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OK, it's on.
Online Privacy
- Thread starter YoungGuns
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Have you ever come across one of those contests where there's a big jar of say, jellybeans, and whoever guesses closest to the actual number of jelly beans are in the jar wins a prize?
Think of the big glass jar as the Internet.
The jelly beans (or milk duds mmmm.... or maybe skittles! Or Smarties omfg it must be breakfast time) are your meta. Your jelly beans are on display in the glass jar for whomever comes across them by hook or by crook. Each individual jelly bean represents some detail about you, however minute or seemingly inconsequential on its own.
The thing about those individual, inconsequential details is that if you collect enough of them and arrange them all just so, then take a few steps back and squint a little you can have created a relatively detailed picture of someone. The more jelly beans you have, the higher the resolution of the picture (BPI? "beans per inch"? *facepalm*).
The prize for guessing the right number of jelly beans is going to depends on the motivations of who is doing the guessing... and basically "what have you got?"
A lot of it is pretty "harmless" or mostly annoying stuff: you're constantly being tracked mined for the purpose of maximizing the potential revenue from and efficacy of targeted advertisements. This is like a stranger sitting next to you while you "use the Internet" taking notes about and recording everything you've done; those ads you keep seeing over and over are not an accident. This kind of stuff seems to be the sort of thing which "makes the world go around", and while some find it offensive others don't seem to mind it so much. The social networks want you IN so that they have ready access to this data - all that cool stuff that Google and Facebook and Apple are doing "for" us comes with the seemingly very minute subscription fee of our meta on demand. So that's one thing you've "got".
A more obvious part of our social media footprint is the amount detail about ourselves we volunteer. This is information easily collected and analyzed by an interested party for whatever reason. Got an old, forgotten MySpace profile kicking around from back in the day? Linkedin? FaceBook? Twitter? There's a lot of jelly beans there. If you leave enough bread crumbs (or jelly beans to be consistent I guess) which create dotted lines between these online profiles then an interested party could find out where you are, what you look like, what you like to do, where you go to do the things you like to do and possibly when you like to do it, who you like to do it with, how well-written/eloquent you are, what you like to talk about, what you like to say when you're talking about things you like to talk about, who you like to say it about and possibly what you're thinking or doing when you say it. These are some delicious, delicious jelly beans... if someone likes jelly beans.
Locally, some dudes at a university in a particular program created a sort of "gentlemen's club" online where they could share some banter. They said some rather questionable stuff on their forum/discussion group and got outed. There were real life repercussions. We sort of expect this kind of retarded conduct from university students in programs related to medicine and science. Maybe they're really okay dudes, or maybe they're really not. Either way, it made the news because they left it out there where someone could find it and point a finger at it.
Speaking with friends recently I was told of how someone they knew who frequents a quilting forum online - QUILTERS, okay? People who like... sew and make quilts and crafty stuff - just pause here for one second and focus on the image that comes to mind when you think of people who make quilts. I'm a small town boy and the immediate association I have in my mind when I think "quilter" is "church groups" or something. So this person is on a quilting forum, makes friends with some people from far away. "Hey you should come visit! We'll hang out and quilt, you can stay at my place!" And so it came to pass that this person hosted this kindred quilter in her home for a few days. Very late one night this person's husband wakes up to use the washroom, and discovers that their guest is rifling through his wife's quilting stuff because she "couldn't sleep". Mmmmmokay. Well, it turned out that the guest copied a number of quilt patterns without asking and also helped herself to a number of supplies and related tools and stuff which are now missing.
A guy I worked with long, long ago met a couple of girls through his myspace... they wanted to hook up for a threesome (ohkaaaay...). They actually really just wanted his wallet. Which they got. For those who are curious, there was reportedly no threesome that day. Just shame.
Anything you put down out there can be picked up by anyone who comes across it, and used for whatever they deem to use it for if at all. Your real opinions, things you said for shock value are all out there and open to interpretation by someone else.
If you build a glass house, how long before you get desensitized to living in plain view and start wandering around your glass house naked?
Is a prospective employer going to profile you and find out what you've been doing in your spare time? What kind of impression are they going to get?
You want to be employed in a position of trust? Or maybe be a public figure or something like that? If you have any kind of history then a motivated party can and will find where it's buried and dig it up. It's not hard to do and it happens all the time.
What do you suppose was on the mind of that guy who was working on Hillary Clinton's email services on the days he signed up for each of his social media memberships? He probably wasn't working for Clinton yet. What do you suppose was on his mind when he asked questions online, hinting that he had a "VIP" who needed to do something underhanded with some email? What do you suppose is on his mind today? I bet he never saw that shit coming.
Nobody ever does.
I don't do social media. I don't have a Twitter, or a LinkedIn account, I'm not on FaceBook or snaptin or plenty of fours. I'm constantly being pressured to "join in" - my family are all on FaceBook and I am "missing out". Sometimes I get hooked in here or there... like you need to have some Google hooks in you if you want to use an Android device and Google's services. The shell cracks and a few jelly beans spill out. I joined INTPf in a moment of weakness for example.
"I'm not doing anything wrong or embarrassing"
"I have nothing to hide"
Great - that makes someone even more interesting, and easy picking - won't see it coming for lack of a sense of suspicion.
We have curtains in our windows, locks on our doors and we don't leave valuable things visible in parked automobiles.
"But I never want to be a politician or the pope anyway."
Okay... but suppose tomorrow you decide you're going to be a super villain. How easy will it be for someone to profile you? Could all that meta out there compromise your goals? Your secret identity?
Once it's out there, it's out there for a looooong time (fo-evahhh). Will our grandchildren stumble across INTPf and read the threads we've left?
So you can probably guess how much I care about mine.
What's too much? I don't know. It's what you're willing to pay to play I guess and we all put different definitions, values and priorities on what our privacy is and means.
tl;dr
Another way to look at it is that all of social media is making some dickbag(s) other than me rich, I am jealous and I wish I thought of it first. Man I hate those guys for being smarter than me.
Think of the big glass jar as the Internet.
The jelly beans (or milk duds mmmm.... or maybe skittles! Or Smarties omfg it must be breakfast time) are your meta. Your jelly beans are on display in the glass jar for whomever comes across them by hook or by crook. Each individual jelly bean represents some detail about you, however minute or seemingly inconsequential on its own.
The thing about those individual, inconsequential details is that if you collect enough of them and arrange them all just so, then take a few steps back and squint a little you can have created a relatively detailed picture of someone. The more jelly beans you have, the higher the resolution of the picture (BPI? "beans per inch"? *facepalm*).
The prize for guessing the right number of jelly beans is going to depends on the motivations of who is doing the guessing... and basically "what have you got?"
A lot of it is pretty "harmless" or mostly annoying stuff: you're constantly being tracked mined for the purpose of maximizing the potential revenue from and efficacy of targeted advertisements. This is like a stranger sitting next to you while you "use the Internet" taking notes about and recording everything you've done; those ads you keep seeing over and over are not an accident. This kind of stuff seems to be the sort of thing which "makes the world go around", and while some find it offensive others don't seem to mind it so much. The social networks want you IN so that they have ready access to this data - all that cool stuff that Google and Facebook and Apple are doing "for" us comes with the seemingly very minute subscription fee of our meta on demand. So that's one thing you've "got".
A more obvious part of our social media footprint is the amount detail about ourselves we volunteer. This is information easily collected and analyzed by an interested party for whatever reason. Got an old, forgotten MySpace profile kicking around from back in the day? Linkedin? FaceBook? Twitter? There's a lot of jelly beans there. If you leave enough bread crumbs (or jelly beans to be consistent I guess) which create dotted lines between these online profiles then an interested party could find out where you are, what you look like, what you like to do, where you go to do the things you like to do and possibly when you like to do it, who you like to do it with, how well-written/eloquent you are, what you like to talk about, what you like to say when you're talking about things you like to talk about, who you like to say it about and possibly what you're thinking or doing when you say it. These are some delicious, delicious jelly beans... if someone likes jelly beans.
Locally, some dudes at a university in a particular program created a sort of "gentlemen's club" online where they could share some banter. They said some rather questionable stuff on their forum/discussion group and got outed. There were real life repercussions. We sort of expect this kind of retarded conduct from university students in programs related to medicine and science. Maybe they're really okay dudes, or maybe they're really not. Either way, it made the news because they left it out there where someone could find it and point a finger at it.
Speaking with friends recently I was told of how someone they knew who frequents a quilting forum online - QUILTERS, okay? People who like... sew and make quilts and crafty stuff - just pause here for one second and focus on the image that comes to mind when you think of people who make quilts. I'm a small town boy and the immediate association I have in my mind when I think "quilter" is "church groups" or something. So this person is on a quilting forum, makes friends with some people from far away. "Hey you should come visit! We'll hang out and quilt, you can stay at my place!" And so it came to pass that this person hosted this kindred quilter in her home for a few days. Very late one night this person's husband wakes up to use the washroom, and discovers that their guest is rifling through his wife's quilting stuff because she "couldn't sleep". Mmmmmokay. Well, it turned out that the guest copied a number of quilt patterns without asking and also helped herself to a number of supplies and related tools and stuff which are now missing.
A guy I worked with long, long ago met a couple of girls through his myspace... they wanted to hook up for a threesome (ohkaaaay...). They actually really just wanted his wallet. Which they got. For those who are curious, there was reportedly no threesome that day. Just shame.
Anything you put down out there can be picked up by anyone who comes across it, and used for whatever they deem to use it for if at all. Your real opinions, things you said for shock value are all out there and open to interpretation by someone else.
If you build a glass house, how long before you get desensitized to living in plain view and start wandering around your glass house naked?
Is a prospective employer going to profile you and find out what you've been doing in your spare time? What kind of impression are they going to get?
You want to be employed in a position of trust? Or maybe be a public figure or something like that? If you have any kind of history then a motivated party can and will find where it's buried and dig it up. It's not hard to do and it happens all the time.
What do you suppose was on the mind of that guy who was working on Hillary Clinton's email services on the days he signed up for each of his social media memberships? He probably wasn't working for Clinton yet. What do you suppose was on his mind when he asked questions online, hinting that he had a "VIP" who needed to do something underhanded with some email? What do you suppose is on his mind today? I bet he never saw that shit coming.
Nobody ever does.
I don't do social media. I don't have a Twitter, or a LinkedIn account, I'm not on FaceBook or snaptin or plenty of fours. I'm constantly being pressured to "join in" - my family are all on FaceBook and I am "missing out". Sometimes I get hooked in here or there... like you need to have some Google hooks in you if you want to use an Android device and Google's services. The shell cracks and a few jelly beans spill out. I joined INTPf in a moment of weakness for example.
"I'm not doing anything wrong or embarrassing"
"I have nothing to hide"
Great - that makes someone even more interesting, and easy picking - won't see it coming for lack of a sense of suspicion.
We have curtains in our windows, locks on our doors and we don't leave valuable things visible in parked automobiles.
"But I never want to be a politician or the pope anyway."
Okay... but suppose tomorrow you decide you're going to be a super villain. How easy will it be for someone to profile you? Could all that meta out there compromise your goals? Your secret identity?
Once it's out there, it's out there for a looooong time (fo-evahhh). Will our grandchildren stumble across INTPf and read the threads we've left?
So you can probably guess how much I care about mine.
What's too much? I don't know. It's what you're willing to pay to play I guess and we all put different definitions, values and priorities on what our privacy is and means.
tl;dr
Another way to look at it is that all of social media is making some dickbag(s) other than me rich, I am jealous and I wish I thought of it first. Man I hate those guys for being smarter than me.
Sinny91
Banned
*shrugs*
Reality is closer to minority report than we think.
I am who I am, and I'll own it.
Intrusive government can go fuck its self. They're the ones hiding the most.
If I ever have to go off grid, I will... but my attitude is all or nothing.
Reality is closer to minority report than we think.
I am who I am, and I'll own it.
Intrusive government can go fuck its self. They're the ones hiding the most.
If I ever have to go off grid, I will... but my attitude is all or nothing.
Ex-User (13503)
Well-Known Member
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- Today 8:56 PM
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- Aug 20, 2016
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Not too much, honestly, though I do differentiate between privacy and security and care much more about the latter.
Beyond some point, taking extreme privacy measures makes you a target regardless of your activity, because "what do you have to hide?"
Beyond some point, taking extreme privacy measures makes you a target regardless of your activity, because "what do you have to hide?"
EyeSeeCold
lust for life
I wouldn't leave sticky notes everywhere I go that detail my home's neighborhood and landlord, nor would I tell a business where they can locate me if I found their product unsatisfactory.
So I think a vpn/proxy is the minimum, plus the ad blockers of course. It's just a matter of reserving your right to privacy while we have what little there is left of it.
So I think a vpn/proxy is the minimum, plus the ad blockers of course. It's just a matter of reserving your right to privacy while we have what little there is left of it.
YoungGuns
Member
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- Today 2:56 PM
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- Aug 14, 2011
- Messages
- 71
I really do very little outside a few browser extensions. I do have some level of concern about government spying, since many things can be contrived. A big problem I see is if I ever was in a position of power, I and most people could be easily manipulated by internet history. And of course, intentionally or not, there's the possibility of running or doing something illegal and getting in trouble (in a future where this is more enforceable to non extreme cases).
On the practical side, I really am not okay with employers being able to view personal social profiles. So there's that to worry about. It's not like workers are getting MORE rights....
I do think I should protect myself more, though there is already plenty out there. But extreme protection is not only tedious but really gets in the way of online usage, and too little may just make you suspicious.
I can see it now: being put on a no-fly list because I was looking at 9/11 truther videos in 2007 hahhaa
On the practical side, I really am not okay with employers being able to view personal social profiles. So there's that to worry about. It's not like workers are getting MORE rights....
I do think I should protect myself more, though there is already plenty out there. But extreme protection is not only tedious but really gets in the way of online usage, and too little may just make you suspicious.
I can see it now: being put on a no-fly list because I was looking at 9/11 truther videos in 2007 hahhaa