees or just basic education, if you have a big car or if you prefer your weekly buy on saturday or friday...
Advertising is just the most visible side of the marketing iceberg.
Re:They've always been spying on us (Score:2)
Privacy is no fantasy (Score:5, Interesting)
It simply has to be fought for and lately it seems it will require some very real bloodshed. The government of the U.S. and all of the other major free society governments of the world are hell bent on stripping away privacy in order to defend intellectual property and to assure themselves of better control over the people "they serve." The last time we saw these kinds of problems, there was a revolution in the US. The next time we see it, it may be a global "civil war" against the tyrants of the nations of the world.
I'm sorry to all the business people out there who believe their right to "grow and proper" outweighs the needs, rights and the very nature of humanity but they don't. You don't have the right to unlimited profits. You don't have the right to sell data you have collected about people to other businesses or governments. You will all find this out before too long "French Revolution" style.
I just hope we have enough "fathers of the new world democracy" or whatever we end of calling it to write a new constitution guaranteeing everything the US constitution guaranteed and adds to it all of the lessons we have learned since that document was written. Among these should include bits like "There shall be no law which impedes, restricts, hinders or limits the rights of humanity, its arts or its legacy."
Frankly, I'm getting to the point where I feel we have little else to lose. And when that happens, a special kind of hell will break loose all over the globe.
Re:Privacy is no fantasy (Score:2)
Re:Privacy is no fantasy (Score:2)
The American revolution started with a tiny minority. And when things started rolling, attention came to what terrible things the British government did which brought more people to support the revolution... it grew and grew and grew. The incident in Tienanmen square called attention to the desires of many, many people in China.
Global activism calling attention to tyrants and human rights violations is growing all over the globe with common themes. The US government is identifying protestors as terrorists of a low calibur... but still classifying them as terrorists enabling their new "anti-terror" laws to be used against them and others.
Perhaps the people affected at first are a minority. But as more attention is given to them, people will begin to identify with the victims more and more creating ripples and waves of sympathizers and supporters because they realize "we are next."
Re:Privacy is no fantasy (Score:2)
"Facebook could work quite well as an encrypted, strongly private system."
Facebook is basically a giant marketing data collecting tool. Without the ability to collect your data how exactly could Facebook work?
Re:Privacy is no fantasy (Score:2)
"Facebook could work quite well as an encrypted, strongly private system."
Facebook is basically a giant marketing data collecting tool. Without the ability to collect your data how exactly could Facebook work?
Sorry, I meant to say "work for the users," how the owners of this new, privacy respecting Facebook like system make money is a little less obvious... I'd say it's one of the problems with today's Internet that still needs to be solved: how to make money without exploiting your user's private data.
Re:Privacy is no fantasy (Score:2)
As a result, people effectively have no rights, and if this isn't changed soon, we'll have a generation of people who are completely disenfranchised, and only exist at the whim of their "free" providers of services. This is not a good place to be.
One major problem (Score:2)
...with a lack of privacy is that there's a lack of accountability. If an institution gets incorrect data on you, it's not that institution's fault - it's not their data - and even if they fix it it will break again because the bad data is still out there. There's no central authoritative source when there's no privacy, which means that nobody is at fault when mistakes are made, and nobody is responsible for cleaning the mess up.
There's a whole raft of other problems, but I fail to see how reliable data could possibly be an impediment to anything - let alone progress. Quality and reliability are surely the pillars on which sustainable progress is achievable. Eliminate privacy, you eliminate the only means by which progress is possible.
Yeah, I know, TFA says nothing about privacy being an impediment, but TFS (the "fine" summary) does and I suspect far too many buy into the whole idea.
Reality TV era that we live in... (Score:2)
Maybe it's different in other countries but in the U.S. people barely seem to care about personal privacy. Between Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Myspace, and so on, people seem more than willing to put their private lives and information out on the internet. And if you look at the type of news that Americans read most often, it is celebrity gossip, tabloids and paparazzi that stalk famous people and report on their every movement.
We put our political beliefs on our t-shirts and bumper stickers. Wear our sports teams on our hats. And now we can share those things on Twitter and YouTube. I think I'm the only employee at my work that doesn't have a LinkedIn, Myspace, Facebook, or a Twitter.
Between Jeremy Lin, Tim Tebow, Kim Kardashian, and the 15-minutes-of-fame type reality TV show people, we have an endless cycle of gossip news available online and on your television. And people seem to love it. The more invasive the questions are at a sports press conference with Tim Tebow the better. The more we can dig up on Kim Kardashian and Kris Humphries the better. Whitney Houston having cocaine in her system was more reported than anything else in the last week on the mainstream news.
The Slashdot crowd is the exception not the rule. When most people are all about getting themselves more friends on Facebook and more followers on YouTube the "geeks" are holding onto their privacy. Personal privacy is simply not cool in America. When America stops everything because Tim Tebow is coming to the Jets (I hope everyone at /. has familiarized themselves with the Wildcat Offense) they are there for the spectacle and not for the actual sport.
Sure no one wants their credit card information online. But too many people in the U.S. seem to think that putting their email, phone number, personal likes and hobbies, thousands of pictures of themselves, and so on, all over the internet, is not only okay but it is preferred. It's fun for them.
pedantic (Score:3)
Dear author:
Puleeze. Science fiction (scifi) and fantasy fiction are separate genres. Everybody knows this most basic fact! To use the adjective "scifi" to describe the noun "fantasy" is Not correct.
Signed,
Comic Book Guy
Re:pedantic (Score:2)
Re:pedantic (Score:2)
In your average Star Wars universe, maybe. Have you actually read any hard sf? And Fantasy sports a lot less gender mainstreaming than Science Fiction.
To be completely fair (Score:2)
My two cents:
Companies which ask for Facebook login information are wasting money on non-work related information gathering. In other words, the company has too much money and is spending it on a non-recoverable cost center. Potential employees who deny access are saving the company money and should be the preferred hires. When I took a computer ethics class in my bachelor of science degree, I was amazed there were people in the class were willing to play cop and "get him" without any evidence that the suspicions are affecting job performance. I was even more amazed at the majority of the class who were against the searches and would said they would not assist an employer by writing software to do so, but began to do so in class when it was re-framed as an "interesting exercise" to demonstrate competance. The IT and IS fields are becoming the Catch-22 of legal responsibility.
We missed one step along the way (Score:2)
There were never any laws stopping someone from watching the outside of your house. There never needed to be. Long ago, the only ones who could were your neighbours, and long-distance enemies camping out. Either way there were very easy deterents. But when remotely operating camperas and such appeared, the law said supported my right to see the outside of your house. So I was allowed to aim a camera at your house. That camera later became infrared and could see through walls. But you posted a photograph of your living room online, so you had no expectation of privacy for your living room, even to my camera. It spiralled like that a few times to wind up here.
The problem is that there was no old law not because people should have the right to view other people's houses. There was no old law because there didn't need to be -- it wasn't an actual problem. When it became a problem, well, our laws are based on precedent. In this case, a lack thereof.
The real law should have been aimed at objectives, like supporting privacy not as an abstract concept but as a control over something. That something can become public but the control over that something should never have been.
We see this in commercial IP all the time. "reserve all rights", duplication rights, publication rights, and more. But those never existing to the outside of your house. So I could publish the outside of your house any way I choose. The result is this.
Or maybe (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe the right to privacy we were told so much about has simply become old-fashioned, a barrier to progress.
Just maybe the generation growing up is more accepting of the intrusions, the same way manners and morals dissolved over the years, compare TV in the 1950's to TV today to see a graphic example of this.
For the record you can maintain your privacy, just learn to think like this; that everything done on the Internet is like shouting in a restaurant so don't post or discuss things you wouldn't yell in a restaurant.
There isn't a problem at all (Score:2)
I don't think so, Tim. (Score:2)
Maybe the right to privacy we were told so much about has simply become old-fashioned, a barrier to progress
Memo to Mr. Venezia:
GO TO HELL!
spelling correction (Score:2)
Misspelled "barrier to profit."
Interesting Timing (Score:2)
Maybe the right to privacy we were told so much about has simply become old-fashioned, a barrier to progress.
The "right to privacy" you've been "told so much about" didn't really come into play in the United States until the Supreme Court was looking to overturn states laws banning contraception in Griswold v. Connecticut. Currently, we're looking at a GOP presidential primary where at least one of the major candidates would like to see that overturned outright, to be able to ban contraception specifically and other privacy protections generally.
EH? (Score:2)
I guess somebody didn't get the memo about GPS searches requiring a warrant.
Sad concept (Score:2)
Knowing that someone would seriously entertain that concept kinda tastes like mental bile.
Amended quote - it's not about "progress" (Score:2)
"...Maybe the right to privacy we were told so much about has simply become old-fashioned, a barrier to profits".
Privatized profits, socialized losses - socialism for the rich and megacorps.
Progress and direction (Score:3)
Maybe time to get back to some basics.. (Score:3)
1 - Privacy is a right. Yes, that's right - a Human Right [un.org]. Quite a lot of expensive people sat around a large table for quite some time working this stuff out, and if they didn't think it was important I'm pretty sure it wouldn't be in their list [un.org].
2 - Laws are made to be followed. Excuses such as "too big to comply", "we're from abroad" or "too costly to comply" (Google Streetview) are not acceptable.
3 - Law enforcement gets a privilege to break the laws to fight crime. It has to be kept VERY clear, that this is a PRIVILEGE, and absolutely NOT a right.
Now, was that so hard?
That sig is offensive. (Score:5, Insightful)
Sorry, but you don't get to turn it around and say the author stated something that in fact he did not.
Re:That sig is offensive. (Score:3, Insightful)
Yet idiots like these are very much everywhere. We have three generations of people in the US who have fallen prey to pop culture marketing thought. Their very thoughts are comprised of slogans and talking points. (As language is the encoding of the mind, it shows everywhere in the way they talk.) It will be the people with "mental problems" who will save the rest of us from ourselves... you know the ones -- the ones with Asperger's and the ones who, for whatever reason, couldn't go along with religion while the rest of their families did.
Bonch needs to go sit in a corner and really think about what he has done. Unfortunately, all he will think is that he's right and righteous and nothing about anything which resembles a slipery slope or witch trials or imprisonment over art in which the eyes of the characters are too large and are therefore "children" as depicted and is therefore child pornography. The McCarthy's and the witch prosecutors out there believed they were right and righteous too.
MANDATORY WARNING! (Score:2, Informative)
Some of the sockpuppets they use here are:
DavidSell
ByOhTek
antitithenai
Bonch
TechGuys
Overly Critical Guy
CmdrPony
InsightIn140Bytes
InterestingFella
SharkLaser
jo_ham
DCTech
smithz
HankMoody
There are many others, including disposable accounts used to moderate and deflect discussions in directions they promote. If you see a post by any of the accounts in this list in a Slashdot discussion you know for certain that discussion is polluted and likely to contain misdirection and lies. Avoid feeding the astroturf machine by posting sensible comments in these threads.
At all times while reading Slashdot and other tech sites, be aware that you are being manipulated by professional reputation managers.
Comment removed (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:How to get Slashdot to care about privacy (Score:3)
Re:I'd love to blame this on politics and greed... (Score:5, Insightful)
For a long time, people didn't care about privacy. They didn't care that some ad agency was writing down what websites they visited as long as they could get to whatever Internet sites.
Now, people are starting to feel the consequences of no privacy. Companies making point scores based on people's Internet postings, the fact that an arrest for *anything* will be a career ender [1], even if it is just PI and a 4 hour stint in the drunk tank. The wrong like on Facebook gets someone branded as a potential racist for 7 years.
A few years back, at first was a joke about people losing jobs due to FB posts. Now, this is routine, as well as the fact that the police can become involved if the wrong thing is posted in minutes. It is scary that one thing stated in anger and stupidity can mean not finding work, but more dire consequences such as expulsion from a school, or jail/prison time.
Will this change? I doubt it. I'm watching the threshold for getting arrested, getting a felony, or even life in prison become ever more trivial. Especially anything related to drug possession.
I can tell I'm getting older when it actually took some doing to be arrested in school when I was there (something that really was a felony). Now, it is common to read about some high school kid whisked from the school grounds and to jail because they backtalked a coach (which is considered assault in some areas), or that they decided to skip a class and went to jail due to curfew laws. What are we teaching kids when their friends get hauled off to jail and the person's chances of a job in the future nixed? Yes, fear of authority, but definitely not respect.
I'm just waiting for a convergence of hardware DRM stacks, data mining, "anti-piracy" laws, and IP address geolocation where new computers will shoot taser probes at the person using them, and keep them doing "the fish" until the cops arrive, the second they type a suspicious or angry post.
[1]: I've asked about that when I got through a round of interviews at one place and others who I know were more qualified than I didn't. The HR droid said something along the lines of, "You can buy an acquittal. If a cop considers someone guilty enough to pull out the handcuffs, they are a criminal and will remain a criminal for the rest of their lives, and they will not ever see a job here."
Re:I'd love to blame this on politics and greed... (Score:2)
"For a long time, people didn't care about privacy."
You will have to rrrrreally go back in the past to find a time when people didn't care about privacy. Just for the most comically obvious sign, when was the last time that shitting in public was socially acceptable?
People has felt that there are issues that are nobody else's business basically since always.
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