Posted May 20, 2016
The fact that huge companies gather as much data as they can from online visitors? That somebody is willing to pay a lot (and therefore has to find some intrinsic value in said data)? Because at this point I'm just going to point at either Facebook or Google that made billions on data mining.
The only part that you can try to question is whether or not the presence of such huge databases will have any detrimental effect on the society. In which case I'll start pointing out all the historical records where personal information was used to subvert individuals, or allow heavy-handed population control. And most of these records are from situations where obtaining and working with that amount of information was vastly more costly than it is currently possible.
The existence of such depositories goes against the very foundation of Western societies. There is a reason why voting records for general elections are not open to public scrutiny. There is a reason for the Constitution of the United States to put such heavy stress on privacy of individuals under its protection (not that it matters nowadays, but the thought is there). There is also a reason why every despotic government ever had some form of vast apparatus used for information gathering and control.
So, yes, I do get quite vocal when people who, by own claims of professionalism, should know better start dismissing this all with flippant comments amounting to "if you have nothing to hide."
Anything prior to introduction of the cloudfront.net - until now, I could block all the elements I found offensive without it impacting usability of the site. Not so much now - you literaly cannot log in (or see images) without allowing cloudfront.net access.
Also, as a professional programmer you should know damn well that
a) any third-party code used may be changed without any notice and at any given moment,
b) without full security audit you cannot have full certainty that the code does what it appears to do. Too many possible ways of doing such fun things as pointer tweaking, buffer overflow, or even more complex ways of getting things that appear to be germane to do something unexpected by the end user. Again, this part is more theoretical than applicable to current discussion, but this is something I would expect a professional to be aware of and acknowledge.
Then there's your comment about the code not sending anything to Amazon, a statement completely ignoring the fact that the act of obtaining the code itself does send information to Amazon's network.
Define "checking." Because with sufficient effort it absolutely does. If anything, you can stop specific packets to cut out whatever information you want to prevent from leaving the system - and as long as it is something auxiliary to the data request rather than required to run whatever the third-party script is supposed to do, you can actually get away with it. Though this is more of a technical possibility than realistic method of dealing with such situations in real life, but I'm being pedantic here since we're discussing this as professionals.
This is a subject that has received so much detailed coverage, including all the associated societal and political ramifications, that I consider any technical person (or somebody with sufficient level of knowledge in the area of "social science") without a reasonable argument to dismiss the danger of data gathering on such scale (and I have yet to meet any such person) to be either unforgivably clueless on the subject, or utterly disingenuous. Take this as you will.
Last I checked (which is right now), the images themselves are still hosted by GOG servers.
As to TOR, if your response to increasing encroachment on privacy is to recommend stop-gap measures with obscure tools, no wonder our society is headed the way it is.
It's not about what specific data is being mined. It's about what will happen if people remain indifferent to such mining. And for that, go read any distopian classic. Or watch Brazil and spend the activity of a neuron or two connecting the dots.
Lastly, for educational purposes:
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/lack-of-online-privacy-has-chilling-effect-us-department-of-commerce-says
Post edited May 20, 2016 by Lukaszmik
