I'd still say one primary benefit of said HIPPA privacy is that the personal information can't be used against you. I'll admit I am disappointed to find discrimination in hiring due to medical status can be legal if it doesn't qualify under ADA, GINA or Pregnancy Discrimination Act (PDA). I'd always thought all medical info was off limits for employment screening, but I guess that is just HR keeping us from asking questions that might expose an issue in a protected category. As far as creditors being able to deny you a loan for medical reasons, I'd really hate to see people who need to take out a home equity line in order to deal with a medical crisis potentially get denied because they have a medical crisis. There are cases where lenders will get burned because of something they don't know, but allowing medical info into the mix with traditional financial info is an ethical rabbit hole that I feel is best avoided.

| Re:--> What "harm"? If a syphilis-infection, for example, increases one's danger of bankruptcy, his credit score should reflect that.

I have no doubt serious medical problems, or any number of very private factors in an individuals personal life increase their risk of default. It doesn't mean there shouldn't be a curtain that that creditors should not be able to look behind. What a person shares unwittingly may not be covered by HIPPA, but protecting people from medical discrimination is in the spirit of why HIPPA exists. In this case we are talking about search history. There is no reliable way to know that the person doing the searching is the subject of the search, or that multiple financially unrelated people aren't sharing a computer. You can't legally discriminate in hiring based on medical info, creditors shouldn't ever be allowed to use that data either, especially not unsubstantiated data collected without the individual's knowledge.

It's not enough to have liability associated with copyright violation. They have to make sure people don't have violation as an available option. Clearly that sort of freedom would be bad for business. Personally, I'd rather people have the choice of breaking any law they choose if they are willing to risk the consequences. It's a model that feels much more American to me than any attempt at crime prevention through the deprivation of free will.

For me it's NoScript, Adblock, Ghostery, BetterPrivacy and Refcontrol, on every computer, every time. Only Startpage for search. I'd love to support DuckDuckGo, but the search results aren't as effective at this point. I blackhole over 300 domains in DNS just for good measure. Google's Advertising Cookie Opt-Out plugin is useless because I clear all cookies and temp files every time I shut down. Without using TOR, that's about as good as I know how to get it. I also null route over 100 foreign /8 IP address blocks, but that is about security rather than tracking.

Yes, everything is being tracked everywhere, to the greatest degree the consumer allows it to occur. The credit reporting agencies behavior overall is really a cause for concern. I think the central job these companies do should be firewalled off from all other commercial interests and activities. There is a risk of non-financial data creeping into financial evaluation of borrowers and job seekers and that has a lot of potential for harm. The credit reporting agencies are also guilty of sharing personal info in some very inappropriate ways. The Experian incident being a fine example: http://krebsonsecurity.com/201... . It's basically impossible to have a normal existence in the U.S. without allowing these companies to have your personal information. If we can't trust them to safeguard our data and use data appropriately, then none of us can be safe from fraud and unreasonable discrimination, no matter how careful we are in our own lives.

The intentions behind stupidity aren't all that important. I'll call scrapping this program a win for the kids. There may be a valid technical solution to some problems in education, but iPads, conventional laptops or any device + Pearson is not the right solution. Technology won't solve teaching to the test and it won't stop schools from pushing to much of the work off to homework when they could do more with the classroom time. Very little percentage of education is well suited to education software and my own experiences with education software lead me to believe it's a format where very little is retained.

What if we simply allow the rights holder should set the price for their work? Isn't that the point of having a copyright? Not all art has the same value and the rights holder should determine their own marketing strategy. Most likely then these services would have to vary the subscription price based on usage, which seems reasonable to me. Everybody except the consumer is losing in the current model and the consumer just gets trained to undervalue the content they consume.

Did someone say spyware? I heard revenue stream. I'm just glad companies are working so hard to enhance my shopping experience. Adware that purposefully circumvents data encryption shouldn't be seen as a criminal violation of the CFAA, clearly they are just enhancing it.

I certainly agree in theory, but I'm a realist on this one. In order to truly have anything and everything be opt-in to the extent we'd want it would kill tens if not hundreds of billions in commerce. It would be a political non-starter. If it went anywhere with legislators they would poke so many loopholes in it, most of the value would be lost. I'd much rather have a real opt-out in a central database that puts legal teeth behind any violation as well as other obvious stuff like forcing respect for do-not-track in HTTP. Currently they do what they want and for most forms of tracking they have no legal obligation to offer true opt-out. Right now my home address is published on the web and I have no legal right to demand its removal because they claim to be able to publish info obtained from public records. I do agree that the default on all agreements should required to be opt-out, but that alone won't stop tracking and information collection by parties that do so without my even being asked.

The largest problem they will face ongoing is most good engineers and hacker types want absolutely nothing to do with the government. They will be stuck trying to figure out how to play an A game with C players. Go read the Cyber Warrior Field Guide soldier, we need boots at the keyboard!

Judging from what they show in figure 4. this looks more like a CDN or caching system than a fast lane. I've heard others say before that if they inspect the traffic they lose the copyright safe harbor protection granted to service providers. It makes me wonder if there is some legal change (Maybe TPP) that gives them more ability.

I don't fully agree that the general public is so unaware of the capabilities. I think they have generally gotten complacent and resigned to the idea that this is just how it is now. They think the privacy losses that they generally think of as trivial, don't have that much impact. The impact really isn't felt by the average person. They use Facebook and a multitude of apps and gadgets and they don't see any current tangible evidence of harm. Many people don't know what McCarthyism was let alone have any perception that it could happen again. All the harm currently is subtle and happens mostly in the shadows. The biggest tangible harm I feel in present day life is that realistically a person in modern society CANNOT have privacy. The opt-outs and extremely limiting choices one would have to make to maintain a decent level of privacy are completely impractical. You would have to sacrifice many freedoms and experiences in order to have a good level of privacy and you would have to do so to such a degree that the act of protecting privacy would be more harmful to daily life than any reasonable person would be willing to tolerate. We need privacy to be the default and its sacrifice to be only through informed consent. We need services and products to generally offer the ability to be used, while NOT agreeing to the loss of privacy. Agree or don`t use the product, should not be the only choices. Much like we have a national do-not-call registry, we need a national do-not-track registry that covers the individual and any information source they choose to register.

How does interfering with user encryption this way not qualify as a violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) ?

I've added a full wallet sized sheet of Mylar. I need to test that theory since it isn't fully enclosed, but maybe an easy solution. I'd much rather not have any stupid RFID cards at all, not that I'm even sure any of them are such, as I don't use it to pay.

The in store tracking can often be stopped by shutting off WiFi on your smart phone. Camera's can be involved there too, but they generally don't know who you are or link to previous visits without the WiFi bit. The purchases often are linked to using a rewards card or some such thing that gives them a way to link your purchases, not that every store doesn't have your credit card purchase history, but hopefully only for that store. I'd be curious if anyone has info on how much the credit card companies know about our specific purchases and how much detail they share.