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Comment by DoreenMichele | Hacker News Reader

When you come from a small town, as I do, where everyone knows your face, public anonymity—the ability to disappear into a crowd—is one of the great pleasures of city living.

The thing is that most of humankind lived in small tribes or villages, everyone knew everyone's business and privacy practically didn't exist. The anonymity of city life is relatively recent and has often been used to further social behavior that wasn't acceptable, like secret affairs or criminal activity.

When everyone you know lives in a really small area, a lot of stuff is apparent by inference and can't really be hidden. This ends up de facto reining in behavior without anyone necessarily telling you to stop.

To be clear, I'm not trying to justify a surveillance state. I'm just commenting on the irony of people acting like anonymity is some long-standing norm in human society. It's really not. It's relatively new and relatively uncommon.

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Privacy is never just about keeping things secrets, it is just as much (or more) about protecting against bad outcomes. A typical example is that we can share the most intimate information to a doctor, but would feel a great sense of privacy loss if they in turn shared the information to someone else.

Small villages and towns has a lot of norm enforcement. A member of the group can't talk about anything just because everyone know everyone's business. There are a lot of complex rules about what information can be used when, where and how.

In sociology, gossip is commonly referred as the practice of norm enforcement. The information that get shared is not random. The stuff that get inferred, the anonymity that cities provide but small towns don't, is context dependent on what norms exist. The surveillance state however do not care about that context. It will take anything and use it anyhow it want, and that scares both people in the small town as well as people in the cities.

> most of humankind lived in small tribes or villages, everyone knew everyone's business and privacy practically didn't exist

No, you are missing the point. The problem is in unequal access to information.

If two neighbors can see each other's business it's not a problem most of the time. It's equal.

If a powerful entity runs large surveillance programs against a large number of citizens and individuals cannot do the same... it's a dictatorship.

> ... people acting like anonymity is some long-standing norm in human society. It's really not. It's relatively new and relatively uncommon.

Not at all. In many societies it was common to be known under a different names in different cities or while traveling. Without IDs and documents people had extremely strong anonymity.

Observation by individuals going about their business is a vastly different thing than machine-generated, correlatable logs of your activities.

The amount, granularity and specificity of detailed information routinely gathered about people is in no way comparable to small town life. I grew up in a small town. The busy bodies knew gossip about me, but did not have timestamped lists of my reading materials to go with my purchase history.

Also, it is possible to opt-out of small towns.

I think the point is that it's possible to opt out now. It wasn't always so both due to the effort (moving to a large city was much harder when you had to walk with your stuff for several dozen or hundred miles) and to the laws (serfs didn't get to opt out of anything).

Serfdom was also not the state of nature. Over the long millennia of human existence, it has usually been difficult to leave all the bullshit behind, but it has nearly always been possible. One problem that stone age humanity did not have was moving their "stuff", because that hadn't been invented yet.

I was born in a village of 2000 people. I didn't know anything about people on the next street. The village was right besides a large city and and since then be absorbed, but there is still a large difference to sharing some tents in the plains. And even then people probably had secrets.

Anonymity is just a means to achieve privacy. Anyone that comes from somewhere small enough not to have privacy by blending in with the crowd had privacy by not actually being watched all the time. For example, the cows in the field aren't gonna tell the preacher that your gay lover stopped by or that you smoke the devil's lettuce every night. Yes these are different kinds of privacy but for normal levels of deviance from whatever the socially condoned behavior is the practical affect is the same.

Yeah but the people who knew also stopped at the level of the small tribe, who were reasonably likely to be your in-group with your best interests at heart.

>who were reasonably likely to be your in-group with your best interests at heart

Or at the very least, you were dealing with people who were _also_ not anonymous. It's a balance-of-power issue more than anything.

There are fundamental differences between people and machines recognizing you. I'm sure people relied on the fact that other people forget. Machines don't. Machines all look the same and you cannot make the difference between friend and foe, who you should be hiding from and who you shouldn't. Machines can be far more intrusive than humans because they don't have to submit to any social norm, they are not afraid of being spied on themselves, they are not afraid of being recognized while spying. And they anonymize the people controlling them.

These make all the difference between being recognized by humans and machines.

> When everyone you know lives in a really small area, a lot of stuff is apparent by inference and can't really be hidden. This ends up de facto reining in behavior without anyone necessarily telling you to stop.

That’s a terrible way to live, IMO. Humans grow and evolve (not in the strict biological sense) by experimenting and doing things that others may frown upon (for reasons good or destructive). That people in the past had very little agency of their own for a species like ours is a blemish on social structures. All the freedoms we take for granted today have been enabled by or have come in conjunction with having better privacy.

We need a balance, but going back to how it used to be would be counterproductive.

In a small town there's mutual recognition. With surveillance there's a control by a small few. What would we think of surveillance apparatus if everyone could see the information equally?

The other aspect of a small town is that you can choose not to be seen. There are many more places to seek solitude. In cities, even parks are covered in cameras nowadays.

Access to solitude has been a human norm--at least in a free society. The dehumanizing effects of taking away access to solitude, removing the ability to sequester oneself, is one of the important historical lessons of the 20th century, from the holocaust up through to the end of the GDR.

> people acting like anonymity is some long-standing norm in human society. It's really not. It's relatively new and relatively uncommon.

It's not a "long-standing norm", it's a fundamental right, as most, if not all, fundamental rights we have today.

> When everyone you know lives in a really small area

Even in small towns and villages people had privacy inside their houses, farms etc.

But from now on, it's constant surveillance everywhere, all the time.

>It's not a "long-standing norm", it's a fundamental right

In the U.S., anonymity is a "fundamental right" only in certain circumstances and it differs by state. It's not a blanket right.

>Even in small towns and villages people had privacy inside their houses, farms etc.

This is still a thing if you choose it.

> This is still a thing

That's debatable, someone can legally "park" a drone above your back yard or in front of a window and the only legal thing you can do is to shield your life behind a non-transparent medium (board your windows).

Someone can legally access your private data coming from ISPs, mobile operators, any number of devices in your house, etc. and the only legal thing you can do is cut yourself off from all of those services that admittedly are more or less a requirement for modern life.

The examples can continue. Saying "if you choose it" doesn't do it justice, the choice comes with severe and likely unreasonable sacrifices relative to what society offers and expects/demands these days.

Now we're talking about the internet. When you get online, you're entering a public space. Being physically inside your house at the time is irrelevant IMO. You don't have to buy smart appliances either. Or apps to control your lights. Use light switches. You CAN still choose to be private in your home. Regarding the drone example, even if technically legal, I seriously doubt a person parking their drone like that would get away with it for long. It would be a scandal. "Local man parks his camera drone over people's houses! Insists it's legal!"

Actually my comment was explicitly referring to both physical and virtual worlds, especially since OP's comment was mostly about the real world. I didn't mean specifically that you are inside the house when using the internet, rather that you lost your privacy no matter which channel you use.

The fact that you have to choose between not using internet or mobile phone (both relatively critical in this day and age), or implicitly give a private company the right to use your (meta)data in any way they see fit is basically an admission that privacy is not enforced, it's taken away from you. In the past nobody logged all of your physical visits around the city, and certainly not at any substantial scale, so the topic never made sense even if you were crossing public space. You can't judge the present by the laws made for the past. You don't just have the right to bear a musket because that's what existed when the Constitution was written. So privacy should refer to the principle, not the actual mechanism and implementation.

Drone related, things are more nuanced. The drone may be in my back yard but filming in yours no matter how tall your fence. And unlike a real person hovering around your house, a drone operator is anonymous for all intents and purposes. Unlike a real person, a drone or (hidden) cameras throughout a city can be out of sight but "remembering" everything. You don't have to get away with it for long. The fact that you can get away with it once is enough of an open door. Once here, once there, and pretty soon your phone collecting every piece of private information about you and sending it out is perfectly acceptable.

> drone

Not in my country and I would imagine that you may be allowed to shoot that tin can down in the US.

But legislation is both easy and effective. There is a huge difference for privacy if compromising information is legally obtained or not. Sure, some will ignore it that can be addressed separately. Again, legislation would be extremely easy.

ISPs can use your data because it isn't legislated otherwise. But even there are limits and not all information can be legally accessed. A solution would be to use the network of your neighbor, but I am sure we wouldn't want to escalate this problem further.

> I would imagine that you may be allowed to shoot that tin can down in the US

This is the debatable part. The FAA considers drones to be aircraft—and under federal law, shooting at aircraft is a crime [0]. The devil's in the details of course. Such cases were usually dismissed because it means trying whether a drone is considered to be trespassing or not and no judge wants to touch this.

The best precedent on this is from the 1946 States v. Causby when the Supreme Court ruled that a farmer in North Carolina could assert property rights up to 83 feet in the air. [1]

Again, the law failed to keep up with the ever accelerating evolution of tech and the SC will probably have to weigh in on pretty much every topic soon, to tweak the interpretation of every outdated law.

> information is legally obtained

Which is why I said that it's not a real choice, not if you have to give up things that are considered more or less basic needs or requirements today. That's because most such information is obtained perfectly legally so there is no recourse. Internet tracking, real life face recognition at every step, all your devices collecting data on you, your "choice" is to pretty isolate yourself from society. Is it a realistic choice then?

[0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/32

[1] http://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme-court/328/256.html

Fundamental rights are even more mythical than long-standing norms.

Even in small towns and villages people had privacy inside their houses, farms etc.

No, they really didn't. Homes were tiny compared to modern American homes. Walls were often thin. Windows were often simply openings in the wall with no glass.

That's exactly part of my point. And it's well documented, though it may not seem obvious to modern Americans who tend to project images of modern homes onto the past.

I think modern American houses are still made out of paper. The ability to escape peer pressure was fundamental in progressing society, which would mostly stagnate with extended surveillance. I see no advantages of going back there. If you expect more security, I doubt the wishes will ever fulfill themselves. Would also be quite irrational if we look at the development of violence.

I see no advantages of going back there. If you expect more security, I doubt the wishes will ever fulfill themselves.

I'm going to repeat myself here: I'm not advocating for more surveillance. That isn't at all why I commented on this.

I commented because I think you don't solve a problem by spouting deluded nonsense and pretending the world works differently than it does.

The fact that humans have a long history of living with all the neighbors knowing their business may be part of why surveillance is a thing. Some part of our monkey brains may be going "We really need to know everything about everybody and this makes sense." Understanding that may help people articulate better mental models concerning "What's wrong with this picture and what do we need to do differently?"

I realize people tend to not actually listen to what gets said and they project their baggage and fears onto the words of other people, but I absolutely am not not not not not advocating for more surveillance. I find social stuff fascinating and my experience suggests that understanding the social and psychological context is step one in trying to put a stop to bad patterns and finding better answers.

(Five nots in a row is maybe not the best way to emphasize my point, but we aren't supposed to type in all caps and I don't know what a good solution is.)

Sorry, I didn't mean to say you would do that. "If you expect more security" was meant to be equivalent to "If one expects more security". Probably a language thing, my fault.

But back to the topic I still think surveillance being the historical norm isn't too accurate. For over a decade we got more and more surveillance with the justification of terrorism, civil unrest and security. Similar aspirations are probably numerous throughout history.

I think everyone favors stability at some point, but to me it looks like the classical ambition to remain in control and fears that cannot really explained by a rational risk analysis, even if officials are in a position of responsibility. But I don't think that many people are keen on monitoring others. There is gossip, but that mostly happens due to nearly the same motivation or is just a detached way to reaffirm each other.

It would be pretty easy to get supporters against censorship. Instead these security measures are creating the dissidents it fears so much.

Probably a language thing, my fault.

Probably a language thing, the fault of English. ("FTFY")

I'm recovering from a mold exposure, something I'm allergic to. When I'm not coughing up phlegm, I'm conked out and sleeping hard. So I'm done with this discussion, having nothing whatsoever to do with anything anyone here said.

But the bright side is that people on the internet aren't judgmental.

edit: I think your point of view isn't comparable. Of course privacy was prevalent. There are some way too curious people in some villages and that is it. That isn't even close to the current situation where your behavior is measured on every click.

but... that excerpt you quoted is saying what you wrote?

author went from small town where everybody knows you and everything to the (supposedly big?) city where you can merge in. and author finds it great.

most people are decrying mass surveillance. not small scale overseeing. many people i know are not concerned that neighbors are looking after each other...

Plenty of affairs in small villages. Always have been.

> The thing is that most of humankind lived in small tribes or villages, everyone knew everyone's business and privacy practically didn't exist.

Where's your source for this?

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