It’s 2 that I’m worried about; or, rather, not specifically worried for myself, but think is an interesting problem.
If information is really supposed to be private (credit card number) then you’re right, straightforward cryptography is the answer. But a lot of the time, we make information public, with the understanding that the viewer is a person, not a bot, and a person who has some reason to look (most people viewing my LW posts are people who read LW.) We want it to be public, sure, but we don’t plan it to quite as public as “all instantly assemblable and connectable to my real name.” In practice there are degrees of publicness.
As a personal issue, yeah, I’d like my job and support network to be the kind that wouldn’t be shocked by what they find about me.
Hm. OK, just brainstorming here; not sure if this idea is valuable.
Suppose you found a way to -detect- when someone was assembling your data? Like if all your public posts had little electronic watchdogs on them that reported in when they were viewed, and if a sufficiently high percentage of the watchdogs report in on the same minute, or if a sufficiently broad cross-section of the watchdogs report in on the same minute, then you know you’re being scanned, and the watchdogs try to trace the entity doing the scanning?
And then if all the people who didn’t like being bot-scanned cooperated and shared their information about who the scanners were so as to trace them more effectively and confirm the scanners’ real identities? You could maybe force them to stop via legal action, or, if the gov’t won’t cooperate, just fight back by exposing the private info of the owners/employees of the bots?
It’s 2 that I’m worried about; or, rather, not specifically worried for myself, but think is an interesting problem.
If information is really supposed to be private (credit card number) then you’re right, straightforward cryptography is the answer. But a lot of the time, we make information public, with the understanding that the viewer is a person, not a bot, and a person who has some reason to look (most people viewing my LW posts are people who read LW.) We want it to be public, sure, but we don’t plan it to quite as public as “all instantly assemblable and connectable to my real name.” In practice there are degrees of publicness.
As a personal issue, yeah, I’d like my job and support network to be the kind that wouldn’t be shocked by what they find about me.
Hm. OK, just brainstorming here; not sure if this idea is valuable.
Suppose you found a way to -detect- when someone was assembling your data? Like if all your public posts had little electronic watchdogs on them that reported in when they were viewed, and if a sufficiently high percentage of the watchdogs report in on the same minute, or if a sufficiently broad cross-section of the watchdogs report in on the same minute, then you know you’re being scanned, and the watchdogs try to trace the entity doing the scanning?
And then if all the people who didn’t like being bot-scanned cooperated and shared their information about who the scanners were so as to trace them more effectively and confirm the scanners’ real identities? You could maybe force them to stop via legal action, or, if the gov’t won’t cooperate, just fight back by exposing the private info of the owners/employees of the bots?
If you found such a way, then a lot of interesting consequences would follow.
Of course, there is no such way for the same reason that the history of DRM is a history of failure.