When it comes to internet privacy, be afraid, analyst suggests

But what can you do as an individual? I think that's what we're all struggling with.

People want to carry around little location aware Internet connected computers studded with sensors and that run third party apps, and there is just no hope of securing these systems against all possible vectors for unauthorized snooping. There is no technical solution. Ultimately I think this can only be fixed with legislation.

If there is money to be made in invading peoples' privacy, it is going to happen unless there are regulations in place that make it costly by imposing fines.

Here's a simple starter idea: extend HIPAA type protection to the most sensitive forms of PII like location information, photos not explicitly shared, microphone data, and health sensor data. Sale or other release of this information without explicit per-sale or per-release user consent is illegal. Leaks or intentional distribution results in fines that start at $10,000 per incident.

Gather your users' locations and sell them? That'll be $10k per user per 24 hour period in which any location data points were leaked.

Microphone and camera data should be subject to further protections. It should be illegal to store such data for longer than what would be needed for legitimate algorithmic uses or to use such data for other than its explicitly intended purpose unless the user explicitly shares it. So something like Siri could leverage cloud compute to parse your verbal commands but it better throw that data away afterwords... leaks would be $10,000 per user per audio recording.

The only exemptions should be for things like IP addresses since this would require fundamental re-engineering of the entire Internet. These do reveal some location data but it's nowhere near as accurate (and hence intrusive) as device location data. There also are techno hacks like VPNs that can be used to obscure such data if a user wishes to do so.

Edit: as far as government snooping goes that also must be fixed at the legislative level. There are legitimate reasons for governments to conduct surveillance but these must be subject to strict regulation and oversight. It's the only way. Government agencies like NSA, CIA, and FBI (and their equivalents in other places) are well funded and very good and there is no hope of preventing them of leveraging the Internet for surveillance unless the legislative branch explicitly regulates their actions.

TL;DR: the only solution here is the rule of law. Techno-fixes won't work and are a cop-out to avoid confronting the dysfunction of our political system.

I am honestly surprised there is not more ultra-targeted advertising to either ultra-high-net-worth individuals, or to individuals in key positions within large institutions.

E.g., there are ads all over the DC Metro for huge defense-sector projects, like a particular company's bid for fighter-jet engines. They're spending huge sums on these ad buys, which presumably are aimed at only a handful of people who actually have influence over the procurement process. Similarly, there are lots of ads in trade publications aimed at buyers, of whom there might only be a few dozen in a particular niche industry. It only follows that this is, the ad-buyers believe, the best they can do.

But consider what they could do if they really drilled down and tried to target the specific individuals with control over the money: instead of a shotgun ad buy in the subway or in a magazine, they could build a model of that person's life -- where they go, what they buy, what makes them happy (at least, happy enough to be externally perceptible), what pisses them off enough to complain about it, etc. And then you could Skinner-box the living shit out of them.

In the limiting case -- I'm thinking here of someone who works in government procurement; maybe not even the person who makes the ultimate decision, but the person who builds the briefing slide deck for the person who makes the decision, or the advisor, or the advisor's assistants -- for the price of a big ad buy, you could probably hire up a bunch of unemployed acting students and follow them around for a few months. Every time something good happens to the contract or in negotiations, make sure they have a really, really good day. Someone offers them a seat on the train, or lets them into traffic, anonymously buys them coffee, randomly compliments their shoes, pulls out of a parking space just as they're looking for one... every little thing just goes right. And every time the negotiations aren't going well, make sure they have a really shit day. They get cut off in traffic, get coffee spilled on them, yelling everywhere, can't even get the machine they want at the gym, takeout place is closed for a special event, rental house down the street is having a loud all-night party again... Pretty soon you'd condition them that when things go right for your company, and when things move fractionally closer to the outcome you want, they have a good day. And when they don't, they don't. It's advertising by gaslighting, basically.

AFAICT the only reason this isn't done is because nobody's really tried it yet, perhaps out of some remaining shred of propriety. I'm not even sure it would be illegal, necessarily (you'd have to get some lawyers to work around anti-stalking laws, I suppose, but they are pretty weak in a lot of states). While there's nothing that would have prevented you from doing this 50 years ago with an army of P.I.s to gather the information, now you could build up all the dossiers in advance and have them ready to go, pretty much turnkey, on anyone you thought you might want to influence. Or, more likely, a company could set all of that up and then offer it as an arms-length service to other companies looking to achieve a particular outcome.

No reason, I suppose, why it might not be going on right now.

Censorship is a valid concern, but I'm not sure what it has to do with on-line privacy.

Can someone explain to me why this so-called "privacy" is such a big deal on internet? Can't internet, or at least a major part of it, be considered a public place? I mean, when I walk in the street, I do not wear a mask (I suspect that'd be illegal in my country), yet I do not worry about someone using surveillance cameras to track all my activities. Sure, it could technically be done but I'm not that important : nobody would bother. Therefore I vaguely consider myself anonymous when I walk in the street, not because my identity is hidden, but because it's mixed in thousands of others : "hidden in plain sight", as they say.

Couldn't things be similar on internet? Or do we really all have to hide our identity like criminals?