Why Privacy Matters
thistooshallgrow.com
thistooshallgrow.com
The irony is that this same mentality of 'everything is good' was the same mentality that people probably had when they walked over to auto-register on the census as Jewish back in the day. They just didn't see it coming. If we can learn something from history is that every 100-200 years the status quo gets thrown out the window.
I don't want to know how does surfing looks like without uBlock.
Two things struck me: the Jewish census and the human smugglers. I would have to look up the origin and intent of the census, but the moral is that the existence of such records put people in peril. As for the smugglers, the lesson is that trusted people can use that information to betray you.
How this relates to the modern world is an open question, but the author goes on to suggest parallels: governments persecuting entire peoples, trusted parties collecting data; and solutions: being able to inspect what our software does.
I wish the article were about that, about what kind of information we are sharing in the present time, that may come to bite us back.
Here is my spin: Information can be used to your advantage (Relevant ads are good when they work), but it can also be weaponized (Oh, you search a lot for medical conditions?, maybe your insurance provider is interested. Or worse like we saw with Cambridge Analytica, "you seem to be democrat, let me see if I can bias you a little by hitting you where it hurts")
Here is my personal take on the situation from my experience: We are in a data collection period. Google, Facebook, Amazon, even Apple. Apple might be the worst actually. Silently amassing and hoarding data, researching the proper databases that can hold the data. We have seen things coming up in the last years like NoSQL, like Spark, massive analytical tools and real time databases. This is the equivalent of building a weapon.
Then the time of using that weapon comes. How? I wish I knew. I remind myself that we are just one CEO away of things being really bad. We are now under the shadow of people that grew in a different time, with a different set of ethics. Google still has the original founders on the board, Tim Cook is of the Steve Jobs school, Amazon is on its first CEO run. A few decades down the board, a new CEO gets appointed, and new CEO finds that he/she just inherited a massive data repository that can be used whatever he pleased. "Oh, we will never do that"? Sure, wait for the next guy to change their mind very fast, in the name of profits, or protecting a stock going down, or less strict ethics because they didn't live in the time where lack of privacy can kill you personally.
Sometimes I hold from sharing my thoughts, because people might label me as a conspiracy theorist :) But it is indeed on the back on my mind.
The best example of this is the handwritten notes of the Tsars Russian imperial intel/police services in the very late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Handwritten records and notes stored in shacks that were retrieved and indexed around (forgive hazy dates) 1905 and used to track down "revolutionaries".
While technically true, they signed out a long time ago from what Google ought to be or ought not to be. That much is evident from Google’s actions and the relegation of “Don’t be evil” and all that.
It doesn't matter what information you share. Facebook buys information from everywhere. They aleady know if your relationship status even if you leave it blank. That's the trap. Then their paying customers are given access to you, based on who they want to convince.
Be as positive as you can about it right now. Assume they don't sell and trade. Assume they don't have data breaches. Assume they don't directly try to use it for evil.
Well I could trust them now. But the future?
Do I trust every employee they could hire for the length of time(forever?) they hold my information?
For private industry, do I trust whoever could buy their company in the future? (FB login for VR anyone?)
We have been lucky enough that no one is obviously directly using this information to kill/incarcerate people.
Well, outside of China anyway but that is somebodies else's problem....
Which is my point. For many people, if it doesn't affect you, it isn't an issue.
Until it does.
The Eternal Value of Privacy
Oh the ironing.
Are we going to see the same comment on every article about privacy?
It is 2020, setting up a website that doesn't send off the data of your trusting visitors to third parties should be totally standard. Yet not even people advocating for privacy can get this done.
BTW. one benefit of not collecting and tracking is that you won't have to show that silly cookie banner.
Last I knew Squarespace had an export option, so you might be able to just bring all your content over without much hassle.
GitHub Pages are also a good suggestion but they don't come with comments, stats or themes. There's quite a bit of development and design to do to match squarespace/wordpress.
I haven't actually used it for anything yet but I have a script that turns LaTeX into nice looking HTML pages, saves messing around with the CSS for hours.
As for the content, I think it's a bit all over the place. You start with references to abuses of vast data stores, and then immediately jump into a technical exposé of personal protective measures, but the introduced concepts have no relation to each other, nor do they appear to protect against the abuses that you started out with.
What was/is your intended audience?
I dislike them, but I have met people who genuinely do not want to think about bad things. I can accept the viewpoint, but these are the people that turn a blind eye during genocides. If you really can't handle discussing topics like these I don't mind a warning, at least rather than self-censoring.
However, I'm reminded of the fuss that was made over the term "Joyplot" due to the term Joy Division - ignoring that band is named after the historical term as an artistic statement, it just seems like pandering into the void.
It's not for society at large to dismiss controversial topics (though some people mistakenly use it that way).
You're passing because someone is attempting to help people with mental health problems? Perhaps the problem is with you, not the warning.
Triggers and warnings are concepts that are absolutely real, but in most usage is instead a fad and a virtue signal. That much is obvious in this case, when the author puts up a warning for authoritarianism. Please.
We, at Cubbit, are contributing to the mission of getting back our privacy by building a distributed and encrypted cloud storage service that puts users in control of their data (https://business.cubbit.io).
Knife can be used to harm people, sure you can fix it by banning/destroying knife but thats not the only way to fix the issue.
I'm more interested to solution where we assume the information will be public and fix the issue that arise due to that.
Assuming all information is public and fixing the issues that arise is like giving everyone (even toddlers) a knife and then fixing the issues that arise from that. There is no fixing the issues that arise from a toddler having a knife. The solution is to take the knife away, they should not have a knife. The same solution is there for data, take the data away from the people who shouldn't have it, they should not have it. Or even better, don't get a knife to a toddler/your data to people who shouldn't have it in the first place.
Yes and that is because that someone can use it to harm you and you'll suffer. Ensuring no one has your data who shouldn't is only one way but not the only way to prevent the suffering.
Let say you know my credit card account number, the reason I don't want other people to know the number is because it can be used to stole my money.
But what if there is way that even though you know my credit card number, you can't stole my money, then having my credit card number public would not be an issue for me.
Analogy is not perfect, but with knife, my point is we let everyone to easily obtain knife even though we know that it can be used to harm people. One way we do this is by having a severe enough punishment as a deterrent for people who use it to harm other. This is what I mean by fixing the issue that arise due to easily accessible knife.
One way that it may work is if there is way you can trace any transaction good enough so that you can't use the credit card number without revealing yourself.
Another example would be if I'm gay. This information can be used to really hurt me in the past but not so much these days. Sure I can hide this information to prevent people to hurt me but I rather to fix the issue of the need of hiding it in the first people.
I would imagine if people can hide being gay perfectly there wouldn't be that much acceptance today.
That will never happen if there is no effort to make it happen.
> 100% of our population is virtuous
Yes that is impossible, I never made or require that assumption.
No it doesn't. The Open Source definition is very much equivalent with that of Free Software, while having the virtue of being more clear, and I wish FS advocates would take the time to actually read it before talking nonsense.
The political vs non-political aspects have nothing to do with their definitions, but with the organizations behind them.
Also not sure what this had to do with the subject of the article.
This puzzles me... The paragraph clearly states that the grandfather had contacts with strangers (and we can then assume there was some exchange of information of some kind), and the ending was positive, whereas another exchange with a single point of contact had a negative outcome. But goes on to present as a lesson that the chance of a negative outcome increases with the number of contacts.
I see the point the author is trying to make, but I think this part fails to prove it satisfyingly. It either doesn't prove anything, or it's missing key information (shared information with the strangers and the smugglers) to support the point. To me, it proves that luck (and maybe the grand-father's ability to be a good judge of character in picking which strangers to rely on) were more likely deciding factors.
(Or that having no plan helps. But that's for a different perspective.)
A census counts people. It might need to know who's a citizen or who's eligible to vote, or maybe even generation or sex. It doesn't need to know name, address, eye color, medical history, fingerprint, etc. The aggregation provides privacy (unless the sample size is incredibly small, like in an extremely remote district).
Another example is the TSA: their job is to protect vehicles and passengers, which means preventing weapons on airplanes. But it doesn't matter who's wielding the weapons. So they don't need ID to do their job, and asking for it (and worse, recording it where it can be leaked) is an unnecessary breach of privacy.
The general problem is there are incentives for collecting excessive information and very few disincentives. Laws and regulation can change that.
https://www.amazon.com/Privacy-Power-Should-Take-Control-ebo...
“.. the truth is, there is something terribly wrong with this country, isn't there? Cruelty and injustice, intolerance and oppression. And where once you had the freedom to object, think, and speak as you saw fit, you now have censors and systems of surveillence coercing your conformity and soliciting your submission. How did this happen? ..”
“.. I know you were afraid. Who wouldn't be? War, terror, disease. There were a myriad of problems which conspired to corrupt your reason and rob you of your common sense. Fear got the best of you, and in your panic you turned to the now High Chancellor, Adam Sutler. He promised you order, he promised you peace, and all he demanded in return was your silent, obedient consent ..”
(It's another thing if we're talking about politics, not about individual choices. In pure politics big picture arguments, like "what if there'll be a dictatorship", might be more proper).
I would try to frame it, for individual people, as a question of quality and technical savvyness. If a supposedly hi-tech company behaves like a scammy phone marketing operation selling you garbage bundled with hidden subscriptions, we should treat is as such. They should be able to treat you seriously, i.e. give you good quality, reliable products for the money, without scheming behind your back and siphoning all the data they can. Their business model should be sound without this. If they don't, it's just an inferior product and you're being exploited.
A related point is that I don't like products being sold solely on privacy. The tone should be more, we provide you an excellent thing (inside our capital constraints) and of course, it also respects your data.
Currently I see a tendency among people to be more-or-less aware of privacy invasions and their potential, but to think that's ultimately a fact of life and they'd have to be some crazy nerds to do something about it. The thinking should be more that they're using low quality stuff and hurting themselves. (I'm not saying that you should now go and antagonize people in your social bubble, just that it may be a communication strategy if there's an opportunity.)
Besides, trying to defend ourselves from the future state will be probably always perceived as kooky. Better do something about politics directly if you're in a moderately free country. It's more about rogue actors inside the companies and in the broad underworld. There was a time when people installed the damn antivirus.
If the idea is to convince non-technical people of the importance of privacy, the article should have just stuck to that. Parts like the free vs. open source discussion seem unnecessary.
How would the Uyghur example be different if the Chinese governments discussions, plans, and actions were public knowledge? More implementable, if every citizen concerned that they were at risk ran a self monitoring system that could be purchased or issued by NGOs or reporters which created a public document of their treatment.
What if the German population had been shown the images of torture and abuse so that they could know what the politics were doing? What if married soldier's philandering and rape were shared with their partners?
What if today in the U.S. the smaller scale oppressions of domestic violence were thoroughly documented for courts and automatically detected to provide systemic support? What if "he said, she said" was a problem of the past?
What if every government official's behavior was publicly documented so that any bad actors could be proactively and clearly identified and their good actions could be commended?
What if your argument with your partner(s) or friends were reviewable so that you never had to argue about what you said, you could check it and apologize for what you said (or be apologized to) and get back on track to building understanding instead of entrenching in conflict?
There are obvious challenges that would need to be thought through but it might be worth considering.
"I have nothing to hide" should be considered equal to "I have nothing to say, therefore I have nothing to say"