3 ms·

$30/mo for AT&T, $10/mo for Facebook, $25/mo for Verizon, $35/mo for Google, but the rest of the companies tracking you don't offer this feature, so are you eve

by Taek 12y ago

$30/mo for AT&T, $10/mo for Facebook, $25/mo for Verizon, $35/mo for Google, but the rest of the companies tracking you don't offer this feature, so are you even protecting yourself? Reminds me of how Germany got around the Maginot line by going through Beligum. You can't set a precedent of paying for privacy because you can't pay everyone who can spy on you. All it takes is for one reasonably frequently used service (credit card, Amazon, AdWords) to refuse to respect privacy, and you are back to square one. Privacy is not something a single company can successfully sell you by paying other companies not to spy. It can only be obtained by making spying expensive and difficult. (Perhaps with cryptography, perhaps with legislation, perhaps through some other means)

username223 12y ago
> It can only be obtained by making spying expensive and difficult. Yes! The only real solutions are client-side: IP-block trackers and encrypt your connection. The "please, sir, can I have some privacy" nonsense of do-not-track headers and IAB opt-out pages needs to die.
- Silhouette 12y ago
  The only real solutions are client-side: IP-block trackers and encrypt your connection. Even those actions have limited value as long as you have any other reasonably reliable signature as you navigate the Web. Anyone with a static IPv4 address for their home computers does. Anyone with a browser that will allow queries for a bunch of collectively-almost-unique properties of the host system does. Even certain standard web protocols inherently act in this way when used for their intended purpose. That means almost the entire web-using population is carrying around at least triple signature information, and if too many people start to block ads and trackers served via third-party systems, the major networks providing those things will just move to a model where sites hosting their ads act as proxies and serve the content from their own domain, which if anything would be slightly worse for privacy. This risk will remain until we get fixes for each issue I mentioned above. Leaving aside TOR and the like, we could move towards dynamic and rapidly rotating IPv6 addresses as points of origin with sufficient ISP support. Browsers could then close the other loopholes, but some of them will be difficult to fully eliminate and keep eliminated without compromising the user experience, because unfortunately some features that are useful for legitimate purposes are also inherently leaky.
anigbrowl 12y ago
You can't set a precedent of paying for privacy because you can't pay everyone who can spy on you. Making spying expensive and difficult is expensive and difficult, because most people are transparent. Think of how much work it takes for an espionage service to maintain an agent in a foreign territory. It's not good enough to have dead drops and cut-outs and safe houses; you need an entire network of them so you don't create patterns, and then you need to compartmentalize it to guard against the inevitable compromises. The problem for privacy advocates is that encrypting everything itself sends a signal, albeit an obfuscated one. The solution ot this is 'everyone encrypt everything' but most people simply do not have the motivation to do so. Notwithstanding the 'everyone has something to hide' argument - most people don't. Either their private matters are unimportant, or they're not important enough to be leaned on for anything. Further, from the standpoint of a bad actor (eg an overbearing state or any private extortionist), you don't need to penetrate people's privacy to compromise them, eg 'Help us out even though you are unwilling to do so, or we'll spread the word that you're a pedophile' would be enough to suborn many people's cooperation, without the accusation having any factual grounding whatsoever. In western society being labeled as a pedophile is so bad that most people turn off their brain as soon as they hear the word and are willing to impute guilt automatically. In fact, they don't even need to get the word right: http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2000/aug/30/childprotection.society http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2000/aug/30/childprotection.so...
- Zigurd 12y ago
  If you are providing a service over connections that are snooped means that you are on the far side of hostile territory from your customers. This means you either have to eliminate the hostile party by buying or replacing them, or you go around them by providing en encrypted tunnel. And doing that reliably means doing away with MITM that browsers trust.
  - anigbrowl 12y ago
    Yeah, but 'snooping' is too individualistic and paranoid, in the sense of being excessively individually centered. The bigger risk (IMHO) is that there are sound commercial reasons for tracking overall consumer behavior because it provides worthwhile business intelligence, so companies have a big economic incentive to do so, which can then be suborned for other purposes. It doesn't have to be malicious by default, eg in a shopping mall they use cameras partly to track shoplifters but also to for more innocent reasons like gauging the popularity of different stores and so on, in order to figure out the rental value of the retail units, how effective their signage is etc., which is a perfectly reasonable concern for a mall operator or retailer to have.
hackuser 12y ago
Also, you can pay AT&T not to track you, but they can buy the same information from someone else, and almost certainly for much less than $30/user/month. It's a profitable deal for them. And is privacy only for people who can afford to spend hundreds per month on it?
droopybuns 12y ago
I suspect that the plan of the carriers is NOT to profit on your privacy. Instead, they are taking a swing at google. Increasing the competition for monetization of web usage means that ad rates go down. Google depends on the ad rates- the carriers don't. The carriers might get a brief sugar rush on their EIBTDA initially (from the monetized, non-private traffic), but over the long hall this is going to be a negative growth market. The consequence is it hits google at center of mass.

by Taek 12y ago

username223 12y ago

> It can only be obtained by making spying expensive and difficult. Yes! The only real solutions are client-side: IP-block trackers and encrypt your connection. The "please, sir, can I have some privacy" nonsense of do-not-track headers and IAB opt-out pages needs to die.

Silhouette 12y ago
The only real solutions are client-side: IP-block trackers and encrypt your connection. Even those actions have limited value as long as you have any other reasonably reliable signature as you navigate the Web. Anyone with a static IPv4 address for their home computers does. Anyone with a browser that will allow queries for a bunch of collectively-almost-unique properties of the host system does. Even certain standard web protocols inherently act in this way when used for their intended purpose. That means almost the entire web-using population is carrying around at least triple signature information, and if too many people start to block ads and trackers served via third-party systems, the major networks providing those things will just move to a model where sites hosting their ads act as proxies and serve the content from their own domain, which if anything would be slightly worse for privacy. This risk will remain until we get fixes for each issue I mentioned above. Leaving aside TOR and the like, we could move towards dynamic and rapidly rotating IPv6 addresses as points of origin with sufficient ISP support. Browsers could then close the other loopholes, but some of them will be difficult to fully eliminate and keep eliminated without compromising the user experience, because unfortunately some features that are useful for legitimate purposes are also inherently leaky.

anigbrowl 12y ago

You can't set a precedent of paying for privacy because you can't pay everyone who can spy on you. Making spying expensive and difficult is expensive and difficult, because most people are transparent. Think of how much work it takes for an espionage service to maintain an agent in a foreign territory. It's not good enough to have dead drops and cut-outs and safe houses; you need an entire network of them so you don't create patterns, and then you need to compartmentalize it to guard against the inevitable compromises. The problem for privacy advocates is that encrypting everything itself sends a signal, albeit an obfuscated one. The solution ot this is 'everyone encrypt everything' but most people simply do not have the motivation to do so. Notwithstanding the 'everyone has something to hide' argument - most people don't. Either their private matters are unimportant, or they're not important enough to be leaned on for anything. Further, from the standpoint of a bad actor (eg an overbearing state or any private extortionist), you don't need to penetrate people's privacy to compromise them, eg 'Help us out even though you are unwilling to do so, or we'll spread the word that you're a pedophile' would be enough to suborn many people's cooperation, without the accusation having any factual grounding whatsoever. In western society being labeled as a pedophile is so bad that most people turn off their brain as soon as they hear the word and are willing to impute guilt automatically. In fact, they don't even need to get the word right: http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2000/aug/30/childprotection.society http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2000/aug/30/childprotection.so...

Zigurd 12y ago
If you are providing a service over connections that are snooped means that you are on the far side of hostile territory from your customers. This means you either have to eliminate the hostile party by buying or replacing them, or you go around them by providing en encrypted tunnel. And doing that reliably means doing away with MITM that browsers trust.
- anigbrowl 12y ago
  Yeah, but 'snooping' is too individualistic and paranoid, in the sense of being excessively individually centered. The bigger risk (IMHO) is that there are sound commercial reasons for tracking overall consumer behavior because it provides worthwhile business intelligence, so companies have a big economic incentive to do so, which can then be suborned for other purposes. It doesn't have to be malicious by default, eg in a shopping mall they use cameras partly to track shoplifters but also to for more innocent reasons like gauging the popularity of different stores and so on, in order to figure out the rental value of the retail units, how effective their signage is etc., which is a perfectly reasonable concern for a mall operator or retailer to have.

hackuser 12y ago

Also, you can pay AT&T not to track you, but they can buy the same information from someone else, and almost certainly for much less than $30/user/month. It's a profitable deal for them. And is privacy only for people who can afford to spend hundreds per month on it?

droopybuns 12y ago

I suspect that the plan of the carriers is NOT to profit on your privacy. Instead, they are taking a swing at google. Increasing the competition for monetization of web usage means that ad rates go down. Google depends on the ad rates- the carriers don't. The carriers might get a brief sugar rush on their EIBTDA initially (from the monetized, non-private traffic), but over the long hall this is going to be a negative growth market. The consequence is it hits google at center of mass.