Data Surveillance Quotes

As we become so visible in the digital world and leave an endless trail of data behind us, exactly who has our data and what they do with it becomes increasingly important.

You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.

You already have zero privacy - get over it.

Facebook in particular is the most appalling spying machine that has ever been invented. Here we have the world's most comprehensive database about people, their relationships, their names, their addresses, their locations and the communications with each other, their relatives, all sitting within the United States, all accessible to US intelligence. Facebook, Google, Yahoo.. all these major US organizations have built-in interfaces for US intelligence. It's not a matter of serving a subpoena. They have an interface that they have developed for US intelligence to use.

If it's easy for the government to learn about us, it should be easier for us to learn about the government.

Throughout the western world, new systems have risen up whose job is to constantly record and monitor the present - and then compare that to the recorded past. The aim is to discover patterns, coincidences and correlations, and from that, find ways of stopping change. Keeping things the same.

When your government, employer, landlord, merchant, banker and local sports team gang up to picture, digitize and permanently record your every activity, you are placed under unprecedented control.

I don't believe in privacy. I mean, I like the idea of privacy, but I don't believe that it happens anymore. I think privacy is something, I am afraid, we seem to be waving goodbye to.

Choosing providers is not a choice between surveillance/not; it's just choosing which feudal lord gets to spy on you.

I was very taken aback and disappointed in Sheryl Sandberg's public statement that if an individual did not want to continue to share their data with FB they would have to pay. To me, that sounds like a threat. Continue to let us use your property or pay?

Twitter, Facebook, and other social media outlets have a great deal of information about all of us - and the government wants to be able to see it.

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.

The more the data banks record about each one of us, the less we exist.

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 internet is watching us now. If they want to. They can see what sites you visit. In the future, television will be watching us, and customizing itself to what it knows about us. The thrilling thing is, that will make us feel we're part of the medium. The scary thing is, we'll lose our right to privacy. An ad will appear in the air around us, talking directly to us.

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.

Citizens' rights cannot be protected if their digital activities are governed and policed by opaque and publicly unaccountable corporate mechanisms.

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.

If information is collected, it will be compromised. People have no idea of the way that data collected for one purpose may be used for another.

In America, we collect more digital communications from America than we do from the Russians.

I am completely opposed to the concept of big data.

We tend to assume that data is either private or public, either owned by one person or shared by many. In fact there's more to it than that, above and beyond the upsetting reality that private data is now anything but.

I worry about any type of bulk collection. If you collect everything, how do you know that you’ve got anything

We have a lot of argument about laws but none of it solves the problem. Let's examine what happened, why did we miss the Tsarnaev brothers, why did we miss the San Bernardino couple? It wasn't because we had stopped collected metadata it was because, I think, as someone who comes from the technology world, we were using the wrong algorithms.

There are programs such as the NSA paying RSA $10 million to use an insecure encryption standard by default in their products. That's making us more vulnerable not just to the snooping of our domestic agencies, but also foreign agencies.