back to article Restoring your privacy costs money, which makes it a marker of class

A colleague was recently required to spend 10 days in a public-health-mandated quarantine after authorities used credit card receipts to determine he'd visited a location that had also hosted a known coronavirus case. Had he paid in cash they would never have found him at all because he'd also been slack and not signed into …

  1. Natalie Gritpants Jr

    What country is your friend in? I'm surprised that Covid trackers have access to financial information.

    1. Blazde Silver badge

      Immediate thought: It can't be the UK because our test and trace is far too hopeless for that level of detective acumen.

      At a guess it's the US because they tend to put cardholder name right there on the paper receipt. And because it's then a quick Google for anyone to find the person's address, mobile number, car registration and so on because all that stuff is often public too. A few dollars if you should want to buy their mobile location data... and so on.

      1. DS999 Silver badge

        There's basically no track and trace happening in the US as far as I'm aware. We've gone all in on the vaccine, for those who take it, and those who don't have chosen to live with the risk.

        1. Choodie

          That's here and right across Australia. In one case, even though it was said that check in data would not be used for law enforcement, in Western Australia, it was last month.

        2. DiViDeD

          Re: vaccine response

          . . . those who don't have chosen to live with the risk.

          And to pass that risk on to whichever poor immuno-compromised sod they happen to run across, of course.

          1. DS999 Silver badge

            Re: vaccine response

            Given that its become basically a political litmus test for Trumpies to refuse the vaccine or be suspected of liberal leanings by their friends and family, there's no real hope of vaccinating the adults who have refused it at this point.

            I'm just glad where I live the vaccination rate is over 70%, though when all the students return to university this fall I worry that might be enough to start an outbreak. Not as big as the huge one when they came last fall, but we were down to under 10 cases a week in a county of 125K a month ago and if it wasn't for delta we might have had a high enough vaccination rate to mostly extinguish it here.

            If I was immuno-compromised I'd simply stay home. They aren't going to be safe and there's nothing that can be done about that.

            1. ProfessorLarry

              Re: vaccine response

              "If I was immuno-compromised I'd simply stay home."

              On full lockdown, probably for years? For the 10.5 million Americans who are immunocompromised?

              1. Michael Wojcik Silver badge

                Re: vaccine response

                It's not a good or desirable option. It may be the only reasonably low-risk one.

              2. DS999 Silver badge

                Re: vaccine response

                OK maybe not "simply", but as the other reply points out it may be the only safe alternative. You can't force people to take the vaccine at gunpoint, it will be hard enough for schools in blue states to require it (or any other vaccine for that matter) for kids in the future now that antivax has gone from a fringe thing to something the majority of republican voters believe thanks to Trump and Fox News disinformation.

                In red states I wouldn't be surprised to see PTA meetings this fall where people want to fire teachers who have been vaccinated for fear of that somehow negatively affecting their kids.

                1. DiViDeD
                  Joke

                  Re: vaccine response

                  You can't force people to take the vaccine at gunpoint

                  Why not? It's not like you guys don't have enough guns to go round or anything.

        3. zoooosh

          Isn't that evolution in action ?

          1. stiine Silver badge
            Holmes

            God, I hope so.

      2. fidodogbreath

        At a guess it's the US

        I doubt it. I mean, yeah, it's absolutely possible due to the privacy flaws that you cite; but most of the country is deeply resistant to contact tracing by the gubmint. Enforced quarantines haven't been a much of a thing here, either.

        1. Alan Brown Silver badge

          "Enforced quarantines haven't been a much of a thing here, either."

          They used to happen regularly

          "Jacobsen vs Massechusetts in the Supreme court" (1915) is the relevant case. No "liberal snowflakes" in sight for that decision

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobson_v._Massachusetts

          Public health trumps personal freedoms - the state CAN force you to be vaccinated and CAN enforce quarantines

          It's been cited as recently as last year in various cases

      3. Michael Wojcik Silver badge

        At a guess it's the US because they tend to put cardholder name right there on the paper receipt. And because it's then a quick Google for anyone to find the person's address, mobile number, car registration and so on

        Some of us here in the US have relatively common names, which makes trivial searching on just a name rather less useful.

        De-anonymization is still possible, of course, and not even very expensive (in total resources required). But it's not necessarily just a matter of whacking a name into a search engine.

    2. Mr. Flibble

      Could be South Korea

      They do that kind of crap there....

  2. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

    "After that, I will need reasonable alternatives to Google Calendar and Google Docs."

    I'm curious as to why people need - or think they need - such services.

    Is it because they want to share data between devices?

    If so do they never have two devices in the same place at the same time? If they bring devices together then they can, at least in theory, be synchronised. If they can't in practice then look to the vendors for an explanation (or, more likely, an excuse).

    1. Version 1.0 Silver badge
      Thumb Up

      It's today's world

      I think the story heading should have been, "Opting out of data monetisation is neither easy nor cheap possible." This isn't really a story, it's good documentation.

      You can think that you're evading data theft but it's unlikely, there's a heck of a lot of powerful technology busy tracking everything. I simply keep a couple of spare phones, each with different accounts for mail, apps, and browsing etc., I don't believe that it's "private" at all, I just hope that it's confusing the tracking attempts.

      1. stiine Silver badge
        Black Helicopters

        Re: It's today's world

        As long as one of them is an iPhone with no google apps, and the second is Android with no Apple apps, and the 3rd one is a pair of tin cans on a string.

        1. GloriousVictoryForThePeople

          Re: It's today's world

          pro tip: Wet the string with prussic acid to stop eavesdroppers

        2. Flywheel
          Joke

          Re: It's today's world

          Sorry, they will be able to trace you by monitoring outlets for unusally high sales of string...

      2. Alan Brown Silver badge

        Re: It's today's world

        Personally I believe that evading trackers merely makes you stand out even more

        It's probably better to simply force feed them with a firehose of bogus data

        1. Charles 9

          Re: It's today's world

          Won't that just make you stand out, too? You have to think they've already developed decent BS detectors already.

    2. Terry 6 Silver badge

      I use ( and need) to synchronise my calendar between my phone and PC, and sometimes get access on the internet. Similarly, I use notes in OneNote.So it's in Outlook.com. Along with some of my email. Some mail is in Gmail, some is in my ISP's and for added obfuscation, anything serious will be in a (free) Protonmail account.

      And I use more than one browser.

      I can't hide my presence, but I can certainly muddle it.

      (I also, in idle moments, do random searches in Google or on Amazon)

      1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

        But is there any reason why the phone & PC can't synchronise directly?

        1. marcellothearcane

          If you're using Android, yes!

          ...it's called Google Calendars.

          1. Terry 6 Silver badge

            Years ago ( pre smartphones) I used Google calendar to sync between the calendars on various PCs and some kind of digital Windows based assistant's diary that I relied on. Then google stopped the compatibility. So I stopped using their calendars.

        2. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Once they did... PalmOS did it, for example, then came iOS and Android, and this feature disappeared.

          1. 89724102172714182892114I7551670349743096734346773478647892349863592355648544996312855148587659264921

            So did Windows CE. Ah, the innocent days...

        3. Graham Cobb Silver badge

          The reason is that PIM syncing has never been treated with any importance. It has been my main topic of interest as an open source developer, and I have worked with several projects making serious attempts to address it (Opensync, GPE, SyncEvolution, ...) over the last 20 years (as well as even more hacks - for Psion, for Rex, for Outlook, ...). Unfortunately, not since Philippe Kahn has anyone really invested in trying to solve the general problem.

          Currently, the best solution for phones and PCs is to use Nextcloud (running your own server or using a commercial service) as a single point of synchronisation - most phones can sync at least contacts and calendar to Nextcloud and so can Thunderbird. Unfortunately even that is unreliable unless you have the discipline to only ever make changes from one of the devices (ideally the one which supports the most fields - normally Thunderbird).

          1. Mr. Flibble

            Unreliable?

            Not sure what u mean by that. It seems to work fine for me, maybe Nextcloud have broken that function after they split from owncloud.

            My old owncloud server works perfectly for calendars.

            1. Graham Cobb Silver badge

              Re: Unreliable?

              No, nextcloud and owncloud work identically for this. It can work reasonably well with 2 devices as long as they both support all the fields you actually care about. But with multiple devices it gets pretty unreliable because they often use different fields for the same information.

              Calendar generally works better (as long as Outlook isn't involved) just because people don't use the unusual fields so much. Contacts often make use of many unusual or unstandardised fields which are unsupported on other devices or supported in different ways (one device may allow only a single value for a field, another device supports a list, another device restricts the values in some way - such as validating postcodes, etc).

          2. Graham Cobb Silver badge

            p.s. just in case anyone feels like jumping in to work on this... the big problem is ontological: the devices don't know what they don't know. Combined with the standard sync protocols not providing changes, only the resulting entries.

            The simplest case is... if two devices sync one day, and the next day they sync again and one device is missing a field, the other device doesn't know whether the user deleted the field (so it should also delete it) or the device just doesn't support that field and never recorded it. It then gets much more complex with multiway syncs and very different types of devices.

      2. SImon Hobson Bronze badge

        I use ( and need) to synchronise my calendar between my phone and PC

        NextCloud

        A while ago I had to find alternatives when Apple removed Sync Services from OS X and my previous solution of Missing Sync for Android (and before that, Missing Sync for Palm) stopped working. Yes, it takes effort to install and run, but if you value privacy then it's worth it - your data, on your system, with your backup schedule, etc.

        Still haven't found alternatives for some of the functions, but it got the basics (like Calendar) sorted - and far better than I had before.

      3. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        I wonder whether muddling really works - or whether the correlations are immediately established.

        As an experiment I once set up a Virtual Server on Linode, set up a separate nested Xephyr X-buffer on my home computer to mask my browser fingerprint, opened a browser on the Linode server which passed X protocol via ssh back to the Xephyr buffer. On the first page I brought up I saw an add for LED lights which I had searched for the previous day, including on Amazon, on my regular setup (I never see ads on my regular setup do to Pihole et. al., but that doesn't mean I'm not being tracked.).

        I suppose that the best possible obfuscation is at the level of putting on level A Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) necessary when going into an active Anthrax zone.

    3. Throatwarbler Mangrove Silver badge
      Holmes

      For me at least, it's because I have people with whom I would like to share calendars and documents. To forestall the obvious objection, yes it is possible to send docs and calendar invitations and whatnot via email, but these applications make it a lot simpler, and they enable seamless collaboration in a way that conventional standalone applications do not.

      To forestall the inevitable hand-wringing about how people today are lazy and stupid and don't value their privacy as much as they should and shouldn't be allowed to even use computers, etc.: we use computers and their software to enable capabilities that we wouldn't have otherwise or to make our lives more convenient. There's nothing wrong with that. There's not even anything inherently wrong with trading convenience for privacy. What's wrong is that the terms of that transaction are obscured from the user: we don't know with any great degree of accuracy or precision where our data is going, and the approaches detailed in the article attempt to at least put more control back in the hands of the end user.

    4. John Sager

      I do have a Gmail acct but I run my own mail server at home & scrape Gmail and my main mail service into it periodically . Same with calendar, I run Davical on Apache/postgresql. For access when I'm away, WireGuard VPN works fine. Granted, you need tech chops to get it all working, but it's a useful privacy boost.

  3. PTW

    When did you write this article?

    Proton Calendar has been available for a while, and Proton Drive is in beta

    1. Terry 6 Silver badge

      Re: When did you write this article?

      Calendar for Android is still in Beta. I'll almost certainly switch to it when It's stable. But for now it's still outlook.com, sadly.

      1. James 51

        Re: When did you write this article?

        I've tried the mail beta. It does work well though it's not suitable for landscape views. It's almost unuseable on my Gemini which forces landscape viewing but is fine on my S9.

  4. Pete 2 Silver badge

    Privacy is free!

    > I've learned that clawing back private space takes real work – and costs real money.

    What costs, is anonymity combined with wanting to use all the regular services that the internet provides. Services that are a significant expense to the company or individual that sources them. Costs that on a per-user or per-visit basis are too small to charge directly, so are "charged" to the visitor by on-site advertising, cookies and selling the fraction of a penny's worth of tracking data to those who wish to buy it.

    If you want real privacy: nobody, anywhere, knowing anything about you then buy a tent and go to live in the wilderness - good luck with that. But nobody actually wants that much privacy. What people seem to be most annoyed about is the intrusions into our lives that advertising - the result of all the accrued costs of the "free" web services we use all the time - creates.

    In social terms, the internet is still quite new. A generation or so. Few people are worried about someone recognising them in the street - we all grew up with that and the expectations that come with it. It is actually quite nice to encounter a friendly face, smiling and showing (fleeting) interest in your wellbeing. Nor are people particularly concerned that their neighbours could know when you leave home, return, what (or who) you are carrying. Nor when you go on holiday, stay away overnight, get visited by the cops or an ambulance draws up.

    The argument that this is less important is that the information is strictly local. Nobody from the gutter press publishes every detail of everybody's life. (Not that anyone would read it). Being local means that anything stupid, illegal, brave or exceptional you do stays within the local community. The counter-argument is that everyone in that local community knows exactly who you are: they point at you, whisper as you pass by, the conversations stop when you walk into the pub ...

    However, that does not seem to concern many people. Possibly because city-life brings with it a certain degree of anonymity. One that means that few people know their next-door neighbour's name. But that also means they would step over your twitching, bleeding body on the pavement, rather than call an ambulance and therefore invade your personal space - or get involved in your life / death.

    That, also, is a form of privacy. The sort that the tent-dweller would get. When someone in the year 2106 finds the remains of your tent and a phone clutched in your cold, desiccated hand and the last message on its screen would have read "No signal".

    1. heyrick Silver badge

      Re: Privacy is free!

      This.

      When I lived in a big town in the UK, I didn't even know my neighbours. Practically nobody knew me, and a scant few people crossed paths because our routines intersected. Who they are? No idea. You didn't look, you didn't talk, you just carried on.

      Now I live in France in a tiny village where the livestock outnumbers the humans by an order of magnitude. Everybody knows who I am, even those I've never met. Failing to enthusiastically wave when driving by is a cardinal sin. And stopping to say hello usually involves a bottle of wine, pastries, and utter shock that these people know more about my life than I do. To the point where I once got myself a nice piece of lamb in a supermarket quite a way away. When I returned home, an elderly neighbour cycled up with some carrots and potatoes from her garden. She told me it will go very nicely with the lamb. How the hell...?

      In a town about ten miles away, the owner of the bar had it off with the mayor's assistant. In the sixties. Before I was even born. Her children's children still feel that. So while you can get away with a lot in a city where you barely exist, you absolutely cannot in a small town where you're known.

      Personally, my concern is not whether or not websites are tracking and profiling me. My concern is the conclusions they're drawing. With real people you have to interact, you can talk to somebody, and if someone is following you then you can ask why, what they think they're doing. And at all points if people have misconceptions, you can attempt to correct these, either amicably or through legal means.

      Online tracking, on the other hand, is unaccountable and secretive and good luck finding anybody who will admit to anything held "on you". Google's report of information held on a person is a joke. It just regurgitates information that you have given to Google either directly or indirectly (like the location tracking). It doesn't say things like "liberal Guardian reading snowflake who likes eighties music" which we all know is the sort of conclusions they'll be drawing because targetted advertising pays more. Especially important is that not so long ago my mother died of an interaction with a medication supposed to help with cancer. Given her degrading health, a lot of our technical discussions required plenty of searches to find information on the drugs, their side effects, and searching all sorts of bizarre symptoms. Do the likes of Google think I'm a cancer patient? With no access to the information they really hold on me, and nobody admitting to this, there's no way of knowing. There's no way of correcting. That's the problem.

      People in life are always going to get the wrong end of the stick and jump to conclusions. In real life you can at least try to argue for yourself. Online tracking is the same, only they go to lengths to hide and obfuscate the process.

      1. Terry 6 Silver badge

        Re: Privacy is free!

        Well apropos of what I wrote earlier, I had an idle ten minutes this evening and for no particular reason ( though I may have seen it mentioned somewhere) I googled for "charcoal". Then freewheeling a bit I searched for fuses. Then nitrates. Which, due to a section in one of the articles I read (interesting they were too) lead me to google " poisons".....So if I get a knock on the door tonight.........This was never an issue when it was just idly leafing through the pages of an encyclopaedia btw.

        1. Quotes

          Re: Privacy is free!

          And now we are all implicated because you mentioned it here

      2. Anonymous Coward
        WTF?

        Re: Privacy is free!

        EXACTLY the same here in my Spanish pueblo! Yesterday I popped downstairs to inform my neighbour that I am replacing the roof later in the year, so advised her to mount her new aircon on the side wall rather than on the roof. Needn't have bothered, she already knew who the architect was, which contractor is doing the work and that it will be finished 'before Christmas'. The aircon guys had already fixed the wall brackets and they then removed her aerial from my pole and mounted it above her balcony (ooh err Missus!).

        She doesn't speak any English and I speak no Spanish, I wonder what else she knows about me....

    2. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

      Re: Privacy is free!

      For email services I'm quite content to pay for a service and domain name to go with it, not least because it's then easy to issue different addresses to different correspondents and to chop one address if it gets abused.

      For syncing between devices there's home storage, in my case NextCloud on a Pi although I assume commercial domestic NAS devices would do that.

      As to the net being paid for by advertising, I wonder when advertisers will start to question what value they actually get. Just how many adverts does the world need?

    3. SImon Hobson Bronze badge

      Re: Privacy is free!

      Few people are worried about someone recognising them in the street - we all grew up with that and the expectations that come with it

      That's not people are bothered about. The current situation is more akin to having a vast army of people with clipboards following your every move, and I mean every move ... Went to loo, took 8 min 23 seconds, and it was a bit of a stinker. Had nooky with mistress, took ... I think you get the picture. If your neighbours were that nosy, I think that quite a few people would have a problem with it.

      And even in a village, you have some control over what the neighbours see. On the internet, control is all but taken away even if you try and have nothing to do with the evil empires. For example, I have nowt to do with FaecesBorg - but I know that people I do know are using WhatsApp, and that WhatsApp will have illegally persuaded them that illegally handing over my details (home address, phone numbers, etc).

      The thing is, had FaecesBorg "done the right thing" and offered a paid-for option without the nastiness then some of us would probably taken them up on it - yes, I can see the value of (some bits of) it's service. If they offered it now then it would be a case of "you expect anyone to trust you at all now ?". They could have built a good service legally - but they've actively done it the illegal and evil way so there's no way anyone would trust them now.

      1. heyrick Silver badge

        Re: Privacy is free!

        "And even in a village, you think you have some control over what the neighbours see."

        There, FTFY.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    "Privacy is dead!"

    Was that Eric Schmidt or Erich Mielke?

    1. Pascal Monett Silver badge
      Coat

      Re: "Privacy is dead!"

      And Goodwin's cousin rears its ugly head.

  6. codejunky Silver badge

    Shock

    So you have to pay for these services (which are not required to use) in some way or other. Historically it has been through money while now other options have opened up which has made these services much easier to access for those with less money. And this is a shock?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Shock

      For me it's fine to pay. I run my own mail server, and other services, and pay to run them.

      The problem I can't easily kill all the other slurping - use any smartphone and you can only decide if your data are sent to Apple or Google. There's no way to pay and have a phone without slurping.

      Microsoft saw that approach work and built Windows 10 around it too. Sure, you can use Linux, but the price can be very high if needed applications are not available and you have to try to use some pale copies which have a third of the features and are not compatible with what you already did. And you can't buy an Enterprise version with less telemetry if you're a private buyer.

      Apple may keep your data more private - private to Apple, of course.

      Heck, even my bank is full of tracking, and I pay for the privilege of lending my money to them already. OK, it's not lending, but I pay them to store and manage my money already.

      1. codejunky Silver badge

        Re: Shock

        @LDS

        "use any smartphone and you can only decide if your data are sent to Apple or Google. There's no way to pay and have a phone without slurping."

        This is where paying customers could use Blackberry as a smarter than dumb phone. Now its dumb phone or Apple/Google. There are alternative OS's out there but for all their effort to start up they cant really compete. Even microsoft couldnt.

        "Heck, even my bank is full of tracking"

        Your bank can track transactions limited to what you use them for. Its a convenience vs logging transactions with the bank.

        Its all trade and trade offs. Convenience often wins for most people.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          "This is where paying customers could use Blackberry"

          Unluckily my bank wants me to use its app to authenticate to its site. If it doesn't run on a Blackberry I have an issue. There's the "SPID" two-factor authentication I need to use to access government sites. That too requires an app that may not run on a phone OS that is not iOS or Android. It's now even difficult to use a dumb phone.

          "Your bank can track transactions limited to what you use them for."

          I didn't meant that. The site above is full of third party tracking (which I of course block) - and I can't easily even opt out of them - despite GDPR, I warned them already, next step is a complaint to the privacy authority.

          Even the government IO app was found by the privacy authority sending data the user didn't opt-in (and couldn't opt-out) to Australia, India and US, in violation of GDPR. When caught, they even complained about it, and a minister went to the press to say the privacy authority was slowing down the deployment of the COVID Green Pass.

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Shock

        Recently (as part of a complaint I have with them) I asked my bank for a copy of my information they hold. I got back a 200+ PDF which includes all transaction back to when I opened the account 18 years ago !

        I've now written to them again asking them under what lawful basis they are still holding that information - I only need to hold stuff for tax purposes for 7 years.

        Mind you, this is also a bank which tells you to beware of cold caller scams - and then phones you up, and expects you to hand over personal information without them identifying themselves first. Something else I've complained to them about.

        1. imanidiot Silver badge

          Re: Shock

          I'm assuming you're still an active account holder there? I don't see why a bank wouldn't reasonably just keep hold of all transaction information. I suspect legally they have to hold onto the information longer to begin with and I also don't really see a reason for them to delete it. As long as that information is securely held and only accessed for whatever legitimate purposes may exist (you or law enforcement asking for it, or internal audits or something) there is no problem in just storing or archiving that information. Imho.

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: Shock

            Barclays Bank UK recently rejected a Direct Debit from my utility supplier. When I complained they said they couldn't find any record of the long-standing Direct Debit authorisation ever existing. Basically they refused to take any responsibility for it . Fortunately he utility company were more helpful and didn't charge me their £15 "rejection" penalty.

            What was interesting was that the bank didn't inform me when a new DDR was raised by the utility company. Yet a completely new DDR from another company did cause an email to me.

            The only explanation I could think of was that - in the switch-over to metered charging the utility company gave me a large credit. Which meant they didn't have to use the DDR for a couple of years until the credit was used up.

            A recent transfer to a friend caused my bank account to be blocked for "potential fraud". The bank didn't send me any warning - filing a failure of "phone number invalid". However the help line acknowledged that I was calling from the CLI landline number registered on my account - and I also receive account emails from them. It is not mandatory to give them a mobile number - but obviously it is.

            Their fraud check had apparently not gone back a few years to see the same friend had received a similar transfer several times. Apparently they automatically (silently) delete recipient account details from your online banking if you haven't sent any money to them in a year.

            When I made a formal complaint suggesting I might change banks - the friendly help line guy was very candid about that might be digging another hole for myself.

        2. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Shock

          "I only need to hold stuff for tax purposes for 7 years."

          Apparently HMRC will go back further than that. A self-employed friend had to produce records for 12 years for HMRC before they stopped investigating him.

          Recent news articles have indicated that HMRC have made eye-watering tax demands for tax avoidance schemes they accepted as ok twenty years ago. Several suicides have resulted.

    2. doublelayer Silver badge

      Re: Shock

      "So you have to pay for these services (which are not required to use) in some way or other."

      That's simplistic or just wrong. A lot of services are effectively required even though we once did without them. Yes, at one point there were no telephones, then they were luxuries. But try having no telephone now and you'll find some things won't work. Getting jobs, for example, can be difficult if they can't contact you. Phone may die and be replaced by email, but if you want to have neither phone nor email, you'll have trouble getting employed. It's subjective how inconvenient a lack of something can be before it becomes a requirement, but there are many things quite high on the inconvenience scale which are privacy risks.

      1. codejunky Silver badge

        Re: Shock

        @doublelayer

        "But try having no telephone now and you'll find some things won't work."

        I didnt say have no phone. You can easily have a mobile that isnt a smart phone. Thats without considering a land line.

        1. doublelayer Silver badge

          Re: Shock

          That's true, but just as phones went from luxury to convenience to requirement, mobile phones and smartphones are following that same curve. I would say that mobile phones are pretty close to required now, as people expect that they'll usually be able to reach you even if you're not at home and also that you can send and receive text messages. Smartphones aren't there yet because you still can do most things people expect if you can receive SMS and standard calls, but those are easily into convenience and I predict that they too will become effectively required.

          The same things apply in other types of services. For finance, banks were once an option, and now for most positions, the option of getting paid in cash isn't available so you need one. Payment cards went from unknown to optional and now we're seeing more businesses rejecting cash payments. I don't like that last change, but that won't prevent it.

          1. codejunky Silver badge

            Re: Shock

            @doublelayer

            "Payment cards went from unknown to optional and now we're seeing more businesses rejecting cash payments. I don't like that last change, but that won't prevent it."

            Same here. I deal in cash. Its my preference. People look at me odd for going to the ATM or bank to fill my wallet but I remind them how insane it used to be considered to pay for fast food with a card.

    3. Stork

      Re: Shock

      The problem is there is no paid, no-track option and even if you don’t use the services you are profiled anyway. FB pixel?

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Attempting real privacy while self-promoting is difficult.

    I would assume that better privacy could be obtained by:

    NOT having multiple websites for self-promotion.

    NOT having a Wikipedia page about yourself (though that is normally beyond the control of the subject).

    NOT publishing your CV and complete history online for anyone to see.

    NOT having a load of publicity photos online so that anyone can identify me in the street.

    But what do I know, I'm no "Futurist, Inventor, Author, Educator and Broadcaster"? Running a 5 second search for someone who claims they like their own "privacy", should really not return so much self-generated information that is widely available.

    1. heyrick Silver badge

      Re: Attempting real privacy while self-promoting is difficult.

      Yup. Share only what you're willing to say to strangers. Keep the rest off the 'net.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Go

        Re: Attempting real privacy while self-promoting is difficult.

        If the information is not true, then is it an invasion of privacy?

        You can always fill your self-promotion with fictional bollocks that have no basis in fact. It is what many of the most enthusiastic self-promoters do anyway.

    2. doublelayer Silver badge

      Re: Attempting real privacy while self-promoting is difficult.

      That depends. You can find some information about me if you do research because I published who I worked for. I did that because other employers seem to be confused if they can't find it. That doesn't prevent other aspects of my life from being private. I didn't publish my browsing history, my financial details, or my communications. I don't post photos of myself or places I go. Privacy can mean a lot of different things, and some information can be public without all of it being so.

  8. big_D

    I don't remember...

    writing this article...

    That about sums up everything I've done, although I started earlier and I went for a private email domain and PGP.

    I never used GMail, well, I have an account, but I only ever used it to sign up to spammy or dodgy looking services. No "real" email ever goes through it.

  9. Throatwarbler Mangrove Silver badge
    Pirate

    Blokada > Disconnect

    As always, let me put in a plug for Blokada, which seems to use the same technical approach as Disconnect but is cross-platform (Android and iOS, at least) and sits below the application layer so that it blocks ads and tracking across the whole device.

  10. eldel
    Black Helicopters

    And here is the list of the cross-site trackers on this page alone ..

    https://static-42andpark-com.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/css/adtoniq-messenger-alert.css

    https://securepubads.g.doubleclick.net/tag/js/gpt.js

    https://www.googletagmanager.com/gtag/js

    https://d1hwfp4apoj7bu.cloudfront.net/js/adtoniq-www-theregister-co-uk.js

    https://www.google-analytics.com/analytics.js

    https://static.ads-twitter.com/uwt.js

    https://sc.lfeeder.com/lftracker_v1_Xbp1oaENLjL8EdVj.js

    https://go.theregister.com/k/abt_to

    1. heyrick Silver badge
      Happy

      https://securepubads.g.doubleclick.net/tag/js/gpt.js

      Secure pub ads? Are those the random flyers they hand out at the local when it's a lockin?

  11. arachnoid2

    You are you friend's worst enemy.

    Where people go out of their way to post their ideas and thoughts on social media , forums and seek to get their 15 minutes in the spotlight. Carry devices that can track and continually log their movements to the meter, use payment techniques that track every purchase, they wonder why they have no privacy.

    Its only a matter of time before western governments follow the Chinese lead and make compulsory identification of all internet and social media for full tracking to be performed, even when you make a statement about poor Aunty Milly. They will cross-check this data to ensure she is actually ill and not getting government sick pay or other services.

    Just am example there is a well known phone app that will tell you all about the caller you're receiving, all the while it will dip into your contacts list and store their data even if they don't own the app or have given permission for it to be used. Get enough hits on the same number or email and they have a semblance of the differing names they go by .

    You are your friend's worst enemy.

  12. tiggity Silver badge

    cash is king

    No tracking when you pay with the folding stuff.

    Also means you can ensure tips go to the staff when buying a meal (if you add a tip extra amount on a card payment no guarantee it goes to the staff).

    1. Quotes

      Re: cash is king

      Every note has a serial number

      1. imanidiot Silver badge

        Re: cash is king

        a serial number that very very very few people actually log. Certainly not in any normal every day scenario like paying for a meal.

    2. heyrick Silver badge

      Re: cash is king

      "Also means you can ensure tips go to the staff when buying a meal"

      You'd be depressed how many times tips are required to be put into a "box" where it gets shared out using some peculiar means whereby the person you wanted to tip gets less than the old timer battle-axe that struggles to manage to smile.

      1. Charles 9

        Re: cash is king

        And how exactly will they know you got a tip? Do they strip search you when you walk in the back?

  13. yobodo

    privacy should be here

    I'm the creator of YourDigitalRights.org, a free and open source service in the privacy space. When we started 3 years ago we decided to make the service free precisely because of the reasons outlined in this article. Almost every week I get an offer to monitize the service in some way, but I still think you shouldn't need to pay for privacy.

    One of the problems is that there is very little funding available for this sort of nonprofits. Even Mozilla with their startup studio programme, which is focused on privacy, target commercial ventures. I guess that the bottom line is that as a society we do not prioritize privacy over other ambitions.

    1. heyrick Silver badge

      Re: privacy should be here

      I suspect the problem is that many people don't understand why privacy is something that matters. They often parrot the "if you have nothing to hide" phrase, without realising that the argument itself is illogical. I don't have anything that I think I need to hide, but at the same time I don't want anybody rummaging around in my private life. That doesn't mean there are secrets, it just means sod off and mind your own business.

      Perhaps until more people understand, this will continue to be an uphill battle.

      Regarding your website - jeez, I haven't even heard of half of those data brokers. Oracle? As in that Oracle? Well, I guess if it's sleazy...

  14. minnsey231
    Meh

    How I learned to love the tracking...

    I used to care and/or worry about this stuff but having older kids has made me re-evaluate.

    For good or bad their lives are already catalogued to the n'th degree. I have discussed online privacy etc with them so they are not naive about it but for them its almost a non-issue its just the way the world works. The apps that knit their world together have access to their data, they accept it. In return they get easy access to their friends all around the world etc.

    We might look on this aghast but I think the world has probably moved on. I wonder if in the future they will look at us the same way we look at prudish victorians?

    I came around to the view that I would stop worrying. From a personal point of view the benefits, the optimisations possible in everyday life made possible by all this shared data, clearly outweigh my personal reservations.

    I don't believe I'm naive, I know the potential pitfalls, but I suspect I've come to a different conclusion about the risks to most commentators here.

    Maybe I'm just lazy/cheap :)

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: How I learned to love the tracking...

      @"Maybe I'm just lazy/cheap :)" or just too young/niave to know the value of privacy and hence what you have actually given away.

      When you get older and have to pay the cost of apathy via allowing unsupervised and unknown people to make lifechanging decisions about you bites you then where will you turn? you don't know who, where or how these people are assessing you so how can you control it.

      You find that you can't get insurance to get a job because they think you are too much of a risk, tough luck, can't get medical treatment because of that picture on social media of you and that carrier. Police think you are a radical/criminal because of some stupid joke someone told about you and refuse to do their jobs because you are "known to them". The reality of loosing privacy is that nightmare where you are too weak to defend yourself because your pursuers have all your strength and weapons ad no matter how you run they are getting closer all the time.

      When there was still privacy there were also laws that controlled what could be revealed about you without your consent and that gave you protections that the Meh! generation are going to miss once they reach an age where the information they foolishly lost control of gains valueas a weapon to use against them.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: How I learned to love the tracking...

      having older kids has made me re-evaluate

      We saw part of parenting as making sure the kids know what they are giving up if they sign their lives away like this. While they are young enough to rely on us to provide things such as mobile phones*, they don't get to sign up for Google Play (Android is perfectly usable without an account) and therefore they don't get to install just anything. The biggest concession we've made is to sideload Snapchat - one of the slightly less creepy social media apps - and mostly because their friends couldn't get their heads around Signal.

      The idea is that while they are still young, they don't have the opportunities to put something "out there" they will later regret - remember that recent story about the teenage tweets of a young England cricket player. Once they have entered adulthood and the world of work and are free to buy their own phones, hopefully they will be a bit more clued-in to what is appropriate and obviously at that point we're not going to have any control over them anyway.

      But giving them a good start - even if that means it's a little more complicated to interact with some of their friends - is better than just saying "meh".

      And it makes it less likely they'll be kept awake after bedtime on a schoolnight by constantly pinging messages back-and-forth. In fact, only the eldest even takes the phone into the room at night - the others leave theirs on the hall table.

      *none of the children had their own mobile phone until secondary school, and then only "dumb" phones, and only because school was so disorganised that hometime could be a nightmare of last-minute re-arrangements. Smartphones came with sixth-form, which kept most of the pinging away from GCSE revision.

  15. zoooosh

    Why is this a "middle class thing" ?

    We had a Class War soc at university, they were funny in their own way.

    1. Korev Silver badge
      Mushroom

      Re: Why is this a "middle class thing" ?

      We had them at Uni too:

      Unwashed: I voted for change in 1997

      Me trolling: Yeah, I voted LibDem

      Unwashed: -->

  16. Richard Pennington 1
    Paris Hilton

    Restoring privacy ...

    Someone once said that restoring privacy is like restoring virginity. Once it's gone, it's gone.

  17. hayzoos

    Poison the well - so to speak

    It seems to me the situation has reached the point where nothing you do can effectively prevent the slurpage. I was thinking that instead of trying to resist, try to obscure. Rather than giving up, give freely and give often. Try to become the 26, 30, 52, 40, 80, and 77 year old male and female white, black, blue, purple, and green unemployed self-sufficient retired woodworker, buggy whip maker, designer, theologian, CEO, capitalist, volunteer that follows .... you get the idea, I hope. You become everything and nothing. Your advertising profile becomes both distinctly identifiable yet anonymous. In effect, poison the well from which advertisers drink.

  18. Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

    Probably not US

    Probably not the US. Last year, Nutjob Trump sided with those even opposing mask mandates. He was overridden by common sense and decency, so there were mask mandates. But with most states expecting the feds to do something (not literally, but breaking out a procedure for states and localities to follow), and the feds doing nothing... there was no tracing, anywhere in the US, as far as I know.

    Now? It's horrifying, several months back Faucci (as an attempt to encourage vaccination) said people would not have to wear masks any more if they vaccinated (to me, it seemed obvious that the anti-mask, anti-vaccine assholes would take this as an opportunity to never wear a mask again.) Of course that's exactly what happened, EVERYONE quit wearing masks within days. There's like 0 mask wearing going on here now (I still put mine on, usually, and I've seen maybe 1 out of 10 wearing one once in a while, despite there still being in-the-wild, widespread Delta variant.) Vaccination rate is like 80% in some areas to as low as 20% in others. California is now re-enacting some mask mandates... but otherwise, with an out-of-control, more virulent, deadlier, and infecting some people with full vaccination, variant in the wild, it's "no masks, go ahead and have that concert or whatever you want." And you know, according to the old media, it's this huge surprise that there's a third (or is it fourth?) COVID wave running through the US.

    As for costs... I don't know. I don't think it's even a matter of money. My friend (who is rather short on cash) claims to care about privacy but won't even quit using Facebook and Facebook Messenger. It's not a matter of being able to afford privacy or not, it's just that people will claim they worry about privacy but not even take the first step.

  19. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    How much does it cost get your DNA altered? Pay somebody somebody willing to swap bodies? Pay to get reincarnated in some surrogate mother's next child?

  20. Long John Silver
    Pirate

    Class divide not unexpected

    A 'class divide' regarding information security and protection from annoyance predates the Internet.

    Nowadays, people such as readers of The Register use an array of free protections on their devices and maybe a low cost VPN subscription too. Perhaps most people with discretionary disposable income lack the (minor) technical savvy or time to make their own arrangements. Security and convenience products are already marketed to them and the market shall thrive. This regardless of the competence with which products are constructed.

    Thus, there shall always be a segment of the population largely free from experiencing the 'ad'-based nightmare.Yet, this is unlikely to discommode the marketing industry and those dependent upon it.

    Consider three population segments.

    1. People with immense disposable income. Very high end luxury goods e.g. yachts, are not advertised alongside the generality of 'consumer' products and services..

    2. Professional classes and other high income people are mostly targeted via interest groups to which they subscribe.

    3. The remainder, in UK terms the lower middle class and below, are the income generating prey for advertisers. They make up the huge bulk of the population. It is they seeking the best/cheapest bleach, washing powder, kitchen goods, DIY equipment, TVs, motor cars, holidays in some Spanish hell hole resort, and so forth. For them, general advertising and some targeted towards specific interests may actually be a boon. In aggregate these people represent a huge pool of disposable income into which to tap.

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