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How Privacy Became a Commodity for the Rich and Powerful
- ajack46 9y agoHow can one trust someone with their email account. I believe that is just a weird thing to do no matter whether it was not such a threat before. But your email is something personal.
- forgottenpass 9y agoBecause the world is hard. People don't don't understand the implementation details well enough to intuit where the boundaries of possibility lie. They don't understand how morally bankrupt the valley is to know "tech" doesn't have a single shard of the restraint that would be necessary to create ethical boundaries.
- FussyZeus 9y agoTo be fair, people don't know because they are constantly told by slick products, pretty interfaces and "easy" stuff that tech isn't hard. It's all just magic. Magic stopped working? Call tech support. I mean seriously, if you own a car, there's a certain level of competence that is expected from the owner, even if it's just the basic stuff like putting the gas pump in the right spot, making sure to get the oil changed regularly, keeping an eye on the various dials and gauges to make sure your engine isn't on fire. There are no such expectancies in a smart phone, they just sell you the thing at a steep subsidy and send you on your merry way, and I find this interesting because you can do far more damage to your life or someone elses with a smartphone than a car.
- d33 9y ago> you can do far more damage to your life or someone elses with a smartphone than a car. Could you elaborate? I find it difficult to imagine how one kills somebody using a smartphone, while with a car it's pretty obvious.
- FussyZeus 9y agoI can't remember her name, but it wasn't long ago someone tweeted an incredibly stupid joke about AIDS in Africa, and by the time their plane landed they'd lost their job and had been publicly disgraced so thoroughly they were unemployed for something like 9 months. I should've been more specific, obviously a car will do more physical damage but I'm talking less about actually hurting someone and more about ruining someone's life.
- wolfgke 9y ago> but it wasn't long ago someone tweeted an incredibly stupid joke about AIDS in Africa, and by the time their plane landed they'd lost their job and had been publicly disgraced so thoroughly they were unemployed for something like 9 months. The mistake in my opinion rather lies in doing such a strong reaction on a bad joke.
- FussyZeus 9y agoWell yeah and if you're t-boned by a drunk driver the mistake is the person driving drunk, not you going for a taco bell run. Unfortunately your spine is still shattered regardless of who actually was making mistakes.
- snerbles 9y agoThe case of Justine Sacco. A magical combination of a single bad joke and outrage culture. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/15/magazine/how-one-stupid-tweet-ruined-justine-saccos-life.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/15/magazine/how-one-stupid-t... http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2955322/Justine-Sacco-reveals-destroyed-life-racist-tweet-trip-Africa.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2955322/Justine-Sa...
- FussyZeus 9y agoRight. Now whether the reaction was too much or not enough is up to the reader, but what is clear is that simply sending a tweet like that can have ramifications for the literal remainder of your life, she's never going to be completely decoupled from telling that stupid joke as long as she lives and probably a decent time after that, too. I find it disturbing that so many people seem to think Twitter and Facebook and the rest are just places to dump whatever thought runs through your brains as though nobody but the people you want to see it will ever see it. But again, that's what things like Facebook advertise as, and that's the type of content Twitter encourages.
- kardos 9y ago> How can one trust someone with their email account. Wait until you hear about mint.com.... ;)
- cheath 9y agoAnything in particular that they are doing with their user data? I am curious.
- kardos 9y agoI don't know. What is their business model? Intuit paid $170M for them, so they're certainly angling to recover at least that much through some monetization strategy. I think it's fantasy to believe that they wouldn't sell your detailed transaction history. It looks like JPMorgan Chase has muscled their way to an exception on that [1], a strong indication that selling data is their MO. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mint.com#Controversial_practices https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mint.com#Controversial_practic...
- stinkytaco 9y agoThey are in the most lucrative advertising business: finance. Every time my credit card fee pops up on my account, they show an ad for credit cards with no fee. Insurance, investing, loans, etc, etc. All of the most expensive adwords on Google and they have treasure trove of data on it. Since I strongly suspect that data's going to get sold by my bank, credit card company, insurance broker, loan provider and so on, the convenience of mint outweighs its disadvantages to me.
- vmateixeira 9y ago> But your email is something personal Tell that to your email provider..
- ionised 9y agoI do. They don't advertise to me and they let me encrypt my mail incoming, at rest and between my mail client and their servers.
- qudat 9y agoYou're trusting any free provider of email with your data ... I think it's unrealistic to expect everyone to host their own email servers.
- alasdair_ 9y ago>I think it's unrealistic to expect everyone to host their own email servers. It's surprisingly more difficult than it used to be. Trying to get your server reputation just right so that gmail won't flag you as spam is much tougher than it was in the past, for example. Speaking of spam - there is so much of it that something like gmail filters out. I still send from gmail, although I use a personally-hosted (and aggressively firewalled/ monitored) box for receiving mail for things like password resets.
- germinalphrase 9y agoWhen setting up my own email server is as easy as downloading and launching Firefox then it might happen. As is, I don't think it's so simple.
- JohnnyConatus 9y agoTruthy. But That plan didn't even work out for Firefox.
- newsat13 9y agoWhat didn't work out for Firefox? Firefox is used by millions last I checked.
- educar 9y agoYou should try cloudron.io
- ckastner 9y agoLast month, the true cost of Unroll.me was revealed: The service is owned by the market-research firm Slice Intelligence, and according to a report in The Times, while Unroll.me is cleaning up users’ inboxes, it’s also rifling through their trash. When Slice found digital ride receipts from Lyft in some users’ accounts, it sold the anonymized data off to Lyft’s ride-hailing rival, Uber.
- j_s 9y agoThis was a useful service for many tech people; some here are still discovering this issue that blew up two weeks ago. Initial discussion of the "buried lede" in the NYT article Uber CEO Plays with Fire: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14178397 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14178397 Discussion of the CEO's non-apology: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14181152 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14181152
- danieldk 9y agoI think the article touches upon a key problem: even if some people are in principle willing to sacrifice some privacy in order to get a product for free, it should be required to state what data is shared with whom in clear human language (and not in a 20 page wall of legalese). The relation between the user and a service is now completely asymmetrical: it is hard to know what your data is used for. It does not help that the legalese often boils down to 'you will sell your soul'.
- ricw 9y agoFree means you are trading your privacy for the service. Unfortunately that is not common knowledge, but it's how the largest part of the internet works. Time to spread the word more aggressively...
- wolfgke 9y ago> Free means you are trading your privacy for the service. Exactly. It should be well-known that "If you are not paying for the product, you are the product.".
- snakeanus 9y agoI will have to disagree. In general by paying it means that you have to have some sort of account and that means that they can track you easier. To be frank I believe that the actual solution is to avoid any cloud-based services.
- chickenfries 9y agoHas anyone implemented something similar to Unroll.me, except not SaaS? Perhaps as a browser extension?
- davidgerard 9y agoFake title. Real title (and URL): How Privacy Became a Commodity for the Rich and Powerful
- Hydraulix989 9y agoI actually disagree with the real title. People of all socioeconomic classes use these privacy-encroaching apps -- Facebook, Unroll.me, etc.
- theprop 9y ago"Facebook revoked users’ ability to remain unsearchable on the site; meanwhile, its chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, was buying up four houses surrounding his Palo Alto home to preserve his own privacy. Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, has defended President Trump’s secretive meetings at his personal golf clubs, saying he is “entitled to a bit of privacy,” That said, privacy is being commoditized for everyone as well with tools such as Snapchat, the Epic Privacy Browser and TOR.
- 659087 9y ago> Snapchat, the Epic Privacy Browser and TOR. One of these things is not like the others.
- bithive123 9y agoThe idea that privacy can be traded away transactionally is a misrepresentation. Privacy is a choice; depending on who I am interacting with I will withhold certain information about my life. If someone convinces a friend or family member of the lie that they can trade privacy for services, then my communications with them are compromised without my consent. This is all about every being's right to choose to be private. The idea that it's okay to impinge this right as long as someone thought of it as a transaction is morally bankrupt.
- stinkytaco 9y agoIt's not always a choice, though. If I need to rent a car, I need a credit card. Now my credit card company knows where I went on vacation or traveled for work. I have to have an email account, but if I apply for a job, now my email providers knows quite a bit about me. None of these things are necessarily the end of the world if there's some data protection guarantee. But to say it's simply a choice ignores how much data other people have on us, just by going about our daily lives.
- bithive123 9y agoWhat I'm saying is that it's immoral for your credit card company to spy on you, regardless of what language they snuck into your contract. Same for your email provider. It's even less acceptable if a company uses its customers to spy on people who aren't customers. To rationalize it by saying "well, you could have used a different bank" is self-indulgent nonsense.
- xherberta 9y agoThis is a VERY important point. I don't use FB, but a data-promiscuous person who knows a ton about me recently unfriended my closest contacts. Ignorance is bliss?
- c_r_w 9y agoAgreed; the article covers regulation meant to foster competition but ignore regulation needed to cover user privacy "rights" over the data collected. Generally speaking, this article seems to gloss over the fact that this data is generated by actual human beings; examine for instance this section on ownership: "And it adds to the confusion about who owns data (in the case of an autonomous car, it could be the carmaker, the supplier of the sensors, the passenger and, in time, if self-driving cars become self-owning ones, the vehicle itself)." So the person from whence the data was generated doesn't own the data, despite owning the vehicle on which it was generated? Isn't that kind of crazy? edit: Ah I do see the passenger in there now, I'll leave this up because the point still stands that "the passenger" is a very passive way to describe the human being involved.
- client4 9y agoI actually wrote a House Bill for Montana in 2013 that would have been a pretty comprehensive privacy law for the state. My friend Dan tried his best to get it passed, but it was a bit too much new code for legislators to stomach. Thankfully Dan has broken the original legislation down into smaller parts and has really succeeded in improving privacy in Montana. https://legiscan.com/MT/text/HB400/2013 https://legiscan.com/MT/text/HB400/2013
- lm_nop 9y agoWell done! With GDPR privacy law in the EU and new ISP data collection legal status, I expect we will have much more work to be done in this area, across the country. Hopefully lawmakers will decide to protect consumers. Thanks for getting the ball rolling in Montana!
- client4 9y agoThanks! I'm not hopeful for federal level privacy protections on par with the EU or even other states (Massachusetts being a leader in the US), so I think a state based strategy is the best bet. Especially in Montana as we have a constitutional right to privacy which makes it much easier to pass pro-privacy laws.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- sixothree 9y agoWhat I want to know is - How can I buy the information marketers have collected about me?
- ptr_void 9y agoI've heard, it's usually not in the interest of companies like Google and Facebook to sell raw data. It's much better for them to keep control of the data and sell it's use as a service.