The New Wilderness
idlewords.com
idlewords.com
The terror that could be unleashed by their already existing hoard is almost unimaginable. For all the concern about rising authoritarian politics, few have figured out how bad it would be for the future equivalent of the Gestapo or the Red Guard (pick your country) to get a hold of a decades long dump of medical and financial data, metadata on relationships, posting history, browsing and location history, behavioral fingerprints, stylometry, device IDs, reading history, private photos, and on and on. The tech industry's "vow" to not create a Muslim registry for the US government had a touch of absurdity to it, since there are already companies that could plausibly give you a list of almost all Muslims in the US with a few queries, along with far more personal information than any census or registry has ever asked for.
I think the "Brave New World" approach is the most likely to happen / is starting to happen / has been happening for a while now.
On the other hand, our ancestors would probably wonder at our obsession over the danger of invisible entities getting into our food or water, but germ theory is still real.
The problem with guarding against invisible dangers, even when they're real, is that they can be hard to distinguish from superstition. It's easy to point at some religious customs and say they are irrational, but is today's folk understanding of nutritional science all that much better? Badly understood science can create especially virulent memes.
When the harms are hard to demonstrate, privacy disputes sometimes feel similar.
The idea is that two people can be talking about the same thing, both with different ideas (and plausible deniability) in their head.
Even privacy policies have their own form of ambiguous polite euphemisms, such as "advertising" or "telemetry" or "analytics", which would benefit from clarifying translations.
"I’ve lost something by the fact of being monitored." is very true, but deniers will say: "what's the something?" and we just don't have the language to explain it yet.
We’ve always been monitored in some situations, but never before around the clock, in the bedroom and the bathroom, at the doctor, etc. There’s no way to know what we lose, when we don’t even know how the information will be used. It is a passive blackmail situation. These companies have compromising information about all of us, and we really don’t have any idea who can or will be able to see it.
Nature is a large interconnected system that, in some cases, has the benefit of being self correcting. Population control and food chains are examples of this. I worry that, in the case of privacy, there are far fewer natural "self correcting" aspects. How will this impact our response to this problem?
(My personal prediction is that it will simply make it possible to do more damage before we begin seeking a solution en masse.)
What is the password?
I used to really enjoy Maciej as a writer, but I've become really bothered by how bad some of his recent arguments are. This is just an amazingly bad analogy. Structurally, it's on the level of the standard libertarian "proof" that income tax is morally equivalent to slavery. Even though there seems to be some analytical validity in both cases, they are obviously bad analogies because slavery is obviously not the same as income tax, and ad tracking networks are obviously not the same as being in prison. This is a cute rhetorical flourish, but nothing more.
The truth is, most people don't care about this stuff. They really just don't. You might want them to, and you might think they would if they had the same understanding of the issues as you do, but as of today, they don't. And I don't see any benefit to the mental gymnastics people go through to avoid accepting this obvious truth.
How many ordinary people had a good understanding of the neurological effects of leaded petrol before it got legislated against?
How many ordinary people have a good understanding of which furniture padding materials give off noxious fumes when burned before that was legislated about?
How many ordinary people understood Thalidomide or Vioxx - or had even heard of them - before they got removed from the market?
Why is “it has to get to the level where everyone understands it before experts can recommend action” any more valid regarding tech surveillance?
If we want legal privacy protections even though people don't care, that's a reasonable thing to want. What I'm reacting against is the claim I see so often which is basically "people actually care about this but they have no choice". I think people care much less, yet have much more choice than is normally claimed.
I think in this case I may be trying to draw out a narrower point than you think. My argument is that you can't infer consent from how people adapt to circumstances in a situation where they are not given a choice.
The whole issue of consent in online privacy is fascinating, because I don't think even experts in the field could understand how their data is used (or will be used) enough to give meaningful consent. I certainly couldn't.
I also agree with you that there is an open empirical question of how much people actually care about this stuff. One way I would like to see it tested is having a legal basis for competitors to sites like Google to give binding privacy guarantees. Then at least we'd be able to put a dollar value (positive or negative) on privacy with a market test.
And I am sorry for being a bit of a dick!
> My argument is that you can't infer consent from how people adapt to circumstances in a situation where they are not given a choice.
I see what you mean, but I don't buy the premise that people don't have a choice, at least not in the same way in which inmates can't choose to leave prison. Technically savvy people can avoid a lot (if perhaps not all) tracking, today, if they care to put in the effort - many don't. The technology for doing this has been productized and is available for purchase to less savvy users, if they choose to buy it - hardly any do.
I don't mean to suggest that there's a silver bullet that fixes this problem, that you can buy today for $19.99. My point is that when there is real demand for something (e.g. privacy protection), even imperfect solutions succeed in the market and grow in capability over time. Lots of people are attempting to satisfy this demand, duckduckgo being one good example. It looks to me like most of these products are having limited success, which I think is exactly what you'd expect if only a small number of people care about this issue.
I may _want_ to be nice to you, but am bad at expressing myself, so end up saying something mean to you. You can then interpret that as me not wanting to be nice to you. But that is in a sense "double counting" the final result of me saying something mean.
Similarly, people might use these services despite the privacy qualms. It _could_ be that most people don't care. It could be that people care but are accepting the tradeoff. And it could be that people are _forced_ to accept the tradeoff to participate in civil society (or at least that's their impression of things).
I feel for this interpretation because I used to not really care about privacy w/r/t Google in particular, and enjoying services from putting my data in their platforms. I still use some of them but over time the privacy thing (or more specifically the advertising thing) has made me feel more and more frustrated. I still use GMail! But I kinda hate that I ahve to at this point (because I _really need_ emails to be delivered and received consistently).
Similarly I used FB despite privacy up to a point, and only fairly recently finally got almost all my messenger usage down by going to different platforms. But the day before I did it, I still didn't like the privacy tradeoff! But I liked "being able to talk to friends"
Any anti-choice politician whose mistress or daughter has had an abortion, some tech company probably knows about it.
Any anti-LGBT politician that's actually gay, Google, Facebook, hell maybe even Grindr is aware.
Any White Knight with a heinous secret fetish, Pornhub knows.
People were able to map out military bases using smartwatch GPS data. Imagine if you had straight up access to the databases of this information.
I guess individuals at these companies are caught within rigid corporate power structures? Maybe the internal tooling prevents that sort of thing (didn't prevent someone from deleting Trump's twitter feed that one time), or just rule of law in the USA is still too strong and the risk of being annihilated by the legal system is too great.
Still, I bet the temptation is strong.
For this reason the it backfired when tried on Bezos argument is somewhat blunted.
Come to think of it, the articles surrounding the Bezos blackmail attempt even mentioned others had been successfully blackmailed because they didn’t have the resources to say to the best legal firm: “fix this, I’m too busy”.
When I was working at Google (which was close to a decade ago now, before tech overreach became a household buzzword) I'd say "People regularly underestimate how much data Google has on them and overestimate how interesting they are." Everybody's first fear is that Google's going to look up their search history and blackmail them with their porn fetishes. They never stop to think that their porn fetishes, no matter how hardcore, are boring, and shared by millions of other people. As a Google engineer you get desensitized very quickly to the fact that 10% of search queries are porn-seeking (17% on mobile), and looking at other people's kinky pasttimes is about the very last thing you would want to be doing.
Similarly, it's significantly more profitable to advertise to people than it is to kill them. Every dead person is one less potential customer in the global economy.
Corporo-government overreach is a concern for obvious reasons.
But it’s also concerning that any individual rogue employee could have malicious intent toward you for no other reason than you have something you might not want publicly known.
It could be argued that, for a person being blackmailed right now, one is a very real present threat, while the other is a hypothetical future.
Fortunately there are enough of us to go round, so we can collectively advocate for protections against both possibilities.
Like I said, individual people are not interesting to Google.
The problem with trying to extort Congress is not just that they have subpoena and investigatory power, but that the crime is inherently political and will (quite rightly) bring the hammer down on you from the entire apparatus of the state.
Real laws get created over lunch. They dont come out of steering committees.
How does HN de-dupe stuff? In the past when I’ve submitted something that was a dupe it took me to the already posted link instead of making a new one. Curious why that didn’t happen here.
Really good article, gave me a lot to think about. I think the nature metaphor is a good one, though it doesn’t fill me with optimism for the future of ambient privacy.
In this case, we actually boosted the submission into the second-chance pool (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380), which lobbed it on the front page. The reason we picked this post rather than yours is that it was the first submission of the article. (It doesn't look like it right now, because the timestamp was adjusted to be the resubmission time, but you can tell from the ID in the URL.) In the future we want to do some sort of karma sharing so multiple submitters can get credit, but that's not implemented yet.
https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=tobr
Or does it show in the original ("days ago") timeline location way further down than "a few hours ago"?
You can also look at https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=idlewords.com. In this case you were the bronze medalist, behind OrwellianChild and mrzool.