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[t'Sade]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,,-7068964,00.html
http://politics.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/11/11/204231

An interesting story and concept. The US Congress is talking about the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Basically, the act that seems to cause a bunch of abuse and explains why the US really needs to have wiretaps and keep track of the population. That and why companies shouldn't be sued if the government asks them to do illegal wiretaps.

But, one of the comments was about privacy.

Privacy no longer can mean anonymity, says Donald Kerr, the principal deputy director of national intelligence. Instead, it should mean that government and businesses properly safeguard people's private communications and financial information.

That is an interesting point of the entire privacy argument: anonymous verses privacy. And comes up with the question, if your stuff was private, would you give up being anonymous. In most cases, yes. I mean, that is the entire foundation of the shopper cards we use in the grocery stories. To track our purchases but hopefully not give it away. When I worked for a major grocery store chain, I got to see their $2B data center, with biometric seals and lots of effort to prevent someone from stealing 1/3rd of the entire east cost's shopping habits across eleven grocery store chains.

I agree, it is probably impossible to stop companies from tracking our data. In one way, it is a more reasonable fight to make sure that the data isn't stolen from those companies. Ideally, it would also be nice if they didn't share it with anyone. We know that won't happen.

Too bad we can't have something in place that says our government can't get information from private sources. At least not without a court order or using the infrastructure we have in place to slow down the mass intrusions into our privacy.

[t'Sade]

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/11/redefining_priv.html

Schneier points out, the argument that privacy and anonymous are hand in hand. He has a really good sense of things that I don't really understand yet.

[KK]

Anonymity means you can do something without it being traced back to you.
Privacy means you can do something and it COULD be traced back to you, but doing so isn't allowed unless special circumstances arise (like you give consent, cops have probably cause, court orders etc.).

Anonymity by this definition includes and goes farther than privacy.
However, I don't think in our society anonymity is even technically possible anymore. There is no way to not leave an electronic data trail. While I don't exactly like this idea, there's little we can do about it. (I don't like bad weather either, but it's still there sometimes).

So, concentrating on the concept of privacy makes sense. If we can't keep anonymity, there should be ways to protect privacy.

And I agree that privacy ensures security. Privacy laws prevent abuse both by the fellow citizen and officials.
So the real questions are: Under which circumstances is it allowed to lift privacy for the sake of fighting potential security risks and how can privacy laws be enforced to prevent leaking private data to people/institutions?

I dont think these are new questions or problems.

[LT]

I'd rather have anonymity in that case.  Sorry, but my business is no one else's.  The only reason it could ever become someone else's is when I break the law, but even in that case, the kind of food I buy for my weekly groceries would be irrelevent.