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I used to feel strongly about not trading my privacy away for some convenience. For a long time I took a luddite pride in not being on various services, having

• jessaustin 10y ago
  I don't want to give up, and I don't want to check out. One thing to try, would be to lie more. We don't owe giant corporations the truth, but we especially don't owe them the whole truth. Never use your real name. Use fake addresses when you can. Use different email accounts for each site that needs one. Never use "social media logins". When you have to make payments, do so through Paypal or some other obfuscating service. Zealously delete cookies, and use whatever tech is available to help with that. There are probably theoretical ways around this, "fingerprinting" etc. It might be like outrunning the lion, however: one might only have to be faster than some other prey, who happily stays logged into FB all the time even when ordering sex toys and vaporizers.
  • Frondo 10y ago
    Yeah, but the convenience is, for example, I get cheap flight tickets, Cortana picks those out of my email and adds the trip to my calendar automatically, etc. How am I going to lie about any of that? If your answer involves paying cash for airline tickets, then we're back to the high-priced, inconvenient world I'm no longer interested in trying to maintain. Stuffing databases with fake data is fun when you're signing up for a newspaper paywall, sure, but that's not a sustainable, long-term solution. This is why I'm looking at law and society, that's the only way these rights will be preserved long-term.
    • knz 10y ago
      Isn't being selective with what you lie about the answer to this? If you don't care that Google know about a purchase then use your normal email/credit card etc. If you want additional privacy then use methods that allow this. Privacy can be a continuum. Given that it can probably be traced back to a mailing address and credit card these measures may be worthless anyway.
      • jessaustin 10y ago
        Flying commercially is never going to be a privacy-preserving activity, for a wide variety of reasons that have nothing to do with payments or online calendars. This is just a trade-off that one must accept.
        • dredmorbius 10y ago
          Not if you're John Gilmore.
    • deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
  • tunap 10y ago
    Give em all the bad info they deserve! I've been giving city park addresses, lottery hotlines and/or obscure character names to everyone but the essentials & the guv. My first lesson in guerrilla counter-marketing came when my book club mis-typed my middle initial and I was flooded with pre-approved credit cards with said typo. My twelve year old brain was alive with all the possibilities I could buy with free cash! Apparently, without a job, a SS# and that particular middle initial, I wasn't really pre-approved. Meh.
• k-mcgrady 10y ago
  >> "So I'm curious, are there any cities, counties, states with any sort of legislative efforts going on to strengthen the citizens' rights to privacy and ownership of data? Is there anyone we can look to as a model for "privacy and data ownership done right," something to work toward implementing at a national level? Is there any awareness group working to raise these issues in a way that's actually accessible to the general public? (Are they doing a good job at it?)" I'm in a similar position to you. I value my privacy and think it's an important right the needs to be protected. Unfortunately you miss out on a hell of a lot of things if you are strict about maintaining it (thanks mostly to ad supported web services). I also agree that it's through laws that this can be fixed. I think generally laws just can't keep up with the pace of technological change or are made by people with almost no technical knowledge. I'm actually just about to start studying for a law degree (I'm in my late 20's) so that I can apply my technical knowledge (I've been a full-time dev for the last 7 years) to privacy law. Hence I've been researching it a lot recently. The best group I've come across raising awareness and fighting for privacy is Privacy International. It's definitely worth checking out. They produce reports on privacy rights in countries throughout the world and they fight government legislation trying to erode our privacy rights. As for legislative efforts to strengthen privacy the EU's recent changes to data protection and data use of EU citizens by companies based outside the EU springs to mind (Privacy Shield). It's not great but there is effort to improve.
• zby 10y ago
  In theory the European Union has a bit better law than the US in this area. I write in theory - because in practice the USA does not need to abide by it - and it is mostly US companies that keep our data. As to the awareness group - I guess this will be controversial - but there are the Pirate Parties with privacy in the core of their ideology. Personally I think that we'll have to give up strict privacy - it is inevitable that more and more online devices will know more and more about us - but we need some time to adjust, to find out how to make a world without this strict privacy reasonable.
  • dublinben 10y ago
    This is only an inevitability because we do not control our software and hardware. It is entirely possible to replace most of these privacy-destroying technologies and services with privacy-respecting free software solutions. Check out this list of alternatives, for example: https://degooglisons-internet.org/liste?l=en https://degooglisons-internet.org/liste?l=en
    • zby 10y ago
      I am all for control of our devices (even though I can see some problems with for example cars) - but it is only a part of the problem. First of all we will never control other people devices - and they will know more and more about us. Second there will be more and more services that will require the devices we control to expose more and more data about us.
  • pjlegato 10y ago
    Additionally, and more importantly, the governments of EU countries themselves do not respect any of the supposed privacy laws. All EU countries have their own intelligence services that are doing substantially the same thing as the NSA does, every day.
    • vertex-four 10y ago
      Well, the EU didn't respect those laws in the first place when it decided we needed to allow US companies to store EU data, despite US companies being incapable of keeping it securely (by law). The whole situation is a mess and nobody's interested in fixing it.
• heimatau 10y ago
  Have you tried the Silent Circle's phone (Blackphone) [1]? I'm similar to you in many ways on privacy. If the price can come down for the Blackphone and Celluar data, I'd be all for it. It make take time though. [1] - https://www.silentcircle.com/products-and-solutions/devices/ https://www.silentcircle.com/products-and-solutions/devices/
• HSO 10y ago
  I also try to find a compromise. If we're talking pragmatic, as opposed to ideal, my suggestions in the current environment are: 1) Be offline as much as possible. I have banished the webbrowser from my phone and tablets. The main computer is completely airgapped; I keep an old laptop around to go online. But I installed an app called Self-Control and use it in whitelist mode. I keep a separate To Do list for things that require internet access and when the time I set in Self-Control has passed, I do all my "internet errands" in one go. Usually does not take more than 1-2 hours/ week all in all. 2) Since you care about privacy, you already do all this but for completeness sake: ublock, ghostery, etc. are your friend. I also use an app called Little Snitch. Very useful! Obviously, I don't approve of Facebook, Google etc. but I actually went one step further and block all their properties in Little Snitch. No beacons, "like buttons" or supercookies for me, thank you. 3) Even with (2), I avoid the web as much as possible. In fact, with the exception of HN, I'm usually not on the web anymore. For news or some light magazine reading, I download the PDF editions (or have them sent to my email). For documentation and manuals, I use an offline reader called Dash. When I want to watch a video, I use youtube-dl (on my "internet groceries day"). For ebooks, I have a dedicated reader that is completely offline (needless to say, I do not sync with "the cloud"; Marvin is an excellent alternative to iBooks for reading epubs). In general, all my media library is local: Music, movies, TV shows, magazines/newspapers,…. I don't do streaming, I don't do "cloud". Storage is cheap, why give up your privacy for nothing? Unlike fking webpages, PDFs don't track your reading/thinking behind your back, you can annotate them if you want, and overall I think they offer a better reading experience compared to a webbrowser, esp. on a bigger tablet like the iPad Pro or (haven't tried but should be the same) Surface. Since I really, really dislike ads (= being told what to think, how to feel, etc) I even paste over all the ads before I read a magazine or newspaper! After a bit of practice, I can do it now in about 1-2 minutes per PDF. It's a small price to pay to keep these mercenary memes from infiltrating your mind. 4) For email, I switched to Protonmail. I understand that the NSA can hack them if they really want, but that's okay, they are not my threat model. My goal is to keep what I write in confidence from being read by Google/Gmail, Microsoft/Hotmail etc. So I usually send "pseudo-encrypted" versions to such addresses (where the reader has to enter a simple password, just to keep it from being machine-read as per default). Alternatively, I might send an encrypted PDF if it's more formal or important. 5) For more fluid, extemporaneous communications with friends and family, I mainly use iMessages. In general, Apple is your sole remaining friend among the mainstream vendors (and like I said, I'm talking pragmatic here, not ideal). If someone is on Android, there's still the cross-platform Signal app. Facebook-owned Whatsapp is an obvious no-go. I found that people usually can understand if I explain it to them why. It's like second-hand smoking, only worse. If they insist on exposing me to their "smoke" (or, negative externalities), then I cut the contact. One last comment: If you feel like you are getting "de-synchronized" from your environment, consider that that might actually be a sign that you are detaching from the hivemind and starting to think on your own again. It's not a guarantee that you will be more (or more often) right than the crowd but at least you have a chance of thinking an interesting thought or developing your own good taste, of not being trite. So take courage! :-) I found that with a bit of effort, it's possible to keep some measure of privacy and make it a bit harder for these people to psychologically profile and manipulate you.
• Paul-ish 10y ago
  > Companies can still track me, my data's still out there. I don' think this is right. When you were being a "luddite" you probably had less data collected about you, but you couldn't see that. All you can see is the cool tech stuff you are missing out on, so you feel that keenly. I think the reason a lot of people give up their privacy is that they feel like they have lost it already, so they might as well "Get what they can" from it. I don't think this is the right way to think about things. Not every company is sharing data with every other company (yet), so each new toy/app/gadget you used by a different company creates a new entry in some database about you.
  • ACS_Solver 10y ago
    Yes, I think this is right. I have very privacy-conscious tech habits, and companies have some data on me, but probably far less than on the typical user of modern services. Some ways I protect myself: 1. Google account - I have one because it's required for Android, but I have never used Gmail, do not search from my Google account or ever log into it from my browser. 2. Facebook or any subsidiaries - never. 3. General Web browsing - reject 3rd party cookies automatically, browse with uBlock Origin, disabled JavaScript (via ScriptSafe) with selective enabling of scripts, Privacy Badger. 4. Only enter my real name online for things I explicitly need/want associated with me. Only enter my real address if actually needed for a delivery or other reason. 5. My mail client is set not to load remote images, which protects me from those 1x1 tracking images. Many of these make the Internet a better experience, and certainly protect my privacy to a large degree. Yes, corporations have some data on me, but not much, and it's not all correct. I also don't feel I'm missing out on too much cool tech stuff, a lot of the privacy-unfriendly stuff is entirely unnecessary, for me at least, or replaced by alternatives that are not much worse.
    • colordrops 10y ago
      Your steps are not even close to enough to mitigate tracking.
      • Sylos 10y ago
• therealmarv 10y ago
  Speaking about countries.... yes there are countries like e.g. Germany with strict privacy laws. The problem with this laws are... they should theoretically protect your privacy but they stop at the border. So the privacy laws are strict for German companies and maybe also some of EU countries... but data from a foreign company like e.g. Facebook do not stop at borders. There are many legal cases that say what Facebook (I'm only using FB as an example) is doing is illegal in Germany but how would you stop an international company betraying your privacy laws in the Internet? Creating a company in Germany which does not respect your privacy is impossible there (maybe this is the reason we are not world class at internet companies).
• wyager 10y ago
  I'm more concerned about the government tracking me than private companies tracking me. As we've seen with the NSA over the last few years, mere laws will not stop the government from spying on you (if you can convince them to implement token restrictions on government surveillance in the first place, which is not often the case).
  • deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
• zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 10y ago
  > I don't want to give up, and I don't want to check out. I like my shiny devices and assistants now, they make my life easier in little ways all the time. How can we balance that with the basic human right to own our data and retain our privacy? You can't. If you want to have the security of a democracy, you have to accept the inefficiencies of a democracy (as far as the power structures are concerned, it's pretty analogous to the difference between a dictatorship and a democracy).
• SEJeff 10y ago
  This is a somewhat spooky, but eerily relevant talk from the CEO of In-Q-Tell, the venture capital arm of the CIA he gave at a security conference not long ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxLJExWk9GE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxLJExWk9GE He mentions that we are past the point of being a luddite much mattering. Much of your activity can be inferred through activity of your friends, family, and those around you.
  • placeybordeaux 10y ago
    This is a great talk, the speaker details some of the ways he tries to protect his own privacy and how useless that can be.
    • SEJeff 10y ago
      And of all the people sans Snowden, or people like him, this guy is also in a place to know.
  • jacquesm 10y ago
    Lone wolfs are called that for a reason.
• mgraczyk 10y ago
  > It's a basic human right. What do you mean by that? That phrase always struck me as an argument-ending non-argument. What if I disagree that you have a "right" to privacy in any meaningful way? What if I think that I have a basic human right to control the data you choose to upload to my server?
  • SCHiM 10y ago
    We'll first of all it's turtles all the way down. Like all morality there isn't an absolute answer that tells us what is good or bad in a secular setting. So the thing that comes closest is the culture and history we've been carrying with us. And that the 'right' to privacy has been a 'right' for a long time (eg. the right to private conversations and mail etc.)
    • pjlegato 10y ago
      Only in western democracies. In Russia and China, for example, the government has the legal right to monitor any communication whatsoever, and always has.
  • dredmorbius 10y ago
    There's a long litarture and philosophical debate on the whole concept of human rights. I also tend not to find those discussions particularly productive, as it's something a "get out of rational discussion free" card: a person can simply declare that some favourite property or aspect is some universally privileged right. I'm less familiar with the debate, its particulars, and various advocates than I'd like to be. Generally, though, I find the empirical arguments more persuasive. This isn't because I don't like the specific rights conveyed. Generally, most liberal rights strike me as personally quite desirable. And preferable on a social basis. It's the latter which I think makes a better basis for arguing for (or against) rights. There are rules of behavior, including rules reserved to individuals, which seem to make for more viable societies, cultures, and civilisations. There are also, though, overabundances of freedoms which can be counterproductive -- as Will Durant has noted, if you've got a choice between an excess of order or an excess of liberty, he'd choose order, because you still have order. (Mind, I'm not entirely convinced he's correct either.) But generally: a right (conditional, empirically-based, predicated on an increase in overall social welfare) to privacy strikes me as something which, on balance, tends to promote rather than diminish preferred function of society as a whole. And a loss of that privacy generates highly negative consequences. I'm les
• hackuser 10y ago
  > Companies can still track me, my data's still out there. It's not all or nothing. Like any security (and confidentiality is one of the three pillars of security), there's no perfect solution but you can make it more costly for attackers. A few things that help for little cost: * Use a pre-paid phone plan; don't give your identity to the telco. (Maybe not possible in all countries.) * Use a VPN and/or Tor. Protect your browsing habits from your ISP. * Use an ad-blocker or something like uMatrix to stop most tracking * Pay for things with cash when possible. If it was invented today, we'd all be impressed with the technology: Complete trust between strangers, anonymous financial transactions - all implemented in paper; no encryption needed. * Use one of the many anonymous, confidential communication services for chat, text and voice. But I agree that the answer in the law, not technical means.
  • anexprogrammer 10y ago
    > Pay for things with cash when possible I do this. The privacy aspect is just a bonus. The main advantage is I consistently spend less and have the world's easiest to manage budget with no forgotten spending, autopayment or contactless swipe. If there's £20 in my pocket after drawing out £50 I spent £30 no matter what I remember or what stuff I now have. I'm immune to 98% of supermarket special offer junk as I draw enough for shopping not shopping + impulse junk. Done it ever since the dot con crash and we were seriously financially challenged for a while. Fifteen years later I haven't had the least temptation to revert, despite numerous offers of higher credit limits and more cards from assorted banks. Plastic gets used 0-4 times a month - for online shopping. Despite all the hubris about cashless I don't find it the least bit inconvenient - everywhere takes it, everywhere I spend it has a cashpoint nearby. So all that remains for card and bank is online shopping and bills.
• Zigurd 10y ago
  There is no need to "balance" privacy with anything. You and I should just have privacy. Technology products can be created that put privacy first, and that thwart surveillance. Moreover you don't need new laws to have privacy. Or looked at from another angle, even if you had laws protecting your privacy you should not rely on laws to keep your private information secure. If all real time communication were secured with endpoint-generated ephemeral keys, and all storage and store-and-forward payloads were secured with keys distributed with a web-of-trust ket distribution infrastructure, the surveillance state and other commerce-oriented snoops would have to work much much harder to glean far less information.
• mark_l_watson 10y ago
  While future IoT devices are a privacy (and security) nightmare, we can take simple steps to leave a smaller digital footprint when using the web: use private browser windows more often, use a separate web browser for Google and Facebook services, use a separate browser with privacy tools for the rest of your web browsing. This helps somewhat and is no real effort. I find Google to useful when travelling so I use gmail for making travel reservations so Google Now knows what I am doing. So, a few times a year I let myself be tracked for convenience. Otherwise I like private email, Private calendar, etc. I don't think privacy has to all or nothing deal. Just make choices you are comfortable with.
  • rsync 10y ago
    "While future IoT devices are a privacy (and security) nightmare, we can take simple steps to leave a smaller digital footprint when using the web: use private browser windows more often, use a separate web browser for Google and Facebook services, use a separate browser with privacy tools for the rest of your web browsing." What I really want is a chroot jail for a browser. This shouldn't be that hard, but the GUI adds some complexity ... and I am not sure how to implement it in OSX. I can do this immediately with vmware fusion, but that's a lot of overhead - quite expensive - for just a second browser instance. It gets even more expensive if I want a third or a fourth.