There are good lists of breaches but few describing what happened to the people afterwards. Credit card theft resulting in a loss being the most obvious one.
Such concrete (real) examples would help me to argue with people who say: all this non-sense about data privacy. What would anyone want to do with your data anyways?
This seems more like a security than a privacy issue. The data (credit card info) is not shared intentionally, but is leaked due to a security hole.
- a women start planning to have a child, her employer know that, she got fired before the conception, legally;
- you are someone who know his/shes knows his rights, no jobs for you since you are not easy to exploit;
- you have a certain political opinion, not nice toward the present government? You'll got hard career and all possible "issues", just like getting more traffic red lights than someone else, more police checks causing delays and so on.
The list is long. The point is: we can't design a society like a factory, we can't plan evolution beyond banal things, so we need noise, variability that nobody can master to ensure nothing can last too much impeding further evolution just because someone manage to grab a certain position of power and do want to end the history to remain there forever in a loop. That's why we need privacy, diversity, and so on.
Torture, rape and imprisonment based on phone data (Belarus 2022)
I'm pretty sure that's documented. The courts slammed that drawer shut, pretty hard.
Something that might hit a little closer to home, here: When I was still looking for work, about four or five years ago, a couple of the companies asked me to tell them my HN ID (I'm not sure if I had joined here, back then).
That's one of the reasons that I try to behave well, here. I'm not looking for work, but a lot of y'all are. I try not to propagate fights (although it can be tough), because the person that really gets harmed, is the one attacking me. They are showing their ass, in front of potential employers and teammates, and, even though I might not like them, I don't want to play a part in their not getting a job.
Victims of domestic violence or stalking. Victims of personal vendettas or bigotry from figures in authority. Victims of exploitative employers. These victims have done nothing wrong and they need privacy.
All kinds of people are randomly distributed throughout all professions and strata of society. Politicians, police, lawyers, doctors, posties, real estate agents, chefs. All have great and terrible human representation.
Now think about a person you distrust/dislike the most in your life. Would you want to give them access to everything about you?
The type of person that you like least will eventually have access to your information. If you don't protect your privacy now, who will protect you then?
This is also why the snippy "so you don't have (locks on your doors/blinds on your windows/etc.)?" comeback does not work.
First, you have those who stormed the Capitol and were identified by the NYT based on their phones location [1]. You also have the Substack that used location data to publicly out a priest as gay [2].
You then have the companies selling location data of people who visit abortion clinics [3]. They obtain this location from SDKs that they deploy via apps you may already be using. And if you want to get more dystopian remember that Texas allows citizens to sue anyone for "aiding or abetting a post-heartbeat abortion" [4], meaning that driving your friend Rebeca to a clinic can land you in a lawsuit for at least $10k by people who do this as their day job.
Even if you're not sued, remember that companies have been reliably predicting whether you're pregnant for at least 10 years [5] and using it to influence your behavior in their favor. This one may be the one with the "least bad" consequences but, paradoxically, the one that better drives home the point since nothing here is criminal.
[2] https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkbxp8/grindr-location-data-...
[3] https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7vzjb/location-data-abortio...
[4] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/texas-abortion-law-bounty-hunte...
The ultimate example is how 1940’s Germany used 1930’s Germany’s census data. In 1933 it didn’t seem so bad to tick a box with your religious affiliation …
W He is looming to something that is well written and convincing, something salient. Punchy
Your post is not that. it is difficult to express this so wlel that it is irrefutable
There is a massive assumption that only justice systen will have access to this data. We know this data is sold to anyone, even criminals.
Several Dutch officials enacted wholesale destruction of those records as the occupation became obviously imminent, which saved many, though the Jewish population of the Netherlands fell from 154,887 in 1941 to 14,346 in 1947.
The point being it's not necessarily your own government you need be worried about.
In another variant on this, surveillance records kept by the East German Ministry for State Security (Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, a/k/a the Stasi) and Soviet KGB were acquired by successor governments (unified German and post-Soviet states including Ukraine). See: <https://www.wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/unearthing-soviet-sec...>
(I'm trying without success to find a reference to the destruction of Dutch census records, though I'm pretty certain this did actually happen.)
I'm pretty sure I saw this spelled out years ago in a groups.google.com post, but the amnesiac search engines of today are not yielding it up to me.
I did find these articles:
https://jacquesmattheij.com/if-you-have-nothing-to-hide/
https://medium.com/@hansdezwart/during-world-war-ii-we-did-h...
And one of them references http://web.archive.org/web/20150812120743/https://stadsarchi... (archive link, site is no longer up).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1943_bombing_of_the_Amsterdam_...
Anyone who interacts with a variety of humans on a regular basis has all of the proof they need that entrusting anonymous others (including corporate entities) with personal information is a bad idea.
The day that humans no longer swindle and scam each other, no longer become jealous or seek revenge, and no longer use power for personal gain at the expense of others is the day we can all freely share everything with each other without worry.
It's such asymmetry the very issue.