On December 11, 2015 10:10:21 AM Steve Kinney <admin@pilobilus.net> wrote:
The power to give and withhold permission for others to see you varies with circumstances.
you are "in the game" whether you want to be or not;
True, unfortunately.
the only alternative is to isolate yourself from resources native to the privacy-hostile environment.
False. Offense is often one of the best defenses. Just one example: the data scraping and collating scum like Intellius and their ilk, from whose talons we cannot escape. In such cases, it is better to pollute their data pool with garbage so it is of little value to them and we retain privacy by obfuscation. I've made sure that Intellius alone has three different profiles on me including varying ages, birthdates and backgrounds, and good luck to the marketing and profiling scum in discerning which - if any - is the real one.
The practical advantages of participating in the networked world far outweigh the perceived and, possibly, the actual harm from "loss of privacy." Only a few atypical individuals will be able to manage their affairs so that the advantages of "strong privacy protections" outweigh the costs of compensating for lost access to resources.
I find absolutely no benefit in allowing Fuckerberg's empire of suck to acquire my data, so I prevent it in every way possible. I don't use Google anything, but I know my emails get indexed and data-raped when I'm forced to correspond with people who use their "free" gmail. There is no way to avoid every avenue of privacy violation, but it is possible to minimize it and not make it easy for the bastards.
Those Old Farts were early adopters, because they happened to take an unnatural interest in computers. So a large faction among them are capable of understanding and implementing network security and making rational decisions about disclosures of their activities and data to 3rd parties.
Yes, and we know there is no closing the door after the data has gotten out so it is best to restrict and control access as best we can.
These folks, and the few /honest/ professionals in related fields, are the only thing that keeps the Internet from clogging up with shit from end to end and falling apart. Well, at least we have mostly kept it from falling apart.
We're not doing a very good job, I fear. But I live so much of my life online, (which is why I am fiercely protective of my right to control my PII when I see fit), I'm not going to acquiescence to zero-privacy as the norm just because "everyone else is doing it." There are billions of people on this planet who believe in nonsensical things; it surely doesn't make them right. -S