The global push to kill privacy makes me sad.
Feels like I grew up in a golden age and subsequent generations won't care because they never knew a different world
Feels like I grew up in a golden age and subsequent generations won't care because they never knew a different world
It's not that I hide it like a secret agent, I just don't shove my face and name next to every opinion I have.
But the younger generations... They grew up with Snapchat which means Snap Streaks, which again means posting your face with every message. Next was Facebook, real names everywhere. Then came "personal branding", again face and name plastered everywhere.
And now governments want to lock in the real name + face + identity combo for everyone with laws. Fuck that.
I remember how that what seemed absurdly risky, meant absolutely nothing to the average person, and the astronomic value Facebook began to accumulate.
I wonder if it wasn't social media that set up the death spiral of the internet. The walled gardens on content and then the ad revenue created incentives to increase engagement, while capturing the value which would have gone to the open internet.
In that light, it seems AI firms are going to complete what Social Media started. Sequestering the remaining value of information and content, and then earning rents on it.
Classmates.com was charging money for reunion information and Facebook was free.
It was the IPO that really tipped the scales.
In that one day Zuck became a Billionaire with everybody else's information.
We were bamboozled. Subscription versus free but not really.
However, I do remember the conversations from that time.
I still don't have any social media other than LinkedIn that connects to my identity, and warned family against it for as long as I could.
Saying people on HN were bamboozled is ludicrous. HN is an old bastions for people who argue for privacy and anonymity. I sincerely doubt (hope) that many people would say they were fooled. That would indicate a degree of intellectual immaturity and avoidance of concequence which makes any other position held suspect.
It was clear that there was no other way this was going to go. Saying the IPO tipped the scales is also being wildly generous to firms.
Perhaps its the other side of the coin of the HN zeitgeist? faith in firms matching the distrust in government.
Incorrect, you are probably in the background of random photos on the internet, and by virtue of not having any profiles and social media sites can tag you and form a shadow profile around you.
This can be done to you whether you have a profile or not. Having an actual profile likely means that you've signed onto some tos that allows them to add a lot more to your "shadow profile" and use it in more ways, and that any complaints about the treatment will go to forced arbitration.
This was already the case for all of human history until the information age. If you wanted to say something, you had to physically say/print/shout it. And your reputation would be affected as a consequence. This more aligned with how humans are wired - that social actions have social consequences.
If every potential mate and employer was able to review everything you've ever posted online, we'd all be much more careful with what we say, much better able to screen out bad actors, and the wold would be a better place for it.
To me "people will be on their best behaviour if they can't be anonymous" sounds eerily similar to Larry Ellison's "people will be on their best behaviour if they're constantly surveilled".
In the modern world, we have governments (and politically aligned lackey-citizens) increasingly actively hunting down anything vaguely dissent-shaped and making those who spoke it suffer in some form, whether than be mass harassment and jawboning or outright muzzling or prosecution.
There’s a chilling effect with growing intensity that pressures people to either obediently nod along or shut up, which makes anonymity (even if only the plausibly deniable sort) important.
This is stalking and is illegal. Are there any other crimes you want to claim as righteous?
Presuming you want stalking to be repealed and permissible, you have quite a few bars to pass through.
And in that society, are you willing to have me as your enemy who is very willing to push society to its utter limits? I know I'd be good at it, and I know thousands if not millions of people who share this interest. Because, as you say, its any potential mate/employer.
What is legal and what is right very rarely went together, so rather poor argument.
And get Charlie Kirk'ed? No thanks. There are a lot of deranged and demented people out there, and publishing on the internet is rolling that dice billions of times, compared to shouting in the town square.
We can't even enforce basic protections of human rights in the United States, privacy does not matter when there are rampant black operations being conducted which violates human dignity in every sense of the term.
The illusion of digital privacy was always, propaganda. There's a pretty good chance your organism is literally compromised.
You have this completely backwards. The threat and existence of such operations is one of the fundamental reasons privacy does matter so much. Privacy is to be protected heavily not just for the now but for what could happen in the future, and it's self-reinforcing. A more privacy preserving society is a harder one to oppress.
Lets say military intelligence has multiple NATO hospitals compromised, and have assets in these hospitals which are being used for various black operations (including non-medical neurosurgery on literal children). In this scenario, maybe total societal surveillance, including radical transparency, would have been a nice thing to have in regards to bolstering national security?
Instead, we got HIPAA, and other medical privacy laws/standards, which are aiding literal mass atrocity to continue to proliferate.
>Lets say military intelligence has multiple NATO hospitals compromised, and have assets in these hospitals which are being used for various black operations (including non-medical neurosurgery on literal children). In this scenario, maybe total societal surveillance, including radical transparency, would have been a nice thing to have in regards to bolstering national security?
Why the heck would you think that the first job of a hostile military intelligence wouldn't be TO COMPROMISE THE TOTAL SOCIETAL SURVEILLANCE NETWORK!?!? There is a sort of really fundamental common failure to this kind of conspiracy thinking, wherein simultaneously your opponent is this incredibly powerful and skilled entity, one that in this case can compromise lots of secured aspects of society and insert actual agents into a hospital for illegal child surgery and escape notice. Yet simultaneously they're complete idiots who don't do the obvious, obvious job #1, job #2, and job #3 of an intelligence agency which is seek to compromise your enemy's intelligence agencies! Duh. It always has been. Counter intelligence and trying to get inside the other agency's decision loops has rich history probably for as long as spying has been done.
Why do you think you can secure this incredibly invasive theoretical network, all evidence from our entire history to the contrary, yet not medical service providers? You've literally built something here that your enemy would desperately love to have! You've done their entire job for them, better than they could! Rather then having to try to compromise endless distributed independently secured private and public organizations, now they just have to compromise a single one and they get the keys to the kingdom.
>Instead, we got HIPAA, and other medical privacy laws/standards, which are aiding literal mass atrocity to continue to proliferate.
This is such schizobabble that makes no sense (HIPAA has nothing to with law enforcement or medical ethics boards or a million other checks on the health system, just for starters) that I don't know what else to do beyond urging you to seek some alternatives to wherever you got this from.
Where do you get your information from, exactly? In criminal and intelligence circles, this is not exactly uncommon knowledge. I hope you never experience the horror of finding out that even in federal protective custody, that military intelligence is already there waiting for you.
>ways it cannot exist with nothing to with privacy,
In the Soviet Union, for example, all medical records were accessible by the state security services, and this served legitimate national security purposes. You have no idea what it's like to be targeted by an entity like the CIA.
>Why the heck would you think that the first job of a hostile military intelligence wouldn't be TO COMPROMISE THE TOTAL SOCIETAL SURVEILLANCE NETWORK!?!?
It would be a legitimate target, tbh there might not even be much of a point in terms of practical affect. Do you have any idea how many "crimes" have been reported to the international community, only to be ignored completely by all relevant propaganda outlets?
> insert actual agents into a hospital for illegal child surgery and escape notice.
Our propaganda outlets have literally reported on, swathes of, evidence of the CIA doing exactly this. Your country was not immune to this spookery.
I have some bad news for you. This is a real scenario, likely happening within a 1000km radius of you. Military usage of brain-computer interfaces go back over a century, the experience of being an intelligence asset is nothing like you assume. Many of the assets aren't even perceptual of their human experience in a manner expected naturally. The individuals who are aware of their status, at this point, learn to be silent very quickly.
Surgery based neurological compromise is only one example of the various operations currently running rampant in NATO countries.
>Counter intelligence and trying to get inside the other agency's decision loops has rich history probably for as long as spying has been done.
And your intelligence agencies won't tell you shit, they will slap a "CLASSIFIED" label on it, and continue to enjoy their cushy positions while their people continue to be exploited.
>Why do you think you can secure this incredibly invasive theoretical network
I'm just one individual who has had the great misfortune of having to deal with this spookery first-hand. You can propose the design of this system if you wish.
> all evidence from our entire history to the contrary
I'm genuinely not trying to be rude, but this line is absolutely hilarious. Depending on the country you reside in, your intelligence agencies likely are well aware of the state of neurological (again, this is just one category) compromise in your country, and aren't telling you shit.
> This is such schizobabble that makes no sense
There's a reason HIPPA has exemptions for national security purposes, to the extent in which law matters when dealing with spookery (it does not, nobody follows the fucking "law" in these operations).
Just wait until you learn about how deeply compromised the CDC is.
It would be nice to at least have the illusion of transparency in regards to, very relevant data, such as what is happening to your citizens in public hospitals. Instead the US went the opposite direction, this is not a coincidence.
> that I don't know what else to do beyond urging you to seek some alternatives to wherever you got this from.
I have been imprisoned extra-judicially, threatened with torture (I complied quickly), and served rotten food on US soil. You don't have to believe me, and I sincerely hope you never experience the horror of realizing your jailers are already compromised, nor the experience of realizing that reporting any of this is literally fucking pointless because the entire national security reporting apparatus for civilians and much of the military is deeply compromised and utterly pointless.
The US is so deeply compromised that it's a joke. Your media is failing you spectacularly in this regard.
> I have been imprisoned extra-judicially, threatened with torture (I complied quickly), and served rotten food on US soil.
Would you prefer these people to have access to all of your communications? Or would you like to be able to legally encrypt your messages?
You made my day brighter by repeating this propaganda, thank you for that.
Anybody reading this who might be a little less indoctrinated, ask your favorite language model about the history of CIA black sites and specifically the CIA's involvement in deep-brain stimulation and similar technologies. This has been publicized for __decades__.
And then realize this propaganda is a tiny, tiny, tiny portion of the spookery that has been running amok in the United States for a little under a century at this point.
You have absolutely no clue just how badly the national security complex has failed it's citizens in the US, and NATO more broadly.
>Would you prefer these people to have access to all of your communications? Or would you like to be able to legally encrypt your messages?
I'm saying the entire security model regarding electronics is completely irrelevant. The same entities who have compromised the US deeply have been operating since long before the personal computer, and even telecommunications broadly. I do not care about what is on my computer, when they can easily kidnap, poison, or bless me with any of the other fun systems military intelligence has to offer.
Your national security apparatus has __good reason__ to be gathering any intelligence it can. I'd gladly hand over any piece of data to any agency which requests it, or anybody else really. These computers are toys.
We are quite far away from that. On the contrary knowledge is preserved better than ever.
Anna's Archive estimates they have preserved 16% of the world's books, all available to download with an internet connection.
On the other hand, I can see the side of Fahrenheit 451 where the people don't value books which is what allowed the book burning in the first place.
You cannot "upload" directly to Anna's Archive for example. It must appear on other sites like Libgen or Z-Library.
Downloads are served by different "partner" servers, almost no downloads come directly from Anna's Archive, they are all distributed around to other servers.
Almost the entire Anna's Archive datasets are available as torrents, which are intentionally to avoid a "single point of failure". [1]
If Anna's Archive shut down tomorrow, almost every single file would still be accessible, albeit in a slightly less convenient manner. The whole system is not flawless, the sheer size of the content is hard to handle, but its one of the best efforts in the space and calling Anna's Archive a single point of failure seems disingenuous to me. I recommend reading Anna's Archive FAQ's and Blogs for more information.
[0] https://annas-archive.gd/faq [1] https://annas-archive.gd/torrents
Only sad? Like, we already lost and we might as well give up?
I’m not sad. I’m scared, and I’m angry. And I’m beginning to think maybe everyone should be too. I mean, in normal circumstances, you don’t want an angry and scared population, that’s generally a recipe for disaster. At this point though, given the various decisions at the top that so clearly disfavour the bottom 99%, angry and scared is probably exactly what we need. Well, angry, mostly. Furious. Mad.
The hard part is determining who the enemy actually is. Hint: the more wealth and power, the more likely this is one of them. Strip them of their ungodly wealth and influence, you may get a human being back.
Lets say the primary force we need to prevent is russian influence campaigns that back and push far right nationalists who will destabilize democracy. Is that a sufficient reason for controls?
It's always curious what people think about the actual content that's typically pushing these things.
no.
Start with dismantling the means by which the information cancer spreads. No more targeted ads, no more data harvesting. Increase privacy.
Everybody knows about the influence of Russian bots on the net and yet precisely fuck all is being done about it.
Fracture point propaganda campaigns only work because we let those issues fester.
And while I don't have any doubt in my mind that there are foreign entities working to exploit these fracture points, I am very skeptical that they are the main cause of problems here. We have seen such fracture points arise and cause political strife up to the point of civil wars many times throughout history without such foreign instigation.
Foreign entities (a particular one really) is a tool used by corrupt politicians in each country. Eventually your political field becomes "who is the biggest traitor" and then you're finished, fascism is the only direction this is headed towards. This is your real destination, very closely modeled after that one foreign entity you have in mind. It already went through all these phases.
Taking Xitter as an example, there are many tells that are visible even to readers with limited info that should be as plain as day to the platform owner. Many are barely even masked. The problem is that for ad supported social media, all incentives align with proliferation of bots, especially if they’re paying you to boost their reach. They’re doing all the hard work of genetically engineering perfectly engaging content for you; who cares about the deleterious effects they’re having on society?
This is why surveillance style adtech must be made into a massive political liability.
You could still mitigate this by blocking accounts that use VPN IPs or requiring invasive IDV for accounts, but isn't this sort of thing exactly the type of authoritarian user monitoring that we would like to avoid?
I don't really get you point about removing surveillance style ad tech. Wouldn't that just make it even harder to detect foreign influence accounts?
That means their content and profile quirks follow clear patterns that are not that difficult to distinguish. Xitter just has no financial or legal incentive to do so.
> I don't really get you point about removing surveillance style ad tech. Wouldn't that just make it even harder to detect foreign influence accounts?
The difference is the invasiveness of the data gathered and who it's given to. For bot/troll/propaganda mitigation, invasiveness is comparably minimal (survelliance advertising isolates marketable qualities such as race, orientation, religion, marital status, purchasing habits, etc; none of these are necessary for mitigation) and gathered data never needs to leave the possession of the social network.
To point: I don't accept the premise that the governments gets to decide which information I should be allowed to consume.
Let's just ban those politicians, ban and censor "bad" media and platforms, and surveil all citizens to protect us from those pesky authoritarians!
No. Because if you solve underlying tensions in society the so called russian propaganda has nothing to take hold on.
Also who and under what rules will decide which propaganda is allowed? is American propaganda fine? Chinese? Japanese? UAE?
Not only this creates dissident, and suppresses voices critical of current government. but also gives extraordinary power on level of soviet union to current government.
You might trust current EU to not abuse it, but it might take a single elections, or single term for un-elected(!) officials in EC for attidute to change.
Just like in US - a lot of powers were granted but suddenly there's a person willing to abuse them.
For that to be even considered in EU we would need a lot more check and balances - especially for European Comission and Council.
Another issue is - is EU a trade union or federation? if former - this is outside of EU's responsiblities and powers. if later - look at point above.
If you really wanted to solve this problem you would go after advertisers and data collection companies, and regulate them.
Look up e. g. Hüseyin Doğru.
>russian influence campaigns
Just FYI, your rhetoric precisely mirrors Russian internal rhetoric used to boil the frog 10-15 years ago. If this doesn't make you pause and think, nothing will. In Russia people who fall for it are called "unteachable". Which makes sense, you don't seem to learn anything from their mistakes even though you have a live example of your future that you will reach with 99% certainty, without any help from your boogeymen, because your politicians mirror each step.
There is a high chance that corrupt money spreads, which explains 100% of why such laws get in, but I fail to see why Russia should the only or primary actor be here. There is no real benefit for Russia here, but there is a LOT of benefit for those who want to reduce privacy and force transparency onto everyone at all times. Several US companies come to mind and there is cross-state kick back going on here even aside from the USA too.