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Comment by fixermark | Hacker News Reader

When Eric Schmidt said "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place," this is pretty much what he was talking about.

We live in a society where passive, ubiquitous, voluntarily-accepted monitoring is becoming the norm because of the vast convenience it affords the users. The flip-side of that coin is of course breaks in your regular pattern of behavior are going to show up in the data trail.

Rather than blame the data trail, maybe we can just all agree to a societal understanding that if you're going to take up murder as a hobby, it might be somewhat incompatible with your other cloud-based ubiquitous-computing hobbies?

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I disagree as there is a pretty broad spectrum of activities that you might not want broadcasted publicly.

Sexual acts, politial opinions, social opinions, partners, etc, all of these are commonly used to discriminate by all groups. Not wanting to have absolutely everything you do recorded doesn't mean that you're doing something that is harmful or wrong to society; there are a multitude of common situations in which you wouldn't want privately shared information attached to you directly. Examples can be given, but excluded for brevity.

Also given that Amazon has shown that it isn't keeping more than what it needs to catch the summon word "Alexa", it shows that it is very easily and technically feasible to balance "always on services" with privacy. Apple does this with iMessage and it's mobile line. Windows, macOS, and many Linux distributions ship with a disk encryption option. This is something we have a pretty easy and readily available technical solution to that allows people to retain their private lives while having "always on" tech.

When Eric Schmidt wrote that quote, it was defending an ill-fated and misguided attempt to force real names for a reason that wasn't really made clear. It was a very weak justification for the real name policy Google was trying to push across their accounts, a policy they eventually gave up on. I get that there are scenarios in which an always on, always tracked, forever recorded, real name data collection policy can solve; but it introduces far more threatening problems than it solves; I've heard talks given by former detectives and police officers on how mindless data collection is an abuser's dream, and how so many abusers were able to find their victims even after relocation because of things like store loyalty cards being leaked, service integration revealing connections, and so on.

> When Eric Schmidt wrote that quote, it was defending an ill-fated and misguided attempt to force real names

He said this 18 months before the real names policy, and he actually said it as a warning to users.

This is the exact thing we have to fight against because it leads to class based systems. Those who use cloud computing are innocent and those who don't are presumably hiding something.

This is the why we have constitutional rights, to avoid such broad generalizations. Everyone has the right to privacy, regardless of what utilities or Hobbies they have.

Everyone has a right to prevention of unreasonable search and seizure.

It's still up in the air whether going to a third-party to whom you've voluntarily given a bunch of information about yourself and asking that third-party to render that information is "unreasonable." It's pretty simple to make a case that it isn't. To wit: there's plenty of legal precedent for compelling a witness to testify against someone; are we to believe that your Amazon logs or your water meter history should share the same privileged status as your attorney, psychotherapist, or priest? "Alexa, forgive me, for I have sinned..."

> It's still up in the air whether going to a third-party to whom you've voluntarily given a bunch of information about yourself and asking that third-party to render that information is "unreasonable."

It's really not 'up in the air' - it's been settled for over a century, look at banks and phone companies.

Taking an oath/pledge of confidentiality would be interesting business strategy on privacy, especially if it could be used to defend against claims from authorities.

There are plenty of things that you can take up as a hobby which are legal (and moral or amoral) that can negatively affect your life (job, social status).

You can argue that most of this is due to bigotry and missing legal protections, but there'll be no ultimate defence against unpopular activities any more than unpopular views.

> […] that if you're going to take up murder as a hobby […]

and right there is the problem. Nowhere in the article does it say that anybody has committed a murder.

You are not proposing to strip privacy away from a criminal, but from a person that is suspected of a crime and might just be completely innocent. That leads to stripping privacy away from everybody.

> Nowhere in the article does it say that anybody has committed a murder.

Article headline: Amazon refuses to let police access US murder suspect's Echo recordings.

If your point is that the suspect is not a proven murderer, then yes, of course I was speaking loosely and not adhering to the legal definition of innocence until proven guilty. But in point of fact, yes, we do strip some privacy away from murder suspects when suspcicion has justified a warrant or subpoena. It's quite necessary in investigating a murder to do so, and we generally have no issue with detectives asking a person's friends, employers, etc. about their activities on and about the night of a heinous crime.

The question of interest here is whether your Alexa logs should be considered "Something you told a friend" or "Something you told a lawyer / priest / spouse." The question of whether police are allowed to pry into a murder suspect's private life, indirectly, with a warrant when they are investigating a murder is well-settled common law.

I would argue that the thing in your home that's listening to all your conversations is quite clearly closer to a spouse than a friend. But that is a different topic.

A murder suspect is just very different from someone who has take[n] up murder as a hobby. The first description might apply to you right now without your knowing, whereas the second (hopefully ^^) clearly doesn't.

> … speaking loosely and not adhering to the legal definition of innocence until proven guilty

You make it sound like that is a minor detail, but it's in fact a cornerstone of a Rechtsstaat (apparently there is no English word for this? see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rechtsstaat).

It's definitely not a minor detail in terms of the law, how it is applied, and the moral dimensions of same.

I don't have to walk far down the street though to find people loosely throwing around terms that suggest guilt or innocence completely divorced from the legal definition. Your streets may differ from mine.

Replace "murder" with "homosexual relations in a country where it is punishable by death" and tell me you still stand by your argument. Are you okay with government using cloud-based computing hobbies to find and kill homosexuals in their country? If not - why? If it is illegal they shouldn't be doing it, right?

Tools used for "good" can also be used for "evil" and something so many people fail to account for is how a "good" tool can be misappropriated. This is why there are so many restrictions on how the police can operate. For example, restrictions or bans on entrapment, wiretapping, "bugging" a home, requiring a suspect to provide incriminating evidence against themselves, etc. We recognize that some bad people will get away because of these restrictions. A seemingly smaller portion of us seem to recognize why we let those bad people get away rather than erode our freedoms even more.

People who defend their freedoms have an unfortunate burden of defending the freedoms of the worst people imaginable.

I think the replacement argument breaks down because I don't expect the countries I'm aware of where homosexuality is punishable by death to have anything like the protections for personal liberty that Arkansas does.

I haven't put a lot of thought into it, but from a practical standpoint, my argument would be something along the lines of a similar sentiment to Mr. Schmidt: "If you're homosexual in a country where that's a death sentence, please keep your head down until you can get out. Learn how to encrypt everyting. Don't rely on any third-party providers that you can't trust. Don't hand the murderer your own noose." And that sucks, because it's brutally unfair, but "brutally unfair" is assumed when talking about nations where homosexuality is punishable by death.

From a moral standpoint, my argument would be something along the lines of "Murder is a horrible evil and homosexuality is not. We should be able to reserve more tools legally to track down murderers than to pry into someone's personal sexual preferences, and I'm lucky to live in a country where (generally) things are seen that way, most of the time." We already do reserve more tools legally to investigate a criminal case; privacy can be encroached upon by existing common-law methods. The question of interest is really, are your water logs and Alexa conversations priest-and-spouse-like or best-friend-like?

Possibly more importantly: how does the replacement argument map to practical action? If we decide that we don't want to allow collected logs to be subpoenaed for murder trials (or we decide logs should be legally banned from being collectible---that'll make a lot of personal-improvement projects illegal, but let's entertain it for a second), how will that help homosexuals in countries where it's punishable by the death penalty? Those countries will look at our worst-case-scenario reasoning, say "That's nice," and then go on to log citizen activities anyway. The "should we" argument has absolutely no bearing on the capability argument, and if we're going to bring other nations into the risk model, we have to talk capability.

Same logic used in the Salem witch trials. You ever wonder why The Right to Be Silent is the first right mentioned in Miranda? Our entire criminal justice system is rooted is this concept. You have to be proven guilty and the state has to provide probable cause to search or seize.

Eric Schmidt is as biased on this subject as you can get, he profits from our data.

The full context of that Schmidt quote was that he was warning people that whatever they do, the government has legal (or as it turned out, extra-legal) ways to find out.

"the reality is that search engines, including Google, do retain this information for some time. And [...] we’re all subject, in the US, to the Patriot Act, and it is possible that that information could be made available to the authorities."

That seems like a good warning, hardly evidence of some nefarious bias.

Precisely. If you're going to take up illegal activity, maybe don't search "How to do illegal activity" on Google the week before you do an illegal activity.

There are, to be certain, concerns about ubiquitous data being used in fishing expeditions, but a dead body in a hot-tub on a person's property is hardly "fishing expedition" territory.

> Eric Schmidt is as biased on this subject as you can get, he profits from our data.

This. Eric Schmidt should release its own full dataset to show us that he thinks this is true. Unless he is doing things he should not be doing in the first place ?

If Eric Schmidt is ever suspected of murder, I would expect his full dataset to be called for.

Eric Schmidt did not mention murder in his quote.

When Eric Schmidt said "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place," this is pretty much what he was talking about.

Pretty sure he regrets saying that in public.

But yeah, as I said in the previous story about this case, I've given up a lot of privacy in the past 10 years for convenience. I'm aware of the ramifications though. Many people just aren't thinking about the consequences.

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