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Going dark: online privacy and anonymity for normal people

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Re: Going dark: online privacy and anonymity for normal people

#21

Post by spangry »

sleepychu wrote: post #14
WA wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem: "Nothing to hide" depends on the context. Maybe you don't have anything to hide under the current laws, but what about laws in 20 years from now? Maybe times change and suddenly, you've got a lot to hide.

I'm having trouble finding it but the perfect example of this is a census that collected religious affiliation (for innocent statistics) that some brave citizens went to great lengths to destroy when they came under Nazi occupation in order to try and protect Jewish residents.

Another example would be the internment/deportation of 120,000 Japanese-Americans during WW2. I'll bet when they were ticking the 'Japanese ancestry' box on their census form they had no idea they were signing up for future imprisonment without due cause or due process.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/confirmed-the-us-c...

Re: Going dark: online privacy and anonymity for normal people

#22

Post by elcapitan »

evgen wrote: post #18
sleepychu wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm having trouble finding it but the perfect example of this is a census that collected religious affiliation (for innocent statistics) that some brave citizens went to great lengths to destroy when they came under Nazi occupation in order to try and protect Jewish residents.

While it makes a nice story, if you think that lacking this information would have seriously slowed down the Holocaust you are sadly mistaken.

That is actually not correct. You should read "IBM and the Holocaust" to get a good account on exact that - there are good comparisons of countries that had very detailed census (typically "more organized" northern European) like Holland, where the majority of jewish population got killed, while in other countries like France it was as "low" as 25%.

In France in particular there is the example of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9_Carmille René Carmille, who was in charge of census and actively sabotaged the collection and use of data.

See also http://theinstitute.ieee.org/technology-focus/technology-his... which calls Carmille one of the first hackers:

"After the invasion, the pro-Nazi Vichy government ordered a nationwide census. Carmille requested the assignment of compiling data from the census forms onto tabulator cards for analysis. His group transferred the data, including information from Column 11—where citizens were asked to indicate their religion—onto tabulator cards. They were instructed by the Nazis to sort the cards and print a list of all Jews living in France so that they could be located and sent to concentration camps.

Over the course of two years, Carmille and his group purposely delayed the process by mishandling the punch cards. He also hacked his own machines, reprogramming them so that they’d never punch information from Column 11 onto any census card. Instead, Carmille’s groups spent most of their time using the information on the cards to find and recruit former French soldiers for the French Resistance."

If that's not hacking and data protection, then I don't know what is.

Re: Going dark: online privacy and anonymity for normal people

#23

Post by Kiro »

WA wrote: post #9
btrask wrote: post #8

This is just a list of more things for them to clamp down on. I'm thinking about going in the opposite direction, and broadcasting all of my personally identifying information (credit card, SSN, etc). Obviously I would have to set aside a large amount of time to deal with issuing fraud reports, and make sure that I wasn't risking anything that I can't afford to lose--but it does seem simpler in some ways. After all,…

The problem: "Nothing to hide" depends on the context. Maybe you don't have anything to hide under the current laws, but what about laws in 20 years from now? Maybe times change and suddenly, you've got a lot to hide.

This is a non-argument for me but may work for others. I couldn't care less what happens in 20 years. I don't even know if I'm alive then. It may be irrational but I simply don't care.

Re: Going dark: online privacy and anonymity for normal people

#24

Post by TeMPOraL »

sleepychu wrote: post #14
WA wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem: "Nothing to hide" depends on the context. Maybe you don't have anything to hide under the current laws, but what about laws in 20 years from now? Maybe times change and suddenly, you've got a lot to hide.

I'm having trouble finding it but the perfect example of this is a census that collected religious affiliation (for innocent statistics) that some brave citizens went to great lengths to destroy when they came under Nazi occupation in order to try and protect Jewish residents.

While an interesting story, I don't think it is as meaningful as people try to make it here. Sure, the census might have helped Nazis quite a lot in committing atrocities. But it doesn't mean the census wasn't genuinely useful, and - more generally - you can't make day-to-day decisions on the assumption that you'll get invaded and conquered by extermination-minded people.

Re: Going dark: online privacy and anonymity for normal people

#25

Post by mbrock »

Kiro wrote: post #23
WA wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem: "Nothing to hide" depends on the context. Maybe you don't have anything to hide under the current laws, but what about laws in 20 years from now? Maybe times change and suddenly, you've got a lot to hide.

This is a non-argument for me but may work for others. I couldn't care less what happens in 20 years. I don't even know if I'm alive then. It may be irrational but I simply don't care.

Then you're not receptive to any reasoning about future values, which seems sad.

Re: Going dark: online privacy and anonymity for normal people

#26

Post by sixhobbits »

I'm surprised he doesn't mention NoScript, Privacy Badger, etc. "Normal people" should be more concerned about about the highly detailed profiles that companies are building based on browsing habits. "Normal people" read about data breaches and embarrassing leaks that force politicians to resign. "Normal people" know nothing about the behind the scenes tracking that goes on when you google medical symptoms[0] or visit pages which have Facebook like buttons as footers[1].

Yes, this article is targeted at people who don't understand the problem of using their .gov email address to sign up for dodgy sites, but think about whether you'd rather have your bank statement made public or a large, visualizable data set representing most of your browsing history.

I would love to see more work done on privacy through noise/obfuscation, such as that started by Adnauseum[2] and TrackMeNot[3] - not necessarily publishing your credit card details online as suggest in another comment here, but in making random search queries and clicking on random ads when your device is idle. Most of us have sufficient processing power and bandwidth for the overhead not to be a problem. It's sad that it looks like both add-ons have failed to make a splash, and seem to have fallen out of active development (end of 2015 marks the last commits for both projects, which is too soon to pronounce them dead, but they definitely don't seem to be hives of activity).

[0] http://motherboard.vice.com/read/looking-up-symptoms-online-...

[1] http://www.allaboutcookies.org/cookies/cookie-profiling.html

[2] http://adnauseam.io/

[3] http://cs.nyu.edu/trackmenot/

Re: Going dark: online privacy and anonymity for normal people

#27

Post by Kiro »

mbrock wrote: post #25
Kiro wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a non-argument for me but may work for others. I couldn't care less what happens in 20 years. I don't even know if I'm alive then. It may be irrational but I simply don't care.

Then you're not receptive to any reasoning about future values, which seems sad.

Why is it sad? I live in the moment and I'm very happy. I'm not saying everyone should be like me though.

Re: Going dark: online privacy and anonymity for normal people

#28

Post by csrm123 »

btrask wrote: post #8

This is just a list of more things for them to clamp down on. I'm thinking about going in the opposite direction, and broadcasting all of my personally identifying information (credit card, SSN, etc). Obviously I would have to set aside a large amount of time to deal with issuing fraud reports, and make sure that I wasn't risking anything that I can't afford to lose--but it does seem simpler in some ways. After all,…

I like the idea of digital chaff: publishing huge amounts of completely erroneous information about yourself and everyone else means that no one knows what to believe anymore.

Shouldn't a service like this exist?

Re: Going dark: online privacy and anonymity for normal people

#29

Post by [deleted] »

sleepychu wrote: post #14
WA wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem: "Nothing to hide" depends on the context. Maybe you don't have anything to hide under the current laws, but what about laws in 20 years from now? Maybe times change and suddenly, you've got a lot to hide.

I'm having trouble finding it but the perfect example of this is a census that collected religious affiliation (for innocent statistics) that some brave citizens went to great lengths to destroy when they came under Nazi occupation in order to try and protect Jewish residents.

[deleted]

Re: Going dark: online privacy and anonymity for normal people

#30

Post by stephengillie »

csrm123 wrote: post #28
btrask wrote: post #8

This is just a list of more things for them to clamp down on. I'm thinking about going in the opposite direction, and broadcasting all of my personally identifying information (credit card, SSN, etc). Obviously I would have to set aside a large amount of time to deal with issuing fraud reports, and make sure that I wasn't risking anything that I can't afford to lose--but it does seem simpler in some ways. After all,…

I like the idea of digital chaff: publishing huge amounts of completely erroneous information about yourself and everyone else means that no one knows what to believe anymore. Shouldn't a service like this exist?

What would this look like? Maybe a bot that went to dodgy sites, and signed up for accounts in your name, with random-but-valid data?

Maybe it would go into comment threads, Google the title, and post a blurb paragraph from a top result? Use karma and elastic search to machine learn which sites and topics to post?

It might even respond to questions with the specific random data for that site from when it signed up, to keep it consistent.

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