My younger brother has never touched a computer connected to the internet, yet a simple google search of his first abd last names brings up his addresses and phone numbers for the last 12 years within the first 30 hits.

Oops, you are talking about online privacy, not real world privacy. My bad.

Well, Facebook and Google are making money off that data--so where's my cut? And why won't they write privacy policies in brief and simple English, or at least find a way to make people actually read them?

And yeah, I already have FF, AdBlock Plus, NoScript, Greasemonkey--it's a whole multi-level strategy, I tell ya.

Also, the targeted marketing isn't always very effective. Much like the Amazon or last.fm recommendation engines, this may be an area where people are still superior to our robot overlords. Do you see ads for lots of snazzy Buddhist/cartography stuff, desjardins, or more junky crap?

I think the main Facebook concern is that they were essentially claiming ownership for any user-generated content, even if the user takes that content down and/or deletes his or her account. They were claiming full rights to reproduction, distribution, derivative works, etc., as though they held the copyrights themselves, which is overreaching and frankly shitty, and I'm glad they backed off.

That's not the same thing as targeted ads, which, yeah, I don't really have a problem with. I'm pretty much ad-blind on the internet anyway.

People think they're hot shit. Withholding information is the best way to create a shadowy sense of superiority. They think they have something worth hiding. Spilling the beans is fine for you and me, but who cares about us? We're not special like they are.

Right, middleclasstool, I understand the objections to the Facebook TOS. What I'm trying to understand is the objections to targeted marketing. I'm also pretty ad-blind; the reason I know about the Facebook ads is because I have to use IE at work. box, I agree that the targeting is far from perfect; for example, I often get diet-pill ads even though I'm 95 lbs and have never searched for diets or weight loss. I guess they're betting that most 30-something females want to diet.

mullacc, hadn't really thought of it that way, but I really can't think of anything interesting that one would hide except drug use and sexual fetishes. Neither of which a corporation really cares about - what are they going to do, threaten to tell your mother if you don't buy their product?

I really can't think of anything interesting that one would hide except drug use and sexual fetishes.

I can. I can think of lots of uninteresting things one could hide, too.

ThePinkSuperhero: Tell me what you're hiding! I HAVE TO KNOW.

Do you want your future employers to hear about that anti-capitalist rant you once made?
Do you want your future dates to be able to find out about those furry sites you visit?
Do you want your future health insurers to know about your peculiar interest in googling about IBS and exploding head syndrome?
Do you want your future communist chinese overlords to know about your buddhist tendencies?
I only care about privacy because people and corporations that have some power over me and my future are busybody whack jobs without any trace of humanity.
(I'm talking about the generic "you" not you specifically)

Do you want your future dates to be able to find out about those furry sites you visit?

Sssshhh!!!

YOU ARE PREGNANT
I AM THE FATHER

I'm going to put the birth video on Flickr. I think it'll be 4 hours worth of 90 second clips.

Well, Facebook and Google are making money off that data--so where's my cut?

I think the cut is in the form of the free use of their services.

I often find myself arguing against a concept of privacy. I think it's a bit of a 20th-century anomaly that rose with urbanization and is disappearing now that we have real search power that can reconstruct networks and find information. The 'privacy' we thoughiculty cataloging and finding information.

And to DarkForest's response - that information's available to anyone who wants to find it out. IT used to be a little harder to find, now it's a little easier to find. When I was online dating, I definitely Googled the hell out of my dates before I met them. Expect they did too. I DO want that ability. Same for employers. I think we're moving toward a world where (as I often phrase it) we have to yield privacy to one another by observing social protocols - but I don't think we can have a real expectation that all our actions will be private. Especially when they're actions taken on publicly accessible websites. Do I want people to be Googling me for information that could come around to hurt me - like in the health insurer hypothetical, or the Chinese government hypothetical? Well, frankly, I'm not sure if I care whether they have the information. The key issue is whether they're allowed to use it against me. So I think these are questions of discrimination law, not questions of privacy. and I think the battles about how information is going to be used are more important than battles about whether there is information.

Whoa!

Make that... The 'privacy' we thought we had was really just a volume difficulty cataloging and finding information.

Live journal has long claimed ownership of all your info up to and including derivative works. The protest for that was small.

I really dislike targeted marketing. Feel free to sell your ideas in the open market but stop trying to anticipate my needs.

Of course I am the sort of prick who will keep the bank or credit card company or insurance firm that calls to up-sell me a new product on the phone for 30 minutes before telling them no thanks and asking to speak to a supervisor to tell them to stop calling or I will pull my existing business.

I'm a rare case. I really don't care if people know my social leanings. I'm cute enough to get away with being liberal in a male dominated environment. (I work for a construction company.) I'm not worried if they know my opinions on politics or evolution, or what have you. But I would really, really worry about naked pics. I won't consent to having my naked body on camera, even for my spouse. (Do not ask pie, he will deny everything. :) )

There are a couple art photos out there from when I was college. Really, really beautiful frames for a photography class, but do I want my employer seeing that? No.

Crazily enough, when I'm an old lady, I'll totally model nekid. What can they hold against me when I'm 80? Don't hate be because I'm beautiful. lol

I think the only real privacy anymore is in offline (paper) diaries. You could probably construct a pretty comprehensive biography of me between my MeFi comments and my Twitter feed, and I'm sure someone with sufficient motivation could figure out my real identity. But, y'know, WHY? I haven't pissed anyone off that I know of, and I'm not a prime target of romantic stalkers.

Honestly, the only reason I don't post my real name on MeFi is because I like to be able to answer the BDSM questions without fear that it will impact my family.

I don't want random strangers to have the ability to know everything there is to know about me -- and by this, I mean, the real-name me -- with just a set of clicks. I understand that anyone who *really* wanted to pierce that veil of semi-anonymity could pull it off but in the meantime, I prefer to make my stalkers earn their keep.

If you have a person's real identity -- his name, his location, etc -- here's what the sum of fifty bucks will buy you on Zabasearch/Intelius:

Locations

Relatives

COMPLETE REPORT INCLUDES (WHEN AVAILABLE):

* Statewide Criminal Check
* Bankruptcies & Liens
* Address History
* Neighbors
* Neighborhood Info
* Alias Names

* Sex Offender Check
* Small Claims & Judgements
* Relatives & Associates
* Home Value & Details
* Satellite & Map Images
* Much More...

I might feel differently about this issue if these services weren't so cheap and readily available.

We do live in a stalkers paradise.

I work in an environment where I have to deal with nutters at arm's length - over the phone and by letter. The decisions I make on their cases often have very serious implications for them in terms of losing homes, businesses, etc. Many of them are very angry. Some of them are just plain crazy.

Consequently I don't want any way of them being able to trace who I am in the real world. I'm not on Facebook or anything like that, and my phone number is unlisted. Googling my real name brings up nothing that can be connected to me and as my real first name is 'Jan' (not short for Janet or Janice), any search of my name also ends up with every mention of my surname + 'January', thus doubly confusing any potential stalker.

A co-worker had a full profile on Friends Reunited, with a recent photo and, idiotically, information about the town where he lives, and where he works. He had some problems as a result from a disgruntled complainant who was able to recognise him when he left the building one evening and followed him to the station.

I don't think it's really a question of "what immediate harm will it do me as a person". It's more of a question of "what eventual harm will it do us as a society".

Now partly it's a case of scary scenarios. What happens if a neo-Nazi looks up the names and addresses of everyone who ordered matzoh bread? What if your insurer refuses to pay out because you've eaten an unhealthy amount of saturated fat? What if your future employer looks at whether you Twittered you were at the Gay Pride parade? What happens if the police look up everyone who's bought cigarette papers but not rolling tobacco?

Now fair enough, you can say "I eat healthy, I don't do drugs, I'm not a minority, I have nothing to fear". But as more and more people accept their lack of privacy, it becomes harder and harder for others to live life without these services. Eventually, simply wanting to preserve your privacy will itself mark you out as suspicious.

But more importantly to me, I find it worrying how much of the public sphere is being taken under the control of private companies. I think that's the big picture: people sometimes worry about the details without necessarily seeing it.

For a non-technological example, consider a teenager who's thrown out of a shopping mall for wearing a T-shirt with a political slogan. There's nothing illegal about that, and no civil rights are being violated. A shopping mall is private property, and the owner can chuck out anyone he doesn't like (unless it's a specifically prohibited form of discrimination, like racial discrimination).

But if he was on a high street, or a public square, that wouldn't happen. Because private, commercial spaces are taking over from public spaces, individuals find themselves more restricted. You could shop somewhere else, but it's easier not to wear the T-shirt.

Now look at the kerfuffle over Facebook banning photographs of mothers breastfeeding their children. Now if you posted those pictures on your own website, like wearing a T-shirt on a public street, there'd be no problem. But because so many people are using a single company's website, that company gets a great deal power over what our society's values are.

Now if the breastfeeders win, they'll all say "hurrah, we've beaten Facebook, breastfeeding isn't obscene". That's the detail. But the big picture is: why should a single company have so much power to decide?

I'm not sure if I care whether they have the information. The key issue is whether they're allowed to use it against me. So I think these are questions of discrimination law

I don't think discrimination law will ever be good enough. Discrimination is part of what people are. People see something they don't like and they act on it. The Patriot Act is watching the books you check out??? Does that give you a feeling of trust?

Having all of your online activities perpetually available for data mining by employers, credit agencies, lessors, insurers, the police, the government, etc., is something I wouldn't want to see. I used to think that if I wasn't doing anything illegal I wouldn't have anything to hide. I guess I don't trust that much anymore.

She is hiding a tiny pianist.

His name is Wolfgang.

Privacy laws vary. Info about Americans is easier to obtain than about Canadians. It's not entirely relevant here but just wanted to mention it because the Zabasearch thing is really only applicable to Americans.

I think Facebook is a bit different from some other ways of sharing information. In fact I think online services and their respective privacy settings/TOSes are all different in ways that make it kind of difficult to talk about them as a group, unless you want to discuss the notion of privacy in a very general way.

Personally? I think I'm closer to you, Desjardins, than anything. Mostly I just try to be realistic. Some info is out there. I control it as much as I reasonably can, but I'm not under any delusion that (a) I can always control it or that (b) anyone really cares anyway. An example of this was an AskMe I read last night about someone being terrified of "identity theft" after a mere possibility of another person seeing their name and social insurance number. Personally? I think the possibility that someone saw it *who also* is the kind of person who would commit a criminal act of that nature *and* would even know how to go about something like that is tiny. I mean, I wouldn't lose any sleep over it. But that's me.

As for targetted advertising: this is hardly anything new. Watch TV during the day and you see commercials of dutiful women scrubbing the floor, chatting to their friends about room deodorizers, cooking for their families, and making tender love to their Swiffers. I find misogyny infuriating, but my attitude is basically that they can target me all they want, I just won't buy.

The Patriot Act is watching the books you check out??? Does that give you a feeling of trust?

No, but that's exactly my point - these are legal issues that changed the status of records formerly treated as private, not issues about stuff posted in a public online forum. IT's up to us what the law is.

Having all of your online activities perpetually available for data mining by employers, credit agencies, lessors, insurers, the police, the government, etc., is something I wouldn't want to see.

Too late!

The thing is, there's a profound naivete out there about the internet. It's not yours. As soon as you connect your computer to another computer, you have lost control of your content, plain and simple. There are varying things you can do about that, structures that can be and have been put in place to render content safer (credit card numbers, for instance) but never fool yourself that it's unavailable. It's just much too easy.

I was looking at an ad on Craigslist the other day about a job and they didn't name the employer (hate that!) because of that I googled the phone number and email address posted. Ended up with a ton of returns including the MySpace page of the HR person who posted the ad, with real name, friends' names, pics of her boozing it up in Vegas. On the first page of returns. What are you going to do? It's out there. You can put a few layers of obfuscation between yourself and your info and online history, but it can be found, especially if you have money, or the FBI. We rely a lot instead on people having no real reason to find us or to care about our minutiae. In cases like Jan's, or like many therapists or teachers I know, being able to avoid easy searchability by clients is important, so they have to be a lot more careful about what they post - but they can still be discovered. My middle-school librarian friend had to ask a friend of hers to take a Halloween picture down off the friend's FaceBook, because it showed her in a 'sexy librarian' costume at a private party - and the friend had friends from the middle school community who could see the pic. The new availability of public, personal, shared content means we have to be more aware of what we put out there.

If it's truly private, keep it offline.

I think the main Facebook concern is that they were essentially claiming ownership for any user-generated content, even if the user takes that content down and/or deletes his or her account. They were claiming full rights to reproduction, distribution, derivative works, etc., as though they held the copyrights themselves, which is overreaching and frankly shitty, and I'm glad they backed off.

This is really it for me. If I have photos that I have posted to Flickr with Creative Commons licensing, and I re-post some of those on Facebook for some reason, Fb is then somehow claiming those CC photos or (c) photos for that matter) as somehow theirs. They can tell their advertisers that I like photography all they want; they can say, this user is a professional photog, and we have x number of those, or whatever, but they DO NOT get to own my photos. (I am not a pro photographer, but for example's sake.)

IT's up to us what the law is.

I'm not quite so optimistic about this today or in the future.

If it's truly private, keep it offline.

It's hard to know how the things said today to a few people here in this thread will be interpreted in the future by third parties. It's the permanent nature of the net that bothers me and the potential ease with which employers, lets say, could retrieve info about me. Sure, today an employer might have a hard time pinning my online identity with my real identity. But that just represents a business opportunity for some unsavory person.

I'm not quite so optimistic about this today or in the future.

Well, you either do something about it or you don't.

As to the rest of it - opportunity for unsavory people - Right. That's what I'm saying. It's true, it's here, it's happening. When you use the internet you're using a free public resource and very little of it can be protected before the fact. If you put it out there, you lose control. Later you may discover an illegal use and bring control to bear, but usually that's after the damage has occurred, and there's something to prosecute or at least contest.

I care less and less about on-line privacy, although I'm aware that I may regret this in the future and it will be all too late.

Whenever I start to feel concerned about what people can find about me, I wonder what would happen if they did find out - nothing. Therefore, there is nothing for me to worry about. In any case, I have a very common name and it would be hard for anyone to pinpoint a lot of things as me - at least two people with the same name in the same country work in the same field, which helps to confuse things. People like essexjan, though, I can see the need for them to keep things a bit private.