14 ms·

Once it was easy to be obscure, but technology has ended that

240 points by tysone 8y ago

devoply 8y ago
Data protection laws need to basically create this sort of ephemerality in collected data in that data is destroyed by law after a certain period of time. Outside of that we're a step away from a total surveillance state where everything that you do in any major city outside of your house is on record for eternity. Here Louis Rossman talks about how all recordings that he has made using his Android phone's voice-to-text feature and Google recording all that audio for years and all of that is on record under his account. So in terms of storage, if Google is storing that level of data. Then yeah we have the ability to store everything, forever. If that's what we as a society want to do. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_vWAF13KigI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_vWAF13KigI
- blakesterz 8y ago
  >> If that's what we as a society want to do. I guess I'd argue that we as a society don't really want to do that, and if we as a society paid attention to privacy/security more then we'd force the companies doing this to stop. Or we'd force our government to pass laws that would stop it. But we as a society only have a limited number of hours in our day, and most of society just doesn't care enough to apply pressure where it would make changes. I think most people just don't see why it matters.
  - baroffoos 8y ago
    Those things are happening though. The GDPR has only recently come in and the average person is starting to realize how data collection affects them in ways like manipulating elections and data leaks. Until recently these privacy intrusions have only been a theoretical risk and most people don't care about theoretical risks until they become real risks.
  - agumonkey 8y ago
    feels like society is becoming more and more a side-effect of business
- JKCalhoun 8y ago
  > everything that you do in any major city outside of your house is on record for eternity And yet, legally speaking, does "a reasonable expectation of privacy" exist outside of your or someone else's home? Just asking. I've been on the fence about this issue for years now.
  - devoply 8y ago
    This is not an expectation of privacy. This is a negative liberty from constant surveillance in public. This has something that has implicitly existed forever. Perhaps it needs to be explicitly stated now. And here I am not even advocating for that freedom, but simply for that freedom to be ephemeral in retrospect. Say after 2-10 years the data is destroyed.
- jodrellblank 8y ago
  Saying that data should rot, is a path to downvotes. I still think it's right, though. Hoarding is a mental disorder, not a plan for a bright future.
  - asdfasgasdgasdg 8y ago
    Hoarding is keeping worthless stuff without a plan for what to do with it. Google, OTOH, has a solid plan for what to do with this voice data. (Use it to train better models that do a better job of recognizing your voice.)
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
qrbLPHiKpiux 8y ago
What all of us are witnessing and living through right now is data in its infancy. There is no one to nurture it and help it develop and grow. Only us - to learn as it grows. To change direction on its growth. I wish I would be alive when it truly becomes what it becomes. My grandkids will likely not even be alive. And I don’t have grandkids yet.
o10449366 8y ago
"And until lawmakers, corporate leaders and citizens embrace obscurity and move to protect it, your freedom and opportunities to flourish will be in jeopardy." True! Look no further than NYT's initiatives to collect and sell their readerbase's emotional engagement to their content.[0] From their very own publisher: "People have little transparency into what is being gathered, where it’s being shared and how it’s being used — to follow their movements, to charge them more for health insurance or to manipulate them with political messages — and even less agency to do anything about it." Mr. Sulzberger, publisher of The New York Times [1] I don't mean to detract from the essay, but I'm pretty skeptical of NYT's "Privacy Project". NYT is the only publication that I read frequently that aggressively tries to prevent me from browsing in private mode with Firefox Focus and I wouldn't be surprised if they collect and sell the most reader information out of all major US publishers. I can only posit that though because they don't disclose any of that information. NYT's attempts at "data transparency"[1] are just excuses justifying the sale of reader information instead of answers regarding what information they collect, what information they sell, and who they sell this information to. How long until NYT writers start facing pressure to produce stories that will maximize "emotional engagement", even if they're divisive and inflammatory? How long until emotional engagement is inadvertently used to discriminate against certain groups based on their reactions to controversial topics? These outcomes are an inevitability when profit motives are involved because humans are incapable of exercising restraint and saying "That's enough information, we don't need to collect any more or expand our current profit levels." NYT is repeating the same mistakes they're currently criticizing tech companies for and, as usual, the individual will suffer. [0] https://investors.nytco.com/press/press-releases/press-release-details/2018/The-New-York-Times-Advertising--Marketing-Solutions-Group-Introduces-nytDEMO-A-Cross-Functional-Team-Focused-on-Bringing-Insights-and-Data-Solutions-to-Brands/default.aspx https://investors.nytco.com/press/press-releases/press-relea... [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/10/opinion/sulzberger-new-york-times-privacy.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/10/opinion/sulzberger-new-yo...
- consumer451 8y ago
  Please post this comment on NYT’s site. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/17/opinion/data-privacy.html#commentsContainer https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/17/opinion/data-privacy.html...
CapitalistCartr 8y ago
Its actually practical to keep track of 328 million Americans now. All it takes is money. And it gets easier every year.
- petilon 8y ago
  And that's the reason we need the EU to make more laws like GDPR and the "right to be forgotten". The US is controlled by big business, so there is no realistic hope that the US will make laws to protect our privacy from corporations, but the EU works for its citizens.
- specialist 8y ago
  Seisent, ChoicePoint, others were tracking everyone in North America by at least 2005, with partial coverage for Central America, South America, Caribbean. Just from public records, which at the time was ~1600 data feeds. Seisent's sales person told us the NSA bought one of their clusters and included their own data feeds (communications, transactions). I assume by now multiple parties, both private and governmental, know everything about everyone, living and dead, in near real time.
tyscorp 8y ago
Although I value privacy and obscurity, this makes me kind of sad for future historians.
- philipov 8y ago
  We will be lucky to have any future historians at all. We're living in the middle of a dark age anyway. All our precious digital media are extremely fragile both in their capacity to be preserved, and in future generations' ability to decode them even if they are preserved. If you want historians to see something, write it on a physical object, in multiple languages.
  - jlawson 8y ago
    I think English would be fine. It's hard to imagine a scenario where future historians can't even translate 2019 English. That's either an apocalypse layered over an apocalypse, or a length of time beyond any human comprehension - tens of thousands of years - of dark ages. You need to be carving in stone or baked clay in the desert to hit time spans that long.
    - philipov 8y ago
      That's fair, English is probably fine. But you'd be hard-pressed to convince me all our massive data centers are going to survive. I don't think that will even require a civilizational collapse, just a company going out of business. Imagine what a full-scale depression would do. And the drive to push everything into the cloud has only gotten started. Just look what happened with Tumblr banning adult content and blocking people from making archives. It's already getting difficult to find hardware that can read old media, and the attacks on public library funding don't help either. We're building a Tower of Babel and storing all our knowledge inside.
      - jacobush 8y ago
        Yeah, but data is like... we could loose 99% of it and be just fine. With the remaining 1% the most important tech/science knowledge and a fair chunk of culture could be interpolated.
1e-9 8y ago
I continue to be amazed by the level of nearly complete indifference that the general populace still has towards privacy. I don't think the politicians are going to do much of consequence until their constituents think it is important. Those who understand the danger of what is happening should take every opportunity to help others become aware. Possibly the biggest challenge of this is how to avoid coming across as a total paranoid wacko.
- waffleguy 8y ago
  Easy answer... cyberstalk them and show off how much you know about their “private” lives.
  - wolco 8y ago
    You have a point but somehow that just makes you the bad one. Perhaps if you exposed everyone's data but then they call it malware/virus/hacker group/rogue nation/terrorist. All that happens is scary privacy themed movies get made. Someone needs to reinvent services with privacy in mind and wait for the next generation.
  - Maximus9000 8y ago
    That reminds me of this article where authorities deemed to OK to go through peoples trash... so Journalists went through those same authorities trash: https://www.wweek.com/portland/article-1616-rubbish.html-2 https://www.wweek.com/portland/article-1616-rubbish.html-2
    - itronitron 8y ago
      >> * Used pekoe tea bags, many. Sure I drink tea, if someone asks me I'm not going to lie about that.
      - michelledepeil 8y ago
        That's just because tea drinking is currently socially acceptable. As examples, in a western context: what if it wasn't tea bags but used condoms? In a middle-eastern context: empty beer bottles? Worse, you can't predict what will happen to society and its rules, up to the point of "normal" stuff becoming illegal. Take as an example the (new) laws on pornography in the UK. What if have an under-18s minor in your house and your trashbags are full of pornmags?
jsnider3 8y ago
I really think at this point that it would be more effective for "privacy advocates" to switch gears. Trying to end the war on drugs, legalize prostitution, make the culture more permissive, etc. actually has a chance of succeeding while privacy has only been losing ground for decades at this point.
- asark 8y ago
  Miniaturized, cheap, low-power electronics and ubiquitous wireless Internet, plus modern image and audio process/recognition, are the end of it, really. It's over. War's lost as long as those exist, and good luck getting rid of them. Cell phones and giving all our data to 3rd parties who can track us without restriction are making it much worse, but the other tools are there, now. We built the ultimate totalitarian toolkit, and a massive disinformation machine that leaves us even less certain what's "grassroots" and what's enemy action than we ever have been. We split the privacy atom and no non-proliferation treaty equivalent is anywhere near the Overton window, nor likely to be any time soon. Whoops.
sn41 8y ago
Ralph Nader has an analysis on how online advertising is often at the root of corporate surveillance. https://nader.org/2018/10/04/the-root-of-the-internets-disrepute-online-advertising/ https://nader.org/2018/10/04/the-root-of-the-internets-disre... Of course, other forms of surveillance, like rulers spying on their own citizens, are time-honoured cornerstones of civilisation. (/s)
mirimir 8y ago
Well, you can if you work at it hard enough. Online, at least. In meatspace, not so much. So you just gotta stay present to that fact that you're under observation at all times. Potentially, at least.
HNLurker2 8y ago
Bypass article: https://lm.facebook.com/l.php?u=https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/17/opinion/data-privacy.html https://lm.facebook.com/l.php?u=https://www.nytimes.com/2019...
sbov 8y ago
I'm not sure if many people have experienced losing the "practical obscurity" this article talks about firsthand. Property records are public. So are WHOIS records. But it's unrealistic to manually search all the property records, phone books, WHOIS records to find someone you're looking for. However, some websites index these, and some search engines index those sites. I've had people contact me that I would prefer couldn't find me because my information was searchable due to a WHOIS record. There are people out there slurping up all the information they can find in the public and attempting to connect it together. If you want to see what I mean, go check out your mylife.com profile. Mine has a big red warning because I have neighbors with court records. It says I "may" have sex offenses. What the actual fuck? This company needs to eat shit. This isn't about people tracking you to give you better ads. Its about people tracking you to sell information to whoever wants to pay them. Its way fucking worse.
- dillondoyle 8y ago
  I think that website might have a goal of making money from people paying to remove the bad content. I've seen this for arrest record sites. If they can get high SEO for your name it could affect job/interviews, especially low level stuff.
- luc4sdreyer 8y ago
  > go check out your mylife.com profile mylife.com has been down for at least a week according to https://www.isitdownrightnow.com/mylife.com.html https://www.isitdownrightnow.com/mylife.com.html
  - coldtea 8y ago
    It's very much up for me now.
    - dTal 8y ago
      Down for me... this is strange. Perhaps they're black holing European traffic at the IP level to avoid GDPR?
lilsoso 8y ago
Now that privacy is gone, I'm surprised that we haven't seen this technology used to unfortunately tarnish people's reputations. I don't want to quite spell it out. I fear that scandals could retroactively breakout: you're no longer safe from your past. Old public recordings could be used to frame nearly anyone in unfavorable light.
- circlefavshape 8y ago
  Last year one of my wife's uncles had a DNA test done, and he turned out to have a sibling match with someone he had never met (living in a different country). Turns out that her grandfather had a child from a relationship with someone he met before her grandmother, and none of the family had ever known
GrryDucape 8y ago
The author may know of a great deal of harm caused, but so far I remain about ten pole lengths away from panic over my privacy. My Life did not seem to have much, and I have found more on myself in the past by simply googling. Yeah, I don’t like how easy it is for people to see my mostly measly political donations, but only a stalker would give a darn about the facade of my home. Seems like it is more likely we need to fear identity theft than a lack of obscurity. Here’s an idea, if you want more privacy/obscurity, refrain from social media or using your real name in comments sections.
- lilsoso 8y ago
  Your political records alone could land you in trouble in the near future. Roger Scruton lays this out elegantly in a lecture at Oxford: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUbfMQ91Mps#t=37m https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUbfMQ91Mps#t=37m Initially Barack Obama was in favor of homosexual rights, but not in favor of altering the institution of marriage. Scruton continues on, "within a year he was saying I am in favor of gay marriage and within another year he was joining forces with those who say that those who are against gay marriage are homophobes." "So something which had been judged perfectly legitimate to oppose suddenly becomes the criterion of moral merit. And I think we've seen this in all sorts of issues that we've gone through in recent years. All of us are within one tiny step of being demonized."
KineticLensman 8y ago
The only certainties in life: death, taxes and surveillance
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
Wyndtroy2012 8y ago
Follow the EU lead, opt-in must be the law. We're such pawns for the corporations and people don't even know it. Ignorance is bliss.
FerosMorgen 8y ago
This is truly scary. I did click on the My Life link, and entered my name. are they wrong! how can one correct wrong information? i don't care too much about my age being widely known, or my ethnicity either (my friends all know that already). But other wrong information is quite distressing. How can one correct it?
johnmapes89 8y ago
I strongly recommend the service of a GREAT Hacker to you and his email is hackersolution89@gmail.com. I have used him quite a number of times and he has never disappointed me. He does all types of mobile hacks, get unrestricted and unnoticeable access to your Partner/Spouse, Skype, Facebook Account, Email(s), Whatsapp, Bitcoin recovery, Instagram, Text messages, In coming and Out going calls, Twitter, Snap Chats, Bank accounts, Viber, Deleted files, Emails and Password etc. He can also help you boost or repair your credit score and also clear all debts on your card(s). Getting the job done is as simple as sending an email to hackersolution89@gmail.com stating what you want to do.

240 points by tysone 8y ago

Data protection laws need to basically create this sort of ephemerality in collected data in that data is destroyed by law after a certain period of time. Outside of that we're a step away from a total surveillance state where everything that you do in any major city outside of your house is on record for eternity. Here Louis Rossman talks about how all recordings that he has made using his Android phone's voice-to-text feature and Google recording all that audio for years and all of that is on record under his account. So in terms of storage, if Google is storing that level of data. Then yeah we have the ability to store everything, forever. If that's what we as a society want to do. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_vWAF13KigI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_vWAF13KigI

blakesterz 8y ago
>> If that's what we as a society want to do. I guess I'd argue that we as a society don't really want to do that, and if we as a society paid attention to privacy/security more then we'd force the companies doing this to stop. Or we'd force our government to pass laws that would stop it. But we as a society only have a limited number of hours in our day, and most of society just doesn't care enough to apply pressure where it would make changes. I think most people just don't see why it matters.
- baroffoos 8y ago
  Those things are happening though. The GDPR has only recently come in and the average person is starting to realize how data collection affects them in ways like manipulating elections and data leaks. Until recently these privacy intrusions have only been a theoretical risk and most people don't care about theoretical risks until they become real risks.
- agumonkey 8y ago
  feels like society is becoming more and more a side-effect of business
JKCalhoun 8y ago
> everything that you do in any major city outside of your house is on record for eternity And yet, legally speaking, does "a reasonable expectation of privacy" exist outside of your or someone else's home? Just asking. I've been on the fence about this issue for years now.
- devoply 8y ago
  This is not an expectation of privacy. This is a negative liberty from constant surveillance in public. This has something that has implicitly existed forever. Perhaps it needs to be explicitly stated now. And here I am not even advocating for that freedom, but simply for that freedom to be ephemeral in retrospect. Say after 2-10 years the data is destroyed.
jodrellblank 8y ago
Saying that data should rot, is a path to downvotes. I still think it's right, though. Hoarding is a mental disorder, not a plan for a bright future.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 8y ago
  Hoarding is keeping worthless stuff without a plan for what to do with it. Google, OTOH, has a solid plan for what to do with this voice data. (Use it to train better models that do a better job of recognizing your voice.)
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]

qrbLPHiKpiux 8y ago

What all of us are witnessing and living through right now is data in its infancy. There is no one to nurture it and help it develop and grow. Only us - to learn as it grows. To change direction on its growth. I wish I would be alive when it truly becomes what it becomes. My grandkids will likely not even be alive. And I don’t have grandkids yet.

o10449366 8y ago

"And until lawmakers, corporate leaders and citizens embrace obscurity and move to protect it, your freedom and opportunities to flourish will be in jeopardy." True! Look no further than NYT's initiatives to collect and sell their readerbase's emotional engagement to their content.[0] From their very own publisher: "People have little transparency into what is being gathered, where it’s being shared and how it’s being used — to follow their movements, to charge them more for health insurance or to manipulate them with political messages — and even less agency to do anything about it." Mr. Sulzberger, publisher of The New York Times [1] I don't mean to detract from the essay, but I'm pretty skeptical of NYT's "Privacy Project". NYT is the only publication that I read frequently that aggressively tries to prevent me from browsing in private mode with Firefox Focus and I wouldn't be surprised if they collect and sell the most reader information out of all major US publishers. I can only posit that though because they don't disclose any of that information. NYT's attempts at "data transparency"[1] are just excuses justifying the sale of reader information instead of answers regarding what information they collect, what information they sell, and who they sell this information to. How long until NYT writers start facing pressure to produce stories that will maximize "emotional engagement", even if they're divisive and inflammatory? How long until emotional engagement is inadvertently used to discriminate against certain groups based on their reactions to controversial topics? These outcomes are an inevitability when profit motives are involved because humans are incapable of exercising restraint and saying "That's enough information, we don't need to collect any more or expand our current profit levels." NYT is repeating the same mistakes they're currently criticizing tech companies for and, as usual, the individual will suffer. [0] https://investors.nytco.com/press/press-releases/press-release-details/2018/The-New-York-Times-Advertising--Marketing-Solutions-Group-Introduces-nytDEMO-A-Cross-Functional-Team-Focused-on-Bringing-Insights-and-Data-Solutions-to-Brands/default.aspx https://investors.nytco.com/press/press-releases/press-relea... [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/10/opinion/sulzberger-new-york-times-privacy.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/10/opinion/sulzberger-new-yo...

consumer451 8y ago
Please post this comment on NYT’s site. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/17/opinion/data-privacy.html#commentsContainer https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/17/opinion/data-privacy.html...

CapitalistCartr 8y ago

Its actually practical to keep track of 328 million Americans now. All it takes is money. And it gets easier every year.

petilon 8y ago
And that's the reason we need the EU to make more laws like GDPR and the "right to be forgotten". The US is controlled by big business, so there is no realistic hope that the US will make laws to protect our privacy from corporations, but the EU works for its citizens.
specialist 8y ago
Seisent, ChoicePoint, others were tracking everyone in North America by at least 2005, with partial coverage for Central America, South America, Caribbean. Just from public records, which at the time was ~1600 data feeds. Seisent's sales person told us the NSA bought one of their clusters and included their own data feeds (communications, transactions). I assume by now multiple parties, both private and governmental, know everything about everyone, living and dead, in near real time.

tyscorp 8y ago

Although I value privacy and obscurity, this makes me kind of sad for future historians.

philipov 8y ago
We will be lucky to have any future historians at all. We're living in the middle of a dark age anyway. All our precious digital media are extremely fragile both in their capacity to be preserved, and in future generations' ability to decode them even if they are preserved. If you want historians to see something, write it on a physical object, in multiple languages.
- jlawson 8y ago
  I think English would be fine. It's hard to imagine a scenario where future historians can't even translate 2019 English. That's either an apocalypse layered over an apocalypse, or a length of time beyond any human comprehension - tens of thousands of years - of dark ages. You need to be carving in stone or baked clay in the desert to hit time spans that long.
  - philipov 8y ago
    That's fair, English is probably fine. But you'd be hard-pressed to convince me all our massive data centers are going to survive. I don't think that will even require a civilizational collapse, just a company going out of business. Imagine what a full-scale depression would do. And the drive to push everything into the cloud has only gotten started. Just look what happened with Tumblr banning adult content and blocking people from making archives. It's already getting difficult to find hardware that can read old media, and the attacks on public library funding don't help either. We're building a Tower of Babel and storing all our knowledge inside.
    - jacobush 8y ago
      Yeah, but data is like... we could loose 99% of it and be just fine. With the remaining 1% the most important tech/science knowledge and a fair chunk of culture could be interpolated.

1e-9 8y ago

I continue to be amazed by the level of nearly complete indifference that the general populace still has towards privacy. I don't think the politicians are going to do much of consequence until their constituents think it is important. Those who understand the danger of what is happening should take every opportunity to help others become aware. Possibly the biggest challenge of this is how to avoid coming across as a total paranoid wacko.

waffleguy 8y ago
Easy answer... cyberstalk them and show off how much you know about their “private” lives.
- wolco 8y ago
  You have a point but somehow that just makes you the bad one. Perhaps if you exposed everyone's data but then they call it malware/virus/hacker group/rogue nation/terrorist. All that happens is scary privacy themed movies get made. Someone needs to reinvent services with privacy in mind and wait for the next generation.
- Maximus9000 8y ago
  That reminds me of this article where authorities deemed to OK to go through peoples trash... so Journalists went through those same authorities trash: https://www.wweek.com/portland/article-1616-rubbish.html-2 https://www.wweek.com/portland/article-1616-rubbish.html-2
  - itronitron 8y ago
    >> * Used pekoe tea bags, many. Sure I drink tea, if someone asks me I'm not going to lie about that.
    - michelledepeil 8y ago
      That's just because tea drinking is currently socially acceptable. As examples, in a western context: what if it wasn't tea bags but used condoms? In a middle-eastern context: empty beer bottles? Worse, you can't predict what will happen to society and its rules, up to the point of "normal" stuff becoming illegal. Take as an example the (new) laws on pornography in the UK. What if have an under-18s minor in your house and your trashbags are full of pornmags?

jsnider3 8y ago

I really think at this point that it would be more effective for "privacy advocates" to switch gears. Trying to end the war on drugs, legalize prostitution, make the culture more permissive, etc. actually has a chance of succeeding while privacy has only been losing ground for decades at this point.

asark 8y ago
Miniaturized, cheap, low-power electronics and ubiquitous wireless Internet, plus modern image and audio process/recognition, are the end of it, really. It's over. War's lost as long as those exist, and good luck getting rid of them. Cell phones and giving all our data to 3rd parties who can track us without restriction are making it much worse, but the other tools are there, now. We built the ultimate totalitarian toolkit, and a massive disinformation machine that leaves us even less certain what's "grassroots" and what's enemy action than we ever have been. We split the privacy atom and no non-proliferation treaty equivalent is anywhere near the Overton window, nor likely to be any time soon. Whoops.

sn41 8y ago

Ralph Nader has an analysis on how online advertising is often at the root of corporate surveillance. https://nader.org/2018/10/04/the-root-of-the-internets-disrepute-online-advertising/ https://nader.org/2018/10/04/the-root-of-the-internets-disre... Of course, other forms of surveillance, like rulers spying on their own citizens, are time-honoured cornerstones of civilisation. (/s)

mirimir 8y ago

Well, you can if you work at it hard enough. Online, at least. In meatspace, not so much. So you just gotta stay present to that fact that you're under observation at all times. Potentially, at least.

HNLurker2 8y ago

Bypass article: https://lm.facebook.com/l.php?u=https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/17/opinion/data-privacy.html https://lm.facebook.com/l.php?u=https://www.nytimes.com/2019...

sbov 8y ago

I'm not sure if many people have experienced losing the "practical obscurity" this article talks about firsthand. Property records are public. So are WHOIS records. But it's unrealistic to manually search all the property records, phone books, WHOIS records to find someone you're looking for. However, some websites index these, and some search engines index those sites. I've had people contact me that I would prefer couldn't find me because my information was searchable due to a WHOIS record. There are people out there slurping up all the information they can find in the public and attempting to connect it together. If you want to see what I mean, go check out your mylife.com profile. Mine has a big red warning because I have neighbors with court records. It says I "may" have sex offenses. What the actual fuck? This company needs to eat shit. This isn't about people tracking you to give you better ads. Its about people tracking you to sell information to whoever wants to pay them. Its way fucking worse.

dillondoyle 8y ago
I think that website might have a goal of making money from people paying to remove the bad content. I've seen this for arrest record sites. If they can get high SEO for your name it could affect job/interviews, especially low level stuff.
luc4sdreyer 8y ago
> go check out your mylife.com profile mylife.com has been down for at least a week according to https://www.isitdownrightnow.com/mylife.com.html https://www.isitdownrightnow.com/mylife.com.html
- coldtea 8y ago
  It's very much up for me now.
  - dTal 8y ago
    Down for me... this is strange. Perhaps they're black holing European traffic at the IP level to avoid GDPR?

lilsoso 8y ago

Now that privacy is gone, I'm surprised that we haven't seen this technology used to unfortunately tarnish people's reputations. I don't want to quite spell it out. I fear that scandals could retroactively breakout: you're no longer safe from your past. Old public recordings could be used to frame nearly anyone in unfavorable light.

circlefavshape 8y ago
Last year one of my wife's uncles had a DNA test done, and he turned out to have a sibling match with someone he had never met (living in a different country). Turns out that her grandfather had a child from a relationship with someone he met before her grandmother, and none of the family had ever known

GrryDucape 8y ago

The author may know of a great deal of harm caused, but so far I remain about ten pole lengths away from panic over my privacy. My Life did not seem to have much, and I have found more on myself in the past by simply googling. Yeah, I don’t like how easy it is for people to see my mostly measly political donations, but only a stalker would give a darn about the facade of my home. Seems like it is more likely we need to fear identity theft than a lack of obscurity. Here’s an idea, if you want more privacy/obscurity, refrain from social media or using your real name in comments sections.

lilsoso 8y ago
Your political records alone could land you in trouble in the near future. Roger Scruton lays this out elegantly in a lecture at Oxford: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUbfMQ91Mps#t=37m https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUbfMQ91Mps#t=37m Initially Barack Obama was in favor of homosexual rights, but not in favor of altering the institution of marriage. Scruton continues on, "within a year he was saying I am in favor of gay marriage and within another year he was joining forces with those who say that those who are against gay marriage are homophobes." "So something which had been judged perfectly legitimate to oppose suddenly becomes the criterion of moral merit. And I think we've seen this in all sorts of issues that we've gone through in recent years. All of us are within one tiny step of being demonized."

KineticLensman 8y ago

The only certainties in life: death, taxes and surveillance

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

Wyndtroy2012 8y ago

Follow the EU lead, opt-in must be the law. We're such pawns for the corporations and people don't even know it. Ignorance is bliss.

FerosMorgen 8y ago

This is truly scary. I did click on the My Life link, and entered my name. are they wrong! how can one correct wrong information? i don't care too much about my age being widely known, or my ethnicity either (my friends all know that already). But other wrong information is quite distressing. How can one correct it?

johnmapes89 8y ago

I strongly recommend the service of a GREAT Hacker to you and his email is hackersolution89@gmail.com. I have used him quite a number of times and he has never disappointed me. He does all types of mobile hacks, get unrestricted and unnoticeable access to your Partner/Spouse, Skype, Facebook Account, Email(s), Whatsapp, Bitcoin recovery, Instagram, Text messages, In coming and Out going calls, Twitter, Snap Chats, Bank accounts, Viber, Deleted files, Emails and Password etc. He can also help you boost or repair your credit score and also clear all debts on your card(s). Getting the job done is as simple as sending an email to hackersolution89@gmail.com stating what you want to do.