Missing the point: it's about privacy

Posted Aug 10, 2009 16:19 UTC (Mon) by sbergman27 (guest, #10767)
In reply to: Missing the point: it's about privacy by jspaleta
Parent article: Ubuntu's multisearch surprise

Wow. You surprised me. Good answer. But that was not what I was expecting you to say.

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Missing the point: it's about privacy

Posted Aug 10, 2009 17:14 UTC (Mon) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link] (4 responses)

The flipside of course is that Mozilla Corporation is a subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation (a non-profit)..and as a subsidiary of a non-profit there is more transparency with regard to Mozilla Corp. finances than there is with the privately held Canonical Ltd. If at some point either entity sold user data as a revenue stream which would be able to keep that secret? I don't think Mozilla could..at least not for very long. That sort of revenue would have to show up in the end of the year reports I think. But then again, people would also have to care enough to look at the Mozilla Foundation's financials and ask the uncomfortable questions.

It's also important to note that Mozilla is trying to figure out how to walk the line with regard to web services and data privacy.

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/legal/privacy/firefox-en.html
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/legal/privacy/firefox-third-...
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/privacy-policy.html

The text on the third-party services page gives an indication that someone in the Mozilla fortress is thinking about privacy as it relates to integrated web services and the role of service partners play there. Would Canonical post the same sort of thing once they integrate default 3rd party services? Probably. The existing UbuntuOne and Launchpad privacy policies aren't particular different than the yawn inducing boilerplate that mozilla has for its website privacy policy. But is this sort of privacy notification enough? If a 3rd party breaches whatever agreement they have with Mozilla concerning data correlation what is the remedy to an end-user?

The issue of data privacy and terms of service notification in a social desktop context where a diverse set of web services are going to be interacting to provide functionality is going to be a very hard and complex issue. And most likely a moot one unless the very small minority of people who really care about data privacy figure out a way to get the much larger majority of web services users to start taking notice.

Something like the use of a specialized search page is just the tip of the iceberg of what you could get upset about. There's really nothing stopping any website you contact or interact with from sharing (and selling) its website access logs including details about ip addresses.

-jef

Missing the point: it's about privacy

Posted Aug 10, 2009 19:26 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (3 responses)

Canonical selling user data as a revenue stream is unlikely to happen. UK
data protection laws are pretty strict and as of next April the
Information Commissioner will have power to levy quite substantial fines
for violation of that law. The UK *had* its privacy Chernobyl, and it
wasn't Canonical who triggered it, it was contractors working for the
taxman.

Missing the point: it's about privacy

Posted Aug 10, 2009 19:39 UTC (Mon) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link] (2 responses)

I'll make it a point to read up on the UK privacy protection situation. But this underlines the point I'm trying to make. There's much more serious issues already associated with data privacy with existing network services activity, especially business-to-business and business-to-government services that we aren't direct participants that involves the sharing of data about us. Actively regulated consumer protection laws are probably the only serious way to balance the explosion of data sharing that is underpinning the digital services economy.

-jef

Missing the point: it's about privacy

Posted Aug 10, 2009 21:19 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Agreed: the US is appallingly bad in this situation. It's actually illegal
to transfer personal data out of the EU to an organization outside it (in
the US or elsewhere) unless that organization commits to following EU
regulations in this area: unfortunately, this is widely breached :(((

they are not selling user data

Posted Aug 10, 2009 22:27 UTC (Mon) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

they are not collecting user data on ubuntu servers and selling it.

they are selling page impressions (advertising)

yes, the act of rendering the page tells the servers that are being queried what you are looking for, and your IP address because that's the way the Internet works (it may also send a cookie if you leave them enabled, which may let them correlate your queries more precisely than they could just with the IP). it's not clear at this point that your IP address can/should be considered private information.

selling access to your eyeballs is something _very_ different from gathering your personal info and selling that.