Bill Gates Quotes

[T]he [Facebook] settlement sends a powerful message about the importance of privacy. The cost of privacy violations like Facebook’s just increased dramatically. And if the need for companies to take privacy commitments seriously was not clear before, it is now.

In circumstances involving dramatic technological change, the best solution to privacy concerns may be legislative. A legislative body is well situated to gauge changing public attitudes, to draw detailed lines, and to balance privacy and public safety in a comprehensive way.

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.

If you are an American, you can understand why people cannot go through your house and go through your files. By the same token, should they be able to go through them electronically?

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.

The idea that you can be totally anonymous in the digital age is increasingly hard to execute.

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.

I believe that it is critical for this country to have a zone of privacy —– for everyone,

The true test of a privacy policy is the remedy to consumers if their privacy is invaded.

You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.

There are two kinds of cryptography in this world: cryptography that will stop your kid sister from reading your files, and cryptography that will stop major governments from reading your files.

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

There used to be technological limitations … that provided a measure of privacy for Americans. Now with essentially no technological limitations—the technology can practically do anything—the only way to strike the appropriate balance between liberty and security is to embed that balance in the law.

Many well-meaning attempts to address public concern about privacy reflect an outdated understanding of the contemporary data ecosystem.

Privacy violations should be considered criminal offences.

Individuals deserve the right to control what happens to their personal data at any given moment -- not only after someone else has obtained it, perhaps even without consent.

Consent allows individuals to set conditions for the use of their data, access the information relating to them that others have obtained, verify the accuracy of that information, check to make sure companies comply with the rules, and seek redress for any harm that results from the misuse of their data. Remove consent, and the other privacy checks and balances collapse.

One can doubt the sincerity of the technology community’s outrage over the NSA’s surveillance practices—doubt, for example, that the Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, whose company reportedly stores petabytes’ worth of data about its billion-plus active monthly users, was shocked at the thought of mass data collection.

This is not a case about one isolated iPhone. Rather, this case is about the Department of Justice and the FBI seeking through the courts a dangerous power that Congress and the American people have withheld: the ability to force companies like Apple to undermine the basic security and privacy interests of hundreds of millions of individuals around the globe. The government demands that Apple create a back door to defeat the encryption on the iPhone, making its user’s most confidential and personal information vulnerable to hackers, identify thieves, hostile foreign agents, and unwarranted government surveillance.

[The FBI v. Apple Case] threatens a radical transformation of the relationship between the government and the governed.

Some call for efforts to weaken or compromise encryption standards such that only Governments may enjoy access to encrypted communications. However, compromised encryption cannot be kept secret from those with the skill to find and exploit the weak points, whether State or non-State, legitimate or criminal. It is a seemingly universal position among technologists that there is no special access that can be made available only to government authorities, even ones that, in principle, have the public interest in mind. In the contemporary technological environment, intentionally compromising encryption, even for arguably legitimate purposes, weakens everyone’s security online.

Online censorship, mass and targeted surveillance and data collection, digital attacks on civil society and repression resulting from online expression force individuals around the world to seek security to hold opinions without interference and seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds. Many seek to protect their security through encryption, the scrambling of data so only intended recipients may access it

Efforts to constrain encryption through forms of extraordinary access will inevitably introduce vulnerabilities into the security of consumer products in ways that are likely to have adverse long-term effects on the security, privacy, and civil liberties of citizens.

We can't allow somebody to create a service like that, which reveals who's looking at your page. That's a violation of privacy.

Businesses that make consumer privacy a point of competitive differentiation will enjoy greater customer loyalty.