
My GDPR-Inspired Rant: Privacy, WTF - QUFB
https://blogs.gartner.com/anton-chuvakin/2018/05/25/my-gdpr-inspired-rant-privacy-wtf/
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u90g4u8904
> Look, my name is Anton Chuvakin (oh, no, nooo, nooo…this is “pee-ai-ai” leak
> … nooo!!!) , and I had my main email on my website

The key here being you voluntarily disclosed this.

> For god’s sake, have these privacy crusaders heard of phone books?

You can have an unlisted number.

>Similarly, if my hospital wants to share my health data with a pharma company
and they pool it and then use it to develop cancer cure and make billions –
you know, I am OK with that.

Great. Then the hospital can ask you for permission before they use your data.

> I am OK with being profiled online and seeing well-targeted ads.

I'm not

> some of it may feel creepy (uncommon, unexpected, weird, etc), but there is
> no harm to you and there is definitely value for you.

The value is "more relevant ads." You know what? I hate all ads. I don't care
if they're relevant.

The harm is, some company has a list of everywhere I go on the internet. They
say it's anonymized, but it's not really. They say it won't be shared with
anyone, but they have crappy security so someone could steal that information.
They say it will only be used to help target ads, but how can they prevent an
abusive government from accessing all that data? The best thing to do is just
not collect the data in the first place. (Unless it's absolutely necessary for
the service, and you consent to it in an obvious way.)

This shouldn't be on gartner, and shouldn't be on hacker news. This guy's
argument is a joke. He completely misunderstands, or is ignorant of, the
privacy issues that led to the creation of the GDPR.

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CryptoPunk
I was agreeing with everything until this:

>>Please, don’t be stupid, PRIVACY IS NOT A HUMAN RIGHT. Privacy is at best a
preference of some people; at worst, a luxury for spoiled neurotics.

I believe privacy is a human right, but the problem here is that the EU
bureaucrats who formulated the GDPR regime are conflating the collection of
voluntarily disclosed PII with a violation of privacy rights.

Warrantless searches are violations of privacy rights. So are income
disclosure laws and the misnamed anti-money-laundering laws. In all these
cases, non-compliance to what is essentially a morally unjustifiable invasion
of one's private sphere means imprisonment or worse.

A company collecting data that you choose to disclose to it when you browse
the website it serves you is not. It's qualitatively no different than someone
remembering PII you disclosed to them when you went out for a walk, or went to
their house, or had a conversation with them.

Others should not be forced to treat your actions and words as privileged
information when they have never consented to entering into a privileged
relationship with you.

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parliament32
When you're in the bathroom stall, I know you're shitting, and you know I know
you're shitting. But you still close and lock the door. That's privacy.

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chopin
A strange style of writing for an analyst at Gartner. It left me more with an
impression of some Reddit rant.

On another note, I am fine with him wanting to publish his data everywhere and
perpetually (if his insurance premiums rise, will he still be ok with that?).
But don't impose that on me; I want my data shared with as few as possible.

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icedchai
You obviously hold Gartner to a higher standard than I do. You'd be better off
ignoring their "Magic Quadrants" and looking for IT recommendations on Reddit.

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blamestross
I've all ways found the premise that "targeted ads make your life better"
utter BS. It is predicated on the premise that the advertised products would
improve the consumer's life more than if they had not been exposed to the ad
and more than the cost of the product. Increasing the efficiency of your money
extracting engine does not make the world a better place, it just means you
are more efficient at finding victims.

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insulanus
I will limit my comments on the writing style (it's crap), and the arguments
about the potential benefits of invasive surveillance.

The overriding point is that you don't get to decide my behaviour or the rules
that I want imposed on myself (the laws I will vote for).

Also, as a separate note, this person is not good at making a convincing
argument.

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xpxpg6zd
t. some guy frustrated by the time he spent in the trenches preparing for May
25

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cromwellian
The only one of his point's I'll agree with is that strawman that GPDR would
protect against a holocaust. This is similar to the gun-rights fetishists who
claim that absolute rights to personal firearms ownership will prevent the
next dictatorship. (your handgun will be useless against a Predator drone)

Both are anachronistic. If you live in an advanced democracy, the primary
threats to loss of privacy are criminal (identity theft), and discriminatory
(banks, insurance companies, employers) using personal, private information to
discriminate against you.

Interjecting dire scenarios of SkyNet or Holocausts is not really helpful to
the debate _in developed countries_.

Ok, I'll bring up another point. Obsession with health record privacy actually
will kill people. Being able to correlate medical histories with diseases and
outcomes would go a long way to developing cured or diagnostic tests. If you
live in a country with guaranteed healthcare, and don't pay private insurance,
it seems a ridiculous fear. I'll list my medical conditions right here: Gout,
Acid Reflux, Prehypertension, abnormal liver enzymes, Gall Stones. Does it
bother me one iota that any entity knows this? Not in the least. But I'll
acknowledge, at least in the US, with discrimination against pre-existing
conditions, or private insurance policies, this is a risky proposition. But
the solution is to get single-payer healthcare in the US, not fight private
insurance evils by walling off medical data that could save lives. (I'm
talking about "anonymized" records of course, even though we know with
sufficient effort, you can deanonymize data)

