Quote: Original post by Mithrandir
Google says... if comrades are concerned with their privacy, then they're probably up to no good!

Welp .... that's it. I'm installing Squiggle



Oh. Ran across this "Scroogle" thingy. Investigating....

Quote: Original post by Mithrandir
/and thus begins my exit of using any google services whatsoever.
//Starting with blocking all google adservers at the host level.

Tell me more...! [smile]


I have a pretty extensive "hosts" file, and use NoScript. But, even right now, it's telling me that "googlesyndication.com" is being allowed, which must mean that some site I care about wouldn't work without it.

Quote: Original post by capn_midnight
....Automatically flagging me as a potential terrorist has serious implications.

Ruthless monopolists flagging you as a corporate threat might not be peanuts, either.


Nor would it probably be enjoyable to have parts of your life's work recreated from your personal habits/researches/Gmails, and then patented by some big corporation before you could say, "datamining".


Though these would be extreme examples, I was interested in invasions of this sort for the thread here.

The thing that got me about reading 1984 was that it seemed that the proles were pretty content. The rationing was probably rough, but that's not unexpected in a time of war, and, otherwise, they seemed to live normal lives. It connected in my mind with one of the two lines that I remember from Game of Thrones:

It is no matter to them if the high lords play their game of thrones, so long as they are left in peace. They never are.

It's been a while, but it seemed to me that the proles in 1984 were, essentially, left in peace.


As for increasing privacy, maybe it would be effective to play devil's advocate. Let all the information be free. Someone will eventually set up a free data mining service that'll connect the dots about anyone for anyone. Stephen Baxter and Arthur C. Clarke's The Light of Other Days introduced a technology that let you see and hear anything that happened anywhere even in the past. It's interesting to think what would change. But, more to the point, if you want people to become concerned with privacy, maybe it would be better to create a backlash against publicity. Try to push society down a slippery slope to get them to push back.


Another thing that could be done is work to create decentralized technologies that are just as easy to use as the Google (or some other "evil" company's) alternative. I love the idea of Opera Unite because the central server is only there to direct you to someone's local computer. Once they connect you, it's more or less private. With the price of netbooks and nettops and the increasing availability of wireless internet access, I can easily imagine having a simple server at home and easy access anywhere. The problem is making it as easy as Google.

Releasing information is an irreversible process; this makes it different from giving out other stuff (like money) because you can't get it back again. As such it's good to have a 'private-by-default' mentality.

One solution to finding out whether companies really are abiding by their privacy policies is to have a collection of watchdog companies that certify companies as kosher. Because you've got multiple watchdogs, they can compete on reputation and thoroughness; if a watchdog certifies a company that then gets caught, it's game over for that watchdog.

Watchdogs could also make privacy policy stuff a lot easier to handle: they can certify privacy policies as conforming to particular standards. Instead of checking through the whole policy to see whether the company will or will not sell your data to third-party vendors, you just look for a badge from your watchdog-of-choice that certifies it.

Big Brother still threatens.

Homeland Security Embarks on Big Brother Programs to Read Our Minds and Emotions

Quote:
...
This past February, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) awarded a one-year, $2.6 million grant to the Cambridge, MA.-based Charles Stark Draper Laboratory to develop computerized sensors capable of detecting a person's level of "malintent" -- or intention to do harm. It's only the most recent of numerous contracts awarded to Draper and assorted research outfits by the U.S. government over the past few years under the auspices of a project called "Future Attribute Screening Technologies," or FAST. It's the next wave of behavior surveillance from DHS and taxpayers have paid some $20 million on it so far.

Conceived as a cutting-edge counter-terrorism tool, the FAST program will ostensibly detect subjects' bad intentions by monitoring their physiological characteristics, particularly those associated with fear and anxiety. It's part of a broader "initiative to develop innovative, non-invasive technologies to screen people at security checkpoints," according to DHS.

The "non-invasive" claim might be a bit of a stretch. A DHS report issued last December outlined some of the possible technological features of FAST, which include "a remote cardiovascular and respiratory sensor" to measure "heart rate, heart rate variability, respiration rate, and respiratory sinus arrhythmia," a "remote eye tracker" that "uses a camera and processing software to track the position and gaze of the eyes (and, in some instances, the entire head)," "thermal cameras that provide detailed information on the changes in the thermal properties of the skin in the face," and "a high resolution video that allows for highly detailed images of the face and body … and an audio system for analyzing human voice for pitch change."

Ultimately, all of these components would be combined to take the form of a "prototypical mobile suite (FAST M2) … used to increase the accuracy and validity of identifying persons with malintent."
...
"We think that you have an inherent privacy right to your bodily metabolic functions," Jay Stanley, director of the ACLU's Technology and Liberty program told AlterNet. "Just because somebody can build some high-tech piece of equipment that can detect your pulse and perspiration and breathing and heart rate, that doesn't mean that it should be open season to detect that on anybody without suspicion."

Besides, he says, the FAST program is based on "the same old pseudo-scientific baloney that we've seen in so many other areas. As far as I can tell, there's very little science that establishes the efficacy of this kind of thing. And there probably never will be."

Bruce Schneier, a security technologist and bestselling author who has been one of the most vociferous critics of such new high-tech DHS initiatives, concurs. In fact, he says, all the evidence suggests the opposite. "The problem is the false positives," he says.
...

Quote: Original post by superpig
Watchdogs could also make privacy policy stuff a lot easier to handle: they can certify privacy policies as conforming to particular standards. Instead of checking through the whole policy to see whether the company will or will not sell your data to third-party vendors, you just look for a badge from your watchdog-of-choice that certifies it.

Sounds a bit like EFF's TOSBack project.

Reading the information from the scroogle site makes me think that posting on this forum isn't such a good idea :(

Quote: Original post by jrjellybean
Reading the information from the scroogle site makes me think that posting on this forum isn't such a good idea :(

Your forum posts are probably safe from Google's profiling unless you used a GMail account to register.

Google has pretty extensive snapshots of the web, for example, I see they have some ancient newsgroup posts that I made once upon a time, but they'd still have to correlate the identities, which seems like a pretty impossible task.

An interesting article from the BBC about the Romanian secret police.

Quote: Original post by Way Walker
The thing that got me about reading 1984 was that it seemed that the proles were pretty content. The rationing was probably rough, but that's not unexpected in a time of war, and, otherwise, they seemed to live normal lives. It connected in my mind with one of the two lines that I remember from Game of Thrones:

It is no matter to them if the high lords play their game of thrones, so long as they are left in peace. They never are.

It's been a while, but it seemed to me that the proles in 1984 were, essentially, left in peace.

A little off topic maybe, but...

The proles were left in peace because they were no threat. They were happy in their ignorance, easily sedated and subdued from questioning the absurdity of perpetual war by the cheap, trashy entertainment.

It has been a while since I've read the book, but I seem to recall that there was an implication that the agents of the thought police would maintain (infrequent?) supervision even on the proles, to isolate and elimanate any overly intelligent, charismatic, artistic or resistant types. But I don't remember this being explicitly spelled out.

A little more on topic, I think privacy is an important issue.

I accept the realities of life, that for some companies it is this data which generates the income, e.g. Google. At the same time I think they have a duty of care which many companies are failing to live up to.

One way of combatting it is to make it a liability rather than an asset. This would discourage companies from collecting data for no reason, and discourage them from sharing it, or maybe requiring all personal data transfers to be anonymised in a particular fashion. Data cannot be "sold off" if a company goes under, it must be permenantly deleted.

For example, make it illegal for companies to sell or share data, or make it illegal for a company to aggregate or correlate data aquired from different client companies. Maybe put a tax on such databases, proportionate to size and how invasive or anonymous the data is, or how much is publically exposed, or combinations thereof. Impose *massive* fines/damages for data losses or leaks.

I like the idea behind superpig's suggestions. I'd almost want to have a set of privacy policies that a company could choose from, but I know that would be unworkable in practise. Privacy policies remind me of open source licenses. If you boil it down to the important details, there should be only 5 or 10 possible licenses. Yet for some reason every second open source project that starts wants to have a new license with some subtle and unnecessary difference from existing variants.

These are just some ideas off the top of my head.

Quote: Original post by rip-off

Quote: Original post by Way Walker
The thing that got me about reading 1984 was that it seemed that the proles were pretty content. The rationing was probably rough, but that's not unexpected in a time of war, and, otherwise, they seemed to live normal lives. It connected in my mind with one of the two lines that I remember from Game of Thrones:

It is no matter to them if the high lords play their game of thrones, so long as they are left in peace. They never are.

It's been a while, but it seemed to me that the proles in 1984 were, essentially, left in peace.

A little off topic maybe, but...

The proles were left in peace because they were no threat. They were happy in their ignorance, easily sedated and subdued from questioning the absurdity of perpetual war by the cheap, trashy entertainment.

My point was that life only looks really bad from the perspective of the outer party and I'm guessing I'd be a prole in that world. Not saying I'd like it if I knew, just that, if 1984 were written from the perspective of a prole, I don't think it would look all that different from daily life during WWII (I'd say today if we had rationing).

Quote:
I like the idea behind superpig's suggestions. I'd almost want to have a set of privacy policies that a company could choose from, but I know that would be unworkable in practise. Privacy policies remind me of open source licenses. If you boil it down to the important details, there should be only 5 or 10 possible licenses. Yet for some reason every second open source project that starts wants to have a new license with some subtle and unnecessary difference from existing variants.

This is still very useful. I read once that the value of the Scheme specification isn't that all implementations follow it, but that all implementations document where they don't follow it. So, instead of reading a spec for a very similar language looking for the few parts that are different, you read a short document describing what's different. Exceptions to the GPL are fairly common.