Your private data as a "human right"

Any data you care enough about to not give to “the cloud”

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It’s a few months since I heard about it initially, from my recollection, it should be based on a law which states that an individuals private life is inviolable, in Danish it’s referred to as “Privatlivets fred” and/or “Privatlivets ukrænkelighed”. Not entirely sure what it’s called elsewhere. This includes using information to for instance monitor you, or to enter your home without a warrant. Then there are the exceptions, Tax department here have something like 230 different exceptions, which allow them to enter your home without consent or warrant.

Yeah, mix up private/personal data, for me it’s all the same really. I just have a hard time understanding why it is so important to store all this data about everyone everywhere. I get that some is needed, and would be rather beneficial, but majority of it is irrelevant for our existence.

Corporations and money machines aside, then it should be for the individual. What is personal, as in pictures, home movies and whatever it is everyone saves, keep it at home. Which, should then cover it under the law which protects your home.

Here it’s largely the ones that vote on a law in senate, that don’t uphold them, or they for some reason are exempt from. At least, very few are prosecuted, as in, I can’t remember a single one over the last 30-40 years. Mostly here tho, agencies and the like tend to uphold the law fairly well. Very little trouble there.

Just a fun little side note when it comes to private data, Danish government sent DVDs to the Chinese embassy containing all data they have on every inhabitant. Nothing happened, task force reached the front door of parliament, then the trail went cold. Another case, a police email servers got wiped for all trace of correspondence between police and parliament when a task force came close. Even witnesses has stated parliament members of being involved, but no evidence, claimed heresay. Case ends. And the list goes on.

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Couple of interesting things that might be worth noting.

This is most definitely a VC funded company. They make no money and their plan to make money is hope enough people join, get people to pay them for their data, and then take a cut(?).

How does Hu-manity.co make money?

The company was founded on a simple principle: We have to help a lot of people first and continue to help them, in order to be successful.

Once enough people have joined the movement, and we are able to set up the pathways for people to get paid for their data, we will be charging a small fee to the buyers of the data in order to give them access to these higher quality data sets.

They are for-profit, including their ‘science’ company. Not that that’s bad, but worth noting.

I’m not sure it even makes sense.

On the one hand they’re saying they don’t collect your data

Is Hu-manity.co using my data?

We do NOT collect or store your data.

On the other hand, they say they do collect your data by tracking it. Although im not sure how they plan to track data they dont have access to.

How the #My31 app works

The app is a tool that powers a movement for people to own their data as property. Anyone who claims their data as their property on our app (which is free) will get a digital title of ownership for their data (like a title for a car or house). Then, our blockchain powered technology tracks and traces an individual’s data as it moves through existing marketplaces. This process provides security, trust and transparency.

On the app, users can manage how, where and if they would like their data used. As certain movement goals are reached, further functionalities will be unlocked. To learn more about the movement goals click here

I think i get their goal. But i’m not convinced. Their company is essentially entirely based on the hope of getting enough people to join to be able to change laws in a country. (the US first i presume). I don’t see how they plan to make this achievable.

The founders of this company also started https://www.humanapi.co/ which probably explains their initial focus on health care data, and probably why they came to the idea of having more control over your “inherent data”.

Im unsure on how accurate crunchbase is, if it tracks all funding? (does anyone know… i just stumbled across it)

https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/hu-manity-co#section-overview

It suggests they have available 5.5M of funding, with 48 people to pay, and no foreseeable date for actually generating cash.

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Unless your country is severely breaking the law. your call data isnt private data, its metadata :man_shrugging:, and no doubt your not being monitored without a warrant. If your laws allow that, then the best thing to do is to push for a change in law.

But its not. personal data can be private data but not all private data i personal data. The laws specifically look at what is PII personally identifiable information, and have controls which need to be in place specifically for this type of data because it can identify you.

I don’t really get what you mean here? If you choose to put data on googles servers that’s a choice you made. You don’t have to. No one is forcing you to, you choose to put your stuff on google, and agree to let them mine it.

You get what you pay for. If you don’t want your data mined, dont sign up to a free service that says they’ll mine your data.

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Blockchain tech would be ideal in tracking ownership in a decentralized way. that way, there doesn’t need to be REST api’s from up-teen different endpoints for everyone who want’s to pull data.

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Indeed they are, which is why a lawsuit has been set in motion. With current government 3-4 newly formed laws had to be pulled because they were in direct violation of human rights. Things like kicking children out of the country, leaving them without a country, because a parent went to Syria to fight. But that’s a whole other discussion.

Yes we are. I can contact my phone company, and demand insight in my data, will cost a maximum of €15, and I can get a log with all location data, automatically generated as i move around with my cell phone in my pocket. This is the first reason the lawsuit got started in the first place, the one who initiated it, requested his files from supplier, and got 180 A4 pages, with location data, he was able to pinpoint addresses of people he visited, could see when he left for work, when he was in town partying.

Yes, you’re right, legally there is a distinction. For me personally, there’s not, personal and private data is on my home address, as much as possible, and only a warrant can make me show it. Key point being, if I want to play along.

Ok, sry. What I meant was, ones data should be on ones home address, seeing that the private rights one has in ones own home, should cover the data that is stored there, therefore it should be reasonably protected, compared to when it’s on for instance cloud servers. At least for cloud servers we have GDPR now, which helps a bit.

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You don’t lose any rights. If you have x data in your home, and the government has a warrant to get x data, they get x data by going into your home and taking it.

If you have x data on google, and the government has a warrant to get x data, they get x data by going to google and taking it.

There’s no difference except maybe that in the first case you know about it because you were in at the time.

There’s maybe a case that you should be notified of a warrant, but even then there are cases that you would not be notified as it would alert you to an investigation and hinder that investigation. But there is likely a case here that you should be notified for certain warrants, maybe.

But theres still no difference between the execution of a warrant on data in your home and that in google.

Do you believe its not reasonably protected? Data in the cloud in almost all cases has more protection than what you could ever possibly make yourself.

I think this is a difference in meaning. Your email to anyone is private data for example. A letter to another person is private data. But its not necessarily personal data. Private just means that it is restricted to certain people.

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Their website reminds of this place I went to a job interview at years ago. Was for a networkmanager position and was a “technology company”

Walked into an office full of 20 year old women and sports memorabilia and TVs blasting sports center in every room (found out the “boss” loved sports). Interviewed with the lady, she couldn’t tell me anything about who they were or what they do, didnt know anything about the position i was applying for, got nothing but that she liked me. Left very confused.

Go check out their social media afterwards and its a bunch of kids in suits involved in some insane pyramid scheme sales cult and going to seminars on self worth with overproduced motivational videos.

All these places look and act exactly the same is what I am getting at.

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If you look at the founders linked in they do have some background in some of the aspects of this company builds on (medical data etc.). So not complete buffoons. Though i still dont think itll go anywhere.

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If they can read it. Already experienced this, got picked up in school by police, holding a warrant. Apparently i looked at servers I wasn’t supposed to. So they took everything with a cable in my flat. They could however not do much, since the data was unreadable to them, and I didn’t understand why. Gave me six months without sentencing and a minor fine, would’ve gotten more if the prosecutor wouldn’t have been an idiot. Lucky for me.

If it’s on google servers, they can read it. But I see your point.

It is however not only in relation to a warrant. It’s about safety of private data you’re able to store yourself, is safer in your possession than on a server somewhere. For one for security reasons, since no hacker will spend time getting 1 persons info compared to thousands on a cloud installation. Secondly for the sake of ones home being private, and therefore protected by the laws i mentioned earlier.

Oh, I believe they do everything they can to protect it, too expensive not to, and they know their shit. For someone that doesn’t pay attention to protecting their data themselves, or simply can’t be bothered spending time on it. Then it’s better on cloud or in case there’d be some form of hardware product specifically designed for protecting it, it could be at home. Key is, user has minimal control over what happens, and can do other things with their time.

For the reason i mentioned just above with hacker and 1 persons info vs 1000, if the person knows what has to be done. For instance adds encryption of the data, and it therefore wouldn’t be viable for any hacker to gain access to.

Ok, let me rephrase. Any data I generate, anywhere, I do what I can for it to not be linkable to me personally, and if it is, I’m aware of it, and try to get as much control of it as is reasonable, to prevent as much of it in public or in any system that can be queried. If I contact local government, i ask what they do with my data, at times I request a view of what they have stored. If in a job interview, I ask what they do with any info I might give them, just out of curiosity to gauge their reaction. 99/100 I talk to now, they get all squeamish, say something something GDPR, we destroy it. Besides, any email to anyone is directly linkable to you, so, to some degree it is personal, metadata. Unless of course steps are taken to prevent this. ISPs are also supposed to log everything for a considerable amount of time, when I worked for one of the larger ones here, it was 5 years, this is however quite some years ago, so probably changed. That aside, yes, you’re right, there is a distinction

To get back on track. I think their intention is good, what they want to achieve sounds good. I’m just not too sure about their implementation or ability to implement it.

If however, it becomes a medium success or better, it could perhaps, down the line, be a factor in getting these rights written into an actual law, which would be quite nice.

In relation to medical data, this will be an uphill battle, would have to get past big pharma for one, they’ve already started patenting sequences of the human genome. And they will need loads of data to be able to move forward.

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Contracting and entering into voluntary agreement is also a human right.

Therein lies the problem.

The majority of the people bitching about what these companies do with their data voluntarily gave it up for the sake of convenience or expediency.

The involuntary collection of it is a problem, but people who can make the claim that it’s involuntary are in the super-minority.

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Exactly, although, the involuntary part for most, lies in the fact that they didn’t read the EULA.

Unfortunately, yeah. On the other hand, as long as majority have food and entertainment, they are happy, so why bother considering any consequences. For me the day it changed radically, to actively work against being tracked, was when I was asked to take a picture and rate the store I just left. I never use GPS, I look at a map for 10 seconds, and remember how to get where I need to go. The first thing I do with new phone is to disable GPS and disallow all apps from using it. It was sneakily re-enabled because of a phone update.

Exactly, although, the involuntary part for most, lies in the fact that they didn’t read the EULA.

EULA’s are garbage for a lot of reason, and they have lots of problem. I would argue (but the government would not) that most of thise are unenforcable, bad-faith contracts. But that’s not the point.

If the EULA for Facebook was:

We can do whatever we want with any and all of your data. You can’t use any of our services if you don’t consent.

People still would, because those services provide an insane amount of value, which is something people seem to forget about when talking about privacy. The black and white thinking that pervades our social and political discourse these days applies to this, too.

You can see it even in the people who think a bit more critically about privacy. The “get paid for using your data” that inspired this post often fails to directly address a critical question - how much (in real currency values) is your privacy worth?

You can get a privacy-respecting email account with Kolab Now for less than $5 a month, using your own domain, and if you don’t like their service you can download the source code and take your data elsewhere. It’s all open source. But Gmail is still the biggest email provider, and even among people who see that as a problem, Protonmail and Riseup aren’t uncommon.

A much more real, practical problem is that people aren’t willing to pay trivial sums of money for services that are extremely valuable.

Spotify gives you access to nearly all the music ever created in a searchable, curated platform, and the majority of users are willing to pay nothing for that. People are perfectly okay using the Netflix account of their friend or family member, even though they spend half of their waking life watching it.

On the internet, you pay for things with money (by being the customer) or you pay for things with data (by being the product), and things that aren’t paid for go away.

It’s a basic economics, which is something fewer and fewer people on the internet seem to grasp.

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As long as entertainment value and ease of use is high, it doesn’t really matter. Unless someone would make decisions for them, it won’t change.

I’ve talked with quite a few about these things, in close to all cases i get the answer “It’s too difficult to understand”, “it’s the easiest not to bother”, “I don’t mind, I have nothing to hide”, while they post pictures of their children without consent or share pictures of their evening meal.

Besides, if many of these things are removed, many would run into a dopamine deficiency, get shakes or plain and simple have a melt down.

Oh, once had a longer talk with a friend of mine’s girlfriend. She was writing her masters on physiological changes due to use of technology. She told me about research which showed that it was possible to measure a decline in brain activity, due to reduced oxygen reaching the brain because of the head being bend forward to look at a phone/tablet for too long periods of time.

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