Privacy vs. “I have nothing to hide” (2019)
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kevquirk.com
Maybe a medical procedure will suddenly become illegal, such that your location history is now subject to warranted search.
Maybe your country will take a sharp turn towards authoritarianism, electing politicians who are ready and willing to use law enforcement to "punish" their enemies.
Maybe your monarch will die, and a recently passed bill will be used to arrest people who protest the existence of the monarchy.
Having "nothing to hide" isn't necessarily a fixed state.
I have seen stuff like "defendant had TOR installed - a popular program for criminals" in court filings. ...and judges and juries accept that as fact because they just don't understand the technology. For example, having a bookmark for "Hacker News" would absolutely show up in court. Crazy stuff meant to bias judges and juries that don't know tech.
The point is that the situation is 100x worse in tech where prosecutors, judges, and juries simply do not understand the evidence. ANYTHING can be painted as incriminating evidence.
I have seen saved credentials on automation jobs being used to incorrectly establish people's network activity. I have seen routine maintenance being used to establish obstruction charges just to intimidate possible witnesses... Like stuff you would not believe happens, happens.
It's even worse in civil suits, where opposing counsel will subpoena as much as possible (mountains of data) just to give you more work and fish for trade secrets or anything they can twist in court.
When I was junior, I proudly told my legal team "good news, I added space to keep our transaction records for 20 years!" and was aghast when they said they wanted files deleted THE DAY the legal requirement to hold it expired because it increased legal liability.
Now I totally get it. Today we only store the bare minimum - everything else is deleted immediately. ... and I have to re-explain this to junior employees each year to their disgust.
Both of those are really good examples of how a statement of fact that is literally true can still be a lie. Politicians do this kind of stuff all the time especially in their attack ads that make TV unwatchable around this time of year in every even numbered year. Amazingly what gets a politician called out by the other party's press as a "liar" is the opposite of this kind of statement: something that is fundamentally true but where the politician got one minor irrelevant detail wrong. That's also a major reason why it isn't a good idea to represent yourself in court or to explain yourself to the police when you get arrested because people are prone to accidentally getting minor details wrong or misspeaking even when they're telling the truth to the best of their ability.
Cannot emphasise this enough.
Unless you live a criminal lifestyle (if so, you can learn nothing from me) you may encounter cops once. They do it every day.
Often police job advancement is helped by making your life hell. Say nothing you are not legally obliged to.
I know a prosecutor who had to investigate the statements made by the husband of a person who (presumably) had drowned themself in their pool (she used workout weights to keep herself at the bottom). The statement to be investigated: "Those were her weights. I never touched those weights!"
Now all of a sudden maybe his fingerprints are on the weights and that statement is untrue...
I also got to learn that they scoop the weights into a bucket because I guess they need to keep them submerged in water, otherwise the prints will wash off.
I was punished in school for having NetHack source code in my home dir. And it was not because it was a game but because it allegedly was a hacking tool.
You're talking about Hillary Clinton, right? That's literally one of the arguments they used against her.
And would the defense be allowed to show the legal and harmless conversations we have here? Or ask the prosecutors which HN posts they believe influenced the accused to commit a crime?
Same in software-land. Nobody wants to have years of who-knows-what subpoenaed.
We do that with speed cameras, why not just automate health data mining too? Why did you stop updating your cycle data, is it because you knew you were pregnant and wanted an abortion? Sounds like suspicious activity to me, exactly identical to turning around at a DUI checkpoint.
Has anyone actually got in trouble for that? I turned around those checkpoints all the time because it's just faster to go around.
Change, but not retroactively.
It's a poignant example of what others have pointed out. "I have nothing to hide" until political landscape changes to make it something to hide.
It's like people pushing for liberal drug laws and legalizing homeless tents and then one day its in their backyard.
While I feel for women part of groups that are impacted by Roe vs Wade being overturned, their apathy against privacy concerns have boomeranged, the same of which proportion of men who aren't having to deal with abortion are looking at this issue as "I don't need an abortion so it doesn't concern me".
Those women caught up in this struggle also looked on, along with men and everybody else as Uyghur women were sterilized and forced to abort using the very surveillance mechanism that were developed and custom tailored to fit the needs of the abusers.
It's almost like the land of CCP is a testing ground for what's in store for Western civilization. Remember what caused Latin America's shift towards tyranny and dictatorship, it was inflation. Nothing about our land that makes it any less susceptible or resilient. Inflation has deep remifications to privacy and this Roe vs Wade situation is only the beginning.
And French Jewry was spared to a large extent not because of the compassion of Vichy administration, who even sent French children to the death camps over German objections, but due to a complicated bureaucracy and disorganized recordkeeping that made it a real challenge for French collaborators to round Jewish people up. They'd have no such roadblock these days.
In theory it’s unconstitutional here to prosecute someone for an act they committed before there was a law against it. But there are other ways to convict someone, for better or worse.
Corporations leverage this all the time, so they go unpunished unless it’s in the court of public opinion. The toolset is necessary but the power dynamics are important.
I'm looking at the European Union and at Apple and Google. Good intentions? That doesn't mean that you're the good guys! History has shown that the bad guys always believe strongly that they were the good guys. Privacy and security is not only about protection from criminals and companies but especially about protection from our governments. It doesn't matter wether you voted for your government or not or you like them or not or they like you or not.
Today people with similar mindsets control politics and surveillance is increased at every step. A frightful older demographic is part of this. Someone said it would be insanity to repeat the same mistakes over and over again and expect different results...
It's not especially governments for which you need to keep the integrity of your privacy - it's everyone. And I would imagine if we're trying to estimate the entities that pry the most, it's corporations. Sure, they may feed it to governments, but there's an energy barrier there (in at least some circumstances) - but the trust of corporations is one of the bigger issues here.
Seeing the arrests in Edinburgh this past week has been heart wrenching. It's just... I thought we were better than that?
Edit: Also, this is OT anyway from the matter of privacy and "nothing to hide".
The state shouldn't get to declare mandatory solemnity.
lol, my country's concept of free speech is in part based on the idea everyone should be able to tell your country's nobility things they don't want to hear.
But I do agree somewhat, if what you’re saying is true. People should be able to hold a funeral in peace.
Maybe the common British people should take notes from their French neighbors and teach these royal shits what true persecution feels like.
And as for time & place, finding the right moment and location to be maximally irritating is part of the art of protest.
The sad part is that they, and all of their supporters, will probably go back to agitating against free speech after this whole thing blows over.
Every officially designated 'pro free speech warrior' I've seen in recent times has been strongly for authoritarianism if it suits their agenda. Just ask many of them for their opinion on say Palestine or Yemen and you'll lots of ugly things come out, none of which are consistent with the image of 'freedom' these types like to portray themselves as.
In fact, many of them seem to support anti-BDS laws and such.
I do not endorse censorship attempts, but also let's not kid ourselves about the nature of many of the people who market themselves free speech advocates, please.
The UK is one of the most "live and let live" countries in the world.
However I think there is a marked difference between 2010 and 2022, especially in Scotland, who I used to think of as usually the sensible ones; the land of David Hume.
Free speech is being curtailed by legislation that is auspiciously about preventing "hate crime", but in actuality is being used as a tool to shut down dissenting opinions, such as the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Bill.
For instance, if you go hiking, you my get attacked by a bear, is it a risk worth taking? Usually yes, bear attacks are rare, unless you do stupid things like going where you know there is a bear. Same thing for privacy, you can take some risks, for example by letting Facebook follow you doing mundane things for targeted advertising, but not be so stupid as to post picture of yourself doing stupid things for everyone to see. The concrete example in the article is in the second category: some guy gets fired because he posts a picture of doing stupid things at his job.
Personally, I consider the political risks you cited low for the US or EU. Not zero, it is never zero, but low enough to be negligible compared to what Google, Amazon or Facebook offer me. Maybe it is not your case.
There are some privacy high risks, and that's, I think, mostly about things you publish online. Police doesn't need a warrant to look at your public profile, neither does your boss or the spouse you are cheating. Others include doing stupid things on your employer's corporate network, or doing things that are seriously illegal right now in your country without necessary precautions.
- (access) trust every individual employee who has immediate access. Forever? And every individual employee of the government agencies that could compel access? Forever?
- (policy from above) trust every executive who could change policy on where your data goes and how it is held. Forever? Trust the relevant national government regarding laws about your data. Forever?
- (security) trust the Security set up is at least great. Forever?
Forever, because data can last that long. And auditing data handling is hard.
Edit: tried to make it clearer.
You have nothing to hide... yet.
Mountains of personal data is too juicy and is inevitably misused.
Actually it started much earlier than that.
Christian started going after Jews since at least the fourth century, inspired by the hatred written in the Gospel of John. In particular, it was a Christian ritual to physically attack Jews around Easter in the Middle Ages.
More detail: https://theconversation.com/why-good-friday-was-dangerous-fo...
There's concerns about: hackers, surveillance capitalism, foreign state actors, and domestic state actors. People that say they have nothing to hide are usually unconcerned about one or two of these (surveillance capitalism and domestic state actors) but often are actually concerned with at least one.
The truth of the matter is, though, that if you're concerned about one, you need to be concerned about all of them. There is no door that only good guys can use and bad guys can't. Breaking it down has often led to more successful conversations for me. Even in a group of highly tech literate people (CS graduate students) I often see the "I don't care" or "what can I do" sentiments. So I suggest when talking about all this, break it down into these categories. Maybe if more of us did this then we'd have more success as a community.
If you want to “worst case” scenario something, that’s your choice, but it’s not very predictive.
Some people (especially here on HN) are so into privacy for the sake of privacy, more like a hobby than a practical exercise in improving their quality of life. And that's completely fine. But I'm more interested in convenience. I'm at the point where I would legitimately prefer my Social Security Number to be leaked on the dark web than have to deal with the proposed three-factor authentication for my banking and brokerage accounts.
In the case of a targeted investigation, yeah, you're probably right. Thing is, that's not the only (or even most likely) threat unless you're some kind of wannabe DPR. Dragnet/geofence-style investigations are getting more common and while not using Google likely won't save you from the CIA, it may very well avoid your technically-incompetent local LEOs accidentally framing you for a bank robbery or something when you win the location-data lottery.
But that's an individual-level argument, which imo isn't the main point - privacy is a societal-level good.
> But I'm more interested in convenience.
This is basically the "I have nothing to say, so I have no need for freedom of expression" argument transplanted into the privacy sphere. The effectiveness of privacy methods scale both technically and socially: an example on the technical front is how tor is more useful the more "normal" traffic ends up on it, and an example on the social front is how encrypted messaging capabilities aren't suspicious if they're integrated by default into widely used apps. So, I see privacy as less about me and more about participating in creating an environment where those who truly require it can have it, and that's something that's way harder if privacy is only conceived as being "for" dissidents or fetishists or whatever.
Is it inconvenient sometimes? Sure, but it's also a civic duty. I'd honestly call it analogous to jury selection: quite possibly nothing but a burden to you personally, but an important part of maintaining a healthy society.
> This is basically the "I have nothing to say, so I have no need for freedom of expression" argument transplanted into the privacy sphere.
Not at all. It's "I do not have infinite time and energy to spend in trying to protect myself against every remote possible negative outcome."
Nothing to hide is an incomplete sentence. Nothing to hide from who? surely you want to hide your children from abusers and predators? Don't you want to hide your banking details from con artists and fraudsters? Your identity from identity thieves.. Your location from burglars, your car keys from car thieves or your blood type from rich mobsters with kidney problems..
we don't know who are any of these things. So we should protect ourselves from all of them, in effect we have everything to hide from someone, and no idea who someone is.
edit; let me just add the obvious, that the government and police, Google and Facebook, are made up of many someones.
Plenty to hide from basically everyone.
You're absolutely right that who and what matter here, but I find the typical who and the typical what to be entirely unobjectionable.
It's telling that the best arguments the privacy activists have are all slippery slope arguments. Of course it's easy to think of hypothetical policies to which I'd object; the point is that I don't object to any of the actually-existing programs as currently constructed. If Gmail wants to scan my mail, I don't care. If the NSA wants to drop in on my phone calls every once in a while to see if I'm affiliated with ISIS, that's fine with me. If Facebook wants to keep a log of my activity on the site to better target ads, then they should go for it.
The only way to get me to agree that a policy is odious is for you to make up some hypothetical policy that doesn't exist and say, "but what if that happened?!!" And I just don't find that very compelling.
In summary, you're absolutely right that, "nothing to hide is an incomplete sentence." The complete sentence is this: I have nothing to hide from any of the people currently looking in any of the places they're looking.
Here's one that isnt: it's none of the government's business!
>the point is that I don't object to any of the actually-existing programs as currently constructed. If Gmail wants to scan my mail, I don't care. If the NSA wants to drop in on my phone calls every once in a while to see if I'm affiliated with ISIS, that's fine with me. If Facebook wants to keep a log of my activity on the site to better target ads, then they should go for it.
You may not care, but I do care, and lots of other people do too. My right to privacy is inherently linked to my dignity as a human being and the neither the government, or anyone else, has the right to violate my human dignity no matter how important they think it is or how inconsequential the details of what I want to keep private are! If you have different ideas about human dignity and privacy, and you want to share all of the intimate details of your life to every government and corporate entity on the planet, more power to you. Perhaps you want to put a webcam in your bathroom, so all the people of the internet can watch you eliminate and perform your daily cleaning rituals, and you have absolutely no problem with that (many people don't!). Some of us do have a problem with that, solely for the (completely valid) reason that we value our privacy and what we do in our bathrooms is not the government's business, or facebook's business, or the business of anyone else, no matter how vehemently they claim they need to peer into our bathrooms for "national security" reasons or to target us with ads. The same goes for the rest of our lives.
Nobody is doing that. Nobody is suggesting we do that.
Again, if things were different, then they'd be different, and I'd have different opinions. But things aren't different. Things are as they are.
Just more evidence that every privacy argument starts with, "but what if..."
You fail to understand that people who value privacy and human dignity view the NSA tapping our phones exactly the same as we view people watching us in the bathroom. There is no "what if.." - this is happening now. Our privacy and human dignity are currently being violated in a wide variety of ways.
Right. Who decides they're legitimate? And who the terrorists are?
Would you like the right to check your location history for church attendance, or the left to scan your messages for inappropriate thinking? That could be made legitimate with the right parliament :)
Oh yeah; problem is, by the time things are noticeably different it takes a war, a revolution or at least fleeing across the border to fix them.
Which seems like a pretty good argument for tightening down on privacy, rather than allowing it to continue as-is or worsen.
Some clever answers: “If I'm not doing anything wrong, then you have no cause to watch me.” “Because the government gets to define what's wrong, and they keep changing the definition.” “Because you might do something wrong with my information.” My problem with quips like these – as right as they are – is that they accept the premise that privacy is about hiding a wrong. It's not.
— https://www.wired.com/2006/05/the-eternal-value-of-privacy/
> “If I'm not doing anything wrong, then you have no cause to watch me.”
Because they couldn't know you're not doing anything wrong unless they watch you. Not doing anything wrong does not get rid of their "need" to watch.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/21/technology/google-surveil...
He had nothing illegal to hide, but got screwed anyway. Privacy would have been useful in this situation, wouldn't it?
It just so happens that it's a cover for outsourcing and scaling up the intelligence apparatus's ability to track everyone, everywhere, all the time. Just in case they do something really bad like steal state secrets or try to blow the whistle on a crime committed by a powerful person. It's always about cover stories for the state's unrelenting paranoia.
If the legal system works you can "fix" an error with the cops. It's not like Google reporting something will automatically go on your criminal record. Once the legal system also starts using AI and automated systems to convict people without further explanation then we are in serious trouble.
Watch the TV show COPS to see how many times criminals lie to police officers during an arrest.
It’s unfortunate this man got caught up in this but the police did exactly their job. Commit a crime, have evidence, press charges. Arrest if is procedure.
>The police had access to all the information Google had on Mark and decided it did not constitute child abuse or exploitation.
>Mark asked if Mr. Hillard could tell Google that he was innocent so he could get his account back.
>“You have to talk to Google,” Mr. Hillard said, according to Mark. “There’s nothing I can do.”
>Mark appealed his case to Google again, providing the police report, but to no avail.
Porn browsing history,bank credentials, intimacy,that one drug fueled party you wish didnt happened,medical records, own kids images, hell, people do not even speak about their salaries.
The only ones worse than these are the people saying "If you do not have anything to hide".
No, thanks. If you want to share your things with the world and governments and private companies, go ahead, but leave me alone.
Do not count on being able to embarrass the enemy :) :(
Also, pretty much everyone is guilty of, at the very very least, numerous traffic violations.
Of course.
I am referring to the people who are boring in private, clearly.
1) Having homophobic parents and buying anything supporting a “non-traditional lifestyle” (like books from a particular vendor)
2) Having liberal parents and buying say a firearm
3) An unfaithful spouse supporting another relationship (remember Ashley Madison?)
4) Being a well known promoter of a particular brand when buying from another for personal use
Why are you making folks that disagree with you "the enemy?"
Just because some doesn't agree with you about a particular issue doesn't mean they are your enemy.
They just disagree with you on a particular issue. Assuming they live in the same culture, it's likely that they agree with you on more stuff than they disagree.
particularly mental health.
So yeah, now employees looking for a salary boost can’t even lie about their current salary anymore.
Maybe in the UK too, but no in the EU,I think Sweden or Norway have total transparency on tax returns etc, though.
Or just say some percentage is a bonus or equity. And especially, ask them for what you want anyway.
I have guessed too low a couple times before, so now I simply go for current rate *1.5 and see if it sticks.
May just be my tin foil hat speaking, but I believe a lot of things would change knowing you're always being listened to even when you think it's just two people in the room
Ignoring the role social taboo plays in that interaction isn’t intellectually honest.
A comment I make to a friend sitting next to me would be inappropriate to make to the policeman in the corner, or to my boss. Inappropriate to the point of there being consequences.
You mean like hiding your bank balance because the social consequences of people seeing it? Or hiding your medical records because of the social consequences of people seeing it?
We already see hints of this when someone gets canceled for something they tweeted 10 years ago. Imagine that, but on a broader scale with more violent consequences. That's why privacy is important for everyone.
I don’t believe we need guns atm… but we are unsure of what the future holds and surrendering such a monumental right would be next to impossible to “undo” if the time ever comes.
No freedom has ever been won or guarded with the types of firearms legal under the 2nd amendment.
Ever. Anywhere.
Literally every single example you're going to reply with is wrong.
Not even the American Revolution was "won" using personally-owned weapons. It was won using artillery, naval vessels, mercenaries from overseas, and the first thing that happened when a patriot showed up for his patriotic duty with his pappy's musket was throw it in the trash and issue a soldier a Brown Bess or Committee of Safety musket so that the caliber, rate of fire, effective range, and operating procedures were the same amongst all soldiers.
Not in Vietnam, not in Afghanistan, not anywhere at any time has a conflict against a government either foreign or domestic been defeated using personally-owned weapons.
The few times in America where it was tried, post Revolutionary War, the tax/whiskey/voting rights rebellioneers were crushed under the might of a pathetically small standing army that used cavalry and artillery to intimidate them.
The various slave rebellions and civil rights conflicts changed nothing. Lawyers, peaceful protest, not-so-peaceful-protest, and public opinion changed things.
In terms of ethnic violence, everywhere, every time, in each and every case where a smaller population has armed itself to protect itself the only result has been the employment of mechanized terror against them with horrific results.
"Oh but the Warsaw Ghetto.." nope. The germans went in, received fire from personal weapons, left and leveled the ghetto with tanks and mortars.
"Oh but if the Tutsis had had rif.." nope. Both sides had rifles. When the Tutsis started scrouging AKs, the Hutus responded with grenades, automatic weapons, and bulldozers. The government didn't even do most of the killing, instead ordering the Hutu majority population to do it for them, at the point of a belt-fed machine gun. During the Kibeho massacre guns were too slow so they just mortared the sea of refugees with 60mm mortars. If every single Tutsi had possessed an automatic rifle with infinite ammunition, they would have all still been murdered. A rifle is useless against 60mm mortars and air-mobile military forces.
The only protection against tyranny is strong civic organizations and the rule of law. When those break down whoever has the most cash to buy the most heavy weapons, usually the government, wins.
The only thing the wide availability of weapons has done in areas WITHOUT strong civic organizations and the rule of law has been to turn vast swathes of Pakistan and Afghanistan into lawless zones of chaos and misery, ruled by whichever warlord can get the most RPGs or convince their followers to become suicide bombers.
Ten million personal AR-15s are useless against ten thousand mechanized infantrymen.
Firearms protecting rights is a myth.
Well, this is a very extraordinary claim… also, one that makes me feel like any potential example will be dismissed by you, as you seem to have essentially considered every single instance of armed conflict involving firearms.
The rest of your comment goes over several examples but I think the foundation is flawed. There is no scenario where there would be 10 million AR-15s vs 10k “mechanized infantrymen.” It’s also akin to saying matches are useless in a competition to see who can detonate the biggest sick of dynamite.
Just touching on your first example. Of course to win an international war against the largest empire on earth, you will need more than just firearms. However, the mere existence of an access to firearms is an undeniable factor in the way things turned out.
Do you really believe independence would have been gained through “strong civic organization and rule of law” - as you claim? You then follow that by saying if that doesn’t work, whoever has more cash and weapons usually wins… certainly not what happened in the revolutionary war… nor the next big conflict (war of 1812).
Absent this, one of three conditions exist;
1. There is no monopoly. In which case violence is widespread, and there is no state.
2. There is no legitimacy. In which case violence is capricious. This is your condition of tyranny (unaccountable power).
3. Some non-state power or agent assumes the monopoly on legitimate violence. In which case it becomes, by definition the State.
The state's claim is to legitimacy. A capricious exercise would be an abrogation of legitimacy
Weber, Max (1978). Roth, Guenther; Wittich, Claus (eds.). Economy and Society. Berkeley: U. California P. p. 54.
<https://archive.org/details/economysociety00webe/page/54/mod...>
There's an excellent explanation of the common misunderstanding in this episode of the Talking Politics podcast: <https://play.acast.com/s/history-of-ideas/weberonleadership>
The misleading and abbreviated form that's frequently found online seems to have originated with Rothbard in the 1960s, and was further popularised by Nozick in the 1970s. It's now falsely accepted as a truth when in fact it is a gross misrepresentation and obscures the core principles Weber advanced.
--------------
"Listen, you fantastically retarded motherfucker. I’m going to try to explain this so that you can understand it.
You cannot control an entire country and its people with tanks, jets, battleships and drones or any of these things that you so stupidly believe trumps citizen ownership of firearms.
A fighter jet, tank, drone, battleship or whatever cannot stand on street corners. And enforce “no assembly” edicts. A fighter jet cannot kick down your door at 3AM and search your house for contraband.
None of these things can maintain the needed police state to completely subjugate and enslave the people of a nation. Those weapons are for decimating, flattening and glassing large areas and many people at once and fighting other state militaries. The government does not want to kill all of its people and blow up its own infrastructure. These are the very things they need to be tyrannical assholes in the first place. If they decided to turn everything outside of Washington D.C. into glowing green glass they would be the absolute rulers of a big, worthless, radioactive pile of shit.
Police are needed to maintain a police state, boots on the ground. And no matter how many police you have on the ground they will always be vastly outnumbered by civilians which is why in a police state it is vital that your police have automatic weapons while the people have nothing but their limp dicks.
BUT when every random pedestrian could have a Glock in their waistband and every random homeowner an AR-15 all of that goes out the fucking window because now the police are out numbered and face the reality of bullets coming back at them.
If you want living examples of this look at every insurgency that the U.S. military has tried to destroy. They’re all still kicking with nothing but AK-47s, pick up trucks and improvised explosives because these big scary military monsters you keep alluding to are all but fucking useless for dealing with them.
Dumb. Fuck">When those break down whoever has the most cash to buy the most heavy weapons, usually the government, wins.
There is more wealth in private hands in the US than government hands.
That's a matter of interpretation, especially since weapons like those didn't exist when the 2A was written.
What really matters isn't what rights people who lived 200+ years ago thought that we should have today; it's what rights we, who are alive now, think we should have. We shouldn't accept the meaning, or even the existence, of the 2nd amendment simply because it's there. We should continually be scrutinizing and improving the entire document.
I could go on like this. I think you underestimate the story someone can build from your data (even if the story they invent is completely untrue) and I think you underestimate the frenzied desperation that can overtake people in power who are desperate to stay in power. Reading historic accounts of life in totalitarian regimes is worth the effort.
Hope you can prove your innocence!
The point to be made is that you don't know because you can't predict.
Take medical information. Who has a right to know that you have cancer? Depression? A spouse, the parent of a young child are entitled to health information as a general principle because of the nature of those relationships. But is Google, some guy at Google, your grocer, some colleague entitled? No. However, a criminal case may require obtaining such information and so the state may have a legitimate, conditional, and very selective claim to that kind of information in certain circumstances.
Privacy is necessary for human beings to flourish, at least in this life. As a practical matter, knowing something about someone can impede the good of both the person about whom something is known as well as the knower. It can negatively affect human relationships. Knowing the boundaries does require sound prudential judgement, of course, which is why if you're unsure, it can help to ask yourself what the justification for inquiring or disclosing is in a given situation. (Gossips are people who lack this sort of prudence and suffer from intemperate curiosity.)
The dark sides of the practice are intentionally overlooked and, in places like entrepreneurship-related media, linkedin etc, one constantly reads praises to their ability to (allegedly) improve their services and offers based on predictions out of users data.
That worldview results in some "interesting phenomena" in my country. You go to a restaurant and they ask you your document ID, it's a "convenience" they offer you so that you don't need to worry if you loose your consumption card -- and now they know what, when and where you eat.
Insurance companies now offer their insurance policies and emergency info in a convenient app, so that you don't need to worry about carrying the docs in your car, and you help saving the planet by not wasting paper -- and now they know where you drive over, the speed and accelerations you usually employ etc.
Drugstores offer you discounts in exchange for your ID -- and now they know or can estimate extremely private info about you, like diseases you may be about to develop, the size of your weenie and god knows what. And I'm pretty sure this data is going to health insurance companies.
This is the best way I've been able to illustrate the difference between privacy and secrecy. Some things I do are just private, doesn't mean that they are secret.
People who live with roommates or family do, sometimes. I considered this. In the end, I decided if I faint while taking a shower and hit my head, I want someone to be able to rescue me, so: door unlocked.
"I have nothing to hide" mental model is dumb on many levels. The most obvious one has already been mentioned here. Leaked information is stored indefinitely, while standard of behavior in our society currently change at an insane pace (by design).
Another big misconception is that you as an individual can realistically evaluate how someone else will perceive your private information. You don't control the context in which your information will be consumed. (Not to mention that the context can be manipulated.) You conversation with a friend will sound very different to a paranoid federal agent whose only job is to find terrorists.
With the advent of global communications you can't even predict who will be using your information and for which purpose. (E.g. tons of people know your home address and it's not a problem, yet doxxing is still a thing. The fact that 99% of the people are benign doesn't mean anything if the information is accessible to 100% of the people.)
Etc, etc. It's the same bad reasoning at all levels, neatly packaged in a short virtue-signaling phrase. It so neat, it seems engineered.
The same goes for "You can’t be truly private online!" It's another dumb mental model. "Truly private" is a fake standard used solely because it's unattainable. In reality, the more information you uncontrollably leak, the worse off you are.
While I may having nothing I need to hide, I have lots of things I want to hide. It's just happens that all the stuff I don't care about hiding are all the things these privacy consuming companies want. For others, they want to hide more and that's ok too.
https://www.amazon.com/Three-Felonies-Day-audiobook/dp/B07J4...
> Many of the laws you are referring to are basically dead laws. You couldn't convict someone if you tried.
That is really immaterial to the discussion, as charges being brought alone can royally fuck up a life, whether or not a conviction is made in the end.
However, it seems rather odd that I say I have nothing I need to hide I just have things I want to hide. People are insisting I must have somethign I need to hide. This is where I think many activists screw up. They're too busy trying to push their framing of the issue on to people. Instead of getting behind the idea that people have stuff they don't want others to know, which we all do, it seems everyone here is busy talking about the need to hide illegal stuff because what they currently do might become illegal. That isn't going to wash with most people. Most people are going to be againist it because now you're keeping privacy in the mindset of committing crimes and all these privacy tools aren't for keeping your personal secrets but for committing crimes. Who wants to support these crimes? Especially when instantly the other side talks about child porn.
It's like how when the protests in the US kicked off in 2020. They framed it as black lives matter which instantly allowed detractors to point out that white people are killed by police more often and silence them. If it wasn't just framed as a racial thing and instead of a police brutality problem against all people, it could have gone further.
I'm still a fan of reducing the complexity of the legal code and enormously circumscribing plea bargaining false-confession-ammunition, so it's not like I'm not aligned with the overall libertarian impulse here, but I disagree that this is a good book.
You may be doing something right now that may be viewed as a crime in the future. Abortion comes to mind but I am sure there are more.
Also, there is only one time I can think of where someone has been convicted of a crime while it was legal when they did it and it was The Pirate Bay conviction. Everything else, it's always been if it's legal while you do it, it's legal. That holds true for abortion.
IME people who have "nothing to hide" get suddenly more interested in data privacy if it stops being an abstract threat. They see Google knowing their intimate secrets in much the same way they would their hairdryer. Until they dont.
Unfortunately, that will probably happen for most people about two weeks before a stasi-like secret police takes full control over the country and by that point it'll have been about 10 years too late to start taking data privacy seriously.
That's true for almost everything, unfortunately.
Suppose your future circumstances change and you find yourself in a situation where you do have something to hide. The mere fact that you have "gone dark" can be observed and used as evidence that you are now engaging in activities you believe need to be hidden.
Anyone with kids will recognise this - you're not worried when they're yelling and screaming. You're worried when they stop yelling and screaming and suddenly become too quiet.
For me I knew people who had been harassed or stalked. Stalking is much worse when they know where you are all the time, and I don’t buy the argument that knowing where the stalker is (symmetric information) works because the two people have different values.
We have a bit of a pretend debate from now and then … and a few technical elite are able to protect their own privacy to some degree… but for the masses privacy debate was over before it began. If anything it is just a marketing campaign by a few companies like Apple.
(Side Note: Apple fully complies with all warrants and decrypts all icloud data and hands it over)
nooo, the same Apple that had "never heard of the NSA". it can't be...
You say this like it's some kind of gotcha, rather than Apple, a major corporation, refusing to actively break the law of the country where they're headquartered.
it is not illegal to allow users to hold their own keys such that Apple would have nothing to hand over to the government
Apple chooses to run icloud in such a way that they can provide data on request.
Expecting them to operate a service like iCloud like a tech-expert-focused privacy-first-even-before-usability service is just utterly unrealistic.
Of course I don't expect companies to break the law, it is to no benefit to them, but we should not pretend that the rule of law has much value when it comes to government surveillance. And I would argue that to protect your privacy the legality of the means are secondary.
At the very least, it's obviously passively breaking the law, unless you consider refusing to obey an activity.
Because there's a world of difference between responding to a lawful warrant to produce data you have stored on your servers, and agreeing to create a special version of your software specifically to give the FBI carte blanche to unlock any phones they want (at least within that particular model).
By contesting it they were going against a court order, not just refusing an informal request by the FBI.
It's used by people who are comfortable with the current status quo. They're also probably your stereotypical cis/het white males.
Since the status quo favors them, why would they care who looks upon their "society approved" lives? It'd probably even flatter them.
It's the same thing with guns. If you're a fudd and you have your grandpa's old hunting rifle, but you think AR-15s are "stupid and pointless and only the uncorruptable government should be trusted with them!" and you refuse to stand up for their rights when tyrannical law strikes, then they won't be there to back you up when they inevitably come for your hunting rifle.
Same for privacy and encryption, and getting off of big tech services and platforms. If enough of us get off now, we can be a force for change. But most people are content with sharing everyone they hang out with, what food they eat for every meal, and all of their life details publicly every day.
FWIW, adding sexuality and race was intentional. Why? Because of the briefs by the justices associate with the Supreme Court's decision on Roe v Wade. Specifically because the same privacy protections which protected RvW also protected gay and interracial marriages.
And that privacy protection was explicitly and intentionally nullified, as called out by Justice Clarence Thomas.
So, in the immediate term, one's sexuality and race is explicitly at risk.
Edit: the Crux of the issue is that the supreme court can just as easily make bad rulings as they can good ones. To pick an admittedly dated but relevant example, the supreme court once ruled that black people are property and must be returned to their "owner", regardless of the laws of the state they were currently in.
Or we could just say "supreme court justice hates minorities and gay people and wants to make his own (interracial) marriage illegal." Who needs nuance?
Thank you for speaking up. For some reason, some people think that generalizing negative attributes to some groups is fine. It is not. If you claim that behaviors/attributes are had by race/gender/other-unrelated-attribute you are part of the problem.
I may be boring. In fact I am pretty boring, looking at my characteristics, I pretty much rolled straight successes on the "nobody wants to oppress me" table. But those of us who are generally safe ought to consider it an obligation to protect our data, so that the more vulnerable populations don't stick out when they try to protect themselves.
The "needle in a haystack" needs the haystack.
Modern high quality spam filtering is based on big data analysis of what spam looks like. Modern voice recognition is based off of millions of samples of queries in real world scenarios. Much of the power of the modern internet comes from the ability to aggregate data from distributed sources, centralize it, analyze it, and act on analysis, and those capacities aren't limited to the corporations doing the aggregation.
So the question becomes not whether one values privacy or not. It becomes how one values privacy relative to the other things one values... Cheap hotel rooms, information on neighborhoods, public and private accountability, the time it will take to cure cancer. All of these benefit from data aggregation and centralization.
One should consider worst case scenarios, but stopping at that consideration is like deciding not to invent the airplane because somebody could crash it into a building some day.
(In the long run, of course, if the set of Apple users approaches "everyone" the risk model shifts considerably and simply becomes, not unlike Google, "How much do you trust Apple isn't just lying to you?" Google also publishes various documents on how they protect user privacy, for example https://www.google.com/chrome/privacy/whitepaper.html... The issue they encounter is people just don't believe them).
I can't find a paper describing the whole process right now, but the broad-strokes flow as it was once described to me is
- a third-party site resolves who you are based on their knowledge of you.
- they send a cookie representing your interests (but anonymized) to Google, where it's collated with similar interest data to figure out what kind of ad someone with your interests should see (but the system doesn't know who you are; you're just "someone with some interests"). So yes, individual sites track your interests on those sites, but they don't hand that data raw to Google; it's valuable to them and (this is key) on this dimension, Google is a competitor in the ad space. These companies don't want to hand Google raw user / interest correlation data because they don't trust Google not to roll it into better advertising products. Your privacy is, ironically, protected by third-party corporate paranoia.
- nonces representing the ads that should be displayed are generated and bounced to the third-party, where they're routed to your client as the data your client should fetch
- your client gets the list of ads to display from the third party's display ads integration, then makes the request for ads from the ads server with the relevant nonce
The third party can't learn more about you because they don't see what ads you got, and Google doesn't know you got those ads; only that someone with a profile like the one the third party sent you got those ads. The only place in the world enough information is consolidated to deanonymize you is on your client.
(Hypothetically, Google could do a timing attack on its own nonce-generator + ad server on a low-traffic site to make an educated guess if they also had your browsing history, but they basically pinky-swear they don't correlate the signal that way and it's warehoused in different places; someone trying to do that correlation would raise red flags because it threatens the privacy guarantees Google relies upon).
I perform very differently in public and when I'm being recorded vs when I'm alone and in private. The psychology behind this is not hard to imagine. Just like I code differently when I think I'm publishing my git logs vs just hacking together a prototype. The act of performance imposes itself on the actor just as it does on the audience, if not more!
Privacy is therefor almost less about the recorded data as it is about the recording itself. The implication of the data or the memory is enough to change everything.
Somehow we've made corporations sovereign on the internet, and the only mitigations we have on it are from free software and encryption tech - which they routinely evade and sabotage on behalf of their advertisers, but also for government agencies whose activities are otherwise regulated by constitutional and other guaranteed freedoms. This axis of state and industry colluding against citizen "users," has a bunch of ugly precedents.
Imo, addressing the "I have nothing to hide," argument at all is a tarpit. These are neutralized and disengaged people who are content to bargain and live as liquid subjects, and expecting anything more than repeating official talking points and bromides from them misunderstands their survival strategy. I don't think you change anyones mind, you can only activate or neutralize them based on their existing beliefs. I'd recommend letting the "I have nothing to hide" people alone, and instead, encourage active minds to develop the skills to build technology and products that shape the future.
I'd even say health information is worse than monetized now, it's actively politicized. I know that C19 vaccination records (names/addr/date/dosenumber) were shared with PR/oppo-research firms working for politicans involved in the rollout, and there was no consent for collection or use of that data either. We live in interesting times.:)
Privacy is actually a group-level challenge. Trying to reduce it to individual action (i.e., "I don't mind if they look through my stuff") is nonsensical because it's not just your data.
They fight for your data like a lion fights for a deer.
Anyone thinking apple has no advertising prospects is deluding themselves.
Advertising is a curse on humanity.
Besides that, iOS E2E encrypt a lot more like health data, browsing history, maps data, HomeKit data etc.
I care about privacy, but not that much. The author gave me the feeling that I would not drink water for fear of choking to death. Providing private information to some big companies has brought a lot of convenience to our lives at the same time. When making a choice, I will weigh the gains and losses. As far as I am concerned, I loss more while over-considering the privacy.
I find privacy advocates tend to put things in a needlessly binary state when really this is a matter of risk assessment. I have plenty to hide, and I've confessed to various crimes in emails that I've saved on Google's servers. So yes, at some point in the future the government could piece that information together and come arrest me. That could happen. But how likely is it?
Similarly, with location history - yes, Google could be compromised and they could sell this information. Yes, it does mean that people (in this scenario) could piece together my schedule and work out the best time to burgle my home but any routine I have is (or was) me going into the office at about 8 and coming home at about 6. What my job is available via LinkedIn and is a matter of public record anyway. My name and address is on the electoral roll. Since I have almost nothing worth stealing, this sophisticated criminal operation would be going to a fair amount of effort for questionable benefit.
The analogy with speech doesn't fit for me - it feels much more like that other American passion - self-defence. I could definitely boost the defences of my home - traps and strategically located knives and so on. I could master several martial arts in case I am attacked on the street. But that's all more effort than I can be bothered with. That doesn't mean I leave my front door wide open but a secure front door (that I close and lock) is enough at home and some basic awareness is enough on the street. Likewise, I don't tell everyone I meet my passwords or bank details but yes, I let Amazon save my payment details because the risks seem acceptable.
Unless there is some clear and genuine overriding interest, I should be the one to decide whether or not, to whom, when, and how that information is disclosed.
That doesn't mean I am necessarily opposed to any piece of information being disclosed (i.e. I have nothing to hide), but these decisions shouldn't be made for me.
SO if Alphabet know what I'm doing I need to know equally what they are doing. In this case I have nothing to hide. If they know much about me and me nothing about them, then I have much to hide.
Knowledge is power. Power need to be balanced to be in peace.
Nothing has really changed since.
For example, consider the recent 11th hour settlement by Facebook, for the second time. Meta will pay anything to keep Zuckerberg from having to answer questions under oath in federal court.
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/aug/27/facebook-c...
It's increasingly difficult to communicate what you actually mean to people.
People are emptying out their contextual and relational knowledge. They are leaving it in facebook profiles and politics. There's no need to understand someone's life context and how it might influence the meaning of their communications.
The more we seek to know in data, the more we see someone's data as their primary context in the world. We see less of what they mean as a person, or what they mean to tell us.
You could record every pore of my skin, every hair on my head, my bank account and my programming code. I'll go out and buy a camel, invest in the next crypto fad and move to africa, and you'll have no idea why.
Frankly some people are more private than ever, in plain sight, thanks to the Sauron eye (or eyes) of data harvesting.
If you 'brought back' privacy, our everyday view of people would require empathy and relating to the person, so that you understand what's different about them. People would make their direction more clear, simply to facilitate communicating something worthwhile.
He asked himself, well what would it be about? His average day, he gets up, he is hungry, so he makes some eggs, has breakfast. By the time he's done with breakfast he goes to do something and it's nearly lunch! So he goes looking for some food for lunch and eats it... annd long story short he concludes that life is mostly about thinking of food, searching for food and eating food.
The uninteresting stuff is predictable. I can tell you where a monk lives, what he does every day. But not what it means to live like he does, nor do I know what he'll write next.
Humble yes, humiliating? No?
I wish there was a better choice; but I think I would still pick Android for now...
These other choices definitely are better when it comes to privacy. But probably worse in every other regard.
I personally am not quite willing to make that tradeoff (yet). But I sure am highly grateful to everyone who does, and helps make those alternatives better, and helps them gain momentum.
The trade offs pretty much rules out the alternatives for most people. I need just a few apps, but they are for payment and government stuff, so they are only ever going to be available in the official app stores. For others it's going to be messaging apps, social media or something local, like an app for the supermarket. If those apps are not available, then the point of a smartphone goes away. At least of me.
The whole thing is making people dependent on the common app stores. Not actually dependent, but practically.
If you're going to use Android, use an open source AOSP fork. Lineage, Graphene, Calyx... how can you be sure that you're actually secure and private if you can't even be sure exactly what firmware your phone is running? You can't.
Look at the recent Minecraft chat bans discussion. On one side those who want a "kid safe" environment. On the other side those who are having fun in small communities on private servers. Turns out what they do there can now earn them a global ban.
Also usually those who have "nothing to hide" tend to be the kind that would impose their values on the society as a whole. At gunpoint if possible.
Hard to say what a "normal" level of tinkering is with Android, as I have switched directly from iOS to Graphene and have never used Stock Android. I am sure some things are a little bit more cumbersome, but for me the tradeoff is worth it.
Also the stock g-cam (with internet access disabled) and g-photos (with internet access disabled) make a pretty amazing photo and photo editing experience.
How would you feel about a system that monitored your driving in such a way that every second you spend 1 mph over the speed limit, you accrue a fine and points on your license?
I'm pretty sure the driving in my home state would change drastically, very quickly, so maybe it'd be a good thing over all.
There's a second layer to this; when a platform becomes so big that not using it is a hardship that platform must offer services without data collection at all (and this should be mandated by law).
For example, a lot of government-provided services require the use of a smart phone to access; yet you cannot use a smart phone without agreeing to data collection (either by Apple, or Google) - I'm ignoring the 0.0001% Linux phones (and ungoogled androids).
Or how Windows is required in many schools and universities to turn in assignments, yet there is absolutely no way to disable data collection by Microsoft.
The bar should be much higher once the platform reaches a certain level; they should no longer be allowed to say "if you don't want to give us your data, don't use us". No, you need to prove why the data collection is absolutely required to provide the services you're providing.
The probability of something bad happening to me is low and the expected value I get from sharing data is high. It's a perfectly reasonable preference and I'm pretty well informed about the history of oppressive governments and the current state of data usage.
Personally I would never pretend to lick somebody's food. However I've don't equally bad shit and left a paper trail online, but I trust both Google and the government with that data. It's possible in 10+ years it could be used against me, but so unlikely that it doesn't offset the benefits I receive from freely sharing data.
> Rene, here's your new Timeline update You're receiving this monthly email because you turned on Location History, a Google Account-level setting that saves where you go in your private Timeline. Location History data also helps give you personalized information on Google, including better restaurant recommendations, and suggestions for a faster commute. You can view, edit, and delete this data anytime in Timeline.
Personally, I have it turned on because I like looking at where I was etc. I have an iPhone and I still have it turned on. There's nothing surreptitious about it. It's quite open and sends you a monthly email if you turned on Location History (though I've forgotten if that's opt-in)
I'm not sure how to change this mindset. I just do not see how to get the vast majority of people to value privacy, especially at the cost of (perceived) safety.
Edit: And, ironically, those same people WILL be very concerned about privacy from (dastardly!) corporations, while I am not so much.
I believe a hacker, or bad actor in general, will gain access to my data if they really really wanted it. I believe stealing data is just a function of time and resources (money). Based on this premise, I don't keep anything truly valuable available digitally. Sure, I have my bank accounts secured, but nothing past start practices.
I do not believe my feelings on this mean I do not care about free speech, nor do I not care about privacy. I believe our reality is that no one should be surprised if their data is stolen. People should plan on this happening and be prepared. Just as corporations have Incident Response and Business Continuity plans.
With regards to not caring about free speech, I am trying to picture myself being in this hypothetical situation: lets imagine I was ran by a car and was denied the right to do or say anything about it because the driver was some prominent person, I'm picturing myself in such situation and I'm glad we still have free speech...
Whether we accept it or not, the cloud is our "home" now. We have little to no control on who keeps our information on their servers. (i.e. employer, government, school, bank, phone company...)
And I'll use the home as an analogy here. A bad actor can access your house anyway, why have a door? Why have laws that criminalize burglary? Using your example, you could say not to keep anything valuable at home.
I agree with your point that we shouldn't be surprised if our information is hacked, but the point about privacy isn't to necessarily protect you against hackers, but to regulate those that keep your information. Prohibit them from selling your info, store it when not needed and as an extra benefit make it more difficult for hackers to access your info.
Yes, the bad actor can break in my door, but they actually have to do it. Walking through without a door is sooooo much easier.
But then when they get inside, what will they find? Will I have silver and gold bars? Or will it be random HN posts?
My advice is to take reasonable precautions. However, if you have your entire life savings in an offshore back account with Venmo access which doesn't require 2FA ... then yea, I would worry.
I believe things that are valuable, like truly valuable, should be hard to change. Like liquidating a 401k life savings shouldn't be a couple mouse clicks. It should be a long and hard process because you are prolly only going to once or twice in your life. There is nothing wrong IMO with requiring being present at a bank to perform significant value transfers. Sure, wouldn't it be nice to only have to click a button? Sure ... but requiring physical (think MFA) slows the process down for the sake of security.
Do you have physical notebooks full of information that you don't like to keep in digital format?
As far as physical, while a lot of your footprint exists on line, still having the physical matters. A property deed is a good example of this. Another example is my will. I might be aging myself out of this conversation, but it's a point of view for consideration. And yes, these are in a fireproof safe along with birth certificates, passports, etc. So yes, if someone steals my identity, I still have physical proof. Standard MFA stuff (from wikipedia) "knowledge (something only the user knows), possession (something only the user has), and inherence (something only the user is)"
I'll end with another opinion ... digital wallets which are not backed by the FDIC are super scary. Im sure this is another conversation, but just because I choose not to have a digital wallet doesn't mean I don't care about free speech :)
For personal use, just have to say offline USB drive is a good investment if you can make the physical switch.
Until we can have something like the quantum entanglement communication.
Again, the same argument could be used about your physical person. Given time and resources someone could kidnap and torture you so you shouldn't be surprised if that happens.
If the above is true, then the choice isn't between privacy and not-privacy; it's between fake-privacy where some people know All The Things but others don't, and openness.
It will be painful to get used to (depending on how fast the transition is) but I'd choose openness.
B: "Then stop wearing clothes."
A: "That's stupid, it's against the law to run around naked in public!"
B: "So what if we had privacy laws like that?"
A: "That's stupid, I have nothing to hide!"
I can't say I agree with that personally - I still use google facebook et al. The answer for me I think is only to put stuff you are not bothered about being private on such services and if you say want to ship 1 ton of cocaine to N Korea in return for a nuke you don't do it on such services. Life's too short to be paranoid that google knows I'm having a coffee in Pret.
I want to hide what sandwich I had for lunch. I want to hide what book I'm reading at the moment. I want to hide what my favourite mug is.
I want to hide lots of things about my life that are legal and socially completely acceptable.
Why do I want to hide these legal and socially acceptable activities? That's also something I choose not to divulge.
Should I be allowed to hide these things?
https://www.amazon.com/Privacy-Power-Should-Take-Control/dp/...
Strongly recommended.
> It is only a matter of time until governments will start prosecuting us en masse using the results of always on surveillance.
I know many who chose not to opt in to technical means allowing surveillance, and I come from the country where people were historically going very far to protect their freedom, including ending up in torture room... we have this in our blood. Many will simply stop using or even owning devices mandated by government, even if the price is very high.
Everyone knows what you are doing. You aren't doing anything immoral or unethical. But you want (and deserve) privacy anyway.
"If I have nothing to hide you have no need to violate my privacy."
Nothing to hide. Really it was the bitchvictim media saying people said this. It cannot be taken seriously, people don't say this, it's a bitchvictim media trope. They imposed it as a social expectation. Then people think people think that. Dude nothing to hide why wear clothing? They don't show their genitals upon request.
Only saints have nothing to hide. Even then, they typically stand up to torture before betraying information leading to eg the Christian Catacombs.
Nothing to hide, yeah.
Until you do, and then it is too late