The Dark Side Of Biometrics: 9 Million Israelis' Hacked Info Hits The Web

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The Dark Side Of Biometrics: 9 Million Israelis' Hacked Info Hits The Web · 4

ecib · 4565 days ago

The sad truth is that there is no way to engineer a solution to the security theft here. Human theft. Somebody, no matter who it is. Is alway going to have that access.

Combine that with the inevitability of these systems....not good.

People can't even say 'enough, -stop!' because they arent even aware of what's going on with their data in the first place. This database is probably nothing compared to what we'll see (or won't see, rather) from private companies in the near future. They'll get all your info, profile you, predict your behavior in order to better sell you stuff. And Uncle Sam will dip in the pot at will with a warrant-less NSA letter or some other term of art. Or some asshole will just steal it and sell it so criminals can have a field day. Sigh.

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NotPhil · 4564 days ago · link ·

There's really nothing inevitable about any of this. It's simply a matter of choice. We can choose, as a society, to allow organizations to collect, store, and trade information about us, where it will be misused and stolen, or we can choose to criminalize this sort of invasion of privacy.

It's strange, but when the East German secret police collected and stored private information about people, the whole world shuddered, but when ACME does it, we just look the other way. I'm sorry, but the effect is the same, whether it's the Stasi or Widgets Inc.. When we lose control of the information about our lives, we also lose control of our lives.

+discuss+discuss

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mk · 4564 days ago · link ·

It seems as if the choice has been made. IMO, the trick was to appeal to people's sense of vanity, and their penchant for voyeurism.

I'm honestly beginning to reevaluate my thinking in this arena. What I thought was stodginess, might just be the proper reaction.

+discuss+discuss

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NotPhil · 4563 days ago · link ·

> IMO, the trick was to appeal to people's sense of vanity, and their penchant for voyeurism.

It sounds like you're talking about things like Facebook and Google+, which are really just communication networks, similar to phone services and postal services. We don't allow postal or phone services to look through our communications and then compile and sell that information to 3rd parties, so why should we allow Internet communication services to do that?

It's not just networked messaging sites either, Gmail and Yahoo Mail scan through the E-mail messages we send and receive, looking for keywords that they think will tell them something about us that will be valuable to advertisers, who, not surprisingly, are also our employers and service providers.

People who communicate over the Internet deserve the same sort of protections that people who communicate over phone lines or through the post receive.

+discuss+discuss

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mk · 4563 days ago · link ·

I'm not so sure that FB or G+ are like phone services and postal services, as I don't think they were designed with that intent. However, I do think that email is intended to be private and much like a phone conversation or a letter. I don't think that we need advertising based on email content.

Lessismore posted about some tracking here on Hubski that raises some related issues. I'd like for you to weigh in if possible: http://hubski.com/pub?id=7144