Category: Privacy, Surveillance, & Security

A new report into U.S. consumers’ attitude to the collection of personal data … asserts that a large majority of web users are not at all happy, but rather feel powerless to stop their data being harvested and used by marketers.

Startups should absolutely see the debunking of the myth that consumers are happy to trade privacy for free services as a fresh opportunity for disruption — to build services that stand out because they aren’t predicated on the assumption that consumers can and should be tricked into handing over data and having their privacy undermined on the sly.

Source: The Online Privacy Lie Is Unraveling | TechCrunch

If a company bases its entire business model on selling your information, then they can’t also be protecting your privacy.

Source: Ad-based Business Models and Privacy Are Mutually Exclusive

In psychology there is the term of affordances. It’s the concept that an object affords different actions for someone interacting with it. Most objects in this world have a plethora of things you can do with them, many are not even intended by the designer of that object. … What I find interesting about that concept is that most of the time the actions that you can perform on an object are heavily shaped by your state of mind and environment.

A similar thing applies to the enforcement of rules.

I’m not going to discuss whether digital enforcement is a good thing or not, more that when you take such a strong stance on an issue it’s important to not just consider the situations in which everything goes by design. … When implemented properly, encryption is a very binary enforcement: there is no way around it.

Source: Unintended Affordances (or why I believe encrypting everything is a bad idea) | Armin Ronacher’s Thoughts and Writings

A growing number of law enforcement agencies have acquired sophisticated surveillance technology to track cellphones but have done so with an unusual restriction: They must not talk about it.

“So, just to be clear,” Joe Simitian, a county supervisor, said, “we are being asked to spend $500,000 of taxpayers’ money and $42,000 a year thereafter for a product for the name brand which we are not sure of, a product we have not seen, a demonstration we don’t have, and we have a nondisclosure requirement as a precondition. You want us to vote and spend money,” he continued, but “you can’t tell us more about it.”

Source: A Police Gadget Tracks Phones? Shhh! It’s Secret – The New York Times

The DEA secretly instituted a mass surveillance program—and almost no one objected, even after it was revealed.

When a prominent attorney and former appointee sees a government abuse more clearly than his fellow citizens, is he obligated to raise his voice against the abusers? I’d argue that doing so is a civic obligation—and that the obligation is particularly acute for people who advocate for a powerful, opaque national security state, dismissing warnings that the federal government is too vulnerable to abuses. The assurances Americans are given about agencies like the NSA, FBI, and DEA ring hollow precisely because elites so often prove unwilling to hold them accountable—even elites who are otherwise committed to serving their country.

Source: An Elite That Has Lost the Impulse to Police Itself – The Atlantic