Instead of an editorial techdirt article, do you have the law's text where the behavior is expressly forbidden? One of these things matters, the other has no bearing on reality.
I'm not sure your question has any bearing on reality?
There is no law that explicitly states that selling individualized internet search history is illegal. However, (and you would know this if you read the techdirt article) internet advertising marketplaces don't function that way. It's not that it's illegal, its just inefficient. The advertisers don't need to know WHO you are to know that their ad is relevant to you.
Something I read long ago (and can't find) was that privacy is a relatively recent part of humanity. In the past, we lived in small groups where everyone knew each other very well.
Now we live in big groups, which provide pseudo-nymity.
One of the things I keep coming back to in my head is a way to democratize the information collected about us. Right now, certain "people" (including companies and government organizations) have lots of access to lots of data and the rest of the population has very little access to that information.
Does privacy matter as much if we share observations as humans likely did in the past?
Difference is these memories are no longer forgotten. Embarrassing stories may fall by the wayside back in the day, but think, your grandchildren will be able to look up your cringey college Facebook posts long after you've passed away.
- information asymmetry: to make things democratic & symmetric, you would have to open up information about those in enforcement. Historically there is a strong resistance to that (though transparency would be welcomed). Even if it were to work at a domestic level, the defense sector still primarily relies on security through obscurity. "National interest" then becomes a convenient way to hide things.
- processing asymmetry: those who have the compute and skill to better access and correlate information will have a big advantage. Compare your ability to (hypothetically) download what you want about anyone, with an organization that houses all the data themselves and deployed Splunk/Watson/Palantir/whatever to massage that data exactly how they want.
Well, todays society would probably collapse, if suddenly someone would publish a website with everthing of everybody... (South made a fitting episode of that)
I mean there are so many lies, so many things people do only in secret, like porn or drugs. By numbers both are a fundamental part of society, but only some can openly admit watching/doing it.
Then all the normal lies, like what you really think about person xyz, or your boss, etc
Or the persons you are attracted to besides your monogamic partner ...
Or all the unsolved thieves, murders or dirty secrets of the governments .. Would probably make a big kaboom if all released at once.
.. Or a rethinking about how it might be nicer to not live with all those lies, but being able to live the way we are and feel and not hiding hit so much with fake politenes etc.
Probably not; reasonable doubts would emerge and in the end people pick what they want to thing and ignore quickly the rest of facts, as Wikileaks releases or climate change shown us. If everybody is caught seeing porn, people will just shrug, say something like 'mind your own bussiness' to other, and in the end nobody will care about porn. Maybe is just a question of time that this happens; so... better evil than stupid.
Antibiotics are pretty recent, too. As is housing with sufficient space and internal structure to not have to see and hear your parents working on your next little brother.
This has to do with scale, and skin-in-the-game. You share things with people you trust. On a small scale, you're just a tightly knit group or community. On a large scale, you're a cog in a cyberpunk machine.
In a small community, people know each other. They also know who's spreading a given rumor. People tend to have great instincts, so if the person spreading the rumor is notoriously unreliable, they'll already have acquired that reputation, and the rumor won't have sway. And people can spread rumors, but rumors can spread about them, too, so they behave. None of that is true in cybermundo. Journalists spread lies about you? Millions who'd never even heard of you before now believe them, and your life is ruined.
You can't have high-trust societies on a high scale.
Even if personal info is not filtered out, what's to stop the communication companies from deliberately excluding the information of certain legislators? Seems unlikely they would bite the hand that feeds them.
I think that the only way to really drive home the importance of digital privacy rights is to craft a bit of targeted advertising that _only_ your senator or representative sees and that follows them _everywhere_ online.
Why only senators? It would be an effective way to teach the public too. "Hi, <full name>. I know you live at <address>, and that <other facts>. If you care about privacy go to eff.org (or some other organization)."
You might also include a message along the lines of "everyone knows this information about you, it's just that we're the only one telling you that we know".
Why would you only want the politicians to see it? Are they somehow unable to install adblockers or have aides take care of that for them? Don't be so naive.
Politicians do not care about such nonsense, because they don't have to deal with it, because they have power. What politicians care about is their credibility, and if the public can't see what's going on then it has no impact on their credibility.
You seem to think that what we need to do is help politicians understand the significance of what they're doing, and that once they see it our way they'll do The Right Thing. But this is to assume that the politicians and the constituencies that elected them share your basic values about fairness, privacy, and so on. In many cases, they don't.
The only way is to communicate to politicians in their own language - money.
Put the money toward campaign contributions to outbid the competition. Apparently they are relatively cheap and you only need a majority consisting of the cheapest ones.
Someone explain why I should fear ISPs more than Google? I can at use Sonic.net for privacy. I can't realistically opt out of Google. The lines seem arbitrary.
My worry is something like Verizon's "super-cookies"[1]. You can block requests to known tracking websites relatively effectively, but if tracking can be added outside your network there is no possible way to fight it.
You can choose not to use Google (and use DuckDuckGo or Startpage instead). However in most places in the U.S., you don't get many choices for ISP. There is no meaningful competition.
The ISP you mentioned, Sonic.net, is only available in a few select locations.
what.. this doesn't make any sense and I don't know what Google has anything to do with this. Why can't you opt out of google ?
1. ISP monitor all your internet traffic. Google can only have access to what google services you opt in to use.
2. At this time we don't know how the ISP's will sell your internet history whether it be individual or in aggregate, but google doesn't sell your information.
Google don't just have access to what you opt in to use. They also have access to whatever anyone else you communicate with effectively opts in to use on your behalf. For example, even if you don't want to give Google any data at all, there is a very high chance that they already have a lot of the emails you send via one of the other parties, and a fair chance that you won't even know it's happening unless you look at the MX records for their domain or something along those lines.
This is, IMHO, one of the biggest unresolved ethical issues with data protection and privacy today. On the one hand, it would be a great burden on society to stop everyone from using any third party services for anything involving personal data about someone else. On the other hand, when those services are no longer neutral and will process any data they receive for other purposes without the informed consent of some of the data subjects, that's a dubious practice at best. Another example is a social network's mobile app uploading your phone's entire contacts list, and just like that they've probably got a unique personal ID and a great deal of networking information about everyone on that list.
while i don't disagree, you still have the option of not responding. Also I think what you mention is more of an issue with integrating systems with open standards. The alternative is using a closed system that only belongs to one vendor or revising the open standard to support privacy
I think this is a little premature until we know what exactly can be purchased and when. As of right now throwing money at this person seems like just giving him free money. Who is this person and is he trustworthy... what's he going to do with the money if he can't buy it ? Does he even know how to buy the data ?
> Who is this person and is he trustworthy... what's he going to do with the money if he can't buy it ? Does he even know how to buy the data ?
You've documented exactly why we should buy Congressional data. Let's make it painfully obvious that the data can be "weaponized" against them, their loved ones, and business partners by the unscrupulous and the unstable.
Can I just sell my data? I really don't care and not sure why everyone is freaking out over this. I also believe most tech muggles don't care either. Also is not most of our data sold by data brokers currently - like your physical address. Not sure what I should worry about with my browsing data...
That's the real issue here IMO. It blows my mind that Comcast et al thinks it's unfair that Google, Facebook, etc get to profit off of user data while they can not. I get that most politicians don't have the slightest understanding of tech, but how hard is it to understand that Google, Facebook et al get this access because they provide a service for nearly free with the cost being your personal information.
Comcast, Verizon, etc. sells a service that consumers purchase. Now they are increasing the costs by profiting off of our personal data while giving users nothing in return. Ironically, this gives them an unfair advantage. These corporate welfare queens don't have to compete by providing a service that I would pay for with my personal information.
38 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 114 ms ] threadedit: link to donate to the gofundme campaign to purchase the browser histories https://www.gofundme.com/searchinternethistory
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20170329/13234837037/no-yo...
There is no law that explicitly states that selling individualized internet search history is illegal. However, (and you would know this if you read the techdirt article) internet advertising marketplaces don't function that way. It's not that it's illegal, its just inefficient. The advertisers don't need to know WHO you are to know that their ad is relevant to you.
https://www.searchinternethistory.com/
Now we live in big groups, which provide pseudo-nymity.
One of the things I keep coming back to in my head is a way to democratize the information collected about us. Right now, certain "people" (including companies and government organizations) have lots of access to lots of data and the rest of the population has very little access to that information.
Does privacy matter as much if we share observations as humans likely did in the past?
We know what the statsi archives did... now there's unprecedented power to repeat that mistake at a larger scale.
- information asymmetry: to make things democratic & symmetric, you would have to open up information about those in enforcement. Historically there is a strong resistance to that (though transparency would be welcomed). Even if it were to work at a domestic level, the defense sector still primarily relies on security through obscurity. "National interest" then becomes a convenient way to hide things.
- processing asymmetry: those who have the compute and skill to better access and correlate information will have a big advantage. Compare your ability to (hypothetically) download what you want about anyone, with an organization that houses all the data themselves and deployed Splunk/Watson/Palantir/whatever to massage that data exactly how they want.
I mean there are so many lies, so many things people do only in secret, like porn or drugs. By numbers both are a fundamental part of society, but only some can openly admit watching/doing it.
Then all the normal lies, like what you really think about person xyz, or your boss, etc
Or the persons you are attracted to besides your monogamic partner ...
Or all the unsolved thieves, murders or dirty secrets of the governments .. Would probably make a big kaboom if all released at once.
.. Or a rethinking about how it might be nicer to not live with all those lies, but being able to live the way we are and feel and not hiding hit so much with fake politenes etc.
Probably not; reasonable doubts would emerge and in the end people pick what they want to thing and ignore quickly the rest of facts, as Wikileaks releases or climate change shown us. If everybody is caught seeing porn, people will just shrug, say something like 'mind your own bussiness' to other, and in the end nobody will care about porn. Maybe is just a question of time that this happens; so... better evil than stupid.
In a small community, people know each other. They also know who's spreading a given rumor. People tend to have great instincts, so if the person spreading the rumor is notoriously unreliable, they'll already have acquired that reputation, and the rumor won't have sway. And people can spread rumors, but rumors can spread about them, too, so they behave. None of that is true in cybermundo. Journalists spread lies about you? Millions who'd never even heard of you before now believe them, and your life is ruined.
You can't have high-trust societies on a high scale.
You might also include a message along the lines of "everyone knows this information about you, it's just that we're the only one telling you that we know".
Politicians do not care about such nonsense, because they don't have to deal with it, because they have power. What politicians care about is their credibility, and if the public can't see what's going on then it has no impact on their credibility.
You seem to think that what we need to do is help politicians understand the significance of what they're doing, and that once they see it our way they'll do The Right Thing. But this is to assume that the politicians and the constituencies that elected them share your basic values about fairness, privacy, and so on. In many cases, they don't.
Put the money toward campaign contributions to outbid the competition. Apparently they are relatively cheap and you only need a majority consisting of the cheapest ones.
Here is the apparent price list for the congress people involved: http://www.theverge.com/2017/3/29/15100620/congress-fcc-isp-...
[1]: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/11/verizon-x-uidh
The ISP you mentioned, Sonic.net, is only available in a few select locations.
1. ISP monitor all your internet traffic. Google can only have access to what google services you opt in to use.
2. At this time we don't know how the ISP's will sell your internet history whether it be individual or in aggregate, but google doesn't sell your information.
3. I trust google's security more than ISPs
This is, IMHO, one of the biggest unresolved ethical issues with data protection and privacy today. On the one hand, it would be a great burden on society to stop everyone from using any third party services for anything involving personal data about someone else. On the other hand, when those services are no longer neutral and will process any data they receive for other purposes without the informed consent of some of the data subjects, that's a dubious practice at best. Another example is a social network's mobile app uploading your phone's entire contacts list, and just like that they've probably got a unique personal ID and a great deal of networking information about everyone on that list.
You've documented exactly why we should buy Congressional data. Let's make it painfully obvious that the data can be "weaponized" against them, their loved ones, and business partners by the unscrupulous and the unstable.
That's the real issue here IMO. It blows my mind that Comcast et al thinks it's unfair that Google, Facebook, etc get to profit off of user data while they can not. I get that most politicians don't have the slightest understanding of tech, but how hard is it to understand that Google, Facebook et al get this access because they provide a service for nearly free with the cost being your personal information.
Comcast, Verizon, etc. sells a service that consumers purchase. Now they are increasing the costs by profiting off of our personal data while giving users nothing in return. Ironically, this gives them an unfair advantage. These corporate welfare queens don't have to compete by providing a service that I would pay for with my personal information.