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It's still my data. Post office employees are not allowed to read my letters, even though I have given them into their care. There are very good reasons why we
by nhaehnle 12y ago
It's still my data. Post office employees are not allowed to read my letters, even though I have given them into their care.
There are very good reasons why we, as a society, have agreed to disallow many activities that are physically possible. There's a good case to be made that such a rule should be explicitly added where organizations are entrusted with private data.
- icehawk219 12y agoIt most certainly is not your data. It's on their servers, in their apps, and running through their network. They decide what they do it with, how long they keep it, and whether or not you even have access to it. Comparing them to the post office doesn't really make sense either considering that's a public service, and one a depressingly large number of people want to get rid of. Google is a for profit company and their data is how they make money. If you don't like that reality then don't use their service. It really is that simple.
- jahewson 12y agoI'm unconvinced: what about UPS? They're not a public service and are a for-profit company.
- Someone 12y agoYou can phrase that even stronger. In many countries, the post office is privatized. Examples: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Post http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Post http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/KPN http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/KPN
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- magicalist 12y agoNo it doesn't. That privacy policy is pretty clear that they won't share personal information without my consent, and I'm quite certain a court would agree.
- Qantourisc 12y agoSure it make sense. The post office could do the same nasty things with your mail. But they don't, even though they could. It's not because you can you should.
- waterlesscloud 12y agoIf I leave some loose hairs on an airline seat, does the airline now own my dna?
- ghshephard 12y agoThey certainly can scan it if you leave it behind.
- gtremper 12y agoNo, but they have access to it.
- TeMPOraL 12y agoThe very concept of "owning data" is nonsense, as your example clearly shows.
- specialist 12y agoNope. My data is me. The totality of my data is literally my identity. If you know everything about me, you can steal my identity and assume my living role. I don't like the reality of the US War Machine killing innocents simply to enrich crony war profiteers. By your reasoning, I should stop paying taxes too.
- jacquesm 12y ago> By your reasoning, I should stop paying taxes too. You can. Depending on how principled you are about thing like this. You'd still need to give up your American citizenship otherwise it doesn't matter where you live on the planet.
- judk 12y agoThe USPS is only partially public. It is mostly a private company with a government influenced charter, which is the same basic structure as every corporation.
- gress 12y agoGmail users permit google to analyze their email for their own purposes.
- frik 12y agoEmails are all about sender and receiver. Often only one participant is using a GMail address. Using email text for ad purposes is one thing, analyzing the email text where Google only acts as a carrier and using it for A.I. purposes is whole different thing.
- gress 12y agoNone of that makes any difference to Google. Their view is that people benefit from what they do.
- jacquesm 12y agoI'd love a world in which email providers would be held to the same standards as the post office. But that's not the world we currently live in. The only thing that sets a limit on what google can do with your data is the amount of data you give them. They also have terms of service and privacy policies but these can change over time and/or be re-interpreted in creative new ways to enable whatever it is they want to do next.
- nhaehnle 12y agoWell yes. The main part of your comment is descriptive: you are describing the state of the world as it is today. However, there is a normative side to the debate as well. This is what I (and you in your first line) explicitly referred to. This side is about asking what state of the world is desirable. It is perfectly legitimate and good to ask this question, so that we might hopefully act upon the answer once it has been found. That is how progress is made in the world.
- PeterisP 12y agoLegal restrictions do apply - for EU citizens, quite a few rights cannot be taken away by 'terms&conditions' of online companies.
- judk 12y agoWhat standard? The US Post office scans the mail it handles.
- yutah 12y agoemail providers and all other providers need to have access only to encrypted data eventually, hopefully soon (to remove the temptation to use this valuable data...)
- TeMPOraL 12y agoThe concept of data ownership doesn't make much sense. Data is infinitely copyable and infinitely inferrable, thanks to magic of causality (at Google scale, if I couldn't read something from your mail, I could probably correlate it out of your search queries, web browsing patterns and location history). The discussion should be about ways to obtain a particular piece of information and the ways to use it. The perfect example to illustrate this is actually what waterlesscloud wrote downthread: > If I leave some loose hairs on an airline seat, does the airline now own my dna? Do you own your DNA? What the hell would that even mean?
- specialist 12y agoDo you own your DNA? Yes. Intellectual property, clean and simple. If someone can make a buck off my DNA, then I get my cut. Prevents exploitation such as this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henrietta_Lacks http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henrietta_Lacks "Neither Lacks nor her family gave her physician permission to harvest the cells. At that time, permission was neither required nor customarily sought. The cells were later commercialized. In the 1980s, family medical records were published without family consent. This issue and Mrs. Lacks' situation was brought up in the Supreme Court of California case of Moore v. Regents of the University of California. On July 9, 1990, the court ruled that a person's discarded tissue and cells are not their property and can be commercialized."
- TeMPOraL 12y agoNo, the "intellectual property" term is absurd, not clean and simple. You cannot own a piece of data like you'd own a physical object. I'll pass the mike to RMS here. http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.en.html http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.en.html Also you call developing a vaccine to cure Polio an exploitation? As far as I can tell from cursory reading of that article, this "exploitation" was hugely beneficial to society.
- specialist 12y agothis "exploitation" was hugely beneficial to society. Which explains why so many people were reluctant to acknowledge the source.