Internet paranoia

[sidewalkcynic]

So, I'm wondering whats up with the development of Internet conglomerations?

I'm looking at Yahoo, right now. The past year there was the merger of Yahoo and Microsoft, or MSN, and Bing and what ever else it all means - I don't know I avoid Microsoft sites because Microsoft . . .

Anyway, Yahoo has Facebook, Delicious, and I think they had Classmates, and the popular love connection site.

Google, now offers a browser, and I haven't tried it yet...


But anyway, Yahoo has a personal information policy, and I think Google was in the news about such a policy, and then there was the real time searching of Twitter and YouTube - I'm wondering if it's all leading somewhere Big Brother like, or am I just being paranoid, because it is inevitable and I just need to accept that everybody has a possibility of being exposed for hypocrisy?

[Gizenshya]

One thing that people often fail to realize is that everything in our human world is made up of humans. Governments and corporations are nothing more than groups of individual people. There is nothing different from government employees, corporate employees, and anyone else. We all have our human nature, and there isn't really anything we can do about it.

The free market system is naturally incompatible with, for example, social freedoms, environmental concerns. Left to its own devices, it will destroy itself.

Governments are intended to mesh the needs the wants and needs of businesses, consumers, the environment, and others, so they can all work together peacefully.

The problem is that governmental interests, being merely a group of the same humans that run corporations, naturally become incompatible with social freedoms and the like as well.

The problem is that companies do not answer to us like our governments do. People say, its a free system, and you can just choose something else. This is a logical fallacy. There are no other choices. The whole system is becoming a group of standardized, hegemonic industries.

Once a company gets so big... you can't vote with your wallet. They are everywhere, encompassing all choice until there is none.

There have been attempts at anti-monopoly and other laws to prevent this... but there are simple ways around them (holding companies, for example), that are effectively impossible to stop. The system both depends on them being there... and depends on them not being there. And then, the laws that are able to be enforced are too lenient. Think about companies like ATT. The government keeps allowing them to grow larger and larger, and buy their competitors, or interest in their competitors. There used to be 3 big choices. ATT, Cingular, and Verizon. ATT bought cingular completely, and I heard that not long ago they bought a significant interest in Verizon. Now there are only smaller companies that people might be able to choose, technically... but they aren't valid choices (major competitors with similar offerings and coverage).

And as far as privacy goes, there needs to be an all-encompasing privacy law. For all data gathered, it must be anonymizes or deleted within X amount of time. Some things are now... but those laws apply to only specific company types (and almost always not government), and then only for very specific types of data. This isn't sufficient. There also needs to be permission removal mechanisms in place. I do business with a bank or company or club, so they have lots of specific data to me. If I change banks, they must remove my personal data after x amount of time, or after taxes or other legal requirements expire (like audits).

[32034]

What I don't understand (not directed at you by any means) is why are people so paranoid about everything online? I don't think Google engineers are sifting through my emails reading that I subscribe to certain mailing lists, reading my incoming Facebook email alerts, or saving my searches for how long to bake chicken in the oven when I forget.

If you are truly paranoid, many company's data retention policies have been leaked online. Yahoo doesn't retain information that long in their Yahoo Groups or Email service. I think it's a maximum of six months and I think, if I remember correctly, they were unable to "undelete" emails on their email service.

[blueshiftoverwatch]

What I don't understand (not directed at you by any means) is why are people so paranoid about everything online?
Never in the history of mankind has there been the means for surveillance society the likes of what is possible today. Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union may have had surveillance states, but those are child's play compared to what is possible today. For example, if a Nazi/Soviet agent wanted to spy on someone's phone conversations they had to manually tap the phone line, record all of their phone calls, and listen to all of them manually. Today they don't even need to send some guy out to your telephone pole to install a listening device. They can tap right in at the phone company (ease of use wiretapping for phone companies is the law now I believe) and they can use voice to text software to record to scan for key words (ie marijuana, bomb, airplane, etc) instead of having to listen manually.

Also, in the past while some extremely totalitarian regimes (like Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union) did exist. They were usually counterbalanced by less totalitarian regimes (the United States, United Kingdom, etc). Today the entire world seems to be heading down towards he direction of mass surveillance and while Soviet and Nazi citizens who were fed up with their governments could conceivably escape to the US or UK. Where today do people in the US or UK who are fed up with their governments hope to escape to that is better than where they're at now?

EDIT: Not only that, but the Nazi and Soviet governments never had the means to build a complete profile of a person's entire life. All governments today have to do is monitor a person's Internet activities to know everything about them. It's like in Orwell's 1984 how Big Brother knew your deepest fears and used them against you.

[cascade9]

+1 to Gizenshya

Thank you blueshiftoverwatch, that said everything I was thinking, and probably in a more clear, easy to read way than my rambling style ;)


What I don't understand (not directed at you by any means) is why are people so paranoid about everything online? I don't think Google engineers are sifting through my emails reading that I subscribe to certain mailing lists, reading my incoming Facebook email alerts, or saving my searches for how long to bake chicken in the oven when I forget.

Google dont need to read everything. But they have the right to do so (if your using google services, its in the EULA).

IMO, what with googles (and yahoo, microsoft and others) deals with totalitarian regimes and dodgy EULAs that they included 'by mistake' you cant trust any of them.


It turns out that Google’s Chrome, like Google’s Apps (http://blogs.zdnet.com/Greenbaum/?p=130), started life with the same ridiculous EULA, the one that gives GOOG the right to use any content you send to Chrome (and Apps as well) in any way that Google sees fit. They generously allowed you to retain the copyright on your content, just as long as you didn’t care if Google used it for its marketing, promotional, or other (hedging operations?) needs as it saw fit.http://blogs.zdnet.com/Greenbaum/?p=180