The Internet and changing expectations of privacy

[innonimatu]

I've just run across one of the best texts I've ever read about this issue, and want to share it. You can find it here.
For the lazyoccupied people with little time, here's the most important bit quoted:

Of course, that is one of the great dangers of the internet and particularly of Web 2.0: No matter how private, dangerous, hurtful, sensitive, or secret a piece of information may be, any fool with a computer and an internet connection—which means just about everybody—can post it online, never again to be private or secret. They say that removing something from the internet is about as easy as removing urine from a swimming pool, and that’s pretty much the story. As soon as somebody posts an item, someone else picks it up and e-mails it to his friends, and friends of friends, and then bots and crawlers pick it up and the Wayback Machine makes sure the genie is never, ever to be stuffed back into the bottle.

Judges, legislators and law enforcement officials live in the real world. The opinions they write, the legislation they pass, the intrusions they dare engage in—all of these reflect an explicit or implicit judgment about the degree of privacy we can reasonably expect by living in our society. In a world where employers monitor the computer communications of their employees, law enforcement officers find it easy to demand that internet service providers give up information on the web-browsing habits of their subscribers. In a world where people post up-to-the-minute location information through Facebook Places or Foursquare, the police may feel justified in attaching a GPS to your car. In a world where people tweet about their sexual experiences and eager thousands read about them the morning after, it may well be reasonable for law enforcement, in pursuit of terrorists and criminals, to spy with high-powered binoculars through people’s bedroom windows or put concealed cameras in public restrooms. In a world where you can listen to people shouting lurid descriptions of their gall-bladder operations into their cell phones, it may well be reasonable to ask telephone companies or even doctors for access to their customer records. If we the people don’t consider our own privacy terribly valuable, we cannot count on government—with its many legitimate worries about law-breaking and security—to guard it for us.

Which is to say that the concerns that have been raised about the erosion of our right to privacy are, indeed, legitimate, but misdirected. The danger here is not Big Brother; the government, and especially Congress, have been commendably restrained, all things considered. The danger comes from a different source altogether. In the immortal words of Pogo: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

I know that article is long, but imho it's well worth reading. The argument it that the increasing violations of people's privacy by both companies and governments have been enabled by changing attitudes about what is private, by the choice being made by (apparently) a great proportion of all people to publish details about what was once considered private. As people freely publish more details about their location, their finances, their sex lives, their health, etc, all these formerly private areas become fair pickings for both private corporate and state-run data collection.

What is your opinion? Are expectations of privacy irreversibly being dismantled?
Is it the norm or still the exception to share all your personal details on the internet, where they'll remain available forever?
What will be the impact of this new attitude as the younger generation raised in this environment (most of you who use these forums!) grows into positions where they'll define what is public and what (if anything) remains private?
Would a total loss of personal privacy be a good or a bad thing?

 

[GhostWriter16]

Its an awful thing. Its the reason Libertarians need to start fighting back.

 

[Traitorfish]

Against what, exactly?

 

[Ayatollah So]

Are expectations of privacy irreversibly being dismantled? [...]
Would a total loss of personal privacy be a good or a bad thing?

Many expectations of privacy are being dismantled, I dunno about irreversibly. This WOULD be a good thing IF it applied to the elites as well as the masses.

But I don't see that happening soon, so I want to protect some of my privacy. I definitely post less to Facebook, where an employer could see it, than here. (If you're really determined to find my real identity from CivFanatics postings, you could probably do that, but a mere employer wouldn't bother, and the NSA just isn't interested in me.)

 

[GhostWriter16]

First of all, the crap that Big Brother is "Well-restrained". Yeah right.

 

[JollyRoger]

What about private entities breaching privacy? What kind of swings should the libertarians throw there?

 

[LucyDuke]

What is your opinion? Are expectations of privacy irreversibly being dismantled?
Is it the norm or still the exception to share all your personal details on the internet, where they'll remain available forever?
What will be the impact of this new attitude as the younger generation raised in this environment (most of you who use these forums!) grows into positions where they'll define what is public and what (if anything) remains private?
Would a total loss of personal privacy be a good or a bad thing?

It seems to me that the norm is to share some of your personal details on the internet, the exception is all, and the norm is still closer to none than all.

It's a very good point. What (the excerpt, anyway) didn't say anything about was that you don't even have to do any sharing yourself. I haven't been on facebook in over a year, but other people are still posting photos I'm in, talking about events I was at, and so on. People used to avoid posting photos of other people, now they're happy to post and label anyone.

I don't think it's a good thing.

 

[innonimatu]

Well, two things are for certain:
- "the internet" does not forget;
- other people who know you can and will publish information about you online that you may not want shared.

I voter for the first option, because I really do not think that our present (or is it already past) expectations of privacy can survive these technological changes.

However, I'm not convinced that it must be for the worse. Accepting that people's social behavior is constantly setting new standards for what is and is not acceptable, can't it be that the exposure of once private and "ashamed" behaviors is already making our society socially more liberal? But I guess that can be bar or good, depending on what gets exposed! The religious moral police is no longer taken seriously? Mostly good, probably. Politicians taking bribesdonations or people evading taxes is reasonable because it looks like everyone is doing it? Mostly bad, probably.

It will be interesting to watch and see what, if any, new kinds of "public morality" this reduction of privacy will create.

 

[Azash]

What is your opinion? Are expectations of privacy irreversibly being dismantled?

Yes, but I think it has less to do with any kind of degeneration and more to do with the ease of sharing your personal information. I'm fully aware of the data mining going on with social networks, and I don't have an issue sharing meaningless details of my life to keep in touch with friends.

Is it the norm or still the exception to share all your personal details on the internet, where they'll remain available forever?

I don't think anyone shares -all- the details, although some people get close to it. With the exception of "available forever", a properly set-up Facebook account could well be isomorphic to the people meeting over a cup of coffee and sharing the latest events. I doubt social life has suffered any with Facebook, as people mainly use it when they would be at home anyway. As for being available forever, you need to keep in mind to whom it will be available. For example, things which you write in social media will be available, but only to your friends and only things you have already shared. Ending up on Youtube is like being in the newspaper ("A certain Bob Bobson stopped a fight bravely by way of enjoying a snack") and it is equally flighty and short-lived.

What will be the impact of this new attitude as the younger generation raised in this environment (most of you who use these forums!) grows into positions where they'll define what is public and what (if anything) remains private?

It's the parents' or wardens' responsibility to teach about what is private and what is not. I doubt it will be tough to do so, and I doubt coming youth will have a weaker sense of privacy than people now.

Would a total loss of personal privacy be a good or a bad thing?

For it to remain not-as-bad-as-could-be, we need to make sure that societal processes and similar administrative functions become equally transparent. Otherwise, a population would essentially give their last privacy and gain nothing to balance it. A fully, bilaterally open society sounds like it could theoretically work out, but I think privacy in some form will still prevail.

 

[innonimatu]

With the exception of "available forever", a properly set-up Facebook account could well be isomorphic to the people meeting over a cup of coffee and sharing the latest events. I doubt social life has suffered any with Facebook, as people mainly use it when they would be at home anyway. As for being available forever, you need to keep in mind to whom it will be available. For example, things which you write in social media will be available, but only to your friends and only things you have already shared. Ending up on Youtube is like being in the newspaper ("A certain Bob Bobson stopped a fight bravely by way of enjoying a snack") and it is equally flighty and short-lived.

That, I believe, is a very dangerous misconception. Newspapers were already potentially "forever" but it was too much trouble going to the library's archives and searching for information. Technology has solved that problem very well already, and it will only improve further: data mining is now extremely easy. Even if generalist search engines like Google,s public engine get a lot of noise in the results, you can already find a lot about a "target" if you want to. When you go into specialized engines there are already a lot of tools freely available. And a lot more you can pay for. There was one demoing searches about (and profiling of) forum posters, making matches between different usernames possibly used across different web forums by the same person, for example. There are similar tools for "social networks". And privacy settings on social networks are a joke to breach. Not only that, the number of people who have unrestricted access to the information is already too large to expect it to remain contaioned: employees, contractors, business partners, governments. It will be kept in multiple databases, and the cost of storing and duplicating those databases will only go down. If past evolution holds for more 20 years, you can expect the whole of facebook's present data to be available in a single device, for example! To be distributed and data mined easily.

Whatever goes into the internet should be assumed to be public, if not now at some point in the future. It will not be forgotten.

 

[Azash]

I think you got slightly confused there. I used the newspaper as a comparison to ending up in a youtube video or similar. Finding out about a "target", if you will, is surprisingly hard if the name is even borderline common or if the person has paid the least bit of attention to remaining private. I've done similar data collection on dozens of people using various tricks to cull out unrelated results and going through the last bit of Google results, and you really don't get much of a picture. The only places you do get good data from are social networks, such as Facebook, which still, despite what you believe, are not a straightforward joke to mine data from without either being friends or having direct access to that person's data. This would narrow it down to three alternatives I can quickly think of: a subpoena, a social engineering attack to be listed as friends with the target, and somehow managing to get said person to use a customized app you're written. None of these is particularly affected by the size of cheap flash memories. And yes, anything that goes to the internet will be public, and will remain there at the very least for a long time. The problem is getting through all the similar people and the other barricades in your way. It's not instantaneous work by any means.

 

[DroopyTofu]

I've heard some employers are requesting a person's facebook login information so that they can see content hidden. If you deny this, you can let them go through your account in your presence so that you can keep your login personal, but short of that, they will turn you down for a job. That's one thing that bothers me about all of this.

 

[Azash]

I've heard some employers are requesting a person's facebook login information so that they can see content hidden. If you deny this, you can let them go through your account in your presence so that you can keep your login personal, but short of that, they will turn you down for a job. That's one thing that bothers me about all of this.

That is also, as far as I know, illegal.

 

[Monsterzuma]

there are also ways in which the internet allows greater privacy, for example by posting on internet forums anonymously.

 

[Leoreth]

Its an awful thing. Its the reason Libertarians need to start fighting back.

First of all, the crap that Big Brother is "Well-restrained". Yeah right.

Do you have to insert your faux ideology into everything? The OP is not about problems caused by the government, but in fact by the free and unrestrained behaviour of the constituents of the web.

Not that I want to advocate government intervention here, far from it, but it's ridiculous to think a problem caused by free share of private information can be addressed by more freedom.

I've heard some employers are requesting a person's facebook login information so that they can see content hidden. If you deny this, you can let them go through your account in your presence so that you can keep your login personal, but short of that, they will turn you down for a job. That's one thing that bothers me about all of this.

I wonder what they would say about me, since I don't even have a facebook account.

 

[Oruc]

Nope!

 

[Leoreth]

I'm afraid so.

 

[Monsterzuma]

I wonder what they would say about me, since I don't even have a facebook account.

+10 respect points.

 

[Disgustipated]

Privacy is overrated. Unless you are a criminal or a psycho, who cares. No one cares about my boring life. My information may be out there, but no one is reading it.

 

[Borachio]

So MI6. CCTV. Hmmm.