7 ms·

The problem is that you can't always opt out of someone else's decisions. Example: Doorbell Cams taking video of you walking by, uploading it to a corporate da

The problem is that you can't always opt out of someone else's decisions. Example: Doorbell Cams taking video of you walking by, uploading it to a corporate database, identifying you using photo recognition algorithms and your location using the home's address, and using that information to sell you things.

roenxi 7y ago
> using that information to sell you things. The horror. The threat isn't corporations. The threat is when the government goes rogue as governments tend to do unpredictably from time to time. The threat materialises in the government using private corporation data to target arbitrary minorities (although usually the educated, wealthy, foreign and free-spirited). People seem to think that because it "could never happen here" they can just ignore the possibility. Then it turns out that that sometimes it can. Privacy isn't just about the world as it stands today. Privacy is an acknowledgement that the present and the future are linked and that the future may be profoundly different from today. People aggressively selling you things is more harassment.
- mindslight 7y ago
  > The threat isn't corporations In a thread about surveillance, why are you drawing a dichotomy between different surveillers and basically giving one a pass? They're both prongs of the same threat! On the collection side, every bit vacuumed up commercially is available for use by the government. And on the use side, there is little difference between a government proper and corporations that have achieved enough power to exert de facto governmental control - especially when colluding through a common third party.
  - roenxi 7y ago
    Corporate surveillance is only a problem because it will sooner or later feed in to government surveillance. If I could wave a wand and stop that happening I'd be fine with corporate surveillance; I'm annoyed but not threatened by the idea that someone will study my every movement trying to sell me things I want. I'm threatened if the extremely arbitrary government decides that I'm an undesirable for some reason. > corporations that have achieved enough power to exert de facto governmental control Might be a failure of the imagination, but I really can't see myself ever getting involuntarily dragged out of my apartment by McDonalds employees. The worst I've ever seen a corporation do is set the police on someone. As long as the government is functioning sensibly a rogue corp can only do so much.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - throw0101a 7y ago
      > ... trying to sell me things I want. "want". Do you actually desire them, or were you persuaded/tricked into it? :) Also do not underestimate the influence of corporations: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Randolph_Hearst#Spanish%E2%80%93American_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Randolph_Hearst#Spanis... * https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/kochland-examines-how-the-koch-brothers-made-their-fortune-and-the-influence-it-bought https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/kochland-examin...
      - roenxi 7y ago
        I honestly don't have a problem being persuaded into wanting something and being 'tricked' is either fraud or the wrong word. I don't agree that advertising is somehow a mind control technique. It is very effective, but being persuaded to do and not do things is part of how I want to operate. If someone makes a case that something is a good idea I'll go with it. It seems to me that if an advertiser can convince me to spend money then I wish they'd done it sooner. I can easily imagine having bought my first smartphone after seeing an ad. It wouldn't be a trick. Corporations are worth keeping an eye on, but governments are more unreliable, less governable and generally have larger professional military. And if a corporation acts it is usually in concert with a government.
        throw0101a 7y ago
        > Corporations are worth keeping an eye on, but governments are more unreliable, less governable and generally have larger professional military. And if a corporation acts it is usually in concert with a government. Are you an American? :)
    - somebodythere 7y ago
      In the same vein, corporate surveillers are roughly bound by law; government surveillers... aren't. For example, EU corporations are required by GDPR to comply with deletion requests, unless they are asked to retain the data by a government.
- rjf72 7y ago
  It's ironic to see a comment like this in a thread on Snowden. It's remarkable how quick we are to forget about things such as PRISM [1]. PRISM is a government-corporate surveillance coop. Players include Apple, Google, Microsoft, and many others. Capabilities described in slides never intended for public access indicate unilateral access by the NSA to "extensive, in-depth surveillance on live communications and stored information" with examples including email, video and voice chat, videos, photos, voice-over-IP chats (such as Skype), file transfers, and social networking details. Especially in modern society government and corporate interests are increasingly interweaving. And I'm no more comforted by governments having access to dystopic levels of personal information than I am by corporations having that access. It just so happens that, in practice, there's no difference anyhow. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)
  - vkou 7y ago
    PRISM was an internal NSA web-form for sending what was considered (by some, but not tested in courts) to be legal data access requests to US cloud app providers. It was a f---ing web-form for sending targeted, narrowly-scoped, legal notices. Nothing more, nothing less. It was not some magical all-seeing Eye of Sauron that gave the NSA a backdoor into every word you ever said online, your blood type, and the number of nose hairs that you plucked this morning. The really illegal backdoor, unscoped intercepts, including the cable taps, were done without the consent of most (all?) of the companies in question, and were not done through PRISM, but rather through physical access to, say, cross-datacenter cables, straight up hacking, and similar means.[1] [1] See: SSL added and removed here :v) https://blog.encrypt.me/2013/11/05/ssl-added-and-removed-here-nsa-smiley/ https://blog.encrypt.me/2013/11/05/ssl-added-and-removed-her...
    - rjf72 7y ago
      This is completely incorrect. To start with "IS, not WAS". PRISM hasn't gone anywhere and the most reasonable path here is to expect it's only substantially grown - as it already was doing at the time of its initial reveal. This [1] is a snippet of the PRISM collection overview. Data is sent straight from the partners to a DITU - data intercept technology unit which then processes the data in various ways before being sent on for further processing to appropriate nodes and ultimately becoming searchable through PRISM. An example of a DITU is here [2]. Microsoft provides unencrypted access to the NSA to user emails. One slightly tricky thing here was Microsoft deciding to roll out a new 'alias' feature enabling users to send emails under an alias. The DITU for outlook there ensured that NSA tracking would remain consistent regardless of the identity chosen by the user. Finally this [3] is a snip of the slide revealing the scope of data available from various partners. [3] And yes, there is supposed to be a formal request where an analyst requests our secret court system approve a search before they carry it out. That process is unsurprisingly a rubber stamp - the court approves 99.97% of all requests. But more importantly this is something with no meaningful oversight. As Snowden emphasized, "in general, the reality is this: if an NSA, FBI, CIA, DIA, etc. analyst has access to query raw SIGINT [signals intelligence] databases, they can enter and get results for anything they want." So, yes it would be much closer to calling PRISM the all-seeing-eye than it would be to a system for sending out warrants. These systems are the reason that the Utah data center was built with storage estimated on the order of exabytes. One exabyte being a million terabytes. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_%28surveillance_program%29#/media/File:Prism-slide-7.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_%28surveillance_program%... [2] - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/11/microsoft-nsa-collaboration-user-data https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/11/microsoft-nsa-... [3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_%28surveillance_program%29#/media/File:Prism-slide-8.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_%28surveillance_program%... [4] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center
ptero 7y ago
Fair. But even this (at least in the US) is the flip side of the laws that in public areas I can take any photos that I want. And I generally like this setup -- I can snap pictures of friends and kids without worrying about proving my right to take those photos). This should not be taken for granted -- in the UK I was twice (very politely) asked to leave because I was taking a picture and apparently a gov't building was in the background (and you need a permission to photograph those!!) and the second time because a school volleyball competition was played in the background. This is stupid because if I did it with a phone instead of a DSLR no one would notice. Maybe some limits on commercial photography in public spaces makes sense, but I would not go as far as putting strong limits on it altogether. My 2c.
- mindslight 7y ago
  Photography in public places is a separate issue from long term stocking by companies. One can enable the other, but this does not mean they are equivalent. It's a very American fallacy to overextrapolate an individual right into a justification for commercial totalitarianism. But if an individual person were to suddenly start following you around and photographing you every few minutes, you would rightfully complain to the police. That this is being done at scale and for a profit motive should make it more worrying, not normalize it.
- jonfw 7y ago
  I don't think that limiting the photography or the means of the data collection is the solution. The law is going to have to apply post-mining. In my opinion, we need to start treating data about users as intellectual property. Generally speaking, you don't have to worry about intellectual property when you're doing something personal. I can say "Just do it" all I want. In the same vein, I can make casual observations about random people on the street without having to worry about violating their privacy (that guy has cool shoes!). But if I start to use "just do it" in my business marketing materials, I'll be in trouble. Similarly, if I start keeping a database of somebody's shoes every time I see them so I can try to sell them something, that should be illegal.
- chenning 7y ago
  Think of everything you would have to do to avoid being surveilled today. Heck, think about everything you would have had to do even 40-50 years ago. I think the issue is not wether or not you can avoid being surveilled. I think that debate is largely settled. So the next logical question is, what are the rules governing access to that data? At what point do you need consent and from whom do you need consent? I think the fear, sadly, is that even if we come up with rules there is the challenge of how to apply them retroactively or in a backwards-compatible way. It's quite possible that we now we significant portions of the economy relying on companies having unfettered access to their data. I see parallels between this and the shift to renewable energy. Revenue from oil companies is tightly woven into the fabric of the US economy in many ways.
mlyle 7y ago
That's the thing. All of our legal precedent about privacy, law enforcement surveillance, commercial data gathering, etc, really dates to the 1800's and early 1900's when things were fundamentally different. There is a qualitative difference when information can be automatically processed in aggregate. I don't really care about individual corporate -- or LE -- surveillance actors if the data is partitioned over many and requires real subpoena power or active, limited sharing. If there's thousands of cameras owned by homes and businesses in my town, and everyone uses the pictures on their own for their own purposes, and law enforcement occasionally asks for and/or subpoenas the data when it'd be particularly useful and there's at least some suspicion-- that's great. On the other hand, when we automatically read license plates and form a big database about where everyone goes every day, that's not so great. When individuals are all subject to mass-scale surveillance that we use with data processing and machine learning to manipulate those people-- that's not so great either.

roenxi 7y ago

> using that information to sell you things. The horror. The threat isn't corporations. The threat is when the government goes rogue as governments tend to do unpredictably from time to time. The threat materialises in the government using private corporation data to target arbitrary minorities (although usually the educated, wealthy, foreign and free-spirited). People seem to think that because it "could never happen here" they can just ignore the possibility. Then it turns out that that sometimes it can. Privacy isn't just about the world as it stands today. Privacy is an acknowledgement that the present and the future are linked and that the future may be profoundly different from today. People aggressively selling you things is more harassment.

mindslight 7y ago
> The threat isn't corporations In a thread about surveillance, why are you drawing a dichotomy between different surveillers and basically giving one a pass? They're both prongs of the same threat! On the collection side, every bit vacuumed up commercially is available for use by the government. And on the use side, there is little difference between a government proper and corporations that have achieved enough power to exert de facto governmental control - especially when colluding through a common third party.
- roenxi 7y ago
  Corporate surveillance is only a problem because it will sooner or later feed in to government surveillance. If I could wave a wand and stop that happening I'd be fine with corporate surveillance; I'm annoyed but not threatened by the idea that someone will study my every movement trying to sell me things I want. I'm threatened if the extremely arbitrary government decides that I'm an undesirable for some reason. > corporations that have achieved enough power to exert de facto governmental control Might be a failure of the imagination, but I really can't see myself ever getting involuntarily dragged out of my apartment by McDonalds employees. The worst I've ever seen a corporation do is set the police on someone. As long as the government is functioning sensibly a rogue corp can only do so much.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - throw0101a 7y ago
    > ... trying to sell me things I want. "want". Do you actually desire them, or were you persuaded/tricked into it? :) Also do not underestimate the influence of corporations: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Randolph_Hearst#Spanish%E2%80%93American_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Randolph_Hearst#Spanis... * https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/kochland-examines-how-the-koch-brothers-made-their-fortune-and-the-influence-it-bought https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/kochland-examin...
    - roenxi 7y ago
      I honestly don't have a problem being persuaded into wanting something and being 'tricked' is either fraud or the wrong word. I don't agree that advertising is somehow a mind control technique. It is very effective, but being persuaded to do and not do things is part of how I want to operate. If someone makes a case that something is a good idea I'll go with it. It seems to me that if an advertiser can convince me to spend money then I wish they'd done it sooner. I can easily imagine having bought my first smartphone after seeing an ad. It wouldn't be a trick. Corporations are worth keeping an eye on, but governments are more unreliable, less governable and generally have larger professional military. And if a corporation acts it is usually in concert with a government.
      - throw0101a 7y ago
        > Corporations are worth keeping an eye on, but governments are more unreliable, less governable and generally have larger professional military. And if a corporation acts it is usually in concert with a government. Are you an American? :)
  - somebodythere 7y ago
    In the same vein, corporate surveillers are roughly bound by law; government surveillers... aren't. For example, EU corporations are required by GDPR to comply with deletion requests, unless they are asked to retain the data by a government.
rjf72 7y ago
It's ironic to see a comment like this in a thread on Snowden. It's remarkable how quick we are to forget about things such as PRISM [1]. PRISM is a government-corporate surveillance coop. Players include Apple, Google, Microsoft, and many others. Capabilities described in slides never intended for public access indicate unilateral access by the NSA to "extensive, in-depth surveillance on live communications and stored information" with examples including email, video and voice chat, videos, photos, voice-over-IP chats (such as Skype), file transfers, and social networking details. Especially in modern society government and corporate interests are increasingly interweaving. And I'm no more comforted by governments having access to dystopic levels of personal information than I am by corporations having that access. It just so happens that, in practice, there's no difference anyhow. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)
- vkou 7y ago
  PRISM was an internal NSA web-form for sending what was considered (by some, but not tested in courts) to be legal data access requests to US cloud app providers. It was a f---ing web-form for sending targeted, narrowly-scoped, legal notices. Nothing more, nothing less. It was not some magical all-seeing Eye of Sauron that gave the NSA a backdoor into every word you ever said online, your blood type, and the number of nose hairs that you plucked this morning. The really illegal backdoor, unscoped intercepts, including the cable taps, were done without the consent of most (all?) of the companies in question, and were not done through PRISM, but rather through physical access to, say, cross-datacenter cables, straight up hacking, and similar means.[1] [1] See: SSL added and removed here :v) https://blog.encrypt.me/2013/11/05/ssl-added-and-removed-here-nsa-smiley/ https://blog.encrypt.me/2013/11/05/ssl-added-and-removed-her...
  - rjf72 7y ago
    This is completely incorrect. To start with "IS, not WAS". PRISM hasn't gone anywhere and the most reasonable path here is to expect it's only substantially grown - as it already was doing at the time of its initial reveal. This [1] is a snippet of the PRISM collection overview. Data is sent straight from the partners to a DITU - data intercept technology unit which then processes the data in various ways before being sent on for further processing to appropriate nodes and ultimately becoming searchable through PRISM. An example of a DITU is here [2]. Microsoft provides unencrypted access to the NSA to user emails. One slightly tricky thing here was Microsoft deciding to roll out a new 'alias' feature enabling users to send emails under an alias. The DITU for outlook there ensured that NSA tracking would remain consistent regardless of the identity chosen by the user. Finally this [3] is a snip of the slide revealing the scope of data available from various partners. [3] And yes, there is supposed to be a formal request where an analyst requests our secret court system approve a search before they carry it out. That process is unsurprisingly a rubber stamp - the court approves 99.97% of all requests. But more importantly this is something with no meaningful oversight. As Snowden emphasized, "in general, the reality is this: if an NSA, FBI, CIA, DIA, etc. analyst has access to query raw SIGINT [signals intelligence] databases, they can enter and get results for anything they want." So, yes it would be much closer to calling PRISM the all-seeing-eye than it would be to a system for sending out warrants. These systems are the reason that the Utah data center was built with storage estimated on the order of exabytes. One exabyte being a million terabytes. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_%28surveillance_program%29#/media/File:Prism-slide-7.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_%28surveillance_program%... [2] - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/11/microsoft-nsa-collaboration-user-data https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/11/microsoft-nsa-... [3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_%28surveillance_program%29#/media/File:Prism-slide-8.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_%28surveillance_program%... [4] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center

ptero 7y ago

Fair. But even this (at least in the US) is the flip side of the laws that in public areas I can take any photos that I want. And I generally like this setup -- I can snap pictures of friends and kids without worrying about proving my right to take those photos). This should not be taken for granted -- in the UK I was twice (very politely) asked to leave because I was taking a picture and apparently a gov't building was in the background (and you need a permission to photograph those!!) and the second time because a school volleyball competition was played in the background. This is stupid because if I did it with a phone instead of a DSLR no one would notice. Maybe some limits on commercial photography in public spaces makes sense, but I would not go as far as putting strong limits on it altogether. My 2c.

mindslight 7y ago
Photography in public places is a separate issue from long term stocking by companies. One can enable the other, but this does not mean they are equivalent. It's a very American fallacy to overextrapolate an individual right into a justification for commercial totalitarianism. But if an individual person were to suddenly start following you around and photographing you every few minutes, you would rightfully complain to the police. That this is being done at scale and for a profit motive should make it more worrying, not normalize it.
jonfw 7y ago
I don't think that limiting the photography or the means of the data collection is the solution. The law is going to have to apply post-mining. In my opinion, we need to start treating data about users as intellectual property. Generally speaking, you don't have to worry about intellectual property when you're doing something personal. I can say "Just do it" all I want. In the same vein, I can make casual observations about random people on the street without having to worry about violating their privacy (that guy has cool shoes!). But if I start to use "just do it" in my business marketing materials, I'll be in trouble. Similarly, if I start keeping a database of somebody's shoes every time I see them so I can try to sell them something, that should be illegal.
chenning 7y ago
Think of everything you would have to do to avoid being surveilled today. Heck, think about everything you would have had to do even 40-50 years ago. I think the issue is not wether or not you can avoid being surveilled. I think that debate is largely settled. So the next logical question is, what are the rules governing access to that data? At what point do you need consent and from whom do you need consent? I think the fear, sadly, is that even if we come up with rules there is the challenge of how to apply them retroactively or in a backwards-compatible way. It's quite possible that we now we significant portions of the economy relying on companies having unfettered access to their data. I see parallels between this and the shift to renewable energy. Revenue from oil companies is tightly woven into the fabric of the US economy in many ways.

mlyle 7y ago

That's the thing. All of our legal precedent about privacy, law enforcement surveillance, commercial data gathering, etc, really dates to the 1800's and early 1900's when things were fundamentally different. There is a qualitative difference when information can be automatically processed in aggregate. I don't really care about individual corporate -- or LE -- surveillance actors if the data is partitioned over many and requires real subpoena power or active, limited sharing. If there's thousands of cameras owned by homes and businesses in my town, and everyone uses the pictures on their own for their own purposes, and law enforcement occasionally asks for and/or subpoenas the data when it'd be particularly useful and there's at least some suspicion-- that's great. On the other hand, when we automatically read license plates and form a big database about where everyone goes every day, that's not so great. When individuals are all subject to mass-scale surveillance that we use with data processing and machine learning to manipulate those people-- that's not so great either.