Does privacy exist anymore?

[Gumby]

For those who find Internet privacy fascinating, and want their mind blown, watch this TED Talk:

TEDX: Mikko Hypponen: How the NSA betrayed the world's trust -- time to act

Hypponen believes that American Internet companies are not — as widely believed — "cooperating" with the NSA, but rather that he shows some loose evidence that suggests they've all been hacked by the NSA and the NSA is monitoring their cloud data and building a profile of every human on the Internet, in every country. I thought I knew about Internet privacy until watching that.

And, if that wasn't enough, I was then blown away by this TED Talks about why privacy matters...

TED Talks: Alessandro Acquisti: Why privacy matters

Acquisti shows how, in the near future, someone on the street will be able to discover everything about you, including your social security number, simply by taking your photograph. And all that info can be linked back to gyroscopicinvesting.com via writing-style recognition software [Mind explosion].

Now I know why Clive always deleted his posts. But in reality, it probably doesn't do much good considering that everything that's posted here is quickly scraped and archived by various bots and archive sites.

[MediumTex]

Now I know why Clive always deleted his posts. But in reality, it probably doesn't do much good considering that everything that's posted here is quickly scraped and archived by various bots and archive sites.

The thing I never understood about clive and deleting his posts was that he wasn't posting especially controversial material to start with.

Why would anyone ever care that clive had posted analyses of hypothetical investment allocations, while making it clear that he always followed a dynamic strategy with his actual investments?  Isn't that what 99% of investors do (though in a less comprehensive way than clive did)?

[Gumby]

Now I know why Clive always deleted his posts. But in reality, it probably doesn't do much good considering that everything that's posted here is quickly scraped and archived by various bots and archive sites.

The thing I never understood about clive and deleting his posts was that he wasn't posting especially controversial material to start with.

Why would anyone ever care that clive had posted analyses of hypothetical investment allocations, while making it clear that he always followed a dynamic strategy with his actual investments?  Isn't that what 99% of investors do (though in a less comprehensive way than clive did)?

I agree, but he would bury a lot of predictions in his analyses. As in.. If X happens, Treasuries will do Y. Or... Based on Japan and A, stocks, bonds and gold would do B and D if C happens. I suppose if his hypothetical portfolios didn't work out exactly as he planned, he didn't want people saying, "you told me that, 'based on Japan and A, stocks, bonds and gold would do B and D if C happens' and it didn't!". That's the only thing I can think of. Which begs the question as to why he would recommend portfolios in the first place if he was just going to delete them...and my best guess is that it was all a mental exercise for his own investments.

Anyway, he did once mention that he thought that one day people would be able to easily match up identities with their "anonymous" writing and at least that prediction does appear to be coming true

[craigr]

Anyway, he did once mention that he thought that one day people would be able to easily match up identities with their "anonymous" writing and at least that prediction does appear to be coming true

About ten years back I started thinking about writing a tool that did just that. But I thought that it could only be used for bad purposes by governments and didn't do it.

But there have been tools out for quite a while that do these things and more. In academics they are used to quickly spot plagiarism, etc.

[dragoncar]

Privacy can exist, but not for those who want to take advantage of technology

The NSA monitors locations via your phone, which we all knew was possible ten years ago, but is now all but confirmed. 

Google Facebook and your ISP know your browsing history unless you take steps to protect it.  And that means anyone with access to their data knows too.

As you say, computers are now good at recognizing faces, writing (license plates), writing style and other patterns.

Even if we enforced laws preventing our government from doing all this, someone somewhere will still be able to

So yeah at some point you have to accept that this is the way the world works or go live in a (metaphorical) cave. 

[Gumby]

Some researchers and stylists have discovered camouflage that people may one day attempt to shield themselves from facial recognition in the future — and protect their identities.

Here's what they came up with...

[align=center][/align]

It looks like a joke, but it actually works (for now) — the facial recognition computers can't make out the faces.

[dualstow]

I was reading about Parham Aarabi's social face tagging algorithm yesterday:

"This Technology Tags Your Photos Based on Relationships"
http://mashable.com/2013/12/03/photo-tagging-algorithm/

I've also thought for a long time that technology would come up with writing style recognition and other clues to match presences on the web. They will barely need to track ip's.

[Ad Orientem]

No.

[RuralEngineer]

There have already been tech security experts that have come out and said based on the Snowden leaks, apparently the encryption standards used for the internet, companies, etc. were developed through a partnership with the NSA.  The NSA deliberately put in backdoors to enable them to gather communication data after the fact that has compromised global data security.

In 2006, a federal agency, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, helped build an international encryption system to help countries and industries fend off computer hacking and theft. Unbeknown to the many users of the system, a different government arm, the National Security Agency, secretly inserted a “back door”? into the system that allowed federal spies to crack open any data that was encoded using its technology.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/22/opini ... .html?_r=0

In a word, no.  When this kind of crap is going down, how can there be any privacy?

[dragoncar]

There have already been tech security experts that have come out and said based on the Snowden leaks, apparently the encryption standards used for the internet, companies, etc. were developed through a partnership with the NSA.  The NSA deliberately put in backdoors to enable them to gather communication data after the fact that has compromised global data security.

In 2006, a federal agency, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, helped build an international encryption system to help countries and industries fend off computer hacking and theft. Unbeknown to the many users of the system, a different government arm, the National Security Agency, secretly inserted a “back door”? into the system that allowed federal spies to crack open any data that was encoded using its technology.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/22/opini ... .html?_r=0

In a word, no.  When this kind of crap is going down, how can there be any privacy?

Only skimmed this, but it's only a back door if you use their random number generator and afaik anybody can use their own random numbers for encryption