The fundamental issue is that the average person in the United States and Austrailia simply don't really care for their online privacy. Offer something free and people will happily sign up and give all sorts of personal information without any hesitation. Offer a loyalty card at a store with discounts, and people will happily sign up for it.
Even after the Snowden revelations, not much really happened to the government or the NSA. Even after the Experian breach, the credit rating agencies are still making good money.
The underlying reason for this is that except for minorities, most people in these countries never really experienced the downsides of this type of loss of privacy. This is in contrast to Europe, especially Germany where people in living memory experienced first hand how the government could use your private information to literally cause you and/or your family to be imprisoned, tortured, or even killed. Hence, there is a much greater appreciation for privacy in Europe and especially Germany.
It is for these reasons that I am pessimistic that the United States and Australia will really take privacy seriously at all in the near future.
Contributing to the issue, I think, is the fact that the like of the media/ad industry and the likes of fb have deliberately eroded the idea and importance of privacy and have encouraged this idea that giving up all your data in return for...nebulous...benefits is a really great thing and you should definitely do it! People have been told (by vested interests) that giving up privacy and all your data is the only possible way x/y/z company can survive.
Once this acceptance of zero privacy cemented and we had the Snowden revelations a lot of people seem to have just capitulated: "they already know everything, why bother fixing it" which itself is a fallacy that only results in sort of fulfilling itself.
I respectfully disagree with you. Most people (in the US) do not care. I used to work for an adtech company which engaged with all sorts of third party vendors (like Axciom, BlueKai, etc) and every time I would explain my job to most friends or strangers, people often rightly assumed that shady data dealing is what was going on behind ads and services like Facebook and seemed not to care. There has been little appetite to change this until recently, and frankly only because of Donald Trump. No one seemed to mind the Equifax hack, and no one wants to change their lifestyle or stop using services they enjoy just to support privacy. Until a company like Google or Facebook gets completely hacked and some truly incredibly embarrassing personal information gets made public on a mass scale, I think that sentiment in the US will continue.
Most people in the US may not care, but that's because they simply do not understand how it will (or already is) affect them.
The average person thinks that, at worst, they'll just see ads that are more intelligent or targeted. Who cares, right?
The do NOT realize that these troves of data are going to be used to someday deny them health insurance, get them fired or not hired for some job, get screwed in job pay and benefit negotiations (due to companys like Experian selling you pay history to employers), be charged more than other consumers for the same product (due to being able to pay more), getting denied for loans or charged higher interest rates, not accepted to a school, refused entry in establishments because you're not a 'good' customer, etc.
And that is just what big business will do.
Wait 'till big governments around the world see just how much power the Chinese are able to exert over their populace playing the same data games.
Legislative fixes would need to be implemented by the Congress — an institution trusted by only about 25% of Americans [1]. So I don't think it's fair to say that there is widespread confidence that this can be fixed with legislation.
The main reason why this is illusionary is that you can't see it when data is used against you. With a sample size of one it would be perfectly indistinguishable from bad luck or just bad individual performance.
> they simply do not understand [...] The average person thinks that [...] The do NOT realize
This reeks of elitism. I'm not sure it's clear what the average person thinks and one could hope that the average person is smarter than this and wouldn't guess what the average person thinks. To not only guess what we, the average, think but to also so confidently predict the future to me demonstrates below average reasoning.
I never understood the following: an online profile is built out of many scraps of data, each data point on its own is not very conclusive (like search history, I am searching for many things, how can they conclude anything from an instant curiosity I had in the past?) Could it be that that customers of this data may see the result as not very conclusive after all? Can we collectively help them to reach such a conclusion by ignoring online advertising?
Wouldn't it be great if all this data aggregation/privacy invasion business reaches a point of diminishing returns just because the subject of the manipulation has developed an immunity to all of it?
We need an online behavior randomization gadget that turns our valued personal data trail into garbage, obfuscation to the rescue.
On the other hand the only thing that counts is the credit card purchase history of a person - and it is impossible to randomize that one (short of sharing the card with your kids)
Most people don't care nearly as much that a telemarketer knows their name and that they have an above average chance of being interested in refinancing their house as they do about the fact that the call interrupted dinner.
You misunderstand. Annoying calls and privacy are related in the same way as a white list and a black list or as "all men are human but not all humans are men.
The success of the do-not-call registry (and the fact it is raised in this discussion at all) shows precisely how little people care about privacy.
The do-not-call registry stops people being bothered by unsolicited calls. It does nothing at all to protect privacy.
People care about the annoying calls, go on the do-not-call registry and they stop so as far as they are concerned the problem is fixed. But the companies keep collecting the data. There is zero change in privacy,
In my experience the DNC has been a failure. I get 10+ calls a day. All are obvious scams. The most recent iterations are student loan related (I don't have any) and an urgent warning about my car warranty expiring (I don't have one)
> In my experience the DNC has been a failure. I get 10+ calls a day. All are obvious scams.
It's kind of expected that calls that are criminal before considering whether there are restrictions on unsolicited commercial calls would not be significantly inhibited by the DNC rule, only legal (but for the rule) telemarketing.
I am mostly shocked that the low quality of calls even exist. Who are the people actually falling for a noisy VoIP call asking for personal information? I've been trolling those calls lately when I have a few minutes just so they can't call someone else.
I think the problem more relates to how the risk associated for privacy violations is communicated to people. "People don't care about privacy" is a reasonable conclusion to reach if you don't factor in the perception of the risk in and of itself.
That being said, I have heard that idea a lot --and again, I see how it could be a logical conclusion in certain (or even numerous) scenarios-- and I think that it might be fundamentally flawed.
Sometimes "but they don't care" sounds more like a line people use to avoid actually addressing people in a meaningful way than an actual summation of the situation.
> The fundamental issue is that the average person in the United States and Austrailia simply don't really care for their online privacy.
It's in part because it's very hard to grasp - so I don't blame them.
But this is why the burden can't be on the end users. The burden has to be on those that create the tools and set the defaults. Apple's decision to include content blocking on iOS was a good step in the right direction. Having isolation between tabs in firefox is another.
The next logical step is enabling everything by default. Having what amounts to a full "don't track me" setup (The equivalent to a full uBlock origin+ghostery+tab isolation whatever else an "aware" person might do) being the default in any new browser and smartphone would go a long way.
Whatever "nuclear options" exist for those that have them, such as browser vendors, need to be used, quickly. I have very little worries for "breaking the web" or putting a sizable fraction of struggling web sites out of business because nearly every visitor suddenly sees no ads. If your business model was creating content and financing it via showing ad-network ads with third party scripts and cookies for targeting - your business model was never viable and you should find another business model or just shut down.
I'd even go so far as to suggest that mozilla and others should start actively and specifically targeting dark patterns and problematic things on specific web sites. This would be enormously controversial - but just like my browser will show a huge red warning if there is something wrong with a certificate, it should do the same thing to the average user if they click "what's your mexican wrestler name?" on facebook.
The "memories from the past allow for a better understanding of the value of privacy" is something I only hear from non-europeans.
The average european does not pay attention to his/her data. Facebook & al might be seen as "bad" by a small minority but google the name of the next person you'll meet and you'll get everything from the name of their kindergarten to the name of their current & past love interests.
Experian is one the largest marketing email provider in Europe and next to no one, even in the marketing space, has heard about the extent of the breach they suffered on their credit rating operations in the US (arguably more sensitive than a mere list of emails: if they fail on credit rating god knows what their marketing operation looks like...).
The only one big difference between Europe & the rest of the world is the GDPR but, again, only professional have heard about it. Many companies are finally addressing their shortcomings thanks to the impeding doom they perceive the GDPR to be.
> This is in contrast to Europe, especially Germany where people in living memory experienced first hand how the government could use your private information to literally cause you and/or your family to be imprisoned, tortured, or even killed.
And we still have a majority who is for gun control. I think part of the reason is how police / state forces are perceived: in Europe people see them as professional so "they're dangerous with data but they're also good at their protecting job". In the US "they're just obese donut eaters who can't do shit to protect you and would not know what to do with data".
This article is arguing for government regulation in the area of privacy. You state how the killers and abusers of privacy in the past in Europe were the government. I am not able to connect the dots between your point and this article.
Government is not intrinsically bad. It can be a tool by which powerless people can get together in large numbers and overcome a small number of powerful people. Of course, the few powerful people will try to distort the democratic process for their own benefit.
You seem to think that the rich minority will always win out. But sometimes the poor majority can change the system. For example in the USA in the Great Depression, and after WW2, government tended to favor the working classes much more than it does now.
This is an important point. We can't point to examples of government distrust as excuses to lean on the government. To me, the differing viewpoints on either side of the Atlantic are simply corporate freedom from government vs customer protection from companies. But there's no denying one side clearly trusts their government to solve these problems instead of other approaches.
Um. The US intelligence community - per book Dragnet Nation - buys data on these markets. Regulating it will restrict the IC and require more conventional means that require warrants, etc.
It's the old instant gratification/delayed fuzzy impact.
This cigarette will feel great I'll smoke it, I might get cancer in 40 years
I need this cupcake now, I might be diabetic in 10 years
I want the app now, so I'm going to accept all those spurious data access requests that might be used to con/trick/rob/profile me later.
If it would hit you straight away, light the cigarette BOOM dead, eat the cupcake BOOM gained 40 pounds, install the app BOOM 10K gone from you bankaccount, people would understand the trade-off.
As it stands, most humans are by themselves not equipped to deal with fuzzy delayed negative feedback.
And the fundamental issue that many here have is that they assume people are too ignorant to make informed decisions. That a user is free to give up their privacy is not automatically a bad thing. It's often parroted that people are willingly giving this information up even after breaches and malfeasance is made known. It's not because they are ignorant or naive, it's because they've made a conscious risk/reward choice.
Forget about average person. Read the thread about moviepass on hackernews. Even tech savvy hn users are willing to trade location privacy for cheap movie tickets.
Are SM the ripples in the societal water? Absolutely.
But who / what is the rock that generates and maintains the narative of those ripples?
The MSM is like Top 40 radio. That is, the public wants what the public gets. No one changes the station. They just keep whistling along to the tunes being played - regardless of how bad and mindless. Most people are simply regurgitating brain-worms. They do that on SM.
p.s. The fact that SM was relatively silent (compared to say Stormy Daniels) is a great example. Which did the MSM "play"? And which was ignored?
There are no ripples without a rock hitting the water.
I would like to see a network graph of the gathering and exchange of people's information between these data brokers. It would simultaneously be really interesting and really shocking. I can't imagine how many thousands of DBs out there are with a smorgasbord of personal data.
Yes, that would be interesting. But it would require a massive research effort, where researchers feed the system with false data, and then, in an undercover operation, i.e. pretending to be customers, request back this data. I'm afraid that would be too much to ask from journalists.
On the other hand, it's exactly the kind of research I expect from privacy protection institutions.
Something like this existed for ad tech several years ago, showing which companies were brokering/selling what. It was basically just an infographic with company logos arranged on it, but it was still enlightening.
I don't meanto be a party-pooper, but what I fear that will ultimately happen is "move slow and change as little as possible".
For FB to stop being the devil/cancer they are now, they have to drop all the current practices and burn many bridges/income with any outsider, and make a living with "just advertisments".
They will still make a good living from that, but greed is in human nature.
Google has as much data collected if not more. Every search you've ever typed, from where, and when. Every internet video you've watched and liked. When you're awake, when you're asleep, etc.
Indeed. I wasn't clever enough to avoid creating a Google account in the first place (although I'm pretty sure it was just a “Gmail” account back then).
I switched away from Gmail and Google Calendar a couple of weeks ago. I also disconnected my Google account from my phone. I haven't regularly used their web search in years.
I've used an email address at my own domain for years, precisely so I wasn't tied to Gmail, and therefore I haven't needed to spam my contacts or change a load of user accounts to a new email address.
It's almost a shame Google+ never took off, because then the non-tech media might be talking about Google in the same way as Facebook.
..or, people can just wise up to what is happening to them. For me, the key moment, was when Microsoft gave away Windows 10. I knew then, that I was the product, however I suspect that most people would not chew on why.
For most people that was great. It was microsoft finially listening to people who refused to pay so much for an OS.
I wonder how much it would take for people to wake up. Maybe if Microsoft came out in full support of Donald Trump maybe then people would start writing and caring about their privacy.
I thought the same thing.
Concerning Windows config: a friends dad who's a network engineer turned me on to this resource for Windows service configuration when I was 10 and broke our family pc by removing required boot files. We reinstalled, and [1] was the first place he recommended I go. Still it use to this day.
Even after the Snowden revelations, not much really happened to the government or the NSA. Even after the Experian breach, the credit rating agencies are still making good money.
The underlying reason for this is that except for minorities, most people in these countries never really experienced the downsides of this type of loss of privacy. This is in contrast to Europe, especially Germany where people in living memory experienced first hand how the government could use your private information to literally cause you and/or your family to be imprisoned, tortured, or even killed. Hence, there is a much greater appreciation for privacy in Europe and especially Germany.
It is for these reasons that I am pessimistic that the United States and Australia will really take privacy seriously at all in the near future.