Internet of Things Demands New Social Contract To Protect Privacy 95
chicksdaddy writes "Changes brought about by the Internet of Things demands the creation of a whole new social contract to enshrine the right to privacy and prevent the creation of technology-fueled Orwellian surveillance states in which individual privacy protections take a back seat to security and 'control.' That, according to an opinion piece penned by the head of the European Commission's Knowledge Sharing Unit. Gérald Santucci argues that technology advances, including the advent of wearable technology and the combination of inexpensive, remote sensors and Big Data analytics threaten to undermine long-held notions like personal privacy and the rights of individuals."
Here's a contract for you (Score:5, Insightful)
I reserve the right to disable the network connection and recording capabilities of any device in a public space with sensors capable of detecting or inferring my presence.
Re:Here's a contract for you (Score:4, Insightful)
To which the only sane response is, "Good luck with that, Ace".
the usual empty bloviations (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe "we" need more than platitudes. Maybe "we" need an original thought instead of bloated, vomit-inducing bureaucrat speak.
But "we" definitely need to find a new hair stylist, Mr. Santucci.
Even open source has tracking and back doors now. (Score:5, Insightful)
We need to be much less tolerant of things that "phone home" to some headquarters. Or accept remote patches. We now have to assume that anything with a remote patch capability can be exploited.
You might think open source would be better. It's not. Even the Mozilla Foundation has become squishy-soft on enforcing their own privacy rules. Check out BlockSite [mozilla.org], a Firefox add-on which used to just block requested sites. It was bought up by a company called WIPS, which buys up abandoned apps and puts in back-door tracking of every site visited. After a year of pressure from WIPS, Jorge Villalobos at Mozilla caved in and let them install tracking in an existing add-on and auto update it.
For Linux, Ubuntu pushes an awful lot of updates to supposedly "stable" versions. Is there a back door in there? Is anybody looking?
Same principle as TV-B-Gone (Score:2, Insightful)
The parent's suggestion is quite similar in concept to the very popular electronic gadget TV-B-Gone [wikipedia.org] which turns off TVs.
Re:Anonymous & Unpopular (Score:4, Insightful)
I think there is a real danger that within a generation or two the concept of privacy will just go away. We will just come to accept that everything is recorded and monitored for our own safety. It's the age old conflict between people wanting privacy but also wanting there to be CCTV footage when someone dings their car.
Here's an idea (Score:2, Insightful)
Don't connect your lightbulb to the internet.
Re: copyright your personal data (Score:2, Insightful)
The problem is that those EULAs usually grant the company all rights and remove all uour rights. And since you really really want to get started with using that application you dont care about the terms... until later. I think it would be an interesting thought experiment having a law that gave each person non-transferable rights to certain information. Slavery is still forbidden, right? so you can put "We own you " in an EULA but it would not hold up in court. What if this was extended to include more aspects?