This paper offers little with regards to future steps to protect your data, and basically accepts that we must give all of our information to corporations, and protect ourselves by improving our government.
But future technological advancements can help us escape giving our data to corporations. Imagine using a bittorrent style service to back up your (encrypted) files instead of drop box. Imagine using freenet to back up your files. Imagine using bitcoin to replace credit cards. Imagine using a mesh-network to avoid centralized ISPs.
A lot of these technologies aren't practical yet, but are moving forward. Changing the govenrment will be a long, slow, painful process. While we are waiting on the bureaucracy, we can work to advance decentralized technologies that will help put privacy back in our own hands.
Bittorrent tracks every IP address you interact with. An FBI-planted "seeder" or even FBI-controlled "peer" can prove which IP addresses are downloading or uploading illegal material.
Every transaction in BTC is _forever_ recorded into the public ledger. Every, single one. BTC is a goldmine for information, and is hardly private at all. Pseudo-anonymous is as close as you're gonna get, and after one transaction, your BTC wallet will forever be associated with a particular purchase.
The mesh-network is the closest idea you've got... but at the end of the day, the ISP is the weakest link. You're connecting to the internet somehow, and that means trusting Verizon, Comcast, or whoever to keep up with Network Neutrality. If Verizon / Comcast bans (or degrades the performance of) Tor nodes, and if ISPs hellban Tor nodes, then the system dies easily.
The first step to creating progress is to understand the current limitations of systems, and understand why they would or wouldn't work.
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Also, COINTELPRO and Project SHAMROCK. Public/private partnership has existed for an extremely long period of time. The political solution IMO is the most logical one, as it stopped Project SHAMROCK before, as well as Nixon's abuses of the government intelligence system. What was the FISA court created for, and is it effective at it's job? What has changed since the 1970s implementation of the FISA court? What are the citizen's responsibilities of the FISA system?
A key is fully understanding politics and US history, which the typical American is unfortunately extremely ignorant about. If you don't like the current situation, then learn a little history, learn a little politics, and do something about it.
EDIT: The answer btw, is to be aware of the "watchdog" systems that have been built into our democracy. The watchdogs are the House Select Committee on Intelligence, and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. As I've stated in my previous posts, the members on these Committees are charged with creating and drafting laws, and have full Top Secret clearances... and the ability to investigate any intelligence agency they so please. These committees were created in response to previous abuses (ie: see the projects I listed above), and are staffed by bipartisan groups.
Why were Senators like Wyden and Udall ignored when they were extremely vocal of these programs before? Were Americans just ignorant on these issues? Did people not care? Do people not realize the importance of listening to Senators / Representatives?
You could definitely use BitTorrent sync securely for personal use, like DropBox. The issues with illegal downloading are totally separate. If you are downloading a public torrent, you join a swarm and upload pieces of it to others, where they can see your IP address. If you are just syncing your files with it, no one else joins the swarm.
> We have no choice but to share our personal information with these corporations, because that’s how our world works today.
While (as usual) the article makes some strong points, it ends on this, which is not convincing. We can certainly control the amount of information we share with these corporations. Cold turkey is indeed very hard, but using their data-collecting services less, diversifying by not using multiple services of a single company, or switching at least partially to a competing product that collects less data - are all certainly possible.
Saying we are powerless and must use these services, and therefore we have to lobby government to legislate a fix, is like saying that trans fats are super-dangerous but so tasty that we have no choice but to eat them, so we need government to ban them. We should both take responsibility and eat less trans fats, and also try to limit their use through government regulation.
no, it isn't. everything is a data collecting service. want to not share this information? then don't do the following:
- use a credit card
- use a cell phone
- use toll roads
- buy utilities
- buy plane tickets
- use a rewards card at a grocery|electronics|drug store
- use an ATM
- visit a doctors office
- walk down a street, or into a conveience store, or into a shopping mall, where a CCTV camera can see you
- rent property
- own property
- rent a car
- have a "regular" job
- buy gas (for the car that you can't own or rent, natch)
don't do the above, and proooobbly a lot of your data won't wind up in some database. do just a few of those things, and you probably have no privacy. do all (and more) of them, and probably "big data" will know when you are going to have relationship trouble before you do
The police car one has been that way forever, because police cars have been equipped with dash cams for a while now. That said, dash cams on police vehicles have generally been positive.
Dash cams have been around for a long time, but their utility has chiefly been to record what's happening right in front of the vehicle, at minimal resolution. The result is not a comprehensive data feed of everything happening, but merely an eyewitness of events.
Not many people see the "data", and the dash cams & their data are (mostly) not used beyond some basic purposes.
On the other hand, the license-plate scanners [0] are higher resolution, pointing in every direction, are also attached to road infrastructure (numerous bridges and buildings), and their purpose is to collect and compile data which then goes into a massive, shared (among the executive branch) system ... in a way, more invasive than a giant "Google Analytics" for public roads. After all, Google Analytics doesn't make it easy (possible?) to see visitors' IP addresses, and even an IP address doesn't tell you the likely human behind it.
Therefore, to avoid leaving footprints for all these "Little Brothers" to see, it's necessary to not drive an owned car on roads that may be adjacent to many bridges, or certain buildings, or may happen to have a police car on them.
Police dash-cams reduce the potential for abuse of authority because they make a permanent record of the actions of the police (as well as anyone else on camera) while ANPR systems increase the potential for abuse of authority because they make a permanent record of law-abiding citizens that can be accessed by the police with no inherent over-sight.
I don't share the same enthusiasm for ALPR camera systems as I do for dash cams, and besides, the capabilities of the two systems are not equivalent (or else one would be unnecessary). You have to fence in your driveway or always park in a garage to have privacy (from police tracking) at your home. It feels invasive to me.
I was (trying to) excluding data collected by the police, since the original assertion was that this data can be denied to corporations. now, if you want to argue that ALP scanners are operated by contractors and the data is technically stored on a corporations systems, but access is only (nominally) given to LE, this gets a little stickier...
The biggest collections of plate-scan data are private. It started with repo-men who pay to be part of nationwide networks where they all drive around scanning every visible plate in exchange for getting hits on plates they are looking for.
But, as always, those enormous databases were too tempting to just sit on and the maintainers have started looking for other ways to monetize them - if they'll sell joe lawyer a search for $10, you can be sure they are selling access to the NSA, et al too.
You have a point. I wasn't thinking corporate access (the "private" part of the parent article) ... and more about the "public" (government) access.
After all, the license-plate scanners may be operated by local police, but you must be certain the FBI sees everything. And with them the DHS and who knows what other alphabet soup of agencies ... many of whom can also see many / all of the other items in your list.
While it's true people can try to reduce their footprint, it's pretty hard to avoid doing everything on the list ... and I suspect you only need to do a small few of those and it's more than enough to get a comprehensive assessment of you.
I wonder if this is the flip side of "information wants to be free". Nearly all use of modern software generates sensitive information, and if that information is online, it will be made available to others, including the government, eventually.
"Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive. Information wants to be free because it has become so cheap to
distribute, copy, and recombine – too cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive because it can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient.
That tension will not go away. It leads to endless wrenching debate about price, copyright, 'intellectual property', the moral rightness
of casual distribution, because each round of new devices makes the tension worse, not better."
-- Stewart Brand [1] - spoken at the first Hackers' Conference, and reprinted in the May 1985 Whole Earth Review. The quotation is an elaboration from his book,
The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT, published in 1987.
Seems reasonable to believe. It's also just hard to contain entropy. Information about you tends to leak out any time you are observed. As observations become more durable, they support stronger inferences.
Personally I'm not that worried about it. Just because police societies have tended to be high on collecting data about citizens does not mean that collecting data about citizens causes a police society. In fact, the opposite is most likely true.
Moxie Marlinspike gave a fantastic talk on this subject in 2010, even down to the government mandated tracking device vs mobile phone: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eG0KrT6pBPk
I was disappointed after having seen the title. I was hoping for a discussion on information asymmetry and a call to arms from the public to balance the scales via a publicly controlled mass surveillance system.
"Cells phones are tracking devices" used to be how cliche, wild-eyed conspiracy theorists were identified. Glad to see the mainstream (bloomberg and others in general, not Schneier) catching up.
yo we got egoistists confusing their selves with their employers an it's just up the alley of all weak willed creatures who crave illusion over substance...
But future technological advancements can help us escape giving our data to corporations. Imagine using a bittorrent style service to back up your (encrypted) files instead of drop box. Imagine using freenet to back up your files. Imagine using bitcoin to replace credit cards. Imagine using a mesh-network to avoid centralized ISPs.
A lot of these technologies aren't practical yet, but are moving forward. Changing the govenrment will be a long, slow, painful process. While we are waiting on the bureaucracy, we can work to advance decentralized technologies that will help put privacy back in our own hands.