Hacker News Reader

Comment by grondilu | Hacker News Reader

Can someone explain to me why this so-called "privacy" is such a big deal on internet? Can't internet, or at least a major part of it, be considered a public place? I mean, when I walk in the street, I do not wear a mask (I suspect that'd be illegal in my country), yet I do not worry about someone using surveillance cameras to track all my activities. Sure, it could technically be done but I'm not that important : nobody would bother. Therefore I vaguely consider myself anonymous when I walk in the street, not because my identity is hidden, but because it's mixed in thousands of others : "hidden in plain sight", as they say.

Couldn't things be similar on internet? Or do we really all have to hide our identity like criminals?

View on HN

You know, every now and then there's a leak in voter registration data, and people start freaking out at the thought that others might know what their political affiliation is.

Well, that kind of leak is really no longer necessary. Your browsing, consuming, and posting histories can all be used to deduce that information and much, much more about you.

Try keeping any of your political opinions secret these days. Short of not saying anything to anyone, it's hard to keep it secret (especially from a determined, well-funded adversary) unless you jump through a million hoops.

The reason people freak out about voter registration data being leaked is that they know that once their political affiliations are known, they can be targeted by their political enemies. Now this kind of targeting is trivial without even needing voter registration data.

>Short of not saying anything to anyone, it's hard to keep it secret

To add to this, many people are doing just that on their social networks. Now that there is a precedent for potential employers to "Facebook Stalk" applicants, and we all know that the major world governments have under the table agreements with all the major social networks for data, our profiles are just another carefully curated facade of our lives.

It might take weeks for someone to identify you in real life based on a grainy still image from a camera. And then one would still have to correlate among people, other cameras, and locations to learn anything about you without surveillance.

With the internet, because of data aggregation, I can go on piple and find all of that about you and more in 2 minutes.

The power with which one may invade privacy over the internet is unprecedented. Let's say you frequent a coffee shop commonly visited by republican groups. In just a few minutes, in theory, someone could find out about every single time you visited, and use that against you. Replace republican coffee shop with sex shop, doctor, psychologist, democrat gathering...some things are better left hidden, because people are terrible.

So it's bad because it's faster? Or easier to automate?

Scale, speed, and costs all matter.

The Jevons paradox notes that an increased efficiency of some process or system increases the total utilisation. In particular, it makes previously nonviable applications viable.

Postal junk mail, telemarketing calls, email spam, popover/popunder ads, malware, robocalls, fake news, chatbots, and more, are all responses of previously nonviable applications becoming viable.

The underlying limitation seems to be the scope of attention of attackers based on private / personal data, and/or of the systems in which they operate. The role of AI in extending that institutional bandwidth ... strikes me as rather frightening.

There've been previous discussion of similar topics which point to the prospect of, say, automated lawsuit filing, or debt collections (already a problem), or more. The prospect of some trained algo running over deep, rich data, seeking arbitrage opportunities, strikes me as undesireable.

You might not be important now. But you might be "important" in the future due to your affiliation with a political group, religion or even your skin color. You never know which way the political winds will blow. And data is kept forever.

> yet I do not worry about someone using surveillance cameras to track all my activities

I find this hard to believe. If someone followed me around video taping what you do, I would be so self-conscious that I will stop having a good time.

For one thing, security cameras don't follow you around, and are generally poor quality images and possibly slow frame rate. I'd rather be watched through security cameras than through a movie camera following me around.

It's about ease.

Before the internet, it was very hard for the average person to find out stuff. Maybe not having a ring on the finger meant they are single. Or are they divorced?

Now, it is just too easy. And commonplace.

Sure, all if our lifes events could have been collected. They were called biographers. Now they are called everyman.

Data had always been collected. Just never easily retrieved.

For me, i am appalled that some people i know think absolutely nothing about googling a person they just met. To me, they were not reared properly of they do that.

Out in the real world you are seen but most are quickly forgotten. On the internet you are seen and it is logged for an eternity.

Not really that true anymore. Especially in cities like NY and London there are practically no public spaces not under 24/7 CCTV surveillance and all that video is cheap to preserve forever.

ok go ahead and publish all your email, chat messages and bank account details here now

Continuing with my analogy that would be like shouting my name and address in the street. Why would I do that?

My point is that I tend to consider myself as anonymous on the internet because I believe nobody is interested enough in me to bother gathering the data. Or if it's done, it's a robot that does it for statistical purpose[1]. No human cares.

But if I publish personal infos in plain text, like email, phone number and stuff, surely there will be trolls that will have fun with it, or thieves that will try to use it for profit. I have zero reason to do that.

1. BTW I believe this has tremendous scientific value, from an anthropological point of view. It'd be a shame not to do it.

So you don't think it is a big deal because you believe your private data is not important.

The issue is that perhaps your data is not as important right now, but it is possible that one day you might do something that might upset someone in the power and any information about you might be used against you (and that would be years and years of your past since that data wouldn't be gone).

Just look at Snowden, how they tried to use every petty detail about him. He was careful though and did not leave much, but there were strong forces trying to discredit him.

Maybe you think you would never did anything like what Snowden did, but what's considered bad depends on what current administration thinks. With our current president it feels like insulting him on twitter might be good enough cause.

Second issue is that Big Data done on you, it can infer a lot about you based on the data that you provided, often it can know more about you than yourself.

That data then can be used against you, here's one example of a company that does this and in fact not only tries to learn about people but actually influence them[1]. It's suspected that they are behind Bexit and Trump victory.

[1] https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/mg9vvn/how-our-li...

I don't think this is a good argument. Posting personal information on a public forum is completely different from letting it sit in some database that no human is likely to look at. The latter can be a reasonable trade-off to use a free service.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com