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I've argued here at HN before that I don't think this is a technological problem, but a social one. There is nothing that stops a powerful enough actor from breaking encryption with a rubber hose, except for a strong stigma against that kind of behavior. We need to give digital privacy the same social protection. The other problem with making a purely technical solution is that you leave out people who are not capable of using that solution because they do not have the resources, education or capability.

Solving the problem with technology is 1000000 times easier than solving it from the "social" side.

Is it? For who?

Do you think people's data would be more secure at the border if

- You kernal-hacked iOS so that it booted into a vanilla account upon entry of a certain passcode, and encouraged people to install your hack from GitHub, potentially borking their phones

- People couldn't be compelled (or face being denied entry) to allow search of their electronic devices

?

What about trying to do everything via a VPN and spoofed UA strings vs. PII being banned from sale, heavily taxed, or a meaningful opt-out existing? Or even just DNT having a legal basis?

Is it? For who?

For HN readers. And probably in general.

As for your questions, I would definitely like to first use software which doesn't compromise my privacy and security and only as a very distant second have some bureaucrat who would maybe in the best case scenario fine a company which leaks my data.

The vote I cast by running a Tor relay is much more meaningful and valuable defence of privacy than a vote in the general elections. By orders of magnitude.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for using technology to preserve privacy.

> The vote I cast by running a Tor relay is much more meaningful and valuable defence of privacy than a vote in the general elections.

I kind of agree, but, not if the new leader outlaws using Tor tomorrow, as they have in China and Iran, and are attempting to do in Russia and France.

> bureaucrat who would maybe in the best case scenario fine a company which leaks my data

You may be selling the power of legislation short. It has the power to entirely transform the default business model of the Internet away from surveillance capitalism, for example. In terms of privacy, this would eliminate entire classes of "threat".

We frequently under-estimate our power as technologists to influence these things; we have very much more than a single vote. The narrative of 'technology' in the media is almost entirely that of billionaires and spies, and the media are gradually starting to realize that they're being led along. Getting the voice of technologists to explain the societal impacts of technology policy is a problem that we need to identify with as group.

Let's say you have your data secured with Ultimate Encryption Method. A couple of thugs appear at your door and mention that if you don't un-encrypt that data, they will send these very compromising photographs of you to very public places.

Ultimate Encryption Method has just been trivially bypassed.

Agreed, and I am very sure governments have been doing that many times since they can force you to keep quiet -- and they got away with very criminal methods probably tens of thousands of times.

Hence, the good crypto is really only the most basic first step. Full privacy should be the second and a very important step. Fine, I might have an account in <insert-trendy-social-network-here>. Fine, my real name is known there.

OK.

But there are plethora of cases where having a user profile and personally identifiable information is simply not necessary -- like web search. Even e-commerce like Amazon can be mostly anonymized: you can pay with an e-gold kind of currency (Bitcoin, Ethereum) and Amazon can only ask politely another API if the goods are deliverable to your address (while Amazon won't have an idea about your physical address). Then, even if that mystical-another-API has your physical address, at least it's not in the hands of Amazon -- fragmentation of personal info gives us a small degree of protection, even if Amazon can eventually procure the info under the table. Hey, every little bit helps. Make surveillance expensive and many will drop it (not everybody of course, I recognize that). Again, every little bit helps.

Of course, due to a mountain of vested interests, nobody is talking about such technical solutions. "They" want your info all over the net. It's easier for them, so why change anything? The current status quo is sadly very logical.

Back to your example, thugs will just be angrily gnawing at their nails if they have no idea who you are and where you live.

Sure, if you're a fairly affluent and educated hacker news reader. But there are far more people who I routinely work with who struggle with the concept of a password but need to use the internet to apply for work, register for disability, social security, communicate with family, etc. Do those people deserve less privacy?

Nom they deserve the same privacy. I wish there was a solution for them, but I don't think there is.

Better software and newer generations that know how to use them will, however, come before anyone can make a government that respects his population.

Stuff like Apple's FaceID might help. I am eagerly awaiting to see how will Apple entrench it in their services because I am sure they will.

A decentralized technology only works until some corporation with large advertising resources creates a proprietary centralized service around it and most people flock to their offering. E.g. Bitcoin is becoming centralized around popular online wallets, exchanges and pools; email was supposed to be decentralized, but now most people use Gmail; etc. We will not achieve full decentralization until it becomes both technological and social norm.

Sadly I agree, Homo Sapiens hasn't collectively evolved enough to recognize the dangers of centralization.

However, what we can do is make decentralized tech absolutely idiot-proof and put it in the hands of non-technical users. If it's convenient, fast and reliable, it will at least have an equal footing against the centralized services. Let's get to that point and fight the other battle you mentioned then.

I agree. The biggest problem in this age is having a strong encryption that is user-friendly. The common wisdom says it's impossible to combine the two. I disagree with it but I don't have the time to try and work in the area, nor am I an expert. IMO it's a good cause to work on anyhow.

Furthermore, spies aren't stopped by social stigma. Even if the whole planet agrees in one voice wiretapping shouldn't be done (never gonna happen) the spies can always deny that they're spying. It's not like any of us can actually prove that any agency is indeed wiretapping.

Morality is, in the technical sense, optional. It cannot be enforced. Thus it's unreliable.

> strong encryption that is user-friendly

Not enough, in my opinion. Where most people will fail is on the opsec side. They just don't understand security best practices. I realize that not all problems can be solved, but technology is not just encryption, it's understanding how the technology works so you can avoid leaking information in the hundreds of other ways that are possible on the Internet.

If one's threat model includes state actors that target that person then all regular methods are useless. The best we can do is to protect against passive attacks and that's where PGP, double ratchet schemes, Tor etc come in handy.

True enough, sadly. Still doesn't mean we shouldn't push back with the means we have in our hands. Open-source firmwares might be a VERY good first step in that direction (one of the reasons I am replacing my ASUS router with Mikrotik; another being that ASUS routers are laggy pieces of crap, even those that cost north of $200).

Also, we all know about Intel ME, right? It's baffling how most people using PCs have hardware-level backdoor and the world hasn't lost its shit. It's a very sad epoch we live in. :(

A solution right now is to simply not get on the state adversaries' bad side, maybe. And utilize the blockchain for anonymity, I guess.

Here's another solution, from the late Pieter Hintjens: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/edgenet#/

> The only conclusion I can make from this article is to avoid services hosted in the USA

The thing is, there are absolutely no guarantees it's any better in other countries : the fact that NSA activities were revealed doesn't mean other countries don't do as bad.

It's probably still a good idea to segments services across countries, though, so that it's not a single country who have access to all data.

I was thinking something else, lately (and it was really weird to me, since I'm a webdev): why do we need webapps for everything? Maybe we wouldn't have so many problems if we weren't centralizing so much data. There are probably many apps for which native apps and p2p would do.

I have asked myself the same. I see two-fold answer:

(1) Business who are familiar with web tech and for them it's simply good business to not invest in entirely new (for the dev teams in there) stacks and data formats.

(2) Political pressure -- we know that NSA successfully pushed a broken crypto once in the past, so it's not a stretch to theorize that influential people were whispering in the right ears at the right time.

Even though #2 is just as likely as #1, please note that I think #2 probably happened much, much less than #1. We should never attribute to malice that which can be attributed to incompetence and short-sightedness.

EDIT: There are several very good candidates for data formats out there which are much more efficient than JSON. Adoption is seldom an issue; if one corporation pushes for the format, it's a matter of several months at the most before that format becomes widely supported. Replacing JS might be much harder but efforts continue even today.

Indeed, especially #1. There's a thing with the web : it's easy. If we start making more native apps, especially desktop apps, we then have to consider users' environment (we do not control the execution environment, like with a server), we have to implement error reporting, manage the propagation of updates, etc. Centralizing data is easier too : no need to manage data synchronization, it's just about putting everything in the same database.

It seems like we'll have to wait for users to complain more about privacy issues before the effort is worth it, from a business point of view.

The alternative, of course, being to find a way to make native apps as easy. Nothing prevent us to make updates automatically apply (many apps do that, actually). Applications can run in some sort of VM/container so environment is controlled. And regarding distributed databases, we already have a good idea of what it could look like with blockchains, even if it would obviously be way better to build something with databases in mind from the start. For example, servers could be used for people to register to a service and be added to groups. Then, clients contact servers to get a list of peers, and then they sync their group database by executing transactions (somehow like migrations).

From previous discussions I've learned that USA companies are the only ones that actually are protected from the USA government.

So feel free to build a company in Sweden, but the US is actually legally permitted to wiretap the crap out of it.

From all the leaks we've seen in the last 4 years, the three lett3r agenc1es weren't deterred by the laws at all, wouldn't you agree?

Except that's not how it works. They will take everything including those USA companies' data and then they will go to a judge to ask for a warrant to make interception after the fact legal. It's US citizens that are exempt and their data is only looked at in exceptional cases but on the whole you should not assume the data is not recorded. The legal fiction used to protect this abuse of your rights is that they claim that as long as nobody looks at it your data wasn't really collected.

There are two levels at play here: who is saying what and who is talking to who. The second one is extremely hard to protect against and already plenty useful on its own.

A fact is a fact. IMO we should approach the problems one by one, even if that means that privacy will remain a pipe dream for a while still. But we can gradually tighten the grip and I think every little bit will make the adversaries panic a little.

Example: make a strong standardized crypto (I still have to workaround API requests to several servers and hardcode TLS v1.2 as a requirement which is not okay!), then work on making a Tor-like net tech, then integrate the blockchain in the picture so anonymity is stronger, then probably put all that in mesh networking, etc. etc. The current internet is broken, many of us know it.

I am not an expert so my example might be naive and stupid -- but recently I am very interested in the area and I'd contribute. After I educate myself first, though.