Things which don't (really) affect me
I was reading the news -- I want to say “reading the paper” but that’s really not the right expression for an online news site which doesn’t even have a printed version -- and I had opinions about things which don’t affect me.
The US now requires that most visa applicants list their email addresses and their usernames for social media sites.
I suspect that many people who’s online activity indicates criminal dealings or concerning extremist tendencies simply wouldn’t admit to any incriminating accounts. A.A. Milne’s poem “The Good Little Girl” springs to mind: I went to the Zoo, and they waited to say:
“Have you been a good girl?”
“Have you been a good girl?”
Well, what did they think that I went there to do?
And why should I want to be bad at the Zoo?
And should I be likely to say if I had?
I don’t think this is going to be a very effective method of screening people who are a threat to security, so it just becomes a gross invasion of privacy for everyone else.
Especially because this would be connecting online pseudonyms with legal identities, and people can have very good reasons for being pseudonymous on the internet.
Of course, listing your online accounts in a visa application doesn’t mean that your boss, students, grandparents, et cetera, are going to be suddenly able to find you online. But it does mean that the connection between online names and legal identities would be made in a database somewhere… and databases are not safe. The other news story I read was about a university whose database was hacked, resulting in “unauthorised access to significant amounts” of personal data.
Then there are databases which don’t even aspire to keep people’s personal data secure. The other day, I read about how dating sites sell their users’ information to data brokers, and are legally allowed to do so, because users agree to it in the terms and conditions.
Again, things which don’t affect me.
On a completely different note, Apple is discontinuing iTunes. But not, it turns out, after further googling, for Windows. And I’m still stubbornly using an old version of iTunes, because I didn’t want to lose certain features in an upgrade.
I don’t open iTunes everyday any more (because Spotify) but I like having a decade of history. Play counts and last played dates and playlists based around that data. That’s data Spotify won’t give me. I also have a twelve-year-old iPod plugged into my alarm clock.
Sometimes this culture of constantly upgrading is exhausting, not to mention unnecessary (and unnecessarily expensive).
Originally @ Dreamwidth.
The US now requires that most visa applicants list their email addresses and their usernames for social media sites.
I suspect that many people who’s online activity indicates criminal dealings or concerning extremist tendencies simply wouldn’t admit to any incriminating accounts. A.A. Milne’s poem “The Good Little Girl” springs to mind: I went to the Zoo, and they waited to say:
“Have you been a good girl?”
“Have you been a good girl?”
Well, what did they think that I went there to do?
And why should I want to be bad at the Zoo?
And should I be likely to say if I had?
I don’t think this is going to be a very effective method of screening people who are a threat to security, so it just becomes a gross invasion of privacy for everyone else.
Especially because this would be connecting online pseudonyms with legal identities, and people can have very good reasons for being pseudonymous on the internet.
Of course, listing your online accounts in a visa application doesn’t mean that your boss, students, grandparents, et cetera, are going to be suddenly able to find you online. But it does mean that the connection between online names and legal identities would be made in a database somewhere… and databases are not safe. The other news story I read was about a university whose database was hacked, resulting in “unauthorised access to significant amounts” of personal data.
Then there are databases which don’t even aspire to keep people’s personal data secure. The other day, I read about how dating sites sell their users’ information to data brokers, and are legally allowed to do so, because users agree to it in the terms and conditions.
Again, things which don’t affect me.
On a completely different note, Apple is discontinuing iTunes. But not, it turns out, after further googling, for Windows. And I’m still stubbornly using an old version of iTunes, because I didn’t want to lose certain features in an upgrade.
I don’t open iTunes everyday any more (because Spotify) but I like having a decade of history. Play counts and last played dates and playlists based around that data. That’s data Spotify won’t give me. I also have a twelve-year-old iPod plugged into my alarm clock.
Sometimes this culture of constantly upgrading is exhausting, not to mention unnecessary (and unnecessarily expensive).
Originally @ Dreamwidth.