Why we can't have privacy on the internet (2018)
chrisstucchio.com
chrisstucchio.com
Why does it follow that we should be okay with privacy intrusions?
Companies don't have a right to their business model. If we as a society decide to limit how companies can collect and use our data, and it forces some to start charging their users or go out of business, that's okay! Just because that's a sustainable way to run a business right now doesn't mean it should be.
As for how society would decide it, I see consumer pressure as decisive, the more ethical handling of data becomes a selling point, the more financial incentives companies have to implement and market it. It's visible right now in how Apple positions itself against Google as the more privacy minded company with enough public appraisal to challenge, if not invalidate, your assumption.
And there are many assumptions in your post that are not necessarily true:
1. Services could still be free to most users, with paid versions that provide more functionality.
2. Privacy invasion and advertising has a cost, that those very people worrying about food have to pay. They don't have to pay 2$/month for e-mail, but then will spend N$ for the expertly marketed toy/cereal their child is throwing a tantrum over, and their own purchasing choices will also be affected adversely - advertising works.
Previously when software was sold at retail, consumers had no qualms paying for software.
So maybe you are right and the root problem are the business models and specifically the funding behind those models.
> Previously when software was sold at retail, consumers had no qualms paying for software.
When was this? I recall the warez, cracking and keygen scenes being huge years ago (before the rise of SaaS).
If "society" requires services with a greater emphasis on privacy, they will be more in demand and will find their corresponding offer in the marketplace.
>Why we can't have privacy on the internet... Bullshit. We can have whatever we want, but if I demand something I must offer something in return, be it money, private data or unicorns. There is no such thing as a free coffee.
Ah yes, the classic refrain of “the free market will just fix everything” despite that, you know, not being the case time-and-time-again.
A huge number of products and services these days are “supply driven demand”, so consumers voting with your wallet is extremely limited in scope and power: you’re not being given a representative set of available options, you’re being given the choice between a few-often superficially different- options that companies are happy to provide. Coupled with the fact that many companies and the advertising industry as a whole has pushed a narrative of “just give up all your data, it’s fiiiinnne” means consumers aren’t informed or aware of all the options they could demand. Add in the fact that a huge number of people simply don’t have the luxury of shopping around for their preferred product at every opportunity.
> you're not being given a representative set of available options...
What would those options be? Who decides that? For me the market does, who should do it for you? What I'm saying is simple, if there are more people who demand services that respect their privacy, then the offer of those services will arise. If, for example, we are in an abstemious society no one will demand wine, then it is foolish to try to produce wine under those circumstances. It will only be profitable to produce wine there if the preferences of that society change.
>"just give up all your data, it's fiiiinnne" I don't know. It may or may not be fine, you decide for you and I decide for me. I'm not going to force you to make a decision you don't want and I hope you do the same.
Anyway, it's silly to say that we can't have privacy on the Internet. My position is that we can have the services we want, privacy, security, with whatever preponderant factor we want to have, but not for free. You will pay with money, with personal data or whatever the other party accepts as payment, but you will always pay. All this discussion takes place only in contexts where there are people who think they can access all kinds of things for "free", who have the right to dispose of someone else's work, capital, time or property as they please.
Whether we like it or not, the market currently tells us that, in general, access to certain services is more valuable than consumer privacy.
As long as it's a voluntary business relationship, there's nothing to say. If your scale of preferences tells you that privacy is a more important factor than the service itself, then use the services that suit your demand, but don't prevent others from acting differently.
>If we as a society decide to limit how companies can collect and use our data...
Why? I don't have the right to decide for you. If you decide to get married, do I have the right to tell you how to proceed in your contractual relationship with your partner? As long as it is a voluntary contract and the individual rights of others are respected..., does the rest of society or the government have the right to decide or impose rules for you or your partner on how your association proceeds?
"Take it, leave it or shut up." If the concept of "privacy" is as important to society as it is to you, it will lead to an increase in demand and supply linked to services that incorporate greater privacy into their products. You don't need to do anything about it, but whatever you try to do in an arbitrary, subjective and coercive way, it will be objectively immoral and violent towards the rest of the people.
>Companies don't have a right to their business model. They have that right because we all have it, just as you have the right to plan your life but you don't have the right to plan someone else's life.
That's completely ignoring network effects: I want to delete WhatsApp from my phone. But if I do so, it means I won't be taking part in everyday family life anymore.
These are all voluntary business relationships. They're illegal because society has mostly agreed that there should be a limit to how much a transaction can extract from someone. That people, even at their most desperate, should still be protected.
And yes, the bounds here can be arbitrary. Selling organs is illegal while selling sperm and eggs is not. But ultimately, most everyone agrees that we should draw the line somewhere. The entire point of a society is a set of norms around how to interact with others.
they probably discussed making people pay a small fee but I'm sure many web things died when they asked for money
I can think of maybe two of these that are are “bad actors”.
So I forsee something like 'setapp/netflix for privacy' that could cover it all for $10/month with enough scale.
Because honestly, paying $10 for each subservice quickly adds up to $100s/month
> https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/04091... The short answer used to be $1 at a time. In some countries, the app used to cost about $1 to download; in others, the first year is free, but each subsequent year costs $1 – in other words, WhatsApp had a subscription model. At the peak under this model it has about 700 million users worldwide; yearly revenue can be estimated at $700 million per year at this time.
There's no reason we couldn't get a $10 a month budget that would give users mail, instant messaging, file sharing or hosting of some kind. But there wouldn't be any of the perspective of the spectacular kind of growth the adtech bubble is trying to sell or integrated software solutions à-la Google that monopolies like so much.
I worked with a serial entrepreneur once who refused to tell his tech people to spend any time on security. He said "no company ever failed because of bad security... nobody cares about anything except UX and price." I dont think he was 100% right but I do think he was like 98% right.
Privacy is like legroom on flights. Everyone complains about it being taken away but nobody will pay even a little bit for it. Price signals say nobody really cares.
Meanwhile advertisers, governments, and political propagandists will pay handsomely for user data. If anything the price signals say to minimize privacy and maximize surveillance surface area.
WRT. legroom - don't know the history here, but I doubt it was ever an isolated issue by which people could differentiate otherwise equivalent flights. Plus, there's the "boiling frog effect" involved, in which you remove conveniences in very small increment that at every point sounds like a reasonable trade-off, but it wouldn't if 20 years worth of changes were to happen immediately.
That's not true at all, otherwise first class, business class and even premium economy would not exist. I've personally paid extra for a seat with more legroom on 2 hour Ryanair flights. It's just a question of what you value (and can afford).
The same goes for privacy - there is definitely a portion of users out there willing to pay extra for services and companies that, at the very least, exploit your user data less than the others. See Apple's latest stance - they are basically packaging privacy as a luxury good. Or the VPN market, paid email providers instead of Gmail, chat applications such as Signal, Riot, Telegram...
If I see a computer with an antivirus on it(besides the default windows defender thing), I assume it is less secure than something with an antivirus. Most often it was installed by someone who was either mislead about the benefits of an antivirus and/or tricked into installing it. Getting adblock is an massively better way of making a computer secure.
Like cash!
> There are privacy preserving/censorship resistant social networks. They're full of Nazis.
Oh crud, has anyone told Mastodon yet? This seems like the sort of thing they'd want to know.
I guess it's time to go back to safer, Nazi-free networks like Twitter.
>how many of you pay at least 500rs/month for services that give you privacy
It's my understanding that's between $7.00 and $8.00; I pay less than half of that to have an entire server I use for things such as hosting my own email server for my personal use.
>Instead of paying for it, many of the people at the panel wanted the government to mandate it. Moreover, many people seemed to think it would somehow be free to provide.
I can understand why this would be looked down upon, but isn't this the manner of thing a government is intended to do? If we're going to pretend democracy is so great, then people wanting the government to outlaw certain business models is perfectly reasonable.
>Will you pay $20-50 a month to replace your free online services with privacy preserving ones?
I'll pay for a server and that's all. If I can no longer read some articles online because of a pay wall, then I won't, but I may if it's otherwise available to me gratis, but I still won't allow any JavaScript to run and so won't see any advertisements. If they dislike people not viewing advertisements, they should have a pay wall, but many of these organizations are aware people won't pay for what they offer.
>User tracking enables product managers/UI designers to figure out exactly what customers want, and give it to them.
They can go to Hell.
>A special case of fraud which also relates to the problem of paying for services with advertising is display network fraud. Here's how it works. I run "My Cool Awesome Website About Celebrities", and engage in all the trappings of a legitimate website - creating content, hiring editors, etc. Then I pay some kids in Ukraine to build bots that browse the site and click the ads. Instant money, at the expense of the advertisers.
This never ceases to amuse me, so far.
>To prevent this, the ad network demands the ability to spy on users in order to distinguish between bots and humans.
They can also go to Hell.
>Question: What does the government call a payment platform that provides privacy to it's users? >Answer: Money laundering.
Money laundering is a made-up crime, just as with jaywalking and copyright infringement.
>In many cases, censorship authorities require social networks and others to track and notify them about people posting illegal content (Nazi imagery, child pornography, Savita Bhabhi, anti-Islamic content).
Oh, so the government makes rules that make something illegal, so the illegal thing is bad. Yes, I can't run a service that transfers money and is unmoderated, because it's illegal. I'm American and I'm well aware this ''freedom'' I enjoy is a lie.
>This is a fundamental collective action problem, and no player in the game seems to have the ability change things.
Right, governments conspire against their citizens, but this is an intractable problem.
>There are bad actors out there - fraudsters/scammers, terrorists laundering money, legal gun manufacturers moving money around, child pornographers, people who believe in evolution (even among humans), people advocating abandoning Islam, Russians posting Pepe memes, and journalists/revenge pornographers revealing truthful information that people want kept hidden. Any privacy preserving network, at it's core, allows these people to engage in these actions without interference.
Many of these things aren't like the others.
What utter foolishness.
As someone who also has their own personal server, I can definitely say it's not cheap.
It's annoying, but it's still cheap. What ''up front costs'' do you mean? Maintenance is mostly me struggling with software someone else wrote and wanting to replace it with my own; the smaller services I run, Gopher and Finger, use software I wrote so I need not configure some awful software written by someone else. My goal is to eventually only run services with server software I've written, such as for email and FTP and whatnot. I have spare time and knowing how to maintain a server is useful.
I'm clearly an advanced user, however. Still, I've offered others some things, not that they want them. I could host email for my family and whatnot if I needed to.
>What about the costs of having an offsite backup?
I use scp to transfer it to my machine. It's all measured in single digit megabytes.
>As someone who also has their own personal server, I can definitely say it's not cheap.
Okay. I don't know what you do with yours, but I run email, HTTP, Gopher, Finger, and I want to have FTP and Bittorrent available soon. The email server gives me the most problems, but that's mostly because of other email servers, as I didn't need to do much configuration and it's measured in hours rather than days. The HTTP is preconfigured and I've written the software I use for Gopher and Finger, although I want to replace it with better software I write, later.