[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_Communications_Priv...
It's actually super weird, because US culture has a strong component of distrust of government. But the government is pretty good at making people fear crime, terrorism, etc., which allows them to get the people to "trust" them with mass surveillance and other privacy invasions.
That is such a horrible idea, I go on vacations longer than that. My Dropbox should be deleted if I don't log in for 4 months?
"Sorry, you can't log into this NCAA bracket website because you haven't used it since last year."
"Why would I use it more than once a year?"
That's the bigger injustice, tbqh.
I'd rather see my family photos leaked to hackers than see them purged from existence forever because I forgot to log in enough.
I found this sentence interesting, as it contained positive and normative statements that I disagree with, with a non-sequitor between them. You say that you have no contract with them, even though you agreed to some sort of 'user agreement'. Then you say that you forgot about it, and that makes your faulty memory their problem. They have to make sure your data is secure for you because you... just don't bother to pay any attention to where you're leaving it? Should they also be responsible for checking your password against known breaches, to make sure it's not compromised? Where does this end?
As a bonus, I get the “bragging rights” of having nearly the oldest possible steam account (it can now vote).
I can see simple things happening though that work towards this; for my pet project I just coded a feature that hashes email addresses of inactive (3 months without any interaction) and using another differently salted hash of their email address (which we then no longer have after this) to encrypt their data. They can still login, which restores their account and data without them noticing, but they will never receive email and possible breaches hurt less.
This is the sort of experience that you want. In case you don't want to click through, this is someone with over 1700 hours in an MMO who lost all their progress and items because they took a break and missed the GDPR-related opt-in to get their account transferred.
I'm super happy I don't have to worry about storage for my large Steam collection.
Or not purposefully obscured.
Those most be some fancy barber shops that you need online accounts for.
Very reasonable and totally with the GDPR rules as well, as long as they purge the data after a certain time.
If a data aggregator can create a timeline of an individuals life, watching personality traits, social graphs, income, travel, routine, biometrics and health, stress and recreation, political affiliation, brand and taste preferences, savings, debt, credit, and social media influence traces, local, regional, and national cultural influences, and so on... that email archive is gold.
You can then create predictive models that let you target products, politics, music, media, and so on. It's not about spying on individuals, it's about manipulating populations. It's about rent extraction and wealth consolidation using tools of influence that negate consent. It augments abuses by law enforcement, corrupting the principles by which democratic governments are supposed to operate by hiding tyranny behind EULAs and TOS and private sector proxies.
Imagine a gpt-3 type model, except that instead of predicting text, it's designed to predict behaviors and psychological effects. That gives you a tool that's got a Darren Brown level of manipulation potential that you can scale. It's never going to be 100% accurate at the individual level, but you can target huge collections of individuals to modulate their lives through advertising and media sequencing.
Source: https://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/netzpolitik/bundesrat-stoppt...
It's not as visible for outsiders, because nations with corruption issues usually also have police and office workers essentially doing shakedowns to do their jobs, and that's not really a thing in Germany.
What is quiet widespread is politicians and office worker enriching themselves either directly from budgets theyre responsible for or by doing things for corporations which pay them handsomely.
Of course, the existence of a mechanism to enable this is itself a thing which can be exploited by the exact same criminals I’m most concerned about with data retained by private businesses, so it’s not much of an improvement even though the attack surface is probably smaller.
[0] and indeed this is why I was already looking to leave the UK even before Brexit; the Investigatory Powers Act gives the Welsh Ambulance Service access to anyone’s “internet connection records” without a warrant.
Private corporations at least do it for money. Governments do it for power. I think it’s a hard case to make that that’s a better reason than to do it for money.
But… money is one kind of power, so I don’t think it’s “better”.
Given what happened in living memory to a previous government in (East) Germany that abused surveillance power, I both accept the concern, and yet also don’t expect it to actually apply here, at least not until about 2040 when the last people who remember experiencing the receiving end of it retire.
Also large enough corporations tend to do things for power reasons rather than money, as once you are a billionaire your money is mostly just a means to exert power so trading money for power is what you do. And at that size they start to intermingle with governments, making the acts of the company hard to separate from acts of the government.
How would they go on about infecting a PC?
Crazy that the app stores play along.
I could easily imagine a system that leaves case by case decisions completely to law enforcement practitioners, but constrains them with paper trail requirements (accountability, I do agree with that part) and, most importantly but unfortunately kind of irreconcilable with the legal mindset, an artificial quota that forces them to actually think about the case. I believe that a system like that might in the end lead to less frivolous eavesdropping than one where everything is fair game as soon as they get someone authorized to sign off a form. "I got it signed off" goes a long way when it comes to questions of moral licencing: suddenly it becomes someone else's job to feel bad about it if maybe someone should.
The Vorratsdatenspeicherung counteracted that principle, if it falls away storing this data gets really complicated.
Middle-Left coalitions are actually a pretty good idea.
And yes, social media providers have to get their act together if they want to do business in Europe.
I didn't spend much time to think about it so I might be totally wrong but anonymizing IP addresses is probably not easy unless we give up aggregation. I think that anything that uniquely maps IP addresses also becomes personal data, e.g. cookies.
[1] https://www.whitecase.com/publications/alert/court-confirms-...
An example: here in the UK the limit on taking legal action on most civil issues is 6 years. This means it is perfectly reasonable to have a 6 year retention policy and indeed that's what most companies do.
Germans are quite pissed about their privacy, and for good reason. I also like that they are taking matters into their hands.
