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Comment by devwastaken | Hacker News Reader

>I basically don't consider anything I do online "really" private. The only reason I assume nobody knows what I do there is that I presume nobody cares.

Thats for /You/ though. Laws are for /everyone/. Also, everyone does private things on the net. Any credit card transaction should be a private dealing. If all your google searches were put up for the public to see, I don't think you'd be too happy about that. For others, they could have very negative social consequences.

I would argue hard privacy laws are more important on the internet, because you can mass collect data and make infinite copies, but in real life you can't mass collect the contents of homes and where things have been. The physical barrier is by itself a natural privacy maker, something that is important to try to replicate in communication with data.

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> Any credit card transaction should be a private dealing.

I'm no expert but I believe they are since they use encryption. I don't think republicans plan to ban encryption.

If you can see the exchange happen, then it is not really private. You don't need to know how much I spent, but just that I spent something. That already is enough to not make it private anymore.

Republicans, FBI, and NSA tried to do exactly that during the Crypto Wars. Their next proposal was an escrow scheme where secret people in government agencies with history of corruption & targetting dissidents would get copies of all our secrets. They eventually relented on the ban and partially on exports.

Now, they're back at it again scaremongering about the Four Horsemen being reason to give them our secrets again:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocal...

If you think Democrats are not guilty of trying to weaken encryption and/or expand anti-privacy capabilities, you are mistaken.

Such false equivalence is harmful if you're a proponent of strict privacy laws.

Even if Democrats were exactly as bad as Republicans in every regard, you could actually choose to randomly thank them for their dedication to privacy. Do that often enough, you'll soon see Democratic politicians adopting pro-privacy positions.

In reality, it seems quite obvious that despite all, there is at least a marginal difference between the parties with regards to not only privacy, but many other closely-linked issues, i.e. net neutrality.

If you get frustrated because these measures don't go far enough and buy into the "they're-all-corrupt-each-worse-than-the-other"-narrative, you're removing all incentives for them to act in your interest.

You presume all incentive isn't already removed.

They're both currently anti-privacy. It was Clinton Administration that originally compromised with escrow and then allowing crypto. Also expanded FOIA use. The conservatives in the military, esp running NSA, wanted it banned. Then conservatives passed Patriot Act and issued State of Emergency creating a lightweight, selective form oc martial law with bulk surveillance and indefinite detention without trial. Also reduced public access to government info. Obama reversed Democrat accomplishments in privacy by expanding on those conservative policies and laws. New Republican President is trying to crank them up to the next level on top of showing himself to be a threat to individuals or companies for arbitrary, unpredictable reasons motivated by ego.

So, both parties suck at privacy but one did something for it once under pressure. Republicans are consistently in favor of trading liberty for temporary, limited security if it's not their firearms, speech, or press.

> Republicans are consistently in favor of trading liberty for temporary, limited security if it's not their firearms, speech, or press

That's a pretty big "if". Trading guns, speech, and press in exchange for security seems like a much bigger deal than trading internet privacy for security.

It's the digital versions of 1st, 4th, and 5th Amendments. They want the physical but not digital versions despite the ideology behind one justifying the other.

Might even be able to add the 2nd Amendment here on the self-defense angle. It takes crypto, privacy, and endpoint protection technologies to stop hackers and online criminals effectively. The conservatives, esp military, classified high-assurance security as "munitions" since they disrupt their spy operations. They remained classified as "munitions" after the crypto wars. And, yet, we really need information security to stop all kinds of daily threats instead of them trying to ban it to hope they spot rare threats [they often fail to spot].

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