Hacker News Reader

Comment by MikeGale | Hacker News Reader

A defeatist piece. If you're determined and have initiative you can achieve a lot. If you depend on the legislators in society, like this author, you may indeed be doomed. But you don't need to be.

The good thing is that with defensive measures you can stop much of it. With retroveillance you may even be able to strike back from time to time.

View on HN

We need privacy at the societal level though. Even if I have perfect privacy for myself, bad actors who invade everyone else’s privacy are still able to influence society in a way that has never been possible before. Think of the election interference made possible solely by the huge amounts of data these companies have.

Even if I have perfect privacy, I’m still screwed if I live in a society where 99% of people don’t.

So construct a government where individuals are not secured or compromised their liberty depending on the outcome of an election. You speak of the popular will being corrupted by an external power, but the tyranny of the majority is enough of a threat to the safety of the individual and the tenants of natural law anyway.

Your perfect society is everybody's perfect society, one where collective force is used to secure individual liberty, and not choke it.

If that's the case, elections are meaningless and you're living in a state where current leadership cannot excercise their power

100% privacy can be hard, for some people also next to impossible to achieve, but making spying more difficult and expensive is still worth. Surveillance is pervasive because it is relatively cheap; what if suddenly it became more costly after people change their habits and adopt safer technologies? Companies do that for profits, and governments use taxpayers money; forcing them to spend more by putting obstacles will hit where it hurts the most.

Depending on the legislators is what most people have to do since not everyone has the time to focus on their privacy - The price of giving up privacy isn't so much that they should focus on it instead of leisure in the few daily hours of free time afforded by the other parts of their life (and sometimes they're directly compensated, eg. ad-supported hulu costing less than ad-free).

Yes, you can fight for your privacy, but good luck fighting for other people's privacy (what they mean by 'protecting privacy').

> Depending on the legislators is what most people have to do since not everyone has the time to focus on their privacy…

Not to mention the knowledge. The "everyone for themselves" approach doesn't address the actual problem, which is why it's important to think about this issue beyond our own personal networks and defensive capabilities.

While I mostly agree with you, it's a very hard endeavor that only a few extremely motivated individuals can do.

I have a Linux desktop and a GrapheneOS smartphone. However my ISP still knows a lot of things about me (and I'm not sure that a VPN provider would be better) including my geoloc, the websites I go to and how much time I spend on them.

I clean my cookies regularly, I use different browsers for different activities, but with browser fingerprinting it's probably in vain.

So basically I'm 80% there. But it's pretty tiring not to have the same apps / capabilities as others (I lost half my contacts by not having whatsapp), to be conscious that I clicked a Google link by mistake etc

The last 20% are way too much overhead for me (TOR etc).

And frankly I don't know anybody else doing it (IRL).

> retroveillance

This is the first time I have seen this term, could you explain exactly what you mean by it?

He may have meant sousveillance.

sousvideance?

yeah, the slowly boiling frog one

Reply on news.ycombinator.com