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Comment by Nifty3929 | Hacker News Reader

The main problem I see is that people are completely distracted by privacy from corporations - when what we really need to be worried about is privacy from our own governments.

So much ink is spilled talking about cookies, ads tracking, etc. But really what's the worst a corporation is going to do? Try to sell you something?

Meanwhile, we continue to allow our governments to regulate and legislate ever more intrusive invasions of our privacy. And they can put us in jail, or worse.

This also gets blurry as governments take increasing control of companies, to the point that some are just about arms of the government, surveilling us in ways that the government can't (yet) do on their own - and being forced to pass that data to the government under penalty of law themselves.

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Until these companies turn around and sell that data to the government, which doesn't require a warrant since the company is volunteering to provide it, and if they don't want to sell it, the government will happily use one of it's loopholes around warrants to demand it anyway. The government does this constantly with location data[1], browsing history[2], license plate scanners[3], and more.

We should be pushing to close these warrantless search loopholes, but in the meanwhile the only pragmatic way for an individual to maintain privacy is to prevent any and all third parties from collecting the data to begin with. After it has been collected, you have no control and no reasonable expectations of how it will be used.

[1]https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/06/how-federal-government...

[2]https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/can-government-look-yo...

[3]https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/07/cbp-does-end-run...

> Until these companies turn around and sell that data to the government...

Yes, the larger issue is that the government has just outsourced a lot of the work to corporations to get around the Constitution. If there were any integrity left in the US government, there would be a reckoning about this. We worry about regulatory capture, but the bigger problem is deep state/military-industrial complex capture.

> prevent any and all third parties from collecting the data to begin with.

This is what I have been doing. What can you add to this?

On phone disable Bluetooth, disable precise location, disable location and infrequently turn that on for something like photo geotag, use carrier phone number for nothing and use phone numbers from googlevoice or others. Put cars in LLCs or Trusts with address at POBox or UPS. Never use home address for mail unless it is from family. Put utilities in name of LLC or Trust.

I disagree.

Companies are building surveillance infrastructure that is:

* way ahead of governments in terms of technical capability (NSA and top-level intelligence agencies are outliers, but your average government IT departments are too incompetent to be of any threat)

* widely accepted and not regarded as malicious - not even the NSA can get people to voluntarily include some malicious Javascript on the vast majority of public-facing webpages, yet Google Analytics managed exactly that

* profitable and self-sustaining - the government doesn't have to spend money on building and maintaining it, nor needs to justify its budget/spending

Those companies however are still at the mercy of governments, either via violence/coercion (in the US, they have to obey a national security letter by law, or armed goons will show up) or mutually-beneficial relationship (a lot of companies either outright sell this surveillance data to the highest bidder, or don't outright sell it but will be happy to let the government in on it in exchange for a good relationship and favors in the future).

I'm completely uninterested in the distinction you draw here.

Actually, several distinctions. What do you mean 'our OWN governments'? This is a world where hostile foreign governments can wreak absolute havoc… including by popularizing arguments literally the same as the one you're making, for the purpose of undermining that government and fomenting revolution for their own selfish, imperialist purposes.

I can think of two great powers (okay, one formerly great) actively doing this within my lifetime, and the formerly great one was doing it as hard as it possibly could, within the last ten years, and is still doing it.

I don't trust your argument at all. You're leaving out significant things, conveniently.

The difference between my own government and a foreign government is twofold: 1. It has always been illegal for a foreign state actor to surveil me, and in any case has no authority over me and can't put me in jail (as long as I'm not in their country). 2. My own government is legally entitled to surveil me and collect my personal data, and can indeed put me in jail.

It is not illegal for a foreign state actor to surveil you. In fact governments sign agreements with other governments for them to surveil you while we surveil their citizens and trade information. This gets around the illegal act of government spying on it's own citizens.

Your government mass surveil's foreign citizens. But they can't mass surveil citizens legally.

It has always been illegal for a foreign state actor to surveil me

This elicited a chuckle, though probably not for the reasons you intended.

>So much ink is spilled talking about cookies, ads tracking, etc. But really what's the worst a corporation is going to do? Try to sell you something?

Cooperate with domestic and remote governments, work with the deep state, influence elections and work with candidate teams, and so on. There are also companies with more reach and resources than entire countries.

Plus, corporations have been known to downright spy, threaten, beat up, and murder people when multi-billion interests are threatened (e.g. by local populations wanting clean water or better working conditions).

You write this as if corporations don't lobby on behalf of their owners, and as if 'trying to sell you something' couldn't be any more dystopian than someone at a store counter greeting a prospective customer.

Corporations lobby governments to provide security, in part because some corporations want to sell security products and governments (at multiple different scales) are the biggest customers for that. Those who do not themselves sell security sometimes demand security not so much for the safety of customers and staff as for the customers that they would like to have. Security is big business. Before dismissing this as some marginal phenomenon, you might want to reflect on the proportion of the economy that revolves around security. Though a few years old now, this article raises a number of surprising questions that I've yet to see effectively answered: https://www.brown.edu/Departments/Economics/Faculty/Glenn_Lo...

What sort of argument is this? I prefer a corporatocracy to a democracy? You elect officials for your government, you have no say in what Google does.

While corporations aren't as powerful as the government, they use data for more than "trying to sell you something."

Network effects cause society to coalesce around the same large corporations for social media, online shopping, payment processing, etc to the point that it can be hard to function in society without their services. Once their services are used by virtually everyone, their governance becomes governmental in its impact. On a weekly basis we see programs like the app stores, ad markets, search algorithms, and payment processors enforcing opaque policies that close businesses and end livelihoods, all based on an automated interpretation of the data we share with them.

> The main problem I see is that people are completely distracted by privacy from corporations - when what we really need to be worried about is privacy from our own governments

Governments have grown to rely on corporations to spy on their own citizens, so being worried about corporate surveillance is being worried about government surveillance.

However, between the two (for the vast majority of people), corporations pose a more realistic threat than governments do.

You speak as if corporations are separate from governments.

I did allude to the gap there closing. I still see them as distinct in most countries, including my own. But I fear we're allowing the gap to close further.

As an aside, I think a lot of people want this gap to close, but for entirely unrelated reasons more related to political and economic goals, with the loss of privacy and individual autonomy being an unconsidered consequence of this.

True. For all their flaws, Google doesn't have the ability to send men with guns to my house to abduct me if I don't pay them 50% of my income.

But Google built a surveillance machine much more advanced than the gov can even dream of, so the guys with guns just have to go to Google first to get your data and then they can go to your house.

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