| > I'm unclear why you seem to assume this change is bad? I guess the idea is to stop assuming you know what the data will be used for. My office manager bought a book then several months later took a trip to NYC. She was pulled into a room and interviewed about it before they let her go, specifically mentioning the book, why she bought it, and asking why she was traveling to NYC. Is this unreasonable use of data capture? I dunno. Seems okay, right? But it is an example of threat-assessment based on you bought a book. What if you instead had access to every email/text/web-search/webpage-i-have-accessed ever? Not to mention purchases. Of course credit cards are the same way. Surely posting THIS thread is just as threat-indicating as buying a book, and even more telling because you have my words to back up your assertions. Ought I not have posted this HN post? Will it come back to haunt me? Computers don't forget. They'll never let me forget this post, or any other, and use it as justification for my future actions. Examples only seem to weaken privacy conversations, since one inevitably internalizes "how likely am I to be caught by that?", but here goes anyway: If I mention "Snowden" in a post on HackerNews/Reddit/email/Facebook ought I be denied a security clearance? I don't know, but the capability is there already. And of course you have to mention the cliché: If there were a Facebook in 1930, the collection of the Jewish people would've been trivial, and extraordinarily efficient. Heck, throw in today's public face recognition and you could net an entire population. You wouldn't even do it loudly. You'd just quietly identify nexus points in the community and start quietly working to discredit and weaken them. Help them lose their job, discredit them, have'm transferred to another city, hire a prostitute to help ruin their marriage... whatever it is that naughty folk do to get their way as quietly as possible. I don't feel like these things are shocking, hard-to-execute, or so fabulously ficticious that one ought eye-roll at it. They're simply what any moral-less entity would do to stay alive/in-power/in-control. |