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My Experiment Opting Out of Big Data Made Me Look Like a Criminal

200 points by nthitz 12y ago

dalke 12y ago
The author of this editorial recently presented the material at the Theorizing the Web conference. A recording and details are available at http://mashable.com/2014/04/26/big-data-pregnancy/ http://mashable.com/2014/04/26/big-data-pregnancy/ . Three people submitted that latter link to HN (see https://hn.algolia.com/?q=pregnant#!/story/forever/prefix/0/%22pregnancy%20from%20big%20data%22 https://hn.algolia.com/?q=pregnant#!/story/forever/prefix/0/... ) but there have been no comments.
- chicagobob 12y ago
  In addition to Tor, I didn't see in the article, did she use Ghostery or any other browser privacy plug-ins?
  - dangayle 12y ago
    Ghostery phones home, doesn't it?
    - jordigh 12y ago
      Ô.Ô I thought it just checked for updates. Does it really phone home? Damn, is it really impossible to be anonymous in today's world without appearing to be a criminal?
      - benologist 12y ago
        They have rankings and tracker lists and stuff that you can use, I'm not sure if the data is bundled with it initially or if you have to download it from them.
      - fixermark 12y ago
        Staying completely off the Internet goes quite a ways toward that goal. But I'm pretty sure it's hard to conduct business on the Internet (with any of the major public companies, such as Amazon) and be anonymous in today's world.
      - zevyoura 12y ago
        Disconnect[0] is often touted as a more privacy conscious alternative. I haven't investigated it thoroughly, but it's open source so you can look into it yourself pretty easily. [0] https://disconnect.me https://disconnect.me
fixermark 12y ago
Digging through the other pieces of the story to the headline nugget, we find this: """ But then my husband headed to our local corner store to buy enough gift cards to afford a stroller listed on Amazon. There, a warning sign behind the cashier informed him that the store “reserves the right to limit the daily amount of prepaid card purchases and has an obligation to report excessive transactions to the authorities.” """ So, it's an interesting point, And it's worth noting that we are leaning very heavily in the direction of assuming that people who want to be anonymous are doing so for criminal reasons. This could be partially mitigated, perhaps, if there were a way to give cash to Amazon (but it's probably the case that large cash transactions would be looked upon with the same scrutiny).
- warfangle 12y ago
  It's long been a trope of dystopian (even utopian! see also: gold pressed latinum in Star Trek) scifi that cash is relegated to the shadier transactions, with legitimate transactions happening in the digital realm.
  - eli_gottlieb 12y ago
    That's not science fiction; it's anthropology (see: Graeber2011 ;-)). Most societies have always seen fit to use some form of credit (or other "virtual money") for more trustworthy transactions while employing "cold, hard cash" for more transactions between individuals with more transient, uncaring, insecure relations (which of course includes criminals). The problem is that "trustworthy" has come to mean "watched over by our corporate overlords".
- reuwsaat 12y ago
  Agreed. Bitcoin provides anonymity and people that use it for political or convenience reasons are sometimes looked at suspiciously. But, if I go into Walmart and pay for $150 in groceries in cash, no biggie. Services like SpiderOak that include anonymity as a feature to a small extent do a disservice so the otherwise laudable principle of "can't I be anonymous sometimes without being a criminal?" Maybe zero-knowledge features would be looked upon less suspiciously if they were just included as a feature, without being advertised as a feature? Well, I think you get my gist?
dangayle 12y ago
Fantastic story. I've been wondering if there is a truly private, easy to use chat. Something cryptographically secure, but easy enough that I could get other family members and friends to use it.
- wlesieutre 12y ago
  I've read that Wickr is working on a desktop client, but it doesn't exist yet. The lack of password recovery could be an issue for some people.
  - dangayle 12y ago
    Yeah, I had a hard enough time getting family to update their passwords after Heartbleed.
- higherpurpose 12y ago
  TextSecure.
- Consultant32452 12y ago
  I have always assumed that chat programs that interact directly with texting (google voice) are regulated by the telecom privacy laws. Can anyone answer definitively whether or not google voice messages can be mined?
- ceejayoz 12y ago
  iMessage is protected end-to-end (each authorized device for an Apple ID generates a key and messages are encrypted against each device's public key). Apple states that they cannot decrypt the data (although they could conceivably tweak that in software updates if desired or ordered to). http://images.apple.com/ipad/business/docs/iOS_Security_Feb14.pdf http://images.apple.com/ipad/business/docs/iOS_Security_Feb1... > When a user turns on iMessage, the device generates two pairs of keys for use with the service: an RSA 1280-bit key for encryption and an ECDSA 256-bit key for signing. For each key pair, the private keys are saved in the device’s keychain and the public keys are sent to Apple’s directory service (IDS), where they are associated with the user’s phone number or email address, along with the device’s APNs address.
gress 12y ago
Every time there is a debate about the intrusiveness of Google, or Facebook, there is a chorus of people around here saying "If you don't like it, don't use it" in defense of some kind of capitalist or libertarian ideal. Hopefully this article helps to put the lie to that kind of thinking, and we see this pervasive intrusion for what it is: corporate oppression; the abuse of the corporate power over individuals.
- zxcdw 12y ago
  Let me play devil's advocate here: So what? Apart from an ideological view on "privacy is good mmkay", how exactly does it hinder your life if Google knows that you are pregnant, or that if Facebook knows that you are planning up a party for a friend? Or that if company X knows you are anticipating movie Y? What concrete things do I gain from opting out? What do I lose? How does it actually affect my life? Edit: It's weird to receive downvotes for this as I'd assume a comment like this exactly contributes to the discussion about the topic at hand.
  - walden42 12y ago
    > What concrete things do I gain from opting out? But why is privacy not enough? Why should I have to convince anyone else that privacy is important? If they don't care, then they don't have to be private themselves, but don't force it on other people. If you want an actual reason, then just look through the history books about how governments were using private information against their citizens (WW2 being the best example). "Oh, you look forward to watching V for Vendetta? New stats show that 90% of violent anarchists have watched that movie. Please come with us, citizen."
  - gress 12y ago
    If it didn't affect your life, it wouldn't be valuable. Are you claiming all the effort spent on all this by corporations is simply misguided and doesn't affect people?
  - minikites 12y ago
    What concrete things do you gain from freedom of speech or any of the other rights enshrined in law?
meritt 12y ago
Is there a better way to purchase prepaid credit cards (perhaps with BTC, check, cash, etc) that isn't likely to be reported?
- walden42 12y ago
  As far as I know, gift card stores like Gyft.com don't require personal information and you can pay with BTC. For example, in the case of the author, she would buy a Target gift card with BTC, then check out at the register with her smartphone. The limit is $200 per gift card, so it's not very low for normal use. I do this with Amazon and it's pretty easy.
  - vertex-four 12y ago
    Getting BTC without an audit trail is in the first place fairly difficult, especially if you're not used to having to watch out for scams.
    - walden42 12y ago
      Well, being realistic, I doubt that most exchanges like Bitstamp are sharing their customer's info with other companies, so the original issue that the author was talking about doesn't really apply here. If you're paranoid, you can use Local Bitcoins or the Mycelium Local Trader app to do in person transactions.
higherpurpose 12y ago
People should be suing these companies, like in the example with Target. She should've sued Target for that. Eventually they'll learn their lesson. Look at Google, they're already backtracked on some privacy invasion stuff because of some recent lawsuits.
qwerta 12y ago
Just for illustration, in Europe I usually carry around equivalent of $700 in cash for petrol and other daily expenses. Less hassle and practically no risk of being robbed. But yes, most people here prefer credit cards.
- dalke 12y ago
  I think there's a large regional variation. That is, in Germany and Switzerland, the small hotels I've stayed at want payment in cash, and often don't accept credit cards. See http://www.thestar.com/business/2012/07/27/germanys_tough_bailout_stance_rooted_in_cash_only_culture.html http://www.thestar.com/business/2012/07/27/germanys_tough_ba... for example, which describes how IKEA in Stockholm accepts credit/debit cards, but not IKEA in Berlin, which is cash only. In Germany one time I bought a camera at the electronics store Saturn. Again, the store didn't take a card, though there was an ATM in the lobby so I could draw the cash for it. This pro-cash view is also why Germany pushed for the 500 EUR bill. Apparently many people don't trust the banks, and prefer to keep their wealth in cash. In the UK I've found that the taxis basically don't deal with credit cards, while in Sweden, every taxi supports it. Most Swedish banks are trying to get away from dealing in cash. And I spent a week in Iceland without ever having Icelandic money. Even the local corner stores took my debit card.
api 12y ago
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwWMrDbvpzE&feature=share http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwWMrDbvpzE&feature=share
suprgeek 12y ago
I wonder if rather than focusing on completely opting out, if the author had tried a deliberate confusion strategy in addition to minimizing her digital footprint would she have been "more" successful? (I recognize the difficulty in measuring "successful" outcomes with this metric). One of the "dirty" secrets of Big data is that for the Analytics to work is that the data has to be "prepped". How about deliberately using different names, genders, etc etc in social media, stores (first abbreviation, maiden name etc). Once the data trail gets muddy enough, you cannot track anything. Hmmm Might even be an "app" idea in this :)
- bediger4000 12y ago
  Would it be possible to maximize your footprint, instead of minimizing it? I think it's almost impossible to opt out, as the story says, so I try to get other names associated with my address, get other people to use my grocery store loyalty card, and I let my kids do school homework searches under my Google log-in. I also fill in as many surveys as I can with semi-fake answers, and on Netflix or Hulu (Can't recall which one does this) I alternate checking "yes" and "no" for "Is this ad relevant to you?" If you create enough "data smog" will the Big Data people be able to penetrate it?
  - nostrademons 12y ago
    If you create enough data smog the Big Data systems will just give wrong answers. Whether that's a good or bad thing depends on how the data's used. It seems to be a common misconception that the Googles and Facebooks of the world have someone nefariously looking at your data to profile your every move. No. The average employee at Facebook does not care about you, and even if they have access to your personal data (I know that this is significantly locked down at Google, and probably is at Facebook these days), they don't care who you are or what you do. Instead, they're developing algorithms that mine lots of data from lots of consumers to produce products for lots of consumers. If you put in wrong information, it's basically GIGO. And since the basic models are trained on millions of data points, if just you do it, you only hurt yourself - you're a drop in the bucket compared to everyone's data, but your own personalized interface will be based on the profile you give it, not what you actually want. You can see this in action with shared Netflix accounts. Share a Netflix account with someone and basically you get garbage for recommendations, because the system tries to make sense of two different "streams" of data that were arbitrarily merged together. (There are ways to separate them out, but they add a lot of complexity to the system.) Things may be different if you're talking about Palantir or the NSA. They specifically do look at individuals. But then, if they get a bunch of random data their assumption is probably going to be that the person is deliberately trying to obscure their tracks ("tradecraft"), which means that the suspect warrants even further scrutiny.
gasull 12y ago
An excellent use case for Bitcoin. We need anonymous payments.
- danudey 12y ago
  The assumption that bitcoin is anonymous isn't really a great one. It's pseudonymous at the very least, but as it's possible to track every transaction ever made (even moreso than cash transactions), it's not a trivial matter for typical users to anonymize their transactions. Even if Bitcoin (and tumblers) became ubiquitous, the legal frameworks that exist to handle cash transactions (e.g. making an unusually large amount of cash purchases of gift cards, moving an unusually large amount of money across the border, etc.) will be revised to include bitcoin, with the result that using BTC in the way that people seem to think it's destined for will become, if not illegal, then at the very least highly suspect. Ideally, we should be fixing the broken systems that are in place, rather than trying to concoct technology to try to work around it (which can then just be regulated/criminalized anyway).
- MichaelGG 12y ago
  People using Bitcoin without investing a massive amount of effort into staying anonymous will probably perform an identity-revealing action at some point. Then, every previous transaction can be linked with some level of certainty. That's hardly "anonymous payments". If Bitcoin were to adopt Zerocoin, then we might have something useful.
Fasebook 12y ago
I don't get the story that pregnant women are such a valuable demographic that marketers would spend so much money trying to give them coupons.
- pjungwir 12y ago
  You must not have any children. :-) When a child comes, there are all kinds of new expenses: diapers, formula, clothes, pediatricians, strollers, cribs, baby monitors, toys. . . . Personally though, I'm surprised the canonical example isn't buying a new home. I bought my first home two months ago, and it seems like every day in the mail I get two offers for life insurance, another for lawn care, and another for furniture/blinds. But I'm not seeing a deluge of online ads for those things. Maybe it's an opportunity?
  - chiph 12y ago
    But this only applies for the first child, when the parents are the most nervous about living up to expectations. By the second or third child, they're like: "I get onesies at Goodwill and garage sales since they're cheaper and they'll only be in it for a couple of months before the knees are worn-out, or they've outgrown it." and "Pack-n-play? Those are expensive - I just take a blanket along for them to play on. Takes less room in the car and easier to clean."
    - Fasebook 12y ago
      I think it's clear that this is about gathering data, not selling anything.
  - donutello 12y ago
    It's much more than just the things you buy for the new baby. Having a child is a watershed moment in your life from a marketing perspective: 1. Your life is different. You used to self-herd [1] yourself to one set of brands and businesses before you had a child. That is now broken. Marketers have a small window of opportunity to get you hooked on new brands and businesses. Once they do, you'll self-herd to them for a very long time, if not for ever. 2. You are tired and you don't make the best decisions in that situation. This leaves you especially susceptible to marketing, which, because of #1, will have a long-lasting impact. That being said, the article is mostly bullshit. My wife recently had a baby. We didn't keep it a secret in any way on Facebook, Google or by our purchase behavior. We didn't get hit by any kind of directed marketing (except for retargeting ads online) until after we had the child and the record of birth is part of the public county records. [1] http://www.stubbornmule.net/2008/05/self-herding/ http://www.stubbornmule.net/2008/05/self-herding/
lackbeard 12y ago
This was an interesting article, but isn't the title begging the question? Unless I missed something, no one made any criminal charges, or even raised any suspicion regarding the author's behavior.
- Zmetta 12y ago
  When trying to pay cash for several pre-paid cards in order to place an anonymous online order for a stroller on Amazon, the transaction was rejected and possibly reported to the authorities for suspicious behavior.
  - proexploit 12y ago
    > But then my husband headed to our local corner store to buy enough gift cards to afford a stroller listed on Amazon. There, a warning sign behind the cashier informed him that the store “reserves the right to limit the daily amount of prepaid card purchases and has an obligation to report excessive transactions to the authorities.” All the article says is that there was a sign on the wall. I didn't get the impression it stopped them.
    - chillingeffect 12y ago
      Precisely. As a diehard paranoid, I wanted to sympathize with the writer, but I felt betrayed. Nothing actually happened. They saw a sign. So the writer gives the impression of being an alarmist worry-wart. Could this article have been selected for publication so as to fuel the idea that people who are worried are merely overly anxious? The Snowden papers proved that government organizations have been feeding us confusing information to sway public opinion toward obedience to central authority. This may be a good example of it.
rayiner 12y ago
I loved this bit: > For example, seven months in, my uncle sent me a Facebook message, congratulating me on my pregnancy. My response was downright rude: I deleted the thread and unfriended him immediately. When I emailed to ask why he did it, he explained, “I didn’t put it on your wall.” Another family member who reached out on Facebook chat a few weeks later exclaimed, “I didn’t know that a private message wasn’t private!” Ordinary people have no idea what they're actually trading for "free" Facebook, "free" Google, "free" Chrome, etc. Heck, I'm technologically savvy and I don't really understand either.
- selmnoo 12y ago
  This is totally and entirely deliberate on Facebook's part. It's kind of a mix between 'Zuckering' and 'misdirection': http://darkpatterns.org/privacy-zuckering/ http://darkpatterns.org/privacy-zuckering/ - http://darkpatterns.org/misdirection/ http://darkpatterns.org/misdirection/ They could conceivably do something so that people aren't misled into this thinking, but they're not going to do that.
- Consultant32452 12y ago
  I'd be interested in knowing what Facebook's privacy policies are regarding private messages. Are they data mined? Did the congrats on the baby message result in baby related advertising?
  - enraged_camel 12y ago
    This would be an amazing way to troll your friends (or people you hate).
  - notahacker 12y ago
    Bearing in mind there are Facebook advertisers unsophisticated enough not to bother filtering on "interested in" before showing dating ads, it seems far more likely that she'd be shown a baby ad coincidentally.
  - mpyne 12y ago
    I suspect Facebook treats them as "direct messages" (i.e. there's no illusion Facebook doesn't know the contents) and not "private messages", if their normal attitude toward privacy is anything to go by.
bediger4000 12y ago
Amusing occurrance of spell-checker-failure: While it has a reputation for facilitating elicit activities... Did the author misspell "illicit" in such a way that the spell checker changed it to "elicit", or did she write "elicit" originally? It makes a difference in how I view this unknown-to-me-author's credibility.
- dTal 12y ago
  I notice she spells it correctly a few paragraphs later. Does that reassure you?
- deepblueocean 12y ago
  I noticed this, too. I think it speaks less of spell checkers and more about Time's ability to do copy-editing. If I submitted a piece to a major outlet such as this, I would do so in full faith that they would assign at least one person to read through it and copy-edit it before publication. Apparently, Time is not a sufficiently reputable institution of journalism to believe in doing this, or at least is unwilling to spend enough money to have it done by competent people. EDIT: As for Janet's credibility, I can speak to it personally, having spent a year with her working down the hall from my office. Probably the coolest stuff she's done relates to how decisions are made in big teams of scientists (she studied the sociology of scientists running some Mars rover missions: http://janet.vertesi.com/projects/social-life-spacecraft http://janet.vertesi.com/projects/social-life-spacecraft).
jnbiche 12y ago
Just to be clear, the store selling gift cards had a signed out stating that they will report excessive number of cash transactions to the authorities because they are forced to by FinCEN and other U.S. regulatory bodies. If a merchant fails to report cash gift card sells over the legal limit per day, they can be criminally prosecuted and put in jail. So please don't blame the merchants for this. I can assure you that the merchant doesn't care if someone wants to pay in cash. In fact, they prefer it usually (e.g., cash discounts at gas stations). What people see as "corporate oppression" is quite often government oppression. Personally, I think both corporations and multinational corporations are engaged in this kind of misbehavior. Indeed, the line between powerful politicians and powerful corporate leaders blurs more and more each passing year. If each side of the political spectrum continues to ignore the fact that both government and large corporations are at fault here, things will never get better.
- gress 12y ago
  As the writer of a comment mentioning corporate oppression, I agree with you. The government is a huge part of this. The true false dichotomy is when we claim that the government is good while corporations are bad, or the converse. The government works for the powerful, and the powerful are corporations.
- wahsd 12y ago
  Government and corporate oppression go hand in hand because they have the same intentions, exploitation and control.
- theorique 12y ago
  In the financial services area (brokerage accounts, etc), there are real consequences for employees in the industry who don't comply with anti-money laundering laws. If "Abdul al-Qaeda" makes hundreds of all-cash deposits under the $10K reporting limit into his brokerage account, that still represents a potential red flag. Employees who are servicing that account could face serious penalties (from the government) for their failure to look into potential money-laundering for nefarious purposes. The laws are written vaguely, so such employees can never be 100% certain that they are in compliance.
junto 12y ago
Rather than fear being 'outed' by her uncle on Facebook whilst pregnant, she would have been better deactivating or 'deleting' her Facebook account. Nobody could have tagged her or posted anything on her wall, nor sent her private messages. You don't dance with the devil if you intend to hide from him.
- Terr_ 12y ago
  Facebook already maintains placeholder "Ghost User Accounts" for possible future members, so I see no reason that they wouldn't continue to track associations with an inactive account too.
  - junto 12y ago
    Indeed, but for 9 months of pregnancy she still wouldn't have feared being outed by her Facebook contacts. Facebook 'delete' is in itself an oxymoron. I believe that they logically delete everything, and then everything gets analysed and archived for posterity. As I was in the process of deleting my Facebook account last year I noted several bugs that suggested that the counts of checkins and photos did not tally with the things I had deleted. I.e. Everything. I have some screenshots somewhere on imgur I should dig out.
Consultant32452 12y ago
I prefer to go the opposite route. When any of my close friends is having a baby I sign up for all the baby clubs with approximately the same due date, then hand over all the free samples and good coupons to the real expectant parents. Some of our friends and family did this when my ex-wife and I were having our daughter, it saved us a bundle.
stcredzero 12y ago
(Karma burning time. Summary: The only way to not swallow the Blue Pill is to make powers that be use trusted execution made by and for the people. Unfortunately: Not going to happen.) It’s time for a frank public discussion about how to make personal information privacy not just a series of check boxes but a basic human right, both online and off. The problem is, is that there is no suitable infrastructure for guaranteeing such a right, and there is no one everyone trusts enough to implement it. To have this in actuality, we really need some sort of trusted execution environment. Unfortunately, this is the same thing as DRM, and we already know how manufacturers and big software companies might collude with the authorities to turn this against us. In a way, this is a win-win for totalitarianism, big-data style. If the powers that be can implement DRM as they want, they control computing from the substrate-up and we've all swallowed the Blue Pill. However if the public has a vehement reaction against DRM, then the population is effectively inoculated against implementing such tools for themselves so they can hold authorities and website operators to account. Either way, the oligarchs/equity lords/0.01% win. If you look at the activities of groups like the IRA, resistance has relied on the power of social networks in the oppressed population. Now, online social networks have embedded the structure of people's social networks in big data itself. That is a lot of aggregated power. Power corrupts. EDIT: After engaging in the discussion below, I'll bend my position a bit. Such infrastructure would be nice (where "nice" = "really the only sane way to do it") but a social and legal framework to set expectations might be the pragmatic thing to go after first.
- wmf 12y ago
  Maybe you don't need a technical solution. Maybe opt-outs with HIPAA-style fines for noncompliance would work.
  - crazy1van 12y ago
    I feel this will become an exercise in box checking "compliance" just like HIPAA. Sure, your medical records are encrypted on disk (but I have the key in plaintext right next them). Sure, there's an opt-out on our site. Good luck remembering to click the opt-out button in the corner every time you visit.
slg 12y ago
I am not putting a value judgement on big data, but I don't think the author's experiment is true to her objective. Instead of testing how easy it would be to opt out of using Facebook or Amazon, she tried to hide something from Facebook and Amazon. She is basically trying to get the advantage of digital life without the downsides. The experiment would have been much easier (and closer to the normal opt out suggestions) if she quit Facebook and made her baby purchases in person from brick and mortar stores with cash. Sure that is an incovenience, but isn't nearly as much trouble as trying to censor your communications with everyone online or trying to launder your baby purchases through multiple anonymous payment methods.
- gress 12y ago
  The 'downsides' as you put it are not inherent in the digital lifestyle. The whole point of the article was to see whether it was possible to do this.
trhway 12y ago
so, she did have something to hide after all. One more example that the rule is working
hooande 12y ago
We have significantly more privacy in the modern era than people did hundreds of years ago. Most of us live in cities large enough that no one will know that you've been to the doctor, what you bought from the butcher or who you spend your time hanging out with. If you think it's easy for people to find out that someone is pregnant now, it was absolutely effortless in 1714. It's common for people to spend days commuting to work and going out to eat and socialize without running into anyone that they know. In the past there was almost no privacy for anyone. People lived in a world comprised of dozens of people and saw many of them every day. Are we moving into a scary new era of data collection and prediction, or cycling back to an old world where it's hard to keep secrets because everyone knows everyone else? Big Data is no more of a threat to privacy than Small Town used to be. But in modern society we have the option to opt out. Or at the very least, use Tor or private browsing and avoid social media. We have the ability to live with a level of anonymity that our ancestors would deeply envy. The only thing stopping us is our own desire to participate in services and online communities designed specifically to collect and broadcast information about ourselves. Why do we do it? Because we really like it. Our cultural roots lie in societies where supposed secrets traveled fast and everyone knew if someone was pregnant or gay or searching for information about strange topics. Even when we're able to hide ourselves in crowds of strangers we invent new ways to connect to each other and broadcast our statuses and purchase habits to as many people as possible. Everything old is new again, and instead of trying to hide on social media we should focus on figuring out how to take advantage of new technology to give ourselves the level of privacy that we want. Modern data collection presents challenges, but challenges that we can overcome to create a world that is better than the one we came from.
- equalarrow 12y ago
  Uh, did you read the whole article? The author's point was you can't opt out and not seem like a criminal. This was because if you wanted to stay anonymous online and actually buy things, you need to purchase gift cards with cash. The place she went (or her husband did) to purchase multiple gift cards had a sign that said something like they're watching people that buy a lot of gift cards. You're response sounds more like a marketing brochure to me. While I love tech and am in the tech world, the fact is, mine and everyone's private info is out there for anyone to buy and many companies to sell. Sure, we can make tools (some day) to put the equation in our favor, but this is not that day. Simply saying we can use Tor/private browsing/avoid social media is only part of it. Actually buying things not in cash leaves a trail and that info is sold to whomever pays. Regardless if you could easily find out in the 1700's if someone was pregnant, the article was not a commentary on the past. It was about opting out in the present, which is pretty much impossible if you use any kind of connected technology in your daily life. Be it your atm/credit card, phone, internet connection - they all leave trails. Sure, in the 1700's a butcher would see your face and maybe remember it. Maybe retain enough info to track you down if need be. But now, it's more than absolute. The more everything becomes digitized, the less anyone can be anonymous. You'd have to really be into the spy mindset to cover your tracks and do the things that would need to be done to get false ids, etc. And I don't know how much that would even help as machine learning and face recognition (coupled with ccd's everywhere) get better and could probably link up those fake ids. Honestly, I don't care much because I'm not a very important or interesting person. So in a sense that way, I have some anonymity. And I love tech (still). Interesting experiment from the author, but we've already crossed the privacy line and there's no going back or opting out.
snorkel 12y ago
She could've just done this instead: 1. Delete Facebook account. 2. Use cashier checks.
genericuser 12y ago
Her experiment while interesting does not demonstrate that all of her elaborate steps were even necessary, just that she put a ton of work into doing this and was successful, who knows how much of that work was needed. Also no where in her article does she reference someone else thinking she looked like a criminal. Yes there was the sign at the store about gift cards but nothing about the cashier caring at all. She alternates between 'look like a criminal' and 'feel like a criminal' while I agree she might of felt like quite a badass criminal using tor and paying for everything in cash and gift cards, the article in no way indicates others thought she looked like a criminal. It does however show that she negatively views people who perform those type of actions, since she views them as actions that make her feel like a criminal; and, as with many people, views criminals negatively. Also if you are going to have to go buy the gift cards to use at Amazon in the first place? Why even shop at Amazon? Why not go to your local Babies R Us (or wherever people buy strollers and such) and buy your items with cash there. The convenience of Amazon seems lost on me when I have to go to a physical store prior to ordering something on Amazon.
ottocoder 12y ago
The story about Target outing the pregnant high-schooler has circulated for some time now, but has it ever been verified? I don't doubt Target's capability to discover if a woman is pregnant, but the citation given [1] sounds a bit too anecdotal (and isolated) for my taste. Are there more cases of this happening? Any other sources? [1] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits.html?pagewanted=7&_r=3&hp&adxnnlx=1398981417-ya9Av3whlYn03kadQuwzMw http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits.h...

200 points by nthitz 12y ago

dalke 12y ago

The author of this editorial recently presented the material at the Theorizing the Web conference. A recording and details are available at http://mashable.com/2014/04/26/big-data-pregnancy/ http://mashable.com/2014/04/26/big-data-pregnancy/ . Three people submitted that latter link to HN (see https://hn.algolia.com/?q=pregnant#!/story/forever/prefix/0/%22pregnancy%20from%20big%20data%22 https://hn.algolia.com/?q=pregnant#!/story/forever/prefix/0/... ) but there have been no comments.

chicagobob 12y ago
In addition to Tor, I didn't see in the article, did she use Ghostery or any other browser privacy plug-ins?
- dangayle 12y ago
  Ghostery phones home, doesn't it?
  - jordigh 12y ago
    Ô.Ô I thought it just checked for updates. Does it really phone home? Damn, is it really impossible to be anonymous in today's world without appearing to be a criminal?
    - benologist 12y ago
      They have rankings and tracker lists and stuff that you can use, I'm not sure if the data is bundled with it initially or if you have to download it from them.
    - fixermark 12y ago
      Staying completely off the Internet goes quite a ways toward that goal. But I'm pretty sure it's hard to conduct business on the Internet (with any of the major public companies, such as Amazon) and be anonymous in today's world.
    - zevyoura 12y ago
      Disconnect[0] is often touted as a more privacy conscious alternative. I haven't investigated it thoroughly, but it's open source so you can look into it yourself pretty easily. [0] https://disconnect.me https://disconnect.me

fixermark 12y ago

Digging through the other pieces of the story to the headline nugget, we find this: """ But then my husband headed to our local corner store to buy enough gift cards to afford a stroller listed on Amazon. There, a warning sign behind the cashier informed him that the store “reserves the right to limit the daily amount of prepaid card purchases and has an obligation to report excessive transactions to the authorities.” """ So, it's an interesting point, And it's worth noting that we are leaning very heavily in the direction of assuming that people who want to be anonymous are doing so for criminal reasons. This could be partially mitigated, perhaps, if there were a way to give cash to Amazon (but it's probably the case that large cash transactions would be looked upon with the same scrutiny).

warfangle 12y ago
It's long been a trope of dystopian (even utopian! see also: gold pressed latinum in Star Trek) scifi that cash is relegated to the shadier transactions, with legitimate transactions happening in the digital realm.
- eli_gottlieb 12y ago
  That's not science fiction; it's anthropology (see: Graeber2011 ;-)). Most societies have always seen fit to use some form of credit (or other "virtual money") for more trustworthy transactions while employing "cold, hard cash" for more transactions between individuals with more transient, uncaring, insecure relations (which of course includes criminals). The problem is that "trustworthy" has come to mean "watched over by our corporate overlords".
reuwsaat 12y ago
Agreed. Bitcoin provides anonymity and people that use it for political or convenience reasons are sometimes looked at suspiciously. But, if I go into Walmart and pay for $150 in groceries in cash, no biggie. Services like SpiderOak that include anonymity as a feature to a small extent do a disservice so the otherwise laudable principle of "can't I be anonymous sometimes without being a criminal?" Maybe zero-knowledge features would be looked upon less suspiciously if they were just included as a feature, without being advertised as a feature? Well, I think you get my gist?

dangayle 12y ago

Fantastic story. I've been wondering if there is a truly private, easy to use chat. Something cryptographically secure, but easy enough that I could get other family members and friends to use it.

wlesieutre 12y ago
I've read that Wickr is working on a desktop client, but it doesn't exist yet. The lack of password recovery could be an issue for some people.
- dangayle 12y ago
  Yeah, I had a hard enough time getting family to update their passwords after Heartbleed.
higherpurpose 12y ago
TextSecure.
Consultant32452 12y ago
I have always assumed that chat programs that interact directly with texting (google voice) are regulated by the telecom privacy laws. Can anyone answer definitively whether or not google voice messages can be mined?
ceejayoz 12y ago
iMessage is protected end-to-end (each authorized device for an Apple ID generates a key and messages are encrypted against each device's public key). Apple states that they cannot decrypt the data (although they could conceivably tweak that in software updates if desired or ordered to). http://images.apple.com/ipad/business/docs/iOS_Security_Feb14.pdf http://images.apple.com/ipad/business/docs/iOS_Security_Feb1... > When a user turns on iMessage, the device generates two pairs of keys for use with the service: an RSA 1280-bit key for encryption and an ECDSA 256-bit key for signing. For each key pair, the private keys are saved in the device’s keychain and the public keys are sent to Apple’s directory service (IDS), where they are associated with the user’s phone number or email address, along with the device’s APNs address.

gress 12y ago

Every time there is a debate about the intrusiveness of Google, or Facebook, there is a chorus of people around here saying "If you don't like it, don't use it" in defense of some kind of capitalist or libertarian ideal. Hopefully this article helps to put the lie to that kind of thinking, and we see this pervasive intrusion for what it is: corporate oppression; the abuse of the corporate power over individuals.

zxcdw 12y ago
Let me play devil's advocate here: So what? Apart from an ideological view on "privacy is good mmkay", how exactly does it hinder your life if Google knows that you are pregnant, or that if Facebook knows that you are planning up a party for a friend? Or that if company X knows you are anticipating movie Y? What concrete things do I gain from opting out? What do I lose? How does it actually affect my life? Edit: It's weird to receive downvotes for this as I'd assume a comment like this exactly contributes to the discussion about the topic at hand.
- walden42 12y ago
  > What concrete things do I gain from opting out? But why is privacy not enough? Why should I have to convince anyone else that privacy is important? If they don't care, then they don't have to be private themselves, but don't force it on other people. If you want an actual reason, then just look through the history books about how governments were using private information against their citizens (WW2 being the best example). "Oh, you look forward to watching V for Vendetta? New stats show that 90% of violent anarchists have watched that movie. Please come with us, citizen."
- gress 12y ago
  If it didn't affect your life, it wouldn't be valuable. Are you claiming all the effort spent on all this by corporations is simply misguided and doesn't affect people?
- minikites 12y ago
  What concrete things do you gain from freedom of speech or any of the other rights enshrined in law?

meritt 12y ago

Is there a better way to purchase prepaid credit cards (perhaps with BTC, check, cash, etc) that isn't likely to be reported?

walden42 12y ago
As far as I know, gift card stores like Gyft.com don't require personal information and you can pay with BTC. For example, in the case of the author, she would buy a Target gift card with BTC, then check out at the register with her smartphone. The limit is $200 per gift card, so it's not very low for normal use. I do this with Amazon and it's pretty easy.
- vertex-four 12y ago
  Getting BTC without an audit trail is in the first place fairly difficult, especially if you're not used to having to watch out for scams.
  - walden42 12y ago
    Well, being realistic, I doubt that most exchanges like Bitstamp are sharing their customer's info with other companies, so the original issue that the author was talking about doesn't really apply here. If you're paranoid, you can use Local Bitcoins or the Mycelium Local Trader app to do in person transactions.

higherpurpose 12y ago

People should be suing these companies, like in the example with Target. She should've sued Target for that. Eventually they'll learn their lesson. Look at Google, they're already backtracked on some privacy invasion stuff because of some recent lawsuits.

qwerta 12y ago

Just for illustration, in Europe I usually carry around equivalent of $700 in cash for petrol and other daily expenses. Less hassle and practically no risk of being robbed. But yes, most people here prefer credit cards.

dalke 12y ago
I think there's a large regional variation. That is, in Germany and Switzerland, the small hotels I've stayed at want payment in cash, and often don't accept credit cards. See http://www.thestar.com/business/2012/07/27/germanys_tough_bailout_stance_rooted_in_cash_only_culture.html http://www.thestar.com/business/2012/07/27/germanys_tough_ba... for example, which describes how IKEA in Stockholm accepts credit/debit cards, but not IKEA in Berlin, which is cash only. In Germany one time I bought a camera at the electronics store Saturn. Again, the store didn't take a card, though there was an ATM in the lobby so I could draw the cash for it. This pro-cash view is also why Germany pushed for the 500 EUR bill. Apparently many people don't trust the banks, and prefer to keep their wealth in cash. In the UK I've found that the taxis basically don't deal with credit cards, while in Sweden, every taxi supports it. Most Swedish banks are trying to get away from dealing in cash. And I spent a week in Iceland without ever having Icelandic money. Even the local corner stores took my debit card.

api 12y ago

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwWMrDbvpzE&feature=share http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwWMrDbvpzE&feature=share

suprgeek 12y ago

I wonder if rather than focusing on completely opting out, if the author had tried a deliberate confusion strategy in addition to minimizing her digital footprint would she have been "more" successful? (I recognize the difficulty in measuring "successful" outcomes with this metric). One of the "dirty" secrets of Big data is that for the Analytics to work is that the data has to be "prepped". How about deliberately using different names, genders, etc etc in social media, stores (first abbreviation, maiden name etc). Once the data trail gets muddy enough, you cannot track anything. Hmmm Might even be an "app" idea in this :)

bediger4000 12y ago
Would it be possible to maximize your footprint, instead of minimizing it? I think it's almost impossible to opt out, as the story says, so I try to get other names associated with my address, get other people to use my grocery store loyalty card, and I let my kids do school homework searches under my Google log-in. I also fill in as many surveys as I can with semi-fake answers, and on Netflix or Hulu (Can't recall which one does this) I alternate checking "yes" and "no" for "Is this ad relevant to you?" If you create enough "data smog" will the Big Data people be able to penetrate it?
- nostrademons 12y ago
  If you create enough data smog the Big Data systems will just give wrong answers. Whether that's a good or bad thing depends on how the data's used. It seems to be a common misconception that the Googles and Facebooks of the world have someone nefariously looking at your data to profile your every move. No. The average employee at Facebook does not care about you, and even if they have access to your personal data (I know that this is significantly locked down at Google, and probably is at Facebook these days), they don't care who you are or what you do. Instead, they're developing algorithms that mine lots of data from lots of consumers to produce products for lots of consumers. If you put in wrong information, it's basically GIGO. And since the basic models are trained on millions of data points, if just you do it, you only hurt yourself - you're a drop in the bucket compared to everyone's data, but your own personalized interface will be based on the profile you give it, not what you actually want. You can see this in action with shared Netflix accounts. Share a Netflix account with someone and basically you get garbage for recommendations, because the system tries to make sense of two different "streams" of data that were arbitrarily merged together. (There are ways to separate them out, but they add a lot of complexity to the system.) Things may be different if you're talking about Palantir or the NSA. They specifically do look at individuals. But then, if they get a bunch of random data their assumption is probably going to be that the person is deliberately trying to obscure their tracks ("tradecraft"), which means that the suspect warrants even further scrutiny.

gasull 12y ago

An excellent use case for Bitcoin. We need anonymous payments.

danudey 12y ago
The assumption that bitcoin is anonymous isn't really a great one. It's pseudonymous at the very least, but as it's possible to track every transaction ever made (even moreso than cash transactions), it's not a trivial matter for typical users to anonymize their transactions. Even if Bitcoin (and tumblers) became ubiquitous, the legal frameworks that exist to handle cash transactions (e.g. making an unusually large amount of cash purchases of gift cards, moving an unusually large amount of money across the border, etc.) will be revised to include bitcoin, with the result that using BTC in the way that people seem to think it's destined for will become, if not illegal, then at the very least highly suspect. Ideally, we should be fixing the broken systems that are in place, rather than trying to concoct technology to try to work around it (which can then just be regulated/criminalized anyway).
MichaelGG 12y ago
People using Bitcoin without investing a massive amount of effort into staying anonymous will probably perform an identity-revealing action at some point. Then, every previous transaction can be linked with some level of certainty. That's hardly "anonymous payments". If Bitcoin were to adopt Zerocoin, then we might have something useful.

Fasebook 12y ago

I don't get the story that pregnant women are such a valuable demographic that marketers would spend so much money trying to give them coupons.

pjungwir 12y ago
You must not have any children. :-) When a child comes, there are all kinds of new expenses: diapers, formula, clothes, pediatricians, strollers, cribs, baby monitors, toys. . . . Personally though, I'm surprised the canonical example isn't buying a new home. I bought my first home two months ago, and it seems like every day in the mail I get two offers for life insurance, another for lawn care, and another for furniture/blinds. But I'm not seeing a deluge of online ads for those things. Maybe it's an opportunity?
- chiph 12y ago
  But this only applies for the first child, when the parents are the most nervous about living up to expectations. By the second or third child, they're like: "I get onesies at Goodwill and garage sales since they're cheaper and they'll only be in it for a couple of months before the knees are worn-out, or they've outgrown it." and "Pack-n-play? Those are expensive - I just take a blanket along for them to play on. Takes less room in the car and easier to clean."
  - Fasebook 12y ago
    I think it's clear that this is about gathering data, not selling anything.
- donutello 12y ago
  It's much more than just the things you buy for the new baby. Having a child is a watershed moment in your life from a marketing perspective: 1. Your life is different. You used to self-herd [1] yourself to one set of brands and businesses before you had a child. That is now broken. Marketers have a small window of opportunity to get you hooked on new brands and businesses. Once they do, you'll self-herd to them for a very long time, if not for ever. 2. You are tired and you don't make the best decisions in that situation. This leaves you especially susceptible to marketing, which, because of #1, will have a long-lasting impact. That being said, the article is mostly bullshit. My wife recently had a baby. We didn't keep it a secret in any way on Facebook, Google or by our purchase behavior. We didn't get hit by any kind of directed marketing (except for retargeting ads online) until after we had the child and the record of birth is part of the public county records. [1] http://www.stubbornmule.net/2008/05/self-herding/ http://www.stubbornmule.net/2008/05/self-herding/

lackbeard 12y ago

This was an interesting article, but isn't the title begging the question? Unless I missed something, no one made any criminal charges, or even raised any suspicion regarding the author's behavior.

Zmetta 12y ago
When trying to pay cash for several pre-paid cards in order to place an anonymous online order for a stroller on Amazon, the transaction was rejected and possibly reported to the authorities for suspicious behavior.
- proexploit 12y ago
  > But then my husband headed to our local corner store to buy enough gift cards to afford a stroller listed on Amazon. There, a warning sign behind the cashier informed him that the store “reserves the right to limit the daily amount of prepaid card purchases and has an obligation to report excessive transactions to the authorities.” All the article says is that there was a sign on the wall. I didn't get the impression it stopped them.
  - chillingeffect 12y ago
    Precisely. As a diehard paranoid, I wanted to sympathize with the writer, but I felt betrayed. Nothing actually happened. They saw a sign. So the writer gives the impression of being an alarmist worry-wart. Could this article have been selected for publication so as to fuel the idea that people who are worried are merely overly anxious? The Snowden papers proved that government organizations have been feeding us confusing information to sway public opinion toward obedience to central authority. This may be a good example of it.

rayiner 12y ago

I loved this bit: > For example, seven months in, my uncle sent me a Facebook message, congratulating me on my pregnancy. My response was downright rude: I deleted the thread and unfriended him immediately. When I emailed to ask why he did it, he explained, “I didn’t put it on your wall.” Another family member who reached out on Facebook chat a few weeks later exclaimed, “I didn’t know that a private message wasn’t private!” Ordinary people have no idea what they're actually trading for "free" Facebook, "free" Google, "free" Chrome, etc. Heck, I'm technologically savvy and I don't really understand either.

selmnoo 12y ago
This is totally and entirely deliberate on Facebook's part. It's kind of a mix between 'Zuckering' and 'misdirection': http://darkpatterns.org/privacy-zuckering/ http://darkpatterns.org/privacy-zuckering/ - http://darkpatterns.org/misdirection/ http://darkpatterns.org/misdirection/ They could conceivably do something so that people aren't misled into this thinking, but they're not going to do that.
Consultant32452 12y ago
I'd be interested in knowing what Facebook's privacy policies are regarding private messages. Are they data mined? Did the congrats on the baby message result in baby related advertising?
- enraged_camel 12y ago
  This would be an amazing way to troll your friends (or people you hate).
- notahacker 12y ago
  Bearing in mind there are Facebook advertisers unsophisticated enough not to bother filtering on "interested in" before showing dating ads, it seems far more likely that she'd be shown a baby ad coincidentally.
- mpyne 12y ago
  I suspect Facebook treats them as "direct messages" (i.e. there's no illusion Facebook doesn't know the contents) and not "private messages", if their normal attitude toward privacy is anything to go by.

bediger4000 12y ago

Amusing occurrance of spell-checker-failure: While it has a reputation for facilitating elicit activities... Did the author misspell "illicit" in such a way that the spell checker changed it to "elicit", or did she write "elicit" originally? It makes a difference in how I view this unknown-to-me-author's credibility.

dTal 12y ago
I notice she spells it correctly a few paragraphs later. Does that reassure you?
deepblueocean 12y ago
I noticed this, too. I think it speaks less of spell checkers and more about Time's ability to do copy-editing. If I submitted a piece to a major outlet such as this, I would do so in full faith that they would assign at least one person to read through it and copy-edit it before publication. Apparently, Time is not a sufficiently reputable institution of journalism to believe in doing this, or at least is unwilling to spend enough money to have it done by competent people. EDIT: As for Janet's credibility, I can speak to it personally, having spent a year with her working down the hall from my office. Probably the coolest stuff she's done relates to how decisions are made in big teams of scientists (she studied the sociology of scientists running some Mars rover missions: http://janet.vertesi.com/projects/social-life-spacecraft http://janet.vertesi.com/projects/social-life-spacecraft).

jnbiche 12y ago

Just to be clear, the store selling gift cards had a signed out stating that they will report excessive number of cash transactions to the authorities because they are forced to by FinCEN and other U.S. regulatory bodies. If a merchant fails to report cash gift card sells over the legal limit per day, they can be criminally prosecuted and put in jail. So please don't blame the merchants for this. I can assure you that the merchant doesn't care if someone wants to pay in cash. In fact, they prefer it usually (e.g., cash discounts at gas stations). What people see as "corporate oppression" is quite often government oppression. Personally, I think both corporations and multinational corporations are engaged in this kind of misbehavior. Indeed, the line between powerful politicians and powerful corporate leaders blurs more and more each passing year. If each side of the political spectrum continues to ignore the fact that both government and large corporations are at fault here, things will never get better.

gress 12y ago
As the writer of a comment mentioning corporate oppression, I agree with you. The government is a huge part of this. The true false dichotomy is when we claim that the government is good while corporations are bad, or the converse. The government works for the powerful, and the powerful are corporations.
wahsd 12y ago
Government and corporate oppression go hand in hand because they have the same intentions, exploitation and control.
theorique 12y ago
In the financial services area (brokerage accounts, etc), there are real consequences for employees in the industry who don't comply with anti-money laundering laws. If "Abdul al-Qaeda" makes hundreds of all-cash deposits under the $10K reporting limit into his brokerage account, that still represents a potential red flag. Employees who are servicing that account could face serious penalties (from the government) for their failure to look into potential money-laundering for nefarious purposes. The laws are written vaguely, so such employees can never be 100% certain that they are in compliance.

junto 12y ago

Rather than fear being 'outed' by her uncle on Facebook whilst pregnant, she would have been better deactivating or 'deleting' her Facebook account. Nobody could have tagged her or posted anything on her wall, nor sent her private messages. You don't dance with the devil if you intend to hide from him.

Terr_ 12y ago
Facebook already maintains placeholder "Ghost User Accounts" for possible future members, so I see no reason that they wouldn't continue to track associations with an inactive account too.
- junto 12y ago
  Indeed, but for 9 months of pregnancy she still wouldn't have feared being outed by her Facebook contacts. Facebook 'delete' is in itself an oxymoron. I believe that they logically delete everything, and then everything gets analysed and archived for posterity. As I was in the process of deleting my Facebook account last year I noted several bugs that suggested that the counts of checkins and photos did not tally with the things I had deleted. I.e. Everything. I have some screenshots somewhere on imgur I should dig out.

Consultant32452 12y ago

I prefer to go the opposite route. When any of my close friends is having a baby I sign up for all the baby clubs with approximately the same due date, then hand over all the free samples and good coupons to the real expectant parents. Some of our friends and family did this when my ex-wife and I were having our daughter, it saved us a bundle.

stcredzero 12y ago

(Karma burning time. Summary: The only way to not swallow the Blue Pill is to make powers that be use trusted execution made by and for the people. Unfortunately: Not going to happen.) It’s time for a frank public discussion about how to make personal information privacy not just a series of check boxes but a basic human right, both online and off. The problem is, is that there is no suitable infrastructure for guaranteeing such a right, and there is no one everyone trusts enough to implement it. To have this in actuality, we really need some sort of trusted execution environment. Unfortunately, this is the same thing as DRM, and we already know how manufacturers and big software companies might collude with the authorities to turn this against us. In a way, this is a win-win for totalitarianism, big-data style. If the powers that be can implement DRM as they want, they control computing from the substrate-up and we've all swallowed the Blue Pill. However if the public has a vehement reaction against DRM, then the population is effectively inoculated against implementing such tools for themselves so they can hold authorities and website operators to account. Either way, the oligarchs/equity lords/0.01% win. If you look at the activities of groups like the IRA, resistance has relied on the power of social networks in the oppressed population. Now, online social networks have embedded the structure of people's social networks in big data itself. That is a lot of aggregated power. Power corrupts. EDIT: After engaging in the discussion below, I'll bend my position a bit. Such infrastructure would be nice (where "nice" = "really the only sane way to do it") but a social and legal framework to set expectations might be the pragmatic thing to go after first.

wmf 12y ago
Maybe you don't need a technical solution. Maybe opt-outs with HIPAA-style fines for noncompliance would work.
- crazy1van 12y ago
  I feel this will become an exercise in box checking "compliance" just like HIPAA. Sure, your medical records are encrypted on disk (but I have the key in plaintext right next them). Sure, there's an opt-out on our site. Good luck remembering to click the opt-out button in the corner every time you visit.

slg 12y ago

I am not putting a value judgement on big data, but I don't think the author's experiment is true to her objective. Instead of testing how easy it would be to opt out of using Facebook or Amazon, she tried to hide something from Facebook and Amazon. She is basically trying to get the advantage of digital life without the downsides. The experiment would have been much easier (and closer to the normal opt out suggestions) if she quit Facebook and made her baby purchases in person from brick and mortar stores with cash. Sure that is an incovenience, but isn't nearly as much trouble as trying to censor your communications with everyone online or trying to launder your baby purchases through multiple anonymous payment methods.

gress 12y ago
The 'downsides' as you put it are not inherent in the digital lifestyle. The whole point of the article was to see whether it was possible to do this.

trhway 12y ago

so, she did have something to hide after all. One more example that the rule is working

hooande 12y ago

We have significantly more privacy in the modern era than people did hundreds of years ago. Most of us live in cities large enough that no one will know that you've been to the doctor, what you bought from the butcher or who you spend your time hanging out with. If you think it's easy for people to find out that someone is pregnant now, it was absolutely effortless in 1714. It's common for people to spend days commuting to work and going out to eat and socialize without running into anyone that they know. In the past there was almost no privacy for anyone. People lived in a world comprised of dozens of people and saw many of them every day. Are we moving into a scary new era of data collection and prediction, or cycling back to an old world where it's hard to keep secrets because everyone knows everyone else? Big Data is no more of a threat to privacy than Small Town used to be. But in modern society we have the option to opt out. Or at the very least, use Tor or private browsing and avoid social media. We have the ability to live with a level of anonymity that our ancestors would deeply envy. The only thing stopping us is our own desire to participate in services and online communities designed specifically to collect and broadcast information about ourselves. Why do we do it? Because we really like it. Our cultural roots lie in societies where supposed secrets traveled fast and everyone knew if someone was pregnant or gay or searching for information about strange topics. Even when we're able to hide ourselves in crowds of strangers we invent new ways to connect to each other and broadcast our statuses and purchase habits to as many people as possible. Everything old is new again, and instead of trying to hide on social media we should focus on figuring out how to take advantage of new technology to give ourselves the level of privacy that we want. Modern data collection presents challenges, but challenges that we can overcome to create a world that is better than the one we came from.

equalarrow 12y ago
Uh, did you read the whole article? The author's point was you can't opt out and not seem like a criminal. This was because if you wanted to stay anonymous online and actually buy things, you need to purchase gift cards with cash. The place she went (or her husband did) to purchase multiple gift cards had a sign that said something like they're watching people that buy a lot of gift cards. You're response sounds more like a marketing brochure to me. While I love tech and am in the tech world, the fact is, mine and everyone's private info is out there for anyone to buy and many companies to sell. Sure, we can make tools (some day) to put the equation in our favor, but this is not that day. Simply saying we can use Tor/private browsing/avoid social media is only part of it. Actually buying things not in cash leaves a trail and that info is sold to whomever pays. Regardless if you could easily find out in the 1700's if someone was pregnant, the article was not a commentary on the past. It was about opting out in the present, which is pretty much impossible if you use any kind of connected technology in your daily life. Be it your atm/credit card, phone, internet connection - they all leave trails. Sure, in the 1700's a butcher would see your face and maybe remember it. Maybe retain enough info to track you down if need be. But now, it's more than absolute. The more everything becomes digitized, the less anyone can be anonymous. You'd have to really be into the spy mindset to cover your tracks and do the things that would need to be done to get false ids, etc. And I don't know how much that would even help as machine learning and face recognition (coupled with ccd's everywhere) get better and could probably link up those fake ids. Honestly, I don't care much because I'm not a very important or interesting person. So in a sense that way, I have some anonymity. And I love tech (still). Interesting experiment from the author, but we've already crossed the privacy line and there's no going back or opting out.

snorkel 12y ago

She could've just done this instead: 1. Delete Facebook account. 2. Use cashier checks.

genericuser 12y ago

Her experiment while interesting does not demonstrate that all of her elaborate steps were even necessary, just that she put a ton of work into doing this and was successful, who knows how much of that work was needed. Also no where in her article does she reference someone else thinking she looked like a criminal. Yes there was the sign at the store about gift cards but nothing about the cashier caring at all. She alternates between 'look like a criminal' and 'feel like a criminal' while I agree she might of felt like quite a badass criminal using tor and paying for everything in cash and gift cards, the article in no way indicates others thought she looked like a criminal. It does however show that she negatively views people who perform those type of actions, since she views them as actions that make her feel like a criminal; and, as with many people, views criminals negatively. Also if you are going to have to go buy the gift cards to use at Amazon in the first place? Why even shop at Amazon? Why not go to your local Babies R Us (or wherever people buy strollers and such) and buy your items with cash there. The convenience of Amazon seems lost on me when I have to go to a physical store prior to ordering something on Amazon.

ottocoder 12y ago

The story about Target outing the pregnant high-schooler has circulated for some time now, but has it ever been verified? I don't doubt Target's capability to discover if a woman is pregnant, but the citation given [1] sounds a bit too anecdotal (and isolated) for my taste. Are there more cases of this happening? Any other sources? [1] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits.html?pagewanted=7&_r=3&hp&adxnnlx=1398981417-ya9Av3whlYn03kadQuwzMw http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits.h...