Give Up the Fight For Personal Privacy?

KlaymenDK writes "Over the last decade or so, I have strived to maintain my privacy. I have uninstalled Windows, told my friends 'sorry' when they wanted me to join Facebook, had a fight with my brother when he wanted to move the family email hosting to Gmail, and generally held back on my personal information online. But since, amongst all of my friends, I am the only one doing this, it may well be that my battle is lost already. Worse, I'm really putting myself out of the loop, and it is starting to look like self-flagellation. Indeed, it is a common occurrence that my wife or friends will strike up a conversation based on something from their Facebook 'wall' (whatever that is). Becoming ever more unconnected with my friends, live or online, is ultimately harming my social relations. I am seriously considering throwing in the towel and signing up for Gmail, Facebook, the lot. If 'they' have my soul already, I might as well reap the benefits of this newfangled, privacy-less, AJAX-2.0 world. It doesn't really matter if it was me or my friends selling me out. Or does it? I'd love to hear your thoughts on the matter. How many Windows-eschewing users are not also eschewing the social networking services and all the other 2.0 supersites with their dubious end-user license agreements?"

Your privacy was eroded for you

I'm a Windows-eschewing user who has embraced all things Google...Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar (my wife keeps it up to date, which prevents "You didn't tell me we had plans on Friday!" moments). I also have Facebook, Friendster, and LinkedIn profiles.

It's funny, I went out of my way to keep my social networking site profiles generic (no pictures, no personal info, no personal statements, no likes/dislikes, etc.), and only really used them so that, when friends sent me links saying "Dude, check out this chick I work with" or "Look what this guy we went to high school with us up to now", I could see who they were talking about.

But what I found out is that, if you know people who have profiles, and those people own digital cameras, and you've ever appeared in any of their pictures, there is a chance that your privacy has already gone up in smoke. Facebook as a very irritating feature called "tagging"...Jenny, an avid Facebook user, takes a picture of their friends Bob, Susan and Mike. Jenny then uploads that picture to her Facebook profile and "tags" that picture with the names of all the people in it. If any of those people have Facebook profiles, their names in that tag will link to them. So in this case, this picture would be tagged with Bob, Susan and Mike. Congratulations, your face is now on the web, and has a name attached to it. This tagging feature is optional, but I've found that it seems to be quite popular.

So despite my efforts to keep my image & life details to myself, this has been undermined many times over by Facebook fanatics who have tagged pictures of me, and have added "helpful" details about how the picture was taken at my wife's cousin's wedding, complete with dates & locations.

Your privacy is gone, my friend. You might as well suck it up & try to look at the silver lining: it is sorta fun to make contact with old classmates and to laugh at ex-girlfriends who've really let themselves go.

You might have to join them just to control them.

I basically made a facebook account so I could remove tags.

I have no applications installed. Installing ONE removes your opt-out.

Re:Your privacy was eroded for you

So despite my efforts to keep my image & life details to myself, this has been undermined many times over by Facebook fanatics who have tagged pictures of me, and have added "helpful" details about how the picture was taken at my wife's cousin's wedding, complete with dates & locations.

I agree, the helpful details etc are annoying as anything. You can, however, UNTAG yourself from photos! If you care about privacy (as you clearly do, and I do as well), I would highly recommend untagging yourself.

Take the opposite approach.

Add photos that you aren't in and tag them as you.

Then add backstory for them.

This photo was taken at my sister's friend's cousin's lesbian wedding in Monaco. That's me on lead guitar.

Since you cannot always hide information. You can always try to obscure the facts with the fallacies.

Re:Take the opposite approach.

This photo was taken at my sister's friend's cousin's lesbian wedding in Monaco. That's me on lead guitar.

While your whole suggested "backstory" made me chuckle, the "lead guitar" bit was the cherry on top.

The big problem that came to mind is that, were I to try this idea, 80 people would leave Captain-Obvious-style comments on said photo:

"Dude, that's not you"
"Who is that guy?"
"OMG UR SOOOOO FUNY THATS NOT U"
"lol thats not you man!!1!"
"You crack me up, just like you did last Friday at that party you guys had at your place at 1234 W. Main St. in downtown Whoville, corner of Main and 1st (Main is one way going east...if you pass the Kwik-E-Mart you've gone too far). Have fun on your two week vacation during which time your apartment, unit 2E, which has no security system and a bedroom window that unlatches if you jiggle it hard enough, will be empty!"

Okay, maybe that last one was a bit over the top...but you know what I mean :)

Re:Take the opposite approach.

Security by obscurity has never really worked. I predict it won't protect your privacy either.
    --Sincerely, Anonymous Coward

Re:Your privacy was eroded for you

I dunno...I just don't find the need to have a facebook or myspace page..etc.

I too have declined to open one, privacy reasons being one of the many reasons, but, I don't find that it has hurt me any.

For one thing...I found that it is not only old people in Korea that use email, I keep in touch with all my friends via email. And not just jokes...we have real conversations,a nd often interesting threads with groups of us on things like political debate. We just don't broadcast it publicly and render it searchable forever.

Also, believe it or not....the phone still is a great way to communicate when you can't be there in person.

I warn people when I can to tell them NOT to put too much out there publicly....some that haven't listened...have already been bitten in the ass by it...and learn their lesson the hard way.

And I gotta say....with the economy getting in bad shape...jobs are gonna get a bit harder to get. And with it already known that many employers NOW search the internet for background on you, putting pics of you out there sucking the skull bong are NOT going to help you any at all.

Bitch about it not being fair to not get a job based on what you do on your own time, or back when you were younger, but, that is how it is today.

On the other hand...maybe I should encourage more people to put stupid shit information like that about themselves on the internet, that will just take them out of competition with me for a good job.

:)

Re:Your privacy was eroded for you

You can control tags of you in your Facebook privacy settings.

David Brin wrote about this years ago

Science-fiction author David Brin got quite a bit of attention here on Slashdot when he began talking some years ago about how one cannot preserve privacy in the modern world, and that what we have to do instead is adapt to people knowing so much about us. See his book The Transparent Society [amazon.com] .

Re:David Brin wrote about this years ago

I was hoping someone would mention that.

This whole obsession with privacy is a little hard to understand at times. Personally, I just don't see the point in trying to prevent your name or photo from ever appearing online. True, there have been cases of identity theft using information on Facebook, but it's not worth worrying about if you're careful and limit your profile to just general information.

I don't know. I think the world is super paranoid today. It never bothers me when someone in another country knows my full name. Or when my picture has been uploaded somewhere. Or when Google records the stuff I search for online. Who really cares? There are tens of thousands of users for every employee who has access to that data, and frankly it's a little self-centered to think one of them cares even remotely about what YOU searched for.

Privacy is important for some things, but it's not this magical state that makes you immune to anything ever going wrong in your life again. Keep some things secret, and stop being so damn paranoid about everything else. Yeah, Gmail scans your emails for keywords. So what? Nobody other than a machine is going to read your letters, and even if they did, nobody is going to care that you wrote a saucy message to your girlfriend (or wife, or whatever).

I don't have a Facebook account, because I don't have any use for one. Most of my friends stay in contact via email and chatroom conversations. We have no use for an AJAX site where we can tell everyone what mood we're in and what goth music we're listening to this week. Okay, so maybe I have a personal gripe with most online networking site, as they tend to be populated with attention-whoring kids who think write text on a bright yellow background is perfectly readable. But even when used properly, those sites just don't fill any specific need of my social life.

If you're paranoid about identity theft, don't use your credit card online. Don't post your contact details anywhere, or your SSN (or any equivalent national ID in your country). But really, there's no need to be so absurdly paranoid about your photo, even when captioned by your full name. Nobody cares about you! I'm sorry to be blunt, but really, nobody is going to see your picture and then suddenly decide to pursue more information (unless you happen to be quite a dashing young man).

This world is full of people who are all worried about themselves. We have our own problems, and we probably spend our private time doing all the same things you do. It really, really isn't a big deal if some of your life makes its way onto the digital world. Nobody is going to care about it anyway.

Re:David Brin wrote about this years ago

You need to understand respect for those that desire privacy. Just because you're an exhibitionist doesn't mean that we are. We can be private in our thoughts, deeds, and actions. Anonymity also insulates you against the whims of government, and organizations that don't have your best interests in mind.

I don't care if anyone knows about me or not; those that do are certainly in touch, and not under the auspices of soul-rendering EULAs from Facebook, MySpace, Plaxo, LinkedIn, or any other 'social site'.

Your broadly cast seeming truisms are indeed false, and suit you, and you and others that agree with it. There are many of us that don't. Privacy is part of liberty, and liberty an essential part of freedom. I give up neither just so that others can use a seeming social network to keep in touch with me. There's email, snail mail, and simple phone calls. Oh yeah-- the best one-- face to face visits.

I don't get it...

I'm not sure what the motivation is here. Either "privacy" is some sort of religious thing for you, in which case giving up Facebook is a small price to pay, or it's a pragmatic matter, in which case you can make a decision about what the pros and cons are for you instead of asking us.

If you're asking whether I personally am impressed by someone bragging about how he refuses to use Facebook or GMail: it impresses me about as much as someone who brags about not having heard of some television show.

Reverse

I'm a privacy guy, too, or at least I was until things like Facebook and blogs come around.

Now, instead of trying to keep everything secret, I think it's easier to assume that everything is known. Some things simply have access controls to modify them or see extended information or are otherwise secured by information that assuredly only I know: passphrases (not passwords).

There's also a key element here: I don't do anything illegal and I'm honest with friends and family. One might say, "What happens when you do?" to which I will reply, "Then I guess I'm going to jail like I should." If someone comes to me with beef about something I wrote, then it's up to me to defend my position.

If I want to pass or store information securely, I'll use PGP or other virtually impenetrable encryption with good secret key protection practices, such as keeping them in my head.

"I'm not doing anything illegal"

"There's also a key element here: I don't do anything illegal and I'm honest with friends and family. One might say, "What happens when you do?" to which I will reply, "Then I guess I'm going to jail like I should." If someone comes to me with beef about something I wrote, then it's up to me to defend my position."

There is a problem with this position.

You are making the assumption that nothing will happen in the future to make currently acceptable, moral, lawful behavior illegal.

If the law changes in such a way as to be tyrannical and you have allowed no possibility for revolt without getting caught you have sealed your fate long before the tyranny came to pass.

Err..

This is a bit over the top. On Facebook, for example, you can restrict practically any information you put into it. Now, Facebook themselves could technically do what they wanted with it, but if you're worried about the information getting out to the internet as a whole, you just go into your preferences and tell it what to make public, friends-only, completely private, or what-have-you, and they'll restrict it as appropriate. Just because most people don't enable this restriction doesn't mean it's not there.

If you're worried about Facebook selling your information to other entities, etc., take a look at Facebook's privacy policy [facebook.com], which states pretty clearly what they will and will not do with your information.

I have a feeling, though, that you've already made your decision and just want to hear from others who feel as you do.

Re:Err..

Facebook implemented without asking anyone anything - until there was a public outcry. [wikipedia.org]

Facebook made it impossible for you to delete your account - until there was a public outcry.

"developers" of "applications" can see a great deal of your private data - this has not been fixed - there has not been a public outcry yet.

If it was private data and how much I choose to let others on the web see then that would be one thing. The issue I see with facebook is that they themselves seem to want to exploit your data at every single stage. Things like the inability to delete your account and "opt-out" services should be the anathema of any business that cares about privacy - instead they nefariously implemented them without consent and defended them until there was outcry. It took a feature piece in the New York Times before they decided to let people delete their accounts. What are they trying to hide?

Resistance is futile

For years I swore that I'd never get a cell phone. I held out admirably until about 2003/04 or thereabouts, but I had to succumb. The reason was that everyone else had one, and social etiquette had moved on to the point where it was considered rude not to call in certain situations, not to return a call promptly, and social events were being organised and plans adjusted with such speed that it was all but impossible to be kept in the loop with a landline and payphones alone.

It's similar to how there are people who live in rural or suburban areas who would probably love to be able to live without a car, but a lot of the infrastructure and social norms that would have made that feasible in the past are no longer around.

Society expects you to be able to have personal mobility and instant availability for communication, and it works on the assumption that you do.

Judging by the experience posted, it looks like some people are holding back on the social networking thing and finding it difficult because of peer pressure pushing them into it. Interesting how society forces a body to conform.

Maintain privacy, except on Slashdot

So, you don't want anything posted on places like Facebook, showing a list of your friends along with articles you have written, journal entries, ties to items you have posted about, etc. But, you have no problem with the same on Slashdot?

Four friends listed
A page filled with your posts to submitted articles
Three journal entries
Three fans

I know some people on Facebook that maintain some privacy: one never fills in all the fields or puts in erroneous information, one puts her middle name as her last name and posts an avatar instead of a photo.

What about Windows?

I fail to see what Windows has to do with your mini-rant. As a long-time Linux user, I'll shake my tiny fist along with you and tilt at all the windmills I come across, but how have you given up your privacy by using a certain operating system?

-B

Let me get this straight

You won't give close friends the ability to post on your wall, yet you have no problem letting the whole world know that you were listening to elvis [www.last.fm] 2 hours ago?

what a drama queen

i consider privacy to include my password to my bank account, what my girlfirend looks like naked, and the details of how i lost my virginity, and a few other things

i don't really consider anything that goes on in gmail, in windows, or on facebook to equate to my privacy. who does? this information is mined in order to display ads in a side panel on my pc? ok. and your point?

if you consider that sort of pointless uninteresting minutae of your life to be in the realm of your "privacy" then i and many other people think you are being rather precious and overly dramatic about your life. its really just not that interesting, or worth protecting. most of us have some ability to gauge exactly how absolutely interesting segments of our daily lives and our social circle is, egomaniacs amongst us notwithstanding, and we find it to be rather common and not valuable. precious in total, to ourselves, because it is our lives, but not inherently precious as some sort of vital aspect of humanity. and we know this. and there is no cognitive dissonance about this observation. only within our own personal perspective does this minutiae have value, and in no other persecptive is it even possible to have value. so there is no need to protect anything

take for example a series of snapshots of a trip to disney world. to the person in those snapshots, they are probably more valuable than the mona lisa. but to most everyone else, they are utterly uninteresting. but, and here's the important part: the person in those snapshots KNOWS they are valuable only to him, such that exposure of those pictures to random people he will never know has no context to his life. it cannot hurt him, their reaction. even if he knew someone was looking at his private pictures and was laughing at them: so what? how can that hurt you? how can it wound you? its completely without relevancy to who and what is important to you, so laugh away. the context in which they laugh has no leverage over your personal life, becuase the judgments being made against you are being made within frameworks that have no impact on how you live your life or how you judge your life, or anyone important to you judges your life

this level of security about one's personal life is not bizarre, its normal. i am aware there are probably brittle insecure people out there who instead would be hurt and wounded by this scenario. and? its not like their reaction is valid. its only their distorted sense of what they attach their ego to that gives them pain. yes, they are in pain, but according to any coherent sense of morality, no valid reason can be formulated that justifies their pain. their reaction has no valid real context to their lives, despite their false impression that it does. their own misplaced sense of perspective is the source of their pain, not anything that anyone has impositioned them with an abridgement of their "privacy"

and this is not even something new to the world of the internet. all of us, thorughout all time periods and cultures, have been exposed to judgments about our personal lives by "outsiders". if i go to japan, and i laugh at what japanese people eat, does that hurt the japanese people's feelings? will it change what they eat? is my laughter valid to them in some way? doe sit have any context in their lives? what if a child laughed at my hairdo? or, if i am a teenager, what if an adult tut tutted at my clothing. has my personal space been judged or hurt in any context that is valid and you would take into consideration in changing your personal life?

its not that people are radically unconcerned about their privacy. its that some people consider things to be "private" and worthy of radical defense that most of us view as completely pointless effluvia. go ahead, make fun of it, expose it to the world. its me, its my personality. and?

Is it worth it?

Obviously, taken to the extreme, privacy means not communicating with anyone.

At some point, you have to find the balance between protecting your personal information and actually being able to interact with other people.

Consider the chance that your life will be somehow ruined by some comment you post on Facebook. It's very low, I think. Now consider how bad you're making life for yourself by refusing to communicate in order to avoid this risk. Is it really worth it?

I, for one, think the benefit I gain from Web 2.0 sites is generally worth the risk.

Lost in the crowd

Short Version: No one is going to pay attention to you unless to invite that attention.

Computers are stupid. The volume of data you're worried about is mind boggling huge. Your google search history is tucked in there with billions on billions of other web requests. If you don't keep cookies between sessions then your thousands of individual search histories are tucked in there with billions of other web requests. This is far too complex for a computer to solve. Someone would have to specifically focus on you to assemble anything useful.

This is the case with just about everything. The volume of data is so large that unless you're doing something to stand out the fact that they have some of your information is meaningless.

If you're doing something to stand out then people will focus on you. That's when things get dicey. Until then you just get lost in the crowd.

Here's what you should ask yourself. Why the fuck would anyone bother with you? I'm not being mean. Seriously who would give a fuck about your web history? Most privacy concerns are simply ego. You're really not as important as you think you are.

You also fail to mention a lot of things. Do you have cable? Do you have your own internet? Do you only use cash? Do you drive on toll roads? The fact that you focus online and not on some of the worse real world things makes worry about you.

If you don't pay for literally _everything_ in cash you're giving away infinitely more intimate information than you'll ever find on facebook.

Do you have a cable box? If so you're entire viewing history ever may be available.

Your entire web history goes through your ISPs servers. Trivial to log. Are you using an encrypted pipe to a proxy? Do you control that proxy? Physically?

if you drive on toll roads there may be a record of all your travels. If you use a transponder to auto pay tolls then there must be.

Basically, We're Doomed

I decided quite a while ago that resistance was futile. Most details don't really matter, but it might be prudent to think about what would happen if you ever wanted to run for office or if the political winds shifted further to the right.

As for me, though, this is not a problem, because I love my country and especially that wonderful President of ours. God has truly blessed us to give us such intelligent, caring, and well-groomed leaders. My goal in life is to someday meet one of them so that I can adore him in person.

Re:Man are you on facebook?

Because some of us that hated High School just as much as you did in High School actually managed to make friends in college. It's a great way to keep in touch with people. The "People you may know" has found some long lost friends of mine.

Yes you enter the argument of "If they were that good of friends I would still talk to them". Adult life (marriage, kids, family, work) leaves little time sometimes for other stuff. It's nice to catch up even once a month with a friend.

Oh wait. Nevermind, we all just get wasted and show pictures. I don't have any pictures of kids or sports. My mom (!) isn't on facebook. I don't send her messages now and again. Nope. All drunken photos from Last Wednesday.