5 ms·

I don't particularly see an issue with this, but I welcome any insights to convince me otherwise. You have no expectation of privacy when in public. My questio

by nness 13y ago

I don't particularly see an issue with this, but I welcome any insights to convince me otherwise. You have no expectation of privacy when in public. My question is whether there is any difference to someone following you around a mall as you go through your shopping journey (whether with cameras or in person even), as compared to someone following your phone?

obituary_latte 13y ago
Someone following you in person takes...well...a person. Following you digitally takes some electricity, bandwidth, storage, and code.
- joonix 13y ago
  So the problem people have with this is the lower cost to the store? They'd be happy with the tracking if the store had to spend more resources to do it? I doubt it.
  - jevinskie 13y ago
    I think the point is they wouldn't stand for it if minders followed them all over the store.
    - superuser2 13y ago
      Security personnel undercover as shoppers already exist and are widely deployed to surreptitiously follow suspicious people. We can and do and will continue to stand for it.
      - gradstudent 13y ago
        We stand for it only because the people being tracked are likely to be criminals. We understand that if we do not engage in criminal activity we will very likely not be followed. If my local store started tracking me for no good reason I would go elsewhere.
        superuser2 13y ago
        >If my local store started tracking me for no good reason You can know that the store uses secret shoppers in general but unless the secret shoppers are terrible at their jobs, you wouldn't know whether or not you're being tracked. Also, doing traffic analysis and strategically placing displays in retail stores has been happening since long before cell phones. Just put someone behind one-way glass, on the mezzanie level of a mall, or even right on the floor with a clipboard.
        gradstudent 13y ago
        I do not disagree that tracking happens. What I disagree with is your implication that the scale at which it happens is irrelevant. It isn't. A security officer tracking me in a mall or a secret shopper recording my actions constitutes a single data point. Mechanically recording of all my movements within the store by tracking my cell-phone removes entirely all of my anonymity. This kind of stuff is creepy, Orwellian and it can fuck right off.
      - obituary_latte 13y ago
        There is a difference between security personnel (who may be responsible for observing hundreds or thousands of people per shift) and wholesale aggregation, analyzing, and collection of data.
- Wingman4l7 13y ago
  Which is cheap compared to, say, a private investigator. Not to mention that it scales a lot more easily -- and such data is a lot more fine-grained and more easily manipulated than any report you'd get from a P.I. trailing someone.
  - superuser2 13y ago
    It's okay for them to have the data only if the reporting functionality is poor? What? Either it's private or it's not.
- superuser2 13y ago
  I've always hated this argument. Banning efficiency, of all things, seems counterproductive. If someone (or a government) really cares, they can simply spend the resources to do full-scale surveillance and tracking the old-fashioned way. It's not like we'll refuse to pay for it, given budgets what they are today. Lack of technology didn't stop the surveillance apparatuses of the USSR or East Germany. They just had larger staffs than we do. Either something is okay, in which case it's okay to do with a machine, or it's not, in which case it's not okay to do at all. If it's okay to tail someone with a police car, it's okay to follow them with a drone. You stop mass surveillance not by making it cost the taxpayer more, but by outlawing mass surveillance and requiring some sort of suspicion or probable cause for each individual case. People who want to track and surveil others like efficiency, but are in general still capable of hard work. Raising the effort required stops only the most pedestrian violators.
  - obituary_latte 13y ago
    Whoa. Once the code is written and so long as the rest of the infrastructure is in place, it can be done wholesale. Cheaply. In perpetuity. To anyone. To do so sans technology requires an undue amount of resource. Ie the energy required to surveil 1x1 personally vs algorithmically is substantial and one is much more feasible than the other (especially if you don't read the TOS - and who does?) All that said, though, I think we are mostly on the same page: you have to accept responsibility for your actions in public. I think where we differ though is that the majority of people don't have a clue wtf is actually going on. PS the argument doesn't hate you. It's willing to take any and all input, process it, and maybe come out changed. It loves, respects, and thrives on you.
    - superuser2 13y ago
      Responeded to your comment pre-edit. If the U.S. Government wants to know who is communicating with whom in a world without modern technology, it can hire n government workers to sit at a desk and write down the address information on all the envelopes passing through USPS in a day. Expensive? Yes. Impossible - to the entity that fought WWII, landed on the moon, and continues to maintain a pretty much stable country of 300 million people? No. Our government may suck at cost-efficiency, but it is great at throwing resources at things that scale O(n), like the number of postal workers required to handle n letters. There are good arguments to be made that it's not the government's place to know who is communicating with whom anyway, so it shouldn't be allowed to. If this is the case, than it shouldn't be allowed to by any means. But how does a shopping mall not have the right to watch people move through its store? If it's wrong to watch the EM signals people emit as the move through, then is it also wrong to watch the light they reflect? I've seen employees doing traffic analysis in museums pretty frequently - in fact art museum security guards do it all the time. They could do the same in a mall. They could even park an employee with a clipboard on the second level and map out people's movements between stores below. Focus on one store at a time, find out where all the people leaving that store go. You'd still get the same result - the general trends of how people move around the stores, based on our evolutionary "tracking" ability - the Orwellian step of correlating neural impulses from the eye as belonging to the same object in different positions. Which is exactly what this cell phone tracking system does, except with MAC addresses instead of faces and hairstyles. I say this to emphasize that not all tracking is bad. Correlating different sensory input with past and future inputs is a large part of being human. Hell, in a small town 50 years ago, the general store owner probably knew you and what you've bought before and who your friends are. The post office worker could recognize a scandalous pattern of letters are tell your family about it. That's way more invasive than this. Involvement of machinery is not the difference between good and bad tracking.
Volpe 13y ago
Agreed, they could achieve the same thing with security cameras and facial recognition (though way more expensive I imagine). People aren't up in arms about security cameras in store.
mcooley 13y ago
I think it has something to do with the power relationship: they can see you, but you can't see them. You might be able to see a camera pointed at you, but the phone locator operates over a passive mechanism that you can't see. Not unfair when you're on their turf--or much different from the online reality, as some have stated--but I could see how it might be disconcerting nonetheless.
bigiain 13y ago
"You have no expectation of privacy when in public." I'm seeing this objection a lot lately, and perhaps I'm showing my age here, but I've certainly got an "expectation of being largely individually anonymous when in public". While there's nothing to stop people looking for me and possibly finding me in public - I _don't_ expect people(/corporations/tlagencies) to be recording everybody in public spaces and archiving them permanently in ways that allow all archived recordings of me to eventually be crossreferenced and de-anonymised. These days though, the technology exists to do just that - and people/companies/agencies are doing it on smaller or larger scales, without societies discussion or approval, and without the laws regarding that collection being brought up-to-date regarding the citizenry's wishes. The genie is probably a long way out of he bottle now, face detection, face recognition, ubiquitous cellphones with their wifi, bluetooth, and GSM/CDMA transmitters - we are all, in a lot of circumstances, uniquely identifiable in crowds - and probably a startlingly large amount of the time, fairly trivially trackable across spaces till we get to places where things like credit card transactions can tie all recorded surveillance back to our legal identities. But acknowledging that all that's _possible_, doesn't mean we need to accept that it's open season on personal tracking data. Your health care providers are under heavy regulation about what data they're permitted to collect and the standards they're required to secure that data too(HIPPA, in the US). Anybody collecting credit card payments needs to comply with the PCI standards. Instead of saying "you have no expectation of privacy in public … ", shouldn't we at least consider having the discussion about "now that ubiquitous surveillance is technically possible, what are the community expectations of privacy in public, and should we choose to regulate the collection, storage, and use of personal data collected in public spaces?" Times change. Peoples opinions and expectations change. Laws change - slower than public opinion, but they _eventually_ catch up (hopefully with the right "lag" to avoid fashion/fad law changes, but quickly enough to stop people revolting against law enforcement and the legal system). Speeding used to be "legal", back before we passed laws recognizing the "danger to society" these new-fangled horseless carriages represent. Cocaine, ecstacy, and LSD were all once unregulated and "legal". It used to be OK to take pocketknives and drinks on airplanes. It used to be against the law to export strong crypto from the US. It used to be legal to own slaves. I'm not suggesting society or the law have settled on ideal solutions or reactions to those examples - but I am suggesting it's time to at least start talking about whether there is a difference between a "shopping researcher following someone around a mall", and an automated system tracking and recording everything every visitor to a mall does - and tying that back to "unique identifiers" (phone's wifi/bluetooth MACs, face recognition, cc details at cash registers), then being able to track that all across multiple visits or visits across multiple locations. Personally, I'm of the opinion that "public space personally identifiable data collection" should be regulated similarly to HIPPA. There needs to be accountability, transparency, up-front notification, and ability for an individual to opt out without suffering any repercussions. I think shopping mall operators should be asking them selves serious questions about whether their ongoing responsibility to secure any personally identifying data (camera feeds, facial recognition output, skeletal geometrics, personal electronics identifiers, etc) - and the legal penalties they'd be responsible for if that data ever gets misused or exposed - is worth the benefit of collecting and storing it in the first place. I think police departments and towtruck/repo cpllectives doing widespread ANPR should all be shitting themselves at the legal/financial consequences of their databases of time/location of individual's vehicles being stolen, and ensuring they've got auditable/provable policies in place to minimise the storage of that data to very short timeframes to demonstrate "reasonable care" of people's privacy in any future court cases. I might be wrong - and perhaps most of society thinks that's all unnecessary government regulation (and hell, I'm perhaps hypocritically all for "small government" and fewer rather than more laws) - but I'm pretty sure nobody has actually _asked_ "the public" whether it's OK with them while explaining what "it" is and the consequences (either positive or negative) to them. I'd at least like that discussion to happen.
DanBC 13y ago
I'm not so bothered by them tracking movements around the shop. But they keep that data, and use it to recognise repeat visitors. In general when people keep data about me there should be a few minimal protections: keep that data secure, use it for what they say they're going to use it for, offer me the option to opt out[1], don't keep the data too long, let me know that you're doing it. In the UK this is covered by Data Protection law. To answer your question: I'd much rather they tracked my phone than a person followed me with a camera. [1] I prefer "don't do it unless I've opted in" but it feels like I lost that argument.
skriticos2 13y ago
So you'd be fine if somenoe would follow you in a car with dark windows and park outside the building when you spend time at home/work/etc.? If there is no expectation of privacy, there should not be a problem with that. How about drones? In a few years it should be possible to have anyone be followed by one all the time. Would you be fine with that? I think at a distinct point it becomes really creepy, especially if you don't know who is actually following you.
- superuser2 13y ago
  The car with dark windows example is how police surveillance has worked for decades. So while it would be uncomfortable, society is pretty clearly in agreement that that's an allowable investigative tool.
  - bigiain 13y ago
    That's true - within the bounds of expected police resource usage. We all expect enough "probable cause" for a police officer's superior to approve dedicating sufficient manpower to do that. I'm less certain that "society is in agreement" with police ANPR systems hoovering up ~1000 number plate records per shift without any "probably cause" and archiving that time/location data permanently. I know it's happening - but mostly because people don't know about it, rather than because most people think it's OK…
    - superuser2 13y ago
      APBs existed before ANPR. It's pretty well known that police who are driving around also have their eyes open for known fugitives, stolen cars, etc. There has to be a reason for an ANPR read of your car to actually do anything. Making that electronic lets the cop focus on driving and increases the maximum number of cars he can be looking for.
barrkel 13y ago
Someone following you around is likely to get their teeth knocked out.

by nness 13y ago

obituary_latte 13y ago

Someone following you in person takes...well...a person. Following you digitally takes some electricity, bandwidth, storage, and code.

joonix 13y ago
So the problem people have with this is the lower cost to the store? They'd be happy with the tracking if the store had to spend more resources to do it? I doubt it.
- jevinskie 13y ago
  I think the point is they wouldn't stand for it if minders followed them all over the store.
  - superuser2 13y ago
    Security personnel undercover as shoppers already exist and are widely deployed to surreptitiously follow suspicious people. We can and do and will continue to stand for it.
    - gradstudent 13y ago
      We stand for it only because the people being tracked are likely to be criminals. We understand that if we do not engage in criminal activity we will very likely not be followed. If my local store started tracking me for no good reason I would go elsewhere.
      - superuser2 13y ago
        >If my local store started tracking me for no good reason You can know that the store uses secret shoppers in general but unless the secret shoppers are terrible at their jobs, you wouldn't know whether or not you're being tracked. Also, doing traffic analysis and strategically placing displays in retail stores has been happening since long before cell phones. Just put someone behind one-way glass, on the mezzanie level of a mall, or even right on the floor with a clipboard.
        gradstudent 13y ago
        I do not disagree that tracking happens. What I disagree with is your implication that the scale at which it happens is irrelevant. It isn't. A security officer tracking me in a mall or a secret shopper recording my actions constitutes a single data point. Mechanically recording of all my movements within the store by tracking my cell-phone removes entirely all of my anonymity. This kind of stuff is creepy, Orwellian and it can fuck right off.
    - obituary_latte 13y ago
      There is a difference between security personnel (who may be responsible for observing hundreds or thousands of people per shift) and wholesale aggregation, analyzing, and collection of data.
Wingman4l7 13y ago
Which is cheap compared to, say, a private investigator. Not to mention that it scales a lot more easily -- and such data is a lot more fine-grained and more easily manipulated than any report you'd get from a P.I. trailing someone.
- superuser2 13y ago
  It's okay for them to have the data only if the reporting functionality is poor? What? Either it's private or it's not.
superuser2 13y ago
I've always hated this argument. Banning efficiency, of all things, seems counterproductive. If someone (or a government) really cares, they can simply spend the resources to do full-scale surveillance and tracking the old-fashioned way. It's not like we'll refuse to pay for it, given budgets what they are today. Lack of technology didn't stop the surveillance apparatuses of the USSR or East Germany. They just had larger staffs than we do. Either something is okay, in which case it's okay to do with a machine, or it's not, in which case it's not okay to do at all. If it's okay to tail someone with a police car, it's okay to follow them with a drone. You stop mass surveillance not by making it cost the taxpayer more, but by outlawing mass surveillance and requiring some sort of suspicion or probable cause for each individual case. People who want to track and surveil others like efficiency, but are in general still capable of hard work. Raising the effort required stops only the most pedestrian violators.
- obituary_latte 13y ago
  Whoa. Once the code is written and so long as the rest of the infrastructure is in place, it can be done wholesale. Cheaply. In perpetuity. To anyone. To do so sans technology requires an undue amount of resource. Ie the energy required to surveil 1x1 personally vs algorithmically is substantial and one is much more feasible than the other (especially if you don't read the TOS - and who does?) All that said, though, I think we are mostly on the same page: you have to accept responsibility for your actions in public. I think where we differ though is that the majority of people don't have a clue wtf is actually going on. PS the argument doesn't hate you. It's willing to take any and all input, process it, and maybe come out changed. It loves, respects, and thrives on you.
  - superuser2 13y ago
    Responeded to your comment pre-edit. If the U.S. Government wants to know who is communicating with whom in a world without modern technology, it can hire n government workers to sit at a desk and write down the address information on all the envelopes passing through USPS in a day. Expensive? Yes. Impossible - to the entity that fought WWII, landed on the moon, and continues to maintain a pretty much stable country of 300 million people? No. Our government may suck at cost-efficiency, but it is great at throwing resources at things that scale O(n), like the number of postal workers required to handle n letters. There are good arguments to be made that it's not the government's place to know who is communicating with whom anyway, so it shouldn't be allowed to. If this is the case, than it shouldn't be allowed to by any means. But how does a shopping mall not have the right to watch people move through its store? If it's wrong to watch the EM signals people emit as the move through, then is it also wrong to watch the light they reflect? I've seen employees doing traffic analysis in museums pretty frequently - in fact art museum security guards do it all the time. They could do the same in a mall. They could even park an employee with a clipboard on the second level and map out people's movements between stores below. Focus on one store at a time, find out where all the people leaving that store go. You'd still get the same result - the general trends of how people move around the stores, based on our evolutionary "tracking" ability - the Orwellian step of correlating neural impulses from the eye as belonging to the same object in different positions. Which is exactly what this cell phone tracking system does, except with MAC addresses instead of faces and hairstyles. I say this to emphasize that not all tracking is bad. Correlating different sensory input with past and future inputs is a large part of being human. Hell, in a small town 50 years ago, the general store owner probably knew you and what you've bought before and who your friends are. The post office worker could recognize a scandalous pattern of letters are tell your family about it. That's way more invasive than this. Involvement of machinery is not the difference between good and bad tracking.

Volpe 13y ago

Agreed, they could achieve the same thing with security cameras and facial recognition (though way more expensive I imagine). People aren't up in arms about security cameras in store.

mcooley 13y ago

I think it has something to do with the power relationship: they can see you, but you can't see them. You might be able to see a camera pointed at you, but the phone locator operates over a passive mechanism that you can't see. Not unfair when you're on their turf--or much different from the online reality, as some have stated--but I could see how it might be disconcerting nonetheless.

bigiain 13y ago

"You have no expectation of privacy when in public." I'm seeing this objection a lot lately, and perhaps I'm showing my age here, but I've certainly got an "expectation of being largely individually anonymous when in public". While there's nothing to stop people looking for me and possibly finding me in public - I _don't_ expect people(/corporations/tlagencies) to be recording everybody in public spaces and archiving them permanently in ways that allow all archived recordings of me to eventually be crossreferenced and de-anonymised. These days though, the technology exists to do just that - and people/companies/agencies are doing it on smaller or larger scales, without societies discussion or approval, and without the laws regarding that collection being brought up-to-date regarding the citizenry's wishes. The genie is probably a long way out of he bottle now, face detection, face recognition, ubiquitous cellphones with their wifi, bluetooth, and GSM/CDMA transmitters - we are all, in a lot of circumstances, uniquely identifiable in crowds - and probably a startlingly large amount of the time, fairly trivially trackable across spaces till we get to places where things like credit card transactions can tie all recorded surveillance back to our legal identities. But acknowledging that all that's _possible_, doesn't mean we need to accept that it's open season on personal tracking data. Your health care providers are under heavy regulation about what data they're permitted to collect and the standards they're required to secure that data too(HIPPA, in the US). Anybody collecting credit card payments needs to comply with the PCI standards. Instead of saying "you have no expectation of privacy in public … ", shouldn't we at least consider having the discussion about "now that ubiquitous surveillance is technically possible, what are the community expectations of privacy in public, and should we choose to regulate the collection, storage, and use of personal data collected in public spaces?" Times change. Peoples opinions and expectations change. Laws change - slower than public opinion, but they _eventually_ catch up (hopefully with the right "lag" to avoid fashion/fad law changes, but quickly enough to stop people revolting against law enforcement and the legal system). Speeding used to be "legal", back before we passed laws recognizing the "danger to society" these new-fangled horseless carriages represent. Cocaine, ecstacy, and LSD were all once unregulated and "legal". It used to be OK to take pocketknives and drinks on airplanes. It used to be against the law to export strong crypto from the US. It used to be legal to own slaves. I'm not suggesting society or the law have settled on ideal solutions or reactions to those examples - but I am suggesting it's time to at least start talking about whether there is a difference between a "shopping researcher following someone around a mall", and an automated system tracking and recording everything every visitor to a mall does - and tying that back to "unique identifiers" (phone's wifi/bluetooth MACs, face recognition, cc details at cash registers), then being able to track that all across multiple visits or visits across multiple locations. Personally, I'm of the opinion that "public space personally identifiable data collection" should be regulated similarly to HIPPA. There needs to be accountability, transparency, up-front notification, and ability for an individual to opt out without suffering any repercussions. I think shopping mall operators should be asking them selves serious questions about whether their ongoing responsibility to secure any personally identifying data (camera feeds, facial recognition output, skeletal geometrics, personal electronics identifiers, etc) - and the legal penalties they'd be responsible for if that data ever gets misused or exposed - is worth the benefit of collecting and storing it in the first place. I think police departments and towtruck/repo cpllectives doing widespread ANPR should all be shitting themselves at the legal/financial consequences of their databases of time/location of individual's vehicles being stolen, and ensuring they've got auditable/provable policies in place to minimise the storage of that data to very short timeframes to demonstrate "reasonable care" of people's privacy in any future court cases. I might be wrong - and perhaps most of society thinks that's all unnecessary government regulation (and hell, I'm perhaps hypocritically all for "small government" and fewer rather than more laws) - but I'm pretty sure nobody has actually _asked_ "the public" whether it's OK with them while explaining what "it" is and the consequences (either positive or negative) to them. I'd at least like that discussion to happen.

DanBC 13y ago

I'm not so bothered by them tracking movements around the shop. But they keep that data, and use it to recognise repeat visitors. In general when people keep data about me there should be a few minimal protections: keep that data secure, use it for what they say they're going to use it for, offer me the option to opt out[1], don't keep the data too long, let me know that you're doing it. In the UK this is covered by Data Protection law. To answer your question: I'd much rather they tracked my phone than a person followed me with a camera. [1] I prefer "don't do it unless I've opted in" but it feels like I lost that argument.

skriticos2 13y ago

So you'd be fine if somenoe would follow you in a car with dark windows and park outside the building when you spend time at home/work/etc.? If there is no expectation of privacy, there should not be a problem with that. How about drones? In a few years it should be possible to have anyone be followed by one all the time. Would you be fine with that? I think at a distinct point it becomes really creepy, especially if you don't know who is actually following you.

superuser2 13y ago
The car with dark windows example is how police surveillance has worked for decades. So while it would be uncomfortable, society is pretty clearly in agreement that that's an allowable investigative tool.
- bigiain 13y ago
  That's true - within the bounds of expected police resource usage. We all expect enough "probable cause" for a police officer's superior to approve dedicating sufficient manpower to do that. I'm less certain that "society is in agreement" with police ANPR systems hoovering up ~1000 number plate records per shift without any "probably cause" and archiving that time/location data permanently. I know it's happening - but mostly because people don't know about it, rather than because most people think it's OK…
  - superuser2 13y ago
    APBs existed before ANPR. It's pretty well known that police who are driving around also have their eyes open for known fugitives, stolen cars, etc. There has to be a reason for an ANPR read of your car to actually do anything. Making that electronic lets the cop focus on driving and increases the maximum number of cars he can be looking for.

barrkel 13y ago

Someone following you around is likely to get their teeth knocked out.