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Comment by tcd | Hacker News Reader

I often wonder if we, as humans during this era, are really at the primitive end of the introduction of computers and big data.

We're still incredibly new to the concept of storing PB's of easily searchable and accessible data, and can be accessed at the speed of light.

At the same time, exposing this can do real human harm, depending on the motives (for example, Cambridge Analytica).

I wonder what the next 100, 500 years will look like, after all this has 'settled' down.

We're seeing this today with facial recognition and machine learning - new concepts today that will grow old with time.

I wish I was capable of seeing all of this 'big tech' in that time to see how it matures. To say we have a long way to go is an understatement.

Breaches like this should be impossible as there should be designs against it.

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> I wonder what the next 100, 500 years will look like, after all this has 'settled' down.

> Breaches like this should be impossible as there should be designs against it.

I see it the other way around. Privacy is equal to security, it is only as strong as its weakest link, and there are many many “links” (attack vectors) and the amount of data you can breach with asymmetric attacks is unprecedented. By way of ergodicity, everything’s going to be leaked eventually, no matter how good our intentions are to protect it.

If you take everything to its logical conclusion, it is inevitable that the concept of privacy is going to be absolutely destroyed in the future, and everyone will know everything about everyone at all times. The latest privacy laws are futile attempts to put the finger in the dike before it explodes; too little, too late.

> it is inevitable that the concept of privacy is going to be absolutely destroyed in the future,

Totally agree, and I am on record as saying that this will happen sooner than people think. Given the rate at which large-scale data breeches keep happening and the lack of ANY kind of consequences for companies and institutions who fail to protect data, I firmly believe that pretty much all personal data belonging to everyone will be either publicly accessible or available for sale by 2025 at the latest.

For most people their address history, phone numbers, medical history, financial transaction history, account- and other ID numbers, browser/search history and every email they ever sent or received will be available for search or purchase.

Yes, we are at the primitive end of history, even the first transistor is still within living memory. What these breaches do is normalize the loss of privacy, the protection of which eats into the profits that fuel the growth of the companies that collect it, and threaten their foundational roles in this early history. That this is early in the game is also why protective laws need to be passed for people to retain the power over their own information. Data is not as cheap as the law treats it, Google makes almost $100MM every week.

Furthermore, how much time do these breaches steal in lost productivity, or in diminished free time, for all of us? Quite a bit, but the only time you hear about that metric is when management is complaining about employees talking to each other in the hallway.

Protections not established early become harder to impose later, which is why the companies and lawmakers to which they donate downplay the severity of these breaches via pittances of penalties, 30min of revenues or something. Fines should be $1000 per individual exfiltrated, or a year of revenues (at last year's number), or other figure that would be actually effective...and with strict liability.

A big problem with slapping huge statutory damages / fines onto data breaches is that only the "suckers" will ever pay or even own up to it.

Recently in Washington State, a small research group at WSU lost a couple of hard drives that had PII data on them on order of 1 M people. They even had them in a safe; the safe was stolen and no real evidence of the data being the target of the theft was found.

Nonetheless, being good civil servants they scrupulously reported what happened and carried out required notification procedures to the million folks.

Their reward was to be sued for basically the maximum that their insurance would pay out.

How many thousands of times per year do similar things happen in private industry? Nobody knows. You don't even have to posit malice or a coverup; just think about how many times a year a hard drive backup of a database with a mere million records gets accidentally thrown away or sold off with surplus.

The stolen hard drive story appears to be a bit different than you portray: https://healthitsecurity.com/news/washington-state-universit...

If the liability had been $50MM or $500MM, you can bet their storage practices would reflect it (not to mention actually telling people you're collecting their data). "Eh, whaddya gonna do?" is absolutely a normalization and a devaluing well out of proportion to the damage that is done.

> concept of storing PB's of easily searchable and accessible data

The scale of this dataset is probably on the two/three digit MB scale. It's 6.5 million people and everyone adds probably less than 500 bytes to the dataset.

Let's say it's 500 MB. This isn't "big data", but it's still highly sensitive. It's still "only" a file on your Computer and deleting it still doesn't delete it safely.

The issue is the effectivity of our data handling devices. As the file is so small, it fits onto current USB sticks cheaply. People can put those USB sticks anywhere and smuggle them out of their jobs. Snowden claims to have gotten the NSA data out this way and even if he lies, it's certainly a plausible method.

The more effective our data handling devices get, the more data can be leaked.

I'm a bit of a pessimist and think we won't be able to stop such leaks in every domain. They'll just get worse and worse over time, the larger the data sets get that are being accumulated about people.

Former Google CEO Schmidt has famously said that there won't be privacy in the future. Maybe he's right. Maybe he's wrong and we figure out a way to preserve it. But doing that is super hard.

Maybe society is just ever changing and the "stable" state will be some form of singularity where a concept like "living on a planet" is regarded as outdated because we live in emulated environments in free orbit around a sun and the planets are better off being dismantled to build more emulated environments, and all our thoughts, dreams, plans, our entire existence is accessible to the environment's operators who claim to be "fair" like Google, Twitter or Facebook claim today.

I wonder if, or when computing will be superceded as the main driver of innovation. In 1950 computers existed but you couldn't have guessed that computation and the innovations derived from it would eat the World. What exists today that will transform the World again?

Unless said designs/process/overview was deliberately overlooked. This is a political app...

Given the history of obvious, obliviously bad flaws in elections machines everywhere, how can one not come to the conclusion that the rigging of the game is just being swept inside the box with the blinkenlights? Where no one can see or audit the process because this is SECURE code, no can see...

Investigations to see exactly who is funding the election tech companies, board members, prime investors, etc etc etc.

The flow of money will tell the story.

Its not that we do an especially bad job with data. Odds are your home is even less secure.

More secure, because a single home is, on average, not a lucrative target.

I’d call that “safe” rather than “secure”. To me, “secure” implies that the target remains safe even against a motivated adversary, not that it just happens to be safe because no such adversary happens to exist. Semantics aside, it just isn’t that hard to gain unauthorized entry into most homes.

1. The only people who can attempt to breach into my home are within driving distance.

2. My home has security systems which can either stop a crime from occurring (security lights, security doors, dogs, alarms, me) or will result in those perpetrators being caught (alarms which contact police, cameras).

3. I don't have the voter details of 6.5M Israelis in my house.

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