Comment by chestnut-tree | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chestnut-tree | Hacker News Reader

It's depressing how perfectly normal and natural the idea of tracking users has become.

I know this isn't a popular opinion on Hacker News, but why should there be any tracking whatsoever when using an OS? Are people saying that they're perfectly fine for their Windows/Mac/Linux distribution to track everything they do? The apps they use? The sites they visit? Because that's basically what ChromeOS does. It even tracks the documents you print to your desktop printer (routed through Google's cloud print service).

You aren't even anonymous when you use ChromeOS - you must be signed into your Google account. Just as a reminder, your Google account = your name, your date of birth, your location and optional phone number. In other words, some of your most personal and private information all tied to the activity you conduct on ChromeOS.

Google states that it does not read the content of your emails in GMail (emails are scanned by computer), but you could argue that your browsing habits are just as private and personal. No such assurances on how they handle this data. Does Google disassociate the identity of the user from their activity? If not, then who sees this data at Google? How long is this data kept for? These are important questions, but you won't find answers in Google's privacy policy. (And you're unlikely to find many in the tech community asking Google about them either.)

I would never recommend an OS that tracked the activity of students so relentlessly, especially when many students are too young to understand the horrendous privacy implications of using ChromeOS. Other companies like Microsoft are rightfully criticised for their tracking in Windows 10, yet Google gets a completely free ride. It's just baffling.

What alarms me is how important privacy has suddenly become, despite a distinct lack of actualization on the "nightmare" scenarios we keep hearing.

A lot of these hypotheticals and fringe molehills are fueled by fear of the unknown. It happens for most newish technologies.

I'd like to give this some thought actually. For now here's an observation.

Situations which produces large amounts of "externalities" seem to produce this strange scenario where we fight against potential nightmare scenarios. Externalities being defined as something that occurs as a result of the new process outside the expected system. Global warming from burning fossil fuels or secondhand smoke are prime examples although easier to think about because the outcomes are tangible.

This brings up the question, "How do we handle this thing that effects people on a large scale?" It's useful to ask, "What's the worst outcome of this we can imagine" which might be along the lines of 1984. Terrifying because the government is normally the vehicle that is used to regulate large amounts of externalities and data collection could provide it with a large amount of power, something that the government often desires. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the government started to abuse this power very quickly and in secret; although to a lesser extent than 1984. It's limited largely by technology (which is improving at a rapid rate). How we deal with this problem now may help us avoid this dystopian situation once the technology catches up.

On the other hand, we also have to look at what we get in exchange. Burning fossil fuels is so essential that maybe it's worth raising the temperature of the earth until we can develop something better. Or maybe it's just a large exercise in game theory. In the case of data collection we get a few extremely convenient services (search, automation, etc.) in exchange for lack of privacy in nearly all forms and the systems that are abstracted above us (businesses, government, economy, etc.) are shifted towards optimizing for their respective interests using the information they can glean from the collected data. These systems become arguably more efficient more powerful.

These conversations effectively shape how we handle the new thing and are overall good. Privacy (and the effects of privacy) isn't really an easily quantifiable thing, but it does appear to be something that people think is worth having. The end result is most likely to be somewhere in the middle of the road; we can burn fossil fuels, but there are certain standards on the emissions to limit the externalities.

So where exactly is the tradeoff "worth it"? It's different for everybody. For me, I think all my data that is seemingly private for me (I wouldn't let my friends read my email / texts; if it's a file in a password protected account) should be encrypted and impossible for anyone outside of that conversation to access; currently this is not the case. Facebook is a bit of a grey area because people seem to use it as if it was private and the friends feature implies that it is, but the reality is that it is not. All of this falls apart completely when everything we previously assumed was private is clearly not when it comes to organizations such as the NSA which is an organization that provides a very questionable amount of value.

Comparing tracking with climate change is a new one as far as nightmare analogies go.

This comment is a good example of how fear, uncertainty, and doubt works. Your entire argument premised on "externalities" could also apply to vaccines causing autism, or a GMO-driven dystopia.

To a degree. Vaccines and autism have some different qualities. One, there doesn't appear to be any link between vaccines and autism and two, if there was a link it's closer to the "do we kill 5 people or 1 person" ethical question with a game theory twist.

I don't know enough about what a GMO dystopia would be to comment.

I like the fuel / climate change analogy because we know the general outcome (increased temperatures) and a number of likely/possible effects, but it's hard to say exactly how much life will change for the majority of people and there is a very obvious short-term benefit to going along with it. There is current evidence that it is actually a real problem as well. Fossil fuels are the revenue model for many industries, which is also the case with data collection.

While it's a lesser problem, data tracking has similar qualities. We know we lose privacy, but how much and what will the effects of losing that privacy be? There is incentive to use these 'free' services. The NSA, constant data breaches by hacking groups and government trying to strong-arm companies into weakening encryption show that it's a pretty big deal. Lavabit was effectively shut down in a very shady legal manner because it didn't want to provide data on all of it's customers when just one was being targeted.

If privacy really doesn't matter, give me read-only access to your emails. Then tell me when you leave the house each morning and when you arrive home. Machine learning is pretty fun, we can often learn more about you from data you think is meaningless than by reading your emails. Some portion (perhaps most) of the information on you will eventually make it's way outside of wherever it was initially stored. Oh and it's stored forever and you couldn't possibly imagine the uses or incentives on how to use that data in the future because you haven't imagined it yet. Let's have the discussion and decide on some kind of limitations and ethical practices please. Relying on people to be reasonable got us the current NSA.

You really don't know what FUD is either, do you?

Also, if you're so afraid of tracking, why don't you live remotely in the wilderness? That's exactly how pointless these types of non-sequitur, hyperbolic questions are.

How was the NSA revelations not a "nightmare" scenario? or the OPM breach?

I would hope that privacy is perceived as important prior to the nightmare scenarios becoming "actualized," because afterward would be too late.

Unfortunately, I don't think that perception is as widespread as it needs to be, despite your alarm.

If the nightmare scenarios ever do become actualized, then any amount of perception or hand wringing up that point is moot.

Did you stockpile food and water for Y2k? Fear of uncertainty and the unknown is both natural and irrational.

The point is to avoid the problem, rather than to stumble into a state from which it is difficult to restore the status quo ante.

Please do not mistake "anticipating risks" for "fear of uncertainty and the unknown." This a risk for which the likelihood currently appears low, but the consequences could be grave and hard to reverse. At least to my mind, that warrants a bit of attention.

The point is that there isn't a nightmare problem supported by evidence, and that irrational fear causes a cognitive bias which leads to such slippery slope fallacies (e.g. Y2K scare).

You're more likely to be negatively impacted by slipping in your shower, yet I bet you have spent more energy hand wringing over tracking. Just as parents have given overt attention to vaccines causing autism.

Many of the "nightmare scenarios" are from the recent past of the West, or non-Western countries. Hoover's FBI, the Stasi, and so on; but also Erdogan's Turkey and current China.

They don't read all emails because it is easier for a program to look for certain phrases/words/etc... but in the end, they are still looking at them even if it is indirectly (unless you encrypt everything).

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