Privacy, confidentiality, anonymity, deceit, paranoia. Part 1
December 4, 2018
By Gonzalo López Martí – Creative director, etc / LMMiami.com
- The Marriott hotel chain announced a massive breach of its databases.
- It might’ve compromised sensitive personal info of hundreds of millions of guests.
- Calling this a privacy problem is a misnomer though: it is a safety issue.
- If your wallet is stolen on the subway it is not actually a privacy breach, or is it?
- Facebook, on another note, is confronting a serious snafu of global proportions allegedly involving, among other things, the direct influence of a foreign power’s intel apparatus on a US presidential election.
- What bugs me about the Facebook scandal is that it is based on the premise that we are all dimwits.
- I’m not necessarily defending the Zuckerberg meme machine.
- However, we cannot blame the big F for our very own tendency to overshare with reckless abandon and believe in absurd conspiracy theories.
- More so, we cannot blame Zuck for our unconscious and not so unconscious racism, sexism and other isms.
- Social media simply amplifies human traits.
- BTW, younger generations, to the chagrin of some old curmudgeons, are more than willing to relinquish their so-called privacy in exchange for free social media, free search, free cloud services, free voice & video calls, free online storage, free music, free video uploads, etc.
- Never mind the surveillance state as long as my entitlements are gratis.
- Give me freebies or give me death.
- “Privacy is needed to protect ourselves from abusive power and dysfunctional bureaucracies.”
- Really?
- Privacy, as far as I know, was born out of the so-called “right to be left alone”.
- A tenet of Constitutional interpretation.
- The right of not having to deal with unwanted meddlers in your life.
- It is a two-way avenue though.
- Privacy doesn’t mean anonymity.
- Nor can it trump freedom of speech.
- Political robocalls are annoying, yes.
- Junk mail is a pain in the rear end.
- Web banners, pop-ups and assorted roadblocks are irritating.
- Freedom is messy and there’s not much we can do about it though.
- Just so you know: ad blockers will never catch on.
- With some honorable exceptions, the entire internet edifice is built on advertising.
- The Silicon Valley powers that be rely way too heavily on said revenue.
- They will never allow ad blocking to prosper, despite the odd posturing at industry gatherings.
- It’s either ads or a paywall.
- Only a select group of very few brands has rolled out a subscription-based model successfully.
- Freeloading is here to stay.
- To be continued next week.