9 ms·

Why you should bet big on privacy

107 points by oulipo 10y ago

sandworm101 10y ago
>>> Don’t be surprised if your insurance company starts charging you more because of how it thinks you should live your life! I almost stopped reading there. The author does not understand that the privacy right is held by the individual. It can be waived. A generation ago we thought that people wanted to protect their privacy. We now know that many don't. Many will trade their entire life history for a discount coffee. Why should we deny these people their right to abandon their own privacy?
- nhaehnle 10y ago
  For very similar reasons as the ones for which we deny people the right to unsafe food and drink. What do you think would happen if supermarkets were allowed to have shelves with cheaper groceries that are not subject to the usual health standards? People will gladly trade their health for discount coffee as well. Do you think that's a good idea as well?
  - icebraining 10y ago
    As long as they were clearly marked, I don't see why not. They'd probably be better than the food from dumpsters that people get when they can't afford to buy from the supermarket.
    - reitanqild 10y ago
      There has been some focus on dumpster diving for food in TV here the last few years, mostly positive. Also, as people who are into cheese or beef will tell you: you should go for the oldest one available at the shelf anyway ;-)
    - soundwave106 10y ago
      Food safety is often about issues that by definition are not going to be labeled. The consumer, for instance, isn't going to know if the producer used adulterated ingredients irregardless of what is labeled, and sometimes irregardless of whether it is deadly or not. Likewise, it may not be obvious if something was stored at an improper temperature (or otherwise mishandled) and is also likewise unsafe to eat. These type of food safety issues aren't one where choice is an option, these are issues of malice or neglect. The right of privacy is individual, sure, and can be waived for purposes. Some might not mind. I'm personally okay with that side. But I also think it's pretty easy to come up with examples of private data being misused due to malice and/or neglect. (Particularly the later... it sure seems like companies have a poor track record in keeping data secure.)
      - icebraining 10y ago
        Food safety is often about issues that by definition are not going to be labeled. I don't understand your argument. Why are they by definition not going to be labeled? We're discussing the merits of replacing the current law that bans the sale of potentially unsafe food with one that requires such food to be clearly labeled. To know which food they can't sell, producers must know which food is potentially unsafe, therefore they could label it instead. And if you're going to assume that producers will break the law, why would they respect the law banning the sale? I also think it's pretty easy to come up with examples of private data being misused due to malice and/or neglect. It's pretty easy to find malice and neglect in almost every possible social interaction. By itself, it can't be a sufficient argument, otherwise we'd be prohibiting people from having children!
        soundwave106 10y ago
        Let's take a sample case: the widely known case of Chinese milk producers that sold milk adulterated with melamine. You assume simply labeling the milk with the melamine is all that is required? That the responsibility of not ingesting what could be a lethal poison that can cause renal failure should fall entirely on the consumer alone? Personally, I doubt it (at any rate I am aware of no law where victim ignorance is a defense for a malicious act). Now, I do understand what you are saying for cases where the safety risk is more minimal or specific, labeling is all that is needed. So food safety laws often are fine with people consuming, say, undercooked / raw seafood, provided a warning is given that certain people probably should avoid this type of food. I think in a way we're talking about different things, but "food standards" cover a lot of things. Anyways, this is where I come from in regard to privacy. I don't believe that every time you waive your right to privacy, something awful happens. So I'm not talking about a general ban of waiving the right to privacy. However, I do believe privacy standards need to be strengthened to help prevent (or at least correct) such cases as malicious misuse of private data (example: doxxing) and neglect of private data (example: hacked websites that expose databases of information to criminals).
  - r00fus 10y ago
    Just like poor health standards enable a toxic and possibly infectious environment... Could we not argue that poor privacy standards create a toxic environment for everyone, not just the poor who are directly subjected to it? By moving privacy to "only those who have paid for it" you're moving the liability for privacy to the victim rather than the perpetrator.
- Aelinsaar 10y ago
  Did people realize what they were trading, for how long, and for how little?
  - mortendahl 10y ago
    it seems unlikely that Google, Facebook, etc. are offering us a good deal in exchange for our data; why would they when we don't even know what the fair price is
    - Aelinsaar 10y ago
      They have some idea, given that they're largely responsible for monetizing it. The economy in trading personal information certainly assigns a set value to it. In any case, there is also the question of how many people underage, or otherwise not in a position to give what a reasonable person would see as "informed consent" are swept into this as well. A lot, I suspect.
      - mortendahl 10y ago
        I agree that the before mentioned companies most likely have a pretty good idea, but also that a lot of users cannot give informed consent to use your words. When we go to a restaurant we can at least make a comparison based on experience; in the case of personal data we are rarely given access to data that allows us to build up any such intuition.
        icebraining 10y ago
        Sure you can: you can compare the various types of services (search engines, social networks, etc) and see who offers the best bang for the private data buck.
- Msasania1993 10y ago
  Sure, if you don't mind companies selling your data for their profit nobody is taking away that right from you. But for those of us who do mind, there is no option whatsoever. People who care about Privacy are the ones denied of their choice. If 99% of the service providers I use today are telling me they won't give me service unless I share my data, what kind of choice does that leave me?
  - sandworm101 10y ago
    They will take your data but there isn't anything saying you have to give it to them, or that it must be accurate. Tor, pgp, VPNs, Adblockers, noscript, linux ... there are always choices. Imho we actually live in a bit of a golden age for privacy. Never have there been as many so sophisticated tools available for those who care to use them.
    - Loughla 10y ago
      The learning curve and loss of features precludes most average people from enjoying the benefits of the items you list there.
      - Msasania1993 10y ago
        Also, these tech-savvy choices require extra steps to be set up and don't integrate well on all operating systems. Average users simply do not know how to protect themselves, unless they get out of their way to do so.
    - robgibbons 10y ago
      I categorically disagree with the premise that we live in anything resembling a golden age of privacy. On the contrary, IMHO we are approaching the clichéd Orwellian system of Big Brother. Don't forget for a second that the privacy tools we currently have only exist due to the rampant and ubiquitous nature of tracking these days. CCTV cameras. "Real Name" policies. Corporate monetization of user data. Third-party cookie networks. Password/data leaks. Doxxing. Tape over laptop webcams. PRISM. TVs with built-in microphones and cameras. Facebook listening to your ambient audio. It is an incessant and relentless reality that everything we say, do, and soon think, is being collated to enable later correlation possibly years from now.
- jhayward 10y ago
  > Why should we deny these people their right to abandon their own privacy? Because desperate people can be coerced to give up anything, whether they truly want to or not. Because these sorts of issues form the basis for many kinds of discrimination that society finds unacceptable. Big="L" Libertarians and Randians opinions notwithstanding, there are worse things than preventing a race-to-the-bottom society built on degradation of the weakest individuals.
  - nostrademons 10y ago
    Privacy issues aside, I'm not sure that the folks who trade their privacy for a discount coffee count as "desperate" in any sense of the word. I do think that they perhaps haven't thought through the implications of what giving up their purchasing history could mean in a decade or two. Or maybe they have, and they're making the very rational choice to focus on the concrete effects of the here & now rather than some abstract consequences in the future. Data has an expiration date, after all.
    - Bartweiss 10y ago
      I think that, as the fight over 'metadata' implies, most people haven't realized how powerful non-central data can be. People who wouldn't tell you their home address, relationship status, or buying history share that information with a dozen companies that collect it implicitly. Of course, we do make some conscious decisions to give up privacy - I don't give a damn who knows what I buy at the grocery store, so I'll have it tracked for 3% off - but a lot what people agree to isn't.
    - hackuser 10y ago
      > I'm not sure that the folks who trade their privacy for a discount coffee count as "desperate" in any sense of the word. I think you have a point, but consider that there are many people who are counting every penny. But more importantly, consider the larger point that privacy shouldn't be only for those who can afford it.
      - icebraining 10y ago
- wfo 10y ago
  Why should we deny people the right to sell themselves into slavery? It's their life, after all. Perhaps in a generation or two our society will degrade to the point that, to the poor, slavery looks like a pretty attractive option. For some, perhaps it already does. In any capitalist system, if anything is permitted, someone (i.e. the poor) will be coerced into doing it.
  - icebraining 10y ago
    Slavery already exists, it's just hidden from sight. A truly compassionate society would offer better alternatives, so that nobody would be coerced. Prohibitionism is not a solution to anything except to the guilt in the moral conscience of the well-fed middle class.
    - wfo 10y ago
      Well of course a compassionate society would provide basic needs for everyone, but while we sit around holding hands praying for utopia to come to America overnight in the form of the end of free-market capitalist extremism let's do what we can to stop people from being exploited in the meantime. We aren't discussing restructuring all of society radically and enacting a massive cultural and political revolution right now, we are discussing specific privacy law in specific technical settings in our socioeconomic and legal circumstances. Prohibition works very well, depending on the circumstances. But you know this, of course: you are simply making a rhetorically contentless incendiary broad generalization. Murder is illegal and there is less murder. Fraud is illegal and there is less fraud.
      - icebraining 10y ago
        we can to stop people from being exploited in the meantime. My point is that they are being exploited, because even being exploited is better than the alternatives they have, and by prohibiting it, you're actually harming the people you're supposedly trying to help. My argument is not a Nirvana fallacy. I'm saying that we're actually better off doing nothing than prohibiting people from taking the least worse option they have. If we want to help, we should provide an alternative (and no, this certainly doesn't require an end of capitalism). If we can't do that, we should leave it alone. Prohibition works very well, depending on the circumstances. But you know this, of course: you are simply making a rhetorically contentless incendiary broad generalization. Murder is illegal and there is less murder. Fraud is illegal and there is less fraud. I thought it was clear from context, but I'll be specific: I'm talking about Prohibitionism as in preventing people from deciding what to do with their lives "for their own good", much like the Prohitibion Party did with alcohol in the early 20th century.
- Bartweiss 10y ago
  I don't think there's much risk of people losing the right to abandon their privacy - much more likely is losing the right to maintain that privacy. How many people do you think are fully aware of what tracking they're subject to? Every time you hit a webpage, or see a "share on Facebook" button, or take a smartphone somewhere, that's another data point. Usually the concession of privacy is made before you know what you're agreeing to - you open a webpage, then see how many tendrils of user tracking you've just been touched by. If you want to talk about whether I should be able to sell my private information, absolutely. I can sell it for discounts (on insurance, say) or straight cash (see Datacoup) and that's my right. But it feels like burying the real issue to discuss that instead of the unannounced, implicit-consent tracking that defines most of our technology today.
vonklaus 10y ago
Here is an unsolicited email I sent last night. I sent it to spinn3r, but any company doing "competitive intelligience", market research, big data, ect can be subbed in here for their name, because the browser and search engine wars are starting. The email: Just read the blog post on optimizing the elasticsearch cluster. It sounds like you have a pretty awesome deployment setup. Now, I know competitive intelligience is "hot" and "trendy", I mean, for sure it isn't mobile-first omni-channel blockchain bitcoin disruptive "trendy", but it's prety close. Now, I jest, but what I am about to say next I am dead serious about: your product is a search engine, just let people use it as a goddamn search engine. Now, let me explain. For like probably over a year now I have been making the case that between google, elastic and apache there is just a goddamn open source version of google sitting out there. Would a consumer facing pay for search engine be profitable? idk, is your product profitable? I suspect there is a lot of people who would pay a $9.99 a month to upload and control page rank and not have google own them. Lets assume you were able to capture even 0.01% of googles customers e.g. 1 billion people and got them to pay you like $9.99, then you'd have just shy of $1M MRR, and $11.98M annually. Obviously, you could do some nice caching of resources like stack overflow, reddit, hacker news, and wikipedia and simply store peoples preferences (sort of a heirarchical git like system) and then you would have some pretty swiggity sweet optimizations. You know what might really add value? Having NLP on your own custom tailored information database. I bet people (who search and use the internet daily) would probably see much higher leverage from this than the sentiment analytics you can give them on a competitor. Also, as an aside, you should be mining the competitors customer support channels not only for sentiment but for their inabiliy to service feature requests/complaints. Proabably one of the biggest predictors of why wealthfront lost MS to betterment. Regardless though, if you guys are looking for an expansion strategy or a pivot, this is it. tl;dr. Peter Theil was wrong (no, not just about Clinkle) but it is true that: The next larry page & sergei brin will build a search engine.
- ChuckMcM 10y ago
  Having "been there, done that, got the t-shirt" I can tell you that no, there currently is no market for an unbiased search engine. We (Blekko) couldn't even get enough people to give up an email address in exchange for more control over their search experience.
robgibbons 10y ago
Ironically, while reading this article I had 38 requests blocked by uBlock Origin, and another 18 by Privacy Badger. Don't shoot the messenger.
- Animats 10y ago
  Only 17 were found by Ghostery. Time to upgrade the blocker. TechCrunch is part of Aol, which is now a content farm service.
  - Bartweiss 10y ago
    I've been using Ghostery for a while, it looks like time to move to Privacy Badger (I'm never sad for a chance to use an EFF product, anyway). One more TechCrunch tracker blocked, thanks TechCrunch!
AgentME 10y ago
I like the article, but a line in it triggers one of my pet peeves. >These companies are basically engaging in mass surveillance. Just as governments justify tracking us to prevent terrorist attacks, these companies are tracking us online, without our consent, ... This equivalence that people often draw bugs me, because companies don't coerce people into being tracked. I can choose to or withold my consent with regards to companies. I can pick and choose to do business with more privacy-respecting companies, and I can block my browser from talking to popular tracking domains. Companies can't threaten me with legal trouble (jail, etc) if I want to run my own websites or programs that respect privacy or use cryptography. It's government surveillance that I don't have a choice of avoiding, short of avoiding the internet. Sure, cryptography does a lot of good, but it's a freedom that is repeatedly threatened, especially it seems like whenever anyone makes a too-convenient tool for it.
- numlocked 10y ago
  That's technically true, but not practically; tracking pixels, embedded 'like' buttons, etc. You are being followed around the internet by large companies, even if you don't directly use their services and avoid FB, Google, etc. entirely (which I think is a reasonable standard for an average user). I agree the distinction is important in that you can e.g. elect to not be a customer of a company, but can't exactly opt out of the government. But there are still plenty of underhanded privacy violations that companies can 'coerce' you into unknowingly. The best-practice security and privacy tools you cite, like Tor, end-to-end crypto, etc, are just as effective protecting against government privacy violations as they are coporate ones.
  - mortendahl 10y ago
    I agree with numlocked that the option of opt-out from companies is less clear, in part because we are on a course where this becomes increasingly strange and irrational. Reminded me of a post on algorithms (data) and conformity: https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2016/01/the_risksand_benefit.html https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2016/01/the_risksan...
    - 10y ago
SeanDav 10y ago
Interesting to note that one of the sites the article refers you to (http://www.youronlinechoices.com/uk/your-ad-choices http://www.youronlinechoices.com/uk/your-ad-choices) to check for trackers, has quite a few trackers of its own...oh the irony...
rhindi 10y ago
Author here! I am the founder of https://snips.ai https://snips.ai. At Snips, we are building an assistant that is private by design: what I describe in the article are things we actually work on today :-) Happy to share my thoughts on it and contribute to the debate! More details about what we do: Like the big software companies (the G, the A, the F, the M), we want to build an AI to help you get what you want more effectively. But we believe this can only be done if we take care of people privacy: your AI should ultimately know your favorite restaurant, your girlfriend’s name, but also your health record and everything else you might not always feel comfortable sharing with the world at large. This is why an AI alter-ego will have to work with privacy-by-design. You should not have to trust any company whose CEO might soon be replaced by another not as trustful one. We think about your data as your most intimate and valuable property, and we want to use it without compromising its safety!
- WireWrap 10y ago
  > your AI should ultimately know your favorite restaurant, your girlfriend’s name, but also your health record and everything else you might not always feel comfortable sharing with the world at large. No. It should know what the user wants it to know. Which may or may not be those things.
  - oulipo 10y ago
    Of course! But if one day you want it to help you with your health habits, it will help if it can guarantee that it is private-by-design, so you know that the information about your health won't leak
proofofconcept 10y ago
I'm glad that the general public is growing more aware of privacy issues but the more cynical part of my brain tells me that, since the government and a very large industry share an interest in eroding privacy as much as possible, putting stronger privacy protections into place won't be easy no matter how many people say that's what they want. I want to feel confident betting on privacy, I really do, but I won't until I see some evidence that growing public awareness is getting politicians to address privacy issues directly instead of brushing them aside to focus on other, politically sexier issues.
- rhindi 10y ago
  Hey author here! I think the debate comes more and more often in the public opinion, and I believe privacy will soon become something people will demand when they buy hardware and software, just like memory capacity or battery usage. But we don't need to wait for politicians to move on this issue, we can already do a lot without tem! There is growing research on privacy-by-design algorithms, on which we work at my company Snips (https://snips.ai https://snips.ai), which will ultimately prevent governments and companies to use data without having the explicit permission of users, what we believe is their right!
xphilter 10y ago
I find it interesting that TechCrunch publishes (albeit through the "contributor network") a piece that derides tracking and declares "Privacy [a]s a fundamental human right" on the same day it runs another piece saying that one of the only US federal laws protecting privacy (the VPPA) is "anachronistic" and "illogical and unclear." I'm not all the way on the "fundamental human right" side, but I do think consumers should have more control over their privacy and laws the VPPA help--especially when an easy way to get around the VPPA is to get consent! Here's the link to the other article. http://techcrunch.com/2016/05/24/a-vhs-era-privacy-law-in-the-digital-age/ http://techcrunch.com/2016/05/24/a-vhs-era-privacy-law-in-th...
superobserver 10y ago
I am almost baffled by the notion that here we're seeing divulging profoundly personal information being flipped on its head with the concept of privacy-by-design, but since we now live in the post-1984 era, I guess this refined level of doublespeak should not be so surprising. "Don't be such a worry worm. If you don't trust us, you can trust our algorithm all the same as your very soul mate. Honest!"

107 points by oulipo 10y ago

>>> Don’t be surprised if your insurance company starts charging you more because of how it thinks you should live your life! I almost stopped reading there. The author does not understand that the privacy right is held by the individual. It can be waived. A generation ago we thought that people wanted to protect their privacy. We now know that many don't. Many will trade their entire life history for a discount coffee. Why should we deny these people their right to abandon their own privacy?

nhaehnle 10y ago
For very similar reasons as the ones for which we deny people the right to unsafe food and drink. What do you think would happen if supermarkets were allowed to have shelves with cheaper groceries that are not subject to the usual health standards? People will gladly trade their health for discount coffee as well. Do you think that's a good idea as well?
- icebraining 10y ago
  As long as they were clearly marked, I don't see why not. They'd probably be better than the food from dumpsters that people get when they can't afford to buy from the supermarket.
  - reitanqild 10y ago
    There has been some focus on dumpster diving for food in TV here the last few years, mostly positive. Also, as people who are into cheese or beef will tell you: you should go for the oldest one available at the shelf anyway ;-)
  - soundwave106 10y ago
    Food safety is often about issues that by definition are not going to be labeled. The consumer, for instance, isn't going to know if the producer used adulterated ingredients irregardless of what is labeled, and sometimes irregardless of whether it is deadly or not. Likewise, it may not be obvious if something was stored at an improper temperature (or otherwise mishandled) and is also likewise unsafe to eat. These type of food safety issues aren't one where choice is an option, these are issues of malice or neglect. The right of privacy is individual, sure, and can be waived for purposes. Some might not mind. I'm personally okay with that side. But I also think it's pretty easy to come up with examples of private data being misused due to malice and/or neglect. (Particularly the later... it sure seems like companies have a poor track record in keeping data secure.)
    - icebraining 10y ago
      Food safety is often about issues that by definition are not going to be labeled. I don't understand your argument. Why are they by definition not going to be labeled? We're discussing the merits of replacing the current law that bans the sale of potentially unsafe food with one that requires such food to be clearly labeled. To know which food they can't sell, producers must know which food is potentially unsafe, therefore they could label it instead. And if you're going to assume that producers will break the law, why would they respect the law banning the sale? I also think it's pretty easy to come up with examples of private data being misused due to malice and/or neglect. It's pretty easy to find malice and neglect in almost every possible social interaction. By itself, it can't be a sufficient argument, otherwise we'd be prohibiting people from having children!
      - soundwave106 10y ago
        Let's take a sample case: the widely known case of Chinese milk producers that sold milk adulterated with melamine. You assume simply labeling the milk with the melamine is all that is required? That the responsibility of not ingesting what could be a lethal poison that can cause renal failure should fall entirely on the consumer alone? Personally, I doubt it (at any rate I am aware of no law where victim ignorance is a defense for a malicious act). Now, I do understand what you are saying for cases where the safety risk is more minimal or specific, labeling is all that is needed. So food safety laws often are fine with people consuming, say, undercooked / raw seafood, provided a warning is given that certain people probably should avoid this type of food. I think in a way we're talking about different things, but "food standards" cover a lot of things. Anyways, this is where I come from in regard to privacy. I don't believe that every time you waive your right to privacy, something awful happens. So I'm not talking about a general ban of waiving the right to privacy. However, I do believe privacy standards need to be strengthened to help prevent (or at least correct) such cases as malicious misuse of private data (example: doxxing) and neglect of private data (example: hacked websites that expose databases of information to criminals).
- r00fus 10y ago
  Just like poor health standards enable a toxic and possibly infectious environment... Could we not argue that poor privacy standards create a toxic environment for everyone, not just the poor who are directly subjected to it? By moving privacy to "only those who have paid for it" you're moving the liability for privacy to the victim rather than the perpetrator.
Aelinsaar 10y ago
Did people realize what they were trading, for how long, and for how little?
- mortendahl 10y ago
  it seems unlikely that Google, Facebook, etc. are offering us a good deal in exchange for our data; why would they when we don't even know what the fair price is
  - Aelinsaar 10y ago
    They have some idea, given that they're largely responsible for monetizing it. The economy in trading personal information certainly assigns a set value to it. In any case, there is also the question of how many people underage, or otherwise not in a position to give what a reasonable person would see as "informed consent" are swept into this as well. A lot, I suspect.
    - mortendahl 10y ago
      I agree that the before mentioned companies most likely have a pretty good idea, but also that a lot of users cannot give informed consent to use your words. When we go to a restaurant we can at least make a comparison based on experience; in the case of personal data we are rarely given access to data that allows us to build up any such intuition.
      - icebraining 10y ago
        Sure you can: you can compare the various types of services (search engines, social networks, etc) and see who offers the best bang for the private data buck.
Msasania1993 10y ago
Sure, if you don't mind companies selling your data for their profit nobody is taking away that right from you. But for those of us who do mind, there is no option whatsoever. People who care about Privacy are the ones denied of their choice. If 99% of the service providers I use today are telling me they won't give me service unless I share my data, what kind of choice does that leave me?
- sandworm101 10y ago
  They will take your data but there isn't anything saying you have to give it to them, or that it must be accurate. Tor, pgp, VPNs, Adblockers, noscript, linux ... there are always choices. Imho we actually live in a bit of a golden age for privacy. Never have there been as many so sophisticated tools available for those who care to use them.
  - Loughla 10y ago
    The learning curve and loss of features precludes most average people from enjoying the benefits of the items you list there.
    - Msasania1993 10y ago
      Also, these tech-savvy choices require extra steps to be set up and don't integrate well on all operating systems. Average users simply do not know how to protect themselves, unless they get out of their way to do so.
  - robgibbons 10y ago
    I categorically disagree with the premise that we live in anything resembling a golden age of privacy. On the contrary, IMHO we are approaching the clichéd Orwellian system of Big Brother. Don't forget for a second that the privacy tools we currently have only exist due to the rampant and ubiquitous nature of tracking these days. CCTV cameras. "Real Name" policies. Corporate monetization of user data. Third-party cookie networks. Password/data leaks. Doxxing. Tape over laptop webcams. PRISM. TVs with built-in microphones and cameras. Facebook listening to your ambient audio. It is an incessant and relentless reality that everything we say, do, and soon think, is being collated to enable later correlation possibly years from now.
jhayward 10y ago
> Why should we deny these people their right to abandon their own privacy? Because desperate people can be coerced to give up anything, whether they truly want to or not. Because these sorts of issues form the basis for many kinds of discrimination that society finds unacceptable. Big="L" Libertarians and Randians opinions notwithstanding, there are worse things than preventing a race-to-the-bottom society built on degradation of the weakest individuals.
- nostrademons 10y ago
  Privacy issues aside, I'm not sure that the folks who trade their privacy for a discount coffee count as "desperate" in any sense of the word. I do think that they perhaps haven't thought through the implications of what giving up their purchasing history could mean in a decade or two. Or maybe they have, and they're making the very rational choice to focus on the concrete effects of the here & now rather than some abstract consequences in the future. Data has an expiration date, after all.
  - Bartweiss 10y ago
    I think that, as the fight over 'metadata' implies, most people haven't realized how powerful non-central data can be. People who wouldn't tell you their home address, relationship status, or buying history share that information with a dozen companies that collect it implicitly. Of course, we do make some conscious decisions to give up privacy - I don't give a damn who knows what I buy at the grocery store, so I'll have it tracked for 3% off - but a lot what people agree to isn't.
  - hackuser 10y ago
    > I'm not sure that the folks who trade their privacy for a discount coffee count as "desperate" in any sense of the word. I think you have a point, but consider that there are many people who are counting every penny. But more importantly, consider the larger point that privacy shouldn't be only for those who can afford it.
    - icebraining 10y ago
wfo 10y ago
Why should we deny people the right to sell themselves into slavery? It's their life, after all. Perhaps in a generation or two our society will degrade to the point that, to the poor, slavery looks like a pretty attractive option. For some, perhaps it already does. In any capitalist system, if anything is permitted, someone (i.e. the poor) will be coerced into doing it.
- icebraining 10y ago
  Slavery already exists, it's just hidden from sight. A truly compassionate society would offer better alternatives, so that nobody would be coerced. Prohibitionism is not a solution to anything except to the guilt in the moral conscience of the well-fed middle class.
  - wfo 10y ago
    Well of course a compassionate society would provide basic needs for everyone, but while we sit around holding hands praying for utopia to come to America overnight in the form of the end of free-market capitalist extremism let's do what we can to stop people from being exploited in the meantime. We aren't discussing restructuring all of society radically and enacting a massive cultural and political revolution right now, we are discussing specific privacy law in specific technical settings in our socioeconomic and legal circumstances. Prohibition works very well, depending on the circumstances. But you know this, of course: you are simply making a rhetorically contentless incendiary broad generalization. Murder is illegal and there is less murder. Fraud is illegal and there is less fraud.
    - icebraining 10y ago
      we can to stop people from being exploited in the meantime. My point is that they are being exploited, because even being exploited is better than the alternatives they have, and by prohibiting it, you're actually harming the people you're supposedly trying to help. My argument is not a Nirvana fallacy. I'm saying that we're actually better off doing nothing than prohibiting people from taking the least worse option they have. If we want to help, we should provide an alternative (and no, this certainly doesn't require an end of capitalism). If we can't do that, we should leave it alone. Prohibition works very well, depending on the circumstances. But you know this, of course: you are simply making a rhetorically contentless incendiary broad generalization. Murder is illegal and there is less murder. Fraud is illegal and there is less fraud. I thought it was clear from context, but I'll be specific: I'm talking about Prohibitionism as in preventing people from deciding what to do with their lives "for their own good", much like the Prohitibion Party did with alcohol in the early 20th century.
Bartweiss 10y ago
I don't think there's much risk of people losing the right to abandon their privacy - much more likely is losing the right to maintain that privacy. How many people do you think are fully aware of what tracking they're subject to? Every time you hit a webpage, or see a "share on Facebook" button, or take a smartphone somewhere, that's another data point. Usually the concession of privacy is made before you know what you're agreeing to - you open a webpage, then see how many tendrils of user tracking you've just been touched by. If you want to talk about whether I should be able to sell my private information, absolutely. I can sell it for discounts (on insurance, say) or straight cash (see Datacoup) and that's my right. But it feels like burying the real issue to discuss that instead of the unannounced, implicit-consent tracking that defines most of our technology today.

vonklaus 10y ago

Here is an unsolicited email I sent last night. I sent it to spinn3r, but any company doing "competitive intelligience", market research, big data, ect can be subbed in here for their name, because the browser and search engine wars are starting. The email: Just read the blog post on optimizing the elasticsearch cluster. It sounds like you have a pretty awesome deployment setup. Now, I know competitive intelligience is "hot" and "trendy", I mean, for sure it isn't mobile-first omni-channel blockchain bitcoin disruptive "trendy", but it's prety close. Now, I jest, but what I am about to say next I am dead serious about: your product is a search engine, just let people use it as a goddamn search engine. Now, let me explain. For like probably over a year now I have been making the case that between google, elastic and apache there is just a goddamn open source version of google sitting out there. Would a consumer facing pay for search engine be profitable? idk, is your product profitable? I suspect there is a lot of people who would pay a $9.99 a month to upload and control page rank and not have google own them. Lets assume you were able to capture even 0.01% of googles customers e.g. 1 billion people and got them to pay you like $9.99, then you'd have just shy of $1M MRR, and $11.98M annually. Obviously, you could do some nice caching of resources like stack overflow, reddit, hacker news, and wikipedia and simply store peoples preferences (sort of a heirarchical git like system) and then you would have some pretty swiggity sweet optimizations. You know what might really add value? Having NLP on your own custom tailored information database. I bet people (who search and use the internet daily) would probably see much higher leverage from this than the sentiment analytics you can give them on a competitor. Also, as an aside, you should be mining the competitors customer support channels not only for sentiment but for their inabiliy to service feature requests/complaints. Proabably one of the biggest predictors of why wealthfront lost MS to betterment. Regardless though, if you guys are looking for an expansion strategy or a pivot, this is it. tl;dr. Peter Theil was wrong (no, not just about Clinkle) but it is true that: The next larry page & sergei brin will build a search engine.

ChuckMcM 10y ago
Having "been there, done that, got the t-shirt" I can tell you that no, there currently is no market for an unbiased search engine. We (Blekko) couldn't even get enough people to give up an email address in exchange for more control over their search experience.

robgibbons 10y ago

Ironically, while reading this article I had 38 requests blocked by uBlock Origin, and another 18 by Privacy Badger. Don't shoot the messenger.

Animats 10y ago
Only 17 were found by Ghostery. Time to upgrade the blocker. TechCrunch is part of Aol, which is now a content farm service.
- Bartweiss 10y ago
  I've been using Ghostery for a while, it looks like time to move to Privacy Badger (I'm never sad for a chance to use an EFF product, anyway). One more TechCrunch tracker blocked, thanks TechCrunch!

AgentME 10y ago

I like the article, but a line in it triggers one of my pet peeves. >These companies are basically engaging in mass surveillance. Just as governments justify tracking us to prevent terrorist attacks, these companies are tracking us online, without our consent, ... This equivalence that people often draw bugs me, because companies don't coerce people into being tracked. I can choose to or withold my consent with regards to companies. I can pick and choose to do business with more privacy-respecting companies, and I can block my browser from talking to popular tracking domains. Companies can't threaten me with legal trouble (jail, etc) if I want to run my own websites or programs that respect privacy or use cryptography. It's government surveillance that I don't have a choice of avoiding, short of avoiding the internet. Sure, cryptography does a lot of good, but it's a freedom that is repeatedly threatened, especially it seems like whenever anyone makes a too-convenient tool for it.

numlocked 10y ago
That's technically true, but not practically; tracking pixels, embedded 'like' buttons, etc. You are being followed around the internet by large companies, even if you don't directly use their services and avoid FB, Google, etc. entirely (which I think is a reasonable standard for an average user). I agree the distinction is important in that you can e.g. elect to not be a customer of a company, but can't exactly opt out of the government. But there are still plenty of underhanded privacy violations that companies can 'coerce' you into unknowingly. The best-practice security and privacy tools you cite, like Tor, end-to-end crypto, etc, are just as effective protecting against government privacy violations as they are coporate ones.
- mortendahl 10y ago
  I agree with numlocked that the option of opt-out from companies is less clear, in part because we are on a course where this becomes increasingly strange and irrational. Reminded me of a post on algorithms (data) and conformity: https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2016/01/the_risksand_benefit.html https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2016/01/the_risksan...
  - 10y ago

SeanDav 10y ago

Interesting to note that one of the sites the article refers you to (http://www.youronlinechoices.com/uk/your-ad-choices http://www.youronlinechoices.com/uk/your-ad-choices) to check for trackers, has quite a few trackers of its own...oh the irony...

rhindi 10y ago

Author here! I am the founder of https://snips.ai https://snips.ai. At Snips, we are building an assistant that is private by design: what I describe in the article are things we actually work on today :-) Happy to share my thoughts on it and contribute to the debate! More details about what we do: Like the big software companies (the G, the A, the F, the M), we want to build an AI to help you get what you want more effectively. But we believe this can only be done if we take care of people privacy: your AI should ultimately know your favorite restaurant, your girlfriend’s name, but also your health record and everything else you might not always feel comfortable sharing with the world at large. This is why an AI alter-ego will have to work with privacy-by-design. You should not have to trust any company whose CEO might soon be replaced by another not as trustful one. We think about your data as your most intimate and valuable property, and we want to use it without compromising its safety!

WireWrap 10y ago
> your AI should ultimately know your favorite restaurant, your girlfriend’s name, but also your health record and everything else you might not always feel comfortable sharing with the world at large. No. It should know what the user wants it to know. Which may or may not be those things.
- oulipo 10y ago
  Of course! But if one day you want it to help you with your health habits, it will help if it can guarantee that it is private-by-design, so you know that the information about your health won't leak

proofofconcept 10y ago

I'm glad that the general public is growing more aware of privacy issues but the more cynical part of my brain tells me that, since the government and a very large industry share an interest in eroding privacy as much as possible, putting stronger privacy protections into place won't be easy no matter how many people say that's what they want. I want to feel confident betting on privacy, I really do, but I won't until I see some evidence that growing public awareness is getting politicians to address privacy issues directly instead of brushing them aside to focus on other, politically sexier issues.

rhindi 10y ago
Hey author here! I think the debate comes more and more often in the public opinion, and I believe privacy will soon become something people will demand when they buy hardware and software, just like memory capacity or battery usage. But we don't need to wait for politicians to move on this issue, we can already do a lot without tem! There is growing research on privacy-by-design algorithms, on which we work at my company Snips (https://snips.ai https://snips.ai), which will ultimately prevent governments and companies to use data without having the explicit permission of users, what we believe is their right!

xphilter 10y ago

I find it interesting that TechCrunch publishes (albeit through the "contributor network") a piece that derides tracking and declares "Privacy [a]s a fundamental human right" on the same day it runs another piece saying that one of the only US federal laws protecting privacy (the VPPA) is "anachronistic" and "illogical and unclear." I'm not all the way on the "fundamental human right" side, but I do think consumers should have more control over their privacy and laws the VPPA help--especially when an easy way to get around the VPPA is to get consent! Here's the link to the other article. http://techcrunch.com/2016/05/24/a-vhs-era-privacy-law-in-the-digital-age/ http://techcrunch.com/2016/05/24/a-vhs-era-privacy-law-in-th...

superobserver 10y ago

I am almost baffled by the notion that here we're seeing divulging profoundly personal information being flipped on its head with the concept of privacy-by-design, but since we now live in the post-1984 era, I guess this refined level of doublespeak should not be so surprising. "Don't be such a worry worm. If you don't trust us, you can trust our algorithm all the same as your very soul mate. Honest!"