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The privacy wars are about to get a whole lot worse

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Re: The privacy wars are about to get a whole lot worse

#161

Post by vertex-four »

pjlegato wrote: post #95
zby wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In theory the European Union has a bit better law than the US in this area. I write in theory - because in practice the USA does not need to abide by it - and it is mostly US companies that keep our data. As to the awareness group - I guess this will be controversial - but there are the Pirate Parties with privacy in the core of their ideology. Personally I think that we'll have to give up strict privacy - it is inev…

Additionally, and more importantly, the governments of EU countries themselves do not respect any of the supposed privacy laws. All EU countries have their own intelligence services that are doing substantially the same thing as the NSA does, every day.

Well, the EU didn't respect those laws in the first place when it decided we needed to allow US companies to store EU data, despite US companies being incapable of keeping it securely (by law). The whole situation is a mess and nobody's interested in fixing it.

Re: The privacy wars are about to get a whole lot worse

#162

Post by vertex-four »

igor47 wrote: post #42
Frondo wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're happy with that kind of marginal existence, then that's great. It works for you. I don't want to lose touch with people, because I don't view my contact with people as being part of a "hivemind". I view my time on Earth as one marked by civic and human engagement, where I want to share my ideas, bounce them off other people, strive to improve my community and the world, etc. Stepping away from that to be a…

> I view my time on Earth as one marked by civic and human engagement, where I want to share my ideas, bounce them off other people, strive to improve my community and the world, etc. I respect that sentiment, and agree with it. However, I think that it's much harder to do what you're talking about online. I would go so far as to say that the tendency of the internet is to encourage the "hivemind" and other bad pract…

Note that the internet doesn't necessarily amount to public forums - there's many reasonable topic-specific semi-private groups all over the internet. Some of my best friends and even partners I've met through those, and I'd like to think we've made each other's lives better, or at least happier.

Re: The privacy wars are about to get a whole lot worse

#163

Post by filman82 »

Great illustration of the pervasiveness in personal data collection that IoT will bring to our future. Check out ProjectVRM from Harvard https://cyber.harvard.edu/projectvrm/Main_Page. Vendor Relationship Management is a concept focused on empowering users in their relationship with service providers. The basic idea being that services (supply side) are in control of the relationship in Web and IoT services today, but historically, control shifts over time to users (demand side).

"You agreed to let us do this. We gave you notice of our privacy practices, and you consented."

The EU regards privacy as a right and the recently passed General Data Protection Rule (GDPR) enforces this right for EU citizens worldwide. US companies are slow to realize this and there will be a flood of litigation from Europe against US companies that service EU citizens when this law takes effect in 2018. GDPR implements many of the concepts of VRM and has the stated objective of putting users in charge of their widely-defined personal information. Consent has to be explicit and opt-in prior to collection, so IoT companies would have to make sure that they either differentiated EU citizens and required consent prior to capture or implement standardized policies that respect GDPR across the board.

My thinking is that the disruptive companies of tomorrow will have user trust and personal data collection transparency as a key differentiator. The problem is that the technology to enable this easily isn't there yet. Privacy and personal data management are complex and remain the domain of health companies subject to HIPAA and European privacy wonks. My team is working on a platform to bring easy and transparent personal data management (including consent) to all services that collect personal information. Check it out - www.carbn.io

Re: The privacy wars are about to get a whole lot worse

#164

Post by mark_l_watson »

Frondo wrote: post #8

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…

While future IoT devices are a privacy (and security) nightmare, we can take simple steps to leave a smaller digital footprint when using the web: use private browser windows more often, use a separate web browser for Google and Facebook services, use a separate browser with privacy tools for the rest of your web browsing.

This helps somewhat and is no real effort.

I find Google to useful when travelling so I use gmail for making travel reservations so Google Now knows what I am doing. So, a few times a year I let myself be tracked for convenience. Otherwise I like private email, Private calendar, etc.

I don't think privacy has to all or nothing deal. Just make choices you are comfortable with.

Re: The privacy wars are about to get a whole lot worse

#165

Post by objectivistbrit »

dredmorbius wrote: post #93
mgraczyk wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's a basic human right. What do you mean by that? That phrase always struck me as an argument-ending non-argument. What if I disagree that you have a "right" to privacy in any meaningful way? What if I think that I have a basic human right to control the data you choose to upload to my server?

There's a long litarture and philosophical debate on the whole concept of human rights. I also tend not to find those discussions particularly productive, as it's something a "get out of rational discussion free" card: a person can simply declare that some favourite property or aspect is some universally privileged right. I'm less familiar with the debate, its particulars, and various advocates than I'd like to be. G…

The irrationality you are noticing is to do with the modern concept of rights. Since the New Deal and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 'right' has come to cover things like right to a job, right to healthcare, right to electricity, right to broadband, and so on. But these rights impose obligations on other people, to either work to provide these rights for you, or to stump up the cash to pay for them. That means you need an agency which violates property rights.

Since you can never raise enough taxes to pay for everyone's needs, there's no consistent way to implement the modern notion of rights, so it simply becomes a list of irrational demands.

The only consistent system of rights (of rights which can be granted to everyone equally), take the right to life as a fundamental, and derive other rights from that. The derivative rights in such a system are the Enlightenment-era rights, I.e, life, liberty, property and the pursuit of happiness.

Re: The privacy wars are about to get a whole lot worse

#166

Post by rsync »

mark_l_watson wrote: post #164
Frondo wrote: post #8

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…

While future IoT devices are a privacy (and security) nightmare, we can take simple steps to leave a smaller digital footprint when using the web: use private browser windows more often, use a separate web browser for Google and Facebook services, use a separate browser with privacy tools for the rest of your web browsing. This helps somewhat and is no real effort. I find Google to useful when travelling so I use gma…

"While future IoT devices are a privacy (and security) nightmare, we can take simple steps to leave a smaller digital footprint when using the web: use private browser windows more often, use a separate web browser for Google and Facebook services, use a separate browser with privacy tools for the rest of your web browsing."

What I really want is a chroot jail for a browser. This shouldn't be that hard, but the GUI adds some complexity ... and I am not sure how to implement it in OSX.

I can do this immediately with vmware fusion, but that's a lot of overhead - quite expensive - for just a second browser instance. It gets even more expensive if I want a third or a fourth.

Re: The privacy wars are about to get a whole lot worse

#167

Post by robattila128 »

meowface wrote: post #121
ACS_Solver wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I think this is right. I have very privacy-conscious tech habits, and companies have some data on me, but probably far less than on the typical user of modern services. Some ways I protect myself: 1. Google account - I have one because it's required for Android, but I have never used Gmail, do not search from my Google account or ever log into it from my browser. 2. Facebook or any subsidiaries - never. 3. Gener…

It's such an uphill battle, though. There are many clever ways you can be tied across websites. Unless you are using some sort of VPN or proxy that's constantly changing your IP as you're browsing, and a browser that consistently changes or masks fingerprintable information and wipes all persistent tracking beacons, then what you're doing is not even remotely sufficient to evade tracking by any entity. What you're do…

> I know enough about the technology to realize it saves me a lot of time, effort, and stress to just accept my fate. I no longer include ad networks or big tech companies in my personal threat model, even though I dislike what they're doing.

That's the reasoning I came to as well, I'm fine with certain sites using JS, session data and filling up my .cache if it's convenient.

The more I understand my fingerprint on the web the less paranoid I get. Lots of comments here advising not storing anything, or using anything... they may as well use tails as their main OS or throw out their computers entirely.

The same privacy-intense users lose credibility when they advice people to trust a bunch of add-ons instead of using system-wide blocklists in their host file or strict IDS rulesets.

Re: The privacy wars are about to get a whole lot worse

#168

Post by dredmorbius »

objectivistbrit wrote: post #165
dredmorbius wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a long litarture and philosophical debate on the whole concept of human rights. I also tend not to find those discussions particularly productive, as it's something a "get out of rational discussion free" card: a person can simply declare that some favourite property or aspect is some universally privileged right. I'm less familiar with the debate, its particulars, and various advocates than I'd like to be. G…

The irrationality you are noticing is to do with the modern concept of rights. Since the New Deal and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 'right' has come to cover things like right to a job, right to healthcare, right to electricity, right to broadband, and so on. But these rights impose obligations on other people, to either work to provide these rights for you, or to stump up the cash to pay for them. That…

I'm not opposed to either the ideas of "rights", or of there being conflicting rights, or of there being rights of obligation, say, an obligation to help those in need (good sam laws, mariners' aid laws).

I'm not even entirely concerned with rights being apparently, at least at first blush, inconsistent.

What I am concerned with is what you've just done: to elevate a single right or a single set of rights to some priveleged status, simply on a say-so. These turn out to be both exceptionally arbitrary, on close examination, and frequently dysfunctional. Take a trolly problem, or a unit in battle, or a sinking ocean liner, or any number of other conditions, with your primacy of right-to-life, for example.

Note that life, liberty, and happiness are given in the US Declaration of Independence (though not the Constitution) as unalienable rights. That is, not rights which must be granted (any two-bit punk can claim your life, a zip-tie can restrict your liberty, and a wailing child can remove your happiness), but they cannot be given to another -- unlike your property, or business income, or even spouse and children.

So no, actually, I don't find that a convincing argument, though thanks.

Re: The privacy wars are about to get a whole lot worse

#169

Post by cassy500 »

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Re: The privacy wars are about to get a whole lot worse

#170

Post by justinclift »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #153
skewart wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can't sue Home Depot for giving up my credit card info to hackers unless I can prove that it led to someone running up my credit card bill. It's funny how personal data is so clearly valuable - if it weren't companies wouldn't spend resources to hang on to it - and yet that value is so hard to define. I wonder if it would be helpful if personal information were treated like some kind of intellectual property whic…

I think this data gets more valuable in aggregate than it is individually.

Doesn't that vary per individual?
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