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A Case That Has Microsoft, Apple and Amazon Agreeing

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Re: A Case That Has Microsoft, Apple and Amazon Agreeing

#81

Post by belorn »

notahacker wrote: post #75
Karunamon wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If by "you", you mean aggregated data about you in lieu of cash payment. Google/Facebook/etc are not selling your data, they are not selling you , they are selling access to you via advertisers, more specifically, they are selling access to people who like certain things and who live in certain areas who have certain demographic profiles. If you're curious about this, go sign up for an Adwords account and see how the…

Not only would "selling your data" as opposed to access to you or a per click basis be a less profitable business model, it'd also be strictly illegal in many jurisdictions without explicit opt-in permission.

In those countries that it is illegal to sell personal data, what kind of abuse are they intending to prevent? Any abuse which is possible by having direct access to private data is also possible to do by going through a intermediate which does the data mining for you.

Re: A Case That Has Microsoft, Apple and Amazon Agreeing

#82

Post by fauigerzigerk »

kgilpin wrote: post #4

If companies stored customer data encrypted by keys that are held by the customer, they wouldn't have this problem. Furthermore, they wouldn't have to worry about deleting customer data either. The customer would have the power to simply deny access to the keys.

They also wouldn't make any money from advertising and the government would pretty soon outlaw the practice.

Re: A Case That Has Microsoft, Apple and Amazon Agreeing

#83

Post by vilmosi »

kgilpin wrote: post #4

If companies stored customer data encrypted by keys that are held by the customer, they wouldn't have this problem. Furthermore, they wouldn't have to worry about deleting customer data either. The customer would have the power to simply deny access to the keys.

But then a lot of things wouldn't be able to exist.

Siri needs collective anonymous data to work and improve itself. Ads, like them or not, cannot function without large collections of data. No attempt to predict customer behaviour is possible, no usage analytics, no cutting edge improvements, a lot of cool things wouldn't be possible.

It's just how it is.

Re: A Case That Has Microsoft, Apple and Amazon Agreeing

#84

Post by abtinf »

dkarapetyan wrote: post #78
CosmicHorrorSam wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hot dang, that last line is insightful. Some people will argue that whenever you let someone have data about yourself, you're implicitly giving access to practically everyone by virtue of often imperfect security. I believe that those people are full of shit.

As long as there is a data silo that is not under your explicit control you have indeed implicitly granted all parties willing to invest enough to break into that silo implicit access. Where exactly is that full of shit? The problem isn't the implicit agreements. The problem is lack of control and centralization. P.S.: I'd also tone down the language. We're having a discussion and calling someone else's opinion "full…

Why is it that data under your control is immune to third parties "willing to invest enough to break [in]", but data trusted to an otherwise reputable service provider is not?

Re: A Case That Has Microsoft, Apple and Amazon Agreeing

#85

Post by infogulch »

dkarapetyan wrote: post #78
CosmicHorrorSam wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hot dang, that last line is insightful. Some people will argue that whenever you let someone have data about yourself, you're implicitly giving access to practically everyone by virtue of often imperfect security. I believe that those people are full of shit.

As long as there is a data silo that is not under your explicit control you have indeed implicitly granted all parties willing to invest enough to break into that silo implicit access. Where exactly is that full of shit? The problem isn't the implicit agreements. The problem is lack of control and centralization. P.S.: I'd also tone down the language. We're having a discussion and calling someone else's opinion "full…

Who says that you can protect your own data silo better than the experts at company X against these 'parties willing to invest enough to break into them'? In the general case, people are notoriously awful at security.

Perhaps you, dkarapetyan, can keep a secure silo, but what about everyone else? Do they have no data rights just because they haven't studied cryptography for 10 years?

Re: A Case That Has Microsoft, Apple and Amazon Agreeing

#87

Post by morninj »

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #82
kgilpin wrote: post #4

If companies stored customer data encrypted by keys that are held by the customer, they wouldn't have this problem. Furthermore, they wouldn't have to worry about deleting customer data either. The customer would have the power to simply deny access to the keys.

They also wouldn't make any money from advertising and the government would pretty soon outlaw the practice.

Some actors in the US government have been trying to outlaw consumer cryptography for decades, and so far they haven't succeeded. See, e.g., the Clipper Chip battle from 1994.

Re: A Case That Has Microsoft, Apple and Amazon Agreeing

#88

Post by jheriko »

this is sad. for all the misguided hate against the US there is a lot of very justified hate that comes from these sorts of attitudes coming from its government and enforcement agencies. they should have more respect for the laws of other countries, especially somewhere like Ireland which could, not unreasonably, be called a crime free paradise compared to the US.

its terrifying when law enforcement doesn't understand the difference between right and wrong...

Re: A Case That Has Microsoft, Apple and Amazon Agreeing

#89

Post by morninj »

whopa wrote: post #43
gioele wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there's always a fallback if you lose all the copies of your key: you pay a locksmith to come pick the lock and rekey it. In the digital world you have Shamir's Secret Sharing. Generate a non-encrypting, non-signing, decode-only key and give a N-th of if to N escrow services. If you lose your key you contact M of those entities and recover the data. Plenty of tricks have been created in the last two decades to addr…

These escrow services would be centralized targets too just like Microsoft, Google, Amazon, etc.

I think the idea is that you store only part of the key with each service, and you're the only one who knows which services have which parts--so, you're the only one who can reconstruct the key. Of course, the UI is still a problem.

Re: A Case That Has Microsoft, Apple and Amazon Agreeing

#90

Post by orf »

CosmicHorrorSam wrote: post #70
soylentcola wrote: post #31

"There’s irony in any tech company confronting the government on privacy matters, considering how much heat many take for mining their own customer information and using it for advertising and other profitable purposes." See, I don't find this very ironic. In fact, my only real issue with data mining and analysis by these sorts of companies is the way governments can demand this info without my approval. If Microsoft…

Hot dang, that last line is insightful. Some people will argue that whenever you let someone have data about yourself, you're implicitly giving access to practically everyone by virtue of often imperfect security. I believe that those people are full of shit.

> whenever you let someone have data about yourself, you're implicitly giving access to practically everyone

I believe there is truth in that. The way I see it is you don't have much control over information entered into any computer. You can practice good security hygiene and that means you can trust information on your personal network, but that really that means you trust your combination of OS vendor, browser, antivirus, router manufacturer, etc. A hole in any one (or more likely a combination) of these could lead to someone gaining access to your data. This applies even more to info stored in 3rd parties/data sent over the net.

Then you're at the mercy of the people who stole your data, they could very well release it to everyone, or sell to the highest bidder (and you wouldn't even know).

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