Keeping your personal info private, why opting out is much harder than checking a box

This was a good story.

“The myth that users will “vote with their feet” is simply wrong if opting out comes at such a high price. With social, financial and even potentially legal repercussions involved, the barriers for exit are high. This leaves users and consumers with no real choice nor voice to express our concerns.”

I think that’s the kernel right there. This belief that people will vote with their feet implies that they can, and so if they don’t they must not mind. No one who doesn’t study such things seems to understand how un-private Facebook is, or to mind the ads that come with g-mail which reflect the content of e-mails. I worry for the next generation.

Eszter, I agree most people are oblivious. I guess I was thinking that people who grew up before the computer age had an expectation of privacy they could apply to the internet, whereas people who have grown up with computers do not have that frame of reference.

This is nicely done and a very good story to tell, but I am pessimistic in regard to our ability to stop the wheel, and turn it back any time soon.

I fear personal privacy in any real sense will become a very rare commodity (possibly only afforded by the very rich), very soon.

As an example close to home, in my own region of the world, there exist an aggressive movement to remove cash from circulation in society altogether, and to make all transactions electronic, which would remove some of the last possibilities you still have to avoid tracking as described in this article.

I don’t really believe that the phenomenon you are referring to is closely related to the level of privacy you enjoy. Certainly there will be odd circumstances; pregnant kids receiving advertisements for diapers could out them to their parents, sure. But generally, targeted search ads are not the same thing as a person reading your private communication. To equate the two is just silly. And this is far less personal than the kind of close scrutiny you will get from your neighbors living in a small community. I agree that opting out is not an easy option and may not be feasible at all. On the other hand, I remain unconvinced that it’s a substantial burden on personal privacy construed broadly.

+1 for mpowell. The internet, with cookies and banner ads has orders of magnitude more privacy than growing up in a small to medium sized community.

I haven’t seen anything online by anyone seriously treating what I’m thinking must be huge systemic behavioral changes resulting from the bulk-collection/metadata analysis whatever-it-is plus the Snowden business. Some thing is watching all of us.
Anonymity was one of the big freedoms of the web, but that’s gone isn’t it?
I certainly have no anonymity whatsoever, but then it’s been years since I felt I did. Decades.
Soon everyone will feel that I think.
That your online choices are being tracked now in granular detail, yes, but that porn was one of the primary drivers of 90’s software development, that the sense of anonymity pervading the early web produced a lot of unusual gratification behaviors involving porn as well as verbal violence, that within the last two years that sense of anonymity has vanished from most rational folks’ sense of things completely.
“Anonymous” the group may still have some shreds of their eponym, but the news is making it clear there was some pretty childish hubris working on at least some members of the hacker underground all along, and that can only get more transparent, harder to maintain obscurity as the observational tech metastasizes.

One would expect a rise in anxious politesse and decorum, or at least a subsidence of nasty vitriol and sleaze.
Which is maybe happening.

Since becoming a denizen of the internet in the late 1990s I have increasingly felt that we are experiencing a return to – as mpowell says – the experience of living in a small community. Try concealing a pregnancy that kind of milieu. And following on from that, it seems the level of privacy and anonymity we were able to have in the twentieth century was the historical anomaly, rather than the reverse.
I’m not saying that’s a good thing, mind you, just that it is what it is.

I really need to get some of those drone things.

This notion that the new lack of privacy is just a return to a premodern norm is misconceived and pernicious. First of all, it is not even necessarily true that your nosy small town neighbors will always know more about you than Google and the NSA do. Even in a small town, you can keep your masturbatory fantasies secret pretty easily, but, if you use the Internet for porn, G & N can deduce them pretty well. More fundamentally, though, “private” information does not generally mean information that no other person in the world but you possesses. Most of what we do involves other people, so most of our “secrets” are shared secrets. If you are closeted, your same-sex partners know you are gay (if you are not actively gay, we are back to masturbatory fantasies). If a teen is pregnant, she usually tells the father, perhaps some friends, likely a doctor or abortionist. If you are having an affair, your partner knows you are having sex with them, may well know you are married, and may even personally know your spouse. The fact that some other people know these things does not mean they are not, or even less, secret or private. What makes information private is not that no one else knows it, but that not everyone can know it. Private information is information from which someone is or can be excluded. Maybe you don’t care if everyone in the world but your child knows what you are getting her for her birthday. That still qualifies as private information.

You can also be in a group wherein secrets are shared. You don’t necessarily get to choose which individuals in the group know what. The nature of the group is that information is liberally shared within it, but not with outsiders – mafias, secret societies, often families follow this pattern.

It cracks me up that the conventional wisdom is that traditional societies have no feeling of privacy whatsoever, that anthropologists often endorse this, and then go on about how it took them 3 years to acquire enough trust to be allowed to see the religious ritual. This is group privacy, like the Masons. The fact that secrets are shared within the group does not change the fact that they are private. Almost all secrets, again, are shared secrets. The only common individual privacy is that of our own thoughts, which are usually of no consequence unless they map to action.

In a small town, you know as much of your neighbor’s business as they do of yours. There is a balance of power. This is quite different from people at the NSA or Google knowing all kinds of things about me without me even being able to determine who they are or anything about them. And knowing things about people gives you power over them, often subtle, but real.

I think it’s funny that conventional

@ Cranky, the more likely outcomes ends at 1, a denial. That’s enough, isn’t it? Your 2 and 3 would be scare tactics, intended to prevent others from trying the same and perhaps succeeding. But they are not worried about that, because it always ends at step 1.

Minor editing mistake at end of comment upthread. Sorry.