Those hypotheticals about voting machines being insecure? Hand me that tinfoil…
Apparently 35 million+ voters’ registration information is for sale on the dark web. [anomali] That includes party affiliation, home address, etc.
In one forum post a known illicit vendor on October 5, 2018 advertised for sale previously undisclosed tens of millions of 2018 voter registration records for at least 19 US states on a popular English-language speaking hacking forum. The voter records affect citizens of:
(notice the color of the predominantly leaked states?)
- Georgia
- Idaho
- Iowa
- Kansas
- Kentucky
- Louisiana
- Minnesota
- Mississippi
- Montana
- New Mexico
- Oregon
- South Carolina
- South Dakota
- Tennessee
- Texas
- Utah
- West Virginia
- Wisconsin
- Wyoming
I no longer believe that voters in the US can have any confidence that their votes are being counted accurately. Furthermore, I don’t think that’s an accident – it’s a set-up for stuffing ballot-boxes and the follow-up is that they can decertify the results if the wrong person wins. This is a win/win situation for the states with vulnerable voting systems (which, coincidentally, are mostly Republican or which are closely contested) we can’t even say “something must be done” because the Republican incumbents can say “well, we better not hold that election, then.”
Purportedly, these records contain voter data including full name, phone numbers, physical addresses, voting history, and other unspecified voting data. The sales price for each voter list ranges from $150 USD to $12,500 USD depending on the state. This pricing model could be related to the number of voter records per database listing and/or, to a lesser degree of confidence, to offset the original cost to the illicit vendor.
Several crowdfunded efforts are underway to buy the databases. So far Kansas has been purchased and published. Now they are working on Oregon:
[screenshot from anomali]
Traditionally, at this juncture, we are supposed to say things about “American Democracy is in Danger” but, remember – I don’t think the US has ever been a democracy. It’s only been a fake democracy since the 15th amendment made some of the states have to adopt a different way of disenfranchising the voters. And, you know which states? How closely does that track the map I produced above?
I’m starting to think the sortition guy was right.
But what if your racist grandpa wins? Oh wait, he already is president.
We need something like the Xavier protocols, so that the fuckers who are responsible won’t get away when the inevitable disaster finally hits.
This is a depressing article that describes the more obvious and open attempts to manipulate the vote, which Republicans are making: [alternet]
It’s disgusting that there is a public dialogue about how to scale back this kind of stuff – the people doing it are traitors and deserve to be taken to airport and put on the next plane to anywhere else; deported with extreme prejudice. But only because we don’t have guillotines.
Hey! What the hell makes you think we want to have to deal with your trash? We do more than enough of that as it is. Sort your own problems out, don’t try dumping them on us.
Sincerely
The Rest of the World
There must be some hungry polar bears in need of a feed…
Marcus @#3: The link is borked by “smart” quotes.
Sorry, Marcus — usually I love your stuff, but this one is lacking. You seem to be writing about apples and oranges here.
The relevant info in the article is:
(emphasis added)
I’ve canvassed during the last several weekends for a local dem, and when you show up, they give you a sheaf of papers that contain, you guessed it, a bunch of addresses with names, ages, and party affiliations of the people who live there. The campaign gets this info from the state, and one of the purposes for our canvassing is to update that database — if a voter has moved, for instance. As the article says, though, every candidate, journalist, and academic can get their hands on all this — and we’re supposed to be concerned or surprised that it’s made its way to the dark web?
You’re worried about election security. I’m worried about election security. When you claim “I no longer believe that voters in the US can have any confidence that their votes are being counted accurately,” I’m ready to believe you. But you’re going to need to give me some stronger evidence than “Commonly available information is commonly available.” Otherwise, you’re just playing into the hands of the people who, as you say, would be just as happy to retroactively cancel an election over specious hacking claims.
Now, in a perfect world the people in charge would have the integrity to step down and … oh.
In a perfect world there is no room for politicians.
—
[from brucegee1962’s excerpt]
Regardless of whether the data is leaked or meant to be available, what is it for anyway? Especially the voting history mentioned above confuses me. What meaningful purpose could that serve? In theory all you’d need to know during an election is where a vote is cast, who it is cast for and whether it is legitimate. For the latter checking the identity of the voter would be one of the simpler ways of doing it but not the only way and it certainly wouldn’t require you to keep that much information, let along make it accessible.
The only uses, if that’s the word, that I can think of for a voting history is for self-indulgent statistics for party people to fawn over* and marketing. And I’m fairly sure both violate the basic idea behind a democracy. (I’m making a distinction here between “campaigning for your political ideas and goals”, which I’d consider legitimate, and marketing as being pleasantly packaged lies and exaggerations)
*Harold H. Haroldson, living in ? has been voting for us for 96 years and been dead for twelve. I bet we could do even better if we did more to address the concerns of all the other Haroldsons around the country!
I believe Louisiana should be red. At least, we went strongly for trump in 16, as well as being repped by Republicans in the senate and house. Our Governor is Dem, but that is an anomaly.
@8 komarov
Here’s my understanding as a neophyte foot soldier in campaigning — I could easily be wrong.
Say you’re the campaign manager for a House candidate you really believe in — “campaigning for your political ideas and goals,” as you say. It’s an average district, so you have 733,000 constituents who live behind 350,000 doors. However, between now and the election, you only have enough volunteers to knock on 15,000 of those doors — so you need to figure out which doors to knock on to get the most out of those volunteers (like me).
Well, you sure don’t want to waste time with people who never, ever vote, so you’ll want to cross them off your list. And there isn’t any point in visiting strong Republicans — not only will that not do any good, it could endanger or at the very least demoralize your volunteers. You want to visit wishy-washy Democrats and Independents, people who sometimes vote and sometimes don’t, and maybe strong Democrats who might be persuaded to volunteer or donate to your campaign. The more data you can gather to target those people, the more efficient your campaign will be. Furthermore, you’ll ask your volunteers to record any changes they come across behind those doors — “last time these people were Independent, but now they Lean Democrat” — to update the records that the DNC maintains for next campaign.
That’s my take, anyway. I don’t see how keeping records is against the basic idea of Democracy.
brucegee1962:
Yes. After all, what sort of democracy would one have without foot-soldiers and door-knocking campaigns and donations? Might as well ask for one person one vote or something.
But that’s the point, anyway. If you can influence voters thus, so can others. Maybe even better.
It’s not their being kept, it is how they’re treated, including the use to which they are (or may be) put.
In your case, boosting votes for a particular faction by targeting propaganda prospects from the vast pool of otherwise uncommitted maybe-voters. Not undemocratic, I grant.
brucegee1962@#7:
Sorry, Marcus — usually I love your stuff, but this one is lacking. You seem to be writing about apples and oranges here.
I really have to apologize – there’s a bunch of stuff I left out of the posting, which I wrote while I was overnighting at gate B87 in Atlanta… Let me try to repair the damage.
I do a lot of incident responses (or, I have done, anyway) and so I was leaping ahead to some common threads and indicators that mean more than just that someone had limited access to some voter data.
When someone hands you a printout, what they’re doing is giving you a non-digital subset of an underlying dataset. In security terms, that’s OK because it’s restricted access to the underlying data. When someone sells the underlying dataset, it means they had unrestricted access to the data itself. How else did they get it? In most systems, if I have read access to the underlying data, I may have had write access as well (99% of the time, a badly managed database is read/write not just read and I tend to assume we’re looking at a badly managed database if it’s for sale on the dark web!) So I immediately jumped to the assumption that whoever is selling the datasets has read/write access to the underlying data. But wait, there’s more! It’s not just one dataset! It’s a bunch of them. So whoever’s selling this appears to have access to the underlying data for a whole bunch of states. The only reasonable conclusion is one of 2 things: 1) there is a central database that aggregates all that data, which someone compromised -or- 2) someone has compromised some kind of database at multiple states and the datasets are laid out similarly and accessed similarly. I.e.: was this one hack, or 20-something that just happened to all be the same?
In an incident response regarding data the first question (OK, second. The first is “how much are you willing to pay for me to be there tomorrow?) is which dataset was compromised and where it came from. We don’t know that. Was this data from a polling company (doesn’t matter much) or from the RNC (where did they get it and how did it leak?) or from the state election commission’s database? If it came from the state election commission’s database when how/why was the attacker able to get multiple states’ election commission databases? Normally, it’d be pretty easy to tell because whoever’s database was compromised would recognize the layout of the information. So someone in Georgia is either very relieved, right now, or really terrified.
So that’s what I jumped past to. I’m inferring that whoever is selling the data is “sending a message” which is either that someone (probably the RNC) has a massive insecure aggregated database which has just leaked – or that the state election commissions’ databases are massively compromisable. Based on what I know about voting machine and backend system security, I immediately leaped to the conclusion that it was the state election commissions that were compromised. And, the way that they are being auctioned out on the dark web – that would be exactly how you’d do it if you wanted to do maximum “splash damage” in the media right before a US election. I assume that right now, there are people scrambling around asking “whose database is that!?” and pulling their hair out.
The big question is whether this was private data from some RNC system, or whether it’s private data from election commission’s voting system databases. The latter would be explosive and if
RussiansHelpful Someones were trying to make a mockery out of US fake elections, that would be exactly what they would leak and exactly how they would leak it.[I leaped to the conclusion that “voter registry” is both sides which means it’s not private data from the DNC or the RNC, it’s data from the election commission’s systems! But it could be just that the story got slightly mangled by the reporting. I don’t have a copy of the datasets and I’m not going to pull any old favors and get a copy because I don’t want to touch that data.]
komarov@#8:
Regardless of whether the data is leaked or meant to be available, what is it for anyway? Especially the voting history mentioned above confuses me. What meaningful purpose could that serve?
If it was data pulled with read/write access from a state election commission’s systems, it would mean you could add a couple hundred thousand additional registered voters if you wanted to, or you could delete 1/10 of the voters in a crucial district.
I believe the implication of this leak is that someone is showing they have their claws deep into the election commissions’ systems at most of the states in the US that have a documented history of having crappy voting machine security.
We do not know at this time what format the data is in. But would you be more or less upset if it was disclosed that the database was in the form of a dump from a particular vote-collecting machine?
brucegee1962@#10:
Say you’re the campaign manager for a House candidate you really believe in — “campaigning for your political ideas and goals,” as you say. It’s an average district, so you have 733,000 constituents who live behind 350,000 doors. However, between now and the election, you only have enough volunteers to knock on 15,000 of those doors — so you need to figure out which doors to knock on to get the most out of those volunteers (like me).
Say you’re a
Chineserepublican operative who has read/write access to the state election commissions’ registry of voters and you decide that you’re going to drop 10,000 randomly-selected democrat voters from certain districts in Atlanta?One other thing that we do not know: someone got the data out, and we don’t know when. How do we know they do not have current access to the data? And what if it’s read/write access 3 weeks before a major election?
This is genius:
Trevor Noah’s suggestion is that everyone in ‘red states’ should register as Republican, so they’ll have trouble telling who to suppress. Except that information is probably public now:
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/trevor-noah-scheme-voter-suppression_us_5bc99e6fe4b0d38b5876e1c6
Remember, we’re in an era where 10,000 votes one way or another makes all the difference. That’s how Bush stole the election from Gore – it was down to a fairly small number of votes in one district. When you see stuff like 100,000 votes being knocked off the rolls this is not ordinary cheating, it’s a putsch.
https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/412195-georgia-purged-more-than-100000-people-from-voter-rolls-because-there-didnt
Holy crap, a three-year period? That’s less than one Presidential election cycle. How can that be constitutional?
@DonDueed: it’s probably not, but the delay to to go court should be *just* long enough…
I run the local precinct in the rather large and populous county of California I live in during elections.—
All of the information you are talking about it readily and specifically intentionally publicly available on-paper. Each precinct gets three copies of their own voters one to hold on the table, one to show outside the polling place, and the third to corroborate updates as voters vote during the day.—
It is easy for one or more of these paper copies to “disappear” if someone were inclined. Us precinct board members are busy and they’re posted outside. I’ve never seen this happen to my own precinct in twenty years but I’ve seen it happen to others using the same building as ours. And it’s also likely that political parties can request or buy these printouts. —
While it seems easiest to hack these databases to Mr. Ranum and it may even be true that they were hacked, it’s unnecessary. Each major party has dedicated organizational volunteers who can either optical-scan or data-enter-by-hand all of this paper data. I know when I have volunteered for various propositions that I wanted passed/blocked that dogsbody work is exactly what they make you do.
Is it old-fashioned for me to believe that information about how each citizen voted ought to not exist (namely, voting ought to be anonymous)? Otherwise you risk vote coercion, vote buying, or voter suppression. Where I live, we have paper ballots. Polling stations have curtains behind which each person fills out their ballot. Thus nobody but me knows how I voted. This makes me safe from employers, friends, or relatives telling me to vote for a specific party (and being able to harass me if I refuse). Never mind some politician deciding to target me for something nasty. I don’t like the idea of some government agency having a list with each citizen’s political affiliation. Such a list shouldn’t exist in the first place.
brucegee1962 @#10
You are basically giving an argument for why targeted advertising is beneficial for the one who’s commissioning it. The same argument could be used to defend the practice of tracking people’s online browsing history.
Where I live, there are no politicians or volunteers knocking on people’s doors. Since on my mailbox there’s a sticker saying, “No unaddressed letters,” I don’t ever get any paper advertisements in my mailbox. How do politicians advertise then? Television and radio commercials, online advertisements, billboards. Politicians also put up their stands in public places where they invite any passerby to talk with them. When people refuse to tolerate the more annoying forms of advertisements, it actually works.
Personally, I hate targeted advertisements. Somebody violated my privacy, tracked my behavior without my consent, they turned me and my private data into a commodity that got traded, bought, and sold. Afterwards they expect that I will buy their crap and reward their efforts to victimize me. Hell, no! I try to never ever buy anything for what I get a targeted advertisement. If some politician dared to annoy me by knocking on my doors, I would never ever vote for their party (I live in a country with over 20 political parties, I have plenty of options to choose from).
The most effective way how to get rid of annoying forms of advertisements (targeted advertisements, knocks on people’s doors, phone calls) would be to ban those. Unfortunately, with oligarchs controlling the parliament, this isn’t going to happen. The only other option would be for citizens and consumers to collectively refuse to ever buy anything that was advertised in an annoying fashion. This is what I’m trying to do.
By the way, if you allow politicians to employ an annoying form of advertising, it’s not Democrats who will benefit from that. Both Republicans and Democrats will employ the same advertising methods. Thus citizens will only get more annoyed.
More republican voter suppression. Guess which areas’ residents are most likely to have an address that’s not on a GPS map?
https://www.npr.org/2018/10/13/657125819/many-native-ids-wont-be-accepted-at-north-dakota-polling-places
Because a constitutional amendment doesn’t mean shit if republican lawmakers can figure a way around it.
Ieva Skrebele @ # 20: … information about how each citizen voted ought to not exist (namely, voting ought to be anonymous)
The “voter history” here – unless our esteemed host has left out some crucial details – pertains to whether one voted, not which way.
I do a lot of database work for local campaigns, and regularly get updated softcopy sets of voter info from the county Supervisor of Elections office. Though awesomely corrupt in many respects, Florida has a strong public-records-availability law, so I can request my choice of 20 past elections with each set, and find out who voted early, or absentee, or not at all, in each of those 20; campaign managers and candidates then request, say, walking lists for a given precinct with households of two or more voters registered to any-party-but-Repubs who cast ballots 50% of the time or more in local elections, and I need ask only whether they want it in large type.
There’s nothing particularly Machiavellian about this, and legitimate grassroots campaigns can benefit greatly by not wasting time/money on the usually apathetic 2/3 of the electorate who waive their say-so in who runs things.
Btw, the map shown above confuses me – since when have, e.g., Massachusetts & Vermont voted Republican? Though both do presently have Republican governors (a testament to Democratic Party ineptitude); I don’t have the time to look up 50 gubernatorial races, but I can’t offhand think of any other explanation for that particular layout.
Which I’d still consider none of anybody’s business, for much the same reasons Ieva stated. It always boils down to using that information against the people doing the voting. Okay, maybe that’s a tad unfair but it certainly isn’t being used for them.
If nothing else that kind of information adds levers and buttons for people to push if they have the resources to do so. Great for the big professional campaigners. Not so great grassroots movements and small groups tired of the professional candidates. More manipulation, more skewing.
I’ve always been baffled by how “loud” US elections are. Apart from the wall-to-wall coverage in the interminable run-up, there’s also the non-stop running polls during, which I’d consider suspect as well. Sadly that’s not just a US thing anymore.
Knowing how polls are currently developing can surely affect how people vote, which is something that shouldn’t really be allowed to happen. Well, knowing or at least thinking you know. Predictions can be wrong or maybe pragmatic groups may change their numbers to skew the actual results. A hypothetical example: Why vote for x if x is clearly already falling behind? Better go for y, lest z win. Only it might turn out x was doing much better and y wasn’t. And now the vote is split even more – all in favour of z. But don’t blame Pragmatic Polls (R), statistical analysis is tricky.
Voting should a quiet thing that doesn’t need to be monitored, tracked or analysed on an atomic scale. If you forgo the panic-inducing live polls you don’t even have to vote quickly. November election? Open the polls in September and maybe you can skip the “long lines at the polls” headlines for a change. Maybe disadvantaged people can make it to the polls in their own time, sort out the paperwork and make their voice heard. Yay democracy, right?
As a slight follow-on from my earlier post, a “good” campagin, i.e. one that doesn’t try to manipulate or lambast me, could be summarised as, “Make your point and get out!” What are the issues you want to tackle, what are you going to do about them and where are you willing to make compromises.* That’s it.
No flyers, no tacky signs ruining my lawn, no stuffed mailbox or late-night phone calls, and, in Hades’ name, no attack ads, which is a ludicrous practice at best. Given how overtly christian the average US politicians claim to be they should know better than to go around casting stones. Politicians are awful people, and if I want to be reminded of that I can open any news site any time.
*Because more often than not the voter may not like that compromise. At all.
Pierce R. Butler @#22
OK, if you say so. Although comments #10 and #15 suggested that there must be some database with each voter’s political preferences.
What does “voters registered to any-party-but-Repubs” mean? Are you talking about people who are officially members of some political party? Or are you talking about average citizens with no party membership who have their political preferences recorded in some database? If it’s the latter, then I don’t like this. Moreover, in my opinion, countries shouldn’t collect information about whether one voted or no. Where I live, upon showing up at the polling station, I get a stamp in my passport. This is to ensure that one person cannot vote several times (if there’s already a stamp in the passport, a person isn’t allowed to vote again). But there is no electronic database with information about who voted. Somebody would have to get their hands on my passport in order to find out whether I voted or no. I prefer this system instead of storing data about who voted and when.
Ok, I know that sending people spam in the form of personalized advertisements is currently legal (thus you can speak about “legitimate campaigns”), but I don’t like the practice. Data about each voter’s past behavior is irrelevant for the less annoying advertising methods. This data is useful only for those advertising methods, which, in my opinion, ought to be outlawed in the first place.
The problem with big data and collecting and storing people’s personal information is that this data is valuable only for somebody who is planning to abuse it. If you aren’t going to abuse this data, then it’s near useless and there’s no point collecting it. Sure, I can think of non malevolent uses for big data (for example, scientific research), but if that was all what you could do with it, then collecting and storing all this data wouldn’t be a financially sound practice. In other words: Google wouldn’t waste their hard drive space and computing power on collecting data about my online activity if they weren’t already planning to abuse this data (I consider personalized advertisements a form of abuse due to the invasion of privacy). Same goes for countries and political parties. The moment there’s big data, somebody will try to abuse it. Gerrymandering would be impossible without having data about the political preferences of each person who lives in a specific address. Georgia officials couldn’t have removed from voter rolls people who didn’t vote in past elections if there was no data about who voted or didn’t vote in the past. Politicians couldn’t rig election results by denying part of citizens the opportunity to vote if they didn’t already have data about how these citizens are going to vote.
komarov @#23
My demands are very similar: don’t track and monitor my behavior, don’t invade my privacy, don’t send me any targeted advertisements, no knocking on my doors, no phone calls, no paper junk in my mailbox. Just leave me alone, don’t disturb me, and don’t annoy me. I’ll decide how to vote by 1) opening the homepage of the Central Election Commission and reading all the party programs that are published there; 2) opening the parties’ webpages and taking a look at what they offer; 3) watching and reading the news (if I hear in the news that some party or politician has done something remarkable, I’ll take that into consideration). I perceive all the advertisements as utterly useless when thinking about how to vote. They show photos of politicians, give meaningless slogans, and say absolutely nothing. Most politicians don’t even bother to talk about which issues they want to tackle. Instead they try to convince me that they are good and trustworthy people, and therefore I should entrust the country to them, so that they could do whatever the hell they want.
komarov @ # 23: … that kind of information adds levers and buttons for people to push if they have the resources to do so. Great for the big professional campaigners. Not so great grassroots movements…
I get the info I described (plus a bit – age, race, sex, date of registration) for $5: hardly an oligarchs-only threshold.
… how “loud” US elections are.
It’s really hard to get voters’ attention when competing against television, advertising, etc. I gather (haven’t traveled overseas in a lloonngg time) that, unfortunately, our political mode is gaining ground elsewhere, as exemplified by the deplorable Tony Blair. Lots of problems come with this, but once the overall culture loses its resistance to “hard sell” tactics, effectively irresistible once any one candidate/party starts in. How we might restore that resistance, I dunno – but count me in if anyone works out a method!
Ieva Skrebele @ # 24: … comments #10 and #15 suggested that there must be some database with each voter’s political preferences.
Indeed there are, but for that you gotta buy the data from Google, some version of Cambridge Analytica, & the like: again, the extension of commercial marketing techniques to politics – in which, as komarov notes, the advantage goes to the deep-pocketed.
Are you talking about people who are officially members of some political party? Or are you talking about average citizens with no party membership who have their political preferences recorded in some database?
In the USA, one has to register to vote, and, at least in most states (these systems are not administered on a national level) the info requested includes party affiliation (no actual partisan activity required). I registered as a Democrat, not out of loyalty to that corrupt organization, but so that I can vote in its primaries and thereby have a little more leverage. This is not obligatory: the fastest-growing group is “No Party Affiliation” – but they don’t get a ballot in the primaries.
… countries shouldn’t collect information about whether one voted or no.
This does, they tell us, keep people from voting more than once. The Repubs insist this is a widespread problem, though they never produce solid evidence for it, but it seems to have been a genuine repeating scandal in the 19th century.
Where I live, upon showing up at the polling station, I get a stamp in my passport.
Whereas most USAstanis don’t have passports, and those who do never take them anywhere unless planning to leave the country (when I was a kid, they weren’t even needed to visit Canada or Mexico either). Getting one is a laborious (and somewhat costly) process, too.
… I know that sending people spam in the form of personalized advertisements is currently legal (thus you can speak about “legitimate campaigns”)…
Only in the last few years have Florida voter files included email addresses, and relatively few who register provide that info. (For that matter, you can also enter “unknown” for race, gender, etc, though date-of-birth is required.) And at least in this county, registrars make it clear that you need not give email or phone info (though since civic groups and campaigns send people out to sign up the unregistered at various places and events, the quality of the process varies enormously everywhere).
Data about each voter’s past behavior is irrelevant …
The most recent city commission elections here (a relatively active university town) had a 17% turnout. Being able to sort out the non-voters makes candidacies of the non-wealthy much more possible and practical, especially for door-knocking and mailing.
… those advertising methods, which, in my opinion, ought to be outlawed in the first place.
Which runs into the thorny legal thicket of limiting free speech. A while ago, we had here a county candidate who was so strongly supported by the local newspaper that they not only would not report on his domestic-violence arrest, they wouldn’t run a paid advertisement about it either. Would you add law enforcement to the obstacles against telling the public of such news?
The moment there’s big data, somebody will try to abuse it.
Quite so, and a problem existing before and extending well beyond political campaigns. How do we get that cat back in the bag, especially (a) without a dictatorial speech code and (b) applying equally to the powerful and the powerless?
Gerrymandering would be impossible without having data about the political preferences of each person who lives in a specific address.
Sorry, you’re factually wrong here. Elbridge Gerry gave his name (involuntarily) to that process a little over 200 years ago, by drawing bizarrely-shaped districts using only knowledge of voting results on a precinct level.
My demands are very similar: don’t track and monitor my behavior, don’t invade my privacy…
Perhaps possible in a benign democratic-socialist economy; virtually impossible in the market-driven and malign-socialist societies we live in here and now. How one establishes and maintains the benign structures implicit in your demands remains a challenge for the citizenry.
Pierce R. Butler @#25
In Latvia a small part of citizens also don’t have a passport. These people have to go to a government agency where they get voter cards for free. Obtaining one is quick, simple, and hassle-free. A voter card is a piece of paper that a citizen uses instead of a passport when they arrive at the polling station. If politicians actually wanted to create a good system for how elections are organized, it would be possible to figure out some solution.
What I would like to ban is collecting people’s personal data without their consent. In this case there would be no need to ban targeted advertising (if some organization cannot legally collect, for example, people’s online browsing habits, then they don’t have this data in the first place, thus they cannot make any targeted advertisements). If some person willingly allows for their data to be collected, then I’m perfectly fine with targeted advertisements aimed at such people who have consented to sharing their personal data. Limiting somebody’s ability to collect other people’s personal data isn’t a matter of free speech—those who collect this data aren’t exercising their speech, they aren’t saying anything, instead they are just gathering and storing other people’s data. And I certainly don’t see how limiting targeted advertising would interfere with somebody’s ability to inform the public about some politician’s criminal past, in such a situation you’d want to inform all members of the public, not just select few recipients of the targeted ads.
I don’t think it’s a good idea to ban advertisement phone calls or door knocks either. But I do want to live in a society where such behavior isn’t socially accepted, where people just don’t do these things. I perceive advertisement phone calls and knocks on people’s doors as rude. It’s disturbing and annoying. Personally, I answer phone calls from unknown numbers, and whenever I hear the doorbell, I go and check who’s there. I do so only because in my country it isn’t socially accepted to disturb people with such advertisements. Thus very few people try this. On average, I get about one door knock per two years and about five phone calls per one year. If I lived in another country where these kinds of advertising methods were socially accepted, I would be forced to stop answering the doorbell and phone calls from unknown numbers. A lot of what people do is governed not by laws but by cultural norms in their community. In some cities car drivers are very aggressive on the road; in other places they are polite. Or how people behave while standing in lines. Are they polite or do they try to cut in the line? In the former society standing in a line is a perfectly normal and peaceful experience. In the latter case the mere act of waiting for something turns into a stressful experience that requires me to be alert at all times and always keep my elbows prepared so as to push away anybody trying to cut in front of me. Personally, I highly value politeness, I want to live in a society where behaving in a polite manner is the norm, because in these kinds of societies pretty much everybody is forced to behave well. It’s the same also with advertisements. There’s no need for them to be rude, annoying, intrusive, loud, and obnoxious. In many societies they aren’t. I’m not going to say that advertising is great in my country, but it definitely is better than in the USA.
Ieva Skrebele @ # 26: If politicians actually wanted to create a good system for how elections are organized…
Now there you’ve put a finger on the problem. At present here the Republicans have succeeded in large part by deliberately suppressing the votes of ethnic minorities, which tend to vote Democratic, and we all expect the Repubs to cling ferociously to every crumb of this advantage they can. Most notably at present, the state-of-Georgia Secretary-of-State, whose office regulates the counties’ election processes, has reportedly recently dumped >150K voters (mostly black, of course) from the rolls for next month’s elections; similar shenanigans are reported in Kansas and other states.
I would like to ban is collecting people’s personal data without their consent.
They (yes, that “they”) have ways of working around such things. Many stores here, for example, offer a chance of prizes for participating in online customer-satisfaction surveys – which collect email addresses to notify the winners of those prizes (and enable spamming).
I perceive advertisement phone calls and knocks on people’s doors as rude.
I would use stronger language – but then again, I use an answering machine to screen all incoming calls (and seem to be the only person I know who does so). I also live so far out in the woods that not even door-to-door evangelists bother me – and I would get seriously aggro if any tried.
… in these kinds of societies pretty much everybody is forced to behave well.
A double-edged sword, in that for most this facilitates daily functioning w/out friction – but where “behave well” comes to mean, say, cisgender heterosexuality, nonconforming individuals get chewed up.
… advertisements. There’s no need for them to be rude, annoying, intrusive, loud, and obnoxious.
Until one company tries that approach, finds that it works, and forces their competitors to face a nasty choice. And unless the society puritanically penalizes all transgressions, that will happen.
@#27
This is an example of a customer willingly consenting to share their data. I see no problem with that.
Moreover, my e-mail address is worth absolutely nothing if obtained in such fashion. I have several e-mail addresses; when some business requests an e-mail address from me, I only give them the one that I have already reserved for spam.
What bothers me are cases where I’m unable to refuse being tracked and monitored. If I want to use a smartphone, or if I want to browse the Internet, numerous businesses will be monitoring and tracking my every action. Sure, I had to click that I accept their terms of service, so theoretically I consented to being tracked, but, come on, it’s not like I was actually given a choice. Unless I want to forego utilizing modern technology, there is no choice.
That’s not how it works. I’m not aware of there being any correlation between what is socially perceived as rude behavior and LGBTQ discrimination. For example, I know homophobic societies where knocking on people’s doors for marketing purposes is perceived as rude (I grew up in such a society). I also know non homophobic societies where knocking on people’s doors for marketing purposes is perceived as rude. Societal standards for what constitutes rude behavior and the prevalence of discrimination of various minority groups are separate issues; there is no reason for some correlation to exist one way or the other. It’s perfectly possible for people to simultaneously be both polite and tolerant towards minorities.
In general, I agree. But it’s more complicated than that. I have heard marketing people say that there’s no such thing as bad publicity. Even if your business pisses off everybody and becomes known as “that company everybody hates because of their marketing practices,” that’s still publicity. Still, many businesses don’t want this kind of bad publicity. Thus they try to abstain from outright angering potential customers with their marketing practices.
Here’s how it works: one company tries a marketing campaign that’s a little bit more aggressive compared to what citizens are already used to. It works. Another company tries the same. People start getting used to this more aggressive marketing and start seeing it as normal. At this point some company tries a marketing campaign that’s even more aggressive. Thus we get a slow and gradual process. This is what I have been observing over the years in my country, it feels for me like advertisements are getting more and more annoying as time goes by.
On the other hand, occasionally I have also observed advertisers dialing down on the more annoying practices. For example, about two years ago I bough puppy pee pads in an online store and gave them my contact information for delivery purposes. Immediately afterwards they started sending me daily text messages with advertisements to my phone number. I sent them a strongly worded e-mail telling them to stop spamming me and informing them about the fact that such text messages are extremely annoying. I got an apology, and the text messages stopped coming. Recently I checked out the same store (having gotten a new litter of puppies), and it turns out that they have changed their webpage a bit. Now they ask customers to choose whether they want any text messages or no, they have stopped automatically adding all the phone numbers to their spam list. It’s unlikely for a business to change their website because of a single complaint. My guess is that mine wasn’t the only complaint they got.
Ieva Skrebele @ # 28: … it’s not like I was actually given a choice.
Your examples are better than mine – and take us into a larger arena than that of electoral politics. Given the nature of internet tech, however, I don’t see a lot of ways to prevent data mining (though the EU seems to have some regulations we in the US can only wish for).
Societal standards for what constitutes rude behavior and the prevalence of discrimination of various minority groups are separate issues … It’s perfectly possible for people to simultaneously be both polite and tolerant towards minorities.
Possible, yes; probable, I don’t think so. This reflects my experiences in USAstan, where the breaking-up of too-rigid standards of “decency” seem to have opened up opportunities for hustlers as well as nonconformists. Now that the lawns no longer get herbicided and manicured, we have more flowers – and more weeds.
… advertisements are getting more and more annoying as time goes by.
I keep recalling a story from at least 50 years ago, about the owner of a tobacco-based conglomerate meeting with his executives about their advertising plans. He gathered them around a elegantly polished mahogany table and spat a big wad of phlegm on it. “See that? You may not like it, but you’ll by God remember it. That’s what I want!” A real trendsetter.
My guess is that mine wasn’t the only complaint they got.
Good work to you and your unknown colleagues! We need a lot more of that, in business and politics alike.
Back to the privacy issue. A decade or more ago, science fiction writer David Brin wrote an article that I really disliked, but to which I have yet to create a good rebuttal, to the effect that we (the general population) have already lost the possibility of protecting our own information, and should focus instead on requiring equal transparency on the part of the powerful. By now I think we’ve lost that prospect too, but that might come from the feelings of futility generated by years of opposing rampant Republican takeover.
@#29
My personal experience doesn’t align with yours (in my case, I’m comparing what I have seen in various European countries).
Moreover, your theory requires that people don’t think about why they disapprove of various actions. As in the following example: “My pastor said that homosexuality is a sin, therefore gays are bad; my pastor said that marketing phone calls are rude, therefore aggressive marketing is bad.” I’m not denying that part of humans really fail to think about why they perceive some actions as good or bad, they just blindly follow all the society’s rules without even thinking about them. Yet I’m unwilling to accept the idea that majority of humans are so stupid that they are completely incapable of thinking about what they value and why. The moment people actually start thinking about it, the difference between self-expression and rude behavior becomes pretty obvious. When some dude decides to wear unusual clothes, get a facial piercing and have consensual sex with another dude, then this person isn’t hurting anybody else. He is simply minding his own business, thus nobody else has a reason to interfere in his life and criticize his lifestyle choices. Rude behavior, on the other hand, is something that harms the rest of society, for example, when some business runs an aggressive marketing campaign, they are hurting everybody whose phone number they called. By the way, this is how I draw the line between what I perceive as acceptable and unacceptable behavior. If somebody shows up at some event wearing a more casual outfit that differs from the dress code, then I don’t see it as bad or rude. After all, the guy who prefers to wear a pair of jeans instead of a suit isn’t hurting anybody. However, cutting in line is something I perceive as rude, because this way the offender hurts everybody else by making them wait in line longer.
Ieva Skrebele @ # 30: … I’m unwilling to accept the idea that majority of humans are so stupid that they are completely incapable of thinking about what they value and why.
Field observation suggests you’ve probably missed some relevant specimens (though plausibly not so many as in the SE USA). Whether by “stupid” one means mentally deficient or programmed-into-reflexive-denial, researchers have published numerous case studies (the latter seem to have multiplied in recent years).
Your personal criteria make a lot of sense, but that word “harm” is in some cases fuzzy enough to leave a lot of subjectivity: the use of certain words, f’rinstance. If a person’s identity includes a set of doctrines, they will probably feel personally attacked by violation of those standards: I feel inclined to support the claims of a transperson to a gender inconsistent with their anatomy above those of True Believers prescribing and proscribing according to the rules Jesus has burned into their hearts, but I don[‘t claim to do so on the impartial basis of perfect knowledge that the latter don’t really feel trespassed upon.
@#31
Well, I am living in the atheist country. When people stop caring about what preachers say, they start thinking a bit more and it becomes easier to reason with them.
True. Agreeing upon what constitutes harm isn’t easy. I may have my own ideas about where I draw the line, but I know that many people will disagree with me. Still, when people start thinking and questioning dogmas, at least it becomes possible to reason with them and seek compromises.
Ieva Skrebele @ # 32: … living in the atheist country.
We’ve also seen a lot of blind tribalism amongst the godfree.
I may have my own ideas about where I draw the line, but I know that many people will disagree with me.
To restate part of my point: I recognize that blocking the agenda of, say, those I call hyperchristians may actually cause them emotional harm, perhaps equivalent to misgendering a transperson. Having chosen sides, I act and speak accordingly, but not under the impression that I don’t produce some pain along the way.
“Ieva Skrebele: What I would like to ban is collecting people’s personal data without their consent.
“Pierce R. Butler: They (yes, that “they”) have ways of working around such things. Many stores here, for example, offer a chance of prizes for participating in online customer-satisfaction surveys – which collect email addresses to notify the winners of those prizes (and enable spamming).
“Ieva Skrebele: This is an example of a customer willingly consenting to share their data. I see no problem with that.”
Well, there is a problem with that. Let me refer to Grice’s Maxims. See https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/implicature/#GriThe . IMX, these maxims are fairly pan-cultural. For instance, if you ask me how many children I have and I say two, when I actually have three, then what I said was true, but deceptive, because I left out important information. Now if I ask for your email for the stated reason that I can notify if you have won a prize, but my main reason (unstated) is to sell your address to spammers, I am also leaving out important information, and am being deceptive.
Online culture has evolved to the point that it is common knowledge that email addresses are for sale. But, IMO, this kind of thing is still deceptive in nature. There are a lot of naive people out there.