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Author Topic: Online Privacy  (Read 8967 times)

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TA

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Re: Online Privacy
« Reply #20 on: April 01, 2012, 11:11:06 AM »

First sentence of the article: "A former teacher’s aide in Michigan says she’s been fired after refusing to give her Facebook password to her supervisors."
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Do you understand how terrifying the words “vibrating strap on” are for an asexual? That’s like saying “the holocaust” to a Jew.

Thad

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Re: Online Privacy
« Reply #21 on: April 02, 2012, 07:16:59 AM »

Via Stross, a Cult of Mac post about an app called Girls Around Me.  Gist is this: you pull up the app, it determines your location via GPS, and, as the name implies, finds girls (or boys) nearby, via Facebook or FourSquare, and lets you take a gander at their profiles.

It should really only take about a microsecond's thought to realize why this is horrifying.

And Stross and Brownlee both point out that the app itself is not the problem, and pulling it (which apparently Apple has now done) won't fix it.  All it is is an aggregator; all it does is provide a filter for publicly-available data.  Even Facebook itself isn't really the problem; its business model is, and that business model would exist with or without Facebook.

Stross extrapolates it further.  A handy tool for rapists is only the beginning.  How long until somebody puts one together that looks for people of a certain race, religion, or sexual orientation?  And as bad as that is when you consider lone-wolves or small bands of bigots, when you start thinking of oppressive governments it gets much much worse.


EDIT: Well this could be useful: Stop Apps From Tracking You Without Your Knowledge Using Foursquare And Facebook [How-To]
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Thad

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Re: Online Privacy
« Reply #22 on: April 03, 2012, 10:27:47 AM »

Franken: still the only Senator worth a damn.

Quote
In his ABA speech, Franken noted how the more that "average Americans depend on Google and Facebook daily, "the less incentive (the companies) have to respect your privacy," he said. Both of these "free" services make the bulk of their money via user profiles, allowing third parties to target ads using the extensive personal information stored there. "You are not their client, you are their product," he said.
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fullmooninu

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Re: Online Privacy
« Reply #23 on: April 03, 2012, 02:38:03 PM »

Wow, that tool for rapists is super nice.

Anyway, will the privacy thing on facebook affect old accounts when it is applied. Or old accounts will have to opt-in somewhere for the newfound privacy privileges.
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McDohl

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Re: Online Privacy
« Reply #24 on: April 09, 2012, 03:08:37 PM »

http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2012/03/facebook-says-it-may-sue-employers-who-demand-job-applicants-passwords.ars

Facebook says it may sue employers who demand job applicants' passwords.

Good for them.
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Mongrel

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Re: Online Privacy
« Reply #25 on: April 09, 2012, 03:54:15 PM »

Yeah, I realize that they're addressing this out of pure self-interest because it could literally be life-or-death for them (they know that if people start treating Facebook like it's their LinkedIn account, it's useless for advertising and they're dead), but it's nice to see that things lined up in a good way.

They probably don't have any actual plans to sue for now (and don't want to be bombarded by user requests), but are hoping the threat may produce something of a chilling effect on Facebook password requests. 
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Büge

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Re: Online Privacy
« Reply #26 on: April 26, 2012, 10:01:51 AM »

Do you know what your Klout score is? No? That's okay, you probably weren't going to get that job anyway.
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Brentai

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Re: Online Privacy
« Reply #27 on: April 26, 2012, 01:19:04 PM »

That guy was applying for VP of Marketing though.

It IS scary to think that we now have to deal with the social eqivalent of a credit score - especially since, Kloutwise, a lot of us just don't have any fucking credit - but yeah that example in particular is indicative of fuck-all.  I'd have booted him out of my office too the moment he admitted he was ignorant of what's going on in his own field.
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TA

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Re: Online Privacy
« Reply #28 on: April 26, 2012, 04:12:52 PM »

I think the awareness of Klout has made me more depressed than anything.
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Mongrel

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Re: Online Privacy
« Reply #29 on: April 26, 2012, 04:16:44 PM »

No kidding.

I always wondered when I would reach that old-man point where you feel so hopelessly obsolete that dealing with new technology just becomes a wall of denial. Now I know.

Twitter was bad enough. I just can't bring myself to have anything to do with these merciless treadmills.
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TA

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Re: Online Privacy
« Reply #30 on: April 26, 2012, 04:20:01 PM »

No kidding.

I always wondered when I would reach that old-man point where you feel so hopelessly obsolete that dealing with new technology just becomes a wall of denial. Now I know.

Twitter was bad enough. I just can't bring myself to have anything to do with these merciless treadmills.

I just don't really dig the Twitter format.  But Klout?  Oh, I understand Klout perfectly.  It makes a lot of sense.  But the very concept makes me so incredibly depressed I just want to lock myself in my room and never come out.
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Do you understand how terrifying the words “vibrating strap on” are for an asexual? That’s like saying “the holocaust” to a Jew.

McDohl

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Re: Online Privacy
« Reply #31 on: April 26, 2012, 04:24:40 PM »

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120426/14505718671/insanity-cispa-just-got-way-worse-then-passed-rushed-vote.shtml

CISPA is being rammed through the House after a change for the worse.

Obama's intending to veto it already, but still.

And a veto for CISPA is a veto for protecting children.  So sayeth the Republican talking points.
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Brentai

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Re: Online Privacy
« Reply #32 on: April 26, 2012, 04:33:09 PM »

You guys do realize that the only thing that Klout really tracks is your effectiveness as a marketing vector, right?  It has certain implications re: market power (if you have 0 Klout and threaten to badmouth an establishment, they have a reason to not care beyond the reasons they probably already didn't care) but not much more beyond that.

Potentially, Klout could be a really powerful force for budging institutions that are notoriously hard to move.  Imagine if a couple guys with 92+ Klout started talking about CISPA (which they need to if they don't want the very foundations of their own power source to become vulnerable).  Last time the Internet needed protecting it took a multibillion dollar self-interested juggernaut to throw its weight; now you could potentially do it with just the right kind of personal-cult loudmouths.

The implications for evil are of course pretty much the same.

But let's be honest: if you're on the Internet and are just NOW becoming wary of the increasing power of an unfiltered opinion, well, welcome to the party I guess.
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TA

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Re: Online Privacy
« Reply #33 on: April 26, 2012, 04:48:15 PM »

You guys do realize that the only thing that Klout really tracks is your effectiveness as a marketing vector, right?  It has certain implications re: market power (if you have 0 Klout and threaten to badmouth an establishment, they have a reason to not care beyond the reasons they probably already didn't care) but not much more beyond that.

Potentially, Klout could be a really powerful force for budging institutions that are notoriously hard to move.  Imagine if a couple guys with 92+ Klout started talking about CISPA (which they need to if they don't want the very foundations of their own power source to become vulnerable).  Last time the Internet needed protecting it took a multibillion dollar self-interested juggernaut to throw its weight; now you could potentially do it with just the right kind of personal-cult loudmouths.

The implications for evil are of course pretty much the same.

But let's be honest: if you're on the Internet and are just NOW becoming wary of the increasing power of an unfiltered opinion, well, welcome to the party I guess.

It tracks a lot more than that, though.  High Klout doesn't happen by accident - it is a reflection of the combination of skill, drive, and opportunity necessary to *get* high Klout.
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Do you understand how terrifying the words “vibrating strap on” are for an asexual? That’s like saying “the holocaust” to a Jew.

Brentai

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Re: Online Privacy
« Reply #34 on: April 26, 2012, 05:17:38 PM »

How is that contradictory to anything I just said?
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Büge

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Re: Online Privacy
« Reply #35 on: April 26, 2012, 07:12:47 PM »

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120426/14505718671/insanity-cispa-just-got-way-worse-then-passed-rushed-vote.shtml

CISPA is being rammed through the House after a change for the worse.

Well, yeah. They have to get it into the books before the liberal leftist commie blogosphere is roused into action.
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Mongrel

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Re: Online Privacy
« Reply #36 on: April 26, 2012, 08:25:38 PM »

Brent, I don't think anyone would argue that you're not technically correct. The inventor himself has this sort of naive well-intentioned idea that the thing will be used for exactly what you say, giving voices to the voiceless, etc. Hell, I agree with you that they were right to blow off the marketing guy in that interview due to his obliviousness of an major evolving marketing tool.

The problem is that if Klout really does become widespread, there's a very strong chance that people will not think of it as "A marketing tool". They're going to think of it as a quantification of how cool and important they are. It's like that snarky .jpg of the Orwell quote warning against hypersimplification with a facebook "like" button next to it. With such open-ended things as social media platforms, it doesn't matter what they're supposed to do, it matters what people make out of them.

In fact, Facebook or Twitter are a great example. Those things already have problems with people who think that the number of friends or followers you have is equal to some kind of win-at-life score (which is just a public quantification of something we all remember from school anyway). The thing is, Facebook, Twitter, and the like nominally have some other useful purpose as their main function; the Pokemon version of social interaction is just a side-effect. But the thing is, that nonsense is Klout's whole reason to exist.

So yeah, sure, it can be used for good. And I expect that if it takes off it will be sometimes. But I think the mundane day-to-day effect will be a much more negative one overall, with people trying (and mostly failing) to game their "cool on the internets" scores like they were min-maxing a shitty D&D character.
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Brentai

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Re: Online Privacy
« Reply #37 on: April 26, 2012, 08:41:36 PM »

You make it sound like the internet invented social climbing.

I suspect the status quo will be mostly unchanged: A few (but seemingly many) people will buy into it, the quiet majority will do something else with their lives and be effectively invisible, and Twitbook will align itself to whatever marketing purpose it serves until suddenly and totally unexpectedly subsumed by a set of social media app that everyone else can use without much fuss, kicking off a new revolution of the cycle.  Fuggit.
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Mongrel

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Re: Online Privacy
« Reply #38 on: April 26, 2012, 08:48:42 PM »

You make it sound like the internet invented social climbing.

I went out of my way to say that wasn't the case.

No, the internet didn't invent social climbing, but it is the place where continuous effort is being made to reducing social status to a single easily-quantifiable number.

Maybe if lived in a post-scarcity world then Down And Out In The Magic Kingdom would be fine. But we don't. The marketing guy not getting a job is one thing, but people are lazy and HR dorks already look for bullshit "metrics" to make their jobs easier. And there are umpty-ump other things that tie in to your social status that have real material impacts.

I'm not saying it will happen, but it's certainly possible (omg slippery slope!). People are stupid and look for shortcuts. If they can press button to receive bacon, they generally will.

I guess we'll see how this gets adopted. Maybe you're right and nobody will think too much of it. I can only hope.
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Thad

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Re: Online Privacy
« Reply #39 on: April 27, 2012, 09:48:24 AM »

CISPA is being rammed through the House after a change for the worse.

Obama's intending to veto it already, but still.

If he ACTUALLY DOES IT, he might win my vote back.

He said he'd filibuster telecom immunity, too.

(Anyway, I don't think it'll get to him because the Senate can't pass goddamn anything.)
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