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Comment by yardie | Hacker News Reader

If your data is not end to end private key encrypted, then you are inviting the government in to look at all your shit; photos, documents, logs, everything.

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We tend to view this as a technology problem.

The real question: Why do we let governments get away with this kind of behavior?

Fighting a technology arms race with the government is a losing battle. They can ask for private keys to be handed over - on threat of jail time if you don't comply.

We need to start at the ballot box.

It's drastically easier to roll out a new technology than change a government policy which all major political parties are more or less comfortable with.

Governments take time to adapt to new technology, so keep the new technology moving faster than the government knows how to deal with it........

>The real question: Why do we let governments get away with this kind of behavior?

Not many care anymore about privacy except basically, us, the tech power user community and then a few stragglers. This new generation just doesn't care because they never really grew up with any in the first place, just shoved right into Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat. They probably didn't go too depth into privacy laws, why your privacy matters in their grade school either.

Just from observing my kid and his friends I think they are amazingly adept at privacy even if they don't realize it, yet. They are more concerned about trolling, being trolled, and in extreme cases, swatting. They share stuff on FB-IG-SC-YT but are conscious to give out just enough information. No real names, no addresses, no phone numbers.

Now the older generations (boomers, GenX, Xillenials) share way too much information, in my opinion. They get on FB, tag everyone in the photo, even those without a FB account. And share their phone number and directions to their house.

It is a technology problem. Technology created the centralisation that makes the target so juicy, and courts treat stuff entrusted to third parties with less care than stuff you keep in your mind.

The closer the storage is to you, the bigger a hurdle the government needs to jump to access it. Closer tech is more private tech. It's also much more expensive to snoop on.

The ballot box approach will last exactly as long as the next terrorist crisis.

I agree we should be divesting from centralized data management for the reasons you stated. The parent poster also had a good point, though. If the public is going to bend over at every crisis and lose rights, how long until residential customers can only hook approved walled-garden devices up to the internet, with no true privacy respecting tools permitted in their app stores?

Because surveillance isn’t an issue of left vs right, it’s an issue of predator vs prey, and all of the elected officials are the predators as much as the voters are prey.

The essential problem is that the great majority of voters are vastly apathetic when it comes to privacy, and there are strong incentives for governments to infringe upon it, especially in law enforcement.

The ballot box is a scam. An illusion of control to keep us complacent.

In reality, they have the guns and jails, write the laws, and can change their mind as they see fit as to what the laws even mean.

Playing in a rigged game.

I'm curious at what point people decide that the government spying on them begins to be ok? How does the average person feel about the following:

1. A spouse going through your cell phone without your knowledge 2. A landlord requiring cameras in all rooms of your house to catch potential property destruction 3. A boss logging all computer activity at all times

I'd imagine the average person would be pretty pissed about all of the above. At some point though, when it gets scaled up to the federal government effectively having the power to go through anybody's phone records, cloud data, email, search history, and now surveillance cameras, a lot of people seem to be okay with that, because terrorism.

Terrorism is bad, but police states are worse, because at that point the government becomes the terrorist. If you're that afraid of terrorists that you're willing to give the government the power to spy on you (which is not even guaranteed to prevent terror attacks), maybe you should move to a rural location far away from any population center. Otherwise, it should be treated like any other crime. Perhaps we should think about why people become terrorists in the first place, and maybe get at the root of the problem, instead of increasing police power endlessly to try to solve the symptom and not the cure.

As someone from the first generation to live in democracy after 41 years of dictatorship, I would say people ignore the signs and when they finally decide to start taking action is too late.

All three of those examples are one person asking for themselves to be granted access to your private info. They're not really any less personal. To some extent, I'm just describing separation of powers, but there's also a difference between an individual with motives, and an organisation.

A better example might be an exec passing a policy requiring HR to have permission to see your X.

I completely agree with you but the challenge is how do you get people to care about privacy when they publicly post their current location and meal to public profiles daily? How do you convince people to PAY for services from companies that care about privacy instead of picking the "free" option where everything you do and say is tracked? We can blame the government but we are complicit in our apathy.

They won't care until their own personal privacy is breached in some horrifying manner, for example nude photos hacked and posted on public forums.

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