sleepundertheleaves

The banality of surveillance | On an internet where everything is tracked, our privacy is maintained mainly because our data is too boring and time consuming to sort through. But AIs don't get bored.

https://infosec.pub/post/43076069

The banality of surveillance | On an internet where everything is tracked, our privacy is maintained mainly because our data is too boring and time consuming to sort through. But AIs don't get bored. - Infosec.Pub

Lemmy

Mar 7 at 3:24pmWeb
Show threadgressenMar 7
How can you argue that trivial data somehow implies private data?
Show threadHondMar 7
Trivial looking data can be very relevant and private. Eg i saw a talk how just scraping the names of authors and the time when they publish articles on a news site can be used to make likely conclusions who is taking vacations “together”. Thats just two parameters of probably dozens or even hundreds of the data we leave behind by using tech.
Show threadfreshcowMar 7
The term you’re looking for is “security through obscurity”. The effort require to create a coherent picture from that scattered information is more than its worth, so it doesn’t get done. The argument here being that AI changes that calculation because it removes the effort part.
Show threadgressenMar 7
Security through obscurity has been disproven long ago and AI sifting through your obscure data with ease is a great example how this approach doesn’t work.
Show threadAA5BMar 7

This was likely the case before ai as well. Collect the data, aggregate the data, we’ll find uses for it later.

I actually had this conversation with a startup company in the 2000’s. Their user profile forms were a mess so they were looking for help to fix the, and secure the data. But the root cause is they were collecting a ton of unnecessary data with no validation, verifiability, or constraints

Me: why are you collecting all this data?

Them: we might need it later

Me: so you don’t have a use now and you’re not making any effort to make the data clean enough to be useful. The best fix is to just stop collecting most of this

Them: no

Show threadkungenMar 8
That’s also why the NSA and such stores sooo much encrypted data. They most likely don’t have the power to break it yet, but they will, and/or utilize when flaws are found.