Why are privacy and advertising strange bedfellows? (Linux Journal) [LWN.net]

Why are privacy and advertising strange bedfellows? (Linux Journal)

Posted Jun 14, 2007 20:44 UTC (Thu) by i3839 (subscriber, #31386) [Link]

Call me cynical, but I'd rather have companies like Google gathering info about me and use it to provide more suitable advertisements to me (which I block anyway), than, say, national agencies and their friends poking in my private internet data they forced my ISP to gather (for our own safety, of course). I get worried when that info is passed along to others though.

I'm not sure if people realize it, but if they gather all your internet data (the interesting parts anyway), telephone and mobile phone info, and where you move by train or car, and where you walk by cameras, there isn't much privacy left for people, you know.

Information is power, and we all freely give very detailed info to shady institutes. Nothing wrong with them, you say, we can trust our own government, right? Don't be such a paranoid idiot, right? Thing is, sure, you're probably right. We can't really know though, can we? We give them our info, but we don't even know what they collect or do with our info. But even if everything is nice and shiny at the moment, how can we be sure it will stay so?

Suppose for whatever reason it gets ugly, then what? Given time, that's sure to happen, keeping history in mind. So the question isn't whether you trust the current system, but whether you trust all future governments and institutes too. I don't, and I don't think it's reasonable to expect that of people.

So imagine it went indeed ugly, and there's a dictatorship in power. One that inherited all the infrastructure to keep tabs on people. Suddenly that nice system to keep you safe from terrorists or whatever also makes it impossible for you to do any kind of organized resistance. Of course people have the power, in the end, but only if they unite. If they can't unite, or even exchange information freely, they lose and are powerless.

On the bright side, incompetence will probably save us. ;-)

Why are privacy and advertising strange bedfellows? (Linux Journal)

Posted Jun 14, 2007 22:06 UTC (Thu) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link]

Everything Google has on you, national governments can get hold of. In the US, all they have to do is send Google a "national security letter" claiming that your Internet activity might have something to do with terrorism (if they even have to say that). It's then illegal for Google to even tell you that they've handed over the information.

The very fact that correlated information on you even exists is a threat.

Why are privacy and advertising strange bedfellows? (Linux Journal)

Posted Jun 15, 2007 1:54 UTC (Fri) by alonzo (subscriber, #2770) [Link]

> Everything Google has on you, national governments can get hold of.
Thank you for saying this. Let us never forget that this is the current
and, very likely, future reality, if *we* don't change it.

So nice

Posted Jun 15, 2007 5:55 UTC (Fri) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link]

Ah, America, Land of the Free. When are you going to restore your civil liberties?

So nice

Posted Jun 15, 2007 10:50 UTC (Fri) by i3839 (subscriber, #31386) [Link]

Sorry, I'm having Europe in mind. It's probably not much different in other places, but I can't speak for those.

So nice

Posted Jun 15, 2007 12:52 UTC (Fri) by Los__D (subscriber, #15263) [Link]

In Denmark, and probably also a lot of other places, ISP's are required to save all information about who you call, write emails to, and websites you visit, and show these to the police upon request, in some cases without a court order.

What's maybe even worse, this logging requirement in itself requires that IT staff at the ISPs has to fill out forms for security clearance, here they, among other personal details, must tell about their sexual preferences and their religion.

All of this is of course in interest of "protecting our freedom from terrorism".

I have the feeling that I'd be less watched in China... :(

So nice

Posted Jun 15, 2007 16:35 UTC (Fri) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link]

In Spain we have had terrorism for 40 years (more, according to the wikipedia). And it is the real kind, the one that kills people, not lunatics with bombs in their shoes or nonsensical "binary" bombs. Something in a scale only comparable to the UK in Europe. We also suffered by an unfortunate turn of events the March 11th train bombings (on a train line I took daily at the time) by islamic extremists which left 200 dead. That is to say, we have suffered the worst of modern terrorism in the western world, after the US and maybe the UK.

And yet we have none of this nonsense: anti-terrorist laws are directed at terrorists (you know, the folks with bombs), not at internet users or immigrants. I hope we never fall to that stupid trap, and I hope other countries wake up. But then you never know.

So nice

Posted Jun 15, 2007 21:59 UTC (Fri) by wookey (subscriber, #5501) [Link]

I thought the ISP monitoring agreement described for Denmark (which is indeed pretty worrying) was across the whole EU - how did Spain avoid it? Is it actually just an agreement reached by a subset of EU countries? We certainly have it in the UK - I know a lot of ISPs were very unhappy about being forced to do this monitoring (at their own expense too).

So nice

Posted Jun 16, 2007 2:52 UTC (Sat) by i3839 (subscriber, #31386) [Link]

To answer multiple people with one post:

ISPs are required to store info in The Netherlands too (for some years now), though I thought a court order was needed, at least for the police. The "security"/spy institutes can get it probably easier.

There were European rules for ISPs storing data, but I don't know whether they all were forced to store it, or that those rules merely gave countries the permission to force their ISPs to do so and gave guidelines on how long it should be stored. I'm afraid it was the first.

Terrorism and child pornography are just the excuses used to get it all in place. I think the second argument wasn't convincing enough on its own, but with terrorism dragged into it there was a majority. If you look at the mortality rate of terrorism and, say, car traffic, most automobilists are more dangerous than terrorists. So for that reason alone I think the whole terrorism thing is blown up way more than it should. Them pretending it all being something new is bad too. (Please panic so we can push al this crap through everyone's throats.)

We don't have much public surveillance here, or at least we hadn't, but it's increasing rapidly.

If they did it really well and were trustworthy, there could be a very good system that's used to get rid of all kind of crimes, making it almost impossible for criminals. Sadly, the bad guys easily get away bypassing everything, and it ends up as a mass control mechanism.

So nice

Posted Jun 15, 2007 13:53 UTC (Fri) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

Yep.

Although it's in England were public surveillance is a sort of a governmental pastime or even a sport.

Seems like it's going to shit irregardless were you are at.

Why are privacy and advertising strange bedfellows? (Linux Journal)

Posted Jun 21, 2007 11:21 UTC (Thu) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link]

Information the state collects is only used by the state and is controlled (in democracies) by elected officials. And states have very focused interests. (plus it's totally unrealistic to expect the state not to spy on you if it really wants to)

Information collected by private entities will end up re-sold or transmitted to a lot more people, including but not limited to civil servants.
Do you really want your employer, your bank, the neighbour you fight with, your rival in love, etc to know the small damaging secrets of your private life? That's what private for-profit information collection leads to.

Why are privacy and advertising strange bedfellows? (Linux Journal)

Posted Jun 22, 2007 20:24 UTC (Fri) by kamil (subscriber, #3802) [Link]

The reselling of information collected by private entities is, as far as I know, currently not really a problem in Europe -- there's an EU directive that pretty much bans it. So, e.g., when I lived there, I never got any offers for credit cards from companies I've never dealt with, etc. This is very different in the US, where I live now...

Amazon vs Google vs Yahoo

Posted Jun 15, 2007 8:44 UTC (Fri) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link]

The separation between "Microsoft" (labeled by them as just "Orange - Serious Lapses") and "Windows Live Space" (labeled by them as "Red - Substantial Threat") is interesting.

BTW: I guess that this just a silly typo, but the "ethical compass" of Microsoft in their report mentions a "patchy management" :-) .

Amazon vs Google vs Yahoo

Posted Jun 15, 2007 22:13 UTC (Fri) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link]

Is their full report available anywhere?

I could only find general comments and estimations. I couldn't really figure out what makes Google essentially worse than Yahoo and Microsoft (except being more successful).

Google (and Yahoo, Microsof: on the portal, and others) provides you a service for free. The price you pay is your information. This is something people should be well aware of by now.

Why are privacy and advertising strange bedfellows? (Linux Journal)

Posted Jun 15, 2007 15:36 UTC (Fri) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link]

pfred1, you're being watched.
pfred2, you're being watched.
pfred3, you're being watched.

Actually, it is:

for x in pfred*; do
$x, you're being watched.
done

Nothing personal. Nothing related to attention. All automatic. Otherwise it wouldn't have been efficient.

red flag to Senator McCarthy

Posted Jun 18, 2007 0:23 UTC (Mon) by xoddam (subscriber, #2322) [Link]

It's Linux which raises the Red Flag, of course!

Privacy vs. "exhibitionism"

Posted Jun 21, 2007 7:01 UTC (Thu) by smurf (subscriber, #17840) [Link]

Yeah, except when your next+1 prospective employer buys all that data and finds some data they don't like. Which may not even be true.

Or when some overzealous prosecutor gets at all the somewhat-correct stuff and builds some entirely wrong but weirdly compulsive case against you. Have fun defending yourself against something you can't disprove (after all, it's all in the computer so it must be correct... right?).

Or when the police starts harrassing you because your buying habits correlate enough with known (*insert craze-of-the-day here -- child molesters, terrorists, ...???*) to trigger a response. Guilt by association. With people you don't even know, let alone would want to be associated with.

And *I* live in a state where the police are generally reasonable, and I'm not (visibly ;-) a member of any minority group here. That can't be said for at least a quarter of the US, give or take, let alone much of the rest of the world.