Will Rant for Food: privacy

Google in The Onion in The Schneier-sphere

March 8, 2010

Google in The Onion

Funny:

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA—Responding to recent public outcries over its handling of private data, search giant Google offered a wide-ranging and eerily well-informed apology to its millions of users Monday.
"We would like to extend our deepest apologies to each and every one of you," announced CEO Eric Schmidt, speaking from the company's Googleplex headquarters. "Clearly there have been some privacy concerns as of late, and judging by some of the search terms we've seen, along with the tens of thousands of personal e-mail exchanges and Google Chat conversations we've carefully examined, it looks as though it might be a while before we regain your trust."

Google expressed regret to some of its third-generation Irish-American users on Smithwood between Barlow and Lake.

Added Schmidt, "Whether you're Michael Paulson who lives at 3425 Longview Terrace and makes $86,400 a year, or Jessica Goldblatt from Lynnwood, WA, who already has well-established trust issues, we at Google would just like to say how very, truly sorry we are."

Posted on March 8, 2010 at 2:24 PM • 15 Comments

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If only this weren't true.

DISCLAIMER: Note to Indian and Chinese news organizations: The Onion is a "fake" news site and should not be used as a source for stories. Bruce Schneier is a serious security and cryptography expert and should not be used as a source for humor.

Posted via web from Will Rant For Food

Privacy is Overrated - RE: De-Anonymizing Social Network Users

Ohm's summary of what's happened:

"Reidentification science disrupts the privacy policy landscape by undermining the faith that we have placed in anonymization. This is no small faith, for technologists rely on it to justify sharing data indiscriminately and storing data perpetually, all while promising their users (and the world) that they are protecting privacy. Advances in reidentification expose these promises as too often illusory. These advances should trigger a sea change in the law, because nearly every information privacy law or regulation grants a get-out-of-jail free card to those who anonymize their data....Yet reidentification science exposes the underlying promise made by these laws—that anonymization protects privacy—as an empty one, as broken as the technologists’ promises. At the very least, lawmakers must reexamine every privacy law, asking whether the power of reidentification and fragility of anonymization have thwarted their original designs.

The power of reidentification also transforms the public policy debate over information privacy. Today, this debate centers almost entirely on squabbles over magical phrases like “personally identifiable information” (PII) or “personal data.” Advances in reidentification expose how thoroughly these phrases miss the point. Although it is true that a malicious adversary can use PII like a name or social security number to link data to identity, as it turns out, the adversary can do the same thing using information that nobody would classify as personally identifiable.... These studies [Sweeny, Netflix study, etc.] and others like them sound the death knell for the idea that we protect privacy when we remove PII from our databases. This idea, which has served as the central focus of information privacy law for almost forty years, is a fallacy that has run its course and must now yield to something else."

via schneier.com

So, you think you should be able to keep your e-mail, phone number, photos quarantined to just you and a few selected friends? Come on, we all live in public now. Get over it...oh, what's my number? Hey, mind your own business.

Posted via web from Will Rant For Food