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The tech giants redefined the word "privacy" years ago. How did they get away with it? Quite simply because the tech community let them get away with it. When
by open-source-ux 7y ago
The tech giants redefined the word "privacy" years ago. How did they get away with it? Quite simply because the tech community let them get away with it.
When it comes to privacy, the tech community is full of contradictions and double-standards. Too many people in the field view privacy solely through the lens of security i.e. if your data is securely held and never leaked that is good enough - no matter how much data is captured. This suits the tech giants very well. In fact, it appears to be how many of these tech giants view privacy themselves.
Of course, you can't have privacy without security. But security simply by itself does not equal privacy. Questions about how much data is held about users, or how relentless is the level of tracking are rarely raised. (Until some of that user data gets leaked and we get a glimpse of the sheer volume of data held.)
Another example: the language around tracking users. It's purposefully worded to sound benign or neutral: telemetry, analytics, web beacons, logging. We don't challenge the use of this language - we gladly use it ourselves.
- JohnFen 7y agoI agree (obviously, I suppose). > Of course, you can't have privacy without security. But security simply by itself does not equal privacy. Privacy is not the same as security, and I agree that you can't have privacy without security. I also think that you can't have security without privacy. This is part of why the argument that some companies make about how securely they're holding our data is a nonstarter for me. That form of security only comes into play after the first form of security: preventing the unauthorized data collection. If the companies don't have my data, then their security practices around how they protect my data don't matter.