

Privacy And Why It Really Matters - uzero
https://markopolojarvi.com/privacy.html

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dmix
The author jumps back-and-forth between statements such as "fundamental
rights" and talking about Google ads. I believe he's mixing market and
government data harvesting as a single entity. This hurts the thesis as they
are somewhat distinct in reality.

I can opt-out of Google (and other networks) ads via technology and market
choice (decentralized options are also becoming a reality). But I can never
opt-out of state-surveillance. Fundamental rights often only apply to the
state for a reason, because of they have a much greater ability to abuse them.

Privacy is a question of associating data to an identity. I can control my
identity I provide online services. But I can't obscure my identity to the
state without threat of jail/violence.

You could argue the state has to operate within warrants, but as we're seeing
this often is not the case, and governments everywhere are attempting to
support warrantless wiretapping (such as by the Canadian government again
announced this week for police-level investigations, not even national
security).

So while I deeply agree with the sentiment, I don't agree with the convergence
of the two (market/state) as a singular privacy issue. One is a far greater
threat.

~~~
forgottenpass
_I can control my identity I provide online services._

Different levels of pseudonymous identity available only to the technically
savvy isn't privacy.

It's a depressing datapoint in the ongoing attrition extinguishing privacy.

edit: I'm not throwing up my hands and saying it is (should be, or will be)
dead. Just that your portrayal is an overly optimistic reading of the current
state of affairs.

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bmoresbest55
I believe that another point needs to be made in terms of privacy. If a person
does somehow become completely anonymous I every way humanly possible I still
don't believe the have their privacy under control.

What I mean by this is that everyone around the person would also need to be
private and anonymous. Say I, for example, am not on Faceboook, Twitter,
Google+, etc. however my mother, father, brother and sister all have those
services they will post something that is related to me or might even post
something about me directly.

This can go for friends, co-workers, complete strangers on the street. You
could basically never be around anyone with a Internet connected device(which
are everywhere by the way).

So what are we supposed to do then?

Even areas that we walk in are associated with something? The rich part of the
city, the poor part. In the country side. Anything we do Internet or not is
associated with something. This goes for the government "surveillance" or ad
targeting. I am all for privacy and I care about mine greatly but I not going
to throw my life out the window in order to keep it.

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Bahamut
This article sort of blurs what privacy is, conflating it with data analysis.
As long as companies anonymize their analysis, then your privacy is kept. If
you don't want to share something like an event that happened to you, you
don't need to share it on an online social network. That choice is still
yours. So is the choice to even use those services. Those companies in
question are not releasing the data to the public, and I'm reasonably certain
that those doing the data analysis are anonymizing the data when analyzing it
(having a positive identity on a person is useless from a statistical
standpoint anyway).

Privacy is being able to do things privately without prying eyes. Reading
email is a private action. Going to the bathroom is (usually) private. Data
harvesting doesn't prevent you from doing these things without anyone
identifying who you are, unless it's a government entity doing so, in which
case that entity is in the business of positively identifying individuals.

~~~
uzero
You mean like how AOL anonymized their data? [http://arstechnica.com/tech-
policy/2009/09/your-secrets-live...](http://arstechnica.com/tech-
policy/2009/09/your-secrets-live-online-in-databases-of-ruin/)

The problem with your "choice to share" is that you don't make that choice
between whether you share that info or not, you make it between whether this
data can come back to haunt me or not. It's a type of self-censoring which is
an important goal for any party looking to suppress unwanted ideas.

~~~
Bahamut
But you are making the choice to share it or not. And despite the claim in the
article in the OP about TOS agreements, they are as legally binding as other
long pieces of documentation out there, including gaming license agreements,
leases, employment agreements, loan agreements, credit card contracts, and
more. Laziness is not a valid excuse.

And self-censoring is present even if this weren't the norm, and to a degree
I'd say should be the norm. For example, a lot of the trashy comments you see
in places like 4chan or reddit - those comments are the type that should be
censored in most venues, and even those trashy comments have the effect of
censoring dissenting views due to overaggressive expression of views by the
posters of the trashy comments. Even a place like here, you have self-
censorship occurring in the form of people fearful of making certain comments
over the threat of downvoting. I don't think that this is a strong line of
argument.

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charleslmunger
This claim:

"Then there's Google Chrome that sends every URL you visit to Google "for
malware protection""

Seems to be directly contradicted by:
[https://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/browser/privacy/](https://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/browser/privacy/)
, scroll to "Information Google receives when you use the Safe Browsing
feature on Chrome or other browsers"

~~~
uzero
I removed the sentence because you're right. I assumed it worked like I said
but like always, assumption is the mother of all errors. My apologies for the
misinformation and thanks for bringing it up.

~~~
frenger
They do, on the other hand, receive every URL you type via the auto-completion
feature on the address bar.

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devindotcom
I didn't really get a lot out of this, which is something I've come to expect
from articles that start with the dictionary entry for the thing they're
discussing. It immediately puts me on guard for sophistry and/or bloviation -
just my personal experience, but it's pretty reliable.

That said, it's always good to have people writing about this stuff. I'll be
trying my hand at some point.

~~~
uzero
Thanks for the feedback. With a big topics like these it's always hard to draw
a line about how much context you provide.

I didn't know using dictionary definitions was a good predictor for the
quality of the content but I'll keep that in mind. For me it's just hard to
discard dictionary definitions as a tool to convey context when dictionary
contain years and years of mental work to compress complex ideas and meanings
into sentences that are easy to understand.

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hephaestus_t
Privacy matters though and the cite doesn't have a valid cert... So I can't
read this

~~~
uzero
It's issued by StartSSL and is valid on all the browsers I have tried the site
on. Can you tell me what browser (and version) are you using?

~~~
regecks
[https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=markopolojarv...](https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=markopolojarvi.com)

Intermediate certificate isn't sent by the server, which might be the issue.

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proton1h1
I used to think, Internet is free..... Books are the safest way to learn now
... Privacy is biggest concern for me, as "It's about me having control over
what I want to share. ". US you made TERRORIST AND you using them. Can you pls
tell me best way to talk to people across Internet, that is secure
enough...??????????? mail me at (proton1h1@gmail.com) !

~~~
OMGjavascript
Dear proton1h1,

I barely understand any of what you may be attempting to communicate with this
comment. Other than privacy being good and secure internet terrorism being
bad, much of the comment was quite confusing. In the future, please compose
your posts more carefully, using standard punctuation.

Yours truly,

OMGjavascript

