Google CEO Schmidt Predicts End of Online Anonymity 591
Andorin writes "A tweet from the EFF pointed me to a short article detailing part of Eric Schmidt's speech to the Techonomy conference in Lake Tahoe on August 4. According to Schmidt, true transparency and anonymity on the Internet will become a thing of the past because of the need to combat criminal and 'anti-social' behavior. 'Governments will demand it,' he says, referring to full accountability and a 'name service for people,' possibly hinting towards mandatory Internet passports. The CEO of Google also made a couple of somewhat creepy references to the availability of information: 'If I look at enough of your messaging and your location, and use artificial intelligence, we can predict where you are going to go ... show us 14 photos of yourself and we can identify who you are. You think you don't have 14 photos of yourself on the internet? You've got Facebook photos!'"
And the internet... (Score:5, Interesting)
... will just fight back. The idea they can end internet anonymity is bullshit, programmers and smart people can always way's to game the system.
This will not end well (Score:5, Interesting)
I suspect that entire subnets of the Internet will be encrypted and continue to allow anonymity. Not to mention, there is always your public library or Internet cafe. It's not like spies will stop using the Internet, so "solutions" to this problem will inevitably surface.
Erm... (Score:5, Interesting)
"show us 14 photos of yourself and we can identify who you are"
I highly doubt that. I assume we're talking about a globally unique identification of a single individual. I call crap, given that we can't even do that with anything at all - fingerprints, DNA, or anything else. No biometric is that good. And, besides, if you have 14 photos of me, you know who I am anyway - I'm the guy who's in the photo. It doesn't exactly prove much at all, or help you out unless the photo shows me doing something illegal and I need to be traced. I *guarantee* you that other humans will catch me from my photo in a newspaper before any computer-based system does, and probably with much smaller margins of error.
And 14 photos is a HELL of a lot. And it depends on their quality, and your clothing, and the lighting, and the angles, and the focus, and anything obscuring the picture, and the resolution. Otherwise you're magical "14 photos" system could be used on 14 frames of any CCTV footage and instantly pinpoint the criminal. See what a ridiculous assertion that is?
A bit of overkill (Score:5, Interesting)
If there is a problem with online banking, why not put all the banks in a different net, accessible only to identified persons? Putting all the websites in an ID-net, for the problem of just one small segment of the whole net, seems a bit of an overkill.
Re:No, I don't (Score:5, Interesting)
Ever had a driver's license or other photo ID?
Maybe he lives in New Hampshire and exercised his right to have them delete the photo out of DMVs database after printing his license?
Gods, why can't all the states be that progressive.....
This is Why I Avoid Google Products (Score:3, Interesting)
Everyone loves gmail & google apps. But it came out early on that google had no respect for people's privacy. I've avoided every on-line product of theirs besides google search & earth.
Re:No, I don't (Score:2, Interesting)
Gods, why can't all the states be that progressive.....
Because some of us aren't paranoid and couldn't give half a shit about a mug shot being present in a state database, when their use for it is obvious and clear. Get over yourself.
Re:No, I don't (Score:3, Interesting)
Me either. TFS says the need to combat criminal and 'anti-social' behavior
Copyright infringement, computer intrusion, child porn... is there anything else that's against the law you can do on the internet? And why just on the internet? Why not make everyone simply wear a badge with a number on it like The Prisoner? [wikipedia.org] After all, I could commit a crime offline, too. Hell, I smoked a joint last night, better put a camera in my bedroom. That's where it looks like we're going, only instead of as small island, everyone in the world is a either number six or number two.
You think you had problems with Ruby Ridge, Waco, the Murrow Building, that last bunch from earlier this year, keep this shit up and you're just going to add to the numbers of violent government haters. Stupid politicians.
Re:No, I don't (Score:1, Interesting)
If you aren't paranoid about your privacy then why don't you register for an account under your real name instead of posting as an anonymous coward?
This is why you use Bing. (Score:1, Interesting)
Schmidt has never been one for individual rights, he gladly admits selling people's information (or even giving it away to the government). Who doesn't remember his famous quote that if you're doing something you don't want people to know about on the internet "perhaps you shouldn't be doing it at all?"
And of course, a quick peek at whitehouse.gov has our dear fascist friend in Obama's "Science and Technology Advisory Council." For all their mock smug righteous fury at China, they seem to do a pretty good job of censoring and screwing the public.
People who thought M$ was bad don't know Google.
I think the reality (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:And the internet... (Score:1, Interesting)
It's not even that difficult to game the system. I use my real name (or an abbreviated form of it) in lots of places online, including slashdot. * That's a conscious choice in those places. But there are other places where I use a completely plausible fake name. This fake name has his own e-mail addresses, street address, business bank account, and credit card. And I didn't even have to break any laws to do this; forging a SSN or driver's license would make this alias even more distinct from me. I just *lied* when asked for personal information. Sure, a skilled detective with time and a subpoena on his hands could eventually figure out that "Donald Kaufman"** and I are the same person, but in the yottabytes of data that will soon be out there to dig through, the chances of that happening accidentally or through AI are slim, and I'm not doing anything with this alias that would attract that kind of attention. It's just for privacy.
I suppose you could raise the philosophical question of whether Donald Kaufman has any privacy, but I'm really not that concerned about him; I can kill him any time I want.
*I'm posting this anonymously because I don't want anyone to take this as a public challenge to link me with my alias.
**fake fake name
Google thinks I'm an anime character (Score:4, Interesting)
Performing a Google image search for my name (which is pretty unique, I'm really the only person on the internet with my first/last name combo), and I get a lot of anime character images. And on facebook, well, they'll think I look like my cat. So, unless you "play by the rules", it's unlikely they are going to be able to *really* identify you.
As for the whole privacy issue: I would suggest that someone start a website ala Wikileaks, where they publish everything known about every corporation, and make that publically accessible. If I want to know the BP CEO's home address, how much he makes, his social security number, yadda yadda, then perhaps there will be more concern over privacy.
The only way to win is to turn it around. If citizens can't have privacy, then neither should corporations or governments. We should be working hard to open up these areas. Right now corporations have a powerful position because they are essentially running the government, and they know more about us then we do about them. But it's time we turned the tables on them and re-took control.
When people fear their government, there is opression, but when government fears the people, there is freedom.
Re:And the internet... (Score:4, Interesting)
You are under arrest for the murder of Donald Kaufman.
We haven't found the body, but nobody has seen him in years and we have evidence connecting you to Mr. Kaufman.
Re:No, I don't (Score:4, Interesting)
All positive rights infringe on individual liberty.
Real rights are universal, meaning there is on logical contradiction if all people exercise the right.
Speech is like that. My having the right to say what I want does not prevent someone else from saying what they want.
A "right" to be guaranteed food, for example, is not. Under this model if don't have food then my right is being violated and the only way to correct this is to have food taken away from someone else. This is not a universal right because clearly not everybody in the world can have the right to have someone else's food.
Positive rights define two classes of people: people who are entitled to receive something from someone else, and another class of people who are required to produce a surplus in order to satisfy the first group. There's a name for this kind of arrangement but I'll let you figure that out on your own.
Re:Fuck the doomed (Score:3, Interesting)
I totally understand this way of looking at it, because emotionally, that's how I see it too. But rationally, it's wrong/impractical. The doomed will take you down with them, or at least make things more difficult for people who are trying to do the right thing. You will get what they deserve.
Take email privacy, for example. This is ludicrously easy problem to solve. We aren't waiting for any tech to show up; we have it right now and have had it for a couple decades, yet its usage is rare. None of my "geek" friends will bother with PGP. In terms of technical ability and understanding, I really am talking about the top 1% of the population, but "top 1%" isn't enough if it doesn't include the will. Shit, look at how people on Slashdot (a population that maybe isn't the top 1%, but certainly in the upper portion compared to the average person) talk about webmail (especially Google's) as though it's a good thing rather than a stupid thing. You can give up and throw all these people into the "Doomed" category, but if you do that, then who is left to talk to? There's no one to have a private conversation with, or to even sign your keys to WoT through and authenticate the people you do want to talk to.
Network effects end up putting us all in the same boat. You don't have to save everyone, but saving 1% isn't nearly enough. My estimate is that when someone asks, "What do we do about the 75% of the population who doesn't care?" then you can say "fuck 'em."
Re:No, I don't (Score:3, Interesting)
Extending your logic, it's clear that if my continued existence will cause you to die (as happens in shortage situations) then either you or I have no right to life.
So the only rights we have are to try.
We can try to escape, try to live, try to obtain property.
The fact is most things we consider rights are granted by us to ourselves as a group.
And all the philosophy in the world won't stop a person with a rock or stick in their hand from taking everything you have including your life.
The elite of our society have lost track of this fact. They have won a war of words so far, but once enough people are hurting, we'll see civil unrest. At some point, we'll stop attacking ourselves and target the wealthy (as has happened over and over throughout history). A few will escape, a few will merely lose everything they have, a lot will not do so well.
Hopefully, this happens after I'm dead because it's no good for anyone. As the wealthy own both political parties in the U.S., I don't see much hope for things rebalancing but there is still a chance.
Cookie Exchange! Bugmenot! Trackmenot! (Score:3, Interesting)
Cookies can be exchanged with others or - better still - edited at random. Those cryptic hashes are unreadable anyway so why not replace them with some other random string every time a site or time limit is crossed?
More problematic are sites which use other sites for eg. authentication. When they say you can use your Google username to login just don't. Run your own OpenID server [keyboard-monkeys.org] and be creative with the accounts you create on it.
Flash and its ilk can be used to track you as well. This is made harder by making its configuration directory read-only - so it can not store its own 'cookies' (which are more like wedding pies given their size).
I've seen reports on the Chromium and Google Chrome browsers - and maybe others? - which claim they can send a UUID. If this is true - I have not verified the claim which might be nothing more than fear mongering - that code is ripe for some creative editing, if one UUID per browser is good then one per request is even better.
More ideas?
Re:No, I don't (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Fuck the doomed (Score:2, Interesting)
If Google really wanted to live up to the 'Don't be Evil' brand, then this is what it would be doing. ... Google just wants to be a corporate version of the NSA.
Robert David Steele, intelligence veteran and CEO of OSS.Net, Inc. told HSToday.us that “Google is being actively hypocritical and deceptive in playing up its refusal to help the Department of Justice when all along it has been taking money and direction for elements of the US Intelligence Community, including the Office of Research and Development at the Central Intelligence Agency, In-Q-Tel, and in all probability, both the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Army’s Intelligence and Security Command.”
Steele added, “I have no doubt that Google, in its arrogance, decided it could make a deal with the devil and not get caught.” — HSToday.us
Google has much deeper ties to intelligence than is generally acknowledged, so I'd say not "wants to be a corporate version" but rather, "is a corporate arm" of the NSA. (I Googled around to find that out! But they know that!)
Re:No, I don't (Score:3, Interesting)
So all you have to do to counteract that is create a facebook account and post someone else's pictures to it as your own - use Eric Schmidt's.
Fortunately I don't live in a country slave to a two-party system. The government demands too much, we kick them out - because WE are the government, and they need to be reminded of that once in a while.
Care Less (Score:2, Interesting)
If I needed an identity card to log onto the net it wouldn't bother me a bit. Nor would it bother me if the government could track my every move 24 -7-365. I don't do anything particularly illegal compared to the next guy and I don't depend upon anyone's opinion of me for income either.
Frankly i think it would be great if we could track down killers, armed robbers, drug dealers and users etc.. The quality of life would go up for most people if they were under close scrutiny at all times. One benefit is false accusations are not a hazard simply because if one is watched closely there can be no accusation that is not true that sticks. And I love the idea of burglars and petty thieves being shut down completely. Stalkers would also be out of luck as getting close to a victim would reveal itself every time.
Re:No, I don't (Score:2, Interesting)
It fails Jefferson's test: "It neither breaks my leg, nor picks my pocket". He said that in reference to religious freedom, but I've found it to be a good test of what constitutes a natural right. I should be able to send my children to a school that I paid for. It doesn't hurt anyone if I send them to school, or if I teach them at home. But when I am told that I MUST send my kids to school, and I MUST pay taxes for a public school system whether I have children in it or not, that proves that this power lies with the state and not the people.
Right; that kind of speech is not free, because it potentially removes the right of others to exercise theirs. It doesn't matter what you say at 150 db because it is anti-freedom to drown out others (and damage their health).
Re:No, I don't (Score:3, Interesting)
Ugh, I hate ideologues. When will you guys realize that a mindless logical consistency is utterly unjustifiable in the face of a thoughtful pragmatism? Libertarianism is a good, humanistic sentiment tarred by a callous application of rigor.
Re:but... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:No, I don't (Score:3, Interesting)
No it's not. No one is allowed to prevent you from obtaining and carrying said arm but no one is obligated to provide you with one either. That's the difference.
Yes it is. Your right to own a gun forces me to find extra protections from crazy people with guns.