The Fantasy of Opting Out | Hacker News Reader

The Fantasy of Opting Out

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23 pointskawera4 comments

'Obfuscation' - feeding fake data to privacy-violating apps - is a promising solution for everyone who does not want to miss out on apps like whatsapp, or become the digital equivalent of a prepper with only self-compiled OSS or hobbyist software.

On Android, XPrivacy and the newer version XPrivacyLua use this approach, but they require the Xposed framework to run. I wish this approach would be more common: https://github.com/M66B/XPrivacyLua/blob/master/README.md

The problem is that for lots of these services, some of the coolest features come from them having your real data. I would love to be able to yell across my house and tell google to re-order toilet paper, or check what's on my calendar for lunch tomorrow, or remind me to change the guest bathroom lightbulb when I get home from work today. Seems like overly aggressive obfuscation would take a lot of features off the table.

I wish there was a way to have the techno-optimist frictionless utopia without giving up full control over my own personal data. The right to be forgotten in the EU is a good step towards that, but we need to go a little farther I think. It just seems like nobody is really sure exactly what that will look like yet.

A little farther you say? That's not nearly going to cut it. We need radical change. The only way data will be 'safe' is if it lives on your device and verifiably only leaves it when intended. Any untransparent store is per definition prone to abuse.

By now I think it's safe to say the free market has provably failed us. We should require regulatory bodies to enforce an open standard for this if you ask me.

I see this a political problem rather than a technological one. Obfuscation certainly helps, but it's still death by 1000 cuts. Even if information is sufficiently hidden in 2019, it might be retained for many years and eventually decoded. Modern privacy issues were pretty unforseeable when most democracies were founded, and seems to be the kind of thing that constitutional amendments were intended to address. I dont know why there isnt more political will surrounding this despite the level of discontent. Maybe people assume that problems arising from tech can only be solved with tech.

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