Ultimately I'm relatively comfortable trading some measure of my privacy for convenient communication with people whose friendship i value and might otherwise struggle to keep in touch with.
If I'd purchased myself a physical good, regardless of it being a sex toy, I'm not sure i would necessarily expect to be entering into the same agreement.
My fridge phones home, but my kettle doesn't, my TV is a CIA outpost, but my wallet is just made of cows and Faraday cages. Granted the app connectivity would be a red flag, but ultimately there needs to be some kind of 'privacy mark' in the same way films carry a cert to allow us all to instantly understand what using it will entail.
For me that is the key difference here, and something that needs to change.
We are used to information deteriorating over time, and the non-zero cost of distribution and analysis limiting how far information about you could spread. Our heuristics that estimate risk are not prepared to evaluate risks that extend indefinitely into the future.
You say your are comfortable trading (some) privacy. Are you prepared for that data being sold/hacked/subpoenaed after 20 years? Are you sure you're comfortable with future machine learning tricks and other advanced analysis techniques reconstructing a detailed patter-of-life from several decades of data?
The worst ways to abuse all this surveillance data probably hasn't been discovered yet. Nobody should be comfortable trading away their privacy, because we don't even know the risks. We only know that risk only increases with time.
A "privacy mark" doesn't help (much). Instead, what we need is an education campaign similar to anti-smoking efforts that attempt to realign the common wildly inaccurate perceived risks to be a closer match to the actual risks.
If my dildo is publicly known to have reported its use whilst I was also known to have been watching Trump's Presidential Address (don't ask!), I would have an out in that all such data has long been known to have been poisoned. Spam is our friend.
(See also my comment to parent post.)
That was the direction we were wanting to go with the Private Play Accord mentioned at the end of our DEF CON presentation: http://www.privateplayaccord.com/
We got as far as drafting an initial star-based grading system but turns out writing code is easier... :)
Was made aware of this earlier initiative today: http://designswarm.com/blog/2015/09/what-does-it-do-a-propos...
Is a log of ip addresses and times that your smart toaster was used acceptable?
What if said smart toaster really needs to contact a server to decide exactly how long to heat the toast for?
It's difficult to have an internet-connected widget with an App that doesn't generate some kind of information in logs somewhere.
I agree with you but I think it's something that needs laws around it, and unfortunately can't be simplified down to your one sentence solution.
Unfortunately with the apathy of the general population and the flat-out corruption of our own untrustworthy governments, I think those laws are unlikely to materialize.
But the problem is not only in the IP addresses. Companies just want to save everything they can collect. Remember Amazon Echo that was storing everything said to the device on the server. And almost every mobile app now has Google Analytics or similar system inside.
It is obvious that companies do this for profit because the information could have some commercial value and could be sold later or used for marketing purposes. But the users want the device just to serve its purpose and not to be a modern implementation of a telescreen.
I think this problem can be only solved by government regulation too.
So for example a store owner that has a CCTV system would not be allowed to keep the records forever or recognize faces on the video and sell this information to marketers. A security system should serve just its purpose.
> It's difficult to have an internet-connected widget with an App that doesn't generate some kind of information in logs somewhere.
The server can be run on the phone or user's computer or router. Why should the data from the toaster travel across the world?
No, but companies will continue to do it if there is no cost and no consequences, which is the current state.
> The server can be run on the phone or user's computer or router. Why should the data from the toaster travel across the world?
Exactly. But people should be given the information to be able to make that decision.
Either mandatory rules on what any IoT appliance is allowed to send and rules on how much of and for how long that information will be stored, or a system that will reasonably allow consumers to make the decision between devices.
But nothing will happen if the consumers continue to not care and buy toasters that send your toasting information back to China.
We need policy changes that separate the choice to have privacy from state/corporate knowledge of our intimate lives from the choice to make connections with friends, advertise, reach out to the world, etc. The market as it currently exists is not an adequate mechanism to achieve these changes.
The business model of people-farming and super-stasi state spying is the polar opposite of the utopian promises made by many in this industry at the emergence of the internet, and there need to be concrete proposals to stop it from every arena, because there will certainly be far more dire consequences as it evolves if it isn't checked in a comprehensive, thoughtful way.
Migrating away from GMail or Google search? Now that's something I don't think I can pull off. I tried switching to DDG several times and I could never stick with it. It's the Linux desktop of search engines.
..that's what Reddit and Hacker News are for :)
What about deleting the always listening FB spyware craplet that comes pre-installed on your non-rootable phone? How easy is that?