Cory Doctorow On Privacy and Oversharing 53
slash-sa writes with a link to an opinion piece from Cory Doctorow that begins: "The European Parliament is currently involved in a wrangle over the new General Data Protection Regulation. At stake are the future rules for online privacy, data mining, big data, governmental spying (by proxy), to name a few. Hundreds of amendments and proposals are on the table, including some that speak of relaxing the rules on sharing data that has been "anonymised" (had identifying information removed) or "pseudonymised" (had identifiers replaced with pseudonyms). This is, however, a very difficult business, with researchers showing how relatively simple techniques can be used to re-identify the data in large anonymised data sets, by picking out the elements of each record that make them unique."
Enough already. (Score:1, Funny)
Does every damn story on here have to be about Doctor Who? It's getting a bit much.
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Re:Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
A massive dataset for use in research, for one. Be that purely academic research, or statistical analysis for marketing usage.
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NOTE: if you want to take information about me from someone else I gave my information to, then ASK ME. It will be under the same conditions as the other person: consideration for the use and/or the data remains mine, not yours.
Microsoft Disagrees.
In an open letter to Microsoft sent January 15, 2013, the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner questioned whether Microsoft was really committed to privacy, based on a series of privacy summits the company organized last November. Specifically, the OAIC expressed "reservations" about one of the "discussion topics" Microsoft encouraged attendees to discuss.
The meetings proposed rewriting the so-called "Collection Limitation Principle," which states: "There should be limits to the collection of personal data and any such data should be obtained by lawful and fair means and, where appropriate, with the knowledge or consent of the data subject."
The report published by Microsoft states this "discussion version" was used:
"Data should be obtained by lawful and fair means and in a transparent manner. Data should not be collected in a manner likely to cause unjustified harm to the individual unless required by law. 'Harm' may include more than physical injury."
The OAIC worried that the revised discussion version placed no limitations on the collection of personal data. And the report said as much:
"[T]he requirement in the original OECD principle that data be collected, 'when appropriate,' with the 'knowledge or consent of the data subject,' seems to ignore the reality of the extraordinary volume of data that is generated today through routine activities and transactions and near-ubiquitous sensors (such as surveillance cameras, location monitoring by smart phones, and embedded computers in cars and other devices). Often, knowledge or consent of data collection in these situations is either nonexistent or likely to be so vague as to be meaningless. No one suggested that knowledge is not important, or that consent may not be appropriate in some settings, but there seems a real risk that the 'where appropriate' exception could swallow the entire principle, given today’s technology landscape."
http://readwrite.com/2013/01/23/microsoft-crows-about-its-privacy-program-but-australia-has-deep-concerns#awesm=~oed5BqlgbBHZTp [readwrite.com]
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The people with the data can make more money.
Cory's site (boingboing) has 7 tracking cookies (Score:5, Insightful)
Cory's site has 7 tracking services that track you every time you logon to his site, and correlate with a multitude of sites that also track everywhere you go online. I would think if you're going to promote digital privacy, the first thing you would do is remove the four google tracking systems installed on your website.
Re: Cory's site (boingboing) has 7 tracking cookie (Score:3, Informative)
What? You mean a writer on boing boing is a hypocrite when it comes to privacy and censorship issues? Shocking.......
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Just like other "globally-renowned" pontificaters, Doctorow is of course a publicity whore who has grown addicted to the lime-light.
Re:Cory's site (boingboing) has 7 tracking cookies (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Cory's site (boingboing) has 7 tracking cookies (Score:5, Informative)
He's listed on the Masthead as a founding member. I don't know what better credentials are needed to call it "his site". Should I have said "his commercial site" and then in subtext mentioned "his personal blog"?
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When you have been dead for two millenia it's kind of difficult to have an opinion one way or the other.
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Only an atheist could say something so bold and brave. You must also be a scientist, because all atheists are also scientists.
Do you shut people down at the dinner table by defining fallacies and start conversations with girls with the word "Actually?"
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I usually try to make girls giggle by secretly making fun of bloviating fools. It's surprisingly effective.
Re:Cory's site (boingboing) has 7 tracking cookies (Score:5, Insightful)
"I'm not sure if I would classify that as "his site". He's one of many bloggers. His site, only seems to block 2 cookies (using ghostery), and they are twitter and wordpress stats."
He blogs there, it's his site. There is no reason to split hairs. He is famous enough, he can blog wherever he damned well pleases, and he pleases to do it on Boing Boing. So it's "his site". Or where he chooses to blog.
Having said that, there are at least 7 javascript libraries on the site, 2 that appear on Ghostery, that are potential trackers, and some of them are definitely trackers.
And yes, hypocrisy applies here.
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Ghostery blocks 16 trackers off the bat.
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There's stuff to privacy besides lack of cookies.
Cookies aren't the problem, scripting is. (Score:1)
Cookies are managed by the user. Scripts that are written to replace rather than sit along side HTML are the problem. Scripts are managed, primarily, by tool-set developers. That makes the script monkeys the evil guys.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
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If you think that is dodgy ask his holiness about Federated Media [edrants.com]. He is near the tops in my list of arrogant self-righteous media whores that say one thing and do another.
Civil and criminal penalties against cyberbullying (Score:2, Interesting)
I think a good first step would be to make life tougher for cyberbullies who post images and documents with the clear intention of destroying someone's reputation or making them the subject of ridicule. Whether such incidents would be sanctioned would depend on how public the documents were, whether the victim was a celebrity or public person (e.g. high-ranking government or corporate official), whether the victim knowingly participated in either the photographing or the posting of the images/documents, et
Facebook (Score:4, Informative)
If you overshare, then every script-kiddie on the planet will be able to hack your life.
No law available to our Fearless Leaders can prevent abuse of the system by our National Security Industry. Forget about any sort of reigning in of the God-given Rights of our Owners.
Vote as if it mattered. Ha-Haa!
Rules? Please (Score:1)
...anyone who can bribe or impersonate a cop can access them...
What 'rules' are going to stop that?
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Cool story bro!
Seriously, the only thing at all interesting in your post was the reference to your friend who got "mega busted" but you didn't even tell us what happened.
On oversharing (Score:3)
I think the problems with oversharing should be fixed if possible. Of course, some of the problems are more difficult or impossible to fix, but we should try to fix as many as we can.
European Parliament (Score:5, Interesting)
It is worth noting that this topic is among the "codecision" matters for which the EU parliament has a word to say. But even in that case it is still long away from being a real parliament. The European Commission proposed the initial draft, and it can strip the amendment voted by the parliament (it already happened). Moreover the parliament will have to agree with the European council, which is made of member states' government representative, and acts as a upper house in the EU framework.
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It's time we got rid of that no good un-elected commission.
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Lobies lobies... (Score:1)
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But the EU is not a democracy. The elected parliament has little power: it cannot start a directive draft. it cannot have the last word on amendments. It can reject a directive, that is its only real power, but that only apply to a limited range of matters for which the parliament is involved. For many matters, it happens at the European Commission, the European Council, or between both of them.
The horror show continues: the executive powers of member states act as a legislative power at the EU level, since
building a public personna (Score:5, Insightful)
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Don't publish anything that wouldn't hold up in a criminal investigation
Sir, we have photographic evidence that you were at this location around the time of a nearby murder, we'd like you to come down to the station for "questioning."
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How has it reduced crime? This cabbie's head is still somewhere it doesn't belong.
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i hate to say this as i hate the surveillance state as much as the next guy but there's this one security camera right on my walk to work and the only way to not walk by it would cost an extra five minutes but i always think anti-government thoughts when i go past it until one day i saw they actually caught a murderer with it, some dude blasted a cabbies head off during a robbery attempt and luckily they had a clear picture of the guy from that camera which i could tell because i go by it every day, i was like "holy shit". now don't get me wrong i know the nsa could use some facial recognition shit to match me to some protest and then find my route i walk to work every day from a database and do something to me or whatever but...on the other hand some of these cameras really do reduce crime on a local level, key part being "local level", the nsa doesn't need a feed from that camera, but i have no problem with the local pd watching it.
I would have no problem with security cameras having local storage that the cops could come and access when necessary, but I'm not crazy about the idea of every security camera being linked back to some central location where you could be tracked 24.7 every time you leave the house.
That small extra degree of difficulty would be enough to provide a lot of extra privacy protection
Cory Doctrow? Seriously? (Score:2, Insightful)
Why is anyone listening to this guy about anything? He's not an authority in any circle - he just curates odd content around the internet and he himself isn't all that bright.
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He is a public figure. He does speak about these issues frequently and held various position in various organization about privacy and copyright issues. I'd say he is the closest thing we have to an expert on privacy from the societal perspective (instead of the technological one).
Personnaly, I like his writing style in novels. But I tend not to like his blog.
There is a path beyond anonymizs and pseudonyms (Score:1)
Disclaimer: I am affiliated with one of the initiatives about to be mentioned.
While anonymization and pseudonymization can be broken with access to related datasets, secure computation is harder to break. There are various ongoing efforts like IBM's HElib (https://github.com/shaih/HElib) and Cybernetica's Sharemind (https://sharemind.cyber.ee) among many others. These tools allow you to build data analysis systems that will not see the data and will work nicely in an environment of distrust.
Some academic pa
Well (Score:1)
Cory Doctorow is a hypocritical self-congratulatory bigot.