QOTD: What’s private?
Pioneering surveillance technology: The Lidless Eye of Sauron
Google rolled out new privacy policies today, consolidating 26 policies into 10. But the result according to one critic is still, “Google’s privacy policy is that you have no privacy.” Facebook’s privacy settings are notoriously difficult to navigate as well. And it’s not just online.
Privacy is under challenge everywhere. Workplaces monitor computer and phone use. People have become accustomed to being photographed every time they go to an ATM, pump gas, walk into a store. Drones patrol the border. Robot cameras issue traffic tickets. License plates are recorded at every toll booth. Private home security records who walks by on the street. Retail stores track your purchase patterns to target you with advertising.
Today’s Question of the Day:
What steps have you taken to better protect the privacy of your person and your information?
Tags: quotd
I never use my real name or email address when I comment on the in-box! BTW you guys at NCPR are sending about an email a week to my real address, wanna knock it off!
Paul–
We’d be happy to drop you from our email list, but as you say, you’re not using your real name or email on this comment. Don’t know who you are. I suppose I could hack your IP address from the blog admin panel…. Oh that’s right, I’m only an English major. How do they do this on NCIS?
Dale, NCPR
I’m reminded of my days as a network admin when people were shocked, shocked I say, to discover that email wasn’t a private means of communication and that people not intended might have access to what you said. It seems that many of us are slow learners. Electronic communication is like passing notes, potentially capable of being read by any of the people passing it.
The latest flap over Google’s privacy policy is (IMO) silly. Google provides a lot of services for free. OTOH Google has bills to pay. They do so by positioning ads on pages they feed you when you do a search. They also put ads on the other services, Gmail, Picasa, etc. To make the ads relevant (not to mention more likely to be effective) their servers pay attention (AKA “track”) your meanderings on the Internet to see what you like. Google then matches your likes to the kind of ads that you are shown when you use their free services. After all, if they feed totally inappropriate ads and no one contacts the advertisers, the advertisers will stop buying ads and Google won’t be able to give you “free” services any more. The advertisers don’t get your data. The matching of users to ads is done by Google.
Until recently Google had twenty odd privacy policies, a different one for each individual service. Then someone at Google said “That’s silly. Why are we constantly updating over two dozen policies? Why don’t we have just one?” And that is what they are doing. Consolidating and making it easier to understand.
Unfortunately we are living in paranoid times and people in general still don’t understand that when you pass a note via a number of other people it can be read along the way. They also don’t seem to understand the old maxim that there is no such thing as a free lunch or search engine or Internet email, etc. Somehow bills have to be paid.
My advice is that if you don’t want someone to know what you said on the ‘net, don’t say it. If you don’t want someone to know what you searched for, don’t search for it. If you don’t want anyone to know your name, address, phone, age or anything about you, don’t enter it. Of course you will be thwarting much of the utility of the Internet just as you would if you went to your doctor and refused to give him/her your medical history.
Be that as it may, if you still want to do those things you could always try using “Private Browsing” in Firefox or “Private Tabs” in Opera. I’m sure other browsers have similar options. That will prevent any history from being recorded and erase any cookies that result. Of course when you try to go back to a site you visited last week but can’t remember the name of, your computer won’t be able to remember either and sites you visit that require you to sign in will require it every time because they don’t recognize you. Google is not “Big Brother” despite alarmist concerns.
Dale, , I am just busting on you. I could drop myself from the email list if I wanted to. Thanks.
Jim, private browsing only keeps information off your local machine. Your ISP (and or your boss) knows where you are have been and what you have sent.
Paul, Did you miss the part where I said I had been a network admin? Yes, I know that the ISP can track stuff by your IP and/or MAC address though not your boss unless your boss is an admin. Most aren’t. They depend on IT for that. The notion that any of the Internet is “private” is naive at best. As I said it is more akin to passing notes through a chain of people. You could encrypt everything (notes sealed in envelopes) but that severely limits your web activity to those who can un-encrypt it. Good for financial transactions but not browsing.
Private browsing breaks the the connection that the Google fear mongers are fretting over, that Google can follow their browsing habits and collect data on them. If you are not signed into Google with your Google ID and your machine isn’t keeping cookies or history, Google can’t draw a connection between different browsing sessions to create a profile of you. They know someone is searching but don’t know who and tracing back to IP address on millions (billions) of searches to create an individual profile isn’t worth the effort.
When you create a Google ID to take advantage of the free services you are creating the connection that allows them to track you, on Google, Gmail, You Tube, Picasa, your Google Android phone, etc. The same is true if you create a Yahoo ID. They do the same thing. Your local stores (supermarket, hardware store, drug store, etc.) does the same thing with those store cards that they scan at the register. Apple does it with their iTunes, Amazon does it with all your purchases. It’s not unique to Google. It’s not new. They (all of them) have been doing it for decades.
Again, if you don’t want people to know that you said something, don’t say it. If you don’t want anyone knowing you searched for something, don’t search for it. As hackers have repeatedly shown, if someone is tech savvy enough even the encrypted stuff can be cracked. I use my own name here (and elsewhere) because I know that anyone with the tech skills and determination can figure out who I am anyway and if I’d be embarrassed or ashamed to have someone find out, I don’t do or say it. It’s that simple.
I had a friend, years ago, who was always worried about “the Man” minding his business. It was his lifelong habit to spell his name a little differently each time, to always make a small error in his address, and to use someone else’s phone number as a contact. The real fun came when he would receive a magazine offer, or credit card application to one of his creative spellings…”Now how did YOU come by this information” he would always say… Our corporations and advertisers have been stealing and selling our personal data for a long time, and now they have bigger and faster tools.
Throw a shoe into the works as often as you can.
What’s odd is that many complain about the ‘big box’ stores and chains saying “they are impersonal”, “they don’t know me as a customer like local retailers do”, “I’m just a revenue source to them”. Yet when these large retailers try to personalize their service it is seen as evil, “they’re tracking me”, tracking being used in the spying or stalking pejorative sense. It would seem that we would prefer to be anonymous to them but known to local retailers. In fact they are all trying to do the same thing… sell us stuff.
I don’t really care about online privacy much. It’s kind of cute in a weird sort of way to watch the ads proliferating for crampons or GPSs or whatever I’ve searched for last.
Re: “there is no such thing as a free lunch or search engine or Internet email.”
Not quite true– there’s Wikipedia and there’s Firefox (though sometimes I’m not 100% sure about the latter) and a handful of other totally free, non-ad-supported services out there. If you want to set up your own wiki, there’s a free wiki server at wikispot.org (it just has to be non-commercial in nature). And I’ve been using a free online OCR service, no ads, at http://www.onlineocr.net.
Speaking of Firefox, they have a private browsing mode. Anyone know how effective it is? Just curious, given what has been said here.
On that last question, never mind– I just looked– it’s just keeping it off the local machine, like Paul said.
It was probably the second Facebook privacy controversy when I realized that there is no privacy on the Web. I now self-edit, using the standard that I won’t publish anything unless I’m comfortable with my mother reading it. I don’t put information like addresses and phone numbers on social networking sites. I keep personal Internet use under control on my work computer. I don’t participate in memes that are actually data collection surveys in disguise (“Tell us 7 things about yourself! Where were you born? What’s your favorite pet’s name?”, etc.). Beyond that, I don’t mind if my personal trail of breadcrumbs is meat for marketers. The only thing I regret is that my favorite email address is on the spammers’ lists, and I have to delete a few hundred messages every day.