Hacker News Reader

Congratulations, they beat you into submission.

You now have accepted a fundamentally different world where anything you like, anything you say, anyone you are with or hope to be with, anything you hope to do, have done, didn't do, every mistake or misstep or misstatement or misunderstanding or fuckup, is recorded, analyzed, classified, and mined. You're being constantly thought about, by the machines, who, if you are lucky, are only interested in making a buck off you, and if you are not lucky, have targeted you for increased scrutiny, security checks, auditing, social classification, digitized karma, and eventually, all of this will translate to a significantly different experience through life. How will it manifest? Maybe it'll be something big like being denied a loan for a car or a house. Maybe it'll be a landlord turning you down for an apartment. Maybe it'll be a constant drip of ads trying to trick you into buying something. Or maybe one day beaker53 will say something bad about the government, or get involved with a terror group, or it will accidentally look like you got involved with a terror group. Or maybe they'll just come annoy you while you're sitting down to tune your guitar with an ad on how to make yourself a better guitar player, if only you did this or that or the other thing. Or maybe they'll pester you because your friends did something or didn't do something or should do something, or how you'll look better in relation to them if you did do something.

Speak for yourself. I'm sick of being watched and being "thought about" by all these damn machines. FFS leave me alone, like it was just 15 years ago. Just 15 years ago.

I'm going to bookmark this comment for when people throw the "I have nothing to hide argument" at me

If that's your angle, remember that that nonsense included explicitly the suggestion that one problem with tracking might be when you "get involved with a terror group", along with other drivel about "digitized karma" and unwanted ads. If you don't want ads, run an adblocker. That's literally what they're for.

> remember that that nonsense included explicitly the suggestion that one problem with tracking might be when you "get involved with a terror group"

No, it was about someone (“beaker53”) who could be confused for a known person (“beaker52”).

P.S. I reject the assertion that being concerned about privacy is some kind of "weird obsession/hobby". It is, or was rather, the default state of life to not be watched constantly not long ago. This new thing of having to fight for basic privacy is the alien thing. You aren't obligated to think about it 24/7, and kudos to you (or something) for going and having fun while not worrying about it. But make no mistake, society has been radically altered while you were sleeping.

I think there is room for nuance between 'concern' about privacy and 'absolute dedication' to privacy, and the tone of your opinion ignores it. You make good points, but I would hope for some critical reading of the original poster's argument.

Data never being completely deleted, and the unending tracking being a slow sort of death of personal freedom is a good point, but I read the point of the poster you responded to as this: We can only do so much to secure our privacy, do effective and easy to implement solutions. If we want absolute privacy, its probably never possible until you cut out massive parts the digital world for yourself, and diminishing returns for your efforts most likely aren't worth it.

> Just 15 years ago

Yeah you were still being tracked. It's just a lot easier and more specific now. But everything about you that's public record, or even semi-public, including your credit reports, housing history, leins/judgments, voter registration, bio/demo data from any product registration card you ever sent in, purchase history from credit cards, etc. was in marketing databases and bought, sold, and traded. This has been going on since the 1970s at least.

But you're right, it's MUCH more pervasive now.

However, if you really yearn for what it was like 15 - 20 years ago, there's an easy solution: Don't be online. At all. Just like it was then.

> Congratulations, they beat you into submission.

This is not really an acceptable attitude towards this opinion. You can not mind the current state of tracking, acknowledge benefits, etc and should not be demonized or told your opinion was beat into you. And then congratulate them some rude way?

I used to wonder why so many people were surprised at recent presidential election results, assumed propaganda must be the cause, assumed ignorance of those they don't understand, take elitist attitudes towards others' preferences, etc. But now I'm starting to understand this cognitive dissonance. It's ok that they don't see tracking as a big deal, it's ok they don't want governments to step in, they aren't just dumb victims beat into submission.

I hope I wasn't rude, I didn't downvote the OP or anything, so I don't think I crossed any lines. Generally speaking opinions that are "meh, status quo seems fine to me" are poorly informed. I don't want to personally attack the OP but they literally stated that they don't want to think about this and would rather spend time doing something more fun. Fine, go ahead, but the rest of us who actually think about the implications of this recognize that a very gradual but very profound shift in society has already occurred. We're not discussing it, frankly, because people are generally passive and some, like the poster, express a pretty dangerous lack of concern. Not only that, but the OP literally said it was a "weird obsession" to be concerned with privacy. That is actually demonization, and it raised my hackles.

> "meh, status quo seems fine to me" are poorly informed

Personally, I feel the status quo is preferred over alternatives, but to each their own. Whether someone is poorly informed on a subject or not is hard to gauge and not always something that has to be fixed. The problem here is that ignorance is used as a reason to protect people from themselves forcefully thereby silencing the informed-yet-disagreeing (emphasis on "here" in this situation at this time, can't make generic absolute statements about consumer protection in general).

> We're not discussing it, frankly, because people are generally passive and some, like the poster, express a pretty dangerous lack of concern.

I see quite the opposite. Can't open any newspaper or obtain any general news without the ills of big-web-tech shoved in your face. The harms are explained as extreme but to many, regardless of what the pitchfork bearers shout, the harms are not that extreme. What's dangerous is over concern and the results of that fervor. But all of that is personal opinion, the good part is the freedom to hold that opinion and act on it personally without imposing.

Your comment aligns closely with this excellent dystopian Alexa/Google Home parody: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfqM63CAC8g

The video portrays a future advanced home speaker which terrorizes its family through ads, AI, and "helpfulness" through data mining and the occasional benign hacking of remote systems.

Protecting your privacy is much like security, in the sense that it's not a black or white issue.

Having a lock on your door won't stop professional burglars, but it implies effort and isn't the same as leaving your front door wide open, which also invites passerbys.

Protecting your privacy actually has a non-negligible effect on your experience on the Internet. Let me give you an example ...

I have a friend that's a T2 diabetic, is self treating and doesn't want to go to a doctor due to past bad experiences. So in trying to help him, I signed up for a Facebook group for diabetics in my area. The result is that now I'm getting commercials for treatments of diabetes.

This to me is freaking scary, because this data can be used against you. Your medical history could affect your credit score for example. Your buying history or your friends list could affect the price of your insurance. Your daughter could get pregnant and the store could find out about it before you. Oh wait, these already happened.

You can't escape all profiling, but the less these profiling companies know about you, the better you are.

I'm using DuckDuckGo lately to search for symptoms of hypothyroidism, because apparently I suffer from it. Along with the privacy extensions I have installed (Privacy Badger, and ad-blocker with EasyPrivacy), guess what, I don't have commercials following me around on hypothyroidism, which to me is confirmation that I'm doing a good job.

You can choose to not care of course. But you're probably young. Give it another decade.

This. Data you leak today will propagate to many businesses you'll deal with in future.

I'd add searx.me to search engines, and uBlock Origin to ad-blockers, in medium mode:

https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Blocking-mode:-medium...

I can easily imagine that there's an identity for me at Google which is linked to all the IP I had ever used (meaning country and ISP at the least), and linked to every google account I ever used and browser ever used (meaning what devices I've been using) and then every page I've visited which has Google ads or analytics (meaning what site I visit) and every keyword I used to search the web (easy to guess what kind of life I'm having) and then every location I've ever searched on their map (meaning they know where I go and perhaps roughly where I live).

They know more about your online history than yourself they can write a diary for you but if you feel comfortable with that, then you don't need to do anything.

Changing IP, clearing cookie and changing browser may divide your ID but as soon as you log in with your Google account or they realize you may be having identical online activities, you can easily get linked again.

And as soon as you buy something on your Google account, be it physical item or an in app purchase, they know your real identity along with all of the above and then with more profiling, you will be linked with other people by family name, location you often visit and recognized by any other profiling I can't think of now.

No google accounts, private browser windows and always-on VPN (not self hosted, as IP must be mixed with other ppl) :)

You know that you can delete, opt in/out to most of that information right. One click, boom.

Data leaks are one way, you can't put toothpaste back into the tube.

So they say.

China has their social score built around tracking. People can't get on planes/buses because of it now.

Considering all data is saved forever, how likely do you think your country is to get something similar in the next 30 years?

Well, I don't really worry much about trying to avoid it. I do stuff somewhere along the lines of your "best bang for the minute" guidelines (aside from running my own mail server).

However, it does concern me that it exists. They use this data to manipulate people. To drive "engagement", which means addiction. I could spend too long describing the evil in it, but at the end of the day, why do they care so much about the data? It all only really comes down to a way to manipulate people... into buying goods, into believing things... without hyperbole, just to try to avoid listing out so many points and examples, their desire for data stands in opposition to the popular conception of free will and democracy. I will always take a strong dislike to people and organizations attempting to manipulate me by means other than simply providing value in my life and getting some value back in exchange.

At this point, it concerns me less how much data they collect on me, and that we as a society haven't dropped some kind of regulatory hammer on them before they almost literally brainwash us out of the notion that we would even want something like it.

Agreed - it seems to come from a similar mindset as being obsessed with "websites must run without Javascript because 0.00003% of HN users disable JS".

Another aspect of this I don't see mentioned nearly as much is that attempting to be more private may actually make you stand out more in terms of government surveillance. They wouldn't be getting as much data on you from companies, but odds are they're still getting plenty, and in the case of taking extreme measures to limit that it only takes one mistake to undo a lot work. So hypothetically if you did have something to hide, or if you really wanted to maximize privacy for a subset of your life, you would allow most of what you do to be tracked in order to appear "normal"

Not wanting to be tracked is normal.

I'm reminded of the (possibly apocryphal) stories of criminals who underwent various procedures to remove their fingerprints - methodical scarring, acid burns, skin grafts from elsewhere on the body, etc: even the procedures that worked didn't actually help them evade identification, because the marks left by their now-printless fingertips were even more distinctive than before.

This is actually one of the arguments that Telegram uses.

https://telegram.org/faq#q-why-not-just-make-all-chats-secre...

>This allows Telegram to be widely adopted in broad circles, not just by activists and dissidents, so that the simple fact of using Telegram does not mark users as targets for heightened surveillance in certain countries. We are convinced that the separation of conversations into Cloud and Secret chats represents the most secure solution currently possible for a massively popular messaging application.

https://telegra.ph/Why-Isnt-Telegram-End-to-End-Encrypted-by...

>people using these apps can be targeted by governments as those who have something to hide. Due to the limited distribution of such apps, the government can identify and track individuals whose phones connect to the corresponding IP addresses. This is something that is already happening in case of tools like Tor, and, to a lesser extent, of some messaging apps. Yasha Levine is publishing a brilliant investigation about it.

In my case it's not a hobby. I actually hate wasting time and money on these kind of things. But on the other side I'm legitimately scared about what's happening with all my digital information. It could be paranoia because of all the privacy movement and the recent scandals but it's not worth the risk when you have very easy to setup tools to improve your privacy like that ones you mentioned in your last paragraph which is exactly what I'm currently using (+ DDG for searching).

No it's not just you. I block ads with ublock origin. The end result of the tracking is targeted ads, and as I don't see any of them I don't care how accurate they are.

Why did you put tracking in quotations?

>Am I the only one who doesn't worry too much about all this "tracking"? Trying to avoid tracking is like some weird obsession/hobby.

A cursory glance at recent human history[1] shows the extreme naivety of not worrying about the negative effects of mass computer tracking.

[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust