Agree. Hope he (and every other asshole currently doing this with everything from soap to canned beans) loses everything.

No, I don't. That information (the "short form") is perfectly understandable, and as you say, constitutionally mandated for good reason. However, it's not the information I had to provide as of the last census. I was one of the lucky people who received a "long form," and it contains quite a lot more than that. I was unclear in my original post; the collecting of information likely to be targeted by identity thieves, etc is what I have an issue with - and it's at least one reason census data would be targeted by such a group.

Actually, dipshit, that's not at all what it's used for. While that may have been one of original the intentions, it now contains massive amounts of PII (assuming someone with your carrot-stick level of intelligence won't have the foggiest idea what that is, so go look it up if you can figure out how), which is not at all necessary for any such purpose. Does the government need to know, for example, your height and weight and the names of your children in order to know where to build a new school? Wouldn't a count of people within a certain area and their age ranges be sufficient? If so, why ask for names?

Of course, I'm also assuming that someone like yourself who lives in his mother's basement and can't comprehend the need to wipe his ass also believes government handouts (like his mommy's handouts) are a necessary part of life. Unfortunately, you're not worth the resources you've consumed in your short, meaningless, miserable life, much less those I (and your mother, as actual contributing citizens) have had to work to provide you with.

No, this is not an internet problem. This is a government problem and a societal problem. The issue with the census is that govt is forcibly collecting information about citizens it doesn't need for any reasonable purpose. Just the act of collecting that information creates a vulnerability; having that kind of information about citizens in a central location (no matter how secure) makes it a target for bad actors. The way to solve that problem is to not collect the information in the first place.

Misinformation about electoral candidates is also not an internet problem. Misinformation would exist with or without the internet, and those who seek out misinformation will find it regardless of whether an internet exists, and those desiring to spread misinformation will find a way to do so, regardless of the internet. More regulations on the internet are not the answer. But even more problematic is the fact that the misinformation is not just being spread by the Alex Jones' and other rabble rousing con men; misinformation has become a part of the US electoral process, such that it is routinely spread by the candidates themselves, their parties, and major "news" organizations, with the blatant purpose of swinging the election toward their favored candidates (or when spread by the candidate, themselves). Therefore, again, this is a problem in our society. The internet is just a medium all of these bad actors use. Destroying it with over-regulation is the same as destroying the ability to drive cars because bad people sometimes use them to hurt other people.

That's a good point. Until tech companies are willing to provide full transparency, using something like that is definitely helpful if you have to use a privacy violating device (like most of us do).

Just having full transparency, at a level even a "non-technically-capable" user can audit and review, is a step forward and would solve a lot of these issues. If I can, beyond a reasonable doubt, know what data is recorded, where it's stored, and exactly who has access to it, I might be willing to own something like an Alexa device. Not having that transparency means I will never voluntarily own such a thing. If I must own such a thing (like a cell phone), I'll always "hack" my own privacy protection into it to the fullest extent possible.

Better, of course, would be having full control over who sees my data and when. In this case, never did Microsoft disclose, even obliquely, that random contractors in China would have access to Skype recordings - much less allow users to choose whether or not to allow that to happen. Microsoft's financial penalty for this failure should be extreme, to the point of crippling the company - otherwise they (and other tech manufacturers) have no incentive to change that behavior.

I agree, and hopefully Apple and others have started to at least suspect what's on the horizon. I'm convinced that this decade will see a pretty severe backlash against privacy violations. If that happens, it may result in a couple of things. The first might be an increase in government regulation around it. That will probably be unhelpful; as the past 20 years have shown, government generally can't be trusted to 1) genuinely care about privacy, or 2) design or enforce laws that actually protect it. Since most government regulation is driven by lobbyists, and designed and enforced by the most ignorant and incompetent, my belief is that government regulation will likely just cause unnecessary collateral (like raising the cost of innovation or even making it impossible to implement one's own privacy controls), and not make any meaningful changes in privacy protection itself.

The second possibility is that the revenue generated by products that currently cause serious privacy violations will plummet to the point that the manufacturers of those devices respond by enforcing their own policies around protecting privacy - hopefully designing transparent systems like what you've mentioned. And that might lead to meaningful change. Tech companies, of course, also can't be trusted to really care about privacy, but they do care about profits, and if genuinely protecting privacy and making a profit become inseparable, meaningful change will probably occur.

I don't think most reasonable people mind trading a little privacy for convenience, at least in some cases. For example, I don't necessarily mind my past purchase history at Amazon being analyzed by an automated algorithm (and - once my personal information has been removed - by a tech team) to show me other useful products. It just needs to be very clear - and verifiable - that they're the only people who will ever have access to it. The consumer must know exactly what they're trading for the given convenience; if my purchase history is also being reviewed by the IRS, NSA, border patrol, mortgage company, and the Fearless Leader of Pottsylvania, I'll probably just find my own useful related products, thanks.

Look, I share your horror but if you're surprised by this you're just not paying enough attention.

If you decide to obtain ANY device that you 1) place in your home 2) that has a microphone and/or camera and 3) can be activated remotely to record audio/video in the cloud, you HAVE to assume that everything that happens in your home within earshot of the mic or view of the camera will be recorded and viewed by a human you don't know. You simply cannot assume you have any privacy in that space once one of those things is present.

Otherwise, you're just blindly trusting the company who made the device, all of their employees, all of their associated 3rd party vendor, and all of those associated companies' employees, not to do that - and you have no reason whatsoever to do that. That's potentially 100's of thousands of people or even more. You don't know any of them, you have no idea whether they're trustworthy or not, and most of them (at least) have no incentive at all to maintain your privacy.

So if you want to use one of these things, that's your decision and no one else's business - but you really should at least be honest with yourself about the implications first.

Second that. I don't see the problem here; seems like these folks have figured out a way to make things that would normally turn into pollution desirable and valuable.

Ah, the power of suggestion. Combine that with the power of peer pressure and a shitload of minds that haven't the slightest idea of how to think rationally, and you've got a recipe for madness.

What the hell have we become.

Interesting. So saying despicable things makes them enemy combatants? I despise the alt-right as much as you do, as the sniveling little shitheads they are. But careful, cowboy.

No, it isn't. Extortion is defined as the use of force or threat to achieve a gain of some sort for the party threatening the use of force (i.e., I put a gun to your head and say "I won't shoot you if you give me $100, otherwise I will").

It also isn't blackmail unless Wikileaks is attempting to achieve some sort of gain for themselves by threatening to release the information publicly unless these companies fail to pay them.

In other words, if wikileaks isn't gaining anything (money etc) from this, it isn't extortion or blackmail. It's Wikileaks allowing the tech companies to fix the holes the CIA created before they release information about those holes to the general public - thereby possibly allowing the tech companies to save face. That makes sense, since it's quite possible that it's no fault of any of these companies that the CIA decided to completely trash their products in the name of spying on everyone. The damage is already done, in other words, and there's really nothing stopping Wikileaks from just telling the world what the damage is. It's kind of nice of them to give Microsoft etc some breathing room first, so that when they do release details on the damage done, they can also include information that shows these tech companies have already fixed the problems.

Beat me to it. And then to think that a border/customs agent administered it? And then checked his answers? Come on.

I'm just hazarding a f*cking guess here, but of the two of us, I'm betting I'm the only one who's actually ever been in said courtroom.

*Sigh.* Again, what I meant was that SHE doesn't need an attorney and therefore wouldn't necessarily be required to foot that expense.

I am really curious, though, for the entertainment value (even if the saner part of me may regret asking). What other "class of legal beagle" were you referring to?

Sorry, what I meant (and I wasn't clear) was that she should wait until they try to come after her for it. A ding on her credit report, harassing her for the money, selling the account to a 3rd party and representing this amount as correct, her inability to get credit at another company for a cell phone because of the report, etc might qualify as damages.

Not being a lawyer, I wouldn't make a prediction on the "emotional distress" component, though stranger things have happened...

Wow. Uh, no! First off, if she sues them (which is what I was clearly indicating should happen), SHE's the plaintiff. And no, even if they were to sue her, they'd have to do it in the county of her residence, or the court has no jurisdiction. You can't just sue someone in NY when your business is in CO and she lives in GA, because you think the NY court is going to rule in your favor.

Secondly, regarding arbitration - even if they produce a contract that they can prove she agreed to (far from a certainty), they're probably not going to want to actually go through with arbitration on a $10K claim.

Thirdly, your last comment is so asinine I'm not sure how to respond to it. The arbitrator is not biased against the litigant because there's some shady deal in which they make "millions" by Verizon bringing them cases. Verizon (and all major corporations) generally avoid actual courtrooms and arbitration whenever possible because it costs one hell of a lot of money (even if they win). So, no, that "obvious bias" doesn't exist except in your fevered imagination. If there's a bias (and I'm certainly not insinuating that the AAA is always as impartial as it claims to be) it wouldn't be for that reason.