6 ms·

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 yo

by hooande 13y 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 13y 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.
- mpyne 13y ago
  > The author's point was you can't opt out and not seem like a criminal. But why is that? Let's face it, if you care very deeply about INFOSEC then you're probably someone who actually has something to hide from people (criminals, military, etc.), or someone who cares about the principle of the matter. If you're the latter then you'll correlate yourself with the former whether you like it or not, and while we all agree that correlation is not causation, it is something that might get you examined at the very least. Remember, police can't psychically predict who among the population has actually committed a crime or not when it happens, so they have to do "good old fashioned police work" (as I've seen it described in NSA threads) to investigate suspicious activity and verify it's innocuous, to determine who in a possible set of people actually committed a given crime, etc. By behaving in almost the same fashion as actual criminals you make it that much harder to be discriminated out of the "possibly criminal" set early in the course of an investigation. In this case the only thing she mentioned that seemed criminal was converting cash to gift cards to shop anonymously on Amazon — exactly the kind of thing a criminal would actually need to do to procure materials for a crime, if they wished. Is this unfortunate? Absolutely! But so are many other tradeoffs society makes, even down to waiting at a red light even when the intersection is actually clear. If it were easy to separate criminal activity from other activity we would hardly need police or forensics.
  - Riesling 13y ago
    I just realized that the same argument could be made regarding gun control. > But why is that? Let's face it, if you care very deeply about GUNS then you're probably someone who actually has to protect from people (criminals, military, etc.), or someone who cares about the principle of the matter. I think it all boils down to the amount of trust we put in our governments. Both guns and privacy are a protective measures against corrupt governments. In todays world privacy is probably a magnitude more important and also associated with lesser drawbacks than guns, as it would be impossible to organize resistance while being under todays surveillance.
    - mpyne 12y ago
      Yeah, there are a lot of parallels. But for every person who is genuinely concerned with government overreach and that alone, I see 50 more Bundys who use government as rhetoric to play up anti-social/selfish ends.
metadept 13y ago
Interesting points, but I don't think the lack of privacy in a small community is very similar to the lack of privacy in a large surveillance ecosystem. If the concern is over the ability to have secrets at all (i.e. to know facts that are unknown to others) then the metaphor works. The problem is that it's not about personal insult or embarrassment, it's about a larger power disparity. In a small town, the lack of secrecy is (generally) mutual. People are aware of the reputation they gain and can usually address any rumors or allegations directly. Furthermore, there's still the option to physically move away, and one can presume that there will be other communities to join while leaving behind social baggage. When it comes to the internet, the metaphor breaks down. Most people are (by design) unaware of the degree or even the presence of surveillance around them. The parties collecting the information (corporations, government agencies, and a few individuals) remain unknown, and their motivations reach far beyond those of rumormongers or gossips. Because they don't share in the same small community, the powers that watch us don't have to fear direct or indirect repercussions from the ways they use our data for or against us. This should be much scarier than any threat of individual antagonism or public shame. There's also no effective way to 'leave' the internet. As this article illustrates, it's difficult or impossible to avoid revealing even a single specific piece of information, let alone your whole identity. It's more than the fact that we "really like" our involvement in the online community, it's a necessity for the vast majority of us to sustain ourselves socially and financially. We will inevitably reveal many things about ourselves by our actions online, and this data will never disappear. I agree that we need to move forward from the way things are rather than trying to back out at this late hour. However, I very much disagree that this is in any way comparable to the way things have been, or a reemergence of previous societal trends. This is a new problem created from our many advancements, and we need to find new ways to address it.
quanticle 13y ago
Big Data is no more of a threat to privacy than Small Town used to be. That's both true and irrelevant. As any nerd who grew up pre-Internet in a small town can tell you, small towns are absolutely stifling places. One of the benefits of the Internet, for me, is that it allowed me to escape the ultra-conformist Midwestern suburban environment I grew up in and allowed me to communicate and interact with people who were (and are) different and not afraid of being different. 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. You leave out the reason for those secrets traveling quickly: to most efficiently ostracize and isolate the person with the nonconformist beliefs, sexual orientation, religion, or what have you. This is all fine and pleasant, unless you happen to be the person about whom these beliefs are spreading.
- wpietri 13y ago
  I'd take your point farther, in a few ways. Small towns are small, so a) the number of people who track you is also small; and b) you can go somewhere else. Big data is global. There is no escape. In small towns, observation is symmetrical. You know who's doing what. But you also know who the gossiping busybodies are, and you know who talks to whom. Big Data is deeply hidden, with complex technical and financial relationships. In small towns, relationships are, by dint of matching our evolutionary context, reasonably human. Big Data is by its nature depersonalized and abstracted. In person, people being creepy can get feedback that they are creepy. With Big Data, though, the only direct feedback they get may be increased profits.
  - belorn 13y ago
    "Remember," says Cicero to Marcellus in exile, "wherever you are, you are equally within of the power of conqueror.". With big data, the opponent of tyranny has nowhere to escape where they can be safe and think different.
amirmc 13y ago
> "We have the ability to live with a level of anonymity that our ancestors would deeply envy." This is completely ridiculous. Just consider how many pieces of data are needed to take part in society as a normal person. Social security numbers, Passports, ID cards, Bank account numbers and who knows how many other things. Back in 1714, I'm sure it was a lot easier to hide things from people and even lie about who you were. Taking pregnancy as the main example is silly and equating Big Data with Small Town even more so.
gress 13y ago
No mention of corporation and power at all? This is pure apologism.
threatofrain 13y ago
You have completely ignored the author's central point: that the movement toward privacy also makes you criminally suspect.
neuralk 13y ago
I can't believe this is (currently) the top post. You've made an egregious false equivalency here. I don't care if the people I interact with individually or personally know that I am pregnant. I care that some company I've never heard of is deducing I am pregnant from information I'd like to be private, and then subsequently selling and doing who-knows-what with that knowledge. >If you think it's easy for people to find out that someone is pregnant now, it was absolutely effortless in 1714. Was it "absolutely effortless" in 1714 for an employee at a company in China to find out a woman in France was pregnant? Because THAT would be equivalent to what the author of the article is discussing. Or even to make it local: would the sellers in the town market know my personal interest if I didn't tell them? No, they would not. At least, not without espionage, which is essentially what a lot of the "big data" surrounding targeted advertising amounts to. >In the past there was almost no privacy for anyone. This is a massive canard. You are taking privacy to mean "not being spotted/recognized/tracked by people around you in daily life" but that is not "privacy" as the author or almost anyone defines it because the privacy issues of today are unique to today. Not only is privacy of the present fundamentally different from the past because of technology, but privacy in this context is about the privacy between individuals and corporations. >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. As others have pointed out, it seems like you didn't read the article. You cannot opt out without becoming Other.

by hooande 13y ago

equalarrow 13y 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.

mpyne 13y ago
> The author's point was you can't opt out and not seem like a criminal. But why is that? Let's face it, if you care very deeply about INFOSEC then you're probably someone who actually has something to hide from people (criminals, military, etc.), or someone who cares about the principle of the matter. If you're the latter then you'll correlate yourself with the former whether you like it or not, and while we all agree that correlation is not causation, it is something that might get you examined at the very least. Remember, police can't psychically predict who among the population has actually committed a crime or not when it happens, so they have to do "good old fashioned police work" (as I've seen it described in NSA threads) to investigate suspicious activity and verify it's innocuous, to determine who in a possible set of people actually committed a given crime, etc. By behaving in almost the same fashion as actual criminals you make it that much harder to be discriminated out of the "possibly criminal" set early in the course of an investigation. In this case the only thing she mentioned that seemed criminal was converting cash to gift cards to shop anonymously on Amazon — exactly the kind of thing a criminal would actually need to do to procure materials for a crime, if they wished. Is this unfortunate? Absolutely! But so are many other tradeoffs society makes, even down to waiting at a red light even when the intersection is actually clear. If it were easy to separate criminal activity from other activity we would hardly need police or forensics.
- Riesling 13y ago
  I just realized that the same argument could be made regarding gun control. > But why is that? Let's face it, if you care very deeply about GUNS then you're probably someone who actually has to protect from people (criminals, military, etc.), or someone who cares about the principle of the matter. I think it all boils down to the amount of trust we put in our governments. Both guns and privacy are a protective measures against corrupt governments. In todays world privacy is probably a magnitude more important and also associated with lesser drawbacks than guns, as it would be impossible to organize resistance while being under todays surveillance.
  - mpyne 12y ago
    Yeah, there are a lot of parallels. But for every person who is genuinely concerned with government overreach and that alone, I see 50 more Bundys who use government as rhetoric to play up anti-social/selfish ends.

metadept 13y ago

Interesting points, but I don't think the lack of privacy in a small community is very similar to the lack of privacy in a large surveillance ecosystem. If the concern is over the ability to have secrets at all (i.e. to know facts that are unknown to others) then the metaphor works. The problem is that it's not about personal insult or embarrassment, it's about a larger power disparity. In a small town, the lack of secrecy is (generally) mutual. People are aware of the reputation they gain and can usually address any rumors or allegations directly. Furthermore, there's still the option to physically move away, and one can presume that there will be other communities to join while leaving behind social baggage. When it comes to the internet, the metaphor breaks down. Most people are (by design) unaware of the degree or even the presence of surveillance around them. The parties collecting the information (corporations, government agencies, and a few individuals) remain unknown, and their motivations reach far beyond those of rumormongers or gossips. Because they don't share in the same small community, the powers that watch us don't have to fear direct or indirect repercussions from the ways they use our data for or against us. This should be much scarier than any threat of individual antagonism or public shame. There's also no effective way to 'leave' the internet. As this article illustrates, it's difficult or impossible to avoid revealing even a single specific piece of information, let alone your whole identity. It's more than the fact that we "really like" our involvement in the online community, it's a necessity for the vast majority of us to sustain ourselves socially and financially. We will inevitably reveal many things about ourselves by our actions online, and this data will never disappear. I agree that we need to move forward from the way things are rather than trying to back out at this late hour. However, I very much disagree that this is in any way comparable to the way things have been, or a reemergence of previous societal trends. This is a new problem created from our many advancements, and we need to find new ways to address it.

quanticle 13y ago

Big Data is no more of a threat to privacy than Small Town used to be. That's both true and irrelevant. As any nerd who grew up pre-Internet in a small town can tell you, small towns are absolutely stifling places. One of the benefits of the Internet, for me, is that it allowed me to escape the ultra-conformist Midwestern suburban environment I grew up in and allowed me to communicate and interact with people who were (and are) different and not afraid of being different. 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. You leave out the reason for those secrets traveling quickly: to most efficiently ostracize and isolate the person with the nonconformist beliefs, sexual orientation, religion, or what have you. This is all fine and pleasant, unless you happen to be the person about whom these beliefs are spreading.

wpietri 13y ago
I'd take your point farther, in a few ways. Small towns are small, so a) the number of people who track you is also small; and b) you can go somewhere else. Big data is global. There is no escape. In small towns, observation is symmetrical. You know who's doing what. But you also know who the gossiping busybodies are, and you know who talks to whom. Big Data is deeply hidden, with complex technical and financial relationships. In small towns, relationships are, by dint of matching our evolutionary context, reasonably human. Big Data is by its nature depersonalized and abstracted. In person, people being creepy can get feedback that they are creepy. With Big Data, though, the only direct feedback they get may be increased profits.
- belorn 13y ago
  "Remember," says Cicero to Marcellus in exile, "wherever you are, you are equally within of the power of conqueror.". With big data, the opponent of tyranny has nowhere to escape where they can be safe and think different.

amirmc 13y ago

> "We have the ability to live with a level of anonymity that our ancestors would deeply envy." This is completely ridiculous. Just consider how many pieces of data are needed to take part in society as a normal person. Social security numbers, Passports, ID cards, Bank account numbers and who knows how many other things. Back in 1714, I'm sure it was a lot easier to hide things from people and even lie about who you were. Taking pregnancy as the main example is silly and equating Big Data with Small Town even more so.

gress 13y ago

No mention of corporation and power at all? This is pure apologism.

threatofrain 13y ago

You have completely ignored the author's central point: that the movement toward privacy also makes you criminally suspect.

neuralk 13y ago

I can't believe this is (currently) the top post. You've made an egregious false equivalency here. I don't care if the people I interact with individually or personally know that I am pregnant. I care that some company I've never heard of is deducing I am pregnant from information I'd like to be private, and then subsequently selling and doing who-knows-what with that knowledge. >If you think it's easy for people to find out that someone is pregnant now, it was absolutely effortless in 1714. Was it "absolutely effortless" in 1714 for an employee at a company in China to find out a woman in France was pregnant? Because THAT would be equivalent to what the author of the article is discussing. Or even to make it local: would the sellers in the town market know my personal interest if I didn't tell them? No, they would not. At least, not without espionage, which is essentially what a lot of the "big data" surrounding targeted advertising amounts to. >In the past there was almost no privacy for anyone. This is a massive canard. You are taking privacy to mean "not being spotted/recognized/tracked by people around you in daily life" but that is not "privacy" as the author or almost anyone defines it because the privacy issues of today are unique to today. Not only is privacy of the present fundamentally different from the past because of technology, but privacy in this context is about the privacy between individuals and corporations. >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. As others have pointed out, it seems like you didn't read the article. You cannot opt out without becoming Other.