Comment by dredmorbius | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dredmorbius | Hacker News Reader

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you can decide not to buy corporate products

That's a fallacy by both choice and externality.

There are cases in which there is no choice but to use specific corporate products, or in which choices are made without an individual's consent or involvement.

Karen Sandler, co-host (with former FSF directory Bradley Kuhn) of the "Free as in Freedom" podcast has an implanted, closed-source proprietary medical device. She can literally chose between non-free software (which includes surveillance), or death.

https://sfconservancy.org/news/2018/mar/26/sandler-fsf-free-...

Emergency medical services, government contracts, third-party contracts by various firms and organisations, third-party use of Gmail either directly or as a hosted email service (see Benjamin Mako Hill's "Google has most of my email because it has all of yours": https://mako.cc/copyrighteous/google-has-most-of-my-email-be...), and the issues of spillover externalities (Amazon Ring doorbell surveillance, third-party tracking of mobile phone SIMs, MACs, and Bluetooth signatures, facial surveillance) mean that, no, actually, you cannot decide not to participate in corporate surveillance.

And, as a final point, both government and corporate surveillance and oppression very often speak to the same underlying dynamic: that of power to defend both itself and its wealth and/or golden geese. Examples are numerous, though the Johnson County War would be a good case history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnson_County_War

Let's please put this canard in its well-deserved grave and bury it.

You cannot escape it completely but you can certainly reduce your exposure. I don't think the parent was talking in binary terms.

This is essentially true of government surveillance as well. Not really a surprise, since most modern state surveillance issues are essentially about ways in which private and public/state power cooperate.

The overarching point is that it's naive to consider issues of privacy particularly distinct in the public or private sphere. Neither market nor political power are trivial to escape (and they have other things in common). Individual opt-outs will only get you so far from either a Google scale or state scale operation.

Each year you can do less and less to limit your exposure. That argument will not old up over time. When IOT and 5G puts more devices online all of these things can be used for surveillance. This argument is not fair or realistic when looking forward a year or two.

There are cases in which there is no choice but to use specific corporate products

"No choice" in the sense that you lose business, lose touch with your high school classmates, or are forced to go out and pick up your own food from the restaurant down the street?

Or "no choice" in the sense that people show up at your door with guns?

What a privilege it is to be able to casually use the same language to describe such disparate outcomes.

I've already given a literal life-or-death example above, which didn't involve guns.

Strategems in which individuals are denied the very fundamentals of life, food, shelter, work, engagement in civic, social, commercial, or cultural practices, access to courts, institutions, and the like, without overt threats of violence, are far more effective than guns.

to fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting

https://suntzusaid.com/book/3

Your life or death scenario is an edge case with its own special complexities which should not be lumped in with discussions of the vastly voluntary choices we can make. Healthcare is heavily regulated as we all know. This raises the barrier to entry to new competitors, and leads to a less dynamic market where the status quo can last a long long time. So you end up with only 1 or a very small number of medical devices (with the associated software) for a given situation.

I would expect that the greater debate on privacy will, over time, hopefully lead to some changes in how we are able to control the data generated by our bodies. Until that happens, I’m going to take the thing that saves my wife’s life with the potential for some shadiness or simple distaste at what may happen to her data, or, I might look at it as her voluntary consent which was fully given with her and my knowledge well ahead of time — helps to save others lives, and some loss of control of that data is actually quite noble.

As you might guess, I started at the abstract, but ended up at the concrete, and my wife really does have such a device, similar to your example. And I also work in big data analytics industry, and get involved in these sorts of discussions pretty often.

Okay, let's try a concrete example: Gmail. Let us agree that the point of Gmail is to read people's email so it can send targeted adds. That automating the process (since human employees don't directly read that email) makes the thing more efficient, and thus worse, as well as easier to misuse.

Let us agree that I can indeed avoid having a Gmail account. Can I realistically avoid sending email to a Gmail user?

Nope.

There are just too many users. Maybe I can avoid sending mail to <anything>@gmail.com (though not responding to one will invariably be perceived as incredibly rude), but I cannot avoid having Gmail users send email to me. I cannot realistically notice ahead of time that john.doe@example.com is actually using a Gmail server under the hood, and not send the email. I cannot prevent Gmail users from talking about me.

I can reduce my exposure, but there are limits to what I can reasonably do. Your usage of Gmail is hurting my privacy. Okay, not yours, but definitely half of my friend's. I can't realistically ask them to either stop using Gmail, or stop interacting with me, now can I?

Let us agree that individual choices and individual actions don't work.

That automating the process (since human employees don't directly read that email) makes the thing more efficient, and thus worse, as well as easier to misuse.

While I agree with your larger point, I don't agree with this subjective value judgement and am not sure why it's necessary to lump it in with the rest of your (valid) points. Why do I want to see ads for things I'm not interested in? How is that in any way "better?"

What I definitely don't want is unauthorized humans reading my email. (Even so, I have to assume that is exactly what will happen whenever I type or dictate anything into a computer. I've operated on that basis since before GMail, Google, or even the civilian Internet existed.)

I live in the EU, and as such am pretty much nameless for any Google employee. It's not like they would disrupt my personal life. Automated reading however, scales. The damage to any individual is lowered, but it is also multiplied by the number of users. Reliably so.

And now they have a mighty powerful pattern matching machine, they can easily ask more than where I could possibly spend money. They could ask for my political affiliations, or my sexual orientation, my social network (who knows, I may be related to the second or third degree to some nefarious terrorist?).

That last one is very worrying. Especially since recently, my country (France) is being eerily harsh with political opponents. I've just read a story about a journalist (whose income happens to come from YouTube & donations), who is being judged for… gang theft (the pun also works in French), risking up to 75.000€ in fines and 5 years of imprisonment, just because he covered the unhooking of a 8€ portrait of our current president in a Town Office (which usually have president's portraits, but this is not mandatory). Unhooking, they reportedly did not even take the portrait.

So yeah, I'm more and more worried about giving our governments the means to apply their increasing insanity. Sure, having an individual reading my private email is unacceptable, but that risk is getting smaller and smaller, in comparison, to the mass surveillance that automation enables.

> more efficient, and thus worse,

You'll have to detail this particular implication.

I for one would think the opposite.

* also FWIW, IIRC, they don't read email for ads any more.

Your life or death scenario is an edge case with its own special complexities which should not be lumped in with discussions of the vastly voluntary choices we can make.

Karen's and my 2019 FOSDEM keynote (and accompanying podcasts) discuss her struggles with the medical device industry and how those struggles relate to the larger set of choices related to technology that we make. This isn't an issue that lends itself well to short-form discussion. The issues are quite complex:

https://archive.fosdem.org/2019/schedule/event/full_software...

https://archive.fosdem.org/2019/interviews/bradley-m-kuhn-ka...

http://faif.us/cast/2019/jan/13/0x60/

http://faif.us/cast/2019/feb/19/0x61/

http://faif.us/cast/2019/mar/12/0x62/

http://faif.us/cast/2019/mar/20/0x63/

I've already given a literal life-or-death example above, which didn't involve guns.

But it was far too specific (and frankly too obscure) to serve as a general basis for argument. Pacemakers used to run on plutonium. Should that influence the larger debate over nuclear power versus fossil fuels?

If someone has to use a pacemaker or insulin pump that runs proprietary software, that's unfortunate as far as it goes, but the patient himself/herself is fundamentally fortunate to have that option. It would perhaps be better to focus on developing open-source alternatives than to rail against a particular manufacturer's policy... except the (captive) regulators will have something to say about that, won't they? Specifically, what they will have to say about the idea of an open-source pacemaker is "No."

What you are complaining about in this specific instance isn't corporate policy, but government policy. I'm actually very sympathetic to your argument, personally. I've made the point many times that any sufficiently-dominant corporation is indistinguishable from a government. But you need to be careful to identify the party who is actually forcing or denying choice.

> Specifically, what they will have to say about the idea of an open-source pacemaker is "No."

Not specific enough. What they would most likely object to is code you can modify. Code you can inspect on the other hand is a whole 'nother business. And one could easily guarante their pacemaker runs the code the manufacturer says it runs, by having reproducible builds, signing the source & binary, and have the device itself communicate (at least) a version number.

Being able to modify the source would be potentially even better, but if we could at least inspect it, then we would know of bugs & vulnerabilities (some of which have affected Karen Sandler in the past), and the manufacturer would have no choice but be shamed and correct the error.

So the argument is not invalid, but you take issue with it because you can imagine someone in a worse situation somewhere in the world? I fail to see the point of your comment, this is not a UN hearing regarding some oppressive regime.

If you require home internet access to do your 30k salary job, you move into an apartment, and they tell you you have one option for internet access, you have literally been restricted to a single corporate product and subject to surveillance.

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