Gary Weiss Quotes

Whether it's Baidu or Chinese versions of YouTube or Sina or Sohu, Chinese Internet sites are getting daily directives from the government telling them what kinds of content they cannot allow on their site and what they need to delete.

The amount of control you have over somebody if you can monitor internet activity is amazing.

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.

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

You have to fight for your privacy or you lose it.

Man, I don't want to have nothing to do with computers. I don't want the government in my business.

You don't get to cut that chain of evidence and start over. You're always going to be pursued by your data shadow, which is forming from thousands and thousands of little leaks and tributaries of information.

The early idealists and companies and governments have all assumed that the Internet will bring freedom. Yet China proves that this is not the case.

If I sign up for Facebook and want my account destroyed, it is impossible. They keep tabs on you; there will always be a trace.

North Korea aside, most authoritarian governments have already accepted the growth of the Internet culture as inevitable; they have little choice but to find ways to shape it in accord with their own narratives - or risk having their narratives shaped by others.

China is building a model for how an authoritarian government can survive the Internet.

I share every aspect of my life with the Internet. Whether or not that's a good thing, I don't know.

It's insane, the Internet. Totally craziness. Like a little cancer. People can just do whatever they want, say whatever they want, be totally anonymous. It's totally out of control.

Being connected to the Internet means being vulnerable to coordinated actions that can knock down walls of secrecy and shatter mechanisms of control.

Every year in China, Internet executives are officially rewarded for their 'patriotism.'

Like it or not, Google and the Chinese government are stuck in a tense, long-term relationship, and can look forward to more high-stakes shadow-boxing in the netherworld of the world's most elaborate system of censorship.

What's really going on is, on your iPhone, you have 200 apps, and they're all collecting a little data on you. Twitter knows a certain thing, Foursquare knows something else, my Fitbit app knows something else, my Waze app knows something else.

In China, Internet surveillance has already become a profitable industry. In fact, a growing number of private firms eagerly assist the local police by aggregating this data and presenting it in easy-to-browse formats, allowing humans to pursue more analytical tasks.

People have a right to surf the Web without Big Brother watching their every move and announcing it to the world. The Internet marketplace has matured - and it's time for consumers' protections to keep pace.

In Russia, they do not generally block the Internet and directly censor websites.

People are just beginning to learn how much their own personal privacy is being invaded and that they’re losing control over their own information.

I think that Internet as such, as a phenomenon is worth prohibiting because it gives nobody anything good.

We now expect Google, Facebook, Twitter and other companies to police the Internet for dangerous and illegal material - violent, terrorist, criminal - and some democratic governments require them to do so. But what if they did decide to repress material for political reasons? How would we know?

The problem of end-to-end encryption isn't just a terrorism issue.

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.