The thing about privacy is you never know when future politics is going to come into play.
Maybe a medical procedure will suddenly become illegal, such that your location history is now subject to warranted search.
Maybe your country will take a sharp turn towards authoritarianism, electing politicians who are ready and willing to use law enforcement to "punish" their enemies.
Maybe your monarch will die, and a recently passed bill will be used to arrest people who protest the existence of the monarchy.
Having "nothing to hide" isn't necessarily a fixed state.
I work with prosecutors, and some of them will straight up misrepresent innocent facts to paint them as evidence of malicious intent and pressure parties to plead guilty.
I have seen stuff like "defendant had TOR installed - a popular program for criminals" in court filings. ...and judges and juries accept that as fact because they just don't understand the technology. For example, having a bookmark for "Hacker News" would absolutely show up in court. Crazy stuff meant to bias judges and juries that don't know tech.
The point is that the situation is 100x worse in tech where prosecutors, judges, and juries simply do not understand the evidence. ANYTHING can be painted as incriminating evidence.
I have seen saved credentials on automation jobs being used to incorrectly establish people's network activity. I have seen routine maintenance being used to establish obstruction charges just to intimidate possible witnesses... Like stuff you would not believe happens, happens.
It's even worse in civil suits, where opposing counsel will subpoena as much as possible (mountains of data) just to give you more work and fish for trade secrets or anything they can twist in court.
When I was junior, I proudly told my legal team "good news, I added space to keep our transaction records for 20 years!" and was aghast when they said they wanted files deleted THE DAY the legal requirement to hold it expired because it increased legal liability.
Now I totally get it. Today we only store the bare minimum - everything else is deleted immediately. ... and I have to re-explain this to junior employees each year to their disgust.
> I have seen stuff like "defendant had TOR installed - a popular program for criminals" in court filings. ...and judges and juries accept that as fact because they just don't understand the technology. For example, having a bookmark for "Hacker News" would absolutely show up in court.
Both of those are really good examples of how a statement of fact that is literally true can still be a lie. Politicians do this kind of stuff all the time especially in their attack ads that make TV unwatchable around this time of year in every even numbered year. Amazingly what gets a politician called out by the other party's press as a "liar" is the opposite of this kind of statement: something that is fundamentally true but where the politician got one minor irrelevant detail wrong. That's also a major reason why it isn't a good idea to represent yourself in court or to explain yourself to the police when you get arrested because people are prone to accidentally getting minor details wrong or misspeaking even when they're telling the truth to the best of their ability.
For anyone that isn't convinced, here is a talk by a lawyer and a police officer discussing the idea of never talking to the police [0]. It's interesting that they largely agree that talking to the police is not a good idea.
> ... prone to accidentally getting minor details wrong
I know a prosecutor who had to investigate the statements made by the husband of a person who (presumably) had drowned themself in their pool (she used workout weights to keep herself at the bottom). The statement to be investigated: "Those were her weights. I never touched those weights!"
Now all of a sudden maybe his fingerprints are on the weights and that statement is untrue...
I also got to learn that they scoop the weights into a bucket because I guess they need to keep them submerged in water, otherwise the prints will wash off.
Bigtech will happily store data on their users indefinitely so they can mine it in the future, should they think of new profit-generating ideas. But they will absolutely delete their employee's emails after N months unless they are on litigation hold (i.e. legally required not to do so). Complete double standard.
I was punished in school for having NetHack source code in my home dir.
And it was not because it was a game but because it allegedly was a hacking tool.
In highschool I was sent to detention and almost suspended because a study hall teacher overheard me talking about the "black market" feature of an roleplaying game I was writing on my graphing calculator. It took an hour of trying to explain TI-BASIC to my principle (and I think some angry phonecalls from my mother, a teacher in that district) before they relented with the insane mafioso accusations.
>Was it really routine maintenance to BleachBit an entire server after you receive a subpoena from the FBI?
I would hope so, since presumably the storage devices on that server would either be resold or sent to a dump.
The info on those storage devices (assuming backups/existence of that data elsewhere for government data retention purposes) should not be let out into the wild.
In fact, I (and I don't work/exist in areas with confidential data) have a dozen or so hard drives that sit in a closet as I don't have the interface cards (any more) to hook them up and securely delete the data.
Eventually I'll probably purchase a bulk eraser[0], but until then, those disks will sit in my closet as my business is my business and no one else's.
I understand why people want to erase hard drives permanently and totally. My point was more about, isn't it a little weird to do so after the FBI says they want to look into the status of said devices.
lol, dude, just take out the screws and toss the platters in the oven. you need software to retrieve data, but not necessarily to destroy it.
I made a cool spiral chandelier out of fishing wire and hard drive parts. The platters don't chime as harmoniously as I had hoped, but it still worked out great - and I have enough super fridge magnets to last the rest of my life.
> In July, FBI Director James B. Comey said while the investigation revealed potential violations, “our judgement is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case.”
In other words, crimes were probably committed but the FBI dropped the investigation because they figured that no prosecutor would file charges in the case.
A plausible justification was given. It makes sense. It also has nothing to do with Hillary's decision-making. You can call all the people involved liars, or just deny the facts that have been presented to you - but the facts, as presented, do portray innocent behavior.
> having a bookmark for "Hacker News" would absolutely show up in court
And would the defense be allowed to show the legal and harmless conversations we have here? Or ask the prosecutors which HN posts they believe influenced the accused to commit a crime?
> Today we only store the bare minimum - everything else is deleted immediately. ... and I have to re-explain this to junior employees each year to their disgust.
Same in software-land. Nobody wants to have years of who-knows-what subpoenaed.
Yeah. Medical procedures, like abortions in the states, are a very real example of how things can dramatically change on a whim to an unbelievable level. Or syncing your cycle data to a smart device and later having a retro-scan to detect cycle anomalies to charge women with probable crimes.
We do that with speed cameras, why not just automate health data mining too? Why did you stop updating your cycle data, is it because you knew you were pregnant and wanted an abortion? Sounds like suspicious activity to me, exactly identical to turning around at a DUI checkpoint.
You don’t get in trouble just for turning around, I think its that turning around gets you pulled over and breathalyzed and you get in trouble for DUI. I realize this is kind of a classic “why worry if you have nothing to hide” argument, but everything is a balance and I’m ok with this intrusion to reduce DUI deaths. It is not equivalent to other privacy invasions.
This assumes the rule of law holds. America has a pretty good track record in this regard, better than most countries I think, but there can be no guarantees for the future.
What I find most ironic is that those people who are now realizing the same privacy platforms they used to defend with "I have nothing to hide" are the ones complying against their interests.
It's a poignant example of what others have pointed out. "I have nothing to hide" until political landscape changes to make it something to hide.
It's like people pushing for liberal drug laws and legalizing homeless tents and then one day its in their backyard.
While I feel for women part of groups that are impacted by Roe vs Wade being overturned, their apathy against privacy concerns have boomeranged, the same of which proportion of men who aren't having to deal with abortion are looking at this issue as "I don't need an abortion so it doesn't concern me".
Those women caught up in this struggle also looked on, along with men and everybody else as Uyghur women were sterilized and forced to abort using the very surveillance mechanism that were developed and custom tailored to fit the needs of the abusers.
It's almost like the land of CCP is a testing ground for what's in store for Western civilization. Remember what caused Latin America's shift towards tyranny and dictatorship, it was inflation. Nothing about our land that makes it any less susceptible or resilient. Inflation has deep remifications to privacy and this Roe vs Wade situation is only the beginning.
> ... maybe we shouldn't have spent years telling them they weren't allowed to have an opinion because it didn't concern them.
that never stopped women from doing what they want. you are completely brushing past the main issue which is apathy towards privacy which is not remotely related to women's rights portrayed by mainstream media and your language generalizes 100+ years of women, who regardless societal expectations, went on their own because they believed they had same rights as any other human. It's sad that the same spirit is now being used as shields to derail completely unrelated issues that by mere association of gender, calls for a complete review of a certain political lens that we are all familiar with. Save us the grace here honey.
Was there a Pope of Abortion Rights that pronounced such an edict? As a man, I haven't encountered this in an abortion discussion, but it sounds like something an asshole would say and I try not to hang out with assholes.
I've heard variations on it many times, usually by the people who frame it entirely as "right to choose" (-> "if you're not capable of getting pregnant you have no right to input on this"). I get what they're going for, conceptually, but wow that is not how you get allies.
Canonical example here are the records (that included religion) kept by the Dutch that enabled the nazis to easily round up all the jews in The Netherlands during WWII
And French Jewry was spared to a large extent not because of the compassion of Vichy administration, who even sent French children to the death camps over German objections, but due to a complicated bureaucracy and disorganized recordkeeping that made it a real challenge for French collaborators to round Jewish people up. They'd have no such roadblock these days.
There's an interesting discussion in the book The Sum of the People which argues that the disorganized recordkeeping in France was a ruse and a deliberate attempt by Rene Carmille to embrace the concept of population registry but to undermine the Nazi policy (Chapter 4, "Paper People"). In particular, Carmille apparently didn't enter the religion data from the census on the punchcards and never delivered lists. Carmille was arrested by the SS in 1944. It's not an entirely happy story though because there were absolutely others in France who collaborated to produce as many lists as they could, especially of Jewish immigrants who were easier to find in the records.
IBM's Holocaust collaboration became all the more significant when I ran across this justification / defence of pervasive data surveillance by Herbert Simon, Nobel laureate in economics and one of the fathers of AI. This is in his 1977 essay "What Computers Mean for Man and Society". In it, he addresses concerns:
The privacy issue has been raised most insistently with respect to the creation and maintenance of longitudinal data files that assemble information about persons from a multitude of sources. Files of this kind would be highly valuable for many kinds of economic and social research, but they are bought at too high a price if they endanger human freedom or seriously enhance the opportunities of blackmailers. While such dangers should not be ignored, it should be noted that the lack of comprehensive data files has never been the limiting barrier to the suppression of human freedom. The Watergate criminals made extensive, if unskillful, use of electronics, but no computer played a role in their conspiracy. The Nazis operated with horrifying effectiveness and thoroughness without the benefits of any kind of mechanized data processing.
There is, of course, one slight problem with Simon's argument: The Nazis did make heavy use of mechanised data processing, provided and supported by an American company, IBM.
Came here to point IBM out which is a sign of how it was: Many Americans supported Nazi.
There is this rose tinted glass view that Americans rose up to defeat Nazism taught in textbooks and mainstream media but was far from the truth. Not only did Nazism was cool then, American corporations like IBM directly aided Nazi party with surveillance efforts, very much like they have funded the persecution of uyghurs by purchasing American software and hardware.
What is constant is that the US looks out for its interest first and foremost, even if it means doing business with authoritarian or tyrannical regimes. Is it moral from a humane perspective? No. But is the state subject to humane? are corporations? The accepted view is that they have no consciousness and is not bound by the same moral/ethical afflictions unless they are shamed out of it that it impacts their bottom line.
Most people were unaware/indifferent, and a nonnegligible number thought it was cool/alright, and tens of thousands openly showed up for it, untold numbers directly/indirectly supported it- undoubtedly some never stopped.
McCarthyism was how this played out in the states. Not as brutal and bloody, but lives were still ruined.
In theory it’s unconstitutional here to prosecute someone for an act they committed before there was a law against it. But there are other ways to convict someone, for better or worse.
Corporations leverage this all the time, so they go unpunished unless it’s in the court of public opinion. The toolset is necessary but the power dynamics are important.
I'm looking at the European Union and at Apple and Google. Good intentions? That doesn't mean that you're the good guys! History has shown that the bad guys always believe strongly that they were the good guys. Privacy and security is not only about protection from criminals and companies but especially about protection from our governments. It doesn't matter wether you voted for your government or not or you like them or not or they like you or not.
My government evaluates police work by number of cases. What does the police do if there is not enough crime? For example they look at energy usage of people and try to spot patterns that might indicate something like a weed farm. If the pattern match your home will be searched. This is a supposedly civilized western country that managed to start two dictatorships in just one century and had massive problems with surveillance. You can guess the country now...
Today people with similar mindsets control politics and surveillance is increased at every step. A frightful older demographic is part of this. Someone said it would be insanity to repeat the same mistakes over and over again and expect different results...
So far, the only jurisdictions in the developed world who seem to be on a trajectory towards increased or at least not decreased privacy of any type are in Europe.
I'm not sure why it's especially governments. I find this propensity for privacy focused people to overlap with more conservative thinking individuals very perplexing. Especially since typically the more prominent feature of conservatism is support towards large corporations - which are the largest entities removing our privacy.
It's not especially governments for which you need to keep the integrity of your privacy - it's everyone. And I would imagine if we're trying to estimate the entities that pry the most, it's corporations. Sure, they may feed it to governments, but there's an energy barrier there (in at least some circumstances) - but the trust of corporations is one of the bigger issues here.
A steelman of that perspective (full disclosure: I'm leaning more libertarian, but my stance is complicated, and nuanced), is that you can just not use facebook, but government's laws are full liability -they enforce (rather than describe) norms, and stances which can suffocate non-represented minorities, and you can not opt out in ways other than moving.
People are many, and weird, and different; the attention of lawmakers & govs are limited, and this can (and have repeatedly made) roadkill of you, with no recourse other than privacy.
In security, to make an assessment of overall risk of a potential vulnerability, we take into account both the probability, and the impact of exploiting such vulnerability. Facebook, and corporations in general, ultimately want to move merch, and, at worst, make you vote for candidates of their choice: probability of being successful is medium, but impact for the individual is relatively low. Goverment laws can roadkill you: probability of this ranges from low to medium, but impact is super high. This advises for being especially vigilant for gov interventions, especially where freedom, and liberties are concerned.
I think the reason most people are wary of sharing banking information is that they are worried you would exploit it or because of social norms not to talk about money, not that they have something to hide.
What better reason to hide something than because you think people will exploit that knowledge to harm you? You don't even need to think the party you're giving the information to will abuse it. Can you trust them to not pass it on or have it stolen from them? We have many many examples of why you should not.
>"I will be expecting your credit card and bank information on my table in the morning"
I've shared this (or similar info) with landlords and realtors and platforms that I don't trust. That's life.
The point is that just because you have something to hide doesn't mean you've done anything wrong. You might end up sharing that information in certain situations, but carefully. The framing those who promulgate that phrasing want to push is that not wanting to share information with the government makes you suspicious, because your only possible reason could be wrongdoing. This notion is hostile to liberty and security.
I completely agree with you about "identity theft" but I also keep the keys to my house private, although anybody who would burglarize me if I didn't would clearly be in the wrong and legally liable for my things.
Notwithstanding any legal or ethical judgement, being burglarized would cause me significant inconvenience and at the very least some sentimental losses, even if I were ultimately compensated years later with interest. Therefore, I keep my keys private to protect myself.
What people mean is that they've done nothing wrong, not that there's nothing they'd rather keep secret. "Not like that!" means they're annoyed you're focused on their words instead of their meaning. They're about to write you off and walk away with their beliefs even stronger.
There are also a ton of bewildered Boomers out there who believe they have done nothing wrong and are completely bewildered their children have gone no contact. I’d say if your kids won’t talk to you’ve seriously fucked up, and at least for some of them it’s over conversations they could have taken to their grave but instead their “truth” was more important than meeting their grandkids.
I told my father something about myself years ago and he tried to make the case that I hadn’t brought it up because I was ashamed.
I wasn’t ashamed. But if you share certain things about yourself, being gay being one of the most obvious examples, some people want to define you by it, or talk about it to the exclusion of all other things. I’d much rather talk about trees, for that matter tax law.
One of my mentees had a bit of a persecution complex about several things, orientation one of them. When late in our relationship I finally mentioned that my kid had come out, she was shocked I hadn’t brought it up before (which in retrospect I think she may have been recalculating her opinions of me on the fly, like the Key & Peele skit, “Oh I see, I’m just an asshole.”)
Without a pause I answered that it’s because it’s not the most interesting thing about them, which just made the eyebrows go up even higher. But I think it finally sunk in.
> you're focused on their words instead of their meaning.
If I were focused on that meaning, I'd call talking about whether they're doing right or wrong things completely unresponsive. We're talking about privacy and protection, not their personal assessments of the merit of their private lives.
Instead, I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt and remind them that the people who are dangerous to them may not share their standards or ethics.
‘Something to hide’ in English often has a negative connotation meaning deliberately trying to deceive or something bad they did and don’t want you to know about.
Better would be to not use that phrase as most people have something they wish to remain private or secret, without it being anything sinister. Like their password for example !
Were they arrested for "protesting the monarchy" or breaching the peace? Context is important. Silently holding up a banner: fine. Yelling at passing royals at a moment of deep solemnity: not fine, and stretching the free speech defence IMO. A bit like yelling at women entering an abortion clinic, or yelling loyalist slogans at an IRA funeral. There's a time & place.
Edit: Also, this is OT anyway from the matter of privacy and "nothing to hide".
> The state shouldn't get to declare mandatory solemnity.
Of course they can - for example, remembering those who died in a terrorist attack, victims of genocide, victims of the diseases such as the AIDS epidemic, etc. Lots of groups can declare solemn events for a lot of different reasons, and they shouldn't have to deal with obnoxious and thoughtless individuals purposely trying to disrupt those events.
> Yelling at passing royals at a moment of deep solemnity: not fine, and stretching the free speech defence IMO
lol, my country's concept of free speech is in part based on the idea everyone should be able to tell your country's nobility things they don't want to hear.
Any time and place other than a funeral or memorial service would be a good start. I can't believe there are adults here arguing that it's somehow ok to crash someone's funeral or memorial service to hurl insults at their relatives.
Holding "not my king" poster has nothing to do with "deep solemnity" and does not prevent anyone from grieving. Yet they still got arrested or questioned.
Different occasion. The guy holding the poster definitely shouldn't have been arrested. The guy shouting at Prince Andrew during the procession was breaching the peace. Different context, which was my point.
Perhaps, but we not unreasonably see it as behaviour where a man was clearly taking advantage of his position of wealth and power over someone of an impressionable age who's unlikely to be in a position to give meaningfully informed consent. At any rate the "sick old man" accusation made by heckler was pretty well justified on its own terms, even if choosing that exact moment to make it did little to help the cause.
I know nothing of the particular case, but this argument isn't very convincing to me; the existence of a disparity does no work to show that disparity was actually part of the decision making process for the 17 year old in the way you're insinuating. The more we start removing the agency of late adolescents by calling them 'impressionable', the less sensible this conversation becomes, as though nobody can remember when they themselves were once 17, I know I can.
The argument is flawed because we generally tolerate power differences in relationships: men and women (institutional power), certain cases of coworkers of different ranks, an able-bodied person with a disabled person, a depressed person with a mentally healthy person, a suicidal person with a happy person, etc.
There are also a lot of adults who vary, due to personal characteristics or experiences with relationships (or lack thereof) who are far more easily snared into a relationship; the average 17 year old has had many more relationships than I have as a 25 year old, and sexual ones too, usually with peers. If anything, I'm the naive one who would fall into a very convincing snare with an older man.
I'm not attempting to make any sort of legal argument, just positing why it's widely seen as being an especially egregious act of sexual predation (and I'll admit that's how it appears on the surface to me, but ultimately it's up to the criminal justice system to decide).
I simply struggle to see it as an 'especially egregious' act of sexual predation when the facts are on the ground, or rather, obscured and unknown. I'm saying that the assumption that a difference in power is enough to turn a relationship from 'weird but OK' to 'egregious sexual predation' does not always hold, and it's hard to see where it does hold without removing all agency from the 'victim'.
Um, the facts aren't really that obscure or unknown - the evidence Ms Giuffre was a pawn in Epstein's sex-trafficking ring, one that Prince Andrew was happy to take advantage of, is pretty compelling, even if not proven beyond reasonable doubt. Yes, she admitted to being involved in recruiting for it (while under 18), which was almost certainly a decision made out of immaturity, given her role now running Speak Out/Act/Reclaim.
17 is not a child, but a teenager. Yeah, still creepy as hell, still wrong, but let's not mix the two things as it only serves to dilute the meaning and severity of actual child abuse.
It's so hard to keep straight, dead children, dead pigs, live children, other politicians... the upper wrung of British society seems to be two thirds disturbing fringe sex stuff and one third terrible decision making.
And this is something you want enforced by the state? What other unenumerated rights should be enforced by security forces? In North Korea, security forces have the responsibility of making sure that people express the appropriate amount of worry and fear when a Kim might be ill, and the appropriate amount of rage when a Kim has been insulted by a foreign leader.
One person, probably not invited, makes a scene, shouts a bunch of stuff. Perhaps they have a mental illness, perhaps they had a grudge against your mom - she might have been a judge or a teacher.
Are you just going to ignore it? Would you expect some security to remove that person so that you and others can have a peaceful funeral?
> But it's far more offensive and far more vile to suggest that the State has any right to regulate public speech based on its content.
Why? Offensive to whom? There seems to be general agreement that some speech crosses lines that are not okay and should be regulated. This is why all countries that have freedom of speech protections also have a list of exceptions. In the US, certain things like ads, pornography, slander, sedition, and lies are generally not considered protected speech. It depends on the specifics in any given case, but I’m not offended at all by the suggestion that the State should be allowed to regulate these kinds of speech when they cause harm.
The risk is that if the state have no power to forcibly remove someone causing such a disturbance then those present may lose faith in institutions such as the police who they may not unreasonably see as being responsible for "keeping the peace" and worse, take matters into their own hands (in fact it very much looked like this was likely in one such case in Edinburgh).
As long it's not considered criminal and the only "punishment" is being physically denied access to the scene in question I wouldn't be overly concerned about it being an overreach of the government.
None of which is to say I accept the police did everything right in this particular occasion.
She was the head of state who presided over genocides, resisted the independence many dozens of British colonies, got carveouts in laws to shield her personal possessions from scrutiny for stolen antiquities...
I could go on.
Public figures in general, and heads of state in particular, lose the right to be treated as "just somebody's mom". They get treated by the public based, at least in part, on their treatment of the public.
And even apart from all that, this funeral, at a time when many, many UK residents are facing skyrocketing costs for everything from food to electricity to heat—as in, increases of 5-10x, not just a few percent—is projected to cost upwards of half a billion pounds, from what I've heard.
> She was the head of state who presided over genocides, resisted the independence many dozens of British colonies, got carveouts in laws to shield her personal possessions from scrutiny for stolen antiquities...
Then it is pretty damning that not almost everyone is shouting! I'll go even further, then it is outrageous that people around the world mostly, including in the US, are saying what a great person she was.
So I wonder why is that?
Also, my understanding is that the person who got arrested for heckling was doing so because Andrew had sex with a 17 year old. So he was more upset about that than the queen overseeing genocides.
And if people really think she was evil, why wait until death? Why not speak up very loudly while the person is alive in order to affect change.
> the people being arrested were in public places.
Funerals are reasonably often held at public cemeteries.
FWIW I disagree the arrests were justifiable unless the protestors refused to be non-violently lead away from the scene, assuming they presented a genuine risk of provoking a violent response from the mourners etc.
In this case no, but the question remains to the GP as to whether having the police remove the man from the crowd would have been justifiable if it were a cemetery.
(To be clear, I don't especially have a problem with the police taking Prince Andrew's heckler away, if nothing else for his own safety given members of the public were also manhandling him. I do have an issue with him being arrested and expected to face court.)
> as to whether having the police remove the man from the crowd would have been justifiable if it were a cemetery.
Of course it would be wrong for the police to arrest people for being disrespectful in a cemetery. What would be alright is if the owners of that cemetery wanted them to leave the property, they refused, and the police were called. That's why all of the photos of Westboro protesting at funerals were them on the sidewalk facing a cemetery.
So if I choose to hold my mother's funeral at a public cemetery owned and administered by a governmental body and our gathering is interrupted by an unruly mob of hooligans determined to disrupt proceedings as much as possible barring physical violence, you're saying I should have no right to request that the police escort them from the scene?
(We have "public nuisance" common law in Australia exactly to deal with that sort of scenario, which allows that "The action endangered the life, health, property, morale or comfort of the public". Surprisingly it can be treated as a criminal offense, though I'm not sure how often it really is).
> So if I choose to hold my mother's funeral at a public cemetery owned and administered by a governmental body
Just because City Hall is public doesn't mean that there aren't rules that you have to follow when you're there, or that you can't be kicked out when you break those rules. What it means is that you can't make up rules, because those are just the whims of the ruler.
If there are no rules at a publicly-owned cemetery against verbally abusing your recently dead mother in front of her grandchildren, you have to face that the abuser, as part of the public, has as much a right to be there as you do. But in real life there will be posted rules, just like there are rules at the public pool.
If Britain wants to pass a blanket law criminalizing all criticism of the royal family, they should. Plenty of dictatorships and monarchies already have lèse majesté laws, they can just copy them. They won't have to make up rules or improvise.
The abuser has as much a right to be there as I do, but I disagree they have a right to act in a clearly harassing/heckling manner. If they have something important to say that's worth protecting with free speech laws, that's not the way to say it.
If that's the sort of behaviour that's protected by the 1st amendment in the US, you're welcome to it.
On the other hand, nor do I ever wish to live in a country that criminalises criticism of anyone, esp. those in positions of power.
Someone’s mothers funeral is a private event. Is this not a public event? Does it seem fair to compare the funeral of an individual citizen to that of a “royal”?
"God save the queen, the fascist regime, make you a moron, potential H-bomb, ..."
Unlike in the 80-es, singing that today would make you arrested. Maybe the song is now more true than then, maybe the regime really became more fascist?
You left out the context, not only was Andrew walking right behind the coffin, the man was yards away and surrounded by mourners.
Their moment for grief was severely impacted by the protestor.
It's nowhere near as simple as you or other people in this thread are pretending it is. Even though I think Andrew should be stripped of his titles, it's right that guy was arrested.
> You left out the context, not only was Andrew walking right behind the coffin, the man was yards away and surrounded by mourners.
>Their moment for grief was severely impacted by the protestor.
>It's nowhere near as simple as you or other people in this thread are pretending it is. Even though I think Andrew should be stripped of his titles, it's right that guy was arrested.
Clearly that guy was being an asshole, but being a loud jerk shouldn't be a crime, IMHO.
If that's the prevailing attitude there, I'm glad I don't live in the UK.
Not because I think it's right to intrude on the mourning/grief/funerary rights of others (cf., Westboro Baptist Church[0]), much to the contrary, but because it shouldn't be illegal (as much as I despise such folks) to be an asshole.
It's not just the protestors that have rights, the mourners do too.
Just like you've got no human right to stab people as much as you like, you can't cause other people distress at a funeral.
You're the one being incredibly unreasonable here.
Also, you can't freely protest a soldier's funerals in America, so you're also ridiculously hypocritical, sort your own country out first if you feel so strongly about this!
If you're not actively protesti g The Respect for America's Fallen Heroes Act then you need to get off your high horse.
>Just like you've got no human right to stab people as much as you like, you can't cause other people distress at a funeral.
Right. Because words that are unpleasant are exactly the same as violence, right?
Shall we jail anyone who says something that annoys, disturbs or is unpleasant to anyone else? Based on the unpleasantness in your comment, let's start with you.
Yes, it's rude and obnoxious to intrude on others, especially at gatherings like funerals. And most of us (myself included) try not to do so.
However, some folks are jerks, and will do so anyway. But making such a thing a crime rather than just removing the disruptive individual from the area is a recipe for abuse.
Who decides what's a crime or not in a given circumstance? You?
I'd note that I'm neither angry nor insulted by you. Rather, I'm trying (I hope successfully this time) to get you to see that making someone a criminal for being a jerk is a really bad idea.
Remove such a person from your sight. Shun them. Verbally abuse them right back. But the idea that someone should be criminalised for being insensitive and/or obnoxious is risible at best.
I expect you will continue to disagree with me and think I'm being nasty, disruptive and a jerk. Shall we arrest me too? How long should I spend in prison for pissing you off?
To arrest someone, the behaviour they're engaging in has to be criminal (i.e. chargeable).
Then the police can ask the prosecution service to charge them (the US equivalent of the DA I guess), which is the discretionary bit. This seems to be the thing you're taking issue with.
So although you don't realize it, you're basically saying you want to give the police brand new powers to grab anyone they want. That's an incredibly dangerous and seriously poorly thought out suggestion.
>So although you don't realize it, you're basically saying you want to give the police brand new powers to grab anyone they want. That's an incredibly dangerous and seriously poorly thought out suggestion.
Nope. Not intentionally or otherwise. Police have always had the "move along citizen" (with no arrest/detention at all) power. In fact, I'd say they use it far too often, at least in the US.
I'm not in the UK, and when I've visited I haven't interacted with the police, so that may not be true there. Is it?
What's more, being asked/encouraged to leave if someone is being disruptive is pretty normal and certainly doesn't require detention and/or arrest. Or even police for that matter.
Even more, (again, I'm not in the UK so not sure if this applies there) arrest records are public records and can negatively affect one's ability to get a job or housing due to the stigma around "criminals" even if they aren't actually charged/convicted in relation to such an arrest.
So no. I'm not advocating (wittingly or otherwise) for any new powers for the police. Rather, I'm agreeing with your premise that folks shouldn't disrupt solemn occasions like funerals, but I'm disagreeing with your premise[0] that such activity should be criminalised.
And I also take issue with your assertion (perhaps I misunderstood, but that's the impression I got. Please enlighten me if I've misunderstood) that the only options for police are either arrest or do nothing at all. That's absurd on its face.
>"A protest that is not irritating is not a protest.... finding the right moment and location to be maximally irritating is part of the art of protest. "
Which school of thought is this from? Protesting can take many forms and they need not be offensive and/or irritating to be effective. I personally respect calm, dignified, and persistent protestors far more than the loud, disruptive, and in-your-face ones.
If your calm and dignified protest achieves a meaningful result, it's because you were a better option compared to someone else who was not calm and dignified. There's some value in that, but not without that other guy to unlock it.
The people getting arrested in the streets of Edinburgh were the same people who have been arguing to take away free speech and privacy rights from others. They got very little sympathy from the pro-free-speech crowd because they are decidedly anti-free-speech. They are now reaping what they have sowed.
The sad part is that they, and all of their supporters, will probably go back to agitating against free speech after this whole thing blows over.
> They got very little sympathy from the pro-free-speech crowd because
Every officially designated 'pro free speech warrior' I've seen in recent times has been strongly for authoritarianism if it suits their agenda. Just ask many of them for their opinion on say Palestine or Yemen and you'll lots of ugly things come out, none of which are consistent with the image of 'freedom' these types like to portray themselves as.
In fact, many of them seem to support anti-BDS laws and such.
I do not endorse censorship attempts, but also let's not kid ourselves about the nature of many of the people who market themselves free speech advocates, please.
> In fact, many of them seem to support anti-BDS laws and such.
This is a fairly easily to verify claim. Now of course it's not going to be all of them, but a large chunk from what I've seen.
It's certainly more concrete than OP saying:
> The people getting arrested in the streets of Edinburgh were the same people who have been arguing to take away free speech and privacy rights from others.
We're not, never were. We're seeing the slow decline in the hard fought rights gained over decades because we were never ever a live and let live country.
The UK is one of the most "live and let live" countries in the world.
However I think there is a marked difference between 2010 and 2022, especially in Scotland, who I used to think of as usually the sensible ones; the land of David Hume.
Free speech is being curtailed by legislation that is auspiciously about preventing "hate crime", but in actuality is being used as a tool to shut down dissenting opinions, such as the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Bill.
It's difficult for me to grasp why you suggest that the UK is "is one of the most 'live and let live' countries in the world." You realise that it wasn't that long ago that Alan Turing, a war hero to say the least, was chemically castrated, which lead to his death, for being gay. The Age of Consent wasn't equalised to 16 UK wide until 2008. Section 28 (and its legacies) were not outlawed until 2010. Homosexual acts stopped being grounds for dishonourable discharge from the armed forces in 2016. Same sex marriage wasn't permitted UK wide until 2020. The blanket ban against sexually active gay men from donating blood wasn't relaxed until 2020. Etc. People forget how extremely recent these things are. So it's hard for me to understand why you think the UK was and continues to be "one of the most 'live and let live' countries in the world"... is it just because our punishments were less severe? That Alan Turing was chemically castrated instead of thrown off a building? That constitutes us being a 'live and let live' society?
And this is just the history I'm personally connected with. There's plenty of other examples of how the UK has treated other minorities poorly, notably the Windrush Generation. Being a 'live and let live' society isn't, and shouldn't, just mean being the least worst country, if we can even claim that title... it's about being a permissive society, of letting people get on with their own lives unmolested and in return you can expect the same. But as I've already shown, that was in no way the case for us... if you ever wonder why there's so few gay men around the age of 60+, it's because so so many of them were left to die of the gay disease.
I don't see how "there are monarchists in Parliament" is a refutation of "this treatment of people protesting the monarchy is a strong argument in favor of abolishing the monarchy"...?
Those Monarchists were elected. I'm sorry that sometimes people you disagree with get elected. Regardless, it's the police who are enforcing this law passed by Parliament... I don't believe the law even mentions republican protests. You are blaming the Monarchy for the acts of the Government and Parliament.
There is a risk to using "not private" services. And like all risks, it has to be measured and balanced against what you gain from taking that risk.
For instance, if you go hiking, you my get attacked by a bear, is it a risk worth taking? Usually yes, bear attacks are rare, unless you do stupid things like going where you know there is a bear. Same thing for privacy, you can take some risks, for example by letting Facebook follow you doing mundane things for targeted advertising, but not be so stupid as to post picture of yourself doing stupid things for everyone to see. The concrete example in the article is in the second category: some guy gets fired because he posts a picture of doing stupid things at his job.
Personally, I consider the political risks you cited low for the US or EU. Not zero, it is never zero, but low enough to be negligible compared to what Google, Amazon or Facebook offer me. Maybe it is not your case.
There are some privacy high risks, and that's, I think, mostly about things you publish online. Police doesn't need a warrant to look at your public profile, neither does your boss or the spouse you are cheating. Others include doing stupid things on your employer's corporate network, or doing things that are seriously illegal right now in your country without necessary precautions.
I think you can even attack this position immediately. When a person (or politician) say they have nothing to hide, ask them to hand you their unlocked phone. You will promise to not tell anyone about anything that you learn or see. I've found that this triggers people desire for privacy even if they haven't committed any "crimes" or what not.
The future politic of other country to. I love to travel, so I try not critic other country online just because I scared that can be use against me when visiting a country with a authoritarian regime.
My take on this is, even if you trust [insert data holding brand name], do you:
- (access) trust every individual employee who has immediate access. Forever? And every individual employee of the government agencies that could compel access? Forever?
- (policy from above) trust every executive who could change policy on where your data goes and how it is held. Forever? Trust the relevant national government regarding laws about your data. Forever?
- (security) trust the Security set up is at least great. Forever?
Forever, because data can last that long. And auditing data handling is hard.
Right. The Jewish before the Holocaust had nothing to hide either. Their ethnicity was outed by things like census data that people divulged and the state collected. Nothing to hide after all. It's not a crime to be Jewish.
Mountains of personal data is too juicy and is inevitably misused.
> The Jewish before the Holocaust had nothing to hide either.
Actually it started much earlier than that.
Christian started going after Jews since at least the fourth century, inspired by the hatred written in the Gospel of John. In particular, it was a Christian ritual to physically attack Jews around Easter in the Middle Ages.
I don't consider myself a paranoid person, but I realized 20 years ago that we were all losing our privacy to online entities. When I first read about "the cloud", I knew that what I put on it was no longer mine. Government regulators don't care at all about our privacy, so what makes anyone really think they have nothing to hide? Honestly though, I can't imagine my life without these entities stealing my data, that's how bad it has become!
You also don't know what future you will be doing. Lots of activists where people with pretty boring lives until someone happened with them that triggered their indignation and revolt. Or maybe some relative of yours, or a friend. It doesn't matter, you don't know future you.
I always try to break privacy concerns down because when everything is lumped together I think people that aren't into privacy get confused.
There's concerns about: hackers, surveillance capitalism, foreign state actors, and domestic state actors. People that say they have nothing to hide are usually unconcerned about one or two of these (surveillance capitalism and domestic state actors) but often are actually concerned with at least one.
The truth of the matter is, though, that if you're concerned about one, you need to be concerned about all of them. There is no door that only good guys can use and bad guys can't. Breaking it down has often led to more successful conversations for me. Even in a group of highly tech literate people (CS graduate students) I often see the "I don't care" or "what can I do" sentiments. So I suggest when talking about all this, break it down into these categories. Maybe if more of us did this then we'd have more success as a community.
Eh, you may not “know” something like this, but considering it’s never happened in my country in my lifetime at any appreciable scale, it’s probably not very likely, and doesn’t realistically factor into my threat model.
If you want to “worst case” scenario something, that’s your choice, but it’s not very predictive.
It just happened in the US. A lady and her daughter were arrested for taking a federally approved abortion pill based on information found when they subpoenaed their Facebook messenger chat.
On the other hand, people from every country which has had dictatorships (like many if not most in Latin America) should be wary of this kind of scenarios.
To me, privacy is first and foremost protection. That's from my upbringing, I guess. It's hard to argue with anything other to people who don't seem like they care about their privacy at all - and I get it, some people just don't care and trust their government etc. What else would you bring up to these people other than the bad things that have already happened due to less privacy than possible?
You could try bringing up relevant situations where a breach of privacy was the proximate cause of a systemic negative consequence on a large scale, rather than irrelevant-but-also-terrible things that weren't directly caused by a lack of privacy.
You mean like when the KGB murdered my grandparent based on class origin and corporation ownership? Or the time when the Gestapo did the same to my great-grandparent, also based on ownership of the same corporation?
To me, it seems like there are much longer periods of problems than periods of peaceful life. Only 30 years out of the last 100 were in lived in relative freedom here, and still excesses are happening today. Protect yourselves people. Nobody will return your health and life back once an excess happens to you.
Again, I get that bad things happen, but none of what you've brought up would have been prevented with better privacy in practice. It's well beyond "privacy" to believe that ownership of a corporation should be hidden information, that'd be exceedingly easy to abuse.
I'm sorry those things happened to your family, but they're not relevant to a modern privacy conversation.
It's nowhere beyond, it's exactly privacy. My country still (since the 90s) has numbered shares - meaning not tied to a person. The fight is not over yet, even though the EU is really trying hard to destroy all privacy here. And it's not really that simple to abuse - someone has to show up with the shares in hand to do that.
You're doing business with a corporation - it's a legal person after all. There are reporting requirements etc so you can check all you need about that corporation very precisely. You don't need to know the owners at all. It's not like you can know with US/EU corps - go check and see how many paper trails end in Virgin Islands numbered corporations ;-)
That's your opinion, and fortunately not one that nearly anyone shares.
You're doing a common Internet Thing by twisting a conversation into the topic you actually want to talk about, even though it's wholly unrelated.
Just because something bad happened to your family doesn't mean the entire planet should adjust fundamental aspects of how humans interact. That's just your trauma speaking, and not a rational thought.
Regardless of opinions, you can't know the owners of many corporations today. Are you sure you're not doing business with businesses that have owners hidden behind Virgin Islands numbered shares? I wouldn't be, it's actually very common. And if you're actually doing business with them - where's the problem?
> You could try bringing up relevant situations where a breach of privacy was the proximate cause of a systemic negative consequence on a large scale
The US Government directly used census data to target families and neighborhoods to send to internment camps within living memory.
Something ongoing: prosecutions are currently underway to parties who have abortions or assist in abortions based off of private correspondences such as texting, calling, or facebook messages.
So your most recent widespread example is 80+ years ago, and then a very tiny hypothetical set of lawsuits that have not been filed (zero prosecutions are "under way")?
My most recent widespread example was so recently that there are people still alive who were subjected to it, yes. Regarding the other point: this is not a hypothetical set of lawsuits. People are getting prosecuted, criminally, right now.
> People are getting prosecuted, criminally, right now.
Name one person who is being prosecuted for obtaining an abortion, and that prosecution is moving forward due to evidence collected from any kind of extrajudicial breach of privacy.
Woah, what's this about the breach of privacy needing to be extrajudicial? There was nothing about that originally. These are goalposts being moved. I refuse to continue this line of discussion if the discussion is happening in bad faith with moving goalposts.
The fact that you equate "privacy" with "warrants as a concept" is kind of sad, but I doubt you're capable of learning better, given your pretty terrible attitude thusfar.
A guy who cares about evaluating the likelihood and significance of an event taking place.
I'm not value judging this, I'm just trying to determine if it's worth reacting to, and based on the number of folks effected, the severity of the impact, and the frequency, privacy violations seem pretty minor overall as a threat, not worth considering within my personal attack surface.
You're right, they didn't have an example of their exact situation, so they should have felt perfectly safe. They could see that pogroms happened in other places, to other people, a long time ago, obviously not even relevant in hypermodern civilized 1930s Germany.
I'm glad you recognize how fundamentally different the world is today than how it was in the 1930s, because not realizing that would probably confuse the hell out of you a lot of the time.
If my government wants to know something about me, they will be able to find out and that's whether I use DuckDuckGo or Google, Chrome or Firefox, Facebook or no Facebook, Gmail or my own private server, and whether or not I use a VPN service.
Some people (especially here on HN) are so into privacy for the sake of privacy, more like a hobby than a practical exercise in improving their quality of life. And that's completely fine. But I'm more interested in convenience. I'm at the point where I would legitimately prefer my Social Security Number to be leaked on the dark web than have to deal with the proposed three-factor authentication for my banking and brokerage accounts.
> If my government wants to know something about me, they will be able to find out and that's whether I use DuckDuckGo or Google, Chrome or Firefox, Facebook or no Facebook, Gmail or my own private server, and whether or not I use a VPN service.
In the case of a targeted investigation, yeah, you're probably right. Thing is, that's not the only (or even most likely) threat unless you're some kind of wannabe DPR. Dragnet/geofence-style investigations are getting more common and while not using Google likely won't save you from the CIA, it may very well avoid your technically-incompetent local LEOs accidentally framing you for a bank robbery or something when you win the location-data lottery.
But that's an individual-level argument, which imo isn't the main point - privacy is a societal-level good.
> But I'm more interested in convenience.
This is basically the "I have nothing to say, so I have no need for freedom of expression" argument transplanted into the privacy sphere. The effectiveness of privacy methods scale both technically and socially: an example on the technical front is how tor is more useful the more "normal" traffic ends up on it, and an example on the social front is how encrypted messaging capabilities aren't suspicious if they're integrated by default into widely used apps. So, I see privacy as less about me and more about participating in creating an environment where those who truly require it can have it, and that's something that's way harder if privacy is only conceived as being "for" dissidents or fetishists or whatever.
Is it inconvenient sometimes? Sure, but it's also a civic duty. I'd honestly call it analogous to jury selection: quite possibly nothing but a burden to you personally, but an important part of maintaining a healthy society.
Posted this two years and five months ago, but its still relevant: My nothing to hide argument;
Nothing to hide is an incomplete sentence. Nothing to hide from who? surely you want to hide your children from abusers and predators? Don't you want to hide your banking details from con artists and fraudsters? Your identity from identity thieves.. Your location from burglars, your car keys from car thieves or your blood type from rich mobsters with kidney problems..
we don't know who are any of these things. So we should protect ourselves from all of them, in effect we have everything to hide from someone, and no idea who someone is.
edit; let me just add the obvious, that the government and police, Google and Facebook, are made up of many someones.
Perfect rebuttal, imo. Everyone has something to hide. It doesn’t mean you’re actively committing crimes… those who say they don’t care the NSA are reading everything they write lack imagination, imo.
I have even more trivial examples: love letters, nude photos, political articles you don't intend to publish, medical records, attempts at poetry, porn collection, business plans, drawings etc
I would turn this argument around on itself and say, yes, of course I have things to hide, but none of those things need to hidden from 1) authorities conducting legitimate searches; 2) mass surveillance programs that are looking for terrorists; 3) advertising trackers; 4) and so on.
You're absolutely right that who and what matter here, but I find the typical who and the typical what to be entirely unobjectionable.
It's telling that the best arguments the privacy activists have are all slippery slope arguments. Of course it's easy to think of hypothetical policies to which I'd object; the point is that I don't object to any of the actually-existing programs as currently constructed. If Gmail wants to scan my mail, I don't care. If the NSA wants to drop in on my phone calls every once in a while to see if I'm affiliated with ISIS, that's fine with me. If Facebook wants to keep a log of my activity on the site to better target ads, then they should go for it.
The only way to get me to agree that a policy is odious is for you to make up some hypothetical policy that doesn't exist and say, "but what if that happened?!!" And I just don't find that very compelling.
In summary, you're absolutely right that, "nothing to hide is an incomplete sentence." The complete sentence is this: I have nothing to hide from any of the people currently looking in any of the places they're looking.
>It's telling that the best arguments the privacy activists have are all slippery slope arguments
Here's one that isnt: it's none of the government's business!
>the point is that I don't object to any of the actually-existing programs as currently constructed. If Gmail wants to scan my mail, I don't care. If the NSA wants to drop in on my phone calls every once in a while to see if I'm affiliated with ISIS, that's fine with me. If Facebook wants to keep a log of my activity on the site to better target ads, then they should go for it.
You may not care, but I do care, and lots of other people do too. My right to privacy is inherently linked to my dignity as a human being and the neither the government, or anyone else, has the right to violate my human dignity no matter how important they think it is or how inconsequential the details of what I want to keep private are! If you have different ideas about human dignity and privacy, and you want to share all of the intimate details of your life to every government and corporate entity on the planet, more power to you. Perhaps you want to put a webcam in your bathroom, so all the people of the internet can watch you eliminate and perform your daily cleaning rituals, and you have absolutely no problem with that (many people don't!). Some of us do have a problem with that, solely for the (completely valid) reason that we value our privacy and what we do in our bathrooms is not the government's business, or facebook's business, or the business of anyone else, no matter how vehemently they claim they need to peer into our bathrooms for "national security" reasons or to target us with ads. The same goes for the rest of our lives.
> Perhaps you want to put a webcam in your bathroom, so all the people of the internet can watch you eliminate and perform your daily cleaning rituals, and you have absolutely no problem with that (many people don't!).
Nobody is doing that. Nobody is suggesting we do that.
Again, if things were different, then they'd be different, and I'd have different opinions. But things aren't different. Things are as they are.
Just more evidence that every privacy argument starts with, "but what if..."
>Nobody is doing that. Nobody is suggesting we do that.
You fail to understand that people who value privacy and human dignity view the NSA tapping our phones exactly the same as we view people watching us in the bathroom. There is no "what if.." - this is happening now. Our privacy and human dignity are currently being violated in a wide variety of ways.
I understand it; it's just that it's an eccentric and unpopular worldview, so often asserted as though it's obvious and universally held. It's not obvious and it's not universally held. The burden is entirely on the privacy people to make their case.
The idea that women should have the same rights as men is an eccentric and unpopular worldview. The idea that slavery is wrong and immoral was an eccentric and unpopular worldview for millennia. I'm not suggesting that the right to privacy and human dignity are popular or universally held beliefs, I'm stating that the assault on privacy and human dignity is occurring right now, in contradiction to your assertion that this assault only occurs as some sort of hypothetical, slippery slope argument. We can agree to disagree over the worth of privacy and human dignity, but it is simply false to argue that the violation of privacy and human dignity is some sort of theoretical assertion about future possibilities, rather than an ongoing transgression.
> The idea that women should have the same rights as men is an eccentric and unpopular worldview. The idea that slavery is wrong and immoral was an eccentric and unpopular worldview for millennia.
Yes, and people died to get those rights, whereas the privacy advocates want to earn them by assertion. Just as it doesn't prove anything that your ideas are unpopular, it also, you know, doesn't prove anything that your ideas are unpopular.
It works both ways. You've got a big case to make and the burden is on you to make it.
I suppose my pointing out the obvious, isn't that obvious to people. But it strikes me as a crazy blind spot; Every serial killer, rapist, child abuser, blackmailer and swindler - had a job, in IT, in civil service, many more recently in the police force. We are bombarded with a steady stream of examples. How can people maintain a Disney princess belief in strangers, so long as they are employed?
currently being the key word there. can you guarantee you will feel this way for the life of your data? if suddenly you become concerned with those collecting the data what do you do with the historical profile they’ve built for you?
> 1) authorities conducting legitimate searches; 2) mass surveillance programs that are looking for terrorists;
Right. Who decides they're legitimate? And who the terrorists are?
Would you like the right to check your location history for church attendance, or the left to scan your messages for inappropriate thinking? That could be made legitimate with the right parliament :)
I think we actually have pretty widespread agreement about who the terrorists are. Again, this is a slippery-slope argument of the form, "but what if they start pursuing people we don't all agree are the terrorists?" And the answer to that is that if things were different I would have different opinions, obviously.
Yes, my point is that a lack of general privacy hygiene, both personally and businesses collecting your information, directly provides information for these crimes. It's very nearly the reason why hacking many companies with personal information is so valuable. It's already a crime, and it's already a (gigantic!) known vector feeding crimes.
Which seems like a pretty good argument for tightening down on privacy, rather than allowing it to continue as-is or worsen.
Bruce Schneier put it quite succinctly in his article The Eternal Value of Privacy (from 2006):
Some clever answers: “If I'm not doing anything wrong, then you have no cause to watch me.” “Because the government gets to define what's wrong, and they keep changing the definition.” “Because you might do something wrong with my information.” My problem with quips like these – as right as they are – is that they accept the premise that privacy is about hiding a wrong. It's not.
It plays into the principle of probable cause (which may or may not be law in your state) and against the idea of widespread surveillance and data retention.
There's the recent story about a man texting pictures of his son's infected <groin area> to his wife and doctor, then Google deletes his account and won't give it back. Oh, and the local law enforcement had a case on him about it. Tell me what evil this man did to deserve what happened.
Privacy would help here but more importantly these big companies need to provide a way to fix errors. Seems once you get caught by one of the filters you get suspended and are offered no path to clarify the situation.
These companies should not police pictures in the first place. The user should have privacy from these corporations as well. This is not a vehicle to fight crime. If it becomes that criminals will quickly find out and switch channels and you are left with false allegations.
Catching child predators is always the tip of the sword in the advancing frontier of surveillance.
It just so happens that it's a cover for outsourcing and scaling up the intelligence apparatus's ability to track everyone, everywhere, all the time. Just in case they do something really bad like steal state secrets or try to blow the whistle on a crime committed by a powerful person. It's always about cover stories for the state's unrelenting paranoia.
Not really. You can't 'fix' an error that you've reported to the cops. That's kind of on a criminal record at that point. This man could have been suspended by the government, and he would have had to clarify the situation to a judge. Granted, the judge would be infinitely more receptive to arguments than Google, but it shouldn't have to come to that.
" You can't 'fix' an error that you've reported to the cops. That's kind of on a criminal record at that point. "
If the legal system works you can "fix" an error with the cops. It's not like Google reporting something will automatically go on your criminal record. Once the legal system also starts using AI and automated systems to convict people without further explanation then we are in serious trouble.
How would you resolve the issues with the police? The police are not and should not be judges. The man had “child pornography” on his phone, it was reported and the police did their job given the evidence they had.
Watch the TV show COPS to see how many times criminals lie to police officers during an arrest.
It’s unfortunate this man got caught up in this but the police did exactly their job. Commit a crime, have evidence, press charges. Arrest if is procedure.
Everyone who says "I have nothing to hide" is a bold faced liar.
Porn browsing history,bank credentials, intimacy,that one drug fueled party you wish didnt happened,medical records, own kids images, hell, people do not even speak about their salaries.
The only ones worse than these are the people saying "If you do not have anything to hide".
No, thanks. If you want to share your things with the world and governments and private companies, go ahead, but leave me alone.
You would be surprised at how many people are completely and utterly boring. How many have so few assets, vanilla history, no embarrassing health issues, and believe all drugs are for wastrels.
Do not count on being able to embarrass the enemy :) :(
"Everybody lies". Even if the majority of people's history and proclivities are considered "vanilla", those individuals themselves don't want that information being made public, would likely feel some sense of shame if the information got out, and want to avoid any situation where they would be judged or teased. Even if that content is considered relatively tame by a tolerant society.
There's a huge difference between secret because it's embarrassing and secret because it's a pain to deal with fraud. Many of them would have no problem turning all of that banking info over to "the authorities" :)
>Do not count on being able to embarrass the enemy
Why are you making folks that disagree with you "the enemy?"
Just because some doesn't agree with you about a particular issue doesn't mean they are your enemy.
They just disagree with you on a particular issue. Assuming they live in the same culture, it's likely that they agree with you on more stuff than they disagree.
Actually it’s not that hard for companies to get salary information about new hires. Equifax has a tool called the Work Number that lots of employers subscribe to. Each report lists every company an employee worked for, total salary, and every paycheck dollar value they received. You can request your report for free.
So yeah, now employees looking for a salary boost can’t even lie about their current salary anymore.
I believe you have a right to "freeze" your work number profile so that they cannot share your past employment and salary information, at least if you live in California. They warn you that other jobs may not be able to verify your employment but I have never had an issue since asking for and being granted a hold on selling my information.
On a side note, never let past salaries dictate your salary negotiation. Always stand your ground, and sell your pricetag. Your past low salary or lack of successful negotiation, does not warrant them a discount.
Negotiators always try to talk down your value, even when you're already paid high. You need to own your pricetag.
The vast majority of people do not get equity as part of their compensation. So, yes, there are cases when this information is inaccurate or incomplete, but for most people, this type of data can artificially cap your earning ability.
The thing which always irks me about the "I have nothing to hide" comment is would you behave the same if you were being observed. The conversations we all have in the pub, in the car and even in the privacy of our home - would they be the same knowing there is a camera or audio device listening.
May just be my tin foil hat speaking, but I believe a lot of things would change knowing you're always being listened to even when you think it's just two people in the room
My standard response to "I have nothing to hide" is "then why are you wearing clothes?". It seems to work relatively well to put things into the exact perspective you describe.
My response is to "I have nothing to hide", is that isn't what you're giving up when you give away your privacy. You should be comfortable with "never needing to hide anything in your past, present, or future". The future is impossible to predict and actions that could be innocuous today may cause a great deal of trouble for you in the future. You give up that right forever when you lose privacy.
I disagree. A lot of what people would "hide" are in fact equivalent to "clothes" worn because of social norms or taboos.
A comment I make to a friend sitting next to me would be inappropriate to make to the policeman in the corner, or to my boss. Inappropriate to the point of there being consequences.
100%. I have group chats with friends where we express views that would be viewed askance, to put it lightly, by those that don't share the same opinions. Something to hide? Not particularly, but its private discussion so fuck off thank you kindly.
> but for the negative social consequences of the alternative
You mean like hiding your bank balance because the social consequences of people seeing it? Or hiding your medical records because of the social consequences of people seeing it?
Social taboo is a reason we hide things. We know there are social taboos against many things that are harmless, like nudity, so we conceal them. I feel it's a pretty good analogy.
I believe there is a much more powerful control mechanism than recording devices. It's in your own brain created by years of socialization and there is no way to hide form it, no thought without it. Some may call it conscience but I think may of its parts are simply surveillance software. It's why most people unconsciously signal it to others when they lie or have done some socially unacceptable things. It can even lower your own self-esteem. That is to say that it has real power.
You may have nothing to hide in the current political climate or under the current political leaders, but what is allowed now might become anathema later, and those records can be searched and retroactively prosecuted.
We already see hints of this when someone gets canceled for something they tweeted 10 years ago. Imagine that, but on a broader scale with more violent consequences. That's why privacy is important for everyone.
This is actually my argument for the 2nd amendment too.
I don’t believe we need guns atm… but we are unsure of what the future holds and surrendering such a monumental right would be next to impossible to “undo” if the time ever comes.
>I don’t believe we need guns atm… but we are unsure of what the future holds and surrendering such a monumental right would be next to impossible to “undo” if the time ever comes.
No freedom has ever been won or guarded with the types of firearms legal under the 2nd amendment.
Ever. Anywhere.
Literally every single example you're going to reply with is wrong.
Not even the American Revolution was "won" using personally-owned weapons. It was won using artillery, naval vessels, mercenaries from overseas, and the first thing that happened when a patriot showed up for his patriotic duty with his pappy's musket was throw it in the trash and issue a soldier a Brown Bess or Committee of Safety musket so that the caliber, rate of fire, effective range, and operating procedures were the same amongst all soldiers.
Not in Vietnam, not in Afghanistan, not anywhere at any time has a conflict against a government either foreign or domestic been defeated using personally-owned weapons.
The few times in America where it was tried, post Revolutionary War, the tax/whiskey/voting rights rebellioneers were crushed under the might of a pathetically small standing army that used cavalry and artillery to intimidate them.
The various slave rebellions and civil rights conflicts changed nothing. Lawyers, peaceful protest, not-so-peaceful-protest, and public opinion changed things.
In terms of ethnic violence, everywhere, every time, in each and every case where a smaller population has armed itself to protect itself the only result has been the employment of mechanized terror against them with horrific results.
"Oh but the Warsaw Ghetto.." nope. The germans went in, received fire from personal weapons, left and leveled the ghetto with tanks and mortars.
"Oh but if the Tutsis had had rif.." nope. Both sides had rifles. When the Tutsis started scrouging AKs, the Hutus responded with grenades, automatic weapons, and bulldozers. The government didn't even do most of the killing, instead ordering the Hutu majority population to do it for them, at the point of a belt-fed machine gun. During the Kibeho massacre guns were too slow so they just mortared the sea of refugees with 60mm mortars. If every single Tutsi had possessed an automatic rifle with infinite ammunition, they would have all still been murdered. A rifle is useless against 60mm mortars and air-mobile military forces.
The only protection against tyranny is strong civic organizations and the rule of law. When those break down whoever has the most cash to buy the most heavy weapons, usually the government, wins.
The only thing the wide availability of weapons has done in areas WITHOUT strong civic organizations and the rule of law has been to turn vast swathes of Pakistan and Afghanistan into lawless zones of chaos and misery, ruled by whichever warlord can get the most RPGs or convince their followers to become suicide bombers.
Ten million personal AR-15s are useless against ten thousand mechanized infantrymen.
> Literally every single example you're going to reply with is wrong
Well, this is a very extraordinary claim… also, one that makes me feel like any potential example will be dismissed by you, as you seem to have essentially considered every single instance of armed conflict involving firearms.
The rest of your comment goes over several examples but I think the foundation is flawed. There is no scenario where there would be 10 million AR-15s vs 10k “mechanized infantrymen.” It’s also akin to saying matches are useless in a competition to see who can detonate the biggest sick of dynamite.
Just touching on your first example. Of course to win an international war against the largest empire on earth, you will need more than just firearms. However, the mere existence of an access to firearms is an undeniable factor in the way things turned out.
Do you really believe independence would have been gained through “strong civic organization and rule of law” - as you claim? You then follow that by saying if that doesn’t work, whoever has more cash and weapons usually wins… certainly not what happened in the revolutionary war… nor the next big conflict (war of 1812).
I hate to say it but all these examples seem to be implying is that the ordinary people should be able to purchase artillery, RPGs and tanks under the 2nd amendment. Indeed, the second amendment's language regarding well regulated militias would seem to suggest the formulation of civic organizations outside of the direct control of the state and federal government with such weapons. The evidence cited here would strengthen this notion that armed civic organizations that can go toe to toe with an army corps and are not under the command of the state or federal government are one the best ways to prevent the state from abusing the monopoly on violence that has somehow been normalized in western political thought.
The state's monopoly, qua Max Weber, is on the legitimate use of violence. That is, the right and legitimacy of that right, is restricted to the state.
Absent this, one of three conditions exist;
1. There is no monopoly. In which case violence is widespread, and there is no state.
2. There is no legitimacy. In which case violence is capricious. This is your condition of tyranny (unaccountable power).
3. Some non-state power or agent assumes the monopoly on legitimate violence. In which case it becomes, by definition the State.
The state's claim is to legitimacy. A capricious exercise would be an abrogation of legitimacy
Weber, Max (1978). Roth, Guenther; Wittich, Claus (eds.). Economy and Society. Berkeley: U. California P. p. 54.
The misleading and abbreviated form that's frequently found online seems to have originated with Rothbard in the 1960s, and was further popularised by Nozick in the 1970s. It's now falsely accepted as a truth when in fact it is a gross misrepresentation and obscures the core principles Weber advanced.
"Listen, you fantastically retarded motherfucker. I’m going to try to explain this so that you can understand it.
You cannot control an entire country and its people with tanks, jets, battleships and drones or any of these things that you so stupidly believe trumps citizen ownership of firearms.
A fighter jet, tank, drone, battleship or whatever cannot stand on street corners. And enforce “no assembly” edicts. A fighter jet cannot kick down your door at 3AM and search your house for contraband.
None of these things can maintain the needed police state to completely subjugate and enslave the people of a nation. Those weapons are for decimating, flattening and glassing large areas and many people at once and fighting other state militaries. The government does not want to kill all of its people and blow up its own infrastructure. These are the very things they need to be tyrannical assholes in the first place. If they decided to turn everything outside of Washington D.C. into glowing green glass they would be the absolute rulers of a big, worthless, radioactive pile of shit.
Police are needed to maintain a police state, boots on the ground. And no matter how many police you have on the ground they will always be vastly outnumbered by civilians which is why in a police state it is vital that your police have automatic weapons while the people have nothing but their limp dicks.
BUT when every random pedestrian could have a Glock in their waistband and every random homeowner an AR-15 all of that goes out the fucking window because now the police are out numbered and face the reality of bullets coming back at them.
If you want living examples of this look at every insurgency that the U.S. military has tried to destroy. They’re all still kicking with nothing but AK-47s, pick up trucks and improvised explosives because these big scary military monsters you keep alluding to are all but fucking useless for dealing with them.
Dumb. Fuck"
>They’re all still kicking with nothing but AK-47s, pick up trucks and improvised explosives because these big scary military monsters you keep alluding to are all but fucking useless for dealing with them.
This is incorrect.
The United States military became very skilled at dealing with them to the point that Taliban activity was near-zero.
Analyzing the causes of death of US servicemembers during the conflict, a surprisingly low number was due to firearms. All of the AKs in the world were useless against the US military and the Taliban knew it so they decided to wait the US out instead.
The moment the US left? That’s a different story.
The moral of this should be that patience is more empowering than firearms.
Guns don't cause that many deaths in military conflicts in general, not even in a fair fight. The kill count is dominated by artillery, air strikes, and other such things that cover a lot of ground at once and can get thru cover much better than those tiny bullets.
But your example of Taliban is a curious one, because, for all their expensive toys, US forces in Afghanistan never really controlled much ground outside of their bases. That's why the Taliban could wait them out - because most of the country out there was already theirs to wait in. To control all that territory would have required a lot more US troops, precisely because of all those lurking Taliban fighters with their measly AKs.
>The moment the US left? That’s a different story.
So in what scenario can the US military "leave" the US? You are pretty much proving the guy's point, no?
Yes, the US military could scorch earth its backyard. Nobody really denies that. What would be impossible is maintaining that control for any meaningful amount of time. This is also assuming somehow that 100% of the military and 100% of its assets are on board with whatever "regime" comes to be, which I just don't see happening.
Patient use of firearms and other guerrilla tactics, I would say. If they weren't armed, it wouldn't have mattered how long they just sat there and waited for American troops to leave.
The regulations surrounding private ownership of explosives require they be stored properly and be subjected to random audits. No law abiding citizen owning explosives would have them in their home.
2A as written doesn't just cover firearms. It covers 'arms.' Like nukes and cruise missiles. The fact that one may need these to overthrow tyranny is also a strong argument to the literal interpretation.
>When those break down whoever has the most cash to buy the most heavy weapons, usually the government, wins.
There is more wealth in private hands in the US than government hands.
> 2A as written doesn't just cover firearms. It covers 'arms.' Like nukes and cruise missiles.
That's a matter of interpretation, especially since weapons like those didn't exist when the 2A was written.
What really matters isn't what rights people who lived 200+ years ago thought that we should have today; it's what rights we, who are alive now, think we should have. We shouldn't accept the meaning, or even the existence, of the 2nd amendment simply because it's there. We should continually be scrutinizing and improving the entire document.
FWIW, while I'm not aware of any court decision that would specifically claim 2A protection, things like grenade launchers, mortars, artillery, and even tanks with active main gun is all legal in US. It's just more paperwork than your usual stuff, and it has to go through the feds - but they can't just say "no".
I agree 100%, which is if we now don't want 'arms' to be protected generally, the constitution should be amended to exclude nukes or whatever. Not just make shit up on the fly and say 'well it says arms but nah, we'll just ignore that because if it sounds absurd I can just re-interpret it at will'
True but your arguments here largely regard deliberate speech, whereas the post is more about personal data. What OS is running on your phone doesn't really make a difference in whether you get cancelled over something your posted on social media 10 years ago.
But were you in a certain building at the time the opposition party was having a meeting? Did you have dinner with this certain person who was part of an underground resistance (of which you had no idea at the time)? Your phone was turned off for 10 hours, during which this murder happened and someone saw you in the area.
I could go on like this. I think you underestimate the story someone can build from your data (even if the story they invent is completely untrue) and I think you underestimate the frenzied desperation that can overtake people in power who are desperate to stay in power. Reading historic accounts of life in totalitarian regimes is worth the effort.
I think the discussion around privacy is too often framed in a defensive manner. Instead, I think the conversation should be reframed as a matter of a right to know. In other words, the burden of proof is not on those whose information is being sought, but those who seek that information about others or from others. If you want to know something, you must have a justification for knowing. The presumption is in favor of privacy. Furthermore, consent alone is not enough to justify seeking or sharing some kinds of information. (This should be read in a common sense way. I am not proposing a society of antisocial and hostile loners terrified to have a conversation with anyone.)
Take medical information. Who has a right to know that you have cancer? Depression? A spouse, the parent of a young child are entitled to health information as a general principle because of the nature of those relationships. But is Google, some guy at Google, your grocer, some colleague entitled? No. However, a criminal case may require obtaining such information and so the state may have a legitimate, conditional, and very selective claim to that kind of information in certain circumstances.
Privacy is necessary for human beings to flourish, at least in this life. As a practical matter, knowing something about someone can impede the good of both the person about whom something is known as well as the knower. It can negatively affect human relationships. Knowing the boundaries does require sound prudential judgement, of course, which is why if you're unsure, it can help to ask yourself what the justification for inquiring or disclosing is in a given situation. (Gossips are people who lack this sort of prudence and suffer from intemperate curiosity.)
I totally agree. I [knowingly] divulge personal information only when I choose to, and protest pretty vocally when information I don't feel like divulging is requested or "required". You can imagine the scathing feedback I gave to the _legally-mandated_ federal census I got subjected to last year. It asked stuff like my religious beliefs, gender identity, stuff that honestly the government has zero business even asking me, let alone knowing.
Another very concerning aspect: It's been a long time since it's widely known Google, Facebook and other bigtechs are collecting users' data and profiting from it. That "inspires" a huge number of other companies to try doing the same.
The dark sides of the practice are intentionally overlooked and, in places like entrepreneurship-related media, linkedin etc, one constantly reads praises to their ability to (allegedly) improve their services and offers based on predictions out of users data.
That worldview results in some "interesting phenomena" in my country. You go to a restaurant and they ask you your document ID, it's a "convenience" they offer you so that you don't need to worry if you loose your consumption card -- and now they know what, when and where you eat.
Insurance companies now offer their insurance policies and emergency info in a convenient app, so that you don't need to worry about carrying the docs in your car, and you help saving the planet by not wasting paper -- and now they know where you drive over, the speed and accelerations you usually employ etc.
Drugstores offer you discounts in exchange for your ID -- and now they know or can estimate extremely private info about you, like diseases you may be about to develop, the size of your weenie and god knows what. And I'm pretty sure this data is going to health insurance companies.
If people say they have nothing to hide, ask them if they close/lock the door when they use the bathroom. It's not like their doing anything secret in the bathroom, I mean there's only a few number of things people realistically do in there and we all know what they are.
This is the best way I've been able to illustrate the difference between privacy and secrecy. Some things I do are just private, doesn't mean that they are secret.
Is there really anything you can do or say that will change peoples mind? If people don't see the problem, then explaining it is one thing, and I think the bathroom thing works okay. It won't cause them to change their mind, but you can convince them of the problem. Even if their privacy is blatantly misused a large number of people wouldn't change their mind.
This is actually an interesting question. If I lived alone, I would rather unlock my door on purpose when taking a shower, so that in case I fell and knocked myself out, my neighbors and the ambulance personnel had an easier time getting in.
I don't think anybody who lives alone locks the door to the shower (or toilet), because what's the point?
People who live with roommates or family do, sometimes. I considered this. In the end, I decided if I faint while taking a shower and hit my head, I want someone to be able to rescue me, so: door unlocked.
I'd say the security concerns are more pressing than the privacy concerns in that case. Though of course the two are related because the person who robs you also learns quite a lot about you.
It's a matter of making people use a dumb mental model that benefits someone else. Even better if the dumb mental model goes viral.
"I have nothing to hide" mental model is dumb on many levels. The most obvious one has already been mentioned here. Leaked information is stored indefinitely, while standard of behavior in our society currently change at an insane pace (by design).
Another big misconception is that you as an individual can realistically evaluate how someone else will perceive your private information. You don't control the context in which your information will be consumed. (Not to mention that the context can be manipulated.) You conversation with a friend will sound very different to a paranoid federal agent whose only job is to find terrorists.
With the advent of global communications you can't even predict who will be using your information and for which purpose. (E.g. tons of people know your home address and it's not a problem, yet doxxing is still a thing. The fact that 99% of the people are benign doesn't mean anything if the information is accessible to 100% of the people.)
Etc, etc. It's the same bad reasoning at all levels, neatly packaged in a short virtue-signaling phrase. It so neat, it seems engineered.
The same goes for "You can’t be truly private online!" It's another dumb mental model. "Truly private" is a fake standard used solely because it's unattainable. In reality, the more information you uncontrollably leak, the worse off you are.
What do I have to hide? Legally, nothing. In my day-to-day life, I don't do anything that is a crime. I'm not using lots of drugs, I'm not into illegal porn, I'm not committing fraud, robbing banks, or planning anything illegal. But I still don't want everyone to know what porn I view, what I did as a child, what I plan on doing next year, or when I am or I am not at home.
While I may having nothing I need to hide, I have lots of things I want to hide. It's just happens that all the stuff I don't care about hiding are all the things these privacy consuming companies want. For others, they want to hide more and that's ok too.
You have no idea whether you are currently committing any crimes. The US code is something like 80,000 pages and includes several felonies like carrying a sharpie or a screwdriver around in public or using a fake name on the internet. In the EU, the situation is similar. Nobody has any idea what they have to hide legally.
No, I'm really certain I'm not committing crimes. Living a rather boring life, where I work almost non-stop and use the internet. Many of the laws you are referring to are basically dead laws. You couldn't convict someone if you tried.
> Many of the laws you are referring to are basically dead laws. You couldn't convict someone if you tried.
That is really immaterial to the discussion, as charges being brought alone can royally fuck up a life, whether or not a conviction is made in the end.
In most countries when a law is basically dead it means they won't even file charges. Prosecutors are overloaded and they don't have all the bag of tricks US prosecutors have for reducing the number of trials so charging an ancient law is one way of increasing your trial count.
However, it seems rather odd that I say I have nothing I need to hide I just have things I want to hide. People are insisting I must have somethign I need to hide. This is where I think many activists screw up. They're too busy trying to push their framing of the issue on to people. Instead of getting behind the idea that people have stuff they don't want others to know, which we all do, it seems everyone here is busy talking about the need to hide illegal stuff because what they currently do might become illegal. That isn't going to wash with most people. Most people are going to be againist it because now you're keeping privacy in the mindset of committing crimes and all these privacy tools aren't for keeping your personal secrets but for committing crimes. Who wants to support these crimes? Especially when instantly the other side talks about child porn.
It's like how when the protests in the US kicked off in 2020. They framed it as black lives matter which instantly allowed detractors to point out that white people are killed by police more often and silence them. If it wasn't just framed as a racial thing and instead of a police brutality problem against all people, it could have gone further.
The title of the book has been repeatedly debunked, applies mainly to professionals who are far from the average American, conflates federal crimes with felonies, and is off by one to two orders of magnitude for the cases that are likely to adhere to the average professional.
I'm still a fan of reducing the complexity of the legal code and enormously circumscribing plea bargaining false-confession-ammunition, so it's not like I'm not aligned with the overall libertarian impulse here, but I disagree that this is a good book.
Have you ever deposited a large sum of cash less than $10,000 in a bank account? Whether or not that's a crime depends on the state of your mind when you did it, which can be hard for you to produce to defend yourself.
You mean the prosecution, and in theory you're right. Yet in practice many jury members believe their job is to find their best guess of the truth, not hold the state to their burden. So if you can't present evidence in your own defense you can still loose. Plus, the process is sufficient punishment. Before you're acquitted you may lose your job and have to spend large amounts of money.
I think you miss the point, I said I have nothing to hide yet still want to hide things.
Also, there is only one time I can think of where someone has been convicted of a crime while it was legal when they did it and it was The Pirate Bay conviction. Everything else, it's always been if it's legal while you do it, it's legal. That holds true for abortion.
You don't have anything you need to hide now, but as seen with Republicans in the US, there are major political parties that will happily criminalize and prosecute basic aspects of bodily function if they get the chance.
The only time I've ever gotten someone "with nothing to hide" interested in data privacy was when I made an idle comment about ads I saw after sharing their IP address that were clearly targeted at them. That idle comment was accidentally 10x more convincing than any amount of rigorous argument.
IME people who have "nothing to hide" get suddenly more interested in data privacy if it stops being an abstract threat. They see Google knowing their intimate secrets in much the same way they would their hairdryer. Until they dont.
Unfortunately, that will probably happen for most people about two weeks before a stasi-like secret police takes full control over the country and by that point it'll have been about 10 years too late to start taking data privacy seriously.
Even for those with "Nothing to hide (tm)", the only rational approach is privacy maximization.
Suppose your future circumstances change and you find yourself in a situation where you do have something to hide. The mere fact that you have "gone dark" can be observed and used as evidence that you are now engaging in activities you believe need to be hidden.
Anyone with kids will recognise this - you're not worried when they're yelling and screaming. You're worried when they stop yelling and screaming and suddenly become too quiet.
My rule of thumb for privacy as a founder and a voter: If you’ve created an online product, or are a interacting with people in any kind of life-critical capacity (doctor, lawyer, landlord, electrician, financial professional, life partner, politician, you name it, etc), you WILL have a very broad swath of clients and some may anger with you due to no fault of your own and try to hurt you in different ways (from murder attempts to scammers). After seeing several friends in different capacity getting attacked for completely unrelated cases, my rule of thumb for privacy is - if a stranger wants to physically hurt you or loved ones, how easy would it be for them to find you and get to you or them. If you are behaving illegally, the law can reach more information and they should, but it should not be so easy for a deranged foe. Privacy is life-saving in that case and it needs to be respected as such.
The argument I always make is that people who think they don’t care about privacy probably don’t want everyone to know what they bought at the drugstore. Does everyone need to know you have hemorrhoids? And if you’re not a nudist you were on pretty shaky ground to begin with.
For me I knew people who had been harassed or stalked. Stalking is much worse when they know where you are all the time, and I don’t buy the argument that knowing where the stalker is (symmetric information) works because the two people have different values.
Sadly in the US there is not really a privacy debate. Essentially the “I have nothing to hide” line of reasoning has been pressed ahead and the nation continues in the direction of China.
We have a bit of a pretend debate from now and then … and a few technical elite are able to protect their own privacy to some degree… but for the masses privacy debate was over before it began. If anything it is just a marketing campaign by a few companies like Apple.
(Side Note: Apple fully complies with all warrants and decrypts all icloud data and hands it over)
> Apple fully complies with all warrants and decrypts all icloud data and hands it over
You say this like it's some kind of gotcha, rather than Apple, a major corporation, refusing to actively break the law of the country where they're headquartered.
Sloppy excuse. Breaking the law seems to be no problem for any form of security service. The case of privacy has long been an issue outside of the law.
Of course I don't expect companies to break the law, it is to no benefit to them, but we should not pretend that the rule of law has much value when it comes to government surveillance. And I would argue that to protect your privacy the legality of the means are secondary.
Because there's a world of difference between responding to a lawful warrant to produce data you have stored on your servers, and agreeing to create a special version of your software specifically to give the FBI carte blanche to unlock any phones they want (at least within that particular model).
Apple doesn’t and can’t “decrypt” data that it says it doesn’t have the encryption keys for like your health information. Apple lists the data that isn’t encrypted and the data that is
The sexuality and race is kind of irrelevant to the point, but I agree with the rest. It is really just a "I'm too comfortable and lazy to do anything to better the rest of civilization."
It's the same thing with guns. If you're a fudd and you have your grandpa's old hunting rifle, but you think AR-15s are "stupid and pointless and only the uncorruptable government should be trusted with them!" and you refuse to stand up for their rights when tyrannical law strikes, then they won't be there to back you up when they inevitably come for your hunting rifle.
Same for privacy and encryption, and getting off of big tech services and platforms. If enough of us get off now, we can be a force for change. But most people are content with sharing everyone they hang out with, what food they eat for every meal, and all of their life details publicly every day.
> The sexuality and race is kind of irrelevant to the point
FWIW, adding sexuality and race was intentional. Why? Because of the briefs by the justices associate with the Supreme Court's decision on Roe v Wade. Specifically because the same privacy protections which protected RvW also protected gay and interracial marriages.
And that privacy protection was explicitly and intentionally nullified, as called out by Justice Clarence Thomas.
So, in the immediate term, one's sexuality and race is explicitly at risk.
What Clarence Thomas is saying is that these decisions shouldn't have been made by the supreme court, not that these things shouldn't be allowed. In his view these decisions require the legislative branch to rule on, not nine lifetime appointed judges. I'm not sure I entirely agree that the constitution has zero room for implied rights, but that's where I think he's coming from.
Edit: the Crux of the issue is that the supreme court can just as easily make bad rulings as they can good ones. To pick an admittedly dated but relevant example, the supreme court once ruled that black people are property and must be returned to their "owner", regardless of the laws of the state they were currently in.
Or we could just say "supreme court justice hates minorities and gay people and wants to make his own (interracial) marriage illegal." Who needs nuance?
> The sexuality and race is kind of irrelevant to the point, but I agree with the rest.
Thank you for speaking up. For some reason, some people think that generalizing negative attributes to some groups is fine. It is not. If you claim that behaviors/attributes are had by race/gender/other-unrelated-attribute you are part of the problem.
This comment was way too low, IMO. Lots of other comments re-state the "ok do you really have nothing to hide" point, which is a funny rhetorical point, but this one seems much stronger.
I may be boring. In fact I am pretty boring, looking at my characteristics, I pretty much rolled straight successes on the "nobody wants to oppress me" table. But those of us who are generally safe ought to consider it an obligation to protect our data, so that the more vulnerable populations don't stick out when they try to protect themselves.
Straight white men are arguably no longer the group which is most favored by the status quo. The remainder of your post is sound though, the "I have nothing to hide" translates well into saying "I am in a position of power, fuck you".
My argument on this point is detailed in a response to a sibling comment, but the TL;DR: is that they are favored by the Supreme Court, which is actively judging on the protections afforded by the privacy clauses by the constitution to people who are non-heterosexual, non-white, and not-men.
The major challenge to developing a robust philosophical model of privacy protection isn't the possible worst-case scenario. It's how to weigh the trade-offs of the worst case scenario versus the benefits of the average case scenario. Because when one is in the loop, i.e. when data aggregation is working in one's favor, the benefits are strong and direct.
Modern high quality spam filtering is based on big data analysis of what spam looks like. Modern voice recognition is based off of millions of samples of queries in real world scenarios. Much of the power of the modern internet comes from the ability to aggregate data from distributed sources, centralize it, analyze it, and act on analysis, and those capacities aren't limited to the corporations doing the aggregation.
So the question becomes not whether one values privacy or not. It becomes how one values privacy relative to the other things one values... Cheap hotel rooms, information on neighborhoods, public and private accountability, the time it will take to cure cancer. All of these benefit from data aggregation and centralization.
One should consider worst case scenarios, but stopping at that consideration is like deciding not to invent the airplane because somebody could crash it into a building some day.
In the short run, shifting from Google to Apple is probably the best of both worlds: Apple can provide those Big Data benefits without the data landing in Google's warehouse.
(In the long run, of course, if the set of Apple users approaches "everyone" the risk model shifts considerably and simply becomes, not unlike Google, "How much do you trust Apple isn't just lying to you?" Google also publishes various documents on how they protect user privacy, for example https://www.google.com/chrome/privacy/whitepaper.html... The issue they encounter is people just don't believe them).
It’s not about trusting that Google is telling the truth. I believe Google is telling the truth. You know that they are collecting your data to advertise to you and the only way they can do that is by having access to your unencrypted data.
Surprisingly, they've actually solved the issue of keeping the data secure while using it for advertising (at least for display ads). The secret is compartmentalization, which is one of the reasons your web client makes so many damn calls to render a page these days.
I can't find a paper describing the whole process right now, but the broad-strokes flow as it was once described to me is
- a third-party site resolves who you are based on their knowledge of you.
- they send a cookie representing your interests (but anonymized) to Google, where it's collated with similar interest data to figure out what kind of ad someone with your interests should see (but the system doesn't know who you are; you're just "someone with some interests"). So yes, individual sites track your interests on those sites, but they don't hand that data raw to Google; it's valuable to them and (this is key) on this dimension, Google is a competitor in the ad space. These companies don't want to hand Google raw user / interest correlation data because they don't trust Google not to roll it into better advertising products. Your privacy is, ironically, protected by third-party corporate paranoia.
- nonces representing the ads that should be displayed are generated and bounced to the third-party, where they're routed to your client as the data your client should fetch
- your client gets the list of ads to display from the third party's display ads integration, then makes the request for ads from the ads server with the relevant nonce
The third party can't learn more about you because they don't see what ads you got, and Google doesn't know you got those ads; only that someone with a profile like the one the third party sent you got those ads. The only place in the world enough information is consolidated to deanonymize you is on your client.
(Hypothetically, Google could do a timing attack on its own nonce-generator + ad server on a low-traffic site to make an educated guess if they also had your browsing history, but they basically pinky-swear they don't correlate the signal that way and it's warehoused in different places; someone trying to do that correlation would raise red flags because it threatens the privacy guarantees Google relies upon).
I'll just chime in with this bit of my own personal musings on the subject.
I perform very differently in public and when I'm being recorded vs when I'm alone and in private. The psychology behind this is not hard to imagine. Just like I code differently when I think I'm publishing my git logs vs just hacking together a prototype. The act of performance imposes itself on the actor just as it does on the audience, if not more!
Privacy is therefor almost less about the recorded data as it is about the recording itself. The implication of the data or the memory is enough to change everything.
There is a view of "rights and freedoms" that is related to privacy, where rights are positively defined, and freedom is a limit on the scope and ability or powers of the state or other party to encroach on it, a kind of "shall make no law" clause. It makes more sense in the context of a freedom, where a platform provider would simply not be entitled to collect, use, disclose, or retain information without the express consent of the data subject. This is how health information privacy works, and privacy legislation around some governments and agencies using PII. Freedom is something for people, not the transnational conspiracies we call "platforms" these days. As arms of policy, the FAANGs are in effect, modern Hudsons Bay and the British and Dutch East India Companies.
Somehow we've made corporations sovereign on the internet, and the only mitigations we have on it are from free software and encryption tech - which they routinely evade and sabotage on behalf of their advertisers, but also for government agencies whose activities are otherwise regulated by constitutional and other guaranteed freedoms. This axis of state and industry colluding against citizen "users," has a bunch of ugly precedents.
Imo, addressing the "I have nothing to hide," argument at all is a tarpit. These are neutralized and disengaged people who are content to bargain and live as liquid subjects, and expecting anything more than repeating official talking points and bromides from them misunderstands their survival strategy. I don't think you change anyones mind, you can only activate or neutralize them based on their existing beliefs. I'd recommend letting the "I have nothing to hide" people alone, and instead, encourage active minds to develop the skills to build technology and products that shape the future.
Even PHI is monetized, btw. You know those HIPAA forms you sign? They tend to authorize sharing of your info with insurers and their partners, and often the sponsors of the plan if it is through an employer indirectly through metrics and reporting. If enough attention is paid, and data correlated carefully enough, one can deanonymize on that alone if one cared to.
Indeed, recording consent in healthcare has become a joke and the incentives for regulators to enforce it aren't there either. I worked on a platform for consent directives management, and the problem wasn't technical, it was "deprioritized" by the agency responsible for it because it put limits on their discretion.
I'd even say health information is worse than monetized now, it's actively politicized. I know that C19 vaccination records (names/addr/date/dosenumber) were shared with PR/oppo-research firms working for politicans involved in the rollout, and there was no consent for collection or use of that data either. We live in interesting times.:)
Let's say I don't have anything to hide. Even so, my devices contain lots of sensitive information about my friends, family, colleagues, and employer. I wouldn't want to put them in a bind.
Privacy is actually a group-level challenge. Trying to reduce it to individual action (i.e., "I don't mind if they look through my stuff") is nonsensical because it's not just your data.
Sometimes having a strong competitor has an advantage. It becomes a team game on who is worse and the question if both are terrible doesn't get the focus it might need.
Worse than Android for privacy? A simple GDPR data request shows Android is FAR worse. If you disable tracking on Google, the user experience is severely limited, while it's not on iOS, as the services is build around less data collection.
Besides that, iOS E2E encrypt a lot more like health data, browsing history, maps data, HomeKit data etc.
I am in an authoritarian country. Our speech is censored, and online chat is monitored. We have to consider whether it is appropriate when typing words and speaking to friends.
I care about privacy, but not that much. The author gave me the feeling that I would not drink water for fear of choking to death. Providing private information to some big companies has brought a lot of convenience to our lives at the same time. When making a choice, I will weigh the gains and losses. As far as I am concerned, I loss more while over-considering the privacy.
I don't see how this has to include any personal information. Perhaps a specific set of otherwise rarely used terms might be able to identify you, but there is otherwise no need to attach any PII to these data sets. The trivial case to implement such a growing dictionary would not collect any private information.
While I do know that people do literally say "I have nothing to hide" this still feels like a strawman as I'm not sure how many people are seriously putting that forward in debates. Most people have something to hide.
I find privacy advocates tend to put things in a needlessly binary state when really this is a matter of risk assessment. I have plenty to hide, and I've confessed to various crimes in emails that I've saved on Google's servers. So yes, at some point in the future the government could piece that information together and come arrest me. That could happen. But how likely is it?
Similarly, with location history - yes, Google could be compromised and they could sell this information. Yes, it does mean that people (in this scenario) could piece together my schedule and work out the best time to burgle my home but any routine I have is (or was) me going into the office at about 8 and coming home at about 6. What my job is available via LinkedIn and is a matter of public record anyway. My name and address is on the electoral roll. Since I have almost nothing worth stealing, this sophisticated criminal operation would be going to a fair amount of effort for questionable benefit.
The analogy with speech doesn't fit for me - it feels much more like that other American passion - self-defence. I could definitely boost the defences of my home - traps and strategically located knives and so on. I could master several martial arts in case I am attacked on the street. But that's all more effort than I can be bothered with. That doesn't mean I leave my front door wide open but a secure front door (that I close and lock) is enough at home and some basic awareness is enough on the street. Likewise, I don't tell everyone I meet my passwords or bank details but yes, I let Amazon save my payment details because the risks seem acceptable.
Privacy is all about having agency over information about one's life.
Unless there is some clear and genuine overriding interest, I should be the one to decide whether or not, to whom, when, and how that information is disclosed.
That doesn't mean I am necessarily opposed to any piece of information being disclosed (i.e. I have nothing to hide), but these decisions shouldn't be made for me.
I have nothing to hide BUT I need to know from others what they know from me to remain in a balance of power situation.
SO if Alphabet know what I'm doing I need to know equally what they are doing. In this case I have nothing to hide. If they know much about me and me nothing about them, then I have much to hide.
Knowledge is power. Power need to be balanced to be in peace.
Forget who said it but it was something like “show me the man and I’ll find the crime.” I never _really_ understood that quote until after high school.
I think there is a simpler way to understand this. If you have nothing to hide, then post all of your crucial information (this is facetious) including your address, your phone number, the names and ages of all members of your family. Then post the history of all your browser usage. Then your place of work, your driver's license, where you shop, all of your Amazon purchases for the last year ... You get the picture. We don't have something to hide when we don't reveal this information. We are just protecting ourselves and our loved ones in a world where there are many bad actors.
For example, consider the recent 11th hour settlement by Facebook, for the second time. Meta will pay anything to keep Zuckerberg from having to answer questions under oath in federal court.
Recording everything doesn't actually erode privacy. What happens in your mind, body and soul is still yours forever. Your relationship to truth and <$DEITY> is only known to you and <$DEITY>, at the end of the day.
It's increasingly difficult to communicate what you actually mean to people.
People are emptying out their contextual and relational knowledge. They are leaving it in facebook profiles and politics. There's no need to understand someone's life context and how it might influence the meaning of their communications.
The more we seek to know in data, the more we see someone's data as their primary context in the world. We see less of what they mean as a person, or what they mean to tell us.
You could record every pore of my skin, every hair on my head, my bank account and my programming code. I'll go out and buy a camel, invest in the next crypto fad and move to africa, and you'll have no idea why.
Frankly some people are more private than ever, in plain sight, thanks to the Sauron eye (or eyes) of data harvesting.
If you 'brought back' privacy, our everyday view of people would require empathy and relating to the person, so that you understand what's different about them. People would make their direction more clear, simply to facilitate communicating something worthwhile.
One of the humiliating aspects of the connected, data-driven world is that reveals how much of our behavior is predictable, even without access to our inner mental world.
Norm McDonald had a great joke about writing his own biography.
He asked himself, well what would it be about? His average day, he gets up, he is hungry, so he makes some eggs, has breakfast. By the time he's done with breakfast he goes to do something and it's nearly lunch! So he goes looking for some food for lunch and eats it... annd long story short he concludes that life is mostly about thinking of food, searching for food and eating food.
The uninteresting stuff is predictable. I can tell you where a monk lives, what he does every day. But not what it means to live like he does, nor do I know what he'll write next.
There actually ARE other choices - like Librem, PinePhone, etc.
These other choices definitely are better when it comes to privacy. But probably worse in every other regard.
I personally am not quite willing to make that tradeoff (yet). But I sure am highly grateful to everyone who does, and helps make those alternatives better, and helps them gain momentum.
> There actually ARE other choices - like Librem, PinePhone, etc.
The trade offs pretty much rules out the alternatives for most people. I need just a few apps, but they are for payment and government stuff, so they are only ever going to be available in the official app stores. For others it's going to be messaging apps, social media or something local, like an app for the supermarket. If those apps are not available, then the point of a smartphone goes away. At least of me.
Not just you. Loads of countries are pushing further digitalization and pseudo-require a smartphone to not make things a complete hassle. If you're lucky, their APKs are distributed outside the playstore and you get to manually update everything once a month.
The whole thing is making people dependent on the common app stores. Not actually dependent, but practically.
I agree, given how much I rely on my phone/computer to just work, I'd not personally be willing to make the usability and reliability tradeoffs with switching to something like a PinePhone. Plus there are some other steps you can take to reduce the privacy/security risks of relying on Google/Apple/etc., for example I use PiHole/Tailscale for DNS and Cryptomator for files stored in the cloud
The most annoying part is the hybris if they would really care they would go for the real alternatives like a pine or phones with plasma or sailfish. Nope most of these articles take the comfort option over what they preach.
Android is just worse from a security perspective, and I'm not an Apple fan.
If you're going to use Android, use an open source AOSP fork. Lineage, Graphene, Calyx... how can you be sure that you're actually secure and private if you can't even be sure exactly what firmware your phone is running? You can't.
Currently replying on my newly deGoogled Android phone (/e/OS). It's a bit awkward in a few ways but it definitely feels like I'm not handing over all my data to Google.
A degoogled pixel phone with CalyxOS or GrapheneOS is a good alternative. You can choose not to use cloud services and better control what runs on your phone.
Look at the recent Minecraft chat bans discussion. On one side those who want a "kid safe" environment. On the other side those who are having fun in small communities on private servers. Turns out what they do there can now earn them a global ban.
Also usually those who have "nothing to hide" tend to be the kind that would impose their values on the society as a whole. At gunpoint if possible.
They lost me with their article "Why I’m Ditching Android" which is a switch from Google to Apple. Just like switching from Coke to Pepsi is not going to help you lose weight. You have to make a real change to be private.
It does, either via AuroraStore (complete Google Play Store replacement without google account) or Sandboxed Google Play [1]. My banking apps works, and everything else I can think of.
Hard to say what a "normal" level of tinkering is with Android, as I have switched directly from iOS to Graphene and have never used Stock Android. I am sure some things are a little bit more cumbersome, but for me the tradeoff is worth it.
Also the stock g-cam (with internet access disabled) and g-photos (with internet access disabled) make a pretty amazing photo and photo editing experience.
A bet a majority of people making the "I have nothing to hide" argument actually do and just don't really think about it.
How would you feel about a system that monitored your driving in such a way that every second you spend 1 mph over the speed limit, you accrue a fine and points on your license?
I'm pretty sure the driving in my home state would change drastically, very quickly, so maybe it'd be a good thing over all.
I don't think privacy, in the sense of a right not to be observed, is a right at all. its like saying you have the right for people not to look at you or remember you, it may sound like a great idea but its fundamentally unworkable.
I think what people mean by privacy is what might be considered private within reasonable expectations. Not being seen in public like you have Potter's cloak is not realistic. But there's no clear reason why an American tech company should have so much access to everything you do.
Everyone talks about consent for data collection which of course is a must, but that's just the first step.
There's a second layer to this; when a platform becomes so big that not using it is a hardship that platform must offer services without data collection at all (and this should be mandated by law).
For example, a lot of government-provided services require the use of a smart phone to access; yet you cannot use a smart phone without agreeing to data collection (either by Apple, or Google) - I'm ignoring the 0.0001% Linux phones (and ungoogled androids).
Or how Windows is required in many schools and universities to turn in assignments, yet there is absolutely no way to disable data collection by Microsoft.
The bar should be much higher once the platform reaches a certain level; they should no longer be allowed to say "if you don't want to give us your data, don't use us". No, you need to prove why the data collection is absolutely required to provide the services you're providing.
IMO this is just a bad counterargument. I do in fact have nothing to hide and it's not worth it for me to worry about very unlikely potential changes in geopolitics 10+ years from now. I know how companies like Facebook and Google use data, I know how the US government uses data. I'm fine with it, I have nothing to hide FROM THEM.
The probability of something bad happening to me is low and the expected value I get from sharing data is high. It's a perfectly reasonable preference and I'm pretty well informed about the history of oppressive governments and the current state of data usage.
Personally I would never pretend to lick somebody's food. However I've don't equally bad shit and left a paper trail online, but I trust both Google and the government with that data. It's possible in 10+ years it could be used against me, but so unlikely that it doesn't offset the benefits I receive from freely sharing data.
Something is wrong about this post. If you have Google Timeline turned on (I do), you get the following:
> Rene, here's your new Timeline update
You're receiving this monthly email because you turned on Location History, a Google Account-level setting that saves where you go in your private Timeline.
Location History data also helps give you personalized information on Google, including better restaurant recommendations, and suggestions for a faster commute. You can view, edit, and delete this data anytime in Timeline.
Personally, I have it turned on because I like looking at where I was etc. I have an iPhone and I still have it turned on. There's nothing surreptitious about it. It's quite open and sends you a monthly email if you turned on Location History (though I've forgotten if that's opt-in)
Privacy is inherently also a security problem - the more identifying information a company has on me, the more vulnerable I am to being targeted (well intention or not). In a world where data breaches are pretty frequent, I'd say less is is preferred.
I suspect that most people are not worried about government intrusion on privacy, exactly because they feel they don't have anything to hide and haven't (they believe) done anything wrong. They want to feel safe and believe government surveillance will help, and that people going out of their way to use encryption or privacy tools are up to shady business.
I'm not sure how to change this mindset. I just do not see how to get the vast majority of people to value privacy, especially at the cost of (perceived) safety.
Edit: And, ironically, those same people WILL be very concerned about privacy from (dastardly!) corporations, while I am not so much.
I believe a hacker, or bad actor in general, will gain access to my data if they really really wanted it. I believe stealing data is just a function of time and resources (money). Based on this premise, I don't keep anything truly valuable available digitally. Sure, I have my bank accounts secured, but nothing past start practices.
I do not believe my feelings on this mean I do not care about free speech, nor do I not care about privacy. I believe our reality is that no one should be surprised if their data is stolen. People should plan on this happening and be prepared. Just as corporations have Incident Response and Business Continuity plans.
Hacker will not gain access to your data if there is no data, that's what article is really advocating.
With regards to not caring about free speech, I am trying to picture myself being in this hypothetical situation: lets imagine I was ran by a car and was denied the right to do or say anything about it because the driver was some prominent person, I'm picturing myself in such situation and I'm glad we still have free speech...
When we talk about privacy, we are not only talking about what you can control. Your bank info is secure until it's not, meaning that without privacy regulations the bank sells your info and habits to anyone who's willing to pay, the same thing goes for your phone company and many other essential services.
Whether we accept it or not, the cloud is our "home" now. We have little to no control on who keeps our information on their servers. (i.e. employer, government, school, bank, phone company...)
And I'll use the home as an analogy here. A bad actor can access your house anyway, why have a door? Why have laws that criminalize burglary? Using your example, you could say not to keep anything valuable at home.
I agree with your point that we shouldn't be surprised if our information is hacked, but the point about privacy isn't to necessarily protect you against hackers, but to regulate those that keep your information. Prohibit them from selling your info, store it when not needed and as an extra benefit make it more difficult for hackers to access your info.
Good response. I believe the right counter is "diminishing returns".
Yes, the bad actor can break in my door, but they actually have to do it. Walking through without a door is sooooo much easier.
But then when they get inside, what will they find? Will I have silver and gold bars? Or will it be random HN posts?
My advice is to take reasonable precautions. However, if you have your entire life savings in an offshore back account with Venmo access which doesn't require 2FA ... then yea, I would worry.
I believe things that are valuable, like truly valuable, should be hard to change. Like liquidating a 401k life savings shouldn't be a couple mouse clicks. It should be a long and hard process because you are prolly only going to once or twice in your life. There is nothing wrong IMO with requiring being present at a bank to perform significant value transfers. Sure, wouldn't it be nice to only have to click a button? Sure ... but requiring physical (think MFA) slows the process down for the sake of security.
I agree, and I think your examples of Venmo, and liquidating your 401k are examples of where regulation is needed. Same goes for storing data, while many people hate the GDPR, I think forcing companies to delete personal data is an important piece of legislation. The same thing goes for the right to be forgotten even if it's by manual request.
I guess the biggest thing is passwords. I use passphrases, but yea - I don't use any single point of failure with respect to access.
As far as physical, while a lot of your footprint exists on line, still having the physical matters. A property deed is a good example of this. Another example is my will. I might be aging myself out of this conversation, but it's a point of view for consideration. And yes, these are in a fireproof safe along with birth certificates, passports, etc. So yes, if someone steals my identity, I still have physical proof. Standard MFA stuff (from wikipedia) "knowledge (something only the user knows), possession (something only the user has), and inherence (something only the user is)"
I'll end with another opinion ... digital wallets which are not backed by the FDIC are super scary. Im sure this is another conversation, but just because I choose not to have a digital wallet doesn't mean I don't care about free speech :)
Yup. For serious people like military, etc they do keep important info in NON-digital form. When Snowden revelations came out, Russians switched to type writer for their internal memos.
For personal use, just have to say offline USB drive is a good investment if you can make the physical switch.
Until we can have something like the quantum entanglement communication.
Im not a conspiracy theorist or eternal cynic, but yes to the above stuff. I simply dont trust anyone. In the software world its the same concept as never trusting anything client side.
I don't think it has anything to to conspiracy theory or anything like that, it just a matter of fact, that nation state actors just simply DO NOT trust anything digital for important stuff ATM.
The same argument could be made about your home. A dedicated burglar will get your possessions (including data drives) given time and resources so you should not be surprised to have everything you own taken and your identity stolen.
Again, the same argument could be used about your physical person. Given time and resources someone could kidnap and torture you so you shouldn't be surprised if that happens.
It seems pretty inevitable we're headed toward a reality where there is no privacy. As one example, people are concerned about face recognition, but researchers have had success identifying people simply by their gait when they walk. As machine learning becomes more powerful, more and more of what we do will be exposed even if we close off the most obvious sources of information.
If the above is true, then the choice isn't between privacy and not-privacy; it's between fake-privacy where some people know All The Things but others don't, and openness.
It will be painful to get used to (depending on how fast the transition is) but I'd choose openness.
>The answer is simple – stop using these services and look for privacy respecting alternatives where possible.
I can't say I agree with that personally - I still use google facebook et al. The answer for me I think is only to put stuff you are not bothered about being private on such services and if you say want to ship 1 ton of cocaine to N Korea in return for a nuke you don't do it on such services. Life's too short to be paranoid that google knows I'm having a coffee in Pret.
If you have nothing to hide, you just be rather dull. I don't mean that only unlawful behavior is fun but if you've never had a thought or written something you would rather not share I can't imagine how either passive or manipulable you must be.
This whole talk is utterly useless. We as a society in most part have accepted multiple 24x7 electronic spies in our lives. It is only a matter of time until governments will start prosecuting us en masse using the results of always on surveillance.
Problems related to privacy are making wider circles, more people who would normally not care are being made aware and this is changing the society on scale which is hard to imagine.
> It is only a matter of time until governments will start prosecuting us en masse using the results of always on surveillance.
I know many who chose not to opt in to technical means allowing surveillance, and I come from the country where people were historically going very far to protect their freedom, including ending up in torture room... we have this in our blood. Many will simply stop using or even owning devices mandated by government, even if the price is very high.
Nobody is ever concerned about privacy until it's too late to be. It's just a question of when you learn this lesson, and how damaging it is. If you're very lucky you only suffer embarrassment.
The author should update this post to describe about abortion stuff in US. Perfect example of how data privacy (or lack thereof) is a literal direct risk to individuals.
The "nothing to hide" line is diametrical to an American education, which typically provides access to the Bill of Rights. And it was talked about that communism was invasive of privacy and private property, which absolutely cannot exist in any way without privacy. Like if you own a farm, you have the deed. Where in the house is it? How do you enter the house? With a key. What does the key look like? Can't reveal that because then it can be forged and the door opened. OK what if you're locked out? Well then there's another way in nobody knows about it's underneath the flowerpot in the dirt--THAT'S PRIVACY. Private property is founded on privacy. The alternative is being the only man strong enough to lift a boulder blocking the entrance. And even then that's because that man has privacy within his nervous system, his muscles are not connecting to other people's nervous systems with wires. Privacy -> private property. Otherwise you have nothing.
Nothing to hide. Really it was the bitchvictim media saying people said this. It cannot be taken seriously, people don't say this, it's a bitchvictim media trope. They imposed it as a social expectation. Then people think people think that. Dude nothing to hide why wear clothing? They don't show their genitals upon request.
Only saints have nothing to hide. Even then, they typically stand up to torture before betraying information leading to eg the Christian Catacombs.
Maybe a medical procedure will suddenly become illegal, such that your location history is now subject to warranted search.
Maybe your country will take a sharp turn towards authoritarianism, electing politicians who are ready and willing to use law enforcement to "punish" their enemies.
Maybe your monarch will die, and a recently passed bill will be used to arrest people who protest the existence of the monarchy.
Having "nothing to hide" isn't necessarily a fixed state.