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Data and Goliath The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World Chapter 10. Privacy
Author: Bruce Schneier Publisher: New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company. Publish Date: 2015-3 Review Date: Status:📚
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Highlight(pink) - Location 2005 The most common misconception about privacy is that it’s about having something to hide. “If you aren’t doing anything wrong, then you have nothing to hide,” the saying goes, with the obvious implication that privacy only aids wrongdoers.
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Highlight(pink) - Location 2007 If you think about it, though, this makes no sense. We do nothing wrong when we make love, go to the bathroom, or sing in the shower. We do nothing wrong when we search for a job without telling our current employer. We do nothing wrong when we seek out private places for reflection or conversation, when we choose not to talk about something emotional or personal, when we use envelopes for our mail, or when we confide in a friend and no one else.
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Highlight(pink) - Location 2010 Moreover, even those who say that don’t really believe it. In a 2009 interview, Google CEO Eric Schmidt put it this way: “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.” But in 2005, Schmidt banned employees from talking to reporters at CNET because a reporter disclosed personal details about Schmidt in an article.
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Highlight(pink) - Location 2013 Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg declared in 2010 that privacy is no longer a “social norm,” but bought the four houses abutting his Palo Alto home to help ensure his own privacy.
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Highlight(pink) - Location 2014 There are few secrets we don’t tell someone, and we continue to believe something is private even after we’ve told that person. We write intimate letters to lovers and friends, talk to our doctors about things we wouldn’t tell anyone else, and say things in business meetings we wouldn’t say in public. We use pseudonyms to separate our professional selves from our personal selves, or to safely try out something new.
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Highlight(pink) - Location 2018 Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg showed a remarkable naïveté when he stated, “You have one identity. The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly. Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.” We’re not the same to everyone we know and meet. We act differently when we’re with our families, our friends, our work colleagues, and so on.
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Highlight(pink) - Location 2022 It’s not necessarily that we’re lying, although sometimes we do; it’s that we reveal different facets of ourselves to different people. This is something innately human.
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Highlight(pink) - Location 2023 Privacy is what allows us to act appropriately in whatever setting we find ourselves. In the privacy of our home or bedroom, we can relax in a way that we can’t when someone else is around.
Note: Which is one reason why i value solitude so much. I can be entirely myself without having to deal with any opposition
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Highlight(pink) - Location 2025 Privacy is an inherent human right, and a requirement for maintaining the human condition with dignity and respect. It is about choice, and having the power to control how you present yourself to the world.
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Highlight(pink) - Location 2026 Internet ethnographer danah boyd puts it this way: “Privacy doesn’t just depend on agency; being able to achieve privacy is an expression of agency.”
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Highlight(pink) - Location 2028 When we lose privacy, we lose control of how we present ourselves. We lose control when something we say on Facebook to one group of people gets accidentally shared with another, and we lose complete control when our data is collected by the government.
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Highlight(pink) - Location 2036 Psychologists, sociologists, philosophers, novelists, and technologists have all written about the effects of constant surveillance, or even just the perception of constant surveillance. Studies show that we are less healthy, both physically and emotionally. We have feelings of low self-esteem, depression, and anxiety. Surveillance strips us of our dignity. It threatens our very selves as individuals. It’s a dehumanizing tactic employed in prisons and detention camps around the world.
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Highlight(pink) - Location 2039 Violations of privacy are not all equal. Context matters. There’s a difference between a Transportation Security Administration (TSA) officer finding porn in your suitcase and your spouse finding it. There’s a difference between the police learning about your drug use and your friends learning about it.
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Highlight(pink) - Location 2041 And violations of privacy aren’t all equally damaging. Those of us in marginal socioeconomic situations—and marginalized racial, political, ethnic, and religious groups—are affected more. Those of us in powerful positions who are subject to people’s continued approval are affected more. The lives of some of us depend on privacy.
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Highlight(pink) - Location 2046 Through most of history, our interactions and conversations have been ephemeral. It’s the way we naturally think about conversation. Exceptions were rare enough to be noteworthy: a preserved diary, a stenographer transcribing a courtroom proceeding, a political candidate making a recorded speech.
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Highlight(pink) - Location 2048 This has changed. Companies have fewer face-to-face meetings. Friends socialize online. My wife and I have intimate conversations by text message. We all behave as if these conversations were ephemeral, but they’re not. They’re saved in ways we have no control over.
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Highlight(pink) - Location 2050 On-the-record conversations are hard to delete. Oliver North learned this way back in 1987, when messages he thought he had deleted turned out to have been saved by the White House PROFS Notes system, an early form of e-mail.
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Highlight(pink) - Location 2052 Bill Gates learned this a decade later, when his conversational e-mails were provided to opposing counsel as part of Microsoft’s antitrust litigation discovery process.
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Highlight(pink) - Location 2054 It’s harder and harder to be ephemeral. Voice conversation is largely still unrecorded, but how long will that last? Retail store surveillance systems register our presence, even if we are doing nothing but browsing and even if we pay for everything in cash. Some bars record the IDs of everyone who enters. I can’t even buy a glass of wine on an airplane with cash anymore. Pervasive life recorders will make this much worse.
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Highlight(pink) - Location 2058 Science fiction writer Charles Stross described this as the end of prehistory. We won’t forget anything, because we’ll always be able to retrieve it from some computer’s memory. This is new to our species, and will be a boon to both future historians and those of us in the present who want better data for self-assessment and reflection.
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Highlight(pink) - Location 2064 One-fourth of American adults have criminal records. Even minor infractions can follow people forever and have a huge impact on their lives—this is why many governments have a process for expunging criminal records after some time has passed. Losing the ephemeral means that everything you say and do will be associated with you forever.
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Highlight(pink) - Location 2067 Having conversations that disappear as soon as they occur is a social norm that allows us to be more relaxed and comfortable, and to say things we might not say if a tape recorder were running.
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Highlight(pink) - Location 2069 Over the longer term, forgetting—and misremembering—is how we process our history. Forgetting is an important enabler of forgiving. Individual and social memory fades, and past hurts become less sharp; this helps us forgive past wrongs.