Can you remember the first time you were typing along in G-mail or in Google Groups and you noticed that the ads were changing to fit the content you were talking about? I do, some years ago. I remember typing something about Tibet, and seeing the ads change to something suggesting travel to Tibet. It was creepy. But I didn't care that much. I don't use g-mail or Google Groups unless I absolutely have to for some job -- I don't like the feeling of being scraped. Yahoo does it too -- I see the spam ads change sometimes according to what e-mails are about, but it isn't as intrusive somehow, there's usually just the generic spam about moms going back to school. Of course, that's probably demographically targeted based on the sign-up info.
Then there's all those 50-plus-year-old men on Facebook always beckoning me to dating sites. The point is, all of social media dredges your sign-up personal info, and your posts, and serves up ads. This is how it can justify your free account. Yes, if you are not paying for something, you are the product. But it's a bargain most people accept.
Most people are now conditioned to the idea that they are constantly being scraped, dredged, combed for data that will help serve up ads and do...whatever else it is that they do. They don't care, because they aren't really being look at in totality, they are just being combed for certain things to serve up the ads. That is, they aren't being looked at in totality with sense like another human being might look at them in real life. They are being viewed by machines. Those machines don't care; and the people being perused by them consequently don't care, either. (Except for the privacy gurus sounding the alarm.)
The Google Street View truck drives around and slurps up data everywhere to use in that service, and it turns out it gets passwords on wireless networks and stuff people are writing on those networks even though that doesn't have anything to do with delivering the Street View. This wasn't a bug, it was a feature; it wasn't rogue, it was deliberate as The New York Times reports. But most people won't care. I don't see Rebecca MacKinnon or Clay Shirky or Evgeny Morozov or Chris Soghoian or any of the other privacy gurus and panel stars frantically retweeting this link about Google. They don't care. Google gets a pass. Google is in Rebecca's Global Network Initiative. Google is cool. Christ interned for Google, and now all his bios refer to the fact that this latest privacy "thought-leader" and influencer got Google to move to https as being "more secure".
But he didn't get Google to stop scraping extra data on Street View, and didn't get Google to stop dredging all communications it owns of yours across all services -- now being coercively harmonized. First of all, he didn't care, or so it seems. Secondly, he'd kill Google's business model if he did that.
It's a serious problem, a private company having all that data. All that power over people. Google can see all your health look-ups and know before your doctor or your employee if you have something wrong with you that may cause lost work days or insurance claims. Wouldn't the insurance companies love to have that! Google can see if you are chatting with people who aren't your spouses or perusing porn or studying jihad sites. Google knows more about you than you know about yourself, because it stores the records, and you may have completely forgotten about those days and days you read up on some political figure or movement which today you have abandoned.
Yet none of those privacy gurus ever really care about this. They care much, much, MUCH more about the US government and its various agencies for security like the NSA or CIA or FBI getting this information than they care about Google *already* possessing it -- and the technology to mine it usefully. They get completely hysterical, in fact, especially now that they have William Binney from the NSA (10 years ago) who claims that the government has trillions of messages and has ALL your emails ever written (say, if that's the case, could I buy some of it off them from those times my computer crashed and took all my email archives?!)
I'm trying to care about the fact that the NSA has this data. Truly, I am. And I'm finding I care...not very much. No more -- and actually less -- than I care about Google having what it has. That's because unlike Google, which is impervious to customers' inquiries because it's so big and there are so many of them, the US government can respond to FOIA requests; if it can't do that, I may have a shot at a lawsuit, or a Congressional inquiry, or perhaps the media can get on it. The government is elected; that means it's accountable, for better or worse. It has laws and procedures. Google doesn't. It's the Borg.
There's also something about the nature of this perusal which means I just can't see the NSA haul as some super breach of privacy.
What the NSA does is trawl through the open sources of communication (and maybe it tunnels into closed sources, too, I don't know) and store it all. As we heard from this panel on privacy, the government isn't so good at (or doesn't have the tech sufficient to) follow you in real-time to see what you might do. So it's dreding and sledging all the time, and data-mining, but while it's grabbing all you're stuff, it's not looking at it.
It is not reading your mail in a coherent, integral manner. For example, if the postman -- or some spy who somehow got at your mailbox in real life -- steamed open your letters and read them and sealed them back up, he'd have to make a conscious opening and closing and reading. He'd have to view the whole text.
What the NSA spying does is more like fishing a word out of your envelop. It's key-word searching. It's searching for patterns, certain terms or phrases or locations. It is not "reading your mail"; it is parsing out of it any words or patterns of interest. That is, it is scanning the data to see if it contains any of those keywords -- if it doesn't, it moves on. It has to work that way, because it has no means -- and no reason -- to sit and read every message. There are trillions. How/who could read them? Machines read them, not people.
People come in and read them with sense and human intelligence only when there is "probable cause" -- an espionage file, a criminal case.
So while Democracy Now! and Chris Soghoian and everybody else is trying to stampede people into panic about loss of their privacy from the NSA, in reality, the government isn't likely functioning any different than they always did, even before the Internet. In the old days, and even today, they put plainclothes men and women on the street and they mingle and gather human intelligence in policing. They put people into situations from bars to mosques to gather intel. They might follow you and eavesdrop on you. They do this when they think they have a case. Do they have a case, always? Of course not. But they do have to make their case, and answer to internal rules and the courts. (Google doesn't, nor likely will it be made to.)
So now the government combs through your communications when they have a reason to. Do they have to have a warrant? No, because they capture everything online (let's say). But they won't look at your file and do more than keyword search you unless there is a case made by someone -- the FBI, whatever.
Soghoian and others think that if you can force the government to report the number of requests for information from this store-house it has gotten from various parties, whether law-enforcement or business or whatever, this will be "sunlight, the best disinfectant." But it won't be. That is, sure it's "nice to have." But it doesn't capture the REAL problem for MOST PEOPLE with social media and online -- prospective employers or partners who search through existing open sources -- without any special slurping of data like Google does, and with none of the technology NSA possesses. For MOST PEOPLE, the privacy problem isn't that they are one of a zillion emails that has been exposed to a goverment agency's keyword search for the word "bomb"; the problem is that a prospective employer has seen a picture of them drunk at a party holding a big cup of beer -- a picture they can't erase because it is on somebody else's Facebook account.
Why these privacy gurus never REALLY go after Google, I don't know (I don't view forcing Google to move to https for gmail as relevant at all to the user, it's "privacy theater" -- and it creates a rising tide of expectations for security certificates which aren't necessarily unhackable anyway). Perhaps because there purpose all along was to attack the US government and undermine it out of some extremist political theory or merely as the typical dissident chattering class. It's easier to hype privacy threats and rant about bills in Congress than it is to actually read them and make a coherent argument about them.
I find it hard to justify somehow barring the NSA from perusing communications to look for key words and clusters of words and phrases that might be urgently relevant to stopping terrorism. Especially when this doesn't involve "reading your mail" with any sense, but merely involves picking out key words like the Google ads do. That's what everyone has been sensitized to, eh?
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