Ask Slashdot: How Do You Protect Your Privacy When It's Out of Your Control? 174
An anonymous reader writes "A week ago, Slashdot was asked, "How do you protect your privacy?" The question named many different ways privacy is difficult to secure these days, but almost all of the answers focused on encrypting internet traffic. But what can you do about your image being captured by friends and strangers' cameras (not to mention drones, police cameras, security cameras, etc.)? How about when your personal data is stored by banks and healthcare companies and their IT department sucks? Heck; off-the-shelf tech can see you through your walls. Airport security sniffs your skin. There are countless other ways info on you can be collected that has nothing to do with your internet hygiene. Forget the NSA; how do you protect your privacy from all these others? Can you?"
By giving things up (Score:2, Informative)
The premise of the question implies "How can I keep doing everything I'm doing right now but 100% maintain my privacy?". That's a dumb question. Look at the assumptions--how do you maintain your privacy when all your friends take pictures of you all the time and share them online? Gee whiz, how about asking your friends not to take pictures of you? Or consider whether being a socialite and a party animal is compatible with your aim of privacy? How about when personal data are stored by banks? Maybe you should consider reducing the amount of data you give to banks to begin with. Airports? Consider not flying.
The problem is that making these lifestyle changes actually involve giving things up, which no one wants to do. If you want a quiet, private, contemplative life lived independent of others then make such a life for yourself. If you want to be an interconnected urbanite who takes full advantage of globally connecting technologies, there's going to be a degree of privacy loss.
I like privacy and I donate to the EFF and I'm for reforming all of the above scenarios to give users more control of their privacy. But given that those reforms haven't happened and the problem is getting worse, at some point you have to change your own behaviour and consider if the goodies you get exceed the value of the privacy you're losing.
Re:When it's out of your control (Score:5, Informative)
You can go to insane lengths, but it will make you insane.
Diligence, tenacity, questioning authority, using pseudonyms, alternate identities (within legal contraints), and being sensible can be rewarding.
I'm betting your browser doesn't have NoScript or Ghostery.... and your phone is an Apple (some say less tracking, others don't) or an Android (just email your every waking moment to Google and friends) and you can mod both phones to be less tracking.
Take a deep breath, acknowledge that they track you, then do what you can to stop it. Question the need for SocSec, phone #s, addresses, at each and every turn. Don't use barcode store cards-- or use someone else's. Pay cash for top-up charge cards, and use them once.
Steal This Book and other tomes (which you'll steal or pay cash for) are great guides to anonymity. Think about them. Don't go crazy.
Re:one quick method.. (Score:3, Informative)
How do you know the banks and companies you do business with don't have horrible IT? Are you James Bond?
Re:Not privacy (Score:5, Informative)
One option I've heard is a property right, such as ownership (similar to copyright) of personal information. Joe "owns" his name &* address, and he'll loan a copy to Time Magazine for the purpose of delivering the periodical he has paid for. Any other use of Joe's information by Time Magazine is a violation, unless Joe & Time have come to some other agreement. This is very similar to copyright, so let's just call it personal copyright.
Copyright might be too blunt an instrument though, because remedies mostly involve (expensive) civil suits. A number of European governments passed legislation called Fair Information Practices. [cdt.org] These laws basically say that personal information can only be used for the purpose for which it was given, and cannot be repurposed without consent of the person involved. Probably the governments involved have given themselves a loophole for national security, but I haven't investigated the details. This option reduces the cost to the individual, and makes it the job of the government to enforce the law. I see this as a benefit, though some may not.
Writing Fair Information Practices into law would probably explode the business models of the currently most successful tech companies in the USA, so maybe there's a way to ease into the laws and allow the tech companies time to adjust their business methods...
Re:When it's out of your control (Score:5, Informative)
"Perform fake google searches every day (search for stuff that you have no interest in whatsoever)."
There's even an extension for that..
http://cs.nyu.edu/trackmenot/ [nyu.edu]