kw: book reviews, nonfiction, privacy, surveys
At a very early age we learn that the things people like and dislike differ. We learn that what some approve, others disapprove. When we find that what we like—any object, food, behavior, hobby, or whatever—is disliked or disapproved by someone who is powerful, or by large numbers of others we must spend time with, we begin to keep secrets. I remember, in second grade, excitedly telling a classmate of something I saw while watching The Mickey Mouse Club on TV. He said, scornfully, "That's for two-year-olds!" After that I never disclosed that I continued to watch the show.
I didn't have that episode in mind when I began to read Privacy: What Everyone Needs to Know® by Leslie P. Francis and John G. Francis (Nowhere in the book could I find why the subtitle is trademarked). I was simply interested in the subject, one so very popular today. Once I dug in, I found the ride rather difficult. Why?
The authors write well, but the subject is difficult. It is also so broad and all-pervasive that no treatise containing a mere 100,000 words can do more than touch on its many facets. Thus the book is composed of a few paragraphs each about some 130 topics, grouped into 10 chapters. It is actually a pretty good ontology of the subject to two levels. But it is a resource or reference, and don't think it is intended to be read through. So I treated it as such, reading the opening section of each chapter, and then dipping into topics that most interested me. My interests are rather broad, so I still read through a lot of the book, but this is my disclaimer that I did not read every word.
The older I become, the more I realize how exceedingly diverse the human race is. I suspect that for every choice I make, were I to broadcast it on FaceBook and invite comment, someone would object or blame or scold me for it. In America, at least (and how often do I consider whether it is really OK to write "America" to mean the United States of America, rather than using "The U.S" or some other locution and thus avoid slighting the other 20 or 21 nations that constitute The Americas?), the climate of Political Correctness that has been a-building for some 50 years makes us all paranoid about "offending" a nation full of hair-triggered people.
A side note here, folks: Political Correctness has become a pervasive form of Censorship, and all the idiots out there who moan or scream, "Oh, I am so offended!" a few dozen times a day really need to find a more productive hobby, and grow a useful thickness of skin. So there.
OK, I'm back. Given the current cultural climate, a strong dose of paranoia is entirely justified. You can get shot at for honking your horn at the wrong time. Nobody accepts an apology if they think they can wring out an abject apology or even get you fired. American culture as it now stands constitutes an assault on the privacy of our own thoughts.
The subject of the novel 1984 was pervasive surveillance by the State. These days, that is just the beginning of our worries. My computer-jock colleagues and I used to joke that, if a company like Seagate were to develop a hard disk with infinite capacity, the government would order two of them. To me and my colleagues in the 1980's, a disk drive holding a few hundred Mbytes was a big (and costly) device. Now for $50 I can get a pocket-size Tbyte or two (and I have an "old" 2-Tbyte drive; it is as big as the book I just read). The big data center the NSA keeps in the Utah desert has a capacity of millions of Tbytes (the unit is called an Exabyte, or Xbyte). But it is not just the government. Data-hungry commercial enterprises store similar quantities of data…about us. About you and me, their customers (or critics, or whatever we are to them). George Orwell might be astonished, or he might say, "Why didn't I think of that?" And just you wait: Moore's Law for storage devices isn't slowing down yet, so a pocket Xbyte for $50 or so is probably just a few years away. And with network speeds pushing Gbyte/sec speeds and beyond, plus cameras everywhere, just everywhere, we live in a social surveillance environment. The primary difference between you and me, and the big actors—governments and large corporations—is that they can afford to employ programmers to write software to actually sort, scan, and analyze these massive data stores and create useful intelligence.
Is privacy dead? The authors, the Francises, don't think so. But many aspects of privacy are indeed dead. They are about to get deader. Some things are still humorous. If I neglect to go into InPrivate mode when I search for products and product reviews, or when I buy what I've researched, I'll see ads for such products appearing in all kinds of places for the following several months, in spite of the fact that I already bought it. But I fully expect the day to come that Google and FaceBook and everybody will know I bought it, and the ads will instead target follow-ons. If I begin using cooking or recipe web sites a lot, will the sudden up-tick trigger ads for cookware and blenders and spatulas and toaster ovens? Maybe. And after a couple more years, "they" will likely know I am thinking about upgrading my kitchen range before I even begin my research.
What is there, in your life, that you most keenly desire to be known to nobody, but nobody, except perhaps your partner? What if your pattern of purchases—even if you never, ever buy anything online—reveals your deepest secret to "somebody" whom you'd rather didn't know it? Or, if not purchases, just the streets you drive down or walk along, tracked by the phone in your pocket? What if the traces of DNA you leave on the paper from the table in the doctor's exam room lead to a pre-diagnosis of an embarrassing or dangerous condition you didn't know you were prone to having? … but that information somehow made it to your insurance company before you even knew it? Will technology eventually make it an almost all-revealing act to simply walk through a certain doorway while breathing? Yet you have no idea which doorway it might be? The current trend in DNA sequencing can be projected to the point where doing a total genome sequence will cost a dollar. Then what? Do you really want to know you might not have the same Y chromosome as your "father"? Or your…son?
The last chapter, the final 10 vignettes of the book, consider privacy and democracy. How much secrecy is required for a democracy to function? Conversely, how much transparency is also required? (Would it change your vote to learn that a certain political candidate has a large collection of antique torture devices? or reads 2-3 romance novels every single week (or writes one every 2 months)? or never buys meat, preferring to shoot it personally? or has raw eggs for breakfast every day? or is a total Vegan? Come up with your own list.) We have had a society that functioned, oh, reasonably well, having a certain mix of privacy and transparency. That mix is being forcibly shifted. Like it or not, more transparency is in our future. And the PC culture is accompanied by a trend that asks, "If you are so hell-bent on privacy, what're you trying to hide?"
I, for one, am glad that I have reached curmudgeonhood and will not likely live long enough to see, for example, the $1 genome sequence. There is a point beyond which we can no longer adapt. I am an introvert, with no more than the average amount of paranoia (so I tell myself - 😁!). I'd hate to be pushed until I "go postal" just because of societal nosiness. It is not entirely out of the question, folks. How about you?
So hey, that was a bunch of good riffs from a book that does no more than discuss a hundred-odd questions we will find ourselves asking more and more in the years ahead. Read it only if you can withstand a boost to your paranoia quotient!
Showing posts with label privacy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label privacy. Show all posts
Friday, February 02, 2018
Sunday, September 10, 2017
A must-read if you care about your internet presence
kw: book reviews, nonfiction, internet, privacy, security, self help
The subtitle of the book should catch your attention: "Are you naked online?". Are you? If so, what might you do about it? Ted Claypoole and Theresa Payton drew on broad experience in the online security arena, including Ms Payton's service in the White House, to write Protecting Your Internet Security: Are You Naked Online?. Start by reading this book.
Privacy as we once knew it is a thing of the past. The security of everything online is similarly threatened. It doesn't have to be. I took certain pieces of the authors' advice, and before noting the results, I should perhaps explain something that may be a little uncommon about me.
I decided from the time I started this weblog that I would go to certain lengths to divorce its identity from my own. There are a few clues here and there in my posts, so a persistent and diligent person could track me down. I tend to trust in "security by obscurity", as compared to more technical means. So these results might indicate how successful I have been.
Of course, the authors recommend that we all fire up a browser window in Private (or Incognito or Stealth or whatever) mode, and search our name. In my case, for historical reasons, there are six variants of my name, and two variants of this blog's name. But the search was not nearly as arduous as I expected. From the longest to the shortest ways to look up my name, always putting the entire thing on quotes (but none of those ways using a first initial rather than a first name):
Now, from an open browser page, I went to the Open Data Partnership "choices" page, which immediately ran a status check. It returned a long list of entities that either are or are not modifying ad choices based on my browsing behavior. Those who are, that I recognized, include Adobe Marketing Cloud, Amazon, Experian, Google and Microsoft. Some that are not doing so include LinkedIn and Ziff Davis (publisher of many magazines including PC Magazine, to which I once subscribed). One may easily opt out of all of their chicanery, but I have learned instead to do most searches for "stuff" in Private mode.
Private mode isn't perfect, so if you want to avoid, or at least confuse, advertisers and their tracking gimmicks, page 78 has a list of nine suggestions such as the Blur feature by Abine. You can also analyze your own online profile—the real one, not any of the ones you created yourself—using Spokeo, for example.
Why should all this be necessary? If you are old like me, it doesn't matter as much, but think of a teenager whose entire online presence is rife with teen attitude, complaints about parental restrictions, kidding and teasing (and worse) of "friends" and others, and the general sort of things you'd expect from kids who don't yet realize they are mortal. Fast-forward five years, when they are applying to a college, or ten years, when they are applying for a job. Colleges and prospective employers track down all the social media you've been using, and they are better at it than you think. Just changing your name on FaceBook or Twitter isn't enough. If your likeness appears anywhere, a single well-composed image of your face can turn up a lot through Image Search in Google, at the very least.
Or maybe you are a 35-year-old trying to build a business who has attracted the ire of a competitor. Will the competitor create an account somewhere in your name and use it to publish inflammatory and defamatory material that would drive away customers who stumble across it and think it is you? An entire industry of Reputation Management has arisen to address just such scenarios. Even if your competitor didn't do you dirt, maybe your teenage self did already, and unpleasant traces remain of someone you once were, but no longer are. The internet has a longer memory than a jilted spouse! To many folks, what you were then, perhaps you still are, under that polished veneer.
This naturally leads to a section on guiding your children through their early years as a digital native. It will be hard work to keep them from shooting their future self in the foot, but it is necessary.
Another notion occurred to me: Phase your life, and use a different online avatar and screen name for each phase. Upon entering Middle School, a preteen might post a sign-off in a soon-to-be-unused FaceBook account, saying "Goodbye, I'll go silent now. Catch everyone later, and elsewhere." Then she can use a new version of her name to start a new account, and gradually import old friends, but only after they have undergone a similar transition. Hard as it may seem, it is best to discard "friends" who don't see the value in this approach. The end of High School is a good time for a similar changeover. Other phases come to mind. Think it through.
Also, such a time is a good one to go through the abandoned account and delete posts that will cause trouble to the "new you". Of course, the Internet Archive will still have them in its "wayback machine", but you cannot cleanse everything. That's why it is best to keep your most private thoughts out of the ether entirely. When you are musing darkly, the Cloud is not your friend! The Google Docs app isn't totally secure; nothing online is.
A lot of this is like getting a better lock for the front door of your house and a better security system. It doesn't guarantee the house won't be robbed, but it makes you a harder target, so most thieves will pick someone less diligent to burgle. And that's the best advice for anyone concerned about their online privacy and security. Take a little forethought to be a harder-than-average target. It is worthwhile, and these authors are good guides to doing just that.
The subtitle of the book should catch your attention: "Are you naked online?". Are you? If so, what might you do about it? Ted Claypoole and Theresa Payton drew on broad experience in the online security arena, including Ms Payton's service in the White House, to write Protecting Your Internet Security: Are You Naked Online?. Start by reading this book.
Privacy as we once knew it is a thing of the past. The security of everything online is similarly threatened. It doesn't have to be. I took certain pieces of the authors' advice, and before noting the results, I should perhaps explain something that may be a little uncommon about me.
I decided from the time I started this weblog that I would go to certain lengths to divorce its identity from my own. There are a few clues here and there in my posts, so a persistent and diligent person could track me down. I tend to trust in "security by obscurity", as compared to more technical means. So these results might indicate how successful I have been.
Of course, the authors recommend that we all fire up a browser window in Private (or Incognito or Stealth or whatever) mode, and search our name. In my case, for historical reasons, there are six variants of my name, and two variants of this blog's name. But the search was not nearly as arduous as I expected. From the longest to the shortest ways to look up my name, always putting the entire thing on quotes (but none of those ways using a first initial rather than a first name):
- 4 text hits, 3 of them reporting my first marriage in various newspapers.
- 1 text hit.
- Though Google initially said 279, there were 17 actual hits, and 12 were about me. There was also one picture of an ancestor of mine in an Image search, but none of me. More briefly for the rest...
- 164 at first, then 19 of 21 text hits.
- 1,330 at first, then 31 of 35 text hits, plus 3 of about 170 images are actually me.
- 2 of 532 text hits are actually about me.
- "polymath07": 3,930 at first, but only 33 if you look at returns pages. Hundreds of pictures in the Image search, most from this blog, in which I frequently post pictures.
- "polymath at large": 7,590 at first, but only 26 actual hits. Many, many pix, nearly all from this blog.
Now, from an open browser page, I went to the Open Data Partnership "choices" page, which immediately ran a status check. It returned a long list of entities that either are or are not modifying ad choices based on my browsing behavior. Those who are, that I recognized, include Adobe Marketing Cloud, Amazon, Experian, Google and Microsoft. Some that are not doing so include LinkedIn and Ziff Davis (publisher of many magazines including PC Magazine, to which I once subscribed). One may easily opt out of all of their chicanery, but I have learned instead to do most searches for "stuff" in Private mode.
Private mode isn't perfect, so if you want to avoid, or at least confuse, advertisers and their tracking gimmicks, page 78 has a list of nine suggestions such as the Blur feature by Abine. You can also analyze your own online profile—the real one, not any of the ones you created yourself—using Spokeo, for example.
Why should all this be necessary? If you are old like me, it doesn't matter as much, but think of a teenager whose entire online presence is rife with teen attitude, complaints about parental restrictions, kidding and teasing (and worse) of "friends" and others, and the general sort of things you'd expect from kids who don't yet realize they are mortal. Fast-forward five years, when they are applying to a college, or ten years, when they are applying for a job. Colleges and prospective employers track down all the social media you've been using, and they are better at it than you think. Just changing your name on FaceBook or Twitter isn't enough. If your likeness appears anywhere, a single well-composed image of your face can turn up a lot through Image Search in Google, at the very least.
Or maybe you are a 35-year-old trying to build a business who has attracted the ire of a competitor. Will the competitor create an account somewhere in your name and use it to publish inflammatory and defamatory material that would drive away customers who stumble across it and think it is you? An entire industry of Reputation Management has arisen to address just such scenarios. Even if your competitor didn't do you dirt, maybe your teenage self did already, and unpleasant traces remain of someone you once were, but no longer are. The internet has a longer memory than a jilted spouse! To many folks, what you were then, perhaps you still are, under that polished veneer.
This naturally leads to a section on guiding your children through their early years as a digital native. It will be hard work to keep them from shooting their future self in the foot, but it is necessary.
Another notion occurred to me: Phase your life, and use a different online avatar and screen name for each phase. Upon entering Middle School, a preteen might post a sign-off in a soon-to-be-unused FaceBook account, saying "Goodbye, I'll go silent now. Catch everyone later, and elsewhere." Then she can use a new version of her name to start a new account, and gradually import old friends, but only after they have undergone a similar transition. Hard as it may seem, it is best to discard "friends" who don't see the value in this approach. The end of High School is a good time for a similar changeover. Other phases come to mind. Think it through.
Also, such a time is a good one to go through the abandoned account and delete posts that will cause trouble to the "new you". Of course, the Internet Archive will still have them in its "wayback machine", but you cannot cleanse everything. That's why it is best to keep your most private thoughts out of the ether entirely. When you are musing darkly, the Cloud is not your friend! The Google Docs app isn't totally secure; nothing online is.
A lot of this is like getting a better lock for the front door of your house and a better security system. It doesn't guarantee the house won't be robbed, but it makes you a harder target, so most thieves will pick someone less diligent to burgle. And that's the best advice for anyone concerned about their online privacy and security. Take a little forethought to be a harder-than-average target. It is worthwhile, and these authors are good guides to doing just that.
Saturday, July 05, 2014
Paranoia is more justified than ever
kw: book reviews, nonfiction, technology, privacy, data mining, cyber crime, surveillance
Whom do you fear the most? The criminals or the police? For most people it will depend on where they live. For me, living on the liberal coastlands of America, criminals are the bigger threat. However, that may not always be true.
George Orwell's 1984, which he thought was set comfortably some 36 years in his future, is now set 30 years into our past, and will be set 36 years into the past in 2020. By then its forecasts may prove all too true. The newest models of "smart televisions" and some set-top cable boxes have cameras and microphones. Many owners never turn on the devices, and most forget they are there. But these are only the tip of the iceberg of the surveillance society in which we live.
Prior to about 40 years ago, the most skilled safecracker or most wily train robber could snatch a payroll in cash. A few skilled embezzlers working at banks used "bologna slicing" methods to skim a few cents here and there from thousands of bank accounts. But as recent data-theft cases from companies such as Target show, the ubiquitous Network ("The Net", formerly called "the Internet") facilitates much broader-scale thievery, of the identities and buying (or other) habits of tens of millions at a time.
Suppose that you could be assured you'd never lose a penny to fraud or theft of any kind, yet your every move would be known and your every word recorded, even in your most intimate moments? Growing numbers of people are paying $100 or more yearly for "ID theft protection" services such as LifeLock. What would you pay to be sure neither Big Brother nor the neighborhood felon, nor even your brother-in-law, could ever see into your toilet, bedroom, or clothes closet?
It's funny. Privacy in America is a big issue in some areas, such as Abortion ("privacy" is THE core of the Roe vs Wade decision), yet is no issue at all in others, such as what you eat, whom you love, what your doctor says, or where you go on vacation. The countries of Europe have strong constitutional or legislative protections for privacy, usually giving you ownership of everything that can be recorded about you. Not so in the good ol' USA.
Privacy! Do you forget the smart phone in your pocket, with its camera and microphone that can be controlled remotely? The cameras, not only the ones in the store with all those little black hemispheres in the ceiling (or simply sitting in the open), nor the ones at red-light-violation intersections, but in places you might never think to look. All are recording 24/7, attached to near-infinite data storage devices. When was the last time you saw a news report about some crime or disaster somewhere that didn't show a few seconds of surveillance footage? And just the other day on a walk my wife and I saw one of our neighbors learning how to use a quad copter in the park down the street. Today, he is satisfied to zoom it around and do acrobatics. Does it have a camera? Probably. How long will it be before I hear it humming overhead as I work in the yard? or outside my window?
A note to the handy: a search for "homemade herf" yielded 100,000 hits just now. Might be worth a look. The device will be the size of a trash can, but can zap a drone out of the sky. Careful, though, a side lobe can zap your PC in the house and the phone in your pocket.
All this is leading up to a very handy reference book: Privacy in the Age of Big Data: Recognizing Threats, Defending Your Rights, and Protecting Your Family by Theresa M. Payton and Theodore Claypoole. Their premise is simple: technology allows ever more intrusion into our private lives, and we are doing it to ourselves. Particularly in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, now 13 years ago, at least half of Americans feel trading away some of their rights is worth getting increased protection. The trouble is, we are getting a pig in a poke. We don't know if we are getting what we pay for, and the pig is accompanied by a wolf: what the government can see can also be seen by criminals.
I was present at some of the meetings in 1980 between Control Data Corp. and data managers for the Mormon Church, who were planning to install a 1TB data store for genealogy records. Its projected cost was $1.2 million. Considering that a big disk in those days was 500 MB, and the drive cabinet was half the size of a washing machine, the building to house the 2,000 disk drives and their A/C equipment was going to cost another quarter million. I recently got a backup disk, 2 TB for $99. The current million-dollar system would be around a tenth of an exabyte, or 100 PB (petabytes). An exabyte is a million TB.
Do you know just how big a Terabyte is? One minute of good quality MP3 audio produces about a 1MB file. 1,000 minutes (16.7 hours) takes up 1GB, and 16,700 hours of audio would fill 1TB. But lower quality audio, such as a phone call recording, can be 1/3 the size, or smaller, so a 1TB disk could hold more than 50,000 hours of telephone conversation, or 3 million minutes. That is 5.7 years of non-stop talk. Even a dedicated motormouth would be hard put to use the phone more than 2,000 minutes per month, so the disk could hold 125 years of phone use for that one person. On the other hand, uncompressed text is quite compact, and compressed text is even smaller. If you type at a "standard" rate of 40 wpm, that's 14.4 KB per hour or about 1/70 of a MB. 1TB is a million MB. That's why it is so easy to copy and store billions of e-mail messages.
In 1980, at one of the meetings mentioned above, someone from CDC joked, "If we invent a disk with infinite capacity—call it the God Disk—the Government will buy two of them." One of the Mormons deadpanned, "So would we." But a big disk is nothing without software to sort and collate it. Now that any $500 laptop can sift through huge amounts of data in a few seconds, all kinds of records become useful.
"All kinds" is amazingly comprehensive to Payton and Claypoole. Nearly everything we buy, from groceries to clothes to knickknacks to more personal items, is recorded, usually along with our identity. To keep from having a purchase tagged to you, you'd need to pay cash at the point of sale, and be among the lucky ones to buy from a store that doesn't have face recognition software running on its security cameras. Retailers love data about buying habits. So do criminals; they want to know who just bought anything expensive and comparatively portable. Government usually doesn't care, except for certain kinds of purchases. I suspect an order for 500 decks of cards, not from a casino, might get scrutiny for two reasons. Firstly, the possibility of an underground high-stakes card game. Secondly, the plastic in certain card brands can be chemically altered into a cheap plastic explosive.
How soon will it be that the store's computer system knows who you are, and your tastes, by the time you walk in the door? Maybe it knows who you are from your phone, or maybe from cameras. The rest is online and they're already tied in to it. Think you can fool the cameras with a wig or hat and dark glasses? They way you walk and other bodily motions you habitually make are harder to disguise (a one-time fakeout can be had by putting some duct tape across your back or a pebble in your shoe).
Planning to travel abroad? The authors advise, most particularly for repressive countries, that you leave your usual phone at home and take a cheap throwaway phone. Also, make no purchases using the phone! Some global companies have their expat executives take "vacations" to safer climes when they need to arrange sensitive deals or discuss important matters with HQ. If you need to carry your phone, keep it in a metal case, and turned off, when not in use, along with those credit cards and their convenient microchip. An easy alternative is an aluminized Mylar balloon, deflated and just wrapped around your electronics. Then the phone can't communicate with cell towers and the chips can't be read by someone walking by using a RFID reader. In one chilling section, though, the authors report on gadgets to read brain waves from a modest distance, say a foot or so. Will I need a foil-lined hat? Better yet would be a phony brain wave generator in my hat, a kind of jammer.
How do we use social media? I never tell my FB "friends" where I am going, only where I have been…usually! Many online retailers want to use us for free advertisements, and urge us to "share" on FB or somewhere. Some have six or more "share" options! Even if you don't share, you'll start seeing more ads for the thing you just bought, or only researched. If you do share, those ads will multiply. That's your "payment" for your "help".
Things will only progress. There is no going back. The authors close with a chapter on legislation. Here we learn that America, where "privacy" was so important to winning the abortion decision, does the least to protect privacy among so-called Democratic nations. Levels of black-market activity are lower in America than nearly anywhere else, which indicates more trust in government here. But I am not worried so much about the government of today in America. I am worried about future governments here and around the world, with a more and more nannyish attitude, or worse yet, with Sharia laws and the technology to enforce them in absolutely every case.
The trusting American people are embracing cars that know more and more about them, and report on them to the car dealer and insurance company; electronic medical records with poor security; smarter and smarter pocket computers that have phones attached, along with multiple cameras and microphones and geolocators and accelerometers and whatever is next; and cameras, cameras everywhere. The members of the freest society ever to arise are forging their own chains.
Whom do you fear the most? The criminals or the police? For most people it will depend on where they live. For me, living on the liberal coastlands of America, criminals are the bigger threat. However, that may not always be true.
George Orwell's 1984, which he thought was set comfortably some 36 years in his future, is now set 30 years into our past, and will be set 36 years into the past in 2020. By then its forecasts may prove all too true. The newest models of "smart televisions" and some set-top cable boxes have cameras and microphones. Many owners never turn on the devices, and most forget they are there. But these are only the tip of the iceberg of the surveillance society in which we live.
Prior to about 40 years ago, the most skilled safecracker or most wily train robber could snatch a payroll in cash. A few skilled embezzlers working at banks used "bologna slicing" methods to skim a few cents here and there from thousands of bank accounts. But as recent data-theft cases from companies such as Target show, the ubiquitous Network ("The Net", formerly called "the Internet") facilitates much broader-scale thievery, of the identities and buying (or other) habits of tens of millions at a time.
Suppose that you could be assured you'd never lose a penny to fraud or theft of any kind, yet your every move would be known and your every word recorded, even in your most intimate moments? Growing numbers of people are paying $100 or more yearly for "ID theft protection" services such as LifeLock. What would you pay to be sure neither Big Brother nor the neighborhood felon, nor even your brother-in-law, could ever see into your toilet, bedroom, or clothes closet?
It's funny. Privacy in America is a big issue in some areas, such as Abortion ("privacy" is THE core of the Roe vs Wade decision), yet is no issue at all in others, such as what you eat, whom you love, what your doctor says, or where you go on vacation. The countries of Europe have strong constitutional or legislative protections for privacy, usually giving you ownership of everything that can be recorded about you. Not so in the good ol' USA.
Privacy! Do you forget the smart phone in your pocket, with its camera and microphone that can be controlled remotely? The cameras, not only the ones in the store with all those little black hemispheres in the ceiling (or simply sitting in the open), nor the ones at red-light-violation intersections, but in places you might never think to look. All are recording 24/7, attached to near-infinite data storage devices. When was the last time you saw a news report about some crime or disaster somewhere that didn't show a few seconds of surveillance footage? And just the other day on a walk my wife and I saw one of our neighbors learning how to use a quad copter in the park down the street. Today, he is satisfied to zoom it around and do acrobatics. Does it have a camera? Probably. How long will it be before I hear it humming overhead as I work in the yard? or outside my window?
A note to the handy: a search for "homemade herf" yielded 100,000 hits just now. Might be worth a look. The device will be the size of a trash can, but can zap a drone out of the sky. Careful, though, a side lobe can zap your PC in the house and the phone in your pocket.
All this is leading up to a very handy reference book: Privacy in the Age of Big Data: Recognizing Threats, Defending Your Rights, and Protecting Your Family by Theresa M. Payton and Theodore Claypoole. Their premise is simple: technology allows ever more intrusion into our private lives, and we are doing it to ourselves. Particularly in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, now 13 years ago, at least half of Americans feel trading away some of their rights is worth getting increased protection. The trouble is, we are getting a pig in a poke. We don't know if we are getting what we pay for, and the pig is accompanied by a wolf: what the government can see can also be seen by criminals.
I was present at some of the meetings in 1980 between Control Data Corp. and data managers for the Mormon Church, who were planning to install a 1TB data store for genealogy records. Its projected cost was $1.2 million. Considering that a big disk in those days was 500 MB, and the drive cabinet was half the size of a washing machine, the building to house the 2,000 disk drives and their A/C equipment was going to cost another quarter million. I recently got a backup disk, 2 TB for $99. The current million-dollar system would be around a tenth of an exabyte, or 100 PB (petabytes). An exabyte is a million TB.
Do you know just how big a Terabyte is? One minute of good quality MP3 audio produces about a 1MB file. 1,000 minutes (16.7 hours) takes up 1GB, and 16,700 hours of audio would fill 1TB. But lower quality audio, such as a phone call recording, can be 1/3 the size, or smaller, so a 1TB disk could hold more than 50,000 hours of telephone conversation, or 3 million minutes. That is 5.7 years of non-stop talk. Even a dedicated motormouth would be hard put to use the phone more than 2,000 minutes per month, so the disk could hold 125 years of phone use for that one person. On the other hand, uncompressed text is quite compact, and compressed text is even smaller. If you type at a "standard" rate of 40 wpm, that's 14.4 KB per hour or about 1/70 of a MB. 1TB is a million MB. That's why it is so easy to copy and store billions of e-mail messages.
In 1980, at one of the meetings mentioned above, someone from CDC joked, "If we invent a disk with infinite capacity—call it the God Disk—the Government will buy two of them." One of the Mormons deadpanned, "So would we." But a big disk is nothing without software to sort and collate it. Now that any $500 laptop can sift through huge amounts of data in a few seconds, all kinds of records become useful.
"All kinds" is amazingly comprehensive to Payton and Claypoole. Nearly everything we buy, from groceries to clothes to knickknacks to more personal items, is recorded, usually along with our identity. To keep from having a purchase tagged to you, you'd need to pay cash at the point of sale, and be among the lucky ones to buy from a store that doesn't have face recognition software running on its security cameras. Retailers love data about buying habits. So do criminals; they want to know who just bought anything expensive and comparatively portable. Government usually doesn't care, except for certain kinds of purchases. I suspect an order for 500 decks of cards, not from a casino, might get scrutiny for two reasons. Firstly, the possibility of an underground high-stakes card game. Secondly, the plastic in certain card brands can be chemically altered into a cheap plastic explosive.
How soon will it be that the store's computer system knows who you are, and your tastes, by the time you walk in the door? Maybe it knows who you are from your phone, or maybe from cameras. The rest is online and they're already tied in to it. Think you can fool the cameras with a wig or hat and dark glasses? They way you walk and other bodily motions you habitually make are harder to disguise (a one-time fakeout can be had by putting some duct tape across your back or a pebble in your shoe).
Planning to travel abroad? The authors advise, most particularly for repressive countries, that you leave your usual phone at home and take a cheap throwaway phone. Also, make no purchases using the phone! Some global companies have their expat executives take "vacations" to safer climes when they need to arrange sensitive deals or discuss important matters with HQ. If you need to carry your phone, keep it in a metal case, and turned off, when not in use, along with those credit cards and their convenient microchip. An easy alternative is an aluminized Mylar balloon, deflated and just wrapped around your electronics. Then the phone can't communicate with cell towers and the chips can't be read by someone walking by using a RFID reader. In one chilling section, though, the authors report on gadgets to read brain waves from a modest distance, say a foot or so. Will I need a foil-lined hat? Better yet would be a phony brain wave generator in my hat, a kind of jammer.
How do we use social media? I never tell my FB "friends" where I am going, only where I have been…usually! Many online retailers want to use us for free advertisements, and urge us to "share" on FB or somewhere. Some have six or more "share" options! Even if you don't share, you'll start seeing more ads for the thing you just bought, or only researched. If you do share, those ads will multiply. That's your "payment" for your "help".
Things will only progress. There is no going back. The authors close with a chapter on legislation. Here we learn that America, where "privacy" was so important to winning the abortion decision, does the least to protect privacy among so-called Democratic nations. Levels of black-market activity are lower in America than nearly anywhere else, which indicates more trust in government here. But I am not worried so much about the government of today in America. I am worried about future governments here and around the world, with a more and more nannyish attitude, or worse yet, with Sharia laws and the technology to enforce them in absolutely every case.
The trusting American people are embracing cars that know more and more about them, and report on them to the car dealer and insurance company; electronic medical records with poor security; smarter and smarter pocket computers that have phones attached, along with multiple cameras and microphones and geolocators and accelerometers and whatever is next; and cameras, cameras everywhere. The members of the freest society ever to arise are forging their own chains.
Monday, April 30, 2012
Another step towards Big Brother
kw: politics, policy, internet, privacy, legislation
An act called CISPA (Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act) passed the U.S. House of Representatives yesterday, and now it goes to the Senate. Proponents say, "Oh, no, it won't impact the privacy of citizens," but we know that's a sham. It is interesting to them precisely because they know it erases most of our privacy protections. See this C|Net article for a good analysis.
I find that Republican congressmen voted in favor 206 to 28. I am ashamed of them. I am a registered Republican, but this sure isn't the party of Abraham Lincoln or Theodore Roosevelt any longer. I may have to become a Libertarian.
I remember the first Terabyte database, which cost about a million dollars to set up in the early 1980s. It was commissioned by the Mormons for genealogical record-keeping. My colleagues and I were joking that if a disk drive with "infinite" capacity were invented—we called it the God file—the government would order two of them. I recall saying, "Sears and GM would be next in line". Today anyone can buy a multi-terabyte disk for about $100. The Google Earth image base is a multi-petabyte (thousands of terabytes) product, and Google is only one of a number of both corporate and government entities to have file bases approaching an exabyte (a million terabytes) in size. The NSA is building a multi-exabyte data store. So just where are they going to get data to fill it? You guessed it: the Internet, and CISPA is an integral part of the process. It gives them the right to "ask" for data dumps without breaking any laws, because CISPA removes or supersedes most current legal protections. The President has stated he will veto it if the Senate passes it. That's one thing he could do that I would like a great deal!
An act called CISPA (Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act) passed the U.S. House of Representatives yesterday, and now it goes to the Senate. Proponents say, "Oh, no, it won't impact the privacy of citizens," but we know that's a sham. It is interesting to them precisely because they know it erases most of our privacy protections. See this C|Net article for a good analysis.
I find that Republican congressmen voted in favor 206 to 28. I am ashamed of them. I am a registered Republican, but this sure isn't the party of Abraham Lincoln or Theodore Roosevelt any longer. I may have to become a Libertarian.
I remember the first Terabyte database, which cost about a million dollars to set up in the early 1980s. It was commissioned by the Mormons for genealogical record-keeping. My colleagues and I were joking that if a disk drive with "infinite" capacity were invented—we called it the God file—the government would order two of them. I recall saying, "Sears and GM would be next in line". Today anyone can buy a multi-terabyte disk for about $100. The Google Earth image base is a multi-petabyte (thousands of terabytes) product, and Google is only one of a number of both corporate and government entities to have file bases approaching an exabyte (a million terabytes) in size. The NSA is building a multi-exabyte data store. So just where are they going to get data to fill it? You guessed it: the Internet, and CISPA is an integral part of the process. It gives them the right to "ask" for data dumps without breaking any laws, because CISPA removes or supersedes most current legal protections. The President has stated he will veto it if the Senate passes it. That's one thing he could do that I would like a great deal!
Saturday, December 31, 2011
Ghettoizing the internet
kw: book reviews, nonfiction, technology, internet, privacy, polemics
Try this sometime, on a computer that you don't use for your banking or paying bills online (maybe at the public library...): Delete all cookies, go to a search web site of your choice and make a search. Then open the privacy window that lets you read all your cookies and see how many have appeared, all from a single action. There may be very few, or even none, but the top "cookie monster" that I've heard about so far was looking up "depression" on dictionary.com. The harvest? 233 tracking cookies!
Another interesting experiment: Call a friend in the phone, then both of you do the same simple search on Google or Yahoo! or Bing, and tell each other what are the top ten hits. Also take note of how many hits there are (it will probably be in the millions). Or you can make a game of it. Collaborate with five or ten friends to do several searches, chosen beforehand, and see who can collect the most hits, or the fewest (these friends all have to be honest!). It is important that everyone do this from their own home, because search personalization depends on your location, and whether you are logged in or searching anonymously.
Why should there be such differences? That is the subject of The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding From You by Eli Pariser. The book is a polemic, in the better sense of the word, exposing and decrying practices that disturb the author, and ought to be of concern to all of us. Yet it is not shrill. The 233 cookies example comes from page 6 of the book.
Just looking at my cookie collection, after a run by AdAware that removed a couple dozen tracking cookies, reveals nearly 260 domains that have cookies stored on my computer. Spot checking shows that my e-mail account server keeps 34 cookies; findagrave.com, where I do genealogical research, has 9; and my online bank keeps 8. Even this blog has one cookie stored there. It is safe to say there are at least a few thousand cookies on my computer, and for most of them I don't know whether I really need them.
Cookies are just the tip of the iceberg. Google stores everything we do through its web site, whether we are logged in or not. Google usually knows who we are even when we are not logged in. But our searching and clicking activities are aggregated into a great many categories that are said to be for purposes of "personalization": the company uses our preferences, as evidenced by what we look for and what we look at, to raise or lower the ranking of search results. The days of pure PageRank are long gone. The data about you that Google or Yahoo! or Bing or Amazon have gathered is stored on their own computers. I've even noticed that, when I finish a blog post and publish it, the next screen usually includes one or two ads that are pertinent to the blog post's subject (in case you didn't know, Blogger is a Google product).
What is the danger of personalization? How harmful can it be? That depends on the personality of each of us. I happen to be rather easy to influence when confronted by an authority figure. This is why I gave up live debating many years ago. It is also why I have learned to hang up quickly (even if it is rude) when a telemarketer or pollster calls. Sometimes I am kind enough to say, "No, sorry" before I hang up; sometimes not. Psst! Did you know that many "polls" over the telephone are actually attempts to influence the way you are likely to vote, or a product you might soon buy? Online marketers of both the commercial and political variety are experts at discerning the levers that influence what you will do next. They vary their approach by time of day, by the mood you seem to be in as seen in how you write, and the various profiles about you, such as your FaceBook account.
Here is a FaceBook experiment: Check your News feed, and sort it by time. Then go to the wall of someone with whom you almost never interact, and find something to "Like", or leave a comment or two. Return to News and see if that person's updates have magically appeared. Sometimes it takes leaving several tracks to get this to work. P.S. If you have more than 100 FaceBook friends, keeping up with all of them is quite arduous. Let's all suggest that FB make available a sorted list of interactions so we can figure out a few people to UnFriend.
In eight chapters, Pariser makes his case, that all this personalization has the effect of isolating us, with the technology that was supposed to make us more connected. I have often said that, if two people have all the same opinions, one of them is redundant. We need variety in our lives, but too much personalization removes a great source of variety. If you only see search results that square with your past interests, how will you ever develop new interests? How can we grow? Serendipity, and the matching of diverse topics, drive our creativity. Personalization is a great creativity killer.
The author and others, including the authors of this USA Today article, mention products like Ghostery, AdBlock Plus, TrackerBlock and Do Not Track Plus, as means to cut out part of the tracking. Nothing will eliminate it all. Thus the author suggests political solutions, legislative solutions, in his last two chapters. I am skeptical of the approach. Like dealing with a home invader at 3:00 AM, sometimes the 38 caliber "solution" is the only effective one; the police can only do something after a crime has been committed. Too late.
I have, instead, a suggestion that is in keeping with the way Google and other search sites already work. I suggest prefixes that influence the filters temporarily. I suppose you know if you put "define:jejune" in the search box, the first hit will be a definition. Google has other prefix words. Here are some it needs to add:
The other political solution is a series of high-profile lawsuits. To avoid such suits, Google needs to provide a tool to show you what it has on you; FaceBook needs a tool to show you whom it is filtering in and filtering out of your News Feed; and the other aggregating companies out there need to make available to all of us the data that exist about us, and allow us to correct mistakes, of which there are billions I am sure. Otherwise, our entire history will dog us forever, not taking proper account of changes in marital status, religious conversions, or the change in lifestyle that would result from a sudden windfall or its converse, loss of occupational income. How ironic is it if the homeless woman using a library computer is besieged by ads based on her former status as a corporate VP?
The book's website has a "10 Things You Can Do" section that can help us all partially alleviate the effects of the Filter Bubble as it currently exists. On this last day of 2011, I wonder what the coming decade will bring?
Try this sometime, on a computer that you don't use for your banking or paying bills online (maybe at the public library...): Delete all cookies, go to a search web site of your choice and make a search. Then open the privacy window that lets you read all your cookies and see how many have appeared, all from a single action. There may be very few, or even none, but the top "cookie monster" that I've heard about so far was looking up "depression" on dictionary.com. The harvest? 233 tracking cookies!
Another interesting experiment: Call a friend in the phone, then both of you do the same simple search on Google or Yahoo! or Bing, and tell each other what are the top ten hits. Also take note of how many hits there are (it will probably be in the millions). Or you can make a game of it. Collaborate with five or ten friends to do several searches, chosen beforehand, and see who can collect the most hits, or the fewest (these friends all have to be honest!). It is important that everyone do this from their own home, because search personalization depends on your location, and whether you are logged in or searching anonymously.
Why should there be such differences? That is the subject of The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding From You by Eli Pariser. The book is a polemic, in the better sense of the word, exposing and decrying practices that disturb the author, and ought to be of concern to all of us. Yet it is not shrill. The 233 cookies example comes from page 6 of the book.
Just looking at my cookie collection, after a run by AdAware that removed a couple dozen tracking cookies, reveals nearly 260 domains that have cookies stored on my computer. Spot checking shows that my e-mail account server keeps 34 cookies; findagrave.com, where I do genealogical research, has 9; and my online bank keeps 8. Even this blog has one cookie stored there. It is safe to say there are at least a few thousand cookies on my computer, and for most of them I don't know whether I really need them.
Cookies are just the tip of the iceberg. Google stores everything we do through its web site, whether we are logged in or not. Google usually knows who we are even when we are not logged in. But our searching and clicking activities are aggregated into a great many categories that are said to be for purposes of "personalization": the company uses our preferences, as evidenced by what we look for and what we look at, to raise or lower the ranking of search results. The days of pure PageRank are long gone. The data about you that Google or Yahoo! or Bing or Amazon have gathered is stored on their own computers. I've even noticed that, when I finish a blog post and publish it, the next screen usually includes one or two ads that are pertinent to the blog post's subject (in case you didn't know, Blogger is a Google product).
What is the danger of personalization? How harmful can it be? That depends on the personality of each of us. I happen to be rather easy to influence when confronted by an authority figure. This is why I gave up live debating many years ago. It is also why I have learned to hang up quickly (even if it is rude) when a telemarketer or pollster calls. Sometimes I am kind enough to say, "No, sorry" before I hang up; sometimes not. Psst! Did you know that many "polls" over the telephone are actually attempts to influence the way you are likely to vote, or a product you might soon buy? Online marketers of both the commercial and political variety are experts at discerning the levers that influence what you will do next. They vary their approach by time of day, by the mood you seem to be in as seen in how you write, and the various profiles about you, such as your FaceBook account.
Here is a FaceBook experiment: Check your News feed, and sort it by time. Then go to the wall of someone with whom you almost never interact, and find something to "Like", or leave a comment or two. Return to News and see if that person's updates have magically appeared. Sometimes it takes leaving several tracks to get this to work. P.S. If you have more than 100 FaceBook friends, keeping up with all of them is quite arduous. Let's all suggest that FB make available a sorted list of interactions so we can figure out a few people to UnFriend.
In eight chapters, Pariser makes his case, that all this personalization has the effect of isolating us, with the technology that was supposed to make us more connected. I have often said that, if two people have all the same opinions, one of them is redundant. We need variety in our lives, but too much personalization removes a great source of variety. If you only see search results that square with your past interests, how will you ever develop new interests? How can we grow? Serendipity, and the matching of diverse topics, drive our creativity. Personalization is a great creativity killer.
The author and others, including the authors of this USA Today article, mention products like Ghostery, AdBlock Plus, TrackerBlock and Do Not Track Plus, as means to cut out part of the tracking. Nothing will eliminate it all. Thus the author suggests political solutions, legislative solutions, in his last two chapters. I am skeptical of the approach. Like dealing with a home invader at 3:00 AM, sometimes the 38 caliber "solution" is the only effective one; the police can only do something after a crime has been committed. Too late.
I have, instead, a suggestion that is in keeping with the way Google and other search sites already work. I suggest prefixes that influence the filters temporarily. I suppose you know if you put "define:jejune" in the search box, the first hit will be a definition. Google has other prefix words. Here are some it needs to add:
- all or every: Results only filtered by the PageRank algorithm that got Google started in the first place.
- serendipity or ser for short: Results deliberately scattered among topical interests.
- anti: Results from an interest set that is the opposite of my own. If I'm liberal, a bunch of right-wing rants; if I'm literary, some scientific and engineering stuff; if I like rock music, some old Roy Rogers or folk music or swing; and so forth.
- statistical or stat: Results based solely on Bayesian statistical ranking, defeating even PageRank.
The other political solution is a series of high-profile lawsuits. To avoid such suits, Google needs to provide a tool to show you what it has on you; FaceBook needs a tool to show you whom it is filtering in and filtering out of your News Feed; and the other aggregating companies out there need to make available to all of us the data that exist about us, and allow us to correct mistakes, of which there are billions I am sure. Otherwise, our entire history will dog us forever, not taking proper account of changes in marital status, religious conversions, or the change in lifestyle that would result from a sudden windfall or its converse, loss of occupational income. How ironic is it if the homeless woman using a library computer is besieged by ads based on her former status as a corporate VP?
The book's website has a "10 Things You Can Do" section that can help us all partially alleviate the effects of the Filter Bubble as it currently exists. On this last day of 2011, I wonder what the coming decade will bring?
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