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"Nothing to Hide"?

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KaiRo

Webmaster

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"Nothing to Hide"?

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2015-04-27 00:38

Jobflirter

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Employees seeking better jobs on work computers
Just to nitpick a couple repeated words first: "people start to think *much* about it much more promptly" and "want to evade some of that and *they* in the end they actually have something to hide".

I often see people using their work computers to look for better jobs. I can imagine the employer going "You understand we have to let you go as we prefer someone committed to working here long term, right?"
2015-04-27 01:23

KaiRo

Webmaster

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Thanks for the pointer to repeated words, that comes from editing around on those sentences a few times and having nobody proofread before I post it. ;-)
I corrected them now, thanks again.

And good point that employers might use data about employees for such purposes as well (and what you mentioned is just the tip of the iceberg). I guess given that I for one am technically a contractor and working mostly from my own machines and for the other working for an organization that holds up privacy, I tend to not think about the work relationships too much there. :)
2015-04-27 02:50

Andrew Somerset

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Quote:
Banks are already buying data from Facebook, probably including "private" messages, for determining credit scores

Do you have a citation for that? If banks are doing this then I'd sure to like to know which ones.
2015-04-27 04:10

Vaibhav Agrawal

from India

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Great Post. I think it is important for people to realize how important internet privacy is and affects everyone.

Last edited by KaiRo at 2015-04-27 14:11

2015-04-27 05:49

KaiRo

Webmaster

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Quote of Andrew Somerset:
Quote:
Banks are already buying data from Facebook, probably including "private" messages, for determining credit scores

Do you have a citation for that? If banks are doing this then I'd sure to like to know which ones.

I can't find the article that I did read quite some time ago that said Facebook was selling data to banks (it's part of FB's business model to sell data, after all) - I'm not 100% sure it included private messages (though IIRC there's nothing in FB's policies to exclude those from such deals), that's why I put a "probably" in front of that.

That said, information of what friends you have is used by some banks at least, as mentioned by articles I found with a quick search:

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/09/lenders-vet-borrowers-social-media-facebook
http://money.cnn.com/2013/08/26/technology/social/facebook-credit-score/index.html
http://www.pcworld.com/article/246511/how_facebook_can_hurt_your_credit_rating.html
2015-04-27 14:12

unpublished

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I have settled on a short list of three counterexamples to succinctly demonstrate when this comes up that, "You don't actually believe that". The idea is that for almost anybody who would actually say, "I don't have anything to hide," the chances are vanishingly small that they'd fail to find a problem with at least one of them. (One being enough to establish a contradiction, but with a substantial margin likely actually having a problem with all three.):

2015-04-27 16:52

Anders

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I don't think you need to switch to "corporate surveillance" to make people see that they do have something to hide.
See e.g. John Olivers "dick-pic"-bit:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEVlyP4_11M
And Glenn Greenwald have a good argument, that you simply can't have democracy if you don't have privacy (if you don't have privacy, you have the panopticon, designed to hinder opposition), in Chapter 4 of his book and in his ted talk:
http://www.ted.com/talks/glenn_greenwald_why_privacy_matters
I think you could also draw parallels to "herd immunity" known from vaccines, that is, even if you do not have anything to hide, you need to encrypt, so use of encryption won't be an indicator of opposition.
2015-04-27 18:52

Liz

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There's always the future
I also think that we can't predict what we may want to have hidden, 10, 20, or 50 years down the line. For example, being a landlord is not seen as something to hide in the U.S. right now, but it seems easy to imagine a future where that could get a person into deep trouble, or it could mean today's landlord's grandchildren are persecuted. Extrapolate to things like, say, owning a car or having a front lawn. We don't really have to look that far ahead to see bad effects, but it's interesting to imagine!
2015-04-28 23:35

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