Personal Panopticons | Hacker News Reader

Personal Panopticons

reallifemag.com

53 pointskawera12 comments

Yes, personal privacy is a function of the system moreso than of the individual. If one doesn't share his contact list with Facebook, but all of his friends do, then his contact list is de facto not private. This is a real occurrence. Financial information is not safe; hundreds of millions of credit card numbers and social security numbers have been stolen in recent years, through no fault to the individual, but to the companies and institutions that they entrusted their information to. Unless you accept isolation, you will be forced to interact with the world using PII, and since it's useless and futile to trust the world to protect your privacy, why should any individual bother? Your location will be tracked by license plate scanners, surveillance cameras, and cell phone towers. You will (soon) be identified by facial recognition. This is the reality we face.

Privacy is something we must believe in and actively strive for as a society in order to be in any way feasible. I don't see that happening any time soon.

> “two friends are talking about recent trips to Japan, and soon after one gets hawked cheap flights there” — that have led users to erroneously conclude that their phones are listening in on their conversations.

Has this not been shown to happen?

What scenario is more likely:

1. While in Japan, or during the planning of the trip to Japan, the persons visited websites that indicated a preference towards visiting Japan, and sometime later an ad network connected the cookie with their past behavior and served an ad for a flight, or

2. Someone has created a hitherto unknown stealth malware designed to circumvent the "microphone on" notification on smartphones and exfiltrate audio from a user's device, deployed the infrastructure to store and process the audio, and then done everything already needed in scenario 1 to serve ads for a flight.

Any moderately-skilled network engineer or security professional would be able to instantly tell if a device was sending audio to a remote server if told to look. And highly-skilled people are actually looking.

I think this covers the current state of the art. No audio capturing adware found, but other privacy problems:

https://recon.meddle.mobi/panoptispy/

We know that apps are constantly listening for audio beacons ( ultrasonic cross-device tracking) which are used to link different devices to the same person (your phone and your laptop for example) so that they can associate data collected on either device to you and that they use them to log when/where you watch certain content (such as TV ads). Mics are active and listening. I think it would take a large security breech to see what companies are actually doing with what they collect vs what they'll publicly admit they are doing.

My Firefox Mobile on Android often asks permission to record audio/video on ad-heavy websites like Vice Media, and installing an ad blocker made the permission requests go away. Why?

> The appropriate response to these shifts cannot simply be an effort to recover the older normative framework and its configuration of legal and social provisions.

So is the author in favor of something like GDPR? I cannot tell.

I struggle with the idea that the benefits of technologies like AI, personal data accumulation, etc cannot be separated from centralized services.

Why must it all be in "the cloud" where it can be surveilled?

2600 words on a Tuesday morning is rough, anybody got a tl;dr?

I'd go with...

> the most serious threats digital technologies pose are not strictly personal concerns like identity theft or companies’ surreptitiously listening in on conversations but the emergence of a softly deterministic techno-social order designed chiefly to produce individuals that are its willing subjects

the goal of every social order is to produce individuals that are its willing subjects, whether it does this softly or not.

Yes. I don't know the correct terminology but to me a 'state' can be viewed as a thing that enforces a social construct on its citizens. If the citizens can openly shape and agree with the social construct, so much the better.

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