Category: Privacy, Surveillance, & Security

As government agencies and tech companies develop more and more intrusive means of watching and influencing people, how can we live free lives?

Masking one’s insides behind one’s outsides—once the essential task of human social life—was becoming a strenuous, suspect undertaking; why not, like my teenage acquaintance, just quit the fight? Surveillance and data mining presuppose that there exists in us a hidden self that can be reached through probing and analyses that are best practiced on the unaware, but what if we wore our whole beings on our sleeves? Perhaps the rush toward self-disclosure precipitated by social media was a preemptive defense against intruders: What’s freely given can’t be stolen.

But I am too old for this embrace of nakedness. I still believe in the boundaries of my own skull and feel uneasy when they are crossed. … There are so many ghosts in our machines—their locations so hidden, their methods so ingenious, their motives so inscrutable—that not to feel haunted is not to be awake. That’s why paranoia, even in its extreme forms, no longer seems to me so much a disorder as a mode of cognition with an impressive track record of prescience.

Source: How to Protect Your Personal Data—and Humanity—From the Government – The Atlantic

At Apple, we respect your privacy and protect it with strong encryption, plus strict policies that govern how all data is handled.

Source: Privacy – Apple “Apple’s commitment to your privacy”

 

Apple and Time Cook staking out some ideological ground.

Many people don’t think about the security implications of this information existing in the first place. They might be aware that it’s mined for advertising and other marketing purposes. They might even know that the government can get its hands on such data, with different levels of ease depending on the country. But it doesn’t generally occur to people that their personal information might be available to anyone who wants to look.

Source: The Security Risks of Third-Party Data – Schneier on Security

the original goals of making the database may have been relatively innocent [but] the data suddenly took on a totally different meaning when the ownership of the data changed

You don’t have to have any dark secrets in order to to value your privacy.

If you really strongly feel that you have nothing that you consider private ask yourself this: Even if you have done nothing wrong, are you willing to publish your pin code, a high resolution scan of your signature, your passport, your SSN, your passwords, your photographs (naked, preferably), your medical records, the conversations with your attorney, the amount of money you currently have, your criminal record (if you have any), your bank statements, your tax returns for the last 10 years, your license plate and a copy of your driving license, your sexual orientation, your infidelities, the names of the people that you love, the names of the people you despise, the contents of your diary, all the emails you ever wrote and received, your report cards, your entire credit history, all the stuff you ever bought, all the movies you’ve ever watched, all the books you ever read, your religion, your home address and so on for all the world to see?

Source: If you’ve got nothing to hide… · Jacques Mattheij

Nobody, and I really mean nobody, is to be trusted with a technical capability to listen to every room in the world, with listening profiles customizable at the identified-individual level, on the mere basis of “trust us”.

Source: Google Chrome Listening In To Your Room Shows The Importance Of Privacy Defense In Depth | Privacy Online News