I read this on Friday and have been mulling (okay, grousing about) it ever since.
Dan Rowinski is mad-mad-mad at the online companies who, one after another, steal users’ data, then (inevitably) go, “Whoops. Oh, it was just an accident! We’ll fix that now.” He’s sick of the repeted abuse. Sick of the lies. Sick of being used. Sick of having to be on alert all the time. Sick even of hearing about it.
Yes, Rowinski is mad-mad-mad. So what’s he going to do to combat that data rape or protect himself?
… I say screw it. Screw the companies for setting up the system that perpetuates this mess, screw the media for making it a scandal every time, screw the users who let it happen. Everybody is to blame.
Use my data. I wash my hands of you and it. Just make for damn sure that no harm comes of it.
Because then, we would really have problems.
Yes, that’s it. He’s going to lie back, let himself be abused … but get really, really, really mad if … um, he gets even more abused.
Look, I know that the fight for privacy gets harder every year. But what the heck does anyone hope to accomplish by a big, loud, ringing declaration that you’re going to … oh, hold your breath until you turn blue or something if “they” misuse that data that you’re giving up and giving to them?
I don’t know Mr. Rowinski. For all I know, he may be a fine, bold human being at other moments of his life. But boy, the phrase “sound and fury, signifying nothing” could have been written for him, right there.
If people aren’t going to protect themselves against this level of abuse, why should anyone take us seriously if we threaten unspecified weepies or foot-stompings at the next level of the same abuse?
I started using “Do Not Track Plus” a while ago and can’t believe how well it works. It blocks tracking. The only way I know it really works is that my computer speed is up remarkably and my computer handles a lot more windows and operations with less trouble than it ever has. Have you ever watched your computer slow to a crawl and then freeze? You blamed it on Windows, right? Well, that seems to be gone. Of course there’s two things that still slow it down, McAffee and Windows updates… of course that’s not a tracking problem. I’m amazed at this point but I’ve only had it for a while, so we’ll see.
http://www.abine.com/dntdetail.php?
EN — Thanks for the report! I haven’t tried DNT+. I have a lot of other privacy protections in place & reached the point where I was discovering that some of them were slowing down my system. Just plain old AdBlockPlus and NoScript for Firefox are huge helps.
But you’re absolutely right; there are SO many things people can do (often very easily) to prevent a lot of the most abusive snooping, Certain Persons’ nihilistic whining to the contrary.
But isn’t this what much of America has done during its history, and *increasingly so over the past hundred years?* Not just about privacy, but about every other type of abuse. We complain and don’t fight back.
It’s why Congress insinuates itself into our lives without a by-your-leave, it’s why TSA gropes kids and little old ladies, it’s why Obama feels he can pass ObamaCare without the public’s blessing. They’ve gotten away with so much that they now believe no one has the moxie to resist. Talk is cheap — they’ve given it to us in lies, now Rowinski is giving it back in “whines.”
Y’know, the issue with privacy never was the privacy itself; it’s about what others can do with the information. If a bunch of looters didn’t lay claim to your earnings, then knowledge of how much you earn isn’t really a threat. And so it goes with all information. Just as an armed society is a polite society, so a transparent society engenders decency. The problem so far is that it works backwards–the servants keep everything a secret, while the owners are threatened by every bit of knowledge.
The error has been treating this as a moral issue when it’s really an existential one. Soon enough, there won’t be any privacy, period. This is an undeniable fact, so the challenge becomes having a society in which information isn’t a threat to people, but rather a value. Decent people don’t care what other decent people do; it’s only the rotten ones who seek to gain from that. Lack of privacy cuts both ways, as some rotten people are learning very quickly.
Not quickly enough, though, and it’s up to the decent people to put a stop to the threats they incur for doing nothing wrong. Don’t misunderstand…a person can still be as private as he or she wishes in a free world; it’s just going to be a challenge so huge that it probably won’t be worth it. For those of us who wish to interact with others, information about ourselves is a plus, not a minus. Good people have little to hide; it’s only when they’re threatened by thugs that they scurry like rats.
Thanks EN. I just downloaded DoNotTrackPlus. I’ll post here if any problems pop up.
Just found a timely article in USA Today.
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/story/2012-02-19/secure-laptop-data/53136014/1
An even better one is here:
http://lifehacker.com/5445101/your-passwords-arent-as-secure-as-you-think-heres-how-to-fix-that
In fact Lifehacker is an interesting website.
Claire, I also run Adblock and Noscript with my Firefox. I have considered running Google Chrome because it’s a little faster than Firefox, but since I’ve added DNT+ it’s every bit as fast as Chrome… and I don’t have to use Google.
Greg, please keep us informed. I’ve not had it that long but so far so good. I would bet that it’s at least doubled my internet speed, and I have a good connection.
An observation: I’ve done many things like Reformatting, cleaning out old programs, this, that, add, subtract, all kinds of stuff that made my computer one faster… but within a few days it would be back to what it was. Right before adding DNT+ I did some maintenance and it was running OK, but nothing special. Since adding it the speed has stayed fast and scans and defrags take half the time or less than before. I’m impressed.
I just went to the Abine web site to download DNT+. I surf behind a proxy that hides most or all of my personal identifying info. After clicking on the download button I received the message:
“Sorry, we do not support your browser yet”
I am using Firefox but of course the proxy hides that info. So in order to get the program I have to uncloak my system? Nope, not today.
I gave up landline phone service in October 2000, and have been very aware of who I give my cell phone number to ever since. Usually I’ll leave online forms blank, or if they insist on having a phone number, I write in zeros. The ones that are more clever than that I’ll sometimes put the own companies phone number in. Other times if I’m afraid they MAY actually need to contact me I’ll use my work number.
But the very worst situations are companies that DO need to call me, once, but use a big ugly nationwide database system to make note of your info. Its not easy avoiding places like that either.
Somehow my phone number got out a couple months ago to a particularly ‘back alley’ rough kind of underworld list. I’ve been getting the “Rachael from cardholder services” calls, spam texts, and illegitimate charges for subscriptions to horoscope type things.
I cant say in public what I’d do if I found a living person that was responsible for it.
On this very page you are tracked by Google adsense and Google analytics. Ironic huh?
Not if you use Ghostery. 🙂 But yes, ironic as hell.
Yep, Ghostery will stop the tracking. NoScript also prevents Google from doing its analytic thing.
The tracking, BTW, is not by my wish and is out of my control. But the real irony is that, since so many privacy-protected folks frequent this blog, Google Analytics reports numbers that (I know from other, voluntarily given, evidence) are much lower than the actual visits. Dunno whether that’s good or bad.
Oh yeah. And taking the very simple step of setting your browser to forbid third-party cookies is also a huge help (though, like everything else, not a panacea).
I think that’s one (more) reason the whiny rant I linked to ticked me off. Yes, plenty of free (and even non-free) sites do evil. But many of the steps to combat their snoopery and their “accidents” are so very, very easy.
I can’t speak to what you might need to do on your smart phone; don’t have one of those things. But for every abuse, somebody always comes up with at least a partial remedy.
I’m not saying the DNT+ product doesn’t work – or that it’s something evil… but I do find it ironic that when I mouseover the link to DL the product on their webpage I see this URL:
http://www.donottrackplus.com/downloading.php?utm_campaign=http://www.backwoodshome.com/blogs/ClaireWolfe/2012/02/19/sound-and-fury/&utm_source=organic
Btw – UTM=Urchin tracking module
(adjusts tinfoil hat to a rakish angle)
Yup. That’s pretty ironic. And that tinfoil hat looks really good on you, Plug Nickel Outfit.
I do wish we ordinary ‘Net users were better able to see and control every aspect of tracking. That said, I think there’s a huge difference between a site wanting to see where its own visitors are coming from (which seems to be the case here) and a site wanting to track every electronic move we make to exploit and sell our data.
I downloaded and ran “Everything,” a super program that tells you about every file it can find on your hard disk. That’s a lot more than Windows will tell you about. And despite my using the “Flash Control Panel” to stop all Flash storage of data, deny all permissions, etc, I found a bunch of “files” that Flash stored about websites I visited and how they were denied permissions…. I wonder what “no storage” means to Macromedia? I am unable to remove some of these “files.” And oddly, I don’t even have Flash installed on this computer, though I do use Chrome and I think Flash is built into it.