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Why to care about privacy after years of sharing data

blog.thenewoil.org

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Re: Why to care about privacy after years of sharing data

#31

Post by jdfedgon »

I like the blog post and the thought experiment. However, I wish the author wouldn't have stopped with the reasoning and would have stressed his arguments further.

Example where his reasoning in the article is coming short, one might answer: Yes, I wanted to go to store a, and yes, after my 'highway hypnosis' I went or was brought to store b instead. So what? It doesn't really matter if I go shopping in store a or b. The important thing is - I am at a store now and can start my shopping.

If we evaluate that from an ethical point of view then we would have to ask about emancipation and sovereignty in regard to the choices we make, and where that fine line is, where it really starts to matter, if we go for store a or b.

Re: Why to care about privacy after years of sharing data

#32

Post by closeparen »

Life is an iterated game. I can see an appeal in living in a video-game kind of world where your counterparty to each interaction treats it as fresh, doesn't even really have an interior experience while it's happening, and forgets it immediately after. I can also see downsides. But that's besides the point. We don't live in that world. In our universe, interaction is a two way street. Both parties to an interaction have an interior experience of it, and that experience contributes to memory (both literal records and subtle formation of impressions/intuitions), and those memories shape the next experience.

The framings "your privacy," "your data," "stealing" are interesting and provocative in some cases but I see the more extreme forms of this as pining for a world in which you are the only stateful or intelligent agent. We have never lived in that world, and I don't share your conviction that we obviously or morally ought to.

Re: Why to care about privacy after years of sharing data

#33

Post by freebuju »

antiframe wrote: post #27
freebuju wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are just wrong. Some of your data such as health data stays constant throughout your life. Especially for guys living with chronic conditions. Your key identifiers stay the same too. E.g your phone number etc. These are then used to re-establish your advertising identity. This theory that old data declines in value couldn't be more wrong given that the "old" data is never deleted. Just waiting to find its origina…

Yes, but the value of the data has declined. If I am a business I would not pay the same amount or more for five-year-old data. Some portion of that dataset will be bad data. Some of the subjects will have had died, for example. Decline does not mean zero, but the point is older data is less valuable. So, making your data leaking footprint smaller today will still provide you value (not infinite value though) as time…

Sure, the more recent data will always have a higher value if you are looking at massive datasets.

But I think if you look at this problem from an individual perspective. Key data that is unique to them doesn't change most of the time. Say a target person has dental issues and you have their phone number. There is a high chance that in 5 years from now, they still may require dental services and their phone number hasn't changed. They may have moved jobs, neighborhoods etc. in between but their need for dental service has remained constant and probably will into the future.

Let me give you another example. Say you want to run for public office, and in your young adult life some of your social media pages had questionable posts/media. Is this data any less valuable to your competition running for the same office?

I may be taking a different approach with this but a lot of nuances get lost in the numbers.

My point is once the data is out there on the internet, it can be hard to control it and/or assign value to it.

Re: Why to care about privacy after years of sharing data

#34

Post by dylan604 »

narush wrote: post #7

This is a cool article. I like the narrative of "Change to a life where you are in control of your direction." I am probably the most privacy conscious person of my friends (not that I do a particularly good job of it), so I spent lots of time thinking about how to communicate about privacy in a way that is effective. [We're all mid-twenties, for context.] The main issue, I find, is that people just mostly don't care…

>Person 2: I don't care about privacy, because I don't have anything to hide.

Because of this person's lack of caring, they don't realize that it's not just their privacy that they are sacrificing. By sharing their contacts, they just gave up all of the privacy of those people as well without so much as a hesitation of thought. The person who does care about privacy has 0 chance because of the careless actions of others.

Re: Why to care about privacy after years of sharing data

#35

Post by freebuju »

wolverine876 wrote: post #30
freebuju wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are just wrong. Some of your data such as health data stays constant throughout your life. Especially for guys living with chronic conditions. Your key identifiers stay the same too. E.g your phone number etc. These are then used to re-establish your advertising identity. This theory that old data declines in value couldn't be more wrong given that the "old" data is never deleted. Just waiting to find its origina…

That cherry-picks examples, phone numbers and chronic conditions. We can think of plenty more that change. (Even phone numbers change sometimes.)

Sure. But what if those two data points are the only things I need to tag and target you.

Re: Why to care about privacy after years of sharing data

#36

Post by dylan604 »

closeparen wrote: post #32

Life is an iterated game. I can see an appeal in living in a video-game kind of world where your counterparty to each interaction treats it as fresh, doesn't even really have an interior experience while it's happening, and forgets it immediately after. I can also see downsides. But that's besides the point. We don't live in that world. In our universe, interaction is a two way street. Both parties to an interaction…

I have much less of an issue when a company runs analytics on the information gained from each time I order from them. It's when they continue to follow you across the internet to keep tabs on you when you are not using their site. It's not much different than having someone like a private investigator shadow you every where you go in real life taking detailed notes. You don't know who's paying the PI, you don't know to what purpose they are investigating, but there's just nothing you can do about. Only the internet tracking continues to follow in places where the PI can't go. It's just flat out creepy

Re: Why to care about privacy after years of sharing data

#37

Post by bdominy »

dylan604 wrote: post #34
narush wrote: post #7

This is a cool article. I like the narrative of "Change to a life where you are in control of your direction." I am probably the most privacy conscious person of my friends (not that I do a particularly good job of it), so I spent lots of time thinking about how to communicate about privacy in a way that is effective. [We're all mid-twenties, for context.] The main issue, I find, is that people just mostly don't care…

>Person 2: I don't care about privacy, because I don't have anything to hide. Because of this person's lack of caring, they don't realize that it's not just their privacy that they are sacrificing. By sharing their contacts, they just gave up all of the privacy of those people as well without so much as a hesitation of thought. The person who does care about privacy has 0 chance because of the careless actions of oth…

This is why I never give permission to apps to access my contacts. I wish Apple would have better protections than just a simple permission ask, when once granted, apps can do whatever they want with all of that data.

Re: Why to care about privacy after years of sharing data

#38

Post by noasaservice »

HN itself is one such black-hole of data permanentness.

They do not support deletion of your data, modifying of your data after 1h, and are what I would describe as a data-tarpit. Nor do they support any of the European privacy directives.

Sure, they're in the US, but they should definitely be forward-thinking about this stuff - The writing's on the wall.

It's why I create junk accounts and abandon them after a bit. Then again, this too is the endemic problem with how silicon valley is run.

Re: Why to care about privacy after years of sharing data

#39

Post by nonrandomstring »

gonehome wrote: post #20
spansoa wrote: post #18

I used to have a large online presence pre-Snowden leaks and was signed up to hundreds of services, some even in my legal name. Gradually I attempted to 'go dark' and delete all those accounts, which was tedious, but worth it. There's two extremes to being online: you can wear your heart on your shirt sleeve and post under your legal name, and share details about your private life, or you can be a ghost and leave no…

I think there's an accessible middle ground for most people. My first suggestion would be to get every account in a password manager like 1Password. In addition to the obvious security benefits, this creates a record of where all your accounts are. For the average person it'll take time for them to remember everything (and they'll realize ones they forgot) - having a place for it all to get documented is the first st…

> I think there's an accessible middle ground for most people.

It doesn't even need to be a middle ground. Even the least effort is enough.

Think about smoking, drinking and other risky behaviour.

I make a similar plea and argument in Digital Vegan [1] as is made in the blog post. Like plenty of other thinkers now (Newport, Doctorow, Kingsnorth, Vaidhyanathan, Kardaras, Tufekci, Rushkoff, Lanier, Véliz and Oddell) I framed surveillance capitalism, social media and smartphone addiction as a public health issue. This is now the dominant emerging frame.

People who use drugs and alcohol use the same sunk-cost fallacy:

"Hey, I've been doing this for years now, what's the point in quitting?"

The point is that ANY reduction offers an immediate health benefit. You don't have to become an Olympic athlete to eat a little healthier and exercise a tiny bit more.

By the same token, any improvement to your digital lifestyle is worth making - whether that's refusing to give personal data, not participating in the "cashless" society, buying quality, durable digital goods that reduce e-waste, getting a dumb phone or quitting social media... they all count.

That's why I think the diet metaphor is very powerful.

[1] https://digitalvegan.net

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