Afghans scramble to delete digital history, evade biometrics | Hacker News Reader

Afghans scramble to delete digital history, evade biometrics

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64 pointsdave_aiello22 comments

Add "regime change" to the list of things you might have to worry about, even if you "have nothing to hide".

Add "regime change elsewhere and those to whom it might impact" if you feel that odds of such an event where you presently reside are low.

Also, add "erase digital footprint" and "obfuscate biometric identifiers" to attack on human rights checklist - try not to worry about how feasible the tasks are.

Unfortunately nobody will allow you on a plane without a valid matching biometric ID passport. And you can bet there would be state security there.

You'd need a forgery from one of the few remaining countries that don't do that, or smuggle yourself out in another way.

There is something called UN Refugee Travel document, looks like a passport, but not quite. Many aren’t biometric, some are.

Any embassy in Afghanistan could issue those.

> Add "regime change" to the list of things you might have to worry about, even if you "have nothing to hide".

I think you don't need regime change to make something like that critical. Companies aren't institutions, they're organizations staffed by people and they have turnover. A company as it exists today is not the same as that company 5 years which wasn't the same as the company 10 years ago etc.

The decisions a company will make with data you provide them now may well change in the future - when their leadership changes, when the board changes, when the managers change, etc etc.

On top of that, companies are bought and sold. Blizzard was my favorite game developer but after a but of time under activision they don't seem to resemble the blizzard I remember when I enjoyed their products.

And police can get judges to sign subpoenas for data even if the company doesn't want to share it - if you sent dna to 23andme it's definitely something the police can use, for example, with enough justification.

Regime change is probably completely unnecessary to use your data against you, or in ways you never anticipated it being used.

I was hoping that "add to your list" implied that 1) the list had additional items on it and 2) whatever finite set the list contains, it's incommplete.

Yes: the context in which data will exist in the future is not the same as the context in which the data were initially provided or created.

Hell, even the context in which data are accessed or provided virtually always exceeds the data subject's awareness or understanding, and would not be considered acceptable.

I censor myself on Wechat as well as to avoid getting detained at the border in China

I’m American and have no Chinese heritage

Lots of cool stuff over there though, and industries for now

No reason to lose social standing over there, and this has no effect on my social standing over here, just inconsequential internet points

Data is forever. Privacy laws can change. Companies can break their privacy policies in bankruptcy. Even democracy is not guaranteed.

..but you got nothing to hide. right, citizen?

I think regime change should've been pretty high up on the list for everyone already. The Soviet Union lasted for less time than the lifespan of people in developed countries. Around half the countries in Europe have only existed in their current form for a few decades.

It shouldn't at all be something unexpected.

I'd suggested this to Google some years back.

Entirely by coincidence, on the anniversary of Kristallnacht.

https://web.archive.org/web/20170604101018/https://plus.goog...

There is a genre of videos showing the Taliban taking over American weapons, humvees, buildings, etc. Here is one of them using the army gym https://www.reddit.com/r/PublicFreakout/comments/p5tp4k/tali...

In addition to the wasted trillions and humanitarian disaster, this might be the first time the sacking of a capital city is streamed on social media.

Pay for cell towers, get free meme vids. Everyone wins.

for a while I've thought that maybe ephemeral should be the default when it comes to public communications and data unless otherwise specified.

In this case it's literally a matter of life and death but there's so many ways in which this permanent accessibility can bite people in ways they can't even anticipate, and I really don't think we're wired for it. Also if you think about it the value of digital history that just accrues is probably zero, it's just a hoarding reflex.

Hard to keep things ephemeral today. Digital is so much easier to to copy and propagate.

The hubris of Reuters news using a domain called 'trust.org' is a perfect parody of today's media.

Is Reuters a particularly untrustworthy news source?

It's not journalism if it's suggested you simply "trust" the journalist.

I'd rather go to unarguable-factbased-article.org myself.

It's not journalism if it is a bullet point of facts, either. Journalism provides context, background, and yes, it provides opinion sometimes as well.

Just wait till the taliban equip all the women with GPS monitored electro-shock collars. The combination of modern technology and maniacal ideology is a new scale of horror as we are seeing in the chinese concentration camps.

That's pretty drastic even for them. Even North Korea can't do that and they have an established regime.

Think we might be waiting a long time for that.

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