Bruce Schneier: Banning Facial Recognition Isn’t Enough
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Banning facial recognition doesn't even banning facial recognition. Anything uploaded to FB/Google/Etc goes through software analysis including facial recognition. Anything publicly posted is crawled and the same thing happens. Even hipster polaroids can later be digitised and analysed. You need to prevent photography, to prevent identification.
Whatever bans are imposed will not be on facial recognition, they'll be on specific use-cases: police, concert security, etc. That might be good, but it isn't a ban.
My instinct is to say "tech illiterate politicians," but I suspect it's worse.
Our political culture just can't really deal with the nuance and ambiguity. If it can't be sloganized to under 5 words, we can't even discuss it.
I also think a lot of people calling for a ban have not really thought through what would be banned. Do we ban models trained with triplet loss over any biometric data? Is it just specific entities that are banned from using it? Is it ok for Apple to build me an album of pictures of my wife and I? How do we define face recognition?
This is an incredibly complex and nuanced topic and it seems like many people discussing it just wave their hands without considering what the ramifications of any overly broad definition might lead to.
https://www.businessinsider.com/san-francisco-amended-its-fa...
If cameras are being used, facial recognition is probably happening... if not in real time than later.
Yo
The opinion section of a newspaper is where one (someone not working for the newspaper) can submit opinion pieces for publication. Opinion pieces like this one espouse a particular idea or standpoint; in this case the plea for banning not just facial recognition, but to broaden the scope of privacy laws addressing the problem of overreaching surveillance.
Opinion pieces in respected newspapers form an influential part of the public debate, and tend to be read by policy makers and politicians as well.
Schneier's article is published as an opinion in part due to editorial convention but also because his expert opinion is that opposing facial recognition will not pragmatically curtail surveillance.
On a deeper level, Schneier's point presumes that surveillance is a problem, which is an opinion and is the tacit foundation of Scheneir's article.
Hence, the article is editorially categorized, correctly in my opinion, in the opinion column.
It’s worse. This site is a good example. It’s rules limit the noise like you get on Reddit which makes it easy to see without automated counting.
Commentary here is often of the “if you disagree with what I see as a fundamental truth, and contextualize, even though it’s a subjective political opinion, well tldr: downvote.”
The group think here is insane. Protectionism of the ideas that we believe prop up our individual identity are not allowed to be challenged.
And I’ve not peddled conspiracy. Just that my work and agency shouldn’t be bent to the whim of elites.
It’s not “tech illiterate politicians”. It’s society addicted to shallow consumerism.
Being addicted to novelty and such is fine, there’s something to be said for that versus war, right?
But this site really doesn’t defend that. It defends social norms that denigrate the masses. That put tons of effort into crap.
That’s by design. Propaganda research went from military to university and was integrated into advertising, marketing, and journalism. That’s not a derpy state idea. It’s plainly recorded in official records.
Every generation ends and we don’t plan for that. We knew fighting to cling to their rules.
While we’re fetishizing their push for quarterly gains, we’re enabling the continued march down the path we’re on.
Gather supplies, coordinate with neighbors, and online to pick a Monday and stay home.
Even a visible enough sustained effort that direction, I feel, would create a ripple that lights a fire under politicians butts.
But let’s discuss fixing tech debt problems the insane grind creates, avoiding burnout it creates, how to get one more todo app of ridiculously shallow value out there, or fetishize Paul Graham’s request for a start up to build a reminder app that helps him send email? Like ffs be creative, Paul. Such low effort amateur ideas from the anointed ones. It’s almost disgusting.
"Opinion" indicates how it was published and fact-checked, who did what; it's not a comment on how likely it is to be in error. These pieces tend to come from outside the day-to-day operation of the paper.
More concerning is netcan's suggestion that if something is just a collection of facts then it must be neutral...
I genuinely do not know what the solution here is, but the sooner we move away from advertising in politics, the sooner we might get somewhere.
A discussion of the engineer's responsibility to protect privacy in an age of increasingly automated personal and business documentation. Computer systems could be designed more carefully than they are at present, but safeguards that provide the protection of privacy are expensive. As the engineer has been trained to focus his attention on carrying out the task assigned to him in as inexpensive a manner as possible, concern for privacy has been too often ignored. In the absence of an organizational structure to enforce a code of ethics, a restructuring of the profession at the engineering school level is indicated. The engineering school curriculum must be modified to cope with large systems in which the citizenry are an integral part of the system, and a new curriculum be devised that would provide course material on the behavior of individuals and of organizations to balance the weight given to training in quantitative methods.
Published: 1968
https://www.rand.org/pubs/papers/P3829.html
https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/papers/2018/P3829... (PDF)
"There are many amongst us who would not hesitate to build equipment to compromise the privacy of any given individual provided the price is right. These are the whores of industry. They would not hesitate building systems and devices contrary to the public interest; their only concern is the buck."
From May, 1968.
We've structured modern society in a way that forces demand for this information:
- Companies must sell products to users
- The more saturated the market for a good, the more incentive there is to game these sales (instill false desire, target vulnerable audiences, find and target users who might be convinced to buy your product through any means)
- This kind of "gaming" requires knowing more and more information about your potential customers, because the companies that engage most in those practices are the most successful.
-----------
The problem is that eventually this starts to look like a nightmare Oroboros situation - We are all both employees of companies doing this targeting and the targeted users.
The snake is literally eating its own tail. Users want privacy, Employees want data. But Users ARE Employees, and Employees ARE users.
In my opinion, the only question is whether the snake chokes to death on its tail, or eventually spits it out.
Or, to put this back into economic terms for a moment, the issue is supply, as the demand function you've described is induced demand, by way of the Jevons paradox: the information and capabilities would not exist if the costs of data collection, aggregation, processing, and utilisation were higher.
Since they are not higher, the data environment exists, and the demand is induced.
Back at uni in one of my econ courses, the instructor who'd returned to teaching from administration for one final term before retirement, made the following observation about computer systems planning from his experience. Roughly:
Every time a new computer system (think enterprise / academic database applications, 1980s era) is designed, you can go through the most careful capacity planning and modeling procdess, but once you actually deploy the system, you find that there are a whole set of new uses which emerge because people wanted to do them previously but were unable to. And as a consequence, the usage levels are higher than anticipated.
It was a throwaway comment in class one day, but is among the handful of most memorable moments from my college education.
The point is that if it's not possible to do a thing then it isn't done. If it is possible, and cost-effective, then there's virtually no way (absent draconian regulation fo some form: legal, social, moral, political) to prevent it from occurring.
And once a process is possible, if it provides some benefit, then it's not possible to not do it when competing with those who do because you simply cannot operate competitively.
Which is where we are now with data, and surveillance capitalism / surveillance state.
From the systems view, what you have is a positive feedback loop, where increased efficiency => decreased costs => increase capability => increased benfit => further research => increased efficiency.
There are further elements to this.
As to the competitive market element, once production or provisioning of goods and services moves beyond strictly local markets, then the actor who can claim a larger share of the market has an advantage to doing so. Being able to do that requires mass production (or provisioning) capabilities, which themselves are a feedback loop (increased capital utilisation, improved processes, greater market share, greater market brand awareness, familiarity with concepts, UI/UX, tools, support and supplychain dynamics, etc.) which further increase benefit.
(And that's excluding unfair business practices, though those also provide considerable advantage.)
An immediate consequence is that the battle for mindshare becomes increasingly fierce, and with that a reliance on advertising -- simply having a good local name, foot traffic, and a shingle on a busy high street isn't enough.
Hamilton Holt's 1909 monograph Commercialism and Journalism describes the impacts of this change over the previous half-century on the publishing trade, both quantitatively and qualitatively. It comes at what we now consider to be the beginning of the mass media age, but does an excellent job of laying out the dynamics of what's occurred since:
https://www.worldcat.org/title/commercialism-and-journalism/...
As to the emplyees vs. users dynamic, the error here is that employees are not ultimately the control agents. Managers and investors are, and they seek, increasingly, short-term direct profit with little concern to either overall social welfare or long-term impacts. So that's a very red herring and misleading analysis.
The value of the analysis though is to recognise just what the power of apparent pricing is. And that if you want to change behaviours you've got to change that price.
There are recognised ways of doing that.
One is to impose mandatory floors or minima of behaviour / requirements.
One is to price in externalised risks. That's what insurance, posting bonds, licensing and credentialing (in some regards), and the like can do. All move the potential costs of future events to the present.
Strictly prohibiting certain types of transactions is frequently latched onto. That has certain benefits, but risks creating black markets, as with prohibition and the war on (some) drugs.
Enforcement / control mechanisms all also become potential avenues for power co-option or manipulation.
Taxing activities or wealth derived from them is another option.
As is mandating open access in specific contexts -- e.g., "common carrier" status, "equal time" doctrines, "fairness doctrine", etc.
This is precisely why I used the snake eating its own tail as a metaphor here. I believe that it's reaching the point where the managers ARE actually employees stuck in the same trap - or at least a large percentage of them are. (I'm with you that there is a class of investor that is still immune, you can picture this as the head of the snake)
I've been in management, it's fairly clear that user data allows you opportunities and a competitive edge. I am also very, very aware that my data is included in that pool. I don't like it, but when asked to make a decision that keeps my product profitable, I'm going to try to use any user data I can.
If I don't, I'm replaceable. If I'm not replaced, I don't have a company to manage in 5 years, because it wasn't competitive.
Add on top that market consolidation is at (frankly scary) record levels, and I'd argue that the number of humans who actually have any real agency and control over how an organization behaves are dwindling precipitously.
So already I've been swallowed.
Middle management is its own special hell. Sometimes even executive management.
A key differentiator is that megacorps and (at least some) very-large-scale investors are in a position to shape the actual competitive landscape, through regulation and/or taxation. They're often not trusted to do this (another issue, and another current HN story -- Edelman's Trust Report), but regardless.
The self-perpetuating and self-feeding nature of the process is disturbing.
[1] http://www.sutjhally.com/articles/advertisingattheed/
All this surveillance stuff is just another tool for advertisers with utter disregard for the consequences.
He can say that. Yet when you as a commoner even dare to, you are being stared at as if you were a mad cow, or worse COMMIE!
Why is that?
Of course comfortable democracies can say what people in evil-land should do if evil-king asks for their help. But where were these same sorts of people to stand beside missile scientists and biologists in WW2? If the people elect Nazis and tolerate Nazi endeavors then no single group of professionals is going to be strong enough to resist the regime on their own. There needs to be some kind of doctrine of mutual cross-disciplinary support ready to politically pre-empt the situation.
Even in the modern environment the same applies. What real value is finger wagging if the government is still allowed to throw grotesque sums of money at contracts for evil-tech? With enough time the money wins out every time.
The important detail is where we are inevitability headed, not the specifics of this or that technology.
The use of the word "surveillance" to discuss this will become progressively more quaint because of the pejorative nature of that word, and the technologies that are the subject of this article will become ubiquitous, typical, and standard.
The behavior of humans will change accordingly, well-behaved or otherwise.
I have complained about mass surveillance for years and every one said it was made up, Snowden proved it and still the mass public can't accept it / don't care.
This is the first time I have seen the general public have any interest in protecting their privacy.
I have many friends in their 20s and even 30s who have grown up in an Internet-enabled, mobile-connected, social-media-driven world. Many of them don't remember 9/11; they were too young to understand when it happened. They certainly don't remember a world without the pervasive surveillance we suffer today.
Many of them are also in relatively privileged social groups, rather than the minorities that tend to suffer the worst from authoritarian measures and one-sided deals.
Even so, having sometimes discussed these issues, it's clear that many of those friends don't approve of or condone such measures. They certainly don't like or encourage them. It's more a combination of not seeing better alternatives, and often for the non-techie crowd (which is most people), of having other priorities when it comes to any advocacy or political movements they want to support with whatever spare time and money they are willing to spend.
People find this stuff, it gets leaked eventually, with a law against it in place stopping it legally is a lot easier.
> Will legislatures once again retroactively protect those who violated the ban?
Most likely but it's a lot harder to do that once the law is in place.
But my point is that government agencies can and do ignore these kinds of bans. Will passing new laws make any difference? Particularly if no one is held accountable, which is invariably the case.
But one thing that really stuck in my craw is how the military intelligence Chelsea Manning had access to later on was accessible by thousands of people, and there are very few who have followed her example. Similar with Snowden, except that much fewer people had his kind of access.
Pictures: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=manhattan+project+signage&t=ffab&i...
Suppose you had a way to know all this stuff about people; what could you do with it that would actually be good?
China has a social credit score system and apparently they justify it on the grounds of preventing bad behaviour of various types (fraud, crime, etc). It would be interesting to think more about this and how we might be able to maximize the benefits and minimise the downsides.
As if we can control them? Those in power (deep state etc) and the big corporations control them. We have no say into the matter, we'll just get what they decide.
(I'm not saying we can't do anything about it - I'm saying to do anything about it we should address the larger issue of popular will and politics).
Police rarely find murder / assault weapons this would allow them to track the assailant and find where this key evidence was hidden. Better evidence could mean a better justice system.
That said, our current justice system usually gets a conviction even when there is no murder / assault weapon. Clearly evidence just isn't that important to the justice system.
More Surveillance will probably lead to more accurate enforcement of laws, all else equal.
We already have old, broken down, and innocent guys walking out of prison 31 years after someone at the innocence project collected the exculpatory evidence that the state was supposed to have handed over to the defense 31 years earlier. Why would the state be more likely to fulfill their obligations to justice in this regard when that evidence is digital? I guess I just don't see that behavior all of a sudden changing because cameras are involved. In fact, cameras have been involved in the past, and the videos have still not made it to the defense in discovery.
Long story short, all else is definitely not equal. When it is, I'm sure a lot more people will exhibit less discomfort at the idea of the authorities retaining film in perpetuity on everything they do 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
What else are you dreaming of?
As it is, and always has been, all this stuff is to the disadvantage of the individual, not lessenig the burden of proof. Anything else is PROPAGANDA!
The problem isn't the techniques, it's that law enforcement in America seems to now be built more around profit than law abidence... And I doubt increased surveillance put in for the best of intentions wouldn't ultimately become coopted somehow by these interests too.
Would the immune system want better ways to identify threats to the state?
Humans are treated as cells. The values of Classical Liberalism and Liberal Democracy don’t apply in this model. The body politic is the main focus, as it was under Fascism and other such ideologies. Corporations together with the State.
Nowhere do we see this more than in China today. The social credit system for example. In the early stages, it seems rather benign, since people will be behaving better and crime will go down. But this apparatus can go far beyond simply preventing crime. Once it is in place and the screws will be tightened, you will see an AI-powered State, with fewer and fewer people at the top in control, or maybe no one really in control, not even the leaders, perpetuating itself against all competing organized thought, whether violent or not.
Already we see it with Falun Gong, Uyghurs, Tibetan nationalism, and now with Christian churches. For example:
https://amp.businessinsider.com/china-harvesting-organs-of-u...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jan/13/china-christia...
Falun Gong practitioners, for instance, may believe kooky things but don’t behave violently. And yet, they have been arrested and incarcerated without due process and held extrajudicially to re-educate them:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Falun_Gong
Some of the re-education camps can do positive things too, like teaching farmers en masse new techniques how to grow food to feed billions. China has to quickly innovate its way out of an environmental catastrophe and feed billions:
https://amp.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals...
The One Child Policy had mitigated potentially a worse disaster.
So it’s hard to say, really, that everything that an oppressive state apparatus is bad. For now. It has to take extreme measures to deal with population growth, for instance.
By almost eradicating child mortality 100 years ago we are bumping up against other limits — of sustainability and ability of ecosystems to not get totally polluted and exploited.
But in every other area, except population growth, this AI-powered state will eventually look NOTHING LIKE the individual-rights-based societies we have come to value so much in the West. And it will happen in the West, just more gradually.
They say the only way evil can triumph is for good men to do nothing. Well, when a large and powerful state with many people undertakes this kind of program, it is tempting to just let it happen. Like when Nazi Germany started treating its Jews in worse and worse ways, the world simply stood by, traded with German companies etc.
Sanctions don’t work. Private trade is good, it provides a counterbalance to the strength of the State apparatus. Sanctions just help radicalize a population into more nationalism and support for eg State developing atomic bombs to “defend itself”. States should not become Autarkies. So what is the only alternatives?
I think international inspectors should not just be for Iran. They should be the norm, including in the USA etc. They should be composed of a randomly selected (nationality wise) groups of people, have access anywhere with warrants, and should make sure that human rights abuses aren’t happening en masse. Think of it as a program funded by the international community to check that no individual “body politic” abandons human rights in favor of Fascism.
Culture is the other. We need a free internet, free spread of ideas. Free-ish movement of people. Without censorship of any ideas (however, with mandating that biased ideas that possibly those that radicalize populations to violence can be hard to share alone, but easy to share accompanied with opposing viewpoints... think Wikipedia rather than Twitter).
With no sanctions anywhere, free trade and culture, we may save human rights from the AI-powered states, at least for a few decades. China is already exporting the AI system to Venezuela and other places.
But I am afraid that, as with Climate Change, we won’t be able to coordinate ourselves to take effective action.
Yeah, this is a serious risk. I don't quite think you have the right solutions but you've certainly identified the problem.
I think the solution to this kind of thing might be found in zero-knowledge technology. A good system doesn't just harvest all the data and basically hand it out to any hacker or alphabet agency. A good system should only hand out aspects of the data that are actually needed. You should not be able to run arbitrary queries, but rather queries like "were any of these 5 suspects within 1km of the crime scene". If the answer is "No", then you don't need to know where those people actually were.
It isn't just useful for mass surveillance.
Bruce Schneier disagreed with him in 2008 [3] (and probably still does).
[1] https://www.wired.com/1996/12/fftransparent/
The practice of consent on websites right now is ridiculous. Look no further than the GDPR-required cookie notices every European website has. You know, the popup boxes you only look at long enough to find the "I accept" button? That's not meaningful consent. Nor is every clickwrap software whose 20 page license has buried in it "by using this software you consent to letting us track your every movement and sell it to data brokers" or whatever nonsense is current.
The only meaningful application of consent would be opt-in consent. Where you could use the software / website / whatever without agreeing to the invasion of privacy, and where the balance is tipped towards requiring consumers make an informed decision to opt in for some significant benefit. Of course no surveillance capitalist company, nor authoritarian government, would tolerate that kind of consent requirement.
The good thing about the GDPR in this context, is that it grants you the right to be forgotten; in the case of the OP:
1. It would not be legal for a company to collect information on you without your consent (if you are using their site, they are the data Controller).
2. It would not be legal for Facebook to share this data with another company, without listing the data collector as a Processor.
3. If you later discover that a company has shared your data to a broker, you can have them delete that data after the fact.
4. You're allowed to opt out of any collection that isn't required to provide the service; it's not permissible to just claim "I need to transmit your PII to this data broker in order to serve you news articles".)
So at least we have remedies for the cases where a site is later found to be acting outside of the norms that folks assume when they click through the terms, unlike in the US where you cannot really put the genie back in the bottle once your data has leaked.
I agree with your point that ideally people would pay attention to the permissions that apps/sites requested, and closely analyzed them, but it's quite clear to me that most humans don't care enough about privacy to take these actions ahead of time. So insasmuch as GDPR lets you fix those mistakes retroactively, it's providing a benefit.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3253939
If you have the time, the first audio of his 2018 lecture is a treat:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4daIk8PCPIc&feature=emb_logo
>We need to have a serious conversation about all the technologies of identification, correlation and discrimination ...
There is:
> Like other media companies, The Times collects data on its visitors when they read stories like this one.
1) Privacy in Public is impossible
Besides being a contradiction in terms, imagine what an ideal society of public privacy looks like: a society where everyone is masked, where voices are obscured, where names are anonymized, where everyone is isolated from everyone by a wall that says, “why do you need to know?” It is patently absurd to promote privacy in public. And ultimately the winners are those who don’t follow the law — those in power in the first place. Do you really think governments and corporations are going to follow their own laws, or fail to ensure loopholes which only their and the cronies can fit through? Yes, look at China. The solution to advanced technology is not to pretend it can be stopped. The solution is to make it available widely and freely. Technology can’t be stopped. But it can be monopolized and misused.
2) Privacy in Public is economic sabotage
Economically, the more corporations know about their customers the more that their business decisions — both strategic and tactical — will be made upon data rather than intuition. The less they know about their users — as any HN reader should know — the more their business is at risk of dying. The presumption of corporations as evil is simply unintelligent. It is especially galling to see such knee-jerk stupidity in a forum dedicated to making corporations. The greatest engine of wealth mankind has ever invented are corporations unhindered by market manipulations. The one exception being rules against monopolization and labor-abuse — i.e, practices that undermine the existence of corporations.
3) Privacy in private is overrated
I received an amber alert on my phone a few days ago. If even one child could be saved from abominable acts of evil, even if it meant privacy was abolished in public and private, I for one would be willing to make that sacrifice. Yes, I’d be embarrassed. Yes, it would put an enormous weight on me to know that anyone could find out about anything I’d ever do or am doing. But for me, a society of truth is a society without a place for evil to hide — whether that evil is kidnapping or corporate corruption.
3) Privacy is going to be lost.
The war is over. We shouldn’t pretend that those who stand most to abuse privacy — the powerful — are the ones best suited to control their own behaviors. Laws won’t stop those passing the laws. Only unhindered permeation of technology will.
I recognize I’m saying something unconventional if not provocative. But when people are scared they make irrational decisions. I’ve never seen so much irrationality among the intelligent as when it comes to privacy. People’s “thinking” on this topic is akin to religious devotion, and that’s what scares me the most.
On the contrary, you're preaching the conventional wisdom of today. And I also don't think you read the short article; it's simply about making more common-sense laws to at least achieve a modicum of privacy and put a leash on the data broker industry.
The technology can't be stopped, but we're still early enough in the game to limit data identification, correlation and discrimination.
Edit: I'd also like to recommend Schneier's books. For instance, his "Click Here To Kill Everybody" is a great look at how security with IoT is failing, why companies _want_ it to fail, and what sort of actionable legislation would fix these issues. He's not a pie-in-the-sky zealot for privacy.
So even with obviously hazardous chemicals, it still takes literal decades for the research and law to catch up. I'm imagining it will take twice as long for surveillance, which doesn't directly kill people/wildlife. Unless, perhaps, China's usage of the tech to oppress Uighur muslims gets decent coverage.
Though regulation undoubtedly helps to allow the development of these alternatives.
Things like environmental concerns also act against raw economic progress, but are necessary for a healthy society as well.
Privacy in public was possible 50 years ago, and no one was wearing masks or using pseudonyms. The existence of huge numbers of cheap machines that can identify people and which have perfect memories changed the system. We can't roll back to a time when the technology didn't exist, but that doesn't mean we have to allow its installation.
> If even one child could be saved from abominable acts of evil, even if it meant privacy was abolished in public and private, I for one would be willing to make that sacrifice.
That's textbook emotional manipulation and a failure to rationally consider the margins. You admit you'd be embarrassed, if two kids out of a billion make a childish mistake and it can't be forgotten, and they chose to commit suicide as a result, you've caused more harm than good. I don't even think that amber alerts do much good, most of those kids are just with one of their parents who lost a custody dispute, there have been zero proven cases where an amber alert saved one child, and I'd be willing to bet that there are more children hurt (not to mention adults, as they're less emotionally potent victims) when ten million drivers look down at their cell phones.
And your defeatist attitude towards the application of laws ignores the fact that we are not living in tribal caves ruled by the man with the biggest war club. Humans are able to organize into governments and make decisions and laws that limit some powerful people so that society is better overall.
My father assumes that a camera in a store is going to a fuzzy CRT display on a CCTV system, maybe watched by a sleepy security guard, and that the tapes will be overwritten in 24 hours. My son assumes that like a Facebook photo he's automatically tagged as having visited the store. We're likely to have a bit of a learning curve between the time that HN readers are aware of what can be and is being done with tracking cookies, IMEIs, cameras, and databases, and when the general public is tech-savvy enough to know what that means.
Then top it off with how quickly people are willing to surrender personal information for free or lower cost services. Privacy was given away for conveniences. People have already voted, they want as much as they can get for free and privacy is a coin they seen no value lost when trading it away. Worse many think that others don't deserve more privacy than they have because of some odd fairness perception, usually boiled down to that other group might be getting more.
The bootlickers don't bother leaving an explanation for their downvotes; you're under no obligation to operate on a higher moral plane to placate the demons who advocate for our subjugation.
I appreciate the engagement.
> if two kids out of a billion make a childish mistake and it can't be forgotten, and they chose to commit suicide as a result, you've caused more harm than good.
In this hypothetical world where everyone knows everything about everyone else, I'd imagine that fewer people would go unnoticed (and untreated) for being at high-risk for suicide. Also, online bullies would have nowhere to hide, as they'd be exposed and stopped. And ultimately, the shame of everyone would either be too much for society to bear and it would crumble in on itself, or maybe we'd lose a little bit of our shame as we came to understand that we're all fallible creatures.
> Humans are able to organize into governments and make decisions and laws that limit some powerful people so that society is better overall.
You're right, I'm skeptical of concentrated power. If I'm wrong, and privacy in public is a good thing, then I'll at least hold on to my assertion that those who pass laws are not going to adhere to those laws when it becomes an obstacle to them remaining in power (whether governmental or corporate). The better choice is to widely distribute technology and information in order to level the playing field, rather than assuming that those in power won't continue to do whatever they please.
The ability for the individual to take actions that the hierarchy doesn't want and to get away with it is a form of power. Excessive surveillance removes this power.
If we do that, we might stabilize on an egalitarian equilibrium, otherwise I think we'll descend into a kind of techno-fascism.
That's why the events in Hong Kong are so important: can a distributed mass win out over a centralized authority?
I've turned them off. I'm not sure it's much a privacy issue--at least any more than having my phone on is. But the likelihood that I'm going to be able to provide any useful information is miniscule vs. the inconvenience of an alert.
But you're basically arguing for ubiquitous monitoring (e.g. license cameras in the case of Amber alerts) becaause, who knows, it might help someone somewhere.
However, I encounter your defeatism/opposition in some of the privacy work I do, and it's good to see the prevalent narrative so boldly expressed. I would ask readers if they are willing to cede the field to the extent this person does? If not, an important first step in supporting privacy is rejecting the common penchant for defeatism.
This is a tautology not inherently, but because of how you're defining it. Privacy is not so simple as whether you can be surveilled in public or not. Technology opens the door to many complex ethical and legal nuances.
You offer a caricature of the future to start off this point, & then point out your own absurdity as a victory. Your examples of China are apt only to oppose your point. The technology in China is the best example we have of how surveillance tech enables specific uses and specific abuses. It is not the presence of the tech, but rather the state's monopoly over control over how the technology is used and abused, where the problem firmly lies.
2) Privacy in Public is economic sabotage
Your use of extreme theories and insulting language in this point doesn't deserve a response.
3) Privacy in private is overrated
Fortunately wiser and more experienced people than you wrote the US Constitution. They had found the elimination of privacy did not eliminate crime, but rather created more of it, concentrated in the hands of power. The elimination of privacy doesn't work how it ideally would in your fantasy.
3) Privacy is going to be lost.
The war is waging right now, and in the USA we're going to win. Laws, good people, and oversight do stop government abuses. Having multiple layers of competing governments does wonders for breaking monopolies of control, like what our friends in China have.
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>If even one child could be saved from abominable acts of evil, even if it meant privacy was abolished in public and private, I for one would be willing to make that sacrifice.
How is wanting to scour millions and billions of peoples minds and homes to try to find one person not an irrational fear driven decision?
>The presumption of corporations as evil is simply unintelligent. It is especially galling to see such knee-jerk stupidity in a forum dedicated to making corporations. The greatest engine of wealth mankind has ever invented are corporations unhindered by market manipulations.
It seems idolization of corporate profit seeking over all else has blinded you to the fact that this "greatest engine of wealth" is redlining in overdrive while steamrolling the planet, causing global scale ecological destruction which is well on its way to destroying the human race.
Imagine you are walking somewhere downtown, visit some stores, eating out somewhere, whatever...
Would you like to be followed by a few dozen people, making notices about every move of yours, what you bought when and where, how (much) you paid, while phoning back to some (central) bank to ask how much of your whole balance/credit that was? And always taking photos. And even intrusively interrupting you by standing in your way, trying to push some thing or service you don't even want?
I'd call that harassment, or even fraud, because in case of offered services you don't have time to reason about the obligatory small print.
To your 2) What you are calling engines of wealth, others may call (mostly) a pile of trash, be it physical or virtual. That is not sustainable in the long term, because Ponzi scheme.
3) As others have already mentioned: Cheap move of yours. Think of the children!1!!
For argument two, I don't believe owning your personal data is economic suicide. Imagine, instead of having ad companies track your every move and perform a bunch of expensive AI guesswork, they finally got smart and served opt-in ads that helped you research stuff in product categories _you_ tell them _you_ actually care about. Perhaps some of these services operate like "personal electronic shopping assistants". They're so good at saving people time researching cool new products people might otherwise never know about, people actually volunteer a little bit of their time in this process. Perhaps such heavily personalized ads makes clickfraud a thing of the past. Perhaps companies stop wasting money advertising diapers to 12 year olds watching minecraft videos on youtube. Perhaps this helps small businesses connect with customers and grow faster... Sounds like a better world to me.
Argument three falls apart when you remove the strawman. Privacy as data ownership doesn't stop you from allowing LEAs to issue amber alerts... Anyway, I'll leave it there since I need to go do other stuff.
> Economically, the more corporations know about their customers the more that their business decisions — both strategic and tactical — will be made upon data rather than intuition. The less they know about their users — as any HN reader should know — the more their business is at risk of dying. The presumption of corporations as evil is simply unintelligent. It is especially galling to see such knee-jerk stupidity in a forum dedicated to making corporations. The greatest engine of wealth mankind has ever invented are corporations unhindered by market manipulations. The one exception being rules against monopolization and labor-abuse — i.e, practices that undermine the existence of corporations.
I'd like to note that there is no one here objecting to fairly compensated user surveys. Acquiring market data isn't free and information can be quite valuable, so why should companies feel entitled to that information for free? Once upon a time surrendering some of your privacy for market data would be a mutually agreed on activity - now it's cheaper to just take that information by force and without the consent of those involved.
Your own idolization of the utilitarian view is nothing provocative, nor is it rational -- just ignorant of history. Your own "thinking" on the topic is also like religious devotion, analogous to one that ignores evolution, and not even because you reject it, but because you've never taken the time to read about it.
I don't doubt it. But when I wrote that I was being unconventional, I wasn't talking about the academy. I was talking about the HN zeitgeist. While the sample size is small here, don't you find it curious that 1 out of 17 responses agreed with me? And that I was called a bootlicker and demon. And that you yourself jumped to conclusions about who I am and what I've done with my life. I would normally ignore the personal stuff, but in this context it makes sense. Because, ironically, if/when privacy erodes completely, we won't have to guess anymore about one another. And I'll make the HN-unconventional assertion that both your response (and this response itself) would have been a bit more understanding, more insightful, and more fruitful for the both of us. As it is, we're essentially blind to one another right now as pseudo-anonymous names on forum.
Banning stuff will allow us to go after and punish the non-honest ones.
Banning stuff will make honest people do it less and therefore present less opportunities for non-honest actors to steal this valuable data (e.g. through security lapses).
There are no silver bullets, we cannot solve complex issues in one master stroke.
In a perfect World yes, we do not live in a perfect World and it is not so simple as many things testifies, drugs - they are banned - see how that works.
>Banning stuff will make honest people do it less and therefore present less opportunities for non-honest actors to steal this valuable data (e.g. through security lapses).
Reducing things and banning them to cater for the lowest denominator - Look at the history of things banned and tell me that that saw a reduction in crime as it don't - again....drugs.
> There are no silver bullets, we cannot solve complex issues in one master stroke.
Totally agree - but a poor stoke can do more harm than doing nothing, not advocating nothing but back to my first point if something appears broken then you fix it.
But I'll raise another issue with an analogy - if the internet was cars - would we allow people to drive without having a test. Yes cars can kill, but not like the internet is incapable of doing them same as we have seen. The internet and offerings have evolved and there are not restrictions beyond age (an artificial hurdle) that stop you doing what you like, oh and laws which are less clear in the quagmire of the internet as it is not in one country and country laws vary.
So unless you ban it everywhere, you are akin to sweeping it under the carper in one location and allowing free reign in others.
Let us remember that more crime has been committed and fraud via the telephone than via the use of facial recognition and old types of fraud - whilst banned/illegal - still prevail.
How did that ban on spam work out again - oh right, you got people who think, well its not in my spam folder so its not spam - this African Prince with loads of money must be legit as rules to block spam and this is not spam - that much I know and tada....a little knowledge driving on the internet strikes again.
Yes - no silver bullet - single solution, but banning things often works as a bad solution due to numerous factors - including human nature as many Number #1 music record that got banned from airplay will attest.
I understand that banning things just trigger the peole that want to legalize drugs but the topic is not about drugs or about guns.
I also would say that banning face recognition in public places is not similar to banning it in your private home or in a company that uses it on images where they have permissions to use it, what most people want is not getting tracked without permissions is more similar like I don't want second hand smoking in a public place where me and my family are but you can smoke in your home or wherever you have permissions from the others.
Pot and alcohol are both very easy to manufacture domestically where heroin is easy to transport. LSD on the other hand is simply not addictive enough.
They could and do punish people who take drugs, the problem is that every one takes drugs and they don't have the resources to punish everyone.
Laws are only effective if the masses agree to them, the masses don't want a surveillance state.
I can't see any survivorship bias at all!
Also, you might want to distinguish "banning common people from doing something they easily can do with local resources for their pleasure" and "banning large organizations from doing something on a global scale for profit".
There are stories we tell the chilodren where some people form a new community without rules because they hate rules and then one guy is a jerk and eventually they have to re-invent the rules one by one.
We are typically talking about nations and states (which aren't necessarily the same thing). You are born into it and typically normally stay within it for the majority of your life. Community is one of those words that are commonly abused these days to the point it doesn't really mean anything.
My comment was referring to real human communities, as an example in my village was introduced a garbage tax and some people were upset)including some in my family) because they did not want to pay for disposing teh garbage, the ones that burned was put to fire and the other kind was abandoned or thrown in the local river. In this case you see that sometimes new rules do not make all people happy. In case you will object because of the financial issue then there is a similar example but a few hundreds years back where a law was passed that you can shit everywhere you want and you must have a hygienic place or other law was pased and children were "forced" into schools instead of working the farms.
The vast majority of people don't really understand what it means for Facebook and Google to track every single click and action you do while on your device, track everywhere you go, who you talk to (both online and soon offline, if that isn't already the case, or even on the phone), and for every service on which they register to sell their personal data, and to tap Accept on all of the "free apps" that ask for contact list permission for no good reason.
They don't understand the implications because it's pretty difficult for just about anyone to understand the thousand possibilities in which that data could be used or who will be the thousand future owners of that data (legally or illegally).