

Why no one cares about privacy anymore - edw519
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-20000336-38.html?part=rss&amp;subj=news&amp;tag=2547-1_3-0-20

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TomOfTTB
Wow. I don’t claim to know specifically where the line between “journalism”
and “propaganda piece” lies but I think this article crosses it.

The way I see it this article’s points fall into two categories.

The first is using alarmists as examples and pretending no one else is
concerned about privacy. Yes, the folks who thought Google Street View was an
invasion of privacy were a little extreme but they certainly don’t represent
the only people who are concerned about keeping things private.

The second thing this article does is to obscure the point with restrictive
surveys. Yes, teens generally don’t care about their privacy because they
don’t have professional reputations to up hold or jobs to lose. It’s when you
start building a life for yourself that you realize how tragic it would be to
lose your lifestyle because you said something stupid on Facebook. So using
teens as your only data point is misleading.

In the end this is a Google propaganda piece IMHO. Google benefits from things
being public because the more public stuff that’s out there the more ads they
can sell. It’s hard to make money off a private profile that’s only visible to
someone’s immediate friends and family.

(On that note, what's CNet thinking having a reporter who is married to a
company employee cover that company?)

~~~
kevindication
It seems Declan has come a long way from the days when he actually added new
content to Politech. (<http://www.politechbot.com>)

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fexl
Voluntary transparency is good for reputation and good for business. However,
I choose not to live in a glass house. To those who demand to know what I'm
trying to hide, I demand to know what they're trying to steal.

~~~
dustingetz
trying to steal? what? edit: my point is that telling the people you're trying
to convince that they are somehow stealing, is not helping our cause.

~~~
loup-vaillant
This is an analogy to physical possessions. "Steal" translate to "disclose",
here.

Personally, I don't like analogies very much. I go for a more direct approach:

Google: "If I am doing nothing wrong, then I have nothing to hide",

Privacy advocate: "if I am doing nothing wrong, then you have nothing to see".

~~~
Groxx
Privacy advocate is closer to "If you don't suspect me of something, you have
no reason to be looking".

"Innocent until proven guilty" isn't meant to protect the guilty, it's meant
to protect the innocent.

~~~
loup-vaillant
That's exactly what I was saying. Out of context, the phrasing I have chosen
may not be the best one, but it matches the phrasing of the sentence it
responds to. I think it has more impact in a live debate.

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RyanDScott
I know I'm greatly generalizing here, but when it comes to privacy there are
two types of people: good people with legitimate things to hide and bad people
with bad things to hide. Knowledge is everything. If I know the government is
logging my chats and I'm in the "good people" category, I'll try not to say
anything I don't want public and at the same time hope they are catching the
"bad people" by logging their chats too.

But does that mean we only care about the privacy of good people? Or do we
justify breaching the privacy of good people in order to "protect" them from
the information bad people might have?

For me, I'll give up a lot of my privacy if it means less savory characters
are stopped from doing bad things. But it's a fine line, and it can be crossed
when so much of my privacy is given up that it becomes dangerous to me because
of the usefulness or sensitivity of the information divulged.

\----------

The death of privacy is quickly being carried out by the age of false privacy.
It's the age of not knowing who is hearing what or even know how much you are
sharing; but more so, it's the age of cover-up, where you buy privacy by
putting forth a salted self. Those immersed in social media are getting
increasingly apt at concealing the bad and accentuating the good. Personal
blogging is usually nothing more than an exercise in deception. And that's not
necessarily a bad thing. I don't want to know your dirty secrets.

~~~
scscsc
Besides yourself, who is good?

------
andrewcooke
for what it's worth i just gave up on gmail over privacy. i've returned to
mutt via ssh. i realise that's probably too old-school for most, but i've been
making notes if anyone want to do the same.
<http://www.acooke.org/cute/LeavingGMa0.html> is the first post with the
general setup (in particular, using mairix to replace gmail's tags and search)
and <http://www.acooke.org/cute/EfficientS0.html> goes into detail about how
to get spam levels down to the same low level as gmail (ie practically none).

------
hooande
I understand that there isn't a commonly accepted term for "I'm creeped out by
how much information about me is available", but we need to stop using
"privacy". If we keep throwing the word around it will lose all meaning.

Someone taking a picture of your street and putting it on the internet doesn't
violate your privacy. Someone making use of information that you volunteered
to a social networking site doesn't violate your privacy, either. Online
advertising relates to privacy in only the most extreme of cases - where
somehow spyware is installed on your computer that records what software you
use and how you use it. Tracking cookies do not violate your privacy.

If you legitimately have something to hide, you won't be found out by online
advertising, facebook or even google. There is very little online that can
gather information about you that you don't volunteer in some way. Can anyone
think of a case where someone's life was significantly impacted by the
exposure of private information online?

~~~
loup-vaillant
The big problem lies in "volunteering". People mostly don't volunteer. They
just don't understand. Writing something on my web site or here, _is_
volunteering. It is public and I know it. Insulting my boss in my Facebook
wall, imagining that only my friends will know it, then getting fired over
that is _not_ volunteering. It's lacking a clue.

And I'm only talking about information I explicitly put there. I didn't talk
about what could be _inferred_ from that, which can be quite a lot. Even more
so when this information is centralized so it can be compared to the other
users'.

> Can anyone think of a case where someone's life was significantly impacted
> by the exposure of private information online?

To convince you, I feel I would have to point to a case where someone's live
was _suddenly_ impacted. It does happen, but the main impact is probably more
subtle, like discriminations (which you can't see) or advertising (which can
do a better job influencing you).

~~~
tedunangst
How is insulting your boss on your Facebook wall different from dissing him at
a bar then discovering that the bartender is his brother?

~~~
loup-vaillant
It's not _really_ different. In both cases, if you knew your boss could've
known, you wouldn't have said it. In both cases, you were in trouble because
your talk was not as private as you thought it was.

The real differences lies in the understanding of the risks. The "brother
bartender" is something most can understand. We all understand that talking in
public areas carries a risk of being overheard, and we tune our speech
accordingly. However, we don't all understand the risks associated with
Facebook and many other services "in the cloud". This means a higher risk of
being careless (and hurt yourself in the process).

Until we understand privacy risks associated with internet services as well as
those associated with physical interaction, we will have unexpected problems.
I'm confident that people will learn anyway. I just hope they don't learn the
hard way.

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slvrspoon
i'd be interested in what the HN community thinks of my current co / hack
that's trying to deal 100% with this issue. use "SXEDCRF310" for your invite..

------
slvrspoon
and that would be: <http://wwww.getabine.com> :)

