Comment by delegate | Hacker News Reader

Comment by delegate | Hacker News Reader

> Now every picture posted, every comment made, every driving infraction could go into a central database to produce a person's 'trustworthiness' score.

How is this China-only ? Can't Facebook do the same ? Can't the government force Facebook, Microsoft, etc to give out all the information that we generate in their networks ? Can't they compute such a "trustworthiness" score and sell it to your (potential) employer ?

Of course they can and they will if they don't already.

I've agreed to countless "license agreements" which I haven't read - I might have given some company my exclusive permission to monitor my every move...

What if your agreement contained a special clause not present in other user's agreements ?

There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that what is going on in China will become the status quo in a lot of other countries and this will accelerate as shit gets tougher due to all the global problems that we now face.

What's even more disappointing is that these surveillance systems are most probably built on top of open source software and libraries - which have been ideologically released in order to increase the user's 'freedom', yet who would have thought ...

Unfortunately the dream of a better, closer, freer world is now passing through a nightmare phase - we've built the perfect tools for crazies to do their crazy thing...

Agreed. There's a technical word for the kind of world we technical folks are helping to build. It's called a "dystopia"

And while it's fun to either wave our arms around and say "But everybody's doing it!" or talking about wild dreams of a better tomorrow, the crap we've created is right here, right now. As a technical person, if you're looking for somebody to blame, there's the mirror.

When I was in the armed forces and you needed something desperately that you did not have, somebody would always say "Well, you'd better grow one"

We technical folks do not have the moral underpinning we need to help there be a brighter tomorrow. We're lacking the social and political theory and the historical grounding to understand what kinds of things might help and what kinds of things might hurt. Instead we just imagine how what we're making might help mankind along. News flash: imagining isn't cutting it any more.

We may not have the tools we need to responsibly create the tech we're creating, but we'd better grow some.

An "apolitical" approach to tech is very much supporting the worst of what people would like to do with said tech, as well as the best. I think people should think a lot more about the bad side of what the tech they're creating enables, and decide whether they're actually comfortable with that, and whether there's a way to achieve their goals which enables less harm.

> There's a technical word for the kind of world we technical folks are helping to build. It's called a "dystopia"

Consider e-cash. People would love to implement it, but banking regulation makes it difficult to actually do business through anonymous transactions.

Similarly many privacy-conscious ISP operators want to throw away logs as soon as possible, but regulation forces them to retain data.

Sure, the likes of facebook and google do thrive on gobbling up more data. But others who want to improve privacy are actually actively hampered by politics.

This creates an asymmetric landscape.

It always comes down to big companies and big gov't.

Yep.

You get to be a big company by creating something where people voluntarily give you information that big governments have long dreamed of forcing out of people.

You can't forget that there are good reasons for those regulations you mentioned, and getting rid of them isn't necessarily going to create a brighter, better future.

I'm not going to push "terrorism" or "pictures of small children" angle, because people engaging in those actions are very rare. Reality is much more boring - those rules help against run-of-the-mill fraud and abuse, the kind which every other individual business, small and large, would happily do. Nor did those regulations came out of thin air or "imagination" - they're almost always responses to real problems.

That does not change the fact that new regulation usually tends to do little against information-gathering entities or even mandates more of it while there's little regulation strengthening privacy.

The thing is, anonymous cash transactions work. They have for millenia. And yet there are 0 motions to enable them in the digital space and >0 to restrict or abolish them in meatspace. The privacy they enable is practically treated like a historical accident that needs fixing.

Maybe part of the problem is that it's easy to assign monetary value to the law enforcement effort saved if you could just have more surveillance or the additional tax revenue if only every transaction were traceable. But it's a lot harder to put a value on privacy.

> they're almost always responses to real problems.

Problems may be real, but if the solutions fix that problem by creating new problems then it's not obvious that we should actually fix those problems. Maybe some youths setting bus seats on fire a few times a year is a price worth paying to not have surveillance cameras following every step you make.

Just because there are reasons behind those regulations does not mean they are good.

1. Secrets that are widely known don't stay secret for long. Snowden leaked a lot of documents and none of them said the government was doing this already.

2. The data that is out there is _very_ messy. If you have a unique name and you use it as your twitter handle, sure, this is already happening. It's called Klout. But most companies just use it to figure out what image to put on their coupons.

3. I've never heard of employers asking for someones "trustwrothiness score". We as a society get pretty pissy about this type of thing. We've banned IQ tests, and needlessly asking for credit reports / scores. If a metric like this came out in wide use we'd ban it.

4. License agreements are generally unenforcible. You don't get the right to someones car just because you put it in a license agreement. If you could do that there would be lots of scams trying to get old grandpa to install a new photo app to see his grandkids.

5. What is going on in China is overblown in the media. It's not a episode of Black Mirror. The people that are most impacted by it are politically loud young adults online, but the vast, vast majority of Chinese don't worry about it. There are much more important human rights concerns in China that need addressing like freedom of the press.

6. We're not in a nightmare phase, we're in the same phase we've always been in. The telegraph cables were tapped by every major government, the radios listened to, the phones tapped, we even put recording equipment into televisions we sold overseas, our major hotels have always been tapped (or easily tapped given a court order if a foreign national was in town). This has been happening for over a hundred years.

I agree we should know about it (thank you Snowden) and in some cases I don't like it, but the solution isn't to wish it away, it's to use encryption and not say or do stupid things around computers.

What about just not saying or doing stupid things at all?

> 3. We've banned ... needlessly asking for credit reports / scores.

No, it's perfectly legal for employers to run a credit report on you and make a hiring decision on that basis. You're outright incorrect here.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/kerryhannon/2013/03/16/has-your-...

> 4. License agreements are generally unenforcible.

Good luck proving that in court. Especially when you just also agreed to mandatory binding arbitration instead of a court hearing.

It's not even a situation of you not being able to mount a defense against a billion-dollar corporation, you will literally never have the chance to have a lawyer in the room with you in any sort of hearing.

3. It's banned almost everywhere in the western world except for America. California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Nevada, Oregon, Vermont, Washington, and NYC have banned it unless it's needed for the job (i.e. they give you a credit card) and even the states where it is legal it's still not used for non-sensitive positions or responsibilities, and if it started to become widespread there they'd ban it there too.

4. It has been proved in court countless times when the terms have been ruled out of scope. You need to have meeting of the minds in contracts. You cannot unknowingly agree to binding arbitration either. This is just FUD. Show me the court case or the media storm when little Sally lost all her money because she unwittingly agreed to some completely unreasonable ToS. The infringing company would get countersued by an attorney working on commission.

Not that you can't get fucked by the courts and contracts in America, you most certainly can, but not by these unenforceable / unreasonable ToS.

> You cannot unknowingly agree to binding arbitration either.

I'm pretty sure that's not true. Hasn't Wells Fargo managed to use binding arbitration clauses to successfully dodge lawsuits about the accounts they fraudulently opened?

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/06/business/dealbook/wells-f...

Those contracts are large, rarely read, often use lots of technical jargon, and are subject to being unilaterally changed by the issuing party. Hardly anyone understands everything they're "agreeing" to.

> Secrets that are widely known don't stay secret for long.

From the Carnivore and the big NSA installations in the late 90's to Snowden there were more than 10 years. That may not be "long" on your definition, but isn't something to dismiss.

> We're not in a nightmare phase, we're in the same phase we've always been in.

The current situation is clearly different from those you point. We never had universal surveillance in history, as it only became possible very recently. It's not a "nightmare phase", but it is unprecedentedly and nobody knows where it will lead.

The solution isn't just to use encryption (although yes, using encryption is part of the solution), there's some deep political transformation going on, and any solution will only arrive by mixing technological and social factors.

In the EU you can instruct a company to divulge everything it knows about you. Facebook will give it to you on a DVD (or at least they used to).

As an instrument of control and coercion, however, there is a massive difference between a government collecting data and not telling you, and a government collecting the data and telling you they use it to calculate your worth to society. The latter seems utterly tyrannical.

I prefer to know. If intelligence agencies are collecting data of citizens without their knowledge, how can they protest it?

What was noteworthy about Edward Snowden leak was the confirmation of the data collection. He made public something that everybody knew.

How can you know what the "massive" difference is between the two cases since in the former case you are left in the dark as to what the information is being used for?

Both cases utilize the tools of tyranny, and Facebook has shown they are more than willing to comply with whatever the host nations government wishes, lest they lose profits for their shareholders.

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