Mon, Apr 19th 2021 9:35am
Mike Masnick
For many years I ve tried to point out that no one seems to have a very good conceptual framework for privacy. Many people act as if privacy is a concrete thing and that we want our information kept private. But as I ve pointed out for years, that doesn t make much sense. Privacy is a set of tradeoffs. It s information about ourselves, that we often offer up freely, if we feel that the tradeoff is worth it. And, related to that, there s a big question about who is controlling the data in question. On top of that, things get confusing when we consider just who is controlling what data. If we re controlling our own data, then we have some degree of autonomy over our privacy trade-offs. But when we hand that data off to a third party, then they have much more say over our privacy and even if they agree to lock down and protect that data, the end result might not be what we want. For one, we re giving those companies more power of our da