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Comment by lumberjack | Hacker News Reader

Everyone is very aware of private mass surveillance now. Everyone knows that they are being tracked in their daily lives by Google and Facebook and they know in which way the are being tracked too. So maybe, not much changed in terms of laws but people are significantly more aware now. What used to be conspiracy theory is now accepted fact. Stallman is no longer the butt of the joke. Technologists that used to dismiss privacy concerns can no longer do so.

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Yeah, my brother commented to me that in retrospect, my consistent objection to handing over my drivers license/SSN and other personal details needlessly wasn't crazy (which at the time he considered odd behaviour).

After working with the credit bureaus, I don't llike giving out enough info for anyone to mess up my personal life. For example, even the front of a drivers license without the license number is enough info for fraudulent creditors to wreck your credit.

Forget government agencies - anyone not afraid of giving them away is a fucking moron for identity theft reasons alone. Which I believe demonstrates a fundemtnal problem with how the system works - that the burden is even on the individual instead of the crediter is itself a problem.

If a schoolboy orders 3000 pizzas in your name that isn't your problem but the pizza place's problem. So why the /hell/ do we consider it different with big banks except for the general stupid human tendency to hold people in power to lesser standards?

Banks employ lobbyists and hand out more than pizzas to politicians?

Sounds pretty crazy to me.

Most people asking for your SSN or drivers license will already know your name and approximate location, therefore they'll have enough information to just look up your SSN and DL via various services like accurint.

You're trying to hide public information.

The credit bureaus only have 157M SSNs from living people last I heard, so no, for half of Americans their SSN is not accessible via accurint.

Unfortunately, a lot of the people who are aware have bought into the idea that it is not harmful or only associated with advertising recommendations that are beneficial to them, even. They don’t recognize the potential for misuse of their personal data and surveillance. Multiple times in coffee shops i have overheard conversations where a man in his 20s is saying opinions to that effect.

I think this is because most people that are against it only talk about turn key tyranny. But few talk about how hackers can use the same things. How a foreign government can use the same tools (by hacking us), or as John Oliver pointed out, the government has your dick pics. And any nudes you sent.

>I think this is because most people that are against it only talk about turn key tyranny

Why would people discount this?

Dumb people don't possess foresight.

It's not "real" to them.

I don't necessarily know if it's them being dumb. I've found that it's mostly "I don't do anything wrong, why should I care?" that gets bandied around as an excuse.

What I've been hearing is "yeah, show me ads about stuff I want to see! that's cool!"

Because they think "it can't happen here". Or "I'd recognize Hitler if he was coming to power" type of thoughts. Probably because we only talk about evil people with respect to their evilness. And not how evil people can also do good things.

It seems they forgot they are being tracked by governments though. E.g. during the gdpr debate the exceptions for governments were barely discussed. I am also not sure to what extent what you re describing was due to snowden or the trump election.

How is the government going to function if we can e.g. ask the census bureau to remove our PII from their database. Clearly the government needs an exception.

Does the census bureau need personal data to do its functions? A "hash" of the name would be enough

With enough data you can often "de-anonymize" to discover actual identities.

Whenever the topic of anonymizing and deanonymizing and PII comes up, I have to use myself as an example of how little data can be considered PII. Despite living in a city of 300,000 people, through a quirk in street numbering my house wound up with a unique postal code. Given the postal code, almost any piece of data goes from 1 of 2 people (me and my wife) to just one of us.

Hopefully that thought sends shivers down the sounds of anyone who is trying to come up with a data anonymization scheme

The census is used to determine the allotment of House representatives for each state, and distribute funds to various federal programs by state or region. This probably requires more accurate and detailed demographic information than hashes would provide.

Also, names are not unique, therefore hashes of names would also not be unique. And how would you verify the hashes belong to actual people?

Hash multiple information. While a name isn't unique, a SSN is. Or a name tied to an address and age IS (age needed because similar address also leads to higher chance of name clashing if something like "Jr" or "Sr" is missed). You can hash more than a single thing.

Why is it clear that the government cannot function if the census bureau doesn't collect PII?

This lack of skepticism is unfortunate. There are some topics where people feel free to say whatever they feel strongly about without supporting evidence. It makes for tedious reading.

When you're a semi-anonymous commenter on the Internet, it's better to share your inputs than outputs.

you discussed zero practical implications of this new found (but should have been assumed) knowledge.

so in other words, no effect, business as usual.

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