Nsa negative

Corporations Violate Privacy

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(__)Privacy is not absolute, corporations and big data make violations of privary inevitable.

Goldsmith, Professor at Harvard Law 2015
Jack, School, The Ends of Privacy, The New Rambler, Apr. 06, 2015 (reviewing Bruce Schneier, Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World (2015)). Published Version http://newramblerreview.com/images/files/Jack- Goldsmith_Review-of-Bruce-Schneier.pdf

The truth is that consumers love the benefits of digital goods and are willing to give up traditionally private information in exchange for the manifold miracles that the Internet and big data bring. Apple and Android each offer more than a million apps, most of which are built upon this model, as are countless other Internet services. More generally, big data promises huge improvements in economic efficiency and productivity, and in health care and safety. Absent abuses on a scale we have not yet seen, the public’s attitude toward giving away personal information in exchange for these benefits will likely persist, even if the government requires firms to make more transparent how they collect and use our data. One piece of evidence for this is that privacy-respecting search engines and email services do not capture large market shares. In general these services are not as easy to use, not as robust, and not as efficacious as their personal-data-heavy competitors.

Schneier understands and discusses all this. In the end his position seems to be that we should deny ourselves some (and perhaps a lot) of the benefits big data because the costs to privacy and related values are just too high. We “have to stop the slide” away from privacy, he says, not because privacy is “profitable or efficient, but because it is moral.” But as Schneier also recognizes, privacy is not a static moral concept. “Our personal definitions of privacy are both cultural and situational,” he acknowledges. Consumers are voting with their computer mice and smartphones for more digital goods in exchange for more personal data. The culture increasingly accepts the giveaway of personal information for the benefits of modern computerized life.

This trend is not new. “The idea that privacy can’t be invaded at all is utopian,” says Professor Charles Fried of Harvard Law School. “There are amounts and kinds of information which previously were not given out and suddenly they have to be given out. People adjust their behavior and conceptions accordingly.” That is Fried in the 1970 Newsweek story, responding to an earlier generation’s panic about big data and data mining. The same point applies today, and will apply as well when the Internet of things makes today’s data mining seem as quaint as 1970s-era computation.

Corporations Violate Privacy extensions

(__)Privacy can’t be restored – technological and corporate invasions happen all the time.

Lewis, Senior Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studeies, 2014

(James Andrew “Underestimating Risk in the Surveillance Debate” - Center For Strategic & International Studies - Strategic Technologies Program – December - http://csis.org/publication/underestimating-risk-surveillance-debate)

On average, there are 16 tracking programs on every website.4 This means that when you visit a website, it collects and reports back to 16 companies on what you’ve looked at and what you have done. These programs are invisible to the user. They collect IP address, operating system and browser data, the name of the visiting computer, what you looked at, and how long you stayed. This data can be made even more valuable when it is matched with other data collections. Everything a consumer does online is tracked and collected. There is a thriving and largely invisible market in aggregating data on individuals and then selling it for commercial purposes. Data brokers collect utility bills, addresses, education, arrest records (arrests, not just convictions). All of this data is recorded, stored, and made available for sale. Social networking sites sell user data in some anonymized form so that every tweet or social media entry can be used to calculate market trends and refine advertising strategies. What can be predicted from this social media data is amazing—unemployment trends, disease outbreaks, consumption patterns for different groups, consumer preferences, and political trends. It is often more accurate than polling because it reflects peoples’ actual behavior rather than the answer they think an interviewer wants to hear. Ironically, while the ability of U.S. agencies to use this commercial data is greatly restricted by law and policy, the same restrictions do not apply to foreign governments. The development of the Internet would have been very different and less dynamic if these business models had not been developed. They provide incentives and financial returns to develop or improve Internet services. There is an implicit bargain where you give up privacy in exchange for services, but in bargains between service providers and consumers, one side holds most of the cards and there is little transparency. But the data-driven models of the Internet mean that it is an illusion to think that there is privacy online or that NSA is the only entity harvesting personal data.

Corporations Violate Privacy - extensions

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(__)Corporation commit much worse privacy violations.

Lowry, Editor, the National Review, 2015,
(Rich, , 5-27-2015, "Lowry: NSA data program faces death by bumper sticker," Salt Lake Tribune, http://www.sltrib.com/csp/mediapool/sites/sltrib/pages/printfriendly.csp?id=2557534)

In the context of all that is known about us by private companies, the NSA is a piker. Take the retailer Target, for example. According to The New York Times, it collects your “demographic information like your age, whether you are married and have kids, which part of town you live in, how long it takes you to drive to the store, your estimated salary, whether you’ve moved recently, what credit cards you carry in your wallet and what Web sites you visit.” Of course, the Fourth Amendment applies to the government, not private entities like Target. The amendment protects against unreasonable searches and seizures of our “persons, houses, papers, and effects.” If the NSA were breaking into homes and seizing metadata that people had carefully hidden away from prying eyes, it would be in flagrant violation of the Fourth Amendment. But no one is in possession of his or her own metadata. Even if the NSA didn’t exist, metadata would be controlled by someone else, the phone companies. The Supreme Court has held that you don’t have an expectation of privacy for such information in the possession of a third party. One frightening way to look at mail delivery is that agents of the state examine and handle the correspondence of countless of millions of Americans. They aren’t violating anyone’s Fourth Amendment rights, though, because no one expects the outside of their envelopes to be private.