This article sort of blurs what privacy is, conflating it with data analysis. As long as companies anonymize their analysis, then your privacy is kept. If you don't want to share something like an event that happened to you, you don't need to share it on an online social network. That choice is still yours. So is the choice to even use those services. Those companies in question are not releasing the data to the public, and I'm reasonably certain that those doing the data analysis are anonymizing the data when analyzing it (having a positive identity on a person is useless from a statistical standpoint anyway).
Privacy is being able to do things privately without prying eyes. Reading email is a private action. Going to the bathroom is (usually) private. Data harvesting doesn't prevent you from doing these things without anyone identifying who you are, unless it's a government entity doing so, in which case that entity is in the business of positively identifying individuals.
The problem with your "choice to share" is that you don't make that choice between whether you share that info or not, you make it between whether this data can come back to haunt me or not. It's a type of self-censoring which is an important goal for any party looking to suppress unwanted ideas.
But you are making the choice to share it or not. And despite the claim in the article in the OP about TOS agreements, they are as legally binding as other long pieces of documentation out there, including gaming license agreements, leases, employment agreements, loan agreements, credit card contracts, and more. Laziness is not a valid excuse.
And self-censoring is present even if this weren't the norm, and to a degree I'd say should be the norm. For example, a lot of the trashy comments you see in places like 4chan or reddit - those comments are the type that should be censored in most venues, and even those trashy comments have the effect of censoring dissenting views due to overaggressive expression of views by the posters of the trashy comments. Even a place like here, you have self-censorship occurring in the form of people fearful of making certain comments over the threat of downvoting. I don't think that this is a strong line of argument.
Sort of like people are making a decision to carry a (smart)phone in their pocket wherever they go and thus implicitly having the opinion that "Yes I am being tracked, so what?", right?
While it is optional for an individual to opt-out from this behavior, it is not optional for masses of people to do so. It will not happen, because people don't care. They don't know, they are ignorant, they can't bother.
It would be outright foolish not to try to exploit all this data which can be gathered. It has enormous value for example in terms of commercial use and also national security. It isn't hard to come up with legitimate uses where data analysis is benefitical. Besides, if it goes through the internet, along the way there most certainly are hops/parties which would benefit from this data too. It would give "foreign" parties(whatever they might be/mean) an advantage, and that's not going to happen.
I think it is inevitable that lots and lots of data will be gathered about and of what we happen to do in our lives, online or otherwise. Either it is done openly(transparency) or secretly(sort of totalitarianism), but it will be done by someone somewhere. First, because it is possible, and second, because it is valuable.
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This article sort of blurs what privacy is, conflating it with data analysis. As long as companies anonymize their analysis, then your privacy is kept. If you don't want to share something like an event that happened to you, you don't need to share it on an online social network. That choice is still yours. So is the choice to even use those services. Those companies in question are not releasing the data to the public, and I'm reasonably certain that those doing the data analysis are anonymizing the data when analyzing it (having a positive identity on a person is useless from a statistical standpoint anyway).
Privacy is being able to do things privately without prying eyes. Reading email is a private action. Going to the bathroom is (usually) private. Data harvesting doesn't prevent you from doing these things without anyone identifying who you are, unless it's a government entity doing so, in which case that entity is in the business of positively identifying individuals.
You mean like how AOL anonymized their data? http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2009/09/your-secrets-live...
The problem with your "choice to share" is that you don't make that choice between whether you share that info or not, you make it between whether this data can come back to haunt me or not. It's a type of self-censoring which is an important goal for any party looking to suppress unwanted ideas.
But you are making the choice to share it or not. And despite the claim in the article in the OP about TOS agreements, they are as legally binding as other long pieces of documentation out there, including gaming license agreements, leases, employment agreements, loan agreements, credit card contracts, and more. Laziness is not a valid excuse.
And self-censoring is present even if this weren't the norm, and to a degree I'd say should be the norm. For example, a lot of the trashy comments you see in places like 4chan or reddit - those comments are the type that should be censored in most venues, and even those trashy comments have the effect of censoring dissenting views due to overaggressive expression of views by the posters of the trashy comments. Even a place like here, you have self-censorship occurring in the form of people fearful of making certain comments over the threat of downvoting. I don't think that this is a strong line of argument.
Sort of like people are making a decision to carry a (smart)phone in their pocket wherever they go and thus implicitly having the opinion that "Yes I am being tracked, so what?", right?
While it is optional for an individual to opt-out from this behavior, it is not optional for masses of people to do so. It will not happen, because people don't care. They don't know, they are ignorant, they can't bother.
It would be outright foolish not to try to exploit all this data which can be gathered. It has enormous value for example in terms of commercial use and also national security. It isn't hard to come up with legitimate uses where data analysis is benefitical. Besides, if it goes through the internet, along the way there most certainly are hops/parties which would benefit from this data too. It would give "foreign" parties(whatever they might be/mean) an advantage, and that's not going to happen.
I think it is inevitable that lots and lots of data will be gathered about and of what we happen to do in our lives, online or otherwise. Either it is done openly(transparency) or secretly(sort of totalitarianism), but it will be done by someone somewhere. First, because it is possible, and second, because it is valuable.