The Fantasy of Opting Out
thereader.mitpress.mit.edu
thereader.mitpress.mit.edu
Likewise I don't care that Google knows what I searched for, or that Twitter knows what I tweeted, or that LinkedIn has my employment history. What I don't want is all of that being sold to Cambridge Analytica to then aggregate and sell on to someone else for goodness knows what purposes.
An awful lot of my life and interests are easily searchable. My handle here is basically just my name, and I use the same handle or even more complete versions everywhere I can. When I'm out in public, the public can see me. When I post in public, the public can read what I say. That's fine, that's why I said it.
However my private correspondences with my wife and kids on iMessage or WhatsApp are nobody else's business. My bank transactions and online shopping likewise, that latter is mainly between me and Amazon. Where I would get upset is if Amazon sold that data to Google to show me 'relevant ads', or show my purchases to my friends. Remember Facebook Beacon? There need to be clear, hard lines in the sand.
What's surprising to most people (and should be the focus of any litigation, imho) is precisely this third-party data sharing. It's partly why the cookie law drives me nuts, since it's made all tracking the bogeyman, and in reality, most first party "tracking" is completely benign. If companies would agree not to sell or share my data with third parties (law enforcement serving a warrant being the major exception) then I have no real issue with the tech. The blatant sharing, and especially ad networks make my blood boil.
You think it is value add because you assume they are using the data to send you more relevant content. That's just not how data is always used. A google customer (eg an advertiser) might want to hit you with deliberately non-relevant ads, ads to divert you away from a competitor product. You might want to book a trip to visit family in Hawaii, but the Florida resort advertiser doesn't much care what you want actually. They will hit you with Florida ads in hopes that they can divert a potential traveler to a different destination. You will miss out on relevant Hawaii content simply because Florida has paid more to put content in front of you.
What would be surprising (to most consumers) is if the Florida resort advertiser, instead of bidding on some broad target demographic, has access to enough data to target me individually. However that comes about, that is the line that is crossed. Why does the third party have direct(ish) access to this data? Why wasn't I informed? Etc. Whether that is direct sale of the data, or indirect targeting through unusually specific ad campaign targeting, the effect is the same: it's creepy.
sure for the few minutes that that data is relevant to selling you stuff you're looking for right now, but why would you expect them to keep it for longer, as this seems to imply?
the time dimension matters too. keeping that data for more than a few minutes should also be explicitly opt-in, as it's data being collected and potentially shared in the future (intentionally or not).
reach and accessibility are naturally limited 'in the old days' where a salesperson might remember your preferences, even writing them down to share with other salespeople, but that data hardly leaked out to other retailers (and potential competitors). it seems that that should be our baseline, and any further gathering/sharing be subject to explicit opt-in.
There is a lot more disclosure about the use of cookies due to those laws. One of the things those disclosures will note is how many of those cookies are from third-parties. How many people have even reviewed a single disclosure? Of those who have, how many know how to disable third-party cookies? I am not surprised that tracking ended up as the bogeyman due to the amount of it, the dubious motives of most of it, and the limited control that people have.
Even if you eliminate third-party tracking and other forms of data sharing, the amount of tracking happening through first-party cookies is sometimes questionable. A company may be fully justified in figuring out how their services are used, but does that extend to creating profiles on individuals? There is a big difference between a business using aggregate data to improve sales and using data to tailor services to individuals. It is worth noting that many people would consider the former as being too manipulative, while it is reasonable to argue that the latter is exploiting the vulnerabilities of individuals.
Personally, I find any sort form of tracking beyond ensuring security and performance to be excessive since most of the other tracking is intended to establish a one-sided relationship to the benefit of the people doing the tracking. Arguing that it sometimes improves the lives those being tracked is missing the point since it is usually very much unintentional.
Perhaps more importantly, restricting third-party but not first-party sharing creates bad incentives. If Google could share search data with first-party services like Google Reviews, but not third-party ones like Yelp, what does that mean for Yelp? We'd just be encouraging the largest companies to bring even more of the world in-house.
I think views related to this topic somewhat depend on whether or not you consider Google a monopoly in the digital advertising space. If you do, it would seem that bringing more of the world in-house would be deemed illegal under anti-trust laws.
I called Amazons customer service to complain about their suggestions. The representative said that their suggestions are based on my searches and purchases. I believe the suggestions are also based on the purchases made for that address.
My father doesn't even get an option to opt out of Amazon suggesting things he's purchased, to other people to purchase for him. There isn't an option for privacy.
and yet after years of buying the same pair of shoes, year after year, amazon still doesn't know what's my shoe size and I have to check if my size is still available every time...
I believe they are not really trying to improve my experience, but their profits.
But I have no proof.
In many countries (Russia, China, Myanmar come to mind) you would not give the law enforcement exception. How certain are you that, in 20-40 years, your current political beliefs won't get you in trouble with the government?
If the email account you use for Amazon is a Gmail account they email a receipt of purchase to that account, which Google will use for 'relevant ads'.
But of course in that case you are expressly granting permission for Amazon to contact google. If it was done via a TOS agreement or something then yes I agree, that would be concerning.
But technologically, they are postcards sent to a business. And we just visit the business to pick up our postcards. Imagine every time you bought something, they sent the receipt to walmart for you to pick up. Not in an envelope, just handed to the guy at the counter and put into a box for you. We never should have let email get this far, but we did.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/23/technology/gmail-ads.html
I'm not trying to separate myself from society. I'm just trying to keep the stalkers away.
A lot of companies seem to want to act less like members of society and more like stalkers.
I once told someone something about my kid, and they responded, "why haven't you told me this before???" My flat reply was, "because it's not the most interesting thing about her." I'm about 50-50 on smart versus stupid answers, but occasionally I surprise even myself. That's one of my best one-liners.
Setting aside police/surveillance state dystopias for a moment: People try to make you small by labeling you. The more things they know about you, the more labels they have. If you don't believe me just look at the sewer that flows through replies to AOC's tweets. Having depression as a teenager should not define you. Being a survivor of assault or harassment should not define you. Having a working class upbringing should not pigeonhole you. Having an itchy groin should not be ammo for somebody to derail and deflect what you're trying to do. Mind your own goddamned business and keep the conversation on topics that are actually relevant, like your embezzlement conviction or my ongoing bribery lawsuit.
This logic would be fine if all google did was search, if all amazon did was shopping, but they don't. They have federal government contracts, they work with defense contractors and law enforcement, they control huge amounts of the internet infrastructure. Google, amazon, facebook gathering your data is more than just a search engine, a store front and a social network gathering it, even if theh share it with nobody other than their internal businesess, those ternal businesses have massive control over the internet qnd many people's lives.
> I don't mind if the building security records me entering the building, or the bank records me using the ATM
Actually, I would pretty much bet the government in a bunch of states in the world can access your bank records. Places like the US, or China, or Russia. But let's ignore that.
> What I object to is if all of those are stitched together and handed over to advertising agencies or my employer.
The thing is, once the information is gathered, and stored, it's an easy transition to feed it somewhere. And judging by current trends, - some company will soon offer pay those disparate surveillers to feed such data to it, constantly - since it can processed and analyzed en masse, and monetized. Oh, and they'll probably send the government a copy of everything too (judging by what FAANG do, for example).
> Likewise I don't care that Google knows what I searched for
That's not "likewise". Google is already a huge stitcher of surveillance - the kind you said you disapprove of. And, again, they send everything to the US government.
> that latter is mainly between me and Amazon.
You mean between you and the entity controlling a huge chunk of all on-line commerce and whose operations are larger in monetary terms than most states in the world? And that acts like a government with its own body of rules and internal judicial system for disputes? ... yeah, it's "just" between you and them.
So you don't like Cambridge Analytica, but Google, Twitter and LinkedIn using your data for goodness know what purposes is fine? I'm pretty sure they're running all that data through all sorts of machine learning algorithms and some of that might be used at some point for surveillance and censorship purposes or dystopian stuff in general. Not might, will be, if already isn't. Because you'd have to be stupid to have this amount of data and not use it to further your political agenda.
Your viewpoint come across as extremely naïve until you've had political persecution, targeted harassment, or stalking issues. Privacy isn't something you or anyone else gets to decide no one else needs because you don't understand it or value it, but you're free to try living in a fantasy world so long as you don't put the lives of reporters or refugees at risk, or condone the invasion of the lives and personal effects of others.
I would think that all that data is being shared. And if its not being shared now, it is being recorded. And an AI will run through all that information and process it in the future. Why anyone would trust self-serving governments and corporations with private information amazes me!
It is a perfectly rational hypothesis to consider that a lot of the reasons governments use to take civil liberties away, are ones that they orchestrated themselves to facilitate their power grab. To not consider this as a possibility, in psychological terms, is like being the co-dependent in a narcissistic relationship, or like the victim in Stockholm syndrome - you can't imagine that someone would be that abusive, even though you know already that governments and corporations do NOT have your back.
All government conspiracy aside, anyone can see that one makes lots of decisions to do things (or not) on account of what it means to be in public. In your mind, contrast the idea of being in public in a busy city versus a quiet country road. You do not act in the same way! You are under greater stress in a city, you will conform with the social norms as you perceive them, you will not 'flower' as an individual.
This stuff is all known. We are better managed in cities hence 'they' want to move the mass of people into 'smart' (spy) cities. Its not a secret. Its been being planned for a long time. Look into technocracy.
On one hand the internet and the big data platforms of Amazon, facebook etc. have allowed this economy and communities based on esoteric interests, but on the other hand they are able to manipulate us else like nobodies business and greed ensures that if it isn't being used adversarially now it will certainly be in the future.
While I agree with most of what you say, and also almost everything from me is relatively easy to find, my parents and family experience living under Salazar´s dictatorship, or the lasting effects from Stasi over here in Germany, keeps me always aware to keep a good price in what we give away.
We could start with the nonstop, look-at-me nature of Instagram (or any other social site). They satisfy a deep craving that just keeps growing. We could marvel at the Jan. 6 rioters posting their moments in history for all to see. It's endless, and it isn't slowing down.
Yes, there's a powerful argument to be made that nonstop surveillance could work out badly. But after 15 years of seeing such pieces thunder into obscurity, rehashing the same arguments in isolation seems futile.
Anyone who wants to contribute to the conversation needs to spend serious time thinking about the reasons why so many people want strangers to know about them. It's a deep-felt desire. For a lot of people, the dread of being unknown/un-noticed/ignored is greater than the risks that come from being noticed. Once we understand why that's so, we might be able to move forward.
Even security cameras are now part of performance culture
There is a tremendous cognitive bias in play here. The idea that because most people around you don't weaponize certain types of information means no one anywhere will ever weaponize that information, even if it is globally and indefinitely available.
It's all a variant of "candy today; diabetes in 20 years." Public health experts have probably thought the hardest about how to get people to take the long term into account. There must be something in their playbook that could benefit the anti-surveillance cause.
For example, most people can imagine living with diabetes, but they have no idea what it would feel like if some entity started using their leaked data against them. It's a much more complex scenario with lots of possible outcomes and variables.
So yeah, people can lack mental capacity without being stupid. They are nevertheless extremely uninteresting people who can't fathom, much like cattle, how they are being harvested.
Do I like to get some Karma on HN/Reddit or reactions on Discord or replies on all 3? Yeah, I do, but not because of some "desire to be noticed" (I think) but because it means someone thinks I have provided some input to a conversation and they want to talk about it at the very least it lets me know I'm not a crazy person talking out of my ass. In fact, I'd prefer that nobody knows my real name or what I look like on all 3 of those sites. I can be a bit more authentic and candid than I'd feel comfortable being otherwise.
Surveillance -- including stuff like profiling people by analyzing their voluntary social media posts -- is imposed on a person by someone else. It is taking away the surveilled person's free choice, and its entire purpose is to gain power over them.
There's also absolutely no inherent reason that surveillance -- the deliberate steps of gathering/cataloging/analyzing -- has to come along with people being able to post things in public. That's just a f'd-up practice that our society has adopted.
Well said. Brilliantly well said. Pithy and correct. I will be sharing your words.
The author comes to the same conclusion I do. I just stated that making vivid images of what your loss of privacy looks like aren't really making a dent.
The author also says it best: there is no simple solution. Rather, the problem exists in people's behavior and belief systems. They feel justified in their beliefs for a cause, and once they are galvanized into that belief system they are no longer required to consider second and third order effects from their belief support. In fact, they're totally allowed to just dismiss people altogether as long as they are doing so in support of the cause.
This isn't anything new. Hot topics show that people just do this when they feel some type of way about a given topic. If you want to solve these problems I think the place to start is making vocal calls to people within your belief system that are encouraging a loss of privacy. This must be from within your belief system because people don't listen fully to people of polar belief systems and it must be vocal so that everyone sees the example.
More or less saying: privacy must be a common concern that is continually addressed and answered for in every discussion where we encourage change. It can no longer be an option.
I wonder, too, how we as tech-minded hackers and programmers and doers can use what we have and what we work with to strengthen these signals. Like, facebook and twitter et al have optimized for things like raw engagement numbers / advertising exposure etc. Are there things we could do to optimize for engagement / cultural development? I pose this question in earnest. It's something I have thought about a lot without many good answers to show for it.
From Dan Geer's portentous talk "Cybersecurity as Realpolitik"[1][2]:
>> Privacy used to be proportional to that which it is impossible to observe or that which can be observed but not identified. No more -- what is today observable and identifiable kills both privacy as impossible-to-observe and privacy as impossible-to-identify, so what might be an alternative? If you are an optimist or an apparatchik, then your answer will tend toward rules of data procedure administered by a government you trust or control. If you are a pessimist or a hacker/maker, then your answer will tend towards the operational, and your definition of a state of privacy will be my definition: the effective capacity to misrepresent yourself.
Or if enough folks gang up and feed the system an avalanche of random (or misdirected) information that we can drown our signature in a sea of noise?
Right now dynamic pricing is still asynchronous. If They do it, They have a model of you that fits some marketeers understanding of people. And this model suggests a price increase or maybe even a decrease.
But what will happen is real-time data exchange. Say you booked a nice hotel for your vacation and now search for flights. Wonder why your prices are 50% higher? Say your TV just broke, or your car didn't start this morning, or you mentioned on whatsapp how you need new sports equipment. Basically whenever you will need something, you will pay a Premium. No matter where the data comes from. That's the price of giving up privacy.
Already, we invite soft surveillance into our private spaces, but will we agree to having those spaces mapped to the millimeter, our objects tracked in kind and location, our private actions (in addition to our words) persistently noticed, considered and logged?
Our current laws are not very detailed, often times they are overly severe to serve as a determent and/or make assumptions based on available evidence (which was less before).
As we know more and more of an individual (due to gadgets, online activity, and cashless transactions)- laws and punishment need to take it all into account and be more tailored to actual crime and make less assumptions because there's plenty of evidence to go by.
Another important issue is that we should not allow those in power shield themselves from surveillance and accountability under a guise of safety or security.
Bruce Schneier disagreed with him in 2008 [3] (and probably still does).
[1] https://www.wired.com/1996/12/fftransparent/
Obviously this won’t happen for centuries. But on the timeline of “future human existence”, it’s really not very long at all. I see this as an inevitable outcome of technological development, even if the Private Ownership of Spacecraft War of 2346 is bloody. That gives me hope for the future.
Why do you think colonies in space will be different and not see “societal forces” emerge?
The more accessible opting out becomes, the more leverage regulator people will have when negotiating with the dominant social order.
Space travel like this is down the road, but it’s only a long road if you are thinking in terms of your own finite existence.
Also, opting out is in demand. From a more immediate perspective, I think that there is a lot of room for innovation around personal privacy and opting out. No system created by humans is permanent. More surveillance means that humans will create systems to subvert it or render it useless. This has already happened in many ways.
A system is nicer to its people when they are there voluntarily. These changes will also work to improve the quality of life of those in the system as well as those outside of it.
“It isn’t possible for everyone to live on principle; as a practical matter, many of us must make compromises in asymmetrical relationships, without the control or consent for which we might wish.”
Even if you could just “go off on your own into space”, you will likely need to transact with other humans in order to survive. Put differently, I think while it is an “option” in principle, it isn’t in reality.
In MBA land they call it BATNA. Best alternative to a negotiated agreement.
Besides that, one shouldn’t have to be a hermit in order to avoid oppression.
Right now the cost for the government to send their agents to "the mountains" is trivial, the most remote you could possibly get is "a few hours commute and a helicopter ride". The government is more than willing to pay that price in important cases.
I think they imagine that space travel can increase that price to "months or years" and "expensive vehicles that support people during that time". Rather like how much it would have cost to send government agents to remote places hundreds of years ago.
(Personally I'm not particularly convinced, the number of habitable rocks in the solar system is small. Living not on a rock means you need to import resources. Maybe if we get interstellar travel).
I’d also imagine it’s far less exciting to live on a floating platform in the ocean than out in space. Certainly the marketing materials will be more appealing.
Besides the infissibility for billions to do so in the next 2-3-5 centuries at least, it will probably also be the total opposite if/when it happens.
Those space colonies won't be like roaming around in some empty earth. It will be like living in some very close knit community on Earth, when everybody is monitored and depends on everybody else don't doing something stupid/suicidal to put the colony in danger...
>I see this as an inevitable outcome of technological development
Why would it be inevitable?
There are big show stopping issues which are only handwaved away atm with "but, progress" (as if technological development is boundless and creativity can bypass any hard constraint).
Some issues as so hard physics problems, that (BS like "Alcubierre drive" aside) would mean the best we could ever do would be "generation ships".
We’re also talking about hundreds or thousands of years here. It seems totally reasonable to me to assume that a private spaceship priced at ~$500,000 in 2021 dollars will exist by say, 2500.
Saying "a question of time, not physical limitations" however is the handwaving of physical limitations "because technology will advance" thing I wrote about.
Why would it be a question of time?
How is time gonna make "faster than light" travel possible, or bring the closest stars any closer than many light years?
If anything time has shown that space travel capability can go worse and languish completely for decades just as easily as some external force (like the Space Race in the Cold War, or easy excess credit to fund things like SpaceX today) makes it so -- it's still been 40+ years since we last went to the moon, and the US had let languish the capability to launch people into ISS for decades...
Regarding technological development, again, on a long enough timeline, I don’t think it’s much of a concern. Technologies will continue to develop, quickly or slowly. It hasn’t even been a century since we walked on the moon. Deriving trends from this short period of time is not particularly relevant.
Between one unhabitable planet and another, plus some gas giants, etc., where's that plenty of space? Unless we also handwaving terraforming into the equation too (as we'll do with carrying any significant number of people via spaceships as opposed to small scientific missions, the 9+ months travel time, space radiation, lack of resources to eat/drink/breath there, etc).
Plenty of space in our own solar system
After all, what can you hide behind floating in space, fully illuminated by the sun?
or something in which you can travel and survive living in space (mobile space habitat).
How will you overcome the lack of gravity causing muscle/bone-density loss?
assuming you camp out near the sun and derive power from solar - how do you get food and oxygen? you'll have to assume extreme air, water recycling, and some way of producing food.
New World 2.0 isn’t coming.
Space is quite literally limitless from a human perspective; to assume that somehow human beings will make zero progress on space travel 500 or 1,000 years from now seems naive to me.
The progression from trains to cars is a good example. At first you had highly centralized, expensive transport. Then cars developed and became decentralized.
On a longer timeline, consider technologies like writing, or paper. Initially highly centralized, now so ubiquitous that we don’t even recognize them as technologies.
I’m basically just saying that on a long enough timeline, the chances that space transportation is controlled by a central authority seems nearly impossible.
Really not sure how to turn this into actionable legislation, but the fundamental problem isn't the data collection. Rather, it's the massive reduction in cost in organizing and querying the data. The laws and norms were set up when the only way to tell if someone had walked down a specific street was to pay someone to watch or to knock on doors and talk to people with faulty memories. Cameras couldn't store years of footage, databases weren't invented yet, and machine facial recognition was pure fantasy.
Like, in the 19th century it'd be absolutely ridiculous to insist that you have a right of "privacy" that means that people can't recognize you when you're walking around in public. And for a long time, pointing a camera outside your window was basically just like looking out it, and it got treated that way. A database of camera footage looking out at a majority of public streets, recording 24/7 with 5 years of back footage, indexed by time + location + facial recognition match, on the other hand, exploits people's privacy in a way that is far more than the sum of parts.
Essentially, my view is that some databases are repugnant to public policy and should be illegal to build and to query. GDPR has well shown the problems involved in legislating this, and there's a massive free speech argument that torpedoes the whole thing anyhow, so I'm pessimistic about actually fixing things.
Foucault on 'Panopticism' addresses that far important aspect. Psychologically defeated people will not seek to "opt out". Opting out is the analog of escaping from prison: most prisoners do not seriously entertain such notions, much less act on them. "A real subjection is born mechanically from a fictitious relation."
https://foucault.info/documents/foucault.disciplineAndPunish...
"Hence the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. So to arrange things that the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action; that the perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary; that this architectural apparatus should be a machine for creating and sustaining a power relation independent of the person who exercises it; in short, that the inmates should be caught up in a power situation of which they are themselves the bearers. To achieve this, it is at once too much and too little that the prisoner should be constantly observed by an inspector: too little, for what matters is that he knows himself to be observed; too much, because he has no need in fact of being so. In view of this, Bentham laid down the principle that power should be visible and unverifiable. Visible: the inmate will constantly have before his eyes the tall outline of the central tower from which he is spied upon. Unverifiable: the inmate must never know whether he is being looked at at any one moment; but he must be sure that he may always be so. In order to make the presence or absence of the inspector unverifiable, so that the prisoners, in their cells, cannot even see a shadow, Bentham envisaged not only venetian blinds on the windows of the central observation hall, but, on the inside, partitions that intersected the hall at right angles and, in order to pass from one quarter to the other, not doors but zig-zag openings; for the slightest noise, a gleam of light, a brightness in a half-opened door would betray the presence of the guardian. The Panopticon is a machine for dissociating the see/being seen dyad: in the peripheric ring, one is totally seen, without ever seeing; in the central tower, one sees everything without ever being seen.
It is an important mechanism, for it automatizes and disindividualizes power. Power has its principle not so much in a person as in a certain concerted distribution of bodies, surfaces, lights, gazes; in an arrangement whose internal mechanisms produce the relation in which individuals are caught up. The ceremonies, the rituals, the marks by which the sovereign’s surplus power was manifested are useless. There is a machinery that assures dissymmetry, disequilibrium, difference. Consequently, it does not matter who exercises power. Any individual, taken almost at random, can operate the machine: in the absence of the director, his family, his friends, his visitors, even his servants (Bentham, 45). Similarly, it does not matter what motive animates him: the curiosity of the indiscreet, the malice of a child, the thirst for knowledge of a philosopher who wishes to visit this museum of human nature, or the perversity of those who take pleasure in spying and punishing. The more numerous those anonymous and temporary observers are, the greater the risk for the inmate of being surprised and the greater his anxious awareness of being observed. The Panopticon is a marvellous machine which, whatever use one may wish to put it to, produces homogeneous effects of power.
A real subjection is born mechanically from a fictitious relation. So it is not necessary to use force to constrain the convict to good behaviour, the madman to calm, the worker to work, the schoolboy to application, the patient to the observation of the regulations. "
I found the conclusion to be very open ended. Who decides what it means to channel the flow of data wisely and justly, and to what ends?
This would require a right-to-privacy constitutional amendment in the US.
I would be curios to hear anyone's experience and/or feedback on these plugins.
We know for a fact that government agencies misbehave. Imagine McCarthy's America, but with the ability to programatically crawl your every movement and spoken word. _That's_ the nightmare scenario.
I'm not sure about this, those who can change our behavior have power over us. knowing somebody does not necessarily mean I have power over said somebody.
likewise, there are things that have power over us without even having to know us.
however if someone has power over somebody AND knows a lot about said somebody then their power is (indeed) more effective.