Assange believes too late for any pervasive privacy

[shelley@misanthropia.org (Shelley)]

On December 19, 2015 5:54:21 PM dan@geer.org wrote:

> Assange is entirely correct.  The reason is the distribution
> curve for sensors and, in particular, everything -- and I mean
> everything -- about "personalization" is simply surveillance.
> I may be able to hide from The Man, but I cannot hide from my
> friends and neighbors, and they are increasingly festooned with
> the infrastructure of total information awareness.  Poindexter
> was simply ahead of his time.  The private sector will do with
> bread & circus what the mil sector can not do with black budgets;
> the private sector will own 95% of the listening posts and will
> buy their freedom of motion with yours.
>
> --dan
>

It's deeply unsettling for me to admit that Dan correct about this, but 
there it is.

I don't use Failbook (as I'm sure you *all* know by now) and yet I have 
received disturbing email from the Fuckerberg empire encouraging me to sign 
up so that I may "connect" with "people I might know." This is because some 
of my friends who use it were not s-m-r-t enough to disallow the harvesting 
of their contacts.

One name that was suggested was someone I hadn't spoken with in well over a 
decade... there was simply no way they could have had my email address 
among their contacts, because that email address didn't exist during the 
time I knew them.  Failbook is omniscient!

There are several more instances in which my privacy was invaded or 
compromised due to the carelessness or ignorance of others, despite trying 
to maintain my nearly-zero online footprint online (in my legal name.  Of 
course I may be selectively found pseudonymously.)  That's not counting the 
countless Big Data database breaches which have put my medical and 
financial PII at risk.

The death of privacy is not going to be 1984'd; we already live within A 
Brave New World, and it's being built one narcissistic, 
geolocation-enabled, duck-faced selfie and status update check-in at a damn 
time.  Why would the TLAs waste any more* money on invasive data collection 
when people put their info and everyone else's out there, sold for the use 
of "free" email and apps?  Can't really blame them for plucking the 
lowest-hanging fruit.

*In-Q-Tel's ROI on that initial Facebook seed money must be positively 
unquantifiable.

-S