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A Case That Has Microsoft, Apple and Amazon Agreeing

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Re: A Case That Has Microsoft, Apple and Amazon Agreeing

#111

Post by axelfreeman »

soylentcola wrote: post #31

"There’s irony in any tech company confronting the government on privacy matters, considering how much heat many take for mining their own customer information and using it for advertising and other profitable purposes." See, I don't find this very ironic. In fact, my only real issue with data mining and analysis by these sorts of companies is the way governments can demand this info without my approval. If Microsoft…

You say that you don't want (your data) to be abused and you don't want to have problems because of that. Nobody wants that in any other case. It's not that special. Only the subject has changed to digital data on the internet.

(German guy here. My english could be bad.)

Re: A Case That Has Microsoft, Apple and Amazon Agreeing

#112

Post by mindslight »

abritinthebay wrote: post #110
mindslight wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like you're perfectly content for Googappazon to turn around and voluntarily sell "your" data to governments. Given that it's really their data about you , they don't even need to disclose this in the TOS. The best you could hope for is for companies to loudly prevent themselves in their contracts. Of course they could end up going through commercial third parties, or any other plausibly justifiable loophole…

> It seems like you're perfectly content if Googappazon turns around and voluntarily sells "your" data to governments, since you've consented for them to use it. Use it under the limited license you agreed to. Not to use it for any purpose at all. This is disingenuous rubbish and you know it .

I had elaborated why the distinction between the two is but a tiny epsilon in the second paragraph. I removed the second part of the sentence you quoted so perhaps people will continue reading rather than having a knee-jerk.

There is no "license" (in the sense of copyright) for the collected data, so there are no builtin penalies for violating the contract. Theoretically a company could commit to $10k in liquidated damages per deliberate privacy violation, but this could be done today so I'll consider it when I actually see such a term in a contract, especially for a free service.

Since you think it appropriate to dismiss me as deliberately writing "disingenuous rubbish", I would kindly ask you to elaborate what you believe my motive is for doing so.

There is certainly a powerful motive to defend private surveillance companies, even if it's just people wanting to believe in what they're creating.

Re: A Case That Has Microsoft, Apple and Amazon Agreeing

#113

Post by tajen »

orf wrote: post #90
CosmicHorrorSam wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hot dang, that last line is insightful. Some people will argue that whenever you let someone have data about yourself, you're implicitly giving access to practically everyone by virtue of often imperfect security. I believe that those people are full of shit.

> whenever you let someone have data about yourself, you're implicitly giving access to practically everyone I believe there is truth in that. The way I see it is you don't have much control over information entered into any computer. You can practice good security hygiene and that means you can trust information on your personal network, but that really that means you trust your combination of OS vendor, browser, an…

If we acknowledge contagion by imperfect security, then please acknowledge by law the right of entering false identites on facebook and false information by electronic means, as a means to protect our privacy.

Re: A Case That Has Microsoft, Apple and Amazon Agreeing

#114

Post by tajen »

mjevans wrote: post #68
gioele wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there's always a fallback if you lose all the copies of your key: you pay a locksmith to come pick the lock and rekey it. In the digital world you have Shamir's Secret Sharing. Generate a non-encrypting, non-signing, decode-only key and give a N-th of if to N escrow services. If you lose your key you contact M of those entities and recover the data. Plenty of tricks have been created in the last two decades to addr…

Who says you need escrow services for that? Store your N'th fragments with /friends and family/ that you know well. You might also be able to get in on distributed backups together.

Here comes Facebook Key Escrow?

Re: A Case That Has Microsoft, Apple and Amazon Agreeing

#115

Post by x0054 »

JupiterMoon wrote: post #100
x0054 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity, which aspect of the US leal system scares you so much? I was under the impression that UK has a rather similar legal system in many respects, and has a number of problems as well. Personally I am a little scared of the French and German legal systems. And last year I read a very scary article about the Swedish legal system on HN. US is doing a lot of things wrong these days when it comes to privacy,…

By European standards prison sentences in the US are very very long. There is also a perception that in the US the system is loaded against people who don't have enough money to pay for a good lawyer.

I am not very familiar with penalties in EU, but I thought that on all the basics, like fraud, robbery, burglary, assault, murder, etc the penalties were comparable to US. Where US does go insane is when it comes to drug and gun crimes. The NRA lobbied for very stiff penalties for anyone who uses a gun in a crime, at least in CA. The drugs on the other hand are just a national obsession for people here in US, so I get that criticism. But on all the basics, I think EU and US are at parity. The Federal prosecutors are quite insane, but Obama has been trying to fix that, and many Federal judges are quite reasonable. But again, if US does need adjust something, it's the Federal system.

As for money and lawyers, US, at least in CA has excellent public defenders. I might be biased, because a few of my good friends are public defenders. But also the smartest man I ever meat, at least when it comes to law, was head Public Defender in San Diego. Public defender job in a major city is a very competitive position. That's my first hand experience in CA. Not sure about other states.

Re: A Case That Has Microsoft, Apple and Amazon Agreeing

#116

Post by compactmani »

SilasX wrote: post #101
soylentcola wrote: post #31

"There’s irony in any tech company confronting the government on privacy matters, considering how much heat many take for mining their own customer information and using it for advertising and other profitable purposes." See, I don't find this very ironic. In fact, my only real issue with data mining and analysis by these sorts of companies is the way governments can demand this info without my approval. If Microsoft…

>It's like signing a contract where someone else has the ability to change the fine print after I've signed it. I don't disagree with your points about government access to this cloud information ... but this point would carry a lot more weight if these services didn't routinely get away with unilaterally changing their privacy terms. I also really doubt people have well-formed beliefs about exactly which privacy rig…

Last I checked, the government gets in zero trouble when misleading you about which rights you are waiving. I thought that was quite clear by now?

Re: A Case That Has Microsoft, Apple and Amazon Agreeing

#117

Post by CosmicHorrorSam »

Tactic wrote: post #42
soylentcola wrote: post #31

"There’s irony in any tech company confronting the government on privacy matters, considering how much heat many take for mining their own customer information and using it for advertising and other profitable purposes." See, I don't find this very ironic. In fact, my only real issue with data mining and analysis by these sorts of companies is the way governments can demand this info without my approval. If Microsoft…

The government has this ability with near all other relationships you have. So much so that they have codified the few that it doesn't apply to. We put lawyers, doctors, clergy and spouses in a special category but others can be required to divulge any information they have on you with the appropriate order. (What's appropriate is another discussion) Ultimately, realize that any dealing you have is open to the govern…

What you said may truly capture what's necessary- we need to codify additional relationships for the digital space that enjoy this level of protection, and codify them such that violations result in criminal cases being thrown out and/or reparations being paid! I envision this like the police force and falsifying evidence/respecting your rights- there's certainly some of all that happening, but police are eager to prove that they've done things correctly, because if evidence falsification or certain rights trampling happens, it result not only in internal probes and scrutiny, but dismissed potential convictions! The incentives generally line up.

Re: A Case That Has Microsoft, Apple and Amazon Agreeing

#118

Post by notahacker »

belorn wrote: post #81
notahacker wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only would "selling your data" as opposed to access to you or a per click basis be a less profitable business model, it'd also be strictly illegal in many jurisdictions without explicit opt-in permission.

In those countries that it is illegal to sell personal data, what kind of abuse are they intending to prevent? Any abuse which is possible by having direct access to private data is also possible to do by going through a intermediate which does the data mining for you.

If I've opted out of having my details passed on to third parties, I only have to opt out of receiving communications once.

And since they're also not allowed to give the data away and can get into trouble for allowing it to be stolen or accidentally shared, my name and personal details are also somewhat less likely to crop up in an embarrassing public "people who subscribe to this service" list...

Re: A Case That Has Microsoft, Apple and Amazon Agreeing

#120

Post by CosmicHorrorSam »

axelfreeman wrote: post #111
soylentcola wrote: post #31

"There’s irony in any tech company confronting the government on privacy matters, considering how much heat many take for mining their own customer information and using it for advertising and other profitable purposes." See, I don't find this very ironic. In fact, my only real issue with data mining and analysis by these sorts of companies is the way governments can demand this info without my approval. If Microsoft…

You say that you don't want (your data) to be abused and you don't want to have problems because of that. Nobody wants that in any other case. It's not that special. Only the subject has changed to digital data on the internet. (German guy here. My english could be bad.)

My general understanding of the difference here is that, while you're correct that we don't want any of our information- our mail, phone calls, movements, etc.- to be abused and give us problems, the issue here is that law enforcement DOES have a legal and legitimate need to look at all those things sometimes with a warrant, issued by a judge, who has reviewed the evidence collected so far and deemed there to be probable cause.

The situation we fear will come about instead is this one: law enforcement has access to all of our data, uses our data to find probable cause, present this to a judge, and arrest us.

It's upside down- law enforcement is supposed to be limited in what it can do until it 'picks up the scent' of criminal activity, after which it can use an expanded power set. If we give law enforcement a greatly expanded power set to use before it has 'picked up the scent' of criminal activity, we would foolish not to expect all kinds of abuse (especially given the nature of 'big data'-driven methods of 'picking up the scent').

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