Are they upset because they lack the choice of who is tracking them? Because I don't think people should be upset about their privacy when they know a company like Facebook already knows everything about you.
- because they said they didn't
- because we don't all live in the USA
- because we have some expectations of privacy regarding mail
- because the reason why ('terrorism') is a fig leaf
- because some people feel that surveillance can lead to a police state
And so on...
The mail one is tricky because somehow people expect that to carry over to email but email is an entirely different beast than regular mail.
The part that falls under "so on" is the scary one. From the article: "NSA reportedly is making a copy of nearly every international email. It then searches that cloned data, keeping all of the emails containing certain keywords and deleting the rest – all in a matter of seconds."
Note the weasel wording: "certain keywords". You don't know what those keywords are. You don't even know what topics they happen to cover. Once you somehow become flagged for suspicious activity, the NSA can go back in time and see everything you have said about _all_ of their "suspicious" topics. You are now an even bigger suspect.
And once you are a suspect, anything and everything in your past can be interpreted in the light of you seeking to commit the questionable activity. Thanks to NSA storing only the material that matched their keywords, they now have a stash of incriminating material that has a very strong selection bias.
I'm pretty sure even Franz Kafka would have been proud.
I guess the overlaps between the different groups are not large. The group of people who post everything to FB doesn't overlap much with the group of people who are annoyed at the NSA surveillance program.
At first glance it feels like a weird cognitive dissonance: People have been told for years that email is not secure, and you should treat email as you would a postcard that anyone can read. And now that we find out that people are reading all email we shouldn't be surprised.
But that misses some points. People feel a difference between a technician getting occasional glances at emails as they transit through the Internet and the government collecting everything. There's a big difference between a mail worker reading a post card and the government photocopying every postcard and storing these copies. And people feel rightly aggrieved that strict laws about surveillance seem to have been side-stepped to allow mass surveillance of totally innocent people.
Personally, I think I agree with you. I am more worried about all these other people having data about me than I am about the government slurping all my data into a big cache.
No, their point most certainly was not reasonable, even though it was polite. The only claim was of letting facebook know 'everything'. This is either mean to be as-written, in which case it's blatantly false, or it's hyperbole, but this is an argument that doesn't work in a weaker form, and a weaker form is still false.
The fact that a private company like Facebook knows a lot about you is not a problem as long as the company has a privacy policy and can be held accountable. The problem specifically is government access to the data. Unlike governments, companies like Facebook have never morphed into tyrannies. Facebook does not tax people, it does not prosecute, it does not put people in prison or fine them, it does not drone people, it does not go to war. Unlike Edward Snowden, an ex-Facebook employee who reveals Facebook's secret illegal activities does not have to fear for his life and take refuge in Russia.
It is just an entirely separate problem that is only superficially similar to the problem of the government knowing a lot about you.
And don't get me wrong, I understand that I can do stuff to stop these things, but I don't see why I should have to, quite frankly.
The point is that even if I have never visited Facebook, they more than likely know a lot about me already, unless explicitly going out of my way to stop it.
Which exist only due to the exact reason I described.
> The point is that even if I have never visited Facebook, they more than likely know a lot about me already, unless explicitly going out of my way to stop it.
Well, that's not what I was addressing. "Going out of your way to stop it" is simply becoming educated about what exactly it is we're doing when we use the Internet and societal institutions. Being prudent about what we enter into a form(either real or virtual) is key.
> Being prudent about what we enter into a form(either real or virtual) is key I agree. But then again, when I need to go out of my way to make sure that all of those little 'Like' icons aren't telling Facebook the sites that I visited, just because my browser loaded them, I think that's a line. Because where you are being explicit about the form being real or virtual, you also should be explicit about who or what is 'entering' data into that form... and even what that form looks like (because a lot of the time, it's just a lot of parameters attached to an image request).
Is there any evidence that privacy policies 1) are actually followed and 2) enable any accountability whatsoever and 3) are anything other than a meaningless token gesture?
I largely agree with your overall point, but this particular sub-point could do with a bit of modification in light of the history of company towns/stores. Unless you were including a division between social-network companies and the extractive industries in which companies towns were frequently found.
It's not a matter of whether or not the information is publicly available. We spend a significant part of our lives in (semi-)public spaces where people are free to observe us.
It's the collection, collation and use of that information that constitutes the violation of privacy.
To put it simply: thousands of people may be able to observe me going from A to B on a regular basis, which is fine. But not even my wife has complete knowledge of all my daily comings and goings. I even have a high degree of privacy from the person I've spent the last few decades with.
Compiling a complete record of all my public movements to the point where the owner of that database has better insight into my habits than even I myself have is a violation of that privacy. Unless I've given explicit permission to do so, and have a certain degree of control over what happens with that data.
The bottom line is, even people who post "everything" on Facebook quite rightly expect a certain degree of privacy. Doing something in public does not equate surrendering your privacy.
But that isn't even the point for most of us. The bigger issue is the potential for future abuse. The next version of McCarthyism will, if it happens, be swift and brutal because they'll just get NSA to hand over the data they hold, and it won't matter if I used privately managed mail systems.
Or if you decide to become politically active, and your views are not aligned with those of the US power structures:
Just last night I was leafing through notes I wrote 20 years ago, as a teenager, when I'd just started being politically active. It only lasted 5 years or so before I got disillusioned and pretty much just dropped everything (except ranting online like a grouchy old man).
But during that period, I had a lot of correspondence that quite likely would have triggered interest from intelligence agencies: I was active in marxist organisation, and I spent a substantial amount of time contacting groups in various parts of the world to try to kickstart and international network.
That included contacts with several anarchist/communist/socialist/trotskyist groups in the US, as well as trade union organisers. It also included contact with other international groups and persons, some in countries where just expressing their political views to the wrong person could potentially get them imprisoned, and some of those countries are countries where the US is or were cosy with the incumbent regimes and where the CIA are known to have kidnapped and "rendered" people to for torture.
While there was undoubtably surveillance happening back then too, if I was in contact with these people today, I'd have to deal with the certainty of extensive surveillance, and the situation that the mere fact I was in contact with them ("metadata" would be sufficient to implicate these people as being in contact with people who'd label them as likely troublemakers) could potentially put them at risk of being imprisoned or worse because of US intelligence agencies. Despite the fact that none of the people I was in contact with ever planned anything that'd be illegal in any democratic country (though some were willing to face the risk of illegal peaceful demonstrations in countries that weren't).
Even just the knowledge of surveillance at this scale is stifling freedom of speech for those who does not know or are willing to engage in the hassle of taking technical measures to protect their speech, and will add serious restrictions for those who do know, and see it as important enough.
And here in Europe few people care - I've done consulting work work with defence institutions, for example.I might have a problem getting top secret clearance perhaps, though I doubt it - most countries don't consider the type of organisations I was involved with enough of a concern anymore. Now, if I were to lie about it when asked, I'm sure they'd find out and it'd be an issue.
There are certainly places I would want to be careful. The irony, though, is that politically I'd probably be seen with more suspicion in places like Cuba and China than in the US, as if these governments were to look into my political activity they'd find connections to groups they see as ideologically threatening (such as contact with Trotskyist groups like the Spartacists, which is a bigger ideological no-no). I've visited China, and did make very sure to keep my mouth firmly shut about politics for that reason.
I like sex, I really do. But that doesn't mean I want to be drugged and raped by the police or stealth-humped by anyone. If anyone wants to have sex with me, I'd like to know before the act and definitely need to have a say in whether or not it'll happen.
I can only speak for myself, but my only sin is to still have an iPhone (soon to be replaced by an Ubuntu phone).
Apart from this, I have left all of the NSA partner companies' products/services in favor of open-source products (or else nothing). It's really not that difficult, much more of psychological "hurdle".
For those who missed it: https://prism-break.org/ is a good start.