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>2. saving all text messages going through a cell phone company

Point of order, phone companies already do that. Third Party Doctrine. I don't believe they should, but as of right now, that's where we're at.

Yes, agree that's long been the case that they do, but it's not forever afaik. My understanding is they only save the last few years and then purge old ones. I wonder if through some reason or another the us govt gets all our text messages and saves them forever? Perhaps you have more information.

> We should have extremely strong privacy laws preventing this, somehow blocking over-broad court orders

Quick question. Should your percieved "right to privacy" supersede all other laws?

To extrapolate into the real world. Should it be impossible for the police to measure the speed of your vehicle to protect your privacy? Should cameras in stores be unable to record you stealing for fear of violating your privacy?

Your two examples don't map to the concern about data privacy.

Speed cameras only operate on public roads. The camera in the store is operated by the store owner. In both cases one of the parties involved in the transaction (driving, purchasing) is involved in enforcement. It is clear in both cases that these measures protect everyone and they have clear limits also.

Better examples would be police searching your home all the time, whenever they want (This maps to device encryption).

Or store owners surveilling competing stores / forcing people to wear cameras 24/7 "to improve the customer experience" (This maps to what Facebook / Google try to do, or what internet wire tapping does).

> searching your home all the time, whenever they want

What? How does OpenAI map to your home at all? This is pure nonsense. You seem to have entirely dismissed the comparison to driving a little too out of hand.

The internet is, like the roads, public infrastructure. You can't claim that encryption makes all traffic on the public infrastructure as private as staying home.

You sound like one of those "free man of the land" guys: "I'm not driving your honor, I was traveling."

Okay, so lets move back to a driving metaphor, since you seem to prefer that.

If you drive in the US, the contents of your car are somewhat protected by law. It's not trivial for authorities to obtain the right to search your car, though I understand it's common for some to flout the rules and search anyway.

But there are not gates on the highway which scan all cars and subject the contents of all the cars along with details of the drivers to government scrutiny. Not just the number plates, everything in and about the car.

However, it is the goal of several agencies to perform this level of searching to all data transmitted. Why do you claim that people have less right to privacy when transmitting data in the virtual vs the physical world?

It's hard to me to find heads or tails in your argument.

The argument you're sketching out, of an authority (the nebulous government, the mysterious agencies) totally surveilling your car, is completely and totally disconnected from the discussion at hand. This is a case about two private entities that that are trying to resolve their dispute in a court of law. There's no government agency involved. Whatever you believe about the scary agencies has no bearing on the outcome of this suit.

I think there's an idea akin to Europe's "right to be forgotten" here.

We can all observe the world in the moment. Police can obtain warrants to wiretap (or the digitial equivalent) suspects in real-time. That's fine!

The objection is that we are ending up with laws and rulings that require a recording of history of everyone by everyone - just so the police can have the convenience of trawling through data everyone reasonably felt was private and shouldn't exist except transiently? Not to mention that perhaps the state should pay for all this commercially unnecessary storage? Our digital laws are so out-of-touch with the police powers voters actually consented to - that mail (physical post) and phone calls shall not be in intercepted except under probable cause (of a particular suspect performing a specific crime) and a judge's consent. Just carry that concept forward.

On a technical level, I feel a "perfect forward secrecy" technique should be sufficient for implementers. A warrant should have a causal (and pinpoint) effect on what is collected by providers. Of course we can also subpoena information that everyone reasonably expected was recorded (i.e. not transient and private). This matches the "physical reality" of yesteryear - the police can't execute a warrant for an unrecoreded person-to-person conversation that happened two weeks ago; you need to kindly ask one of the conversents (who have their own rights to privacy / silence, are forgetful, and can always "plead the 5th").

  > Not to mention that perhaps the state should pay for all this commercially unnecessary storage?

They do. Not upfront, but they pay very nicely for inconveniencing businesses when demanding the data.

Unfortunately, that often creates incentive for the business to error on the side of sharing too much with the authorities, even when proper procedure (warrants) have not been followed. It's the only way to retroactively get payed for all that storage and for the code to retrieve that data.

Do you have any sources for this? Never heard of the justice system compensating a company for providing data.

Why do you think telecom companies are so eager to comply with wiretap laws?

Here's a source discussing Google specifically: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/24/technology/google-search-...

I know of smaller companies that have been charging since at least 2014.

There are better extrapolations into the real world:

Cellphone location data: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carpenter_v._United_States

Thermal imaging a home: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyllo_v._United_States

Biometric unlocking: https://cdt.org/insights/circuit-court-split-lays-the-ground...

In these cases, privacy, or rather, the constitution, does supersede all other laws.

Didn't the Supremes decide there was no constitutional right to privacy as a side effect of overturning Roe? (Or, at least, throw it into full Calvin Ball mode...)

https://www.americanbar.org/groups/communications_law/public...

Not really. The reason the overturning of Roe was widely considered to be inevitable, even by jurists who were pro-choice, is that the theory of privacy used in that case was fundamentally incompatible with a broad range of regulatory powers most people think the Constitution grants the Federal government.

The reasoning behind Roe was generally regarded as tenuous even by the justices that supported it. Overturning it was required to defend the government’s Constitutional authority for agencies like the FDA, which was undermined by inconsistencies introduced by Roe v Wade. Eventually those judicial inconsistencies come home to roost.

tl;dr: Roe being overturned had little to do with privacy and more to do with protecting specific regulatory powers from being unconstitutional using the same reasoning introduced in Roe v Wade.

Removing such decisions from Federal purview was an elegant solution to the problem, with the practical effect of deferring all such decisions to voters at the State level.

I think both you and pyuser583 are correct to a certain extent. The stated reasons for overturning Roe were because of the tenuous basis as a privacy grounded position. On the other hand I completely believe that Roe was such a politically charged issue that the judges voted according to their allegiance, even though they are not supposed to have such allegiances. Everybody would have been surprised if any of the judges had decided differently to how they did. So, while there may have been a legal argument to be made, I don't think that particular issue was decided on those grounds.

Every decision to overturn a decided opinion, can potentially harm all other decided opinions.

Beyond that, no, it didn’t impact anything other than abortion.

When the SCOTUS ruled the constitution protected the right to engage in gay sex, and later gay marriage, precidents were overturned.

Conservatives claimed this might make it easier to overturn Roe. It didn’t.

Roe wasn’t in danger until SCOTUS had six reliable anti-Roe justices.

No right or law supersedes all other laws, and obviously no-one is asking for that. But nor should a court just be able to order anything they want without regard to who else is affected.

"saving off"?

this is a strange turn of phrase

Maybe it's a regional dialect? You can find a lot of examples of it in the wild, for example on microsoft forums:

1. https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/savin...

2. https://community.fabric.microsoft.com/t5/Service/End-User-S...

In both cases it's being used for "copying".

We can also see it was used as early as 15 years ago on this very site ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1182478 ), so it's not a new turn of phrase.

My experience has definitely been that I've heard it more online and in San Francisco, and not very often in Germany, Texas, or Russia. Are you in one of those areas?

I feel like the etymology is something like "print off a few sheets" becoming "copy off a sheet with the copier", and then to the more general digital copy meaning.

Huh. I'm from the Boston area, 50yo, avid reader, former English teacher, fairly well-travelled...

I've definitely been using phrasing like it ("save off a copy", etc) for at least the past 20-25 years (upstate NY, moderately online, avid reader, parent is an English professor, fairly well-traveled).

Conceptually, I think that the "off" serves the purpose of aligning it with something like "split off"—you're essentially forking the history by creating a separate saved copy.

Today I learned I am using a less common expression. ;-) I'm just an ordinary engineer.

It wasn't the best way to express what I was thinking, but I did mean it to refer to "storing" or saving the text message contents (and metadata - source and destination and time ...)

This is like storing copies of all physical mail because one letter could contain a Xerox of a newspaper.