Google's Chief Internet Evangelist: 'privacy may be an anomaly' (2013) | Hacker News Reader

Google's Chief Internet Evangelist: 'privacy may be an anomaly' (2013)

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77 pointsgullyfur54 comments

It's odd to describe Vint Cerf as Google's Chief Internet Evangelist, a largely honorary and emeritus position, as opposed to co-creator of TCP/IP for which is is famous. It makes the headline and framing feel very click-baity.

The referenced FTC announcement was titled "Internet Innovator Vinton G. Cerf to Keynote FTC's Internet of Things Workshop".

More people know what Google is than TCP/IP.

And more people know what the internet is than Google.

I think, in a weird way, this is actually debatable.

I read the comment as "more people know what the internet is than google knows what the internet is".

In some developing countries many people believe that Facebook is the internet.

How is TCP/IP relevant to his opinions on Privacy?

It's relevant to the reader to understand the impact this man has had on developing the internet as we know it, and realising that he probably knows what he is talking about.

Maybe there should be three terms acknowledged in the study of privacy:

Public

Obscure

Private

For the longest time we have interpreted obscurity as privacy. Such as what your house looks like. Or how many people know of your legal immigration status.

There are very few pieces of information that are truly private, like social security number, health records (known only by Healthcare providers), and the actions you did in secret where no one was present, and maybe even the thoughts you have and the writings of your journal.

I sometimes wonder about the day when even thoughts won't be safe from outside scrutiny.

> There are very few pieces of information that are truly private, like social security number

Most countries don't have such a number with such high value.

How do those countries handle taxes, public services, and credit?

Those countries do have a number, but it's not SSN it's a National Identification Number and its usually not considered valuable or secret information.

They have similar IDs, but they are IDs not authentication methods in and of themselves. SSNs are Bearer IDs that the knowing of is proof of identity, which is dumb.

> There are very few pieces of information that are truly private, like social security number, health records (known only by Healthcare providers)

Knowing the security of the organizations that handle these, I don’t really think so.

> the writings of your journal

…unless that journal is electronic

I think this starts to get at it, but missed the lopsided situation we're in today.

In the small town he mentions, yes, there's little privacy, but it's constrained to the small town, and largely equal. Everyone knows about everyone.

If someone from outside showed up to ask questions the town would likely protect your privacy, but also let you know someone was asking questions.

Instead today there are corporations (some public, some very secretive) gathering vast amounts of information and it's impossible to know who knows what about you. That information is also much more easily tradable, so it spreads.

For example, in the small town, pre-IT, it was hard to produce consolidated, and deep reporting of who's buying what, beyond the memory of the staff.

Now Target, Amazon, etc can know not just what you're buying, but what you're looking at, and correlate it with information from other sources, and it can be easily correlated with public records, and other information on a scale that's just wasn't ever possible historically.

I think this assumes people don't have a choice about being "extremely online". As someone who quite literally grew up on the Internet in the early 90s (before that was common), I have pulled back my engagement significantly in the last 5 years. I'm not on social media at all.

And you know what? Other than a few Facebook Groups, I realized I'm not missing much. I rather enjoy living life offline; I'm not obsessed with checking the news 30 times a day or being performative with my posts. The last few weeks have actually been pretty hard for me because it's like being forced to take heroin when you've been clean for a while.

But I also have privacy. There are things in my life that I don't feel are even appropriate to broadcast widely, so I don't. You can't really Google me and find anything meaningful. The advertisements I see are not in any way aligned to things I would do / buy, which makes it way more obvious how much advertising we are subjected to. I feel it's a bit like peeking behind the curtain.

> I'm not on social media at all.

What's HN then?

HN is an Internet forum: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_forum

Which is one kind of medium for socially interacting.

Well, if you insist, sure, but social networks are focused on people while forums are focused on topics (news article etc.). The difference is significant enough that some people may post on various forums all day long but never on Twitter or FB.

/r/selfawarewolves

Social media like the rest of them, except you can be pseudonymous here.

You can be pseudonymous on almost all of them. For the ones that "require" real names, your name just has to look real.

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

Not having to eat your own dog food helps a lot too... You lose your privacy for his benefit, not the other way around.

Yeah, in the modern world privacy is a luxury. It's actually pretty damn hard to find information about many technology executives outside of their LinkedIn profile; but many lower-income jobs practically require an active social media presence.

Exactly correct. Corporations like Google and Facebook successfully turned privacy into a luxury good available only to the oligarch class. See for example Zuckerberg buying all the mansions around his, to protect his privacy, with the money he made proselytizing "privacy is dead" and selling us out to advertisers.

I’m interested in which jobs you speak of. Surely nobody cares whether or not you have aFB profile when deciding to hire you as a grocery stocker or cashier...

> according to a study by CareerBuilder, nearly 70% of employers screen their candidates using social media and what’s more surprising is 57% of employers are less likely to even contact applicants who lack an online presence [0]

[0] https://www.lawdepot.com/blog/should-employers-look-at-socia...

"having an online presence" is a much lower bar than "on social media".

Your comment is based on a summary quote, the full text linked in the article makes it perfectly clear:

> 57 percent are less likely to interview a candidate they can't find online

> 54 percent have decided not to hire a candidate based on their social media profiles

> Half of employers check current employees' social media profiles, over a third have reprimanded or fired an employee for inappropriate content

> 70 percent of employers use social media to screen candidates, up from 11 percent in 2006

For more than half of the world's population or 80+% of all internet users "an online presence" means precisely "social media". Nothing else comes even close to that. It's also one of the few segments where people use their real identity. Your anonymous HN account will fly under the radar.

Let's not bury our heads in the sand, employers will check social media so they don't hire anyone who's publicly offensive or extremist, unprofessional, trashes their employer, even someone posting too much or with poor communication skills, etc. From a link in the article I posted above [0].

[0] https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/number-of-employers...

I wouldn't say my job is low level (it's on the higher end of the spectrum) and in the past few interviews the recruiters/HR/interviewer/(whatever their exact role in the company may have been) added me on social media to explore my profile before the interview.

Actually for my current job they added me right after I won the recruitment, around the time I was starting the job, "validated" my timeline on different platforms, and then quietly removed themselves from my lists. So they did some due diligence but wanted to show this had no bearing on the recruitment process.

Is there a Firefox extension to fold threads containing that kind of recurring generalities? Sinclair's quote (not even quoted here), "If you are not paying for it, you are the product", "Government are bad", etc. ?

Add "Chrome is evil, you ought to use Firefox instead" and "I switched from Google to DDG and it's mostly fine, apart from having to use !g as a prefix everytime I search anything on it". Oh and please make it a Chrome addon ;)

I prefer "Even if you are paying for it, you are the product"

This is Vint Cerf, co-creator of TCP/IP (aka the internet protocol). He's better known by his actual name, isn't he?

By technical audiences maybe. By the general public, Verge readers, etc, not so much. Half of the population doesn't know who the vice president is, much less Vint Cerf.

We're on Hacker News. I think we can assume audience here is fairly technical.

I'm smart enough and I didn't know he was the cocreater of tcp/ip. I also get him confused with Tim Berners Lee, as they are both referred to as the father of <2 different things that are use somewhat interchangeably>.

It's a reasonable hypothesis, but I think it overlooks the scope of information that is now shared electronically and the ability to collate it. Noticing the people from whom somebody get mail is very different from having access to a huge amount of private communication in a queryable database.

As people have said before, a modern smartphone is like a diary times a thousand.

> Elaborating, he explained that privacy wasn't even guaranteed a few decades ago: he used to live in a small town without home phones where the postmaster saw who everyone was getting mail from. "In a town of 3,000 people there is no privacy. Everybody knows what everybody is doing."

Terrible, stupid analogy. If I wanted to have a private conversation with someone, I could just close my door or make sure no one was eavesdropping in the bushes. Perfect secrecy. In the digital realm, there's always a danger that my message will be recorded, decrypted, or analyzed and I have no idea how long that message will live. Internet communications are insecure, but that is not the default in real life person-to-person interactions.

It does work in some sense: everyone in town will know you bought that fancy new thing, etc.—there's less privacy there—but as far as communication has been concerned, the default was private: no one other than the participants hears the message.

And I think scale matters. We are living in an eavesdropping-on-steroid era

Agreed.

Clay Shirky in Here Comes Everyone compared kids online convos to real life, from memory:

Kids hanging out in a food court, gossiping about this and that, are talking to each other. Not to outsiders. And adults eavesdropping are creepy. They treat their online chatting the same way.

What I take away from Shirky's (many) observations is that social conventions haven't adapted to the new reality and that our new communication technology was implemented irrespective of social norms.

I haven't used Snap, so this is speculation: I think it's tech of short-lived messages tried to implement social norms. Which would be exceptional in the tech world.

Is there any way to make personal data usage within companies more transparent and verifiable? Are there known studies/works in this line of thought? In an ideal world, what can we do to make data usage more transparent?

How would you guarantee privacy by requiring transparency? They are opposites.

I had been a staunch advocate of not sharing any personal information wherever possible, but recently I've been thinking whether I've approached the whole privacy issue from a wrong angle. I now believe privacy is the lesser evil we pursue because of lack of trust. The world is full of "evil" corporates that funnel our personal info into black boxes for their private gains. We have no idea what happens to our data once they're collected and fear that they could be used to exploit or even harm us down the road. In this zero-sum environment, our best option to protect ourselves is by not sharing data at all.

Trust is the game changer. We almost take it for granted that increased transparency is inherently good, and we've seen how people's data could be used for good in how countries like S. Korea handled the COVID crisis. Verifiability and transparency are how we achieve trust.

Agree with him, we need to evolve and adapt. Relying on privacy is not feasible going forward. Instead of privacy we need to strive to minimize the damage due the information being online.

Open source is a work in progress. There are plenty of software and hardware projects that care about security and big tech can't stop them although they would probably like to.

Vint Cerf has been infected with COVID-19 [0], btw.

[0]: https://twitter.com/vgcerf/status/1244636584508604417?lang=e...

Well, Google may be an anomaly too...

Oh let me be more explicit: Google's destiny is deeply intricated with geopolitics, and as several US-based giants it will have its future indexed on the US destiny. And the US are declining at the speed of light. China has built its own tech powerhouse and it is dwarfing the american digital universe. Moreover Trump's tech blocade on China is just prompting them to develop alternatives on every possible hardware and software product and therefore China is becoming the biggest threat to US Big tech companies. Europe can (and will) go on make easy money taxing Google and other 'privacy predating' companies because they cannot afford the luxury to quit the biggest trade bloc in the world... ANd it is a good strategy to weaken the US. If you think that Google will remain what is is now, get your head off the SV tech blogs and read a bit about geopolitics. So yeah, I think that Google is anomaly. And most anomalies tend to disappear...

indirect Proof:

To all Googlers, does your contract include clauses about Confidential Information, Trade Secrets, NDA-type clauses etc? Great penalties for breaking these?

-- Q.E.D

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