Privacy Behaviors After Snowden

I'm not surprised by this. Getting the public at large's attention concentrated in the first place is hard enough; keeping it there is impossible. However, that's not to say that all this has been in vain.

The snooping revelations sent huge ripples through the tech community, and that is the community both most affected and most poised to make a change. A small group of dedicated people is all it takes to enact change, and it's clear to me there has been significant increase in the scrutiny of both government surveillance and existing businesses privacy policies and software. Maybe the public at large has moved on, but some people have adopted the cause, and a small focused group can be far more potent than a vague, if large, mass of people. Just ask Occupy Wall Street.

The main take-away here is that yes, the public will move on. As it always does. Nothing is going to hold the country's attention more than a couple weeks, and even that is pushing it. So use that momentum if appears, but don't depend on it staying. More important is whether a subgroup is galvanized to action and will commit to the long fight.

Parallels to consider: - the political influence of relatively small interest groups via lobbyists - the oft-repeated wisdom that for a startup it's better to have a core group that loves you than a million that think you're just pretty good

Re: Privacy Behaviors After Snowden

#7

Post by belorn » Mon, May 25, 2015, 11:28 AM UTC

The research methodology seem to have looked at the amount of people looking for privacy tools, privacy statements, and usage of privacy tools. This seem to correlate with news article, and then die down a time afterward.

I am not very surprised by this. If one would look at global health news and news about diseases, and correlate that with purchases of health products, you would likely find similar pattern where you get initial peaks that is followed with a decreased interest which slowly returns to original levels. Once you have tried a product out, its hard to notice any difference and its thus easy to return to previous behavior after a initial scare.

What is hard to predict is if peoples risk analyses changes from reading such news. After Snowden, has help lines, priests, lawyers, and therapist seen a impact? If so, how much and for how long? The decision to try out tor for a week and then switching back feels inherently different from deciding to not call a help line in case someone might be listening in.

Re: Privacy Behaviors After Snowden

#8

Post by themartorana » Mon, May 25, 2015, 12:15 PM UTC

chrisacree wrote: post #6

I'm not surprised by this. Getting the public at large's attention concentrated in the first place is hard enough; keeping it there is impossible. However, that's not to say that all this has been in vain. The snooping revelations sent huge ripples through the tech community, and that is the community both most affected and most poised to make a change. A small group of dedicated people is all it takes to enact chang…

I'm also interested in the effect companies pushing for and enacting better privacy and encryption had. For instance, Google made sweeping and immediate changes, and Apple tightened encryption in iMessage and iOS, to the vocal chagrin of govnt agencies. Did visible actions like these help speed the public decline in interest because the public at large felt that major influencers had become their champions (naive though it may be)?

Re: Privacy Behaviors After Snowden

#9

Post by fnordfnordfnord » Mon, May 25, 2015, 12:37 PM UTC

"Privacy" probably isn't a keyword that I would search for if I had new concerns about my online privacy. I think "secure" or "encrypted" as in secure browser, text, communication, etc. After reading a few Snowden related articles, I think a lot of people would also bypass simple keywords for more targeted searches such as "TOR", "OTR", etc. Also, as the author makes note of, I'd want to look at search data that wasn't from Bing, mainly because that is the default installed search engine for MS Windows. While anyone may choose to use Bing, its users will also include a large pool of unsophisticated users.

Re: Privacy Behaviors After Snowden

#10

Post by junto » Mon, May 25, 2015, 12:54 PM UTC

I have also sadly noted that there is little interest from my peers in such matters.

It is also hard to change. I work with technology everyday. I planned to:

- move away from Gmail to Fastmail

- move away from Dropbox to Spideroak or Owncloud

- move away from G+ Photos to ?

- move away from SMS and WhatsApp to TextSecure

The results? I'm still on Gmail. I still have a Dropbox account and I'm slowly moving stuff to Spideroak. I'm the only one who uses TextSecure and I end up sending SMS in the clear to my friends. I've tried a multitude of photo apps and none of them do what I want.

All a very sad state of affairs.