If You're Not Paranoid About Your Privacy, You're Crazy (theatlantic.com) 373
Muad'Dave writes: Here's an interesting article at The Atlantic about the prevalence of surveillance and the recent uptick in 'deja-vu' moments where devices seemingly hear your conversations and then attempt to market to you. From the article: "One night the previous summer, I’d driven to meet a friend at an art gallery in Hollywood, my first visit to a gallery in years. The next morning, in my inbox, several spam e-mails urged me to invest in art. That was an easy one to figure out: I’d typed the name of the gallery into Google Maps. Another simple one to trace was the stream of invitations to drug and alcohol rehab centers that I’d been getting ever since I’d consulted an online calendar of Los Angeles–area Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. Since membership in AA is supposed to be confidential, these emails irked me. Their presumptuous, heart-to-heart tone bugged me too. Was I tired of my misery and hopelessness? Hadn’t I caused my loved ones enough pain? Some of these disconcerting prompts were harder to explain. For example, the appearance on my Facebook page, under the heading “People You May Know,” of a California musician whom I’d bumped into six or seven times at AA meetings in a private home. In accordance with AA custom, he had never told me his last name nor inquired about mine. And as far as I knew, we had just one friend in common, a notably solitary older novelist who avoided computers altogether. I did some research in an online technology forum and learned that by entering my number into his smartphone’s address book (compiling phone lists to use in times of trouble is an AA ritual), the musician had probably triggered the program that placed his full name and photo on my page."
Alcoholics Anonymous (Score:2)
Another simple one to trace was the stream of invitations to drug and alcohol rehab centers that I’d been getting ever since I’d consulted an online calendar of Los Angeles–area Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. Since membership in AA is supposed to be confidential, these emails irked me.
Of course the author just told the readership of The Atlantic... and by extension many others.
On a serious note, I wonder what online calendar it was? Anyway, the AA meetings are "secret." Not so much searches.
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I wonder if the author has malware installed on his computer or is cherry picking coincidences to create a story. Google, Bing, et al do not provide email addresses and query histories to spammers. Similarly, there is no way that visiting a web page should provide your e-mail address to a spammer.
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The Facebook part of the story is easy to explain. He could have explicitly used the friend finder at some point, which mines your contacts (AND "helpfully" creates shadow profiles for any who aren't on Facebook). Alternatively, he could've been using the Facebook app on his phone, where it was given access to his contacts as part of the blanket permissions the Android version asks for at installation time.
I also wouldn't be surprised if he's taken some artistic license here and there to enhance his narrati
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I also wouldn't be surprised if he's taken some artistic license here and there to enhance his narrative.
Of course. The best stories always seem to do just that. I suspect there's wisdom in both cautious acceptance and jaded disbelief.
But. Prior to the Snowden revelations, many an extroverted anti-establishment activist was referred to in educated company as a tin-hatter.
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Fine, but the fact that your government spied on you illegally (which honestly should have shocked no one who has been paying attention since J. Edgar Hoover ran the FBI) doesn't justify unrelated and uninformed privacy invasion theories. And while I don't think I want to waste time reading TFA, if the summary is accurate, I am disappointed in The Atlantic, an otherwise reputable source of journalism.
For example, while I think Google is filled with smug, hypocritical bastards, I have never ever heard a seri
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Or perhaps the author uses LinkedIn. Their web page periodically asks me to enter my email password to find new people to connect with -- by attempting to mine my (empty) online contact list. Or if he has the LinkedIn app on his iPhone, it, too, asks permission to access his Apple contacts, which it then would monitor continually for changes. I've never let their automation anywhere near my contact lists, but it kept prompting me right up until I uninstalled the damned app.
While I carefully won't allow my c
Re:Alcoholics Anonymous (Score:4, Informative)
Anyway, the AA meetings are "secret." Not so much searches.
Umm... no, not secret. At all. Anonymous. Which is much different. I assume the author was referring to this online calendar of AA meetings in the L.A. area [lacoaa.org] which is, yes, public.
Some basic rules (Score:3, Insightful)
The basic rules:
1) Do not use "free" services that require you to identify yourself in some way. This includes most any service from Google, Facebook, etc.
2) Do not use "free" apps on your smart phone. It is next to impossible to prevent an app on your smartphone from providing ID information to outside entities.
3) Basically - learn the first rule of life - there is no such thing as a free lunch. If someone is giving you something for free, then they are taking something from you without telling you - in our modern era, that is almost always your identity in some way shape or form.
Re:Some basic rules (Score:5, Insightful)
Those don't help much. Paying for something doesn't do anything to guarantee you aren't being "spied" on.
The better goal is to become a low-value target and increase the cost of marketing to you. Use ad blocking, and when you do see ads, just click on them. Click around on the site a little bit, and happily close the tab and get on with your life. Try to do so while reciting how much you hate advertising scum and all kinds of negative thoughts while on the advertiser's pages to make sure any association with their brand is negative.
Focus on the ad block though. If they can't display an ad to you you don't have much value to them.
Re:Some basic rules (Score:5, Informative)
The fallacy here is that we're all low-value targets. Those ads you're avoiding are costing something tenths or hundredths of a penny. They really don't give a crap if a handful of people ignore them or try to game it or whatever.
All this shit is based on scale. If they advertise to 1,000,000 people and only 0.1% even pay any attention, that's still 1,000 people viewing their products and likely 10 or 20 that buy something -- which more than recoups the cost of those 999,000 "wasted" ads.
Tack on to that the fact that your connections and other such metadata are just as important as your browsing history. If they notice you've been looking at cars for example, they might send ads to your wife with more "girly" models or something.
You can go ahead and do everything in your power to reduce the visible impact to yourself (adblock and such) but don't mistake that for being immune to the disease -- you're only hiding the most obvious results of the data collection, not stopping the collection itself.
The only way to avoid all of these privacy breaches is stop using technology. Of any kind. No bank cards, no credit cards, no grocery store discount cards, no accounts on any websites. Hell probably don't even want an internet connection since that IP address is traceable in theory. Perhaps if you take a laptop with you and only use free public wifi and remember to re-image the device between usages so there's no possibility of leftover tracking data.. then maybe you can do something in near-complete privacy. Oh. And you probably shouldn't have any friends either in case they decide to post something about you on their wall/blog/whatever.
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The "no such thing as a free lunch" rule doesn't actually work. Sometimes there are free lunches. Other times, you are paying for the lunch, but the people offering the lunch want you to pay more than advertised. At the end of the day, you have to look at it on a case by case basis. In some cases, it will be rather obvious (e.g. businesses expecting to generate revenues from free services). In other cases, it won't be obvious.
Re: Some basic rules (Score:4, Funny)
It may have been given but it was not free. It had a cost albeit paid by the mother. Nothing in life is free and if you think it is then you are the one being foolish.
Exactly, to stretch far enough to make the statement seem true, you have to undefine other words so that they never can be used. Once you've redefined "free" so that nothing can be called free, even the supposedly free stuff that triggers recital of the cliche, then you can pretend it is true.
Except, it is a load of crap. Things can be free, that is why we have the word. The word describes real situations, it is not a word like "Utopia" that describes imaginary or "prefect" forms of things. Free stuff exists, just check popular writing to see that the word is used that way and therefore contains all those meanings.
If you're politically opposed to all things free, just be that. You don't have to believe that people are incapable of giving just because you decided that giving is bad.
Like it or not, you just got some free advice. Take it or leave it. But if you claim it cost something, I won't believe you.
Your device is p0wned (Score:5, Insightful)
Google is not in e-mail advertising business. If you got any ads from maps visit, they would be the usual ones in your search results or banners on 3rd party sites [google.com] (which do not get access to your e-mail or other identity info). Either you shared your e-mail in some other context related to the event, or your browser and/or mobile device are infected by keylogging/location logging malware.
You should get even more paranoid about your privacy!
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More likely, a contact's device is pwned. And their contact list is compromised. All of the e-mail or text data was probably consumed.
Statistically speaking, the likelihood of someone being compromised is small compared to a recipient being compromised.
Start sending purely nonsense, unrelated e-mails to made up addresses, and see if anything changes. If you like guns and motorcycles, ask about buying a Barbie doll collection, or vintage 8mm porn. If nothing changes, it's a contact.
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If you're going to publish
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Came here to say this too. I read a lot of complaints about privacy invasions online, but it doesn't happen to me on anything like that scale. The little spam I do get seems unrelated to anything I have done, ads don't follow me around web sites because they are all blocked, tracking cookies are blocked too. I only use ublock and Privacy Badger, nothing too fancy.
It makes me think most of these people have really bad computer security habits. I can't think of any other explanation for the huge difference in
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BS. You have no idea how cookie works, nor what those cookies contain, nor how tracking cookies actually works.
Cookies are only retrievable from the originating website. And some of critical cookies are https-only. Embedding iframe into some sites doesn't allow some random websites or ads to get google.com cookies or facebook.com cookies. What it means, is that those ads embedded in various web pages through iframe (that originate from the same ads network) get the same cookie from your browser whenever tho
a world we've been warning about for decades (Score:5, Insightful)
Many of us have been warning about that trend for decades, to be ignored by the vast majority who do not mind a world with not a single shred of privacy. "What do you have to hide?" they ask.
Those of us who don't want to live in that world sadly have little choice. It's increasingly hard to avoid it, try as you might. You can wall yourself off, refuse to use the privacy-invading tech that everyone else favors, but at the cost of being increasingly cut off from mainstream society and even your own friends who no longer use any non-corporatized online communication. "Why use email when there's Facebook? Dude, get with the times! Nobody's on email man!"
People appear to hate the idea of the original internet: open standards with communications that were not monitized or centrally controlled. They much prefer that it be replaced with proprietary services, closed non-interacting protocols, and corporate-censored for-profit services that monitize everything they do. Thereby, the rest of us are forced to watch the internet we knew and loved be dragged in a direction we hate to see. It feels like destroying everything that made it great. In fact, destroying the very things that allowed it to become as world-changing as it did.
And I say that as somebody who was not young when it was arpanet and Vaxen. Rips out my heart to see what's happened to the place since then. Improvement, good. Development without wisdom, not so much.
Re:a world we've been warning about for decades (Score:5, Insightful)
People appear to hate the idea of the original internet: open standards with communications that were not monitized or centrally controlled. They much prefer that it be replaced with proprietary services, closed non-interacting protocols, and corporate-censored for-profit services that monitize everything they do.
That's kind of sad, actually
Re:a world we've been warning about for decades (Score:5, Interesting)
I've noticed that every commercial web 'strategy' tries to maximise supplied user information. For example, I don't want to reveal my mobile number [it's usually switched off or in the kitchen drawer anyway, I'm old] so I put 99999 etc. in that field, unless I feel it's really necessary. I tick/untick the 'supply information to third parties and receive offers from third parties boxes'. I am on the mail preference list and telephone preference list in the UK, very little or no junk mail or robocalls. I'm with a cooperative that supplies telephone and broadband, not one of the big commercials. I've started using a lot of cash again, just to annoy anything that's datamining my shopping habits.
I'm aware that all this is somewhat quixotic and minimal, but it's better than inaction.
One last thing join where something = something-else is a powerful enemy, phone number, email address etc. and we don't really know who's doing that, on which set of databases and where. But 'they' [I don't necessarily mean NSA, could be Walmart, ASDA in the UK] are doing it. Maximise shareholder value baby and fuck your bratty whiny protests about 'privacy'.
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The phone number requirement when signing up for email is very annoying, but it's not there because Yahoo or whoever wants your phone number. It's there to stop abuse. It's much more work to get a new, working phone number than it is to create another email account. This is after pressure from people who have been harassed and sites getting put on spam block lists etc.
The author really is paranoid (Score:5, Insightful)
Just because you are paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you. But in this case, the author kinda is paranoid. He could use a course on web browsers and email.
The next morning, in my inbox, several spam e-mails urged me to invest in art. That was an easy one to figure out: I’d typed the name of the gallery into Google Maps.
It sounds like the author is alleging that Google gave his email address and marketing information to spammers. Is that true? Considering I have a gmail account that receives no spam at all, I think a more believable explanation is that he dropped his business card into a box somewhere, or signed-up on a list. In reality, 100% of my spam comes to the email address I have registered to my domain. My personal email gets nothing because I don't give it out.
Some people receive almost no spam. Other people get a 200:1 ratio of spam to real emails. Having done tech support, I can tell you by talking to someone for 5 minutes how much spam they get. Do they click on ads? Do they sign-up for stuff and give out their email? Do they play the lottery? Then they are in the high spam category. I bet a reporter is one of those people who gives out his contact information to absolutely everyone.
Another simple one to trace was the stream of invitations to drug and alcohol rehab centers that I’d been getting ever since I’d consulted an online calendar of Los Angeles–area Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. Since membership in AA is supposed to be confidential, these emails irked me.
Unless he created a dedicated email address specifically for the AA membership, he has no evidence of this. Again, more likely, he enaged in networking.
I don't even want to consider his example where his bluetooth somethingorother was transcribing his words and turning that into spam. That one is technically possible, but we just aren't there... yet.
With those complaints registered, many of the anecdotes in the story do make sense. A Google search triggered targeted ads on YouTube. Well yeah, Google owns both sites. This is one of the reasons people feared Google Plus: it was just *too* well integrated. I am just surprised that this is news to people at all. What do you think is in that 35 page license you clicked "accept" to in order to play that free Facebook game? Why do you think that flashlight app needs access to your contact list and the internet?
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Also the spam thing would require Google to sell your information, which is very much what Google doesn't like to do. What they know about people and their ability to gather it is their value, and they hold on to it jealously. They want companies to sell ads through them, they are not interested in handing out your info so people can advertise to you directly and cut them out of the loop.
Everyone I know has a G-mail account (no surprise, they are common with tech users) and none of them experience anything
Re:The author really is paranoid (Score:4, Interesting)
Hmm. I don't know.
Ad networks, tracking, cookies, etc, allow even disparate ad companies to deduce information about an individual user without having to resort to the "sell your information to spammers" mantra. Google doesn't sell your information to spammers, they instead provide detailed demographic information for better ad targeting. So you add that data to referring URL information on sites that track user movements across the web, the cookies created at the various sites, etc; and you have a pretty good idea of who a person is and what their interests, habits, and proclivities are. There's no doubt that Google has this information, and they likely aren't the only ones. Do a search on something like "how can I better target my advertising online" and behold the cesspool that we've built.
The issue's not whether you're paranoid,... the issue is whether you're paranoid enough.
BTW - uMatrix reports that Slashdot works with the following advertising/tracking networks: Google Analytics, Google Ad Services, Google Tag Services, RPX Now/Janrain, and Taboola. There's also ntv.io, I'm unable to quickly find what that is.
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Yeah I agree.
Of course his bluetooth thing didn't intercept the word, walnuts, and then try to advertise it to him later. But the way we're heading, technology is rapidly enabling that kind of thing to actually happen.
What today is, or yesterday was, a conspiracy theory spouted by those crazy people we all know, tomorrow becomes reality. Like the example of TVs watching people back. Okay we're not there yet, but TVs are listening in a way. Maybe the crazy conspiracy theorists were more reasonable than
"I’d bumped into six or seven times" (Score:2)
The "number into his smartphone’s address book" is all part of the free social media experience.
The "William Binney, a government whistle-blower and former top NSA cryptologist, the answer was simple: almost everything, today, tomorrow, and for decades to come." should be clear to most readers.
The "Its employees dealt with us in an upbeat, tightly scripted
closed source software (Score:3)
if you use closed source software then there is no way of knowing what your handheld computer is actually doing without going to extreme measures.
will they ever learn? nope.
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Use a desktop computer with Linux to store, sort and manage contacts. Most distros do not phone home unless they offer that as a service or a user wants that service.
The doing part surround the "had probably triggered the program that placed his full name and photo on my page" would be facial recognition gold to city, state, federal and foreign intelligence services.
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If you use open source software then there is still no way (for the average user) of knowing what your computer is doing without going to extreme (for them) measures.
No expectation of privacy if you use facebook (Score:5, Insightful)
Consent (Score:3)
That's like keeping your front door wide-open and putting a sign in your yard that reads 'Steal my shit' then getting mad when you're robbed.
No it's not. The sign provides consent.
AdBlock, NoScript, etc? (Score:2)
It does not require esoteric knowledge to prevent some of the "coincidences" the article discusses. Block ads, block third-party cookies, refuse unnecessary scripts... those actions will actually prevent some of this from happening and the authour is negligent to not mention them.
Going to visit the NSA data center, in contrast, accomplishes jackshit.
Paranoid About Your Privacy? (Score:2)
Don't want to have your information collected, don't use Facebook. I mean seriously, what the fuck is wrong with you? Also, don't let Google or anyone else store a permanent cookie on you, don't stay logged in, don't keep a personal account on the search engine you use. For starters. Also don't use a web-based E-Mail service like gmail and encrypt all your E-mails fanatically. At this point the number of people willing to talk to you will
Who gets spam these days? (Score:3)
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On the rare occasion I look at my Gmail spam folder, I almost always see one or two false positives in there, even though I always mark then as Not Spam. I'm pretty glad my main email provider is my own server.
AdBlock warned me the site uses targeted ads (Score:4, Informative)
Puhlease (Score:2)
You are paranoid about security and have a Facebook account? You bring shame to Paranoid schizophrenics everywhere. Please join your local chapter of technologically illiterate anonymous.
On a more serious note. I know people who are convinced that Navy seals sit in the trees outside their house. You are halfway there. Get help before it is too late.
First run-in (Score:5, Interesting)
My first run-in with online privacy happened in the late 1990's when a persistent troll found personal info on me and broadcast it all over discussion boards in an attempt to embarrass me into silence.
I realized after the "breach" it's easy to leave inadvertent clues. Somebody with enough patience and persistence can put these clues together to dig around in search engines for personal info and your online trail.
And there are plenty of freaks out there who make the Interwebs their sadism engine. It's their only "power" in life.
I'm much more careful about "crossing topics" now. For example, if I'm on a board about pets, I don't talk about IT and vice versa. But, that's probably still not enough as one tends have certain phrasing patterns that leave sufficient clues for "statistical linking". Most trolls probably don't go that far or are not smart enough, but you never know. They may have a script-buddy to barter for zombie PC time or something.
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no problem (Score:2)
Dont use a smart phone, don't use google products, and dont use social media.
I guess that's what passes for "off the grid" these days. Not hard.
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Dont use a smart phone, don't use google products, and dont use social media.
Good God, man! How could I survive without my daily dose of mildly amusing cat pictures?
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Wrong. Use them. And use them to your advantage. Feed them information you want the world to hear about you. True? Why would it have to be true? Be creative!
Poison the Well (Score:2, Informative)
Whenever I read one of these articles about how tiny fragments of information are gathered and assembled into a personal profile I'm struck by how much is based on so little. They make a lot of assumptions about the veracity of these little details that they collect. Thins makes me wonder if active and deliberated injection of miss information could serve as an effective defense mechanism.
If course, you'd have to be sure that the false picture you paint is a favorable one. And that the resulting ad targetin
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trackmenot https://cs.nyu.edu/trackmenot/ [nyu.edu] "... actual web searches, lost in a cloud of false leads"
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Way ahead of you. If you google my name, you will notice that I have accomplished a lot. Most of it is hard to verify (I didn't give myself a Nobel Prize, because that could be debunked) but I made sure that you will come up with me being one of the hottest things in IT security. And I know everyone that matters. Of course all this can only be found on pages I own (sometimes via proxy), and they only link to each other in a circle jerk kinda way, but if you data mine me, getting bogus information is what yo
know your actions and anticipate the consequences. (Score:2)
Android Marshmallow (Score:2)
I just updated to Marshmallow, where you can see and control app privileges. I went through the apps and disallowed anything they didn't need. Almost every app had the right to look at my contacts. Music apps, map apps, fitness apps - everything. None of them need this access, but they are all selling it. Hopefully, those days are now over...
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Either way the men with the white coats are coming after you... or maybe the men with the funny glasses with an extra band on one side.
Those who don't learn from history...
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We have already been far more than chipped by the nano chips in chemtrails. That is what 'morgellons' is. Morgellons has been proven in study, it is not just on patient's skin, those with the fibers coming out of their skin, their bodies are rejecting the fibers. The chemtrail nano chips self assemble in to fiber optics inside of us./p>
Did you mean Midochlorians?
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What exactly is there to be worried about?
Depends on what you own or are trying to hide... For most of us it's "Not much" and "Not Much" which gives you the answer you seek.
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As for me, I'd rather have the internet as it was before......with less stuff. The good stuff, I'm willing to pay for.
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Called Zero Bugs and Program Faster, I think it's pretty good.
Re: Okay, So Why Should I Be Paranoid? (Score:3, Insightful)
We shouldn't have to pay anything for privacy. You're not thinking clearly because of how far our society has gone down the road of routine invasion. Privacy used to be normal, and people had to pay to be known, typically for business but also socially - remember classifieds?
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We shouldn't have to pay anything for privacy. You're not thinking clearly because of how far our society has gone down the road of routine invasion. Privacy used to be normal, and people had to pay to be known, typically for business but also socially - remember classifieds?
If privacy was normal, it was due to lack of mass broadcasting and data processing, and the existence of a strong social fabric among those who DID have access to you if they wanted to. (Apartment neighbors, etc.)
Technology ruined the first part. And now everyone's your neighbor on the internet, rendering the second part irrelevant.
Re: Okay, So Why Should I Be Paranoid? (Score:4, Informative)
If privacy was normal
Unless you lived in a village, where probably everybody know almost everything. Somethings just where not talked about in the open.
Re: Okay, So Why Should I Be Paranoid? (Score:5, Insightful)
We shouldn't be so willing, as a species, to sell our privacy in return for services. People know Facebook etc are mining everything they put into the platform, they just don't care enough and would stop using the site if it started charging in return for stopping the mining. You can blame companies like Facebook all you like, but as long as the only businesses that succeed are the ones that don't charge users and instead make money by selling the users (as advertising viewers or data directly) it'll keep happening.
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Re: Okay, So Why Should I Be Paranoid? (Score:5, Interesting)
Privacy is not a fixed thing. There are shades of privacy...
This is what shits me about privacy legislation, it is too black and white (either private in your home behind the curtains, or it public - hey you're on public property I have the right to record you and publish whatever you are doing to millions of eyes and ears). Actually even private is no longer private apparently.
Where is the granularity? I'd like to see some sort of localised expectation of privacy, eg if I walk down the street in my undies, I don't care if the neighbours see me, but does that give someone the right to put on TV? If I have a picnic in the public park with my mistress, should that be allowed to be put on TV?
It seems that the notion that you are in public doesn't appreciate that public in your local area is not the same as public globally.
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Willing or able? Or does "your privacy or your home" count as a free choice?
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"Privacy in your own home" isn't really at risk here, unless you are talking about "privacy to post on Facebook in my house"
Actually, it is - and big time.
The provider of this story notes that he was being stalked by Alcoholics anonymous in multiple ways - including FB.
This isn't like kiddie diddlers looking at their porn, or any other nefarious use some folks might have for the web - it's a person who looks at an online calendar of AA, and is now branded as an alcoholic by big data.
That is a decision by big data that would have life changing ramifications for some folks.
Let's take me for example. I am a very spare drink
Re:Okay, So Why Should I Be Paranoid? (Score:5, Insightful)
What exactly is there to be worried about?
Depends on what you own or are trying to hide... For most of us it's "Not much" and "Not Much" which gives you the answer you seek.
I have zero to hide from anyone.Yet, I value my privacy very much. Your statement is fail.
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Precisely. To the best of my knowledge, I don't have any skeletons lurking in my closet. I've never had a run-in with the police, my wife is the only person I've ever been romantically involved with, I didn't see a point in experimenting with drugs, and even though I have several drinks a month, I've never even had enough in one sitting to get buzzed, let alone drunk enough to regret it later.
And yet, despite all of that, I fiercely value my privacy. Why? Because relationships work best when they're symmetr
Re:Okay, So Why Should I Be Paranoid? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Okay, So Why Should I Be Paranoid? (Score:5, Funny)
You're a Dutch heterosexual?
Re:Okay, So Why Should I Be Paranoid? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Okay, So Why Should I Be Paranoid? (Score:5, Insightful)
What exactly is there to be worried about?
Depends on what you own or are trying to hide... For most of us it's "Not much" and "Not Much" which gives you the answer you seek.
The thing you will want to hide is the thing you didn't know you should have kept hidden.
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Seriously? Your, or rather every potential boss wouldn't care if you were a casual marijuana user in your personal time or liked to dress up in drag on the weekends or a million other things that some people find harmless and others find abhorrent? You're taking it to the extreme of blackmail but I'm thinking simply of being fired from your job, passed over for promotion, or limited in some other way from progressing in your career. Marriage is the same, yes my wife knows I watch porn but it's not someth
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What exactly is there to be worried about?
*probable cause*
Re:Okay, So Why Should I Be Paranoid? (Score:5, Insightful)
Or soiled reputation. What happens when instead of getting help at an AA meeting, you are sponsoring someone you know and become a second line for someone else in the group and all this makes it look like you are the alcoholic when a job does a security and background check before they hire you. Or what about the same and your new girlfriend checks to see what kind of creep you might be and dumps you.
It can be problematic in several ways. If the info is being sold to advertisers, there is nothing stopping it from being sold to the investigation company or even law enforcement (who would likely had otherwise needed a warrant )
Re:Okay, So Why Should I Be Paranoid? (Score:5, Insightful)
What exactly is there to be worried about?
The main takeaway, to me at least, is that very personal information of yours is not as personal as you think it is anymore. Do your google searches indicate that you've been diagnosed with an STD? Do they infer that you're a frequent marijuana user? Do your posts reveal that you're paranoid about your lover cheating on you? Do they flag you for an NSA interesting persons list?
Your searches reveal information about your interests, and they are most definitely recorded in order to advertise to you. As we have learned with the OPM, or with Ashley Madison, or with one of the many other thousands of instances of data theft, much of your information is unprotected. It can be used to blackmail you, to out you as a minority or stereotype, and to reveal your (mildly or severely) illegal activities.
You may think that you're a moral person, but most people have character traits that give them shame.
Re:Okay, So Why Should I Be Paranoid? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not simply about shame. Less than a century ago the world tore itself apart because a single trait was vilified, hunted, and slaughtered. We like to think that we've moved forward and are past such things but they are never far off. Donald Trump has more in common with Hitler than the founding fathers, yet he's the fore runner in the US Republican nomination. All it takes is a failing economy & desperate people to begin the cycle of hate. It might be gays in the US, Muslims in the EU, the poor in Canada, etc. Maybe it doesn't go to the lengths that Hitler did, maybe it only excludes certain classes of people from being able to attain a reasonable life. Alcoholic/Drug user? Excluded from working. Gay? Excluded from society. Criminal? Excluded from both. The biggest thing in immediate danger with the loss of privacy is opportunity. You must conform publicly in every way to the definition of the ideal or face ridicule, ostracization, or limitation. Privacy is liberty. Liberty to explore your boundaries, interests, and desires. Liberty to fix your mistakes, change your mind, & move forward in life without being restrained by your past choices. Without privacy none of that is possible.
Re:Okay, So Why Should I Be Paranoid? (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not simply about shame...
Let's also not forget that in the U.S., it is against the law to track someone who is under 13 years old. But only maybe 1 in 1000 trackers really knows or cares about age. So many trackers in the U.S. are violating the law thousands or even millions of times a day.
And I, for one, object to that. I agree that children should not be tracked. Something must be done.
My own position, and the position EFF has (finally!) adopted is: tracking by opt-in only!
It is the only remaining viable way to protect privacy (and children).
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Ya, that law was never going to work. You need to be able to track 13 year olds to be able to "not" track them otherwise how would you know if they're 13 or not?
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Let's also not forget that in the U.S., it is against the law to track someone who is under 13 years old. But only maybe 1 in 1000 trackers really knows or cares about age. So many trackers in the U.S. are violating the law thousands or even millions of times a day.
My own position, and the position EFF has (finally!) adopted is: tracking by opt-in only!
What if users were able to configure age bracket within browser and it went out with the request header of every request?
If widely implemented, everyone knows about it the lawyers might be able to make a stronger case failure to check such a header == negligence. Of course the same theory would not be limited to tracking and may ultimately prove to be counterproductive.
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Let's also not forget that in the U.S., it is against the law to track someone who is under 13 years old. But only maybe 1 in 1000 trackers really knows or cares about age. So many trackers in the U.S. are violating the law thousands or even millions of times a day.
My own position, and the position EFF has (finally!) adopted is: tracking by opt-in only!
What if users were able to configure age bracket within browser and it went out with the request header of every request?
If widely implemented, everyone knows about it the lawyers might be able to make a stronger case failure to check such a header == negligence. Of course the same theory would not be limited to tracking and may ultimately prove to be counterproductive.
Then people who aren't 13 will start using it because they don't want to be tracked either and then the advertising industry will drop support for it just like they did with the 'Do No Track' header.
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People older than 13 will set their age to be lower in order to avoid tracking, while those younger than 13 will set their age higher in order to access age restricted content.
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Facebook at least used to (still does?) require you to claim to be >13 when you sign up, and at the very least it asks for your age so you've effectively already opted in to being tracked at that point. I imagine most other sites also ask for age etc when you sign up, so they have done their due diligence by asking and it's down to the end user if they've lied.
Re:Okay, So Why Should I Be Paranoid? (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't see how any of those arguments follow from one another. Ultimately it comes down to forgiveness and personal choice, doesn't it? We must all allow the liberties to OTHERS that we expect for ourselves. I don't see how privacy has anything to do with liberty, it simply removes the ability for those opposed to freedom to hide their oppressive tendencies.
Our history as humans is littered with examples. Women hiding behind male names to express their liberty in books. Irish hiding their ancestry to have the liberty to use services. Jews hiding their religion to avoid being rounded up and shipped to concentration camps.
How do you forgive someone for being Black or Muslim? Can you forgive a convicted child molester who has supposedly paid their debt to society?
Those are extreme examples to be sure but small ones happen every day. An alcoholic passed over for promotion despite 3 decades of sobriety, a teacher fired for taking part in a porno while in college, a politician forced to resign over an internet post taken out of context before they were in political life - all of these things are real events that would not have happened had their privacy been respected. The politician used a pseudonym, the teacher a stage name, the alcoholic attended meetings. All actions that had clear intent to remain anonymous and private under "private in public" doctrine (a foreign concept to Americans but well entrenched in other countries). The liberty to change, experiment, and speak all wrapped up in information that was intended to remain private and limited current/future opportunity for these individuals. Others who look at their situations and are influenced not to exercise their liberty for fear of loosing their opportunities leads to a society that is free in nothing but language.
Also, please don't mistake me. Actions have consequences (like the child molester going to jail), that is without question. Private actions, especially private in public actions, (like participating in a demonstration or shopping at certain stores or internet commenting) are very different and need protection.
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Riiiiight... http://www.businessinsider.com... [www.businessinsider.com] [businessinsider.com]
This is just a bunch of 3rd and 4th -party hearsay that Trump may have had a book of Hitler's speeches. It in no way supports your assertion that "Donald Trump has more in common with Hitler..." at all.
http://www.poynter.org/news/me... [poynter.org]
This, of course, is just more of what I assumed you really meant, which that Trump is a racist and a misogynist, which is simply what the political class (especially on the left, and this guy is very far left) say about Trump. Sure, you can mischaracterize statements from anyone and claim they are racist,
Re:Okay, So Why Should I Be Paranoid? (Score:5, Interesting)
This is just a bunch of 3rd and 4th -party hearsay that Trump may have had a book of Hitler's speeches. It in no way supports your assertion that "Donald Trump has more in common with Hitler..." at all.
No, it's a first party witness (Ivana Trump) making a statement to Vanity Fair. Yes, it was re-reported by Business Insider making that particular article a 3rd party but the original statement is true as far as anyone can know.
This, of course, is just more of what I assumed you really meant, which that Trump is a racist and a misogynist, which is simply what the political class (especially on the left, and this guy is very far left) say about Trump. Sure, you can mischaracterize statements from anyone and claim they are racist, it happens all the time, but it's just hyperbole. This guy didn't really even try to demonstrate any commonalities between Trump and Hitler (except, as I pointed out, hair), rather he used Hitler's election to drum up additional hatred for Republicans in his leftist audience. You can find articles doing that all the time. In fact, I can find lots of similar articles using the same rhetoric about Bush W. and even Mitt Romney.
"Laziness is a trait in the blacks. ... Black guys counting my money! I hate it" - Trump
"China is killing us. They’ve taken so much of our wealth. They’ve taken our jobs. They’ve taken our business, they’ve taken our manufacturing, [audience member screams out “our land”] Our land? The way they’re going they’ll have that pretty soon.Think about it, we have rebuilt China — somebody said to me “that’s a harsh statement” — it’s the greatest theft in the history of the United States." - Trump
"When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people." - Trump
Hitler propaganda, bolstered by his "cabal" or not, preyed on such themes as the "lazy" Jews were stealing from "hardworking" German people. The blacks, the Jews, the Bolsheviks were to blame for all of "normal German's" issues. Much like Trump blames the Chinese, the Mexicans, the "Blacks", etc.
I'm not going to convince you but for most people it's plain as day that he uses the language of hate and fear to gain popularity. Win or lose he demonstrates how easily large portions of the population are swayed by the politics of blame and how large that population is.
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Well history shows that such a strategy works, after all preying on people's fear and blaming the bogeyman worked for hitler, so why wouldn't it work for trump too?
There is however a huge difference between what someone says in order to get elected, and what they actually do after they have been elected.
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How much damage do they cause along the way? How many Kim Davis' are emboldened? How many unknown persons are pushed further out of society? He doesn't have to get elected for any of those things to occur. Simply by being given the attention and people saying "this is ok" is enough to cause problems. Every step down that path makes privacy that much more important (or down the path of 'if you're not with us, you're against us' of the W. Bush era).
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You're not talking about reality. You're talking spin. It's really easy to call anyone a racist - especially with the media consistently misquoting Trump over and over and then having long panel discussion about things he didn't actually say, or ways that they interpret what he said. You've bought all that rhetoric from supporters of the political status quo hook, line and sinker. And people that know the media is deceptive check out what Trump is really saying and he gets more support. Too bad so many
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the one who singles out the "others" and casts blame on them for a majority of the problems
Actually, this is a good one. You've pegged Bernie's campaign exactly.
Re: Okay, So Why Should I Be Paranoid? (Score:5, Insightful)
There's a pretty clear difference between raising up anger against people in power at the top of the system, and attacking the "other" because of inherent "otherness". Bernie is mad about people who have amassed so much wealth and power that they make the rules that govern them. Hitler didn't just want the rich and powerful Jews to suffer for his hatreds, he wanted to kill every single one of them.
Bernie just wants the super rich to pay some fucking taxes and not have the power to override the rest of the people.
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What doesn't have me paranoid though is that I'm open about my cannabis use and so are tons of others. There simply hasn't been a mass roundup of cannabis users from social media.
I'm not worried the NSA or the FBI is out to get me because I think they literally have more important things to worry about.
What I am worried about is anything actually getting flagged? If I get curious about say, how do explosive belts used by terrorists work, does *that* get flagged?
So far, I'm pretty sure the answer is no. The
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Cannabis use isn't always illegal, and even when it is, its generally considered a very low severity crime that might get you a slap on the wrist... Law enforcement departments are generally underfunded, so rounding up thousands of users to give them a slap on the wrist for cannabis use would be a terribly poor use of their limited resources.
On the other hand, they will keep record of the fact that you are a cannabis user incase that information proves useful in the future... For instance they may suspect y
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The main takeaway, to me at least, is that very personal information of yours is not as personal as you think it is anymore.
That in itself is not so much of a problem - but what happens as a result can be. One thing is being targeted with a flood of inept advertising for things you don't want or need, but much worse is the fact that there are far too many people in the world, who are more than happy to jump to conclusions based on superficial evidence and a lack of understanding. A lot of them are hostile and some are in positions where they can make decisions against you.
Personally, I don't think there is any need to be paranoi
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What part of Alcoholics Anonymous did you overlook?
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Ted Kaczynski is that you? I didn't think they let inmates on Slashdot..
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Those are a few horrible fads and hardly constitute a regression from civilized society. There was a time when putting your real name on-line would get you laughed off of slashdot. sad.
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I have a facebook page too - it's not real but I have one.
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