Why is privacy so hard? (2019)(cacm.acm.org) |
Why is privacy so hard? (2019)(cacm.acm.org) |
Hear me out. Google, Meta, etc. offer "free" services to a significant portion of the world's population. This isn't charitable work. They do this for data that makes them money. Lots of money. Data has real monetary value, but governments don't treat it as such. Few, if any, jurisdictions view data exports as taxable. It's simply not tracked. If data collection isn't tracked, how can one realistically enforce privacy standards?
If we tax data, then we'll have an incentive to track how data is being used and corporations will suddenly have a direct financial interest in not just casually collecting data if they don't need to. Such taxes should be gauged to be tolerable for Google and Meta, but high enough to make companies who make their money via other avenues (e.g. Smart TV sellers) to take a pass on data collection.
If they are exporting data for sale, we can tax the value they are selling it at. If they are using data to generate ad revenue, we can tax that.
If we want to enforce privacy standards, we can make liability laws around sharing that data with third parties; we can make it harder for users to consent to the sharing of data by making users decide and approve on a case by case basis.
There is so much to do before exotic schemes, for instance way less intrusive things like making it so privacy policies legally survive bankruptcy.
Potentially, if data was accounted as valuable, the income would be accounted for where it is generated, each country gets its fair share, and tax avoidance gets harder.
They currently don't? Why? Isn't that completely insane? How is that different from buying a music CD with the restriction that it may not be used commercially, declaring bankruptcy, and selling it without that restriction, so the buyer can make and sell copies of it? I.e. it's using bankruptcy to create from thin air and sell permissions that one was never given.
Can I, in the process of personal bankruptcy, sell information I've signed an NDA on? Can I sell genetically modified seeds that I signed a contract forbidding me from re-planting them, now without the re-planting restriction?
If we start taxing data, why not tax any other underlying asset a company makes profits from?
If you're a corporation, you're taxed. If you're a human, you're not.
It is hard to maintain privacy when a law enforcement body insists that it isn't allowed. There are also indications that companies quickly become too enmeshed with intelligence services to be able to create properly private options even if tactically they might have an interest. Companies like Telegram stand out as looking difficult to run in practice because of the pressure from various snoops.
If it is legal to create private options then they will always exist because the people who care about specific aspects of privacy can self-serve.
1. government gets new income source.
2. government is invested in making sure they are not getting short changed.
3. failure to pay me is fraud.
4. When you pay me now I know your crap is spying.
5. Government taxes almost never go down, with this system it going down will immediately be visible to consumers who will balk.
Problems: ad revenue is the new shrink-flation without it prices will rise. companies will fight this tooth and nail, but voters get "free" money.
Some prices rise, some prices go down.
Ads aren't free money, the advertisers are paying for them (I know, seems obvious) but where do the advertisers get the money to advertise? Well, it's baked into the cost of the goods they advertise. That makes everything that advertises more expensive.
Lots of examples of this cycle you can search for.
All companies now raise their prices by 20% or more depending on how much data they collect. Let's just make surveillance technology/pricing illegal. That way we're solving the problem instead of inventing accounting games and companies with more money than nation states can maneuver around or bribe their way out of.
Wasn't income tax 90% during America's golden age? What is it now?
Everyone else just hasnt come up with a good enough story.
Secondly what is stored in the head of a priest is usually forgotten cuz human memory is flaky and no one is writing anything down in a central db. So every now and then a state attack on the seal work but the everything then reliea on how reliable the memory of a single priest is. Its like a terrible distributed atorage system that is constantly forgetting things. Notice this is literally what large platforms have now built to defend privacy. Its called data minimization and costs a huge amount that they constantly cry about.
So its really funny how the church just stumbled into a solution that is cheap and hard to attack.
If simple regulation existed - say, "no one can use data for any purpose the user did not explicitly consent to, including product improvements AND including on-selling", that suddenly turns giving up data into a legally-binding, two-party transaction.
There'd be an explosion of really cool uses of data as a result of the trust that'd engender.
But today's status quo is lucrative - so here we stay.
80% of buyers of anything simply smash "Accept" (and watch through ads/spam) until their device shows the content they wanted to access. (Statistic is made up, but I think it's hard to refute.)
Do you call that "explicit consent"?
We agree that most peopke aren't equipped to provide informed consent and "buyer beware" won't work. For these the government steps in - car & plane safety for example.
Even if Apple truly had perfect privacy you still need to use credit cards, bank accounts, insurance, cell towers, drive a car, etc.
I think that’s the underlying reason why privacy is so hard.
And spend money on products you can install locally that do not connect to the web. Free products will always abuse your privacy
This ignores that fact that products that cost several thousands of dollars, even tens of thousands, also abuse your privacy. Pretty much always too. It also ignores the fact that local/non-internet connected isn't always an option at any price and that will only continue. Stop blaming the consumers when they're being abused by corporations. If it's you vs a multinational corporation with trillions of dollars you are always going to lose.
1) there's a lot of money to be made with data, so there are a lot of incentives to jump over any gates setup to protect privacy. If not actively tear down the gates and lobby to make it illegal to build more gates
2) The policy makers have a lot of power to be gained with data, so there are a lot of incentives to at worst, legalize backdoors so they get access to data, and at worst make it illegal to build more gates
Two powerful incentives in lockstep for once means an uphill battle for the force that is society. There's a lot of points brought up, but it mostly comes down to (the articles's points) 4) and 8). In my eyes, everything else is secondary and only serves to justify the ends of 4) (which includes 8, the only real barrier in the way).
A way to solve this problem would be to create a portal where customer data is stored in control of the customer. Companies are only allowed to tell each other about customers, not even which data they hold.
And then each data request goes directly through the customers.
Then customers can decide who to share data with. And then those customers will be happy with their choices.
Privacy is one of those words that you think you understand until you try to define it.
> a state in which one is not observed or disturbed by other people. > the state of being free from public attention.
From this, it seems obvious that a person should not be observed in our digital spaces without clear consent, where consent is not tied to preclusion of goods or services (i.e. without coercion).
Today, though: governments are actively pushing policy to restrict the internet, legalize backdoors, and normalize mass surveillance. We're in the levels of obvious privacy violations that would make for an overly alarmist dystopian novel if published. There's not much nuance to worry about as of now.
If customers had to log into some website (collecting their data) and then explicitly allow data one company collected on them to be sent to some other company so that the second company can use that data to take advantage of them, no company would ever get access to another company's data again. No customer would do that. It's cool if that's what you want, but it seems like at that point you might as well just make surveillance capitalism illegal.
He wrote about individual liberty (before SCOTUS Chief Warren and Brandeis branded the word "privacy" in their 1890 "Rights to Privacy".
He should have been one of the Founding Fathers.
Frankly, I think a large reason it goes unaddressed is because governments love to invade privacy just as much as advertisers do. Adding new laws to curtail consumer products from spying also means the likes of the NSA, FBI, or local law enforcement can't also tap into that spying machine. They want google to log everything you do because they are all to happy to use those logs.
Data economy which survives on privacy encroaching practices depend on ur "stream of data". Reducing the flow can exclude you from data breaches, spam calls, personalised pricing which rips from you etc.
Sure, there are PII which can't be hidden. But you surely can reduce the footprint. And browsing the internet is always a better UX with adblockers.
https://www.unsungnovelty.org/posts/07/2026/fire-alarms-priv...
The data that google collects are somewhat useless on their own, and is only valuable in aggregate with the millions of others they also collect. And for an individual, the leakage of this data (e.g., your advertising profile) is not detrimental unless the data is highly identifying (like your name, address, phone etc).
Therefore, people tend to simply ignore such leaks, and place zero value on the data. This difference in valuation is how google generates their money. The church, on the other hand, generates value from the gratitude of the confessors, and is therefore, aligned with the interest of the confessors.
There is no way Google does not have a good idea about the (sexual) kinks and (medical) issues that the majority of its users have. They know when you're shopping for an engagement ring. If they don't know when you're cheating, it's just because they don't want to know. Just wait for the ad: "is your relationship on the rocks, come to us for tele-counseling" and "caring for yourself post-breakup" (hopefully arriving after the actual breakup, but the whole thing is inferred so... you never know!).
My argument is: the data told in the confessional is as serious as what the ad networks know about you.
I can't avoid traffic cams by any sane means (like taking side roads?) I MIGHT be able to do without the electric company and water company (which I do during outages) but I am not seeing how to avoid the DMV and USPS, which sell my data.
Does a privacy seeker have to be a prepper? I certainly hope not.
Surveillance capitalism and policing is so pervasive. And the connection is money. Especially with Citizens United, laws are bought to trash any right to, or even possibility of privacy.
Not bashing your post, just pointing out the extreme difficulty.
We live in a world where both the government is increasingly spying on everything, often in secret, as well as companies in every aspect of modern life who constantly lie about this. It is not a fair choice with natural disadvantages.
Blaming all this on the individual reeks of bad faith.
And what do you mean by "sacrifices"? For example, if students don't agree to TurnItIn's policy, it becomes significantly harder to take classes. Do you mean to say students should have to suffer the consequences of these sacrifices just because we can't seem to support their right to privacy?
It is literally illegal.
Are you suggesting that we must commit crimes?
We are still trying to figure out how to hold people accountable for how they misuse air for manufacturing and power production. Water and soil were easier to work out, but we still flounder a bit. We've been slowly piecing air consumption together but Kyoto failed to deliver a holistic system that people would accept, so here we are experiencing record heat waves and droughts, which broke records that have already been broken twice in the last few decades.
Look at the 23andMe case, which ended sort of ok. Previously, a company called Toysmart caused some legislation to pass some specific rules around it, but it did not go far enough.
> Can I sell genetically modified seeds that I signed a contract forbidding me from.
You can't but the court can adjust terms.
Coca-cola, for example, isn't going to lower their prices in response to increased demand from their $4 billion marketing budget.