The Problem With How We Think Of Surveillance 96
blastboy writes "Here's a great essay on Snowden, technology and the problem with how we think of surveillance. From the article: 'Why do we give them our data? For the same reason that prompted the protesters to pull out their phones amid a swirl of tear gas: digital channels are one of the easiest ways we have to talk to one another, and sometimes the only way. There are few things more powerful and rewarding than communicating with another person. It’s not a coincidence that the harshest legal punishment short of the death penalty in modern states is solitary confinement. Humans are social animals; social interaction is at our core. Yet the more we connect to each other online, the more our actions become visible to governments and corporations. It feels like a loss of independence. But as I stood in Gezi Park, I saw how digital communication had become a form of organization. I saw it enable dissent, discord, and protest.'"
Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
Wrong question, because it incorrectly assumes that something is willingly "given." More properly, "Why do they take our privacy?"
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Interesting)
No, you give them your data. Well, maybe not you personally, but in general, we do. We insert Facebook in the middle of all our communications, when there's no bloody reason to, and everything people do on FB was done without FB for a few decades online before that.
We put all our photos up on social network sites, instead of just sharing them with our friends, we share them with data mining companies.
Fill in your own example - there are thousands upon thousands. But yes, we give them our data. We GAVE those companies the power to data-mine us to hell. We MADE those companies succeed financially.
Captcha: consent. We gave them our consent, and routed all our communications through them. They took advantage of it, but what did we expect?
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You are a statistical outlier. This is not about you. Sit back and learn about the majority of people, who are different from you. Yes, such people exist, and make up the vast sea of humanity.
They aren't on Facebook? Non sequitur, they would be if they chose poorly between an internet connection vs. a pot to shit in.
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You are a statistical outlier.
And you are just a plain lire.
The majority of people do not have facebook accounts.
Oh, and here's another tip for you: your little circle jerk of facebook friends does not represent the real world.
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And you are just a plain lire.
He is a misspelled musical instrument?
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Actually, Facebook gathers "shadow profiles" of people who don't have accounts but friends talk about anyways (and the information is "public" - so it's advantageous to create an account if nothing other than to mark it private).
And while the vast majority of the world doesn't have a Facebook account, the ones of
Re: Huh? (Score:1)
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Finally, a decent ironic captcha.
Most are pretty much a stretch, at best, some, I don't get at all.
If you were referring to TFA you are not alone in your bewilderment. It is neither a great article (as the summary suggests), nor does it have a particularly well structured chain of thought. It is, at best, tangential to what the summary claims, and the entire purpose seems to be the self aggrandizement of an urban anarchist and his photographer buddy.
I'd like my 10 minutes back please.
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Most of that can be shared between govs once you become interesting or bought on the open market by govs to index and sort until they find you interesting.
Add in local mil mercenary data firms, contractors with clearances - all the classic privacy firewalls are gone between the public, private and a globally connected intelligence community.
The good aspect
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There are two different "we"s in some languages (IIRC Finnish being one of them). An inclusive one and an exclusive one, i.e. including or excluding the one you're talking to.
I sincerely hope you meant the excluding one. For I don't feel like I am part of that "we" you talk about. For the very reason you mention I neither have a FB account nor did I ever consent to my picture being smeared across any pages.
The problem I have with the whole shit is that even if I decide not to give away my data, you may rest
blame facebook (Score:4, Interesting)
IMHO, you're giving facebook.com and others a pass.
They have the **factors of production**...facebook wasn't ONLY some kids in a dorm room. They were from rich families who could support them for years before they made any profit directly. They had family connections to high level attorneys. They had the protection of our laws paid by all of our taxes.
You can't be consistent and just cross your arms and say, "Hey, its their system, you agreed to it...if you dont like it dont use it"....that's only half an argument. It's a complaint masked as an argument. Anyone who says this is thinking like a slave.
It's inconsistent because its not a free market. Any facebook.com competitor faces ***SEVERE*** barriers to entry that are by facebook.com's design.
There is an artificial scarcity of competition with facebook.com.
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Just because people do that doesn't mean that facebook/nsa et al don't TAKE that communication.. They could choose to anonymize it. They don't.
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"We insert the internet in the middle of all our communications, when there's no bloody reason to..."
"We insert phones in the middle of all our communications, when there's no bloody reason to..."
"We insert pencil and paper in the middle of all our communications, when there's no bloody reason to..."
Facebook is just another communications medium and doesn't have to be the privacy blackhole that it is. When you post your personal informa
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I've got nothing of this. Nothing. No Facebook, no tweeter, no nothing. Not even a picture of me on the public Internet can be found. /. and Linkedin , that is all [I regret the latter and perhaps I am beginning to regret the former too].
Now, do you think that the contacts from my phone are not pulled hundred times already by everyone and their dog? Do you think that I have no file somewhere based only on my /. posts? Do you think my I-net queries and everything I do online is not followed? Do you think tha
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Re: Huh? (Score:2)
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And omnipresent CCTV is pretty much "someone following every single step you take".
If I do something like that, I'd be in jail for stalking. If the government does it millions of times every single day, it's "protection".
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websites are not public space! (Score:2)
I have to differ for several reasons.
First, the 'data' is 1's and 0's stored on any number of servers. It completely technically possible to isolate where exactly your digital data is stored.
2nd, it's easy to define and protect a person's personal information by law. It's called 'unreasonable search and seizure' of 'personal papers, etc' in the Bill of Rights. The problem is that people make false distinctions between digital
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You can do whatever you want. You may only get to try once, but you can.
*let them take* (Score:2)
Yes.
IMHO, it's better said, "Why do we **let them** take our privacy"
Here in America, we still have a democracy. It can function theoretically. We need to ***elect better leaders***.
The people who wrote the Digital Millenium Copyright Act could barely check their own email....think about that.
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Here in America, we still have a democracy.
Today this is very questionable, thirty years ago I would have agreed with you. I am not saying that we don't, but rather that the last few tests have failed so I have no confidence. You can investigate Ross Perot and what happened to him just as easy as the next guy. You can also investigate Ron Paul and see what happened to him, including the leader of Iowa's Republican caucus stating on public radio "Ron Paul will not win in Iowa" a week before the primaries followed by numerous problems and suspiciou
Not all humans are social animals. (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm sure a fair percentage of Slashdot readers would like nothing more than a nice quite room, limted exercise and regular meals. The only thing missing is a laptop, and good wifi github access. ... and please firewall off Facebook and Twitter - pretty please.
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I'm stuck at work... I'ld rather be home coding :-)
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Only because there wouldn't be new content for me to consume to cure my boredom.
Exactly and by this you admit that you need interaction to other people in the form of absorbing information generated by them.
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Things are as they are, you can accept them or pretend they are otherwise, that is your prerogative but that won't make them different.
You enjoy having feces rubbed all over your face. Things are as they are, you can accept them or pretend they are otherwise, that is your prerogative but that won't make them different.
Stop generalizing. Just because most people are like that doesn't mean 100% of all people on the planet are. Believe it or not, mutations actually occur, and there people born with various genetic and psychological defects. Are you saying it is impossible for someone to not be a "social animal" (a disgusting term, by the way)
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You may think yourself as different and unique as you want, but you still have the same biological characteristics of your species. You will be exactly as successful in being the exception while trying to completely isolate yourself from in
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Find me a person that can survive indefinitely alone without mental degeneration and I promise to change my mind.
That depends on what you mean by "mental degeneration." I find most people utterly idiotic and I'd even say that their minds are diseased. One person's "crazy" is another's "genius."
As far as I know there is no case registered yet.
That's because they have no chance to be isolated. If they go out of society, they lose all the benefits. And again, being a "social animal" is quite different from being an antisocial animal who only sees other people as providers of entertainment, like that guy claimed to be above.
You may think yourself as different and unique as you want
I'm not even talking about myself.
Think what y
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That depends on what you mean by "mental degeneration."
I mean things like acquiring multiple personalities, schizophrenia, acute clinical depression etc.
That's because they have no chance to be isolated
So you basically have absolutely no evidence supporting your position. Cute.
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I mean things like acquiring multiple personalities, schizophrenia, acute clinical depression etc.
Most people could have all of those things and they wouldn't be any less annoying than they are currently.
So you basically have absolutely no evidence supporting your position. Cute.
So you basically have absolutely no evidence supporting your position. Cute.
And what position? You mean the one where I accept that it is possible for such people to exist, rather than arrogantly claim that none do?
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Sure it may be wrong as any scientific theory, but the likelihood of this being the case is the same of Darwin`s Evolution or Einstein's General Relativity being wrong. It is not arrogance to stick to the most probable explanation for the evidence you have, it is common sense and one of the basic
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Oh I do have quite a lot of evidence supporting my position. my friend. No one exists in recorded history that disprove this theory and all cases of forced isolation produced results that further corroborates it.
Ignorance is not the same as evidence.
Sure it may be wrong as any scientific theory
You have no scientific theory; just ignorance of the answer, same as me. All I did was say that it was possible for someone to have such a mentality, not that I know it happened. If you keep opposing this in such a desperate fashion, I'll start thinking you're a religious fundamentalist.
it is common sense and one of the basic principles of Science.
"common sense" is often garbage, so please don't mention that tripe. Whether something is common is irrelevant. All that matters is whether it makes sense, and only you can decide that f
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Psychology is mostly pseudoscience to begin with, as the testing is often subjective, subject to bias, and not nearly as rigorous and repeatable as, say physics.
Oh, I do have evidence and a scientific theory on my side.
You have evidence that shows it's impossible for someone is be a complete loner? Do tell. Either that, you make an attempt to understand my position.
You on the other hand have only wishful thinking and ignorance at your side.
Such as? Are you so opposed to accepting that the possibility is there? What exactly do you think my position is that you would call it "wishful thinking" and "ignorance"? Explain.
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In this case you just have to provide a single example of someone that managed to live in total isolation for a few decades without ending with serious psychiatric problems.
What is and is not a problem is completely subjective. Those "psychiatric problems" of which you speak are nothing more than us passing judgement on people with different thought patterns, or describing them, because we believe them to be harmful.
With that said, that isn't even what I was talking about. I've been talking about the possibility of being a complete loner, not the possibility of being a complete loner that ends up as normal as every other human. I don't really care about the latter.
I will stick with the best explanation given the evidence we have, that evidence being that all cases of people that lived in isolation for long periods of time ended with very serious psychiatric problems
Given the sh
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What is and is not a problem is completely subjective.
No it is not. Although some psychological problems are indeed badly defined and too broad to mean anything, there are a fair number of them that are very well defined and documented. These are sufficiently objective to be determined with reasonable precision by true doctors (psychiatrists) and not psychologists. And all people who were isolated were found presenting problems in the second category.
Given the sheer number of people who lived throughout history, the sheer number of people who live now that we don't pay attention to, and the fact that we really only started paying attention to this sort of thing not much more than a century ago, I'm more hesitant to say that it is extremely unlikely that someone, at some point, had the mentality of a complete loner.
Given the sheer number of beings and species who lived from the down on life in this world, the very limited
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No it is not.
One person's idea of a problem is a good thing to someone else. Describing behaviors and states of mind isn't the problem to me, but saying that these things are bad is subjective.
Given the sheer number of beings and species who lived from the down on life in this world, the very limited number of evidences we found about evolution, and the time since when we started to pay attention at it, you should be reluctant in believing this theory too, for example.
We have *lots* of evidence for evolution, not just ignorance.
You claimed you didn't deny that it was possible, and in that case, you actually agree with me, even though you keep making comments that seem as if they're attacking my position.
Oh, you did, and since the beginning. The fallacy is on your part, by trying to argue that because some theory may be untrue it is untrue.
Actually, that's all a straw man on your part. If my position wasn't clear then, it should b
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Screw it. It's getting boring toying with you. Argue with me using your imagination from now on, because I'm done; that's all you've been doing, anyway.
Reply to me again and all you'll get is a copied and pasted version of this reply, just to further obliterate your drone-like mind.
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Screw it. It's getting boring toying with you. Argue with me using your imagination from now on, because I'm done; that's all you've been doing, anyway.
Reply to me again and all you'll get is a copied and pasted version of this reply, just to further obliterate your drone-like mind.'
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It's a difference between interacting with people you enjoy interacting with and having to interact with people. Work is the latter, usually, unless you're REALLY lucky.
There's a good reason my circle of friends contains no marketing people. I can choose who I socialize with in my spare time. Sadly, no such luck at work.
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Possible, but I know from experience that I can do without human contact for quite a while. Having SAD sure helps with it.
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I'm sure a fair percentage of Slashdot readers would like nothing more than a nice quite room, limted exercise and regular meals.
Except for the quiet, you can get that for free in prison.
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Slashdot is social media.
Comment on this story... (Score:2, Insightful)
Why do we virtually sign EULA's and don't read them? Don't people know that they are the law of the land and basically you give concent to them to use YOUR data in a manner that is outlined within said document. Obviously it's written in legaleese and not ment to be read by anybody except lawyers. If you don't want them to have your data, don't give it to them. The service is FREE for a reason, and YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THEY ARE SELLING.
Problem with Medium (Score:2)
Privacy Myths (Score:3)
websites are not **public space** (Score:3)
wrong analogy by a mile
facebook.com is not publicly owned like the beach!!!!
facebook.com is a **private business** located on 1s & 0s on privately owned servers and they sure as hell can be regulated by law
your whole 'privacy myth' idea is a total cop out....you're thinking like a passive consumer in a dictators
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Somehow I fear we passed that point a few miles ago. Most people didn't even wake up from the bump.
That's why we need to control it (Score:2)
I saw it enable dissent, discord, and protest.
And now you know why the powers that are want to have a communication kill-switch without oversight.
How "They" think of surveillance is the problem... (Score:2)
More information on you? More ways for greed within ranks of power to prey upon you. Simple as that...
On teh flip side of that coin.. (Score:2)
Mass surveillance allows the few who have access to the results to manipulate the public. Thsi was done regarding 9/11 and there was a lawsuit against the telcos for it but the ones that got them to do it also dismissed that case.
Such information is used in a feedback loop for manipulation. The other part of that loop is the main stream media which is controlled by a few as well.
A lot of people do not think very highly of FOX news but what I saw regarding 9/11 was news that was so out of it that I have to s
Correction (Score:2)
it’s not a coincidence that the harshest legal punishment short of the death penalty in modern states is solitary confinement.
It should probably have said:
it’s not a coincidence that the harshest legal punishment in modern states is solitary confinement.