Re:How Privacy Became a Commodity for the Rich and Powerful
by _jal on Tuesday May 09, 2017 @05:26PM
(#14303940)
My commentary isn't talking about HN denizens who sit around debating this stuff in their spare time. I'm talking about folks who buy surveillance-TVs 'cause they're new and cool, hook it up to their Wifi because that's what the directions said, and never thought about the idea that they just installed a remote listening device in their bedroom. And sure, probably only robots listen to it. Probably.
As for personal harms, I readily admit that most of my concern is about risk. It is more speculative - as far as I know, there's not been a huge number of targeted attacks on random people yet, and for those that do happen, people focus on the specific details, rather than the data that enabled it. You can write off the attacks on political figures, because you're not that important. But that ignores all the Gmail cracks that compromise other services because enough data about them is floating around to make an attack possible.
But 10 years ago, perople weren't worried about automated attacks on US tax returns, internet-originated bank heists and ATM harvester stories were novelties instead of near-daily occurrences, and so on. What data did I leak somewhere that will come back to bite me next decade?
As for personal harms, I readily admit that most of my concern is about risk. It is more speculative - as far as I know, there's not been a huge number of targeted attacks on random people yet, and for those that do happen, people focus on the specific details, rather than the data that enabled it. You can write off the attacks on political figures, because you're not that important. But that ignores all the Gmail cracks that compromise other services because enough data about them is floating around to make an attack possible.
But 10 years ago, perople weren't worried about automated attacks on US tax returns, internet-originated bank heists and ATM harvester stories were novelties instead of near-daily occurrences, and so on. What data did I leak somewhere that will come back to bite me next decade?