Tag: Privacy

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Quotations

2013.1.5

Over the last forty years, a strong and principled argument that privacy is a fundamental human right deserving special protection in an age of high technology has confronted more pragmatic considerations from a variety of interests. The messy twists and turns of this international struggle have produced a sort of consensus on what it means for an organization to process personal data responsibly. But it is an uneasy consensus, hedged by exemptions and qualifications, and regularly shaken by monumental shifts in the processing powers of technology, and by game changers like the 9/11 attacks.

This conflict is now being played out again with respect to a new Draft Regulation on privacy protection from the European Union. We have heard that this Regulation is too burdensome, that it will block innovation, that it will cost jobs, trade, and investment, that it will kill the online advertising industry, that it will unreasonably extend the reach of European law beyond European borders and exacerbate the transatlantic divide between a more protectionist and regulatory Europe and a more open and innovative United States.

These views are simplistic and misleading. The same fears were expressed twenty years ago when the first set of European privacy rules were proposed. The Internet developed and flourished since that time, and within that framework of national and international privacy law. Privacy protection did not constrain innovation then, and it will not do so today.

Colin Bennett, “The Geo-Politics of Personal Data”
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Writing

Could Google+ Depend of Google Now’s Success?

MG Siegler recently argued that:

Google+ is a turd.

I’m not sure why everyone seems afraid to admit this. I think it’s similar to the reason why some seem reluctant to call Windows 8 a turd when it’s already abundantly clear: people are scared that such a bold statement could come back to bite them in the ass. But it won’t. Both are clearly turds.

Google continues to try to cram Google+ down people’s throats, but it just won’t stay down. People are gonna keep puking it right back up. The only compelling feature of Google+ is Hangouts; everything else is a carbon copy of some social activity that people can (and already do) do elsewhere. Google simply made a bad call and started chasing the wrong thing (social) far too late.

…

I wonder how long it will take Google to admit defeat here? I’m sure we’ll see a lot more of the shoving of Google+ in our faces first — Chrome, you’re next. But I really wish Google would take all the energy being put behind this dog and use it to blow out their truly interesting and innovative products, like Google Now.

I think that the of Google+ could depend on Google’s capability of linking signals from their social networking product with their Now product. Currently, Now can ascertain things like when you’re near certain locations or about to perform certain actions (e.g. near a bus stop/station or about to take a flight) and provide relevant and helpful data to the Android Phone user. This is really cool and, if you’re comfortable with this degree of personalized data mining, potentially convenient.

What Now presently lacks is the ability to tell me that when I’ve a break in my day (based on Google Calendar analysis) and a friend also has a break (based on an analysis of their calendar) that we could mutually meet for coffee or meal. It similarly lacks an awareness of my colleagues and friends to suggest that there are special non-birthday dates coming up. Same thing for mass-mining of check-ins (to figure out what my social community eats, and where they do it often) and preferred news and website content.

The thing is, all of these functionality elements could be implemented if there was widescale adoption and use of Google+. This means that updated version of Android need to get to millions of handsets or, alternately, Chrome need to deploy Now functionality (something that code analyses suggest is imminent). Either/or could encourage people to adopt Google+ to get heightened personalized data mining. Yes, you read that right: (perceived) helpful surveillance could get people to intentionally adopt products that facilitate useful personalized insights.

The key issue – beyond pure legal and regulatory concerns – will be whether this kind of mining is seen as ‘creepy’ or not. If the Now product is seen as cool, feature rich, opt-in, and not privacy infringing – and is adopted by a significant portion of the masses – then Google could offer personalized services in excess of those offered by Twitter and Facebook today. This might be the ‘nudge’ necessary to get a significant portion of the social graph onto Google and consequently elicit a network effect sufficient to turn Google+ into a viable and useful social networking community.

If Google+ is seen as a gateway to improved Now information, and if users see Now as a feature they want more of in their life, then Google+ could see a fresh (if somewhat forced) breath of life. A key question, however, is whether the advantages of a cool product offering are sufficient to get people to ‘jump ship’ onto a largely empty social networking platform. It’ll be curious to watch because if Google is successful they’ll have found a way to create a social graph in a novel manner, one that other companies may subsequently attempt to replicate.

Categories
Quotations

2012.12.31

I’m jealous of old people because they didn’t have the internet and Facebook when you were young — you could get away with just about anything.

Mathew Ingram, “Snapchat and our never-ending quest for impermanence”
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Quotations

2012.12.4

… sacrifices often involve the rights and liberties of minorities and dissidents, so the costs aren’t born equally by all in society. When people say they’re willing to give up rights and liberties in the name of security, they’re often sacrificing the rights and liberties of others rather than their own.

Dan Solove, Nothing to Hide: The False Tradeoff between Privacy and Security
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Quotations

2012.11.27

As Denham points out, though, the RCMP is not under her jurisdiction, so she can’t bring them into line. But the RCMP simply shouldn’t be running a surveillance system on people who haven’t broken any law, and they shouldn’t be able to take advantage of the federal-provincial jurisdictional split to do so either.

This means Canada’s Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart is going to have to school the Mounties on what privacy rights really mean, and why setting up a massive “just in case” database is not only a bad idea, it’s against the law.

Vincent Gogolek, “It Takes Two To Kill Illegal Police Licence Surveillance”
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Links

The Rationale for Retaining Passwords

Alec Muffett has a terrific piece that clearly articulates why, exactly, passwords are beneficial elements of a broader security apparatus. He also notes core ‘risks’ associated with passwords, and how many of these risks can be defrayed (spoiler alert: just use a strong password management system).

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Quotations

2012.11.24

The issue here is not whether Anonymous activists can be rightfully prosecuted: acts of civil disobedience, by definition, are violations of the law designed to protest or create a cost for injustices. The issue is how selectively these cyber-attack laws are enforced: massive cyber-attacks aimed at a group critical of US policy (WikiLeaks) were either perpetrated by the US government or retroactively sanctioned by it, while relatively trivial, largely symbolic attacks in defense of the group were punished with the harshest possible application of law enforcement resources and threats of criminal punishment.

That the US government largely succeeded in using extra-legal and extra-judicial means to cripple an adverse journalistic outlet is a truly consequential episode: nobody, regardless of one’s views on WikiLeaks, should want any government to have that power. But the manifestly overzealous prosecutions of Anonymous activists, in stark contrast to the (at best) indifference to the attacks on WikiLeaks, makes all of that even worse. In line with its unprecedented persecution of whistleblowers generally, this is yet another case of the US government exploiting the force of law to entrench its own power and shield its actions from scrutiny.

Glenn Greenwald, “Prosecution of Anonymous activists highlights war for Internet control”
Categories
Writing

Ubiquitous Police Surveillance and Guilt by Location

The Times Colonist has a particularly good opinion piece concerning authorities’ use of automatic license plate recognition. This technology was recently subject of an investigation in British Columbia, with the provincial information and privacy commissioner asserting that many of the current uses of the technology must stop. For more information, you can read the decision  (.pdf) or some press coverage about the decision.

When speaking about authorities’ interests in retaining locational information about people who aren’t immediately of interest to police, the author of the opinion piece writes:

And the concept [of collecting such information] goes against the golden thread that winds its way throughout our justice system – the presumption of innocence unless proven otherwise. A person shouldn’t become the focus of an investigation just because he or she happened to drive along a certain street at a certain time.

But a person who hasn’t done anything wrong shouldn’t worry, right? Ask that to people whose lives have been ruined when they have been investigated or charged for a crime and later exonerated. That stigma of being the target of a police investigation is not easily erased, even when a person is cleared of all wrongdoing.

This latter paragraph – that the stigma of a false investigation can significantly alter a person’s life possibilities for an extensive period of time – is often forgotten about or glossed over when reporting on new policing surveillance practices. In an era where information is in abundance, and the attention span to monitor stories and issues is at a premium, a false charge may be legally overturned without the population more generally ever correcting their false impressions. This can create a long-standing disadvantage for falsely accused person as they try to carry on with their lives.

Moreover, the very potential that information could be used against you turns the (popular) understanding of guilt on its head: instead of authorities clearly linking a person’s presence at a location with a crime, it becomes the responsibility of each individual to demonstrate the innocence of being in place X at time Y. Given that these license plate scanners can capture where people are, at any time of the day, there isn’t a necessary reason that a person will know why they were at X at Y. While such oversights ought to be understood as the reasonable failings of a reasonable human’s mind, the danger is that an inability to justify one’s presence at a particular place could be taken as an indication of potential guilt. As a result of such ‘suspicious’ behaviour an individual who was just driving at the ‘wrong place’ at the ‘wrong time’ could be subjected to more intrusive police surveillance, simply because a scanner identified a person at a particular place at a particular time.

Fortunately, the privacy commissioner has significantly come out against this ubiquitous form of surveillance. Her stance should limit these dystopian risks of license plate scanners in her jurisdiction. Now it’s up to the authorities to respect the decision and mediate how and why they use the technology.

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Videos

Why Privacy Matters

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Quotations

2012.11.15

Iranian officials have been assuring the public that the establishment of the [National Information Network] NIN will not cut them off from the Internet. The NIN, according to the government, will provide a “faster, safer, and more reliable” network for domestic purposes, in addition to the global Internet for daily usage.

What the officials have been less vocal about is that the NIN will make it easier for them to monitor user activities and carry out surveillance. Moreover, the establishment of the NIN as an independent network from the Internet will provide officials with the option of cutting off access without affecting the country’s administration. Shutting down the Internet in the aftermath of the contested 2009 elections, for example, was problematic since it interrupted banking and government operations. With the establishment of the NIN, a similar outage will not interrupt internal network traffic.

asl19, “Iran’s National Information Network”