3 ms·

I don't think this is quite accurate; it's actually somewhat similar to say that there is no privacy in the real world because you have to travel through public

by esrauch 15y ago

I don't think this is quite accurate; it's actually somewhat similar to say that there is no privacy in the real world because you have to travel through public property to get anywhere. Anyone could follow you to any store, keep ultimate tabs on where you go and who you meet. Except that isn't a problem, it doesn't happen. And it's not that people don't see you go places; it's very unlikely that you can make it from your house to the grocery store without a bunch of people seeing your car and its unique identifier of a license plate. The thing is that it is almost always different people that see your car on each trip, and those people would be hard pressed to connect your license plate back to your name or your house address. This is true on the internet when your mail, your news source, your social network all are separate entities that have no real way to link between each other. Many people knowing a tiny portion of your identity is very nearly the same thing as none of them knowing anything; and with only the smallest amount of effort that is easily possible to achieve on the internet.

talmand 15y ago
Imagine your ISP is some guy that goes wherever you go and sees whatever you see and hears whatever you hear and so on. Now imagine that the guy is willing to share that information with others due to court order or a nominal fee. Your analogy works if you imagine the privacy issue is other internet users seeing what you are doing while they are going about doing whatever it is they are doing. Unless you have a direct connection to the Internet that does not go through a third party everything you do on the Internet is open to the possibility of being tracked. You use a gateway to get to the Internet and you are not the gatekeeper.
- esrauch 15y ago
  Even still, the ISP only keeps logs of what URLs you visit and as far as I know they are almost never mined in any way that correlates to your identity. At the worst it is like someone knows all of the addresses I go to in real life, which is still way way less knowledge than private messages to friends and colleagues or the contents of my email, or even what friends and colleagues I am contacting. Actually, it's even less than that because going to gmail or secure.google.com indicates exactly nothing to the ISP about your behavior, for pages like that it would be like someone having knowledge that you are a member at the local library without knowing what books you have checked out; hardly the most privacy infringing knowledge possible. Additionally I naturally access the internet from at least 3 different ISPs on any given day, so even then it is still less concentrated than a single monolithic entity like Facebook. With regards to court order; literally anything can happen with a court order. You can claim that phone calls or paper letters aren't private because a court order could allow police to read their contents, but I think that is really stretching the truth.
  - talmand 15y ago
    "Even still, the ISP only keeps logs of what URLs you visit and as far as I know they are almost never mined in any way that correlates to your identity." As far as you know is dead right. The ISP knows who you are and what you are doing. Why do you think they receive subpoenas all the time to reveal the identities of people? The entertainment industry has an entire extortion racket going simply because they can ask a court to force an ISP to tell them who you are. Everything you do on the internet has the possibility of being observed. It may not be active but it can be done. We have privacy because we aren't important enough to be heavily watched. The only thing we have is SSL and I for one am not convinced it is as totally secured as many believe it is.

by esrauch 15y ago

talmand 15y ago

Imagine your ISP is some guy that goes wherever you go and sees whatever you see and hears whatever you hear and so on. Now imagine that the guy is willing to share that information with others due to court order or a nominal fee. Your analogy works if you imagine the privacy issue is other internet users seeing what you are doing while they are going about doing whatever it is they are doing. Unless you have a direct connection to the Internet that does not go through a third party everything you do on the Internet is open to the possibility of being tracked. You use a gateway to get to the Internet and you are not the gatekeeper.

esrauch 15y ago
Even still, the ISP only keeps logs of what URLs you visit and as far as I know they are almost never mined in any way that correlates to your identity. At the worst it is like someone knows all of the addresses I go to in real life, which is still way way less knowledge than private messages to friends and colleagues or the contents of my email, or even what friends and colleagues I am contacting. Actually, it's even less than that because going to gmail or secure.google.com indicates exactly nothing to the ISP about your behavior, for pages like that it would be like someone having knowledge that you are a member at the local library without knowing what books you have checked out; hardly the most privacy infringing knowledge possible. Additionally I naturally access the internet from at least 3 different ISPs on any given day, so even then it is still less concentrated than a single monolithic entity like Facebook. With regards to court order; literally anything can happen with a court order. You can claim that phone calls or paper letters aren't private because a court order could allow police to read their contents, but I think that is really stretching the truth.
- talmand 15y ago
  "Even still, the ISP only keeps logs of what URLs you visit and as far as I know they are almost never mined in any way that correlates to your identity." As far as you know is dead right. The ISP knows who you are and what you are doing. Why do you think they receive subpoenas all the time to reveal the identities of people? The entertainment industry has an entire extortion racket going simply because they can ask a court to force an ISP to tell them who you are. Everything you do on the internet has the possibility of being observed. It may not be active but it can be done. We have privacy because we aren't important enough to be heavily watched. The only thing we have is SSL and I for one am not convinced it is as totally secured as many believe it is.