19 ms·

No one sane would ever want their relatives, friends, work colleagues, and neighbors to be able to know (quoting from the OP): > who you sleep with because bot

by cs702 5y ago

No one sane would ever want their relatives, friends, work colleagues, and neighbors to be able to know (quoting from the OP): > who you sleep with because both you and the person you share your bed with keep your phones nearby > whether you sleep soundly at night or whether your troubles are keeping you up > whether you pick up your phone in the middle of the night and search for things like "loan repayment" > your IQ based on the pages you "like" on Facebook and the friends you have > your restaurant visits and shopping habits > how fast you drive, even if you don't have a smart car, because your phone contains an accelerometer > your life expectancy based on how fast you walk, as measured by your phone > whether you suffer from depression by how you slide your finger across your phone’s screen > if your spouse is considering leaving you because she's been searching online for a divorce lawyer No one sane is OK with corporations, governments, and other third parties being able to obtain and save this information either -- especially if their only hurdle is to get you to click "OK" to agree to some legal agreement almost no one has the time to read or expertise to understand in its full implications. We need a New Declaration of Human Rights for the 21st century that takes into account rapidly advancing technologies for collecting and acting on data at mass scale.

jackjeff 5y ago
But the only penalty is “seeing” personalized ads. It’s not exactly a problem for most people. Even I who’s privacy conscious don’t particularly care I block ads with ad blockers anyway.
d1lanka 5y ago
> We need a New Declaration of Human Rights for the 21st century that takes into account rapidly advancing technologies for collecting and acting on data at mass scale. Sir Tim Berners Lee already came up with "The Contract for The Web": https://contractfortheweb.org/ https://contractfortheweb.org/ Spread it around.
nutellaandgo 5y ago
That's not gonna happen. But there are services out there that are vastly more private such as ProtonMail, Telegram, Signal, etc. If you want privacy, quit Facebook and Gmail. News flash: they're NOT gonna stop spying on you. You need to stop using them.
SavantIdiot 5y ago
This is a great list. SO many times people have said to me, "Let them track me, I've got nothing to hide." And you hit them with a few things off this list and they immediately change their mind. There should be a tinurl for website I can send people to that shows a simple list of all the ways personal information can be used.
- amelius 5y ago
  Yes, great list. But salary and bank balance should probably be added.
  - reaperducer 5y ago
    But salary and bank balance should probably be added. ADP is one of the largest paycheck processors in the United States. But almost no one realizes that if their paycheck comes through ADP, their salary information is being sold. Remember, this is also a company that knows when you've been hired, fired, has your Social Security Number, and a lot of other very personal financial information. According to a New York Times article from a few years ago, ADP is selling you out worse than even the cell phone companies. Yet, there was zero uproar about it that I noticed. As for bank balances, I was very surprised to learn recently that bank balances are not part of credit scoring. I have a substantial amount of emergency savings. The last time I pulled my credit reports, it wasn't on any of them.
    - bombcar 5y ago
      Bank information does appear in some other lesser know reporting agencies - but savings aren’t “credit” so it’s understandable they don’t appear on a credit report.
  - flowerbeater 5y ago
    I feel like there should be more outcry for credit bureaus and ISPs having even more life-affecting information than what is listed.
- nINYqGQadl 5y ago
Swizec 5y ago
> your life expectancy based on how fast you walk, as measured by your phone Shit I would love to know this for myself! Is there a service or app that can crunch the numbers and tell me?
- bo1024 5y ago
  Just to respond seriously for a second: it's good to remind ourselves that ML isn't magic. If it knew your weight and age it would use those for predicting life expectancy instead. Same for smoking history, sleep habits, etc. But all it has access to is the accelerometer, and a weak correlation is better than nothing, so that's what it uses.
  - weasel_words 5y ago
    Someone previously illustrated sceneries where the algorithm hiccupped on your data and erroneously labeled you as a pedophile and/or terrorist (at the same time!). If you think about it, bad ML (or your words: "...ML isn't magic.") is just as bad, if not worse, than infallible ML.
- rahoulb 5y ago
  Apple Health and many fitness tracker apps can estimate your Vo2Max score based on your height, weight and how your heart rate varies during brisk walks and runs. It's not incredibly accurate but Vo2Max is regarded as an important indicator of your cardiovascular health.
- geenew 5y ago
  I thought that was interesting too. Looks like the research on it came out 10 years ago. A couple of links from some quick searching. The second link has some charts and graphs, though it limits its estimates to 65+ age groups. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/walking-speed-survival/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/walking-speed-sur... https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/644554 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/644554 Edit: I'd add that you likely don't need any tracker to get a rough estimate. If you walk faster than people around you who are roughly the same age, then you'll likely outlive them. That may be a reason to take it slow and smell the roses, since you have more time :)
meh99 5y ago
There’s still billions of people who believe in helicoptering. Being watched by sky wizard and judged at all times is their expectation. It is their agency. Write down whatever you want, how does one resolve the reality? We have documents in place to cover all these things. Yet here we are still. You’re doing what the people you aren’t ok with do; expect everyone to undertake creating and importing some wholly new perspective. We know how to regain our agency: take control of it away from the aristocracy. The species has done this again and again. It’s not new.
slver 5y ago
From reading this list, I can deduce OP just made up most of them, because over half of them contains details that are total BS. Also I happen to think we'd be a better society if we all knew everything about each other. Instead of discouraging companies from analyzing us, encourage them to publish everything all the time. Let governments join in on the fun. Everyone should be tracking an analyzing everyone else. Solves the issue with companies manipulating us to sell our data, because if they publish it they can't sell it. Solves the ransomware problem as well. Publish everything, no privacy for anyone. You can't blackmail someone for data everyone has. I wanna know what you think right now. I'm not asking you to tell me, I'll scan your brain instead. And I'll know what your dream last night was. And you'll know the same for me as well. That's the future, prove me wrong.
- shkkmo 5y ago
  The worst thing about the information economy of today is absolutely the inequality of access. We would be better off if everything that is collected was public. I don't think that means we don't need privacy. It absolutely has value. The problem is when privacy is only available to the rich and powerful, while the details about the rest of us are hoarded and used by the very same powerful people who pay such a premium for their privacy. If we allow the collection of information, that information should absolutely be public, but that doesn't mean we should allow everything to be collected.
  - matz1 5y ago
    >I don't think that means we don't need privacy. It absolutely has value. I never heard any convincing argument about why privacy has value. >but that doesn't mean we should allow everything to be collected. Why ?
    - deep-root 5y ago
      Perhaps you'd like some privacy to surprise a significant other with your purchase, rather than it show up on their Venmo feed in real-time.
donatj 5y ago
> No one sane would ever want all their relatives, friends, work colleagues, and neighbors I'd happily share basically all of that information with that specific group of people - except maybe my neighbor that keeps reporting me to the city, they don't need to know my life, but if in turn I could know who was googling city ordinances in the middle of the night it might make up for it. At worst I get a funny look for something I googled in the middle of the night? To your point, it's 100% the government I'm worried about. They've got legal and lethal authority to do far worse than a weird look.
- virtue3 5y ago
  But how would you trust any company to properly respect who you share stuff with? There's a multitude of anti-patterns that make some things public already with social media. I think we should all be looking at this as either they're getting -all- of your data and sharing it with -everyone- (because that means more $$$) or they're NOT getting your data and they CANT share it cuz they don't have it. We cannot trust companies to respect our privacy because it goes against their core value of turning a profit.
  - philosopher1234 5y ago
    turning a profit depends to some extent on our trust, so we can expect companies to do some good for us too
    - virtue3 5y ago
      Either they sell the data, or they keep it protected as a fuck you to google (aka apple) or they potentially get a data leak because they aren't following best practices in the slightest (aka Experian). I remember being out of college and finally being able to buy adobe products to do photography and then Adobe got hacked and my un/pw was out in the wild. It was safer to pirate their stuff and trust some crazy keygen software that's definitely doing something nefarious cuz at least I could run that in a VM.
- Pet_Ant 5y ago
matz1 5y ago
No, I am okay for them to be able to know. Them knowing is not the problem. Them using it to harm me is the problem. These are different thing, latter is a problem, former is not. Let pick this one example : 'your restaurant visits and shopping habits' Just them knowing is not problem, in fact them knowing can also benefit me: e.g when they want to give me gift.
- amelius 5y ago
  They will frame it as you harming yourself.
- javajosh 5y ago
  "If invasive tracking is outlawed then only outlaws will use invasive tracking." The problem is that symmetry is impossible.
  - matz1 5y ago
    I'm not advocating to outlaw invasive tracking, rather advocating on solving the problem of the use of invasive tracking to harm people.
swiley 5y ago
>your IQ based on the pages you "like" on Facebook and the friends you have That's got to be extremely noisy, does anyone have any links about this?
- alextheparrot 5y ago
  Paper has some flaws, but this is a good seed point. https://www.pnas.org/content/110/15/5802?sid=98dc0a8b-4443-45b5-8af1-dc897a37f001 https://www.pnas.org/content/110/15/5802?sid=98dc0a8b-4443-4... IQ: https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/suppl/2013/03/07/1218772110.DCSupplemental/st01.pdf https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/suppl/2013/03/07/121877211...
toss1 5y ago
>> Many of these companies call themselves “data brokers.” I call them data vultures. Perfect. Except it is insulting to vultures, who at least put carrion back in the food chain. This is straight-up theft of our data and privacy, for profit, and it needs to be both outlawed and shamed. Seriously, but these slime should be more despised than common burglars (tho maybe a notch above mobsters). Seriously, these people are not respectable, and should not be respected or tolerated in polite society. So, don't.
mancerayder 5y ago
Add to this... everything you said is a forever kept thing. So over decades this stuff can be mined and a tiny needle can be found if it's meaningful to the searcher. It's terrifying.
- choeger 5y ago
  Add to this that no one cares about whether the data is even correct. A glitch in the location tracking and, bam, you have an affair. Some wrongly assigned search queries or speech requests and suddenly you are a pedophile. A terrorist selecting you as a cover identity and you wake up in Guantanamo.
  - reaperducer 5y ago
    Add to this that no one cares about whether the data is even correct. It's interesting how our culture has adopted the mantra that "computers are never wrong." Yet, every day in the media there are dozens or hundreds of articles about computers and systems making mistakes. I wish we could break that cycle of believing anything that comes off a screen. I fight my own minor battles against this weekly. As part of my job, I maintain an online directory of about 70,000 businesses related to the one I work for. I regularly get e-mails from people saying things like, "The phone number for X is wrong. Google says it's this...!" Then when I look into it, Google is wrong. But because it's Google, people assume it's right, and my web sites are wrong. We need to teach people that not only do computers make mistakes, but Google is the king of all mistake-generating engines.
    - graphtrader 5y ago
      Hopefully Daniel Kahneman's new book will spread the way people talking about bias is common now. It couldn't be more timely as our society has no concept of measurement noise. "What I read is 100% true and based on "science" so to have any uncertainty means you are anti-science". There is an astounding number of people using that as their main heuristic.
    - is_true 5y ago
Black101 5y ago
> how fast you drive, even if you don't have a smart car, because your phone contains an accelerometer Any car 2010 and later "smart/stupid": https://www.businessinsider.com/ford-exec-gps-2014-1 https://www.businessinsider.com/ford-exec-gps-2014-1, so even if you leave your phone at home, don't assume that you aren't tracked.
- Black101 5y ago
  you don't like to hear the truth, but that's ok
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
yboris 5y ago
The author of this article, Carissa Véliz, also wrote Privacy Is Power: Why and How You Should Take Back Control of Your Data https://www.amazon.com/Privacy-Power-Should-Take-Control/dp/B08FBKC1L6 https://www.amazon.com/Privacy-Power-Should-Take-Control/dp/...
- freddyym 5y ago
  I'd advise reading pretty much everything that they write on privacy, its all very worthwhile.
- codeisawesome 5y ago
  If one were to buy that book (or even visit the link) - some new interesting ‘data points’ have now been collected ;) Actually no, not a wink, it’s terrifying :D D:
  - an_opabinia 5y ago
    Privacy for me, but not for thee. Imagine trying to be a new author, marketing a book before Amazon, before Twitter and Facebook.
uberdru 5y ago
Or even just a constitutional amendment that specifically defines rights of privacy.
xibalba 5y ago
Would you please demonstrate to me how I, Joe Q. Public, can find out, via collected data that I can access, with whom another person is sleeping with? Or, in lieu of that, walk me through how that would be done with Facebook's, Google's, or Apple's data via your first-hand knowledge of those data and where and how they are stored and accessed? These fear mongering comments about data collection have never demonstrated real world harms, AFAIK. It reminds me of the genetically engineered foods bogeyman that, in spite of a complete lack of empirical evidence, continues to be trotted out as a huge danger.
- weswpg 5y ago
  > These fear mongering comments about data collection have never demonstrated real world harms Notable examples: * Strava revealed the position of US military bases * Muslim prayer apps sharing location data with US military In my own experience, I work for a call center. We have many important American companies as clients. They give us access to their systems so that we can service their clients. I am overseas dealing with their customers and I can access their personal information. I can see their face linked to their Facebook profile. I admit I've been tempted to misuse the information any time a customer makes me angry.
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  There was Uber's "God View" which showed travel history of customers, which was at one point available to anyone who could pass Uber's driver onboarding process. Venture capitalist Peter Sims wrote about being tracked in a blog post this September. Back in 2011, he wrote, he was in an Uber car in Manhattan when he started receiving text messages from someone he barely knew telling him exactly where he was. That person later told him that she was at an Uber launch party in Chicago, where Sims' movements were being tracked via God View on a large public screen. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/johanabhuiyan/uber-is-investigating-its-top-new-york-executive-for-privacy#.cnWMObQ3V https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/johanabhuiyan/uber-is-i... https://www.theverge.com/2016/1/6/10726004/uber-god-mode-settlement-fine https://www.theverge.com/2016/1/6/10726004/uber-god-mode-set... https://www.vice.com/en/article/ypw5n7/ubers-god-view-was-once-available-to-drivers https://www.vice.com/en/article/ypw5n7/ubers-god-view-was-on...
- 5y ago
prestigious 5y ago
I would be curious to know my inferred IQ.
erikerikson 5y ago
I had a wedding to make sure everyone closest to me knew who I was sleeping with (Emily as is already public record). It took a fair bit of time and money to coordinate and hold that event. When people ask how I'm doing, I tell them and that includes whether my problems are impacting my daily routines and needs. (Not lately) I've shared the results of my IQ tests and had plenty of discussions about the validity and lack thereof of those results (145-160+ depending on test). Facebook likes are the least good mechanism to work that out by. I think one of the helpful things I do is share really good places to eat and find things I want. (Nirmal's is my favorite in Seattle) I hope driving monitoring helps us shift from a penalize infrequent rule breaking instances to helping manage attention and grow skill. I speed when conditions let that be safe. I suffer depression and have my whole life as everyone I know is aware and now is more public on the internet. You'll have to ask her but I'm not looking to leave. I'm very honest and want that in my closest relationships so if we were going that direction she'd be among the first people I spoke with. If she feels she needs to leave I'll try and help us both find happier lives but I hope it never comes to that. I respect that you have a different level of openness. I think a good criticism of my post is that I have a ton of privilege to feel safe sharing these things. I've chosen to live a life I feel entirely comfortable sharing. Clearly I'm not handing out credentials but... I prefer a world that is more honest and intimate and that simply requires I be open, honest, and self-reflective.
- throway98752343 5y ago
  Good of you to offer concrete examples. I don't mean these as ad hominems since I don't know you, more as counter examples: > I've shared the results of my IQ tests (145-160+) I wonder if the part of the population with <100 IQs are similarly open with their results. > I speed when conditions let that be safe. Admitting to breaking the law is an excuse for higher insurance premiums and for the police to hassle you. > I suffer depression This is one of the few relatively "safe" mental health conditions to announce. Who's lining up to hire someone who's openly struggling with addiction or has psychopathy? > I'm very honest and want that in my closest relationships Let's say your partner gets served ads about how your single, attractive co-worker has been googling you late at night, how your location histories have significant overlap, and by clicking the ad they can find out more. Not everyone will get suspicious, but some people definitely will click. ~~~ It would be great if we could all be open like you say you are, but society isn't even close to ready for that. Any rapid transition (like wide-scale encryption breaks) would be traumatic on so many levels.
pbhjpbhj 5y ago
>No one sane would ever want their relatives // People close to you probably know all these things already. Even if you don't. >No one sane is OK with corporations, governments, and other third parties being able to obtain and save this information either // This is a popular view here. I don't think it's true of the population as whole.
- maybelsyrup 5y ago
  > This is a popular view here. I don't think it's true of the population as whole. I think you're right. They can get to the point where they care, but my intuition is that it'd take a real crisis, and even then there's plenty of incentive with this topic to move on as fast as possible. We (the public) are pretty fickle, and it's psychologically threatening to admit we've had a voyeur living in our bedroom for a decade.
  - Pokepokalypse 5y ago
    It could be argued (pretty convincingly) that the collection of PSYCHOMETRIC data, (like what Cambridge Analytica did in 2011-2015; via innocent-seeming "personality quizzes" on social media - then the weaponization of that data by foreign intelligence services to target ads directly at people with certain personality types, in order to subvert the democratic election process on a massive scale, in order to affect a nation's foreign policy, and therefore the strategic balance of powers in the world - does, indeed represent "a real crisis". (the real horror here, is they only had to sample a small subset of social media users, then compare their profiles with everyone else via "likes" and whatnot to develop accurate personality profiles of users who had no fucking idea they were being profiled because they never took a personality test). I assume that data like that, unless refreshed, gets stale and useless fairly rapidly. But holy shit we're just sitting here, blind to the dangers of this data collection. Or it could be as mundane as Russia's CozyBear group hacking a Ukrainian app store to insert malware into popular messaging apps, and using that app installed on a Ukrainian soldier's phone to direct artillery fire. Maybe THAT'S "a real crisis"?
    - TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
treis 5y ago
>No one sane would ever want their relatives, friends, work colleagues, and neighbors to be able to know (quoting from the OP): The things you mentioned are kind of how it was before the advent modern civilization. Before Facebook tracking it was old biddy tracking. Through gossip everyone knew pretty much everyone's business. That said, there's not an immediately obvious connection between surveillance and our neighbors knowing things. I have 0 information about who my neighborhors are sleeping with based on their cell phone tracking.
- ramphastidae 5y ago
  I downvoted this because I can’t read this as anything but a disingenuous comparison. Surely you can understand the difference in scale and motive behind village gossip and global surveillance by profit-seeking corporations.
  - saddlerustle 5y ago
    "global surveillance by profit-seeking corporations" is a string of scary words, but gossip is much more likely to cause the average person clear, tangible harm. Just pointing out that digital tracking is creepy doesn't do much to convince most people to inconvenience themselves at all.
  - treis 5y ago
    The point is that everyone knowing everyone's business is the "natural" state of human society. For most of human history all my neighbors would know who I'm banging. It doesn't take some sort of insanity to live like that. And you've only addressed half my argument. I don't know who my neighbor is banging because of cell phone tracking. You don't know who your neighbor is banging. Nobody in this thread knows who their neighbor is banging. It's an entirely theoretical danger that has not yet come to pass.
- bryanrasmussen 5y ago
  >Before Facebook tracking it was old biddy tracking. Through gossip everyone knew pretty much everyone's business. As already noted the difference in scale, but obviously if you didn't like what the old biddies tracked about you in your small town you could move to a new one and start over - you can't with the global surveillance system. finally it should be obvious that not everyone lived in a small enough town that the old biddy network was actually useful for tracking you.
matheusmoreira 5y ago
What an awesome list of examples!
polynomial 5y ago
This naturally invites the question, what percentage of the general populace is in fact sane? (sincerely curious to know what number hn readers would assign to that.)
pezezin 5y ago
> how fast you drive, even if you don't have a smart car, because your phone contains an accelerometer Minor nitpick: you can't measure speed with an accelerometer, at least not with a cheap one like the one in your phone. I mean, in theory you can numerically integrate the acceleration to get the speed, but in practice the noise will be so big as to render the result useless after a few seconds. It's much better to have a GPS and derive the speed from the position. Signed: someone who spent too long programming an IMU and fighting with stupid bosses full of misconceptions. Other than that, I totally agree with your comment.
- z77dj3kl 5y ago
  I'm pretty sure it'd be easy to at least fingerprint/classify your "driving style" given enough of even crappy accelerometer data.
  - Pokepokalypse 5y ago
    TBH it's very routinely done with onboard GPS tracking instruments which also have accelerometers, (or apps running on phones) - used by insurance companies, car rental agencies, and other fleet operators.
rhizome 5y ago
Its location is a bit more obscure, but I think there's a much simpler list of privacy practices to follow: whatever Mark Zuckerberg does. Anything he does to protect himself in the data realm is what we should be doing. Yes, I know there was the "Mark's FB has better defaults than yours" story some years ago, but this is outside of FB (though applicable anywhere). So what is it? Exploding email addresses? Making friends with someone with DMV database access? Temporary credit-card numbers? Tinted windows? Never carrying a wallet? Having an entourage take care of all of this for you? All of the above? Anyway, it would be nice if the zillionaires who have put a lot of resources into personal safety told us what they've learned. Heck, if adopted wide enough their practices might put the crunch on data criminals (though probably also data businesses, which would maybe be a reason they'd resist it.)
- KirillPanov 5y ago
  "Decoy House" https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/12/technology/how-to-disappear-surveillance-state.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/12/technology/how-to-disappe...
1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
If spying is tomorrow's only viable "economy" we are in trouble. This is why "Big Tech" is a joke. Spying, like legally selling opiates, is not a legitimate business. It does not matter how much money can be made doing it.
HWR_14 5y ago
I actually look through that and see quite a few things on that list I would be fine with my friends and relatives knowing. The difference between them and my work colleagues is that they are people who truly have my best interests at heart. As opposed to most companies that are tracking me to try to take advantage of me.

by cs702 5y ago

jackjeff 5y ago

But the only penalty is “seeing” personalized ads. It’s not exactly a problem for most people. Even I who’s privacy conscious don’t particularly care I block ads with ad blockers anyway.

d1lanka 5y ago

> We need a New Declaration of Human Rights for the 21st century that takes into account rapidly advancing technologies for collecting and acting on data at mass scale. Sir Tim Berners Lee already came up with "The Contract for The Web": https://contractfortheweb.org/ https://contractfortheweb.org/ Spread it around.

nutellaandgo 5y ago

That's not gonna happen. But there are services out there that are vastly more private such as ProtonMail, Telegram, Signal, etc. If you want privacy, quit Facebook and Gmail. News flash: they're NOT gonna stop spying on you. You need to stop using them.

SavantIdiot 5y ago

This is a great list. SO many times people have said to me, "Let them track me, I've got nothing to hide." And you hit them with a few things off this list and they immediately change their mind. There should be a tinurl for website I can send people to that shows a simple list of all the ways personal information can be used.

amelius 5y ago
Yes, great list. But salary and bank balance should probably be added.
- reaperducer 5y ago
  But salary and bank balance should probably be added. ADP is one of the largest paycheck processors in the United States. But almost no one realizes that if their paycheck comes through ADP, their salary information is being sold. Remember, this is also a company that knows when you've been hired, fired, has your Social Security Number, and a lot of other very personal financial information. According to a New York Times article from a few years ago, ADP is selling you out worse than even the cell phone companies. Yet, there was zero uproar about it that I noticed. As for bank balances, I was very surprised to learn recently that bank balances are not part of credit scoring. I have a substantial amount of emergency savings. The last time I pulled my credit reports, it wasn't on any of them.
  - bombcar 5y ago
    Bank information does appear in some other lesser know reporting agencies - but savings aren’t “credit” so it’s understandable they don’t appear on a credit report.
- flowerbeater 5y ago
  I feel like there should be more outcry for credit bureaus and ISPs having even more life-affecting information than what is listed.
nINYqGQadl 5y ago

Swizec 5y ago

> your life expectancy based on how fast you walk, as measured by your phone Shit I would love to know this for myself! Is there a service or app that can crunch the numbers and tell me?

bo1024 5y ago
Just to respond seriously for a second: it's good to remind ourselves that ML isn't magic. If it knew your weight and age it would use those for predicting life expectancy instead. Same for smoking history, sleep habits, etc. But all it has access to is the accelerometer, and a weak correlation is better than nothing, so that's what it uses.
- weasel_words 5y ago
  Someone previously illustrated sceneries where the algorithm hiccupped on your data and erroneously labeled you as a pedophile and/or terrorist (at the same time!). If you think about it, bad ML (or your words: "...ML isn't magic.") is just as bad, if not worse, than infallible ML.
rahoulb 5y ago
Apple Health and many fitness tracker apps can estimate your Vo2Max score based on your height, weight and how your heart rate varies during brisk walks and runs. It's not incredibly accurate but Vo2Max is regarded as an important indicator of your cardiovascular health.
geenew 5y ago
I thought that was interesting too. Looks like the research on it came out 10 years ago. A couple of links from some quick searching. The second link has some charts and graphs, though it limits its estimates to 65+ age groups. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/walking-speed-survival/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/walking-speed-sur... https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/644554 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/644554 Edit: I'd add that you likely don't need any tracker to get a rough estimate. If you walk faster than people around you who are roughly the same age, then you'll likely outlive them. That may be a reason to take it slow and smell the roses, since you have more time :)

meh99 5y ago

There’s still billions of people who believe in helicoptering. Being watched by sky wizard and judged at all times is their expectation. It is their agency. Write down whatever you want, how does one resolve the reality? We have documents in place to cover all these things. Yet here we are still. You’re doing what the people you aren’t ok with do; expect everyone to undertake creating and importing some wholly new perspective. We know how to regain our agency: take control of it away from the aristocracy. The species has done this again and again. It’s not new.

slver 5y ago

From reading this list, I can deduce OP just made up most of them, because over half of them contains details that are total BS. Also I happen to think we'd be a better society if we all knew everything about each other. Instead of discouraging companies from analyzing us, encourage them to publish everything all the time. Let governments join in on the fun. Everyone should be tracking an analyzing everyone else. Solves the issue with companies manipulating us to sell our data, because if they publish it they can't sell it. Solves the ransomware problem as well. Publish everything, no privacy for anyone. You can't blackmail someone for data everyone has. I wanna know what you think right now. I'm not asking you to tell me, I'll scan your brain instead. And I'll know what your dream last night was. And you'll know the same for me as well. That's the future, prove me wrong.

shkkmo 5y ago
The worst thing about the information economy of today is absolutely the inequality of access. We would be better off if everything that is collected was public. I don't think that means we don't need privacy. It absolutely has value. The problem is when privacy is only available to the rich and powerful, while the details about the rest of us are hoarded and used by the very same powerful people who pay such a premium for their privacy. If we allow the collection of information, that information should absolutely be public, but that doesn't mean we should allow everything to be collected.
- matz1 5y ago
  >I don't think that means we don't need privacy. It absolutely has value. I never heard any convincing argument about why privacy has value. >but that doesn't mean we should allow everything to be collected. Why ?
  - deep-root 5y ago
    Perhaps you'd like some privacy to surprise a significant other with your purchase, rather than it show up on their Venmo feed in real-time.

donatj 5y ago

> No one sane would ever want all their relatives, friends, work colleagues, and neighbors I'd happily share basically all of that information with that specific group of people - except maybe my neighbor that keeps reporting me to the city, they don't need to know my life, but if in turn I could know who was googling city ordinances in the middle of the night it might make up for it. At worst I get a funny look for something I googled in the middle of the night? To your point, it's 100% the government I'm worried about. They've got legal and lethal authority to do far worse than a weird look.

virtue3 5y ago
But how would you trust any company to properly respect who you share stuff with? There's a multitude of anti-patterns that make some things public already with social media. I think we should all be looking at this as either they're getting -all- of your data and sharing it with -everyone- (because that means more $$$) or they're NOT getting your data and they CANT share it cuz they don't have it. We cannot trust companies to respect our privacy because it goes against their core value of turning a profit.
- philosopher1234 5y ago
  turning a profit depends to some extent on our trust, so we can expect companies to do some good for us too
  - virtue3 5y ago
    Either they sell the data, or they keep it protected as a fuck you to google (aka apple) or they potentially get a data leak because they aren't following best practices in the slightest (aka Experian). I remember being out of college and finally being able to buy adobe products to do photography and then Adobe got hacked and my un/pw was out in the wild. It was safer to pirate their stuff and trust some crazy keygen software that's definitely doing something nefarious cuz at least I could run that in a VM.
Pet_Ant 5y ago

matz1 5y ago

No, I am okay for them to be able to know. Them knowing is not the problem. Them using it to harm me is the problem. These are different thing, latter is a problem, former is not. Let pick this one example : 'your restaurant visits and shopping habits' Just them knowing is not problem, in fact them knowing can also benefit me: e.g when they want to give me gift.

amelius 5y ago
They will frame it as you harming yourself.
javajosh 5y ago
"If invasive tracking is outlawed then only outlaws will use invasive tracking." The problem is that symmetry is impossible.
- matz1 5y ago
  I'm not advocating to outlaw invasive tracking, rather advocating on solving the problem of the use of invasive tracking to harm people.

swiley 5y ago

>your IQ based on the pages you "like" on Facebook and the friends you have That's got to be extremely noisy, does anyone have any links about this?

alextheparrot 5y ago
Paper has some flaws, but this is a good seed point. https://www.pnas.org/content/110/15/5802?sid=98dc0a8b-4443-45b5-8af1-dc897a37f001 https://www.pnas.org/content/110/15/5802?sid=98dc0a8b-4443-4... IQ: https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/suppl/2013/03/07/1218772110.DCSupplemental/st01.pdf https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/suppl/2013/03/07/121877211...

toss1 5y ago

>> Many of these companies call themselves “data brokers.” I call them data vultures. Perfect. Except it is insulting to vultures, who at least put carrion back in the food chain. This is straight-up theft of our data and privacy, for profit, and it needs to be both outlawed and shamed. Seriously, but these slime should be more despised than common burglars (tho maybe a notch above mobsters). Seriously, these people are not respectable, and should not be respected or tolerated in polite society. So, don't.

mancerayder 5y ago

Add to this... everything you said is a forever kept thing. So over decades this stuff can be mined and a tiny needle can be found if it's meaningful to the searcher. It's terrifying.

choeger 5y ago
Add to this that no one cares about whether the data is even correct. A glitch in the location tracking and, bam, you have an affair. Some wrongly assigned search queries or speech requests and suddenly you are a pedophile. A terrorist selecting you as a cover identity and you wake up in Guantanamo.
- reaperducer 5y ago
  Add to this that no one cares about whether the data is even correct. It's interesting how our culture has adopted the mantra that "computers are never wrong." Yet, every day in the media there are dozens or hundreds of articles about computers and systems making mistakes. I wish we could break that cycle of believing anything that comes off a screen. I fight my own minor battles against this weekly. As part of my job, I maintain an online directory of about 70,000 businesses related to the one I work for. I regularly get e-mails from people saying things like, "The phone number for X is wrong. Google says it's this...!" Then when I look into it, Google is wrong. But because it's Google, people assume it's right, and my web sites are wrong. We need to teach people that not only do computers make mistakes, but Google is the king of all mistake-generating engines.
  - graphtrader 5y ago
    Hopefully Daniel Kahneman's new book will spread the way people talking about bias is common now. It couldn't be more timely as our society has no concept of measurement noise. "What I read is 100% true and based on "science" so to have any uncertainty means you are anti-science". There is an astounding number of people using that as their main heuristic.
  - is_true 5y ago

Black101 5y ago

> how fast you drive, even if you don't have a smart car, because your phone contains an accelerometer Any car 2010 and later "smart/stupid": https://www.businessinsider.com/ford-exec-gps-2014-1 https://www.businessinsider.com/ford-exec-gps-2014-1, so even if you leave your phone at home, don't assume that you aren't tracked.

Black101 5y ago
you don't like to hear the truth, but that's ok

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

yboris 5y ago

The author of this article, Carissa Véliz, also wrote Privacy Is Power: Why and How You Should Take Back Control of Your Data https://www.amazon.com/Privacy-Power-Should-Take-Control/dp/B08FBKC1L6 https://www.amazon.com/Privacy-Power-Should-Take-Control/dp/...

freddyym 5y ago
I'd advise reading pretty much everything that they write on privacy, its all very worthwhile.
codeisawesome 5y ago
If one were to buy that book (or even visit the link) - some new interesting ‘data points’ have now been collected ;) Actually no, not a wink, it’s terrifying :D D:
- an_opabinia 5y ago
  Privacy for me, but not for thee. Imagine trying to be a new author, marketing a book before Amazon, before Twitter and Facebook.

uberdru 5y ago

Or even just a constitutional amendment that specifically defines rights of privacy.

xibalba 5y ago

Would you please demonstrate to me how I, Joe Q. Public, can find out, via collected data that I can access, with whom another person is sleeping with? Or, in lieu of that, walk me through how that would be done with Facebook's, Google's, or Apple's data via your first-hand knowledge of those data and where and how they are stored and accessed? These fear mongering comments about data collection have never demonstrated real world harms, AFAIK. It reminds me of the genetically engineered foods bogeyman that, in spite of a complete lack of empirical evidence, continues to be trotted out as a huge danger.

weswpg 5y ago
> These fear mongering comments about data collection have never demonstrated real world harms Notable examples: * Strava revealed the position of US military bases * Muslim prayer apps sharing location data with US military In my own experience, I work for a call center. We have many important American companies as clients. They give us access to their systems so that we can service their clients. I am overseas dealing with their customers and I can access their personal information. I can see their face linked to their Facebook profile. I admit I've been tempted to misuse the information any time a customer makes me angry.
dredmorbius 5y ago
There was Uber's "God View" which showed travel history of customers, which was at one point available to anyone who could pass Uber's driver onboarding process. Venture capitalist Peter Sims wrote about being tracked in a blog post this September. Back in 2011, he wrote, he was in an Uber car in Manhattan when he started receiving text messages from someone he barely knew telling him exactly where he was. That person later told him that she was at an Uber launch party in Chicago, where Sims' movements were being tracked via God View on a large public screen. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/johanabhuiyan/uber-is-investigating-its-top-new-york-executive-for-privacy#.cnWMObQ3V https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/johanabhuiyan/uber-is-i... https://www.theverge.com/2016/1/6/10726004/uber-god-mode-settlement-fine https://www.theverge.com/2016/1/6/10726004/uber-god-mode-set... https://www.vice.com/en/article/ypw5n7/ubers-god-view-was-once-available-to-drivers https://www.vice.com/en/article/ypw5n7/ubers-god-view-was-on...
5y ago

prestigious 5y ago

I would be curious to know my inferred IQ.

erikerikson 5y ago

I had a wedding to make sure everyone closest to me knew who I was sleeping with (Emily as is already public record). It took a fair bit of time and money to coordinate and hold that event. When people ask how I'm doing, I tell them and that includes whether my problems are impacting my daily routines and needs. (Not lately) I've shared the results of my IQ tests and had plenty of discussions about the validity and lack thereof of those results (145-160+ depending on test). Facebook likes are the least good mechanism to work that out by. I think one of the helpful things I do is share really good places to eat and find things I want. (Nirmal's is my favorite in Seattle) I hope driving monitoring helps us shift from a penalize infrequent rule breaking instances to helping manage attention and grow skill. I speed when conditions let that be safe. I suffer depression and have my whole life as everyone I know is aware and now is more public on the internet. You'll have to ask her but I'm not looking to leave. I'm very honest and want that in my closest relationships so if we were going that direction she'd be among the first people I spoke with. If she feels she needs to leave I'll try and help us both find happier lives but I hope it never comes to that. I respect that you have a different level of openness. I think a good criticism of my post is that I have a ton of privilege to feel safe sharing these things. I've chosen to live a life I feel entirely comfortable sharing. Clearly I'm not handing out credentials but... I prefer a world that is more honest and intimate and that simply requires I be open, honest, and self-reflective.

throway98752343 5y ago
Good of you to offer concrete examples. I don't mean these as ad hominems since I don't know you, more as counter examples: > I've shared the results of my IQ tests (145-160+) I wonder if the part of the population with <100 IQs are similarly open with their results. > I speed when conditions let that be safe. Admitting to breaking the law is an excuse for higher insurance premiums and for the police to hassle you. > I suffer depression This is one of the few relatively "safe" mental health conditions to announce. Who's lining up to hire someone who's openly struggling with addiction or has psychopathy? > I'm very honest and want that in my closest relationships Let's say your partner gets served ads about how your single, attractive co-worker has been googling you late at night, how your location histories have significant overlap, and by clicking the ad they can find out more. Not everyone will get suspicious, but some people definitely will click. ~~~ It would be great if we could all be open like you say you are, but society isn't even close to ready for that. Any rapid transition (like wide-scale encryption breaks) would be traumatic on so many levels.

pbhjpbhj 5y ago

>No one sane would ever want their relatives // People close to you probably know all these things already. Even if you don't. >No one sane is OK with corporations, governments, and other third parties being able to obtain and save this information either // This is a popular view here. I don't think it's true of the population as whole.

maybelsyrup 5y ago
> This is a popular view here. I don't think it's true of the population as whole. I think you're right. They can get to the point where they care, but my intuition is that it'd take a real crisis, and even then there's plenty of incentive with this topic to move on as fast as possible. We (the public) are pretty fickle, and it's psychologically threatening to admit we've had a voyeur living in our bedroom for a decade.
- Pokepokalypse 5y ago
  It could be argued (pretty convincingly) that the collection of PSYCHOMETRIC data, (like what Cambridge Analytica did in 2011-2015; via innocent-seeming "personality quizzes" on social media - then the weaponization of that data by foreign intelligence services to target ads directly at people with certain personality types, in order to subvert the democratic election process on a massive scale, in order to affect a nation's foreign policy, and therefore the strategic balance of powers in the world - does, indeed represent "a real crisis". (the real horror here, is they only had to sample a small subset of social media users, then compare their profiles with everyone else via "likes" and whatnot to develop accurate personality profiles of users who had no fucking idea they were being profiled because they never took a personality test). I assume that data like that, unless refreshed, gets stale and useless fairly rapidly. But holy shit we're just sitting here, blind to the dangers of this data collection. Or it could be as mundane as Russia's CozyBear group hacking a Ukrainian app store to insert malware into popular messaging apps, and using that app installed on a Ukrainian soldier's phone to direct artillery fire. Maybe THAT'S "a real crisis"?
  - TheOtherHobbes 5y ago

treis 5y ago

>No one sane would ever want their relatives, friends, work colleagues, and neighbors to be able to know (quoting from the OP): The things you mentioned are kind of how it was before the advent modern civilization. Before Facebook tracking it was old biddy tracking. Through gossip everyone knew pretty much everyone's business. That said, there's not an immediately obvious connection between surveillance and our neighbors knowing things. I have 0 information about who my neighborhors are sleeping with based on their cell phone tracking.

ramphastidae 5y ago
I downvoted this because I can’t read this as anything but a disingenuous comparison. Surely you can understand the difference in scale and motive behind village gossip and global surveillance by profit-seeking corporations.
- saddlerustle 5y ago
  "global surveillance by profit-seeking corporations" is a string of scary words, but gossip is much more likely to cause the average person clear, tangible harm. Just pointing out that digital tracking is creepy doesn't do much to convince most people to inconvenience themselves at all.
- treis 5y ago
  The point is that everyone knowing everyone's business is the "natural" state of human society. For most of human history all my neighbors would know who I'm banging. It doesn't take some sort of insanity to live like that. And you've only addressed half my argument. I don't know who my neighbor is banging because of cell phone tracking. You don't know who your neighbor is banging. Nobody in this thread knows who their neighbor is banging. It's an entirely theoretical danger that has not yet come to pass.
bryanrasmussen 5y ago
>Before Facebook tracking it was old biddy tracking. Through gossip everyone knew pretty much everyone's business. As already noted the difference in scale, but obviously if you didn't like what the old biddies tracked about you in your small town you could move to a new one and start over - you can't with the global surveillance system. finally it should be obvious that not everyone lived in a small enough town that the old biddy network was actually useful for tracking you.

matheusmoreira 5y ago

What an awesome list of examples!

polynomial 5y ago

This naturally invites the question, what percentage of the general populace is in fact sane? (sincerely curious to know what number hn readers would assign to that.)

pezezin 5y ago

> how fast you drive, even if you don't have a smart car, because your phone contains an accelerometer Minor nitpick: you can't measure speed with an accelerometer, at least not with a cheap one like the one in your phone. I mean, in theory you can numerically integrate the acceleration to get the speed, but in practice the noise will be so big as to render the result useless after a few seconds. It's much better to have a GPS and derive the speed from the position. Signed: someone who spent too long programming an IMU and fighting with stupid bosses full of misconceptions. Other than that, I totally agree with your comment.

z77dj3kl 5y ago
I'm pretty sure it'd be easy to at least fingerprint/classify your "driving style" given enough of even crappy accelerometer data.
- Pokepokalypse 5y ago
  TBH it's very routinely done with onboard GPS tracking instruments which also have accelerometers, (or apps running on phones) - used by insurance companies, car rental agencies, and other fleet operators.

rhizome 5y ago

Its location is a bit more obscure, but I think there's a much simpler list of privacy practices to follow: whatever Mark Zuckerberg does. Anything he does to protect himself in the data realm is what we should be doing. Yes, I know there was the "Mark's FB has better defaults than yours" story some years ago, but this is outside of FB (though applicable anywhere). So what is it? Exploding email addresses? Making friends with someone with DMV database access? Temporary credit-card numbers? Tinted windows? Never carrying a wallet? Having an entourage take care of all of this for you? All of the above? Anyway, it would be nice if the zillionaires who have put a lot of resources into personal safety told us what they've learned. Heck, if adopted wide enough their practices might put the crunch on data criminals (though probably also data businesses, which would maybe be a reason they'd resist it.)

KirillPanov 5y ago
"Decoy House" https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/12/technology/how-to-disappear-surveillance-state.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/12/technology/how-to-disappe...

1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago

If spying is tomorrow's only viable "economy" we are in trouble. This is why "Big Tech" is a joke. Spying, like legally selling opiates, is not a legitimate business. It does not matter how much money can be made doing it.

HWR_14 5y ago

I actually look through that and see quite a few things on that list I would be fine with my friends and relatives knowing. The difference between them and my work colleagues is that they are people who truly have my best interests at heart. As opposed to most companies that are tracking me to try to take advantage of me.