Index: [thread] [date] [subject] [author]
  From: Kenneth Canfield <ksc2103@columbia.edu>
  To  : <cpc@emoglen.law.columbia.edu>
  Date: Fri, 17 Feb 2006 00:15:06 -0500

Re: [CPC] the Dutch sold themselves easily

Alexander van der Wolk wrote:

[re: debates with friends about privacy concerns]
<snipped above and below>
> [...] Ever since taking Eben's Law and the Internet Society class in the
> fall, I have found myself far more than once in live debate with my
> friends over such services as Gmail and Amazon.com, and the privacy
> issues involved.
>
> During those debates, it struck me that virtually nobody saw any
> reason for concern, as they didn't see why anybody would be
> particularly interested in them in the first place. In addition,
> should the government be interested, they had nothing to hide? Should
> commercial services be interested, then trading a little information
> about themselves would be fair in return for the ease or benefit
> conferred. 
[...]

I've had similar experiences to you.  I half seriously have suggested to
friends to download GPG (GNU Privacy Guard for encrypting email) and
GAIM (an IM client) with the encryption plug-in.  The former is very
simple to integrate with Thunderbird (haven't tried with other email
clients), and the latter is a perfectly acceptable and easy-to-setup
replacement for AIM.  Yet the response I get is something like, "Like
anyone cares about what we write," and the discussion ends there.  While
I basically agree that our conversations don't contain anything that
that should come back to hurt us, encrypting email and IM conversations
is something everyone, even the computer illiterate, can take without
any sacrifice -- it isn't even like we are giving up lower prices or
faster or more customized service.  Unfortunately if only one party
wants to use it, it's not any good.  I have my computer set up to
encrypt email and IMs, but only 1 person who I email also does, and it's
someone I only email occasionally.

With regard to data mining by those selling us things, I have to admit
I'm guilty as everyone.  I use my credit card as much as possible
instead of cash, I've used the wish list feature on Amazon, I use
EZ-Pass when I'm driving, and I've used club cards at stores to get
discounts.  I think the attitude there is less that I'm not upset with
what is going on, but almost an attitude of "it's not going to happen to
me" (i.e., I'm not going to be the one stopped when trying to fly for no
reason).  And at least there there's a benefit of getting discounts or
convenience.

Yet in many cases, the losing privacy for convenience bargain might even
be accidental.  Putting aside the store club cards which might exist
solely to track individuals, I suspect that the other sources of data
mining didn't originally exist to data mine.  As I think we mentioned in
class, anonymous digital cash is completely possible--yet it doesn't
exist, or at least it isn't commonly used.  Amazon could easily set-up a
system where we can purchase things untracked, yet once it started
getting information and realizing it was valuable, it's not going to
stop.  (I'm presuming at the beginning it didn't realize the info would
be so valuable.)  With EZ-Pass, I can envision a similar anonymous
payment system that allows us the convenience of not waiting in lines,
yet will the Thruway authority (or whoever collects the data) ever turn
back?  Consumers pushing for such a payment system perhaps could be a
way to prevent some future data mining, though of course we can't do
anything about what was already collected.

-----------------------------------------------------------------
Computers, Privacy, and the Constitution mailing list



Index: [thread] [date] [subject] [author]