The author jumps back-and-forth between statements such as "fundamental rights" and talking about Google ads. I believe he's mixing market and government data harvesting as a single entity. This hurts the thesis as they are somewhat distinct in reality.<p>I can opt-out of Google (and other networks) ads via technology and market choice (decentralized options are also becoming a reality). But I can never opt-out of state-surveillance. Fundamental rights often only apply to the state for a reason, because of they have a much greater ability to abuse them.<p>Privacy is a question of associating data to an identity. I can control my identity I provide online services. But I can't obscure my identity to the state without threat of jail/violence.<p>You could argue the state has to operate within warrants, but as we're seeing this often is not the case, and governments everywhere are attempting to support warrantless wiretapping (such as by the Canadian government again announced this week for police-level investigations, not even national security).<p>So while I deeply agree with the sentiment, I don't agree with the convergence of the two (market/state) as a singular privacy issue. One is a far greater threat.
I believe that another point needs to be made in terms of privacy. If a person does somehow become completely anonymous I every way humanly possible I still don't believe the have their privacy under control.<p>What I mean by this is that everyone around the person would also need to be private and anonymous. Say I, for example, am not on Faceboook, Twitter, Google+, etc. however my mother, father, brother and sister all have those services they will post something that is related to me or might even post something about me directly.<p>This can go for friends, co-workers, complete strangers on the street. You could basically never be around anyone with a Internet connected device(which are everywhere by the way).<p>So what are we supposed to do then?<p>Even areas that we walk in are associated with something? The rich part of the city, the poor part. In the country side. Anything we do Internet or not is associated with something. This goes for the government "surveillance" or ad targeting. I am all for privacy and I care about mine greatly but I not going to throw my life out the window in order to keep it.
This article sort of blurs what privacy is, conflating it with data analysis. As long as companies anonymize their analysis, then your privacy is kept. If you don't want to share something like an event that happened to you, you don't need to share it on an online social network. That choice is still yours. So is the choice to even use those services. Those companies in question are not releasing the data to the public, and I'm reasonably certain that those doing the data analysis are anonymizing the data when analyzing it (having a positive identity on a person is useless from a statistical standpoint anyway).<p>Privacy is being able to do things privately without prying eyes. Reading email is a private action. Going to the bathroom is (usually) private. Data harvesting doesn't prevent you from doing these things without anyone identifying who you are, unless it's a government entity doing so, in which case that entity is in the business of positively identifying individuals.
This claim:<p>"Then there's Google Chrome that sends every URL you visit to Google "for malware protection""<p>Seems to be directly contradicted by: <a href="https://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/browser/privacy/" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/browser/privacy/</a> , scroll to "Information Google receives when you use the Safe Browsing feature on Chrome or other browsers"
I didn't really get a lot out of this, which is something I've come to expect from articles that start with the dictionary entry for the thing they're discussing. It immediately puts me on guard for sophistry and/or bloviation - just my personal experience, but it's pretty reliable.<p>That said, it's always good to have people writing about this stuff. I'll be trying my hand at some point.
I used to think, Internet is free.....
Books are the safest way to learn now ...
Privacy is biggest concern for me, as "It's about me having control over what I want to share. ".
US you made TERRORIST AND you using them.
Can you pls tell me best way to talk to people across Internet, that is secure enough...???????????
mail me at (proton1h1@gmail.com) !