Tom Wheeler writes that the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation establishes privacy by default for personal information online.
Tag: privacy
👓 Facebook and Google hit with $8.8 billion in lawsuits on day one of GDPR | The Verge
Time to regulate
👓 Can we PLEASE talk about privacy, not GDPR, now? | Sebastian Greger
It’s the “morning after”: a mere twelve hours have passed since the GDPR applies and while still awaiting breaking news on hobbyist blog owners being fined EUR 20 million, an army of burnt-out web and legal professionals has begun to clean up from the party that was “the final dash towards GDPR”.
tl;dr: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
Reply to vishae’s issue Affects the status of private posts
Simple location’s privacy setting seems to override the post’s public/private settings on my site as well. Perhaps it’s a naming conflict (function/filter/etc.) with WP’s core content visibility code?
In any case, I can’t make a post private while Simple Location is installed/activated either. This seems to happen regardless of other plugins. I do seem to be able to use @vishae’s method of using the quick edit option to change a post to private. I’m not sure if this may indicate a potential solution to the issue based on what is firing on a post save/update versus what fires on a quick edit save.
Additionally, I don’t seem to be able to mark a particular location as “private” in a post either as upon saving it it defaults back to public in the UI. I only seem to be able to use “public” or “protected” options for locations.
👓 No one’s ready for GDPR | The Verge
The General Data Protection Regulation will go into effect on May 25th. No one is ready — not the companies and not even the regulators.
👓 The Coming Wave of Murders Solved by Genealogy | The Atlantic
The same DNA analysis used to find the alleged Golden State Killer has led to the arrest of a second alleged murderer. It’ll likely lead to more.
👓 GDPR will pop the adtech bubble | Doc Searls
Since tracking people took off in the late ’00s, adtech has grown to become a four-dimensional shell game played by hundreds (or, if you include martech, thousands) of companies, none of which can see the whole mess, or can control the fraud, malware and other forms of bad acting that thrive in the midst of it.
And that’s on top of the main problem: tracking people without their knowledge, approval or a court order is just flat-out wrong. The fact that it can be done is no excuse. Nor is the monstrous sum of money made by it.
Without adtech, the EU’s GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) would never have happened. But the GDPR did happen, and as a result websites all over the world are suddenly posting notices about their changed privacy policies, use of cookies, and opt-in choices for “relevant” or “interest-based” (translation: tracking-based) advertising. Email lists are doing the same kinds of things.
There’s a lot to unpack here, but it looks like some tremendously valuable links and resources embedded in this article as well. I’ll have to circle back around to both re-read this and delve more deeply in to these pointers.
👓 2018/Düsseldorf/gdpr | IndieWeb
GDPR Basics was a session at IndieWebCamp Düsseldorf 2018.
An Indieweb Podcast: Episode 4 “Webmentions and Privacy”
Running time: 1 h 16m 00s | Download (23.8 MB) | Subscribe by RSS
Summary: With the GDPR regulations coming into effect in Europe on May 25th, privacy seems to be on everyone’s mind. This week, we tackle what webmentions are, using them for backfeed, and the privacy implications.
Show Notes
Related Articles and Posts
- The Indieweb privacy challenge (Webmentions, silo backfeeds, and the GDPR) by Sebastian Greger (n.b. the comments here are worthwhile as well)
- Webmention Specification
- Philosopher reference at the end of the episode: “I want the whole world.”
Related IndieWeb wiki pages
👓 Privacy | David Shanske
I admit to a certain amount of frustration on the subject of privacy lately. It seems, in all aspects of my life, both personal and professional, the new data privacy regulations that the EU rolls out May 25th are a theme in every discussion.
👓 Daniel Goldsmith’s reply to Sebastian Greger
Sebastian, first of all, thank you for your detailed write up on this issue. I think much of your roadmap is worthwhile, and of great interest.
I cannot, however, say that I am convinced by your contentions regarding the effect of GDPR and indieweb sites. In particular, I think your definitions are excessively broad, and you elide much information from both the Regulation itself and the Recitals.
I think I fall somewhere in the middle of the two and see some of the moral and ethical pieces which are more important from a people perspective. I’m not as concerned about the law portion of it for a large variety of reasons. It’s most interesting to me to see the divide between how those in the EU and particularly Germany view the issue and those in the United States which may be looking at regulations in the coming years, particularly after the recent Facebook debacle.
As I think of these, I’m reminded about some of the cultural differences between Europe and the United States which Jeff Jarvis has expounded upon over the past several years. Europeans are generally more leery of corporations and trust government a bit more while in America it’s the opposite.
Reply to The Indieweb privacy challenge (Webmentions, silo backfeeds, and the GDPR) by Sebastian Greger
There’s so much to think about and process here, that I’ll have to re-read and think more specifically about all the details. I hope to come back to this later to mark it up and annotate it further.
I’ve read relatively deeply about a variety of privacy issues as well as the weaponization of data and its improper use by governments and businesses to unduly influence people. For those who are unaware of this movement over the recent past, I would highly recommend Cathy O’Neil’s text Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy, which provides an excellent overview with a variety of examples about how the misuse of data can be devastating not just to individuals who are broadly unaware of it, but entire segments of society.
There is a lot of publicly available data we reveal via social media and much of it one might flippantly consider “data exhaust” which has little, if any inherent value by itself. Unfortunately when used in aggregate, it can reveal striking things about us which we may either not be aware of ourselves or which we wouldn’t want to be openly known.
My brief thought here is that much like the transition from the use of smaller arms and handguns, which can kill people in relatively small numbers, to weapons like machine guns on up to nuclear weapons, which have the ability to quickly murder hundreds to millions at a time, we will have to modify some of our social norms the way we’ve modified our “war” norms over the past century. We’ll need to modify our personal social contracts so that people can still interact with each other on a direct basis without fear of larger corporations, governments, or institutions aggregating our data, processing it, and then using it against us in ways which unduly benefit them and tremendously disadvantage us as individuals, groups, or even at the level of entire societies.
In my mind, we need to protect the social glue that holds society together and improves our lives while not allowing the mass destruction of the fabric of society by large groups based on their ability to aggregate, process, and use our own data against us.
Thank you Sebastian for kicking off a broader conversation!
Disclaimer: I’m aware that in posting this to my own site that it will trigger a tacit webmention which will ping Sebastian Greger’s website. I give him permission to display any and all data he chooses from the originating web page in perpetuity, or until such time as I send a webmention either modifying or deleting the content of the originating page. I say this all with some jest, while I am really relying on the past twenty years of general social norms built up on the internet and in general society as well as the current practices of the IndieWeb movement to govern what he does with this content.
👓 How a Genealogy Website Led to the Alleged Golden State Killer | The Atlantic
Powerful tools are now available to anyone who wants to look for a DNA match, which has troubling privacy implications.
👓 Privacy sentences to ponder | Marginal Revolution
The increasing difficulty in managing one’s online personal data leads to individuals feeling a loss of control. Additionally, repeated consumer data breaches have given people a sense of futility, ultimately making them weary of having to think about online privacy. This phenomenon is called “privacy fatigue.” Although privacy fatigue is prevalent and has been discussed by scholars, there is little empirical research on the phenomenon. A new study published in the journal Computers and Human Behavior aimed not only to conceptualize privacy fatigue but also to examine its role in online privacy behavior. Based on literature on burnout, we developed measurement items for privacy fatigue, which has two key dimensions —emotional exhaustion and cynicism. Data analyzed from a survey of 324 Internet users showed that privacy fatigue has a stronger impact on privacy behavior than privacy concerns do, although the latter is widely regarded as the dominant factor in explaining online privacy behavior.Emphasis added by me. That is by Hanbyl Choi, Jonghwa Park, and Yoonhyuk Jung, via Michelle Dawson.
The past weeks have indicated that we really do need some regulations. It’s not just Facebook, but major, unpunished leaks from data brokers like Experian (which seemingly actually profited from it’s data leak) or even those of companies like Target. Many have been analogizing data as the “new oil”, but people shouldn’t be treated like dying sea birds trapped in oil slicks.
I’m bookmarking this journal article to read: The role of privacy fatigue in online privacy behavior. 1
References
👓 Gmail is getting a ‘confidential mode’ that prevents users from printing or forwarding your email | CNBC
Gmail is getting a new confidential mode that reportedly prevents recipients from forwarding or printing email messages.