The Facebook prospectus told us how the company is using and profiting from our personal data. I have just learned that here in America the address book on your smartphone is routinely collected by app developers when you download their app. According to a well researched article in Thursday’s New York Times (16 February 2012) this is considered to be “Industry best practice.”
Apple’s published rules prohibit this but according to evidence presented to Congress it is routinely happening. Android say their operating system requires explicit approval for our address book to be downloaded but say that once permission has been given – whether we are aware of giving it or not – a lot more data will be collected such as our telephone call logs and text messages. With the Twitter app, choosing “Find Friends” downloads your address book. The New York Times journalists were told not to worry because this information is encrypted. Apparantly, often it is not. So who knows who has our personal data?
I presume this is happening all over. Following the revelations in the Facebook prospectus, this is another example of how I. T. companies are collecting our personal data without our knowledge and using it to develop their business in spite of privacy laws. In this case presumably to speed up the rate of increase in the number of people using their software or apps. How many more more examples are we going to learn about by chance instead of being told the true scale of this activity?
Can I also put in a plug for preventing the government from invading our privacy too? They usually use excuses such as preventing terrorism or child welfare, when in fact what they’re doing has almost nothing to do with the claimed purpose and everything about collecting a lot of personal information about people, either under the guide of offering services or under pressure of ‘bad things will happen if not’. Other parts of government (DVLA springs to mind) will happily pass on personal details to commercial companies with minimal checking as to whether there’s a reasonable cause.
I can choose not to have dealings with Facebook, I can’t choose to avoid having dealings with government, so they should be held to a higher standard.
You are right and the government should be more open. Choosing whether to be on Facebook should not be a matter of the safety of our personal data. There was a time when travelling by plane was considered unsafe, but the industry and government set about making it safer and now safety is hardly a consideration in deciding whether to fly. So it should be with the safety of our personal data on the internet.
Whilst being protected from overtaxation of one’s personal-human-energies and essential-living timeframes and resources, for instance when laid low in a terminal bed, is a human-need and deserves application of Legalised Privacy,
the wasteful, hedonistic, unskilled, and ‘blasphemous’*,
destruction, extinction, and over-consumption of Lifesupports should never have been called
“Private Matters, Private-Rights”;
and in the same moral-reasoning vein neither should the Business-Economics-Sector ever have been called the “Private Sector”.
(* Oliver Wendell Holmes)
———–
So you see
(please)
that any ‘business’ or ‘individual’ you put in the Dock (such as Facebook)
is going to cost us more of “the Earth” for months, years, decades, centuries on end,
simply for them to “walk free” at the end of the Hearing
because the Judges, The Government, The Highly Successful and Trustworthy Private Individual Capitalist Socio-Economic System, and The Establishment,
are all super-corruptly drawing multiple-human-livings from the Common Purse,
resulting in Obscene Over-Destruction and Extinction of Earth’s Finite Lifesupports.
———–
(Helpful book, further to “Edward de Bono’s Thinking Course” (1982);
“The Retreat of Reason: political correctness and the corruption of public debate in modern Britain” (Browne, 2nd ed April 2006).
Look
(please)
the above Thinking Course has been available to all and sundry since 1982 – thirty (30) years
and the Reason book since 2006 – four years
and many other equally clear and constructive guides have been available,
all well within mere ‘pocket-money’ cost,
and are printed in the English Language which
(NB please)
in a real sense has now long been ‘governing’
(or rather, been mis-informing and thereby mis-governing)
the whole wide world
and our hopes and practical plans for a second-Earth somewhere else;
So (somehow) we surely need to be curtailing saboteurs of language, life, and reason,
such as Twitter, Facebook, Sunday-Sons & Daily-Foxes, and our very own British-to-the-Backbone “Spin Doctors”;
so, it being too late to quit (they already have all our Details)
how ?
The News oF the world phone hacking crimes are small beer by comparison, considering the newspaper/BBC mileage given to it, but then Murdoch is merely rationalizing his empire and presumably deeply involved in the kind of hacking the noble lord mentions as standard practice.
The press gossip and parliamentary evidence is merely a cover for expanding such activity
exponentially and using his Newscorps to do so.
Is collecting and using our personal data the same as obtaining it by hacking? Somehow hacking crosses a line.
Actually, there is nothing new in collecting information in the real sense. Only in the easiness to now obtain it.
My family friend, in the 1970’s, worked for an engineering company in the USA on a temporary student basis and her job was to go through all employees files and place inside each one any information on their person, via newsppaer clippings, letters sent to the company, anonymous or otherwise, about the person. Accounts of their credit worthiness, their banking and family connections, aa well as which state they were in. The files were endless. And she was not alowed to spend any time with the people in that company for lunch breaks or other.
At the end of the three month stint she was told she was not to pass any knowledge of her job onto the people who worked there. And had to sign a disclaimer. So those employees had no idea that clippings of their weddings or divorces were kept in the companies offices, or any other information like their shoplifting or thei childrens life gaines or losses. Most especially their political affiliations.
And our government does much the same to us. They are collating more and more personal data as to our private lives as well as the surface issues. Soon they will be aking and expecting to know all aspects of our sexual preferences and activity as well as whether we are of one pursuasion or another. Which they already do as you know. How could anyone have bellieved this would ever happen and be accepted as matter of fact?
It is time to seriously think about exodus en masse? How? I don’t know, but something has to give, because they don’t want all this info for no purpose, there is something behind it. Think of Hitler and the field day he would have with what they’ve already gleaned.
Every bit more, leaves us more open to risk and abuse, each and every one of us. Including those in the Lords.
Your religion, your sexual preferences, where and when you were born, every movement of your day, from morning until night we are on camera, not just in this country but when we leave it.
Imagine that. Watched like criminals or lab animals day and night. It is unconscienable.
Start filming them back.
Start recording your conversations with them.
Start asking questions.
For example, why is the Lords keeping secret what the criminals in the Lords have been up to?
Can I get into double figures for secrecy certificates sign off to hide what the Lords knew?
I am not aware that Lords’ activities – criminal or otherwise – are being kept secret.
I had three certificates signed by David Beamish, the Clerk of Parliament in response to FOI requests about three Lords, making it a state secret. http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/house_of_lords_correspondance#incoming-251003
Uddin, Hanningfield and Taylor being the Lords in question.
Comments?
@LB:
I would have thought our ‘daily beasts’ would have drawn attention to this, as surely they must have made similar applications to yours.
Does that mean this is a conspiracy to deceive the public in matters of criminality by those who have been placed in office unlawfully? Surely, over the centuries there must be a banning of crominals from taking up positions of trust in matters of public office?
@Lord Blagger
I thought the response from David Beamish was helpful, polite and in keeping with the spirit of the FOI Act. What you refer to as “state secrets” seems to be their personal details such as account numbers, address etc. Which he was right not to reveal.
Completely the opposite.
David Beamish has made a state secrets the documents relating to Uddin, Hanningfield and Taylor.
For others, he has not made them a state secret, just redacted addresses and contact details. I’m quite happy with that sort of redaction, bar the caveat about second homes. The addresses should be redacted to address A, address B.
So why should a different approach be taken to say, Melvyn Bragg, who if you follow the links was made to pay back money he claimed that he shouldn’t, but in the case of the three above, none of the information released?
I know what my conclusions are.
So come on, why would David Beamish treat Melvyn Bragg differently from Uddin, Hanningfield and Taylor?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zettabyte
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SI_prefix
Somebody the other day tried to work out “how long it would take to get somewhere in the universe in years”, forgetting that we use the “solar year”, whereas in space travel the “Galactic year” is the only relevant time scale, the time it takes for the solar system to rotate round the centre of the galaxy.
Miles is similarly forgetful.
The wiki entry for “data management” seems to be relevant to the present discussion about Facebook data collection.
“Actually, there is nothing new in collecting information in the real sense.”
Quite so.
But now we know “…in the real sense” has changed.
Yes, because the ‘virtual sense’ has taken over from going through the nations information by stealth, as, once upon a time, was so very common. Now it can be done with a click of the button. Reduces hands on labour no end that, even when you offset the billions for the technology. And makes it somewht harder to file away lies and heresay without having to answer for it.
But, with it comes a price. It won’t be too long before all your data is at the tip of public fingers. Will it? Hacking, through progress, will get very much faster, smarter and more covert. Until we can all buy the software from China at a few pence per head.
What fun that will turn out to be.
Gareth Howell trying to make Miles a ‘normal-human’
but on ‘smeary’ grounds (becoming reliably regular from Howell now) ?
Maude and Tizzy
the point missed-out
(perhaps ‘forgetfully’ by you two as well as by Howell)
is that
it all depends what the information is being gathered to accomplish
Assassinating you ?
Or making you a Nobel Prize Winner ?
Well, Miles, I for one have very little chance of a Nobel…. So, the uncomfortable truth has to be your second option.
depends what the information is being gathered to accomplish
Assassinating you ?
Or making you a Nobel Prize Winner ?
Possibly not both on account of the provenance of the prize.
Selling junk would certainly be one purpose,
both political commodity and chattels/consumer durables. Political commodity is of course
dis- or mis-information as often as not.
Then they’ve got ya!
One Ca based dating agency goes to great lengths to accumulate entirely irrelevant
information about its clients probably to pass on to credit agencies.
Lord Haskel,
If you think this is bad, have a long, hard look at what our Credit Reference Agencies are doing. Just like the sovereign credit agencies like Standard & Poors and Fitch, but for people.
They hoover up EVERYTHING and they NEVER FORGET. Statutes of Limitations apply to crimes, The Rehabilitation of Offenders Act wipes the slate clean, with exceptions.
But Experian never can be erased, and they are getting more and more control over Government business…
What makes you think the Credit Agencies have it wrong? If they have it wrong, which way do they have it wrong. Too high a rating or too low a rating.
If we take the UK, you need to remember what the CRAs are rating. They are rating bonds. They aren’t rating the UK government’s ability to pay its other debts. e.g. Pensions. You also need to look at what the ratings means. It means failure to pay within a given time period. The odds on the UK government failing to pay a Gilt obligation within 10 years. Odds of that are quite low.
Failure to pay what was promised on a pension, however, is high. They already have defaulted there.
What’s wrong with the CRA for people? Shouldn’t the lenders get the information? Aren’t you arguing for fraudsters?
@Bedd Gelert
You are right about the credit reference agencies. If we want credit I suppose it is inevitable that we supply them with details so that they can assess our ability to repay. It is part of an agreement.
Lord Haskell,
This has been a active are for bith the courts and for legal theorists in the United States for quite a while. It has not been an inactive area for legislatures. One idea that has had some currency in all these discussions is that the overall realistic and resonable expectation of privacy in the use of many new techn ologies is simply intrinsically lower than under the old technologies and customs. Some would go the next step and say that the reasonable privacy expectations of people living in and among these media and expectations is simply lower than among reasonable people a few generations ago in most walks of life. The courts are usually barred from creating a new higher standard in like matter and legislators often find the idea and practice of doing so daunting…
I am not sure that we should just lower our standards and accept this as inevitable as new technology develops. The EU is taking a much stronger line on this and fortunately for all of us they are seeking to stop the transfer of information without our informed consent.
Lord Haskell,
I was more or less reporting a trend. I think under your constitution a person in Your Lordship’s position is well situated to advocate as you appear to be doing.
” What’s wrong with the CRA for people? ”
Pay your bills when they are due and forget it.
Saw this headline and felt this was a good spot to address it.
All your tweets for sale! Ha, Ha………
http://rt.com/news/twitter-sells-tweet-archive-529/comments/
Now, this is only the beginning. Next all the information you have passed on through those tweets will be collated and sold to anyone who wants to do a check on your thinking, position in life, naughty behaviour, etc..
Have fun people. Enjoy!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxmD724H70Q
All i can say, if your stupid enough to use facebook, you get what you deserve.
Education is what is required.
The internet is a tool – the sites on it may or may not be safe.
That is not up to the government, its up to the people that use them.
Unless a law is being breached (Data protection act etc) then the government should stay out of things it does not understand.
Even your posting, with respect, scream of someone who has just been reading the media, rather than someone well informed about the problems.
You cannot police the internet, it is GLOBAL – your laws have no effect on sites in other countries.
You cannot police it, because whatever you do will result in more people doing the same, but in a more underhand manner.
Never treat fire – with fire – which is what I suspect the government is longing to do.