The IT Skeptic - Comments for "Privacy is dead - get over it."

If you do stuff online

skeptic — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 20:30:44 +0000

TechCrunch's Michael Arrington put it this way:
"If you do stuff online, people are tracking it and putting it into a database and trying to sell you stuff based on that. There’s not much you can do about it except not be online. And it’s not all that bad, really, to get ads for diapers when you’re having a baby, or ads for cars when you are looking to buy a car. Life will go on."

Privacy was a social function

davethekiwibloke — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 16:45:45 +0000

"Go back a few centuries and/or away from modern urban centres, and there is no privacy."

Certainly not privacy in the sense that we have perverted the use of the term nowadays, but in the past there was a personal accountability attached to 'private' events that an individual may have seen/overheard/been involved in. Abuse of this knowledge was not condoned as it would rapidly lead to the destruction of fragile social frameworks that were more critical to survival then than now.

The abandonment of privacy on social networks

skeptic — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 05:25:20 +0000

An interesting aspect of the decline of privacy due to the connected world is the generations growing up who apparently don't WANT privacy. From Wharton

A generation is growing up with social networking web sites such as Facebook and MySpace, casually posting accounts of their lives for their friends -- and the world -- to see. Few of these users realize that the information they post, when combined with new technologies for gathering and compiling data, can create a fingerprint-like pattern of behaviour... "The way privacy has traditionally been defined is being challenged," ... "Our kids today will give everything [in terms of personal information] away, but it's not at all clear how this will shake out in the long run," says Wharton marketing professor Peter S. Fader. "Privacy is a moving target."

...individuals' notions of privacy are malleable depending on the context of an interaction. ...people are more likely to divulge key personal information -- their photo, birthday, hometown, address and phone number -- on social networking sites than they would on other web sites.

.."People [say] privacy [is] important to them, yet they engage in behaviors that indicate a remarkable lack of concern,"

more about privacy

skeptic — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 22:56:42 +0000

read more about privacy and the concept of Big Uncle, or "benevolent security"

How far is too far

Visitor — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 04:57:20 +0000

What if you're doing something unlawful in the privacy of you home? What if those intentions are very harmful? What would you do if you thought you next-door neighbor might be a terrorist?

Privacy trackback

skeptic — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 21:34:00 +0000

Comment here

the whole world could be watching via Google

skeptic — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 21:09:15 +0000

New Zealanders have a long tradition of public urination - something to do with trees always handy and unpopulated country roads. I'd like to think I can do so without some CIA operative watching from a satellite. Mind you, nowadays the whole world could be watching via Google.

Agreed

Visitor — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 20:22:24 +0000

I can think of nothing is worse than having a guided missile fall on you while performing a seemingly private afternoon micturition.

I'm a Skeptic not a conspiracy theorist

skeptic — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 19:34:00 +0000

Hey I'm a Skeptic not a conspiracy theorist. But any objective examination of the activities of the regimes of Pinochet, Marcos, Hussein or Muggabe or dozens of others show us how the experts do it.

The activities of J Edgar Hoover and Richard Nixon tell me Yanks shouldn't feel too comfortable either. What do you suppose the FBI dossier on Michael Moore looks like? And wanna bet Bush hasn't seen it? Moore has no privacy right now.

You could argue the ultimate violation of privacy happened when the US flew an unmanned aircraft into a sovereign African state (Sudan as I recall) and rubbed out an Al Queda leader by dropping a Predator missile on him as he got out of his 4WD to take a leak in the desert. Is nothing private?

Hummmmm!

Visitor — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 17:00:25 +0000

You've been reading too much Robert Ludlum.

defense against evil government

skeptic — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 03:58:56 +0000

"For the right price, any life is an open book. " Quite. You have no privacy now. If a corrupt government wants to destroy you they can tap your phones, read your mail, interrogate your friends. If they are friends with the Yanks they can read your email, listen to your international phonecalls and know your website preferences (ever heard of Echelon?).

Heck, if a government wants to destroy you, they don't need any of that. They invent charges, plant evidence, create witnesses... The most direct of them just send the cops round to disappear you. As an argument for the existence of privacy, "defense against evil government" has no substance.

Privacy is not inherently good or bad

Visitor — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 00:34:25 +0000

I think you missed the point.

What if privacy was abolished? As abhorrent as this sounds, think about the end state for a moment. This idea has something important to say to us about the way that society is changing. The openness and intimate details of the MySpace community, for example, may be a sign of things to come, rather than the aberration of misguided youth. Maybe it is us elders who don't quite get it.

For the right price, any life is an open book. We may not like to admit it, but our illusions of privacy are tenuous. As governments and businesses record more and more of our actions, nobody lives an unexamined life. Each of us is monitored, filed, stamped, indexed and numbered every day.

Historically, problems arose when privacy was abolished in one direction. Individuals used privacy as a means of resistance against oppressive (and opaque) regimes. Individuals used privacy as weapon when governments controlled information and all channels of communication.

But what if it worked both ways? What is privacy was abolished for everyone, including all governments?

If we have no privacy, then all the secrets we keep are open for public scrutiny. If everything is open to public scrutiny, then society as we know it is irrevocably changed. The problem is how society copes with new ways of seeing the world, and this is the problem we face with the new online world… and we’re only just beginning to find out what’s next.

Absolute nonsense

Anonymous by design — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 22:46:23 +0000

"Even decent people living quietly in a corrupt nation should have nothing to fear if they have nothing to hide."

This is obviously false to anyone who spends more than a second thinking about the abuses of the past by those in power over those who have none. Power corrupts, as any student of history knows all too well. Any time there has been a class of powerful people, there have been malicious, maladapted individuals who have no problem destroying the lives of innocents without conscience. This is the unarguable reason that individual privacy should be sacrosanct, not to protect criminals, as it is so often misconstrued.

Big Uncle

skeptic — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 19:47:58 +0000

Food for thought indeed. I will post again soon on "Big Uncle", Big Brother's flip-side. I'm a believer that people get the government they deserve, one that reflects their own group values. We must recover honesty and decency (and quality) as core values. In my view this has nothing to do with US Moral Majority fundamentalism, or 20th Century Political Correctness, or US "peacekeeping", or any of the other recent movements that reflect awful distortions of those values.

A decent community with a decent government has little to fear from the fall of privacy.

The fall of privacy is a big issue for those actively trying to overcome corrupt government - this is the only genuine problem I see with the coming changes. Even decent people living quietly in a corrupt nation should have nothing to fear if they have nothing to hide.

What privacy is inherent in the past?

skeptic — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 19:33:48 +0000

What privacy is inherent in the past? What privacy is there when

whole families sleep (and even bonk) on a common "bed"
"toilet" means behind a tree, or in a communal pit
what walls exist are thin brush or a layer of hide - all conversations (and other sounds) are heard
writing is available to few or no members of the society
your mother-in-law lives with you

Go back a few centuries and/or away from modern urban centres, and there is no privacy.

Taken for granted

Visitor — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 15:14:44 +0000

Many of us still take our privacy for granted, even as we become more reliant than ever on telephones, computer networks, and electronic transactions of all kinds. Some will argue that if we are to retain the privacy that characterized face-to-face relationships in the past, we must build the means of protect it today.

Food for thought

Visitor — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 12:57:43 +0000

There is a novel by Arthur C. Clarke entitled "The light of other days." While is it is clearly science fiction, the story is based on what happens to society when technology is created which effectively destroys all secrecy and privacy, past and present.

Clarke cleverly challenges the reader's notion that privacy is inherently good.

The novel looks at the philosophical issues that arise from being aware that anyone could be under constant observation by anyone, or that they could observe anyone without their knowledge. Corruption and crime are drastically reduced; nations discover the true root causes of international conflicts; and religions worldwide are forced to reevaluate their divine histories.

Food for thought.