Current Event : Privacy is a joke
How many of you have received letters from your banks about a ‘revised’ privacy policy? Have you even bothered to read through this revised policy information? And the .000001% percent of you that have, have you ever found anything objectionable and done anything about it?
Welcome to the new joke called ‘Privacy’. No, I’m not talking about the most intimate information that you already have on facebook (which by the way, facebook now owns and has the rights to share). I’m talking about the numerous merchants/banks/credit companies that you do business with but never really cared about what they do/could do with your information. When you read phrases like ‘shared with affiliates’ and ‘shared with third parties’, have you wondered what the difference between these two are? And besides, have you wondered why on earth, banks would need to share your information with other people in the first place?
Most of us Almost all of us never think twice about how our information is freely passed around(for money of course) in the open market for ‘agencies’ to analyze. Such information is then sold by VISA to other marketing companies for ‘market analysis’ and ad campaign management. I have a friend who works for VISA and he was able to pull up every purchase I’ve ever made on the credit card and all he needed was my credit card number which is easily available (how many of you shred your old credit cards?).
And guess what!!?? you have no control over who they share it with because well, first of all, you never really read their privacy document. Even if you read it when you got the credit card, you never really read it the numerous times that they sent you the revised privacy policy. Now again, to the .00001% that read the document every time, you have no control over how VISA decides who their affiliates/partners and third parties are.
Concerned yet? Privacy in the current state is nothing but a big joke.
The only viable solution seems to be a universal privacy declaration/document issued by the government that the companies can be held responsible to. As much as we all hate a big brother state, trusting a bunch of greedy banks/credit companies/vendors is much worse.
Comment by dannya
February 13, 2009 @ 10:29 pm
I suppose I’m one of the few people paranoid about giving away my personal information. Although all the grocery stores tricked everyone into giving up their personal information to have the lowest price, I did not fall for it. I’ve used other people’s numbers at QFC, Safeway, and Albertsons every time I’ve gone. If this is illegal, so be it!
I also routinely read privacy statements, but recently a Microsoft web page’s privacy statement wouldn’t even open for me (at support.xbox.com). When clicking “privacy statement” it just refreshed the page. This incredibly pissed me off.. as if I need more reasons to be annoyed by MS. At least it looks like they’ve fixed the problem now after my angry feedback…
Comment by Joshua Barr
February 13, 2009 @ 10:55 pm
Well DANNYA, I can definitely sympathize with your objective of keeping information leakage to a minimum, but you don’t have to use other people’s numbers for the grocery stores. For QFC and Safeway at least you don’t have to activate their cards in any way to get their deal-bestowing powers. Try it next time you go in: ask for a card and then use it. It comes with paperwork that you’re supposed to fill out, but I just file those in the circular file and move on with my life. At that point they’re just tracking “someone,” and they have no idea who you are. If the gradual aggregation of information is bothersome than just switch cards every couple of months.
I don’t know if you saw Palantir’s tech talk at UW (a month ago? something like that) but the demonstration of what could be done with that technology was more than a little frightening from a privacy perspective. For the truly paranoid you might want to consider keeping multiple cards and cycling or load-balancing them in some way.
I’ve pretty much categorized my privacy as “gone” and don’t worry about it too much, at least as far as things like credit-card transactions go. I also have a firm conviction that our (and other) governments do a great deal more domestic surveillance and data-mining than they’ll ever admit to. So you take what measures you can (anonymous discounts, etc), and go on with your life. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll support anything that gets me more privacy, fiercely resist new encroachments (especially by the government), and win what battles I can. But pessimistically I think that what privacy advocates fight is a delaying action at best. One thing you can hope for is that all of these agencies become much much *better* at acquiring and storing information. As we in the CS department should know, information can be very easy to come by. It’s in *processing* that information intelligently, quickly, and thoroughly that you rapidly reach very difficult and intractable problems.
Comment by oterod
February 14, 2009 @ 8:16 pm
One of the most unfortunate aspects of “privacy” in today’s tech-happy world is that there is little choice in the matter. I do read privacy policies for services I use, but the unfortunate fact is that, apart from taking activism into my own hands, there isn’t much to do about the outrages contained within those policies. I mean, one thing I regularly due is pop a few minor capillaries in my forehead, but that’s not the most constructive thing.
The greatest problem to us (where “us” refers to people concerned for the privacy of their information) is that there are no options. For instance, in our society you need credit. If you don’t have good credit, you can’t get a home loan, finance a car, etc. To get credit, you essentially need a credit card. If you want a credit card, you will be stuck with an equivalent (a.k.a. “worthless”) privacy policy at any of the available outfits. Don’t like the privacy policy? Well, it’s not exactly negotiable.
All of the above, however, assumes a defeatist outlook on options. True, no credit card companies, software firms, banks, auto dealerships, clothing stores, and on and on, none of them currently offer reasonable privacy policies. That’s all because nobody cares if the privacy policies are absurd, because nobody reads them. There’s an obvious solution that people seem to ignore: the same solution that gave women and minorities the vote, and helped us reach many of our more elusive political, social, and economic goals. The secret? Step 1: have an opinion. Step 2: quit ranting to yourself or your poor, poor, poor neighbor of the moment, and find lots of other people that agree with you. Step 3: you and those other people make your voices heard, eventually bringing about awareness and thus change. It’s your standard process for change.
Now the problem is, can we all care enough to make that change happen, or are we going to watch reruns of MTV’s Laguna Beach until our behavior patterns are copyrighted and wholly-owned by Facebook. That’s a tough cookie.