Gary Kovacs Quotes

Internet privacy is dwindling. Every purchase you make, flight you take, website you view, file you download, person you call, and e-mail you send is tracked. … and then stored indefinitely and often sold to the highest bidder—whoever that may be. Personal data, long thought to be confidential simply isn’t anymore.

Call it a hunch, but I sense that many of us are not entirely comfortable with a world in which every single thing we buy creates a cloud of data. I'd like to have an option to not have a record of how much I tipped, or what I bought at 1:08 A.M. at a corner market in New York City.

You can have Google or you can have privacy but you can’t have both.

In this era of massive online connectivity, the majority of privacy breaches and data leaks remain unknown, unchallenged, and unregulated. Regulatory compliance alone cannot ensure privacy.

The Internet gave us access to everything, but it also gave everything access to us.

It's not Big Brother that we now have to be afraid of, but Big Browser.

People are starting to be very skeptical of the Facebook algorithm and all kinds of data surveillance.

[I am] not even two bites into breakfast, and there are already nearly 25 sites that are tracking me. I have navigated to a total of four.

Historically, privacy was almost implicit, because it was hard to find and gather information. But in the digital world, whether it's digital cameras or satellites or just what you click on, we need to have more explicit rules - not just for governments but for private companies.

The institutions that we've built up over the years to protect our individual privacy rights from the government don't apply to the private sector. The Fourth Amendment doesn't apply to corporations. The Freedom of Information Act doesn't apply to Silicon Valley. And you can't impeach Google if it breaks its 'Don't be evil' campaign pledge.

The people who are worried about privacy have a legitimate worry. But we live in a complex world where you're going to have to have a level of security greater than you did back in the olden days, if you will. And our laws and our interpretation of the Constitution, I think, have to change.

Everything we do in the digital realm - from surfing the Web to sending an e-mail to conducting a credit card transaction to, yes, making a phone call - creates a data trail. And if that trail exists, chances are someone is using it - or will be soon enough.

We have never really had absolute privacy with our records or our electronic communications - government agencies have always been able to gain access with appropriate court orders.

When documents were analog, they were protected by government laws against unreasonable search and seizure. When they live in the cloud... the ground is shifting.

Google, Facebook, and other consumer web companies violate our privacy. But that's only because they have an ad-based business model. They can only make money by selling your data - and degrading the product experience with ads.

The Internet is unpoliceable essentially.

… corporations do almost everything that the federal government has been banned from doing under various laws, in particular the Privacy Act of 1974.

Hopefully, the world will not have a lot of different privacy standards requirements--particularly some commonality between the United States and Europe.

Every few years, the feds and the courts change direction or fail to answer important questions. And every day, the Internet becomes more of a platform for lousy ads, for increasing the power of a few rich companies, and for intrusive tracking. It's too important to leave unprotected.

I don't actually, as a general policy, block any sort of cookies. I keep them all turned on, and that's because I'm willing to make the tradeoff that I let companies gather this information about me in return for a better experience.

I promoted Hyderabad to the world by saying that there was privacy in India and their data will be sage. Data is wealth.

It is both impractical and very harmful for each state to enact differing and conflicting privacy burdens on broadband providers, many of which serve multiple states, if not the entire country.

The only thing privacy laws accomplish is making the bugs smaller.

A child born today will grow up with no conception of privacy at all.

I think there are all kinds of intrusions into private rights that make use of contemporary technology.