Oh, the author, my sweet, summer child. Anyone who grew up under the communist regime in 20th cetury and people living under a totalitarian state these days know too well what "Ambient privacy"...
Oh, the author, my sweet, summer child.
Anyone who grew up under the communist regime in 20th cetury and people living under a totalitarian state these days know too well what "Ambient privacy" is. It's not a new term by any measure. When NKVD ran wild and most educational or scientific facilities had a First Department you just implied that any communication you can possibly have via any medium is tracked, recorded and read by a third party. "It's not a phone conversation" was a very common phrase you'll hear over the wire, and even if you talked eye to eye this couldn't have been inside an apartment building or, better yet, any building at all.
At least when the corporations do it they don't do it for the sole reason of using the info they gathered against you, but that can change at any moment, since all that data exists somewhere already. For a lot of Eastern Europeans these habits of secrecy and serious consideration of privacy will be a saving grace when modern states would start slowly integrating all that info into their operations, after all this cornucopia of everything left behind on the internet is too juicy and tempting not to tap into.
First, Maciej Ceglowski was born in Poland (though he immigrated to the US at the age of 6). I don't think he's a stranger to Eastern European surveillance. Second, he addresses this point (albeit...
First, Maciej Ceglowski was born in Poland (though he immigrated to the US at the age of 6). I don't think he's a stranger to Eastern European surveillance.
Second, he addresses this point (albeit briefly) in the article:
Even police states like East Germany, where one in seven citizens was an informer, were not able to keep tabs on their entire population. Today computers have given us that power.
Oh, the author, my sweet, summer child.
Anyone who grew up under the communist regime in 20th cetury and people living under a totalitarian state these days know too well what "Ambient privacy" is. It's not a new term by any measure. When NKVD ran wild and most educational or scientific facilities had a First Department you just implied that any communication you can possibly have via any medium is tracked, recorded and read by a third party. "It's not a phone conversation" was a very common phrase you'll hear over the wire, and even if you talked eye to eye this couldn't have been inside an apartment building or, better yet, any building at all.
At least when the corporations do it they don't do it for the sole reason of using the info they gathered against you, but that can change at any moment, since all that data exists somewhere already. For a lot of Eastern Europeans these habits of secrecy and serious consideration of privacy will be a saving grace when modern states would start slowly integrating all that info into their operations, after all this cornucopia of everything left behind on the internet is too juicy and tempting not to tap into.
First, Maciej Ceglowski was born in Poland (though he immigrated to the US at the age of 6). I don't think he's a stranger to Eastern European surveillance.
Second, he addresses this point (albeit briefly) in the article: