The privacy wars are about to get a whole lot worse

My thought on this, for some time, has been that people need ways to effectively express, legally and technically, their disagreement and noncooperation with such terms.

An alternative model for funding both innovative reasearch and creative content (writing, music, film/video, visual, and other arts) also seems increasingly essential. Information and culture are public goods, and cash-on-the-barrelhead (or bitcoin-through-the-anonymised-exchange) transactions are largely not appropriate for them.

I am very much hoping this all dies in a fire. I'm increasingly concerned as to just how all-encompassing that fire may turn out to be.

I mean, it's already happening. People walk around with smartphones, tablets and laptops which constantly record audio for their virtual assistants, and I have not once consented to having my voice recorded by any of those devices.

Actually, not: https://mako.cc/copyrighteous/google-has-most-of-my-email-be...

Other problems:

* Services you use indirectly.

* Services your employer uses and reires you to use.

* Services a government service requires use of.

As technological tools become part of the social, corporate, governmental, and institutional infrastructure, "opting out" becomes an increasingly less viable, and more punishing, alternative.

Too: you're denying the specific tools which directly address the situation. Legal and technical means to loudly and clearly state "no", or to sue for damages where this isn't possible.

I used to feel strongly about not trading my privacy away for some convenience. For a long time I took a luddite pride in not being on various services, having a dumb phone, keeping it turned off, etc. Over time, though, I've found myself having a change of heart. What started as little inconveniences have turned into big ones, as I'm more and more out of touch with my peers, contemporaries, and family. I don't like that. And for what? Companies can still track me, my data's still out there.

But I still care about privacy. It's a basic human right. What I've realized is that our laws are lousy at enshrining that right--companies can largely do what they want, etc.,--and we're lousy as a society at recognizing the value of that right.

So I'm curious, are there any cities, counties, states with any sort of legislative efforts going on to strengthen the citizens' rights to privacy and ownership of data? Is there anyone we can look to as a model for "privacy and data ownership done right," something to work toward implementing at a national level?

Is there any awareness group working to raise these issues in a way that's actually accessible to the general public? (Are they doing a good job at it?)

I don't want to give up, and I don't want to check out. I like my shiny devices and assistants now, they make my life easier in little ways all the time. How can we balance that with the basic human right to own our data and retain our privacy?

It doesn't matter. There are many ways to get information from you in "public" ways. We can get speech from video and keystrokes from sound. Target already predicts pregnancies, and facebook predicts breakups. China already has a citizen reputation system the way we have credit bureaus. We can identify you by your gait, or wifi signals in your home without you even moving. We store most of the CCTV video camera footage until such time as it would be useful.

And when will it be useful? The scariest thing is when all this data will be used by smart algorithms designed to construct plausible stories in a court of law about you, making anyone a target for legal threats and jailtime and intimidation. It's already the case in more totalitarian countries, but this is about free countries where juries of peers and other systems will be subverted with clever algorithms and a mountain of data to use.

All your blockchain and anonymous transactions are stored until such time as you slip up and get deanonymized.

All you are currently relying on -- all that our legal systems are relying on -- is inefficiency of the attacker. You think they can't cross reference enough materials, analyze them deep enough, at a large enough scale, fast enough, and can't put two and two together. But the growing repository of data is there to be (quantum-cracked and) mined for information.

Ask yourself this: what would it take for a determined attacker to ruin your reputation or credit today using only the techniques in the NSA field manual? https://theintercept.com/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipulation/