When did “privacy issues” start to mean “too much privacy”?
mleverything.substack.com
mleverything.substack.com
If that statement is uncomfortable, this is the level of criticism that anyone building a new, divergent, or privacy focused technology or platform can expect from mainstream institutions in the current political climate. We can rail and write screeds against how insane it is, or we can write the code that gives people the tools to preserve the human dignity and freedom that individual privacy makes possible. (mods, please delete if this crosses the provocation line, it seemed important and topical enough to take the risk.)
But the main point is that there is no need to explain why you need basic privacy, it is already revealed why you need it when the NSA goes on a manhunt when somebody reveals that they can search every information on you with a single click. Or when the big five get their shady practices revealed they get defensive and start making bull crap points, or that there are laws on privacy for a reason. Their arguments always have a ton of flaws because they are only after an agenda, public shaming is the answer to their bull crap. "If you aren't doing some shady stuff with that binary then why aren't you releasing the source code?"
Likening anonymity to being silenced is a little far-fetched idea when compared to simple acts like avoiding data leaks.
I don't value anonymity because it allows me to say offensive things without consequence. I value anonymity because mob justice is arbitrary and disproportionate.
People can and will harass you over the stupidest perceived slights, or just because you're hot. Some people won't be satisfied with just attacking your arguments, no matter how petty the subject.
If you're given sufficient attention, you're bound to make someone unreasonably angry, no matter your stance. Privacy protects you from those loonies.
Is it so that if it’s not a big red in-app button, it’s too complicated?
I dunno, the journalists carry their handy recorders with them all the time, have they forgotten how they work all of a sudden?
People should never rely on technology to ensure their content remains ephemeral. Snapchat tried and that obviously never worked. There used to be automated tools that could save content out of the cache automatically.
It's as if the police learns a group of terrorists used a local coffee shop to meet and go through some details of their operation, and then proceeds to arrest the coffee shop owner not on the grounds that he knows the suspects (for the sake of the story, he doesn't), but on the grounds that an incriminating conversation happened within his walls and he had the chutzpah to not have the place bugged, in case someone is going to need those conversations and so that the owner can be held responsible for the conversations people have in his shop.
In fact I won't be surprised if at least one of replies to this comment expresses a genuine lack of understanding what's wrong with this story. Just sad.
If it takes off it will go through the same problems that every other unregulated online-casino-posing-as-a-neutral-social-network has gone through. Oops, kids are using it. Sorry. Oops, turns out we're boosting engagement with white supremacist clubs. Sorry. And so forth.
If a factory for get-rich-quick schemes makes it difficult to leave a trail of the damage it's inflicting on its user base, I'm not sure in which moral universe that could be considered a desirable feature.
What is the reason that users shouldn't be allowed to have the strongest guarantees of privacy possible if it happens to be the case that they are users of "proprietary apps" that want to "boost engagement" (here, of course, engagement being people talking to/with other people)?
This is the most horrifying thing I've read on HN and not seen downvoted to oblivion.
> driving engagement
I wrote
> boost engagement using whatever industry standard and novel methods it can find
AFAICT the challenge of something like Signal is to have a UX that feels like everything else, while being able to essentially prove by design that they cannot leverage the user's data. E.g., they can't plug the user's data into the kinds of nasty rabbit-hole algos as featured on Youtube.
That's not "whatever novel methods" they can find. It's highly constrained given the privacy guarantees they are after.
Everything is constrained in some dimension. To assert that E2EE as a constraint immediately removes “whatever novel methods” from consideration is non-sensical. Is CH not constrained by being audio only? By being invite only? By being iOS only? By being mobile only?
I’ll ask again, why is it that users should be denied privacy guarantees because an app is proprietary and wants to drive engagement growth? Do you demand the same for telephone lines?
Having Facebook owned crap in the same sentence as telegram is doing telegram dirty, telegram has shown that they stand up for censorship and the program provides a pretty basic privacy level that i think should be the absolute minimum. Whatsapp on the other hand is facebook owned and we all know what that means so no need to elaborate.
E2EE is not everything, it doesn't mean that your conversation are private. Even if you can prove that the proprietary app uses E2EE (Discord said they did use it for voice calls but then they posted charts of what people talked about...) there is the metadata part which is still super goddamn important. Knowing: (who talks to who, when and where, with what device...etc) is still super effective to fuck someone over.
Lastly, there shouldn't be any privacy guarantee with proprietary apps because you can never know what the app will do, you can make speculations based on intercepting network packets and looking at system logs on it accessing memory places and stuff. But there is always the nice surprise of it doing not what it is supposed to do which is considered by all means malware. Remember even on a pixel with Graphene OS Proprietary apps can still use super sonic tracking if worse comes to worse for them.
So again-- if someone builds the same ole' shitty proprietary business model on an "at all costs" growth model that adopts an early band of scam artists, it is without a doubt undesirable to make it difficult for the future victims of those scams to collect evidence. (And it doesn't matter that one could get a screenshot, and that one could record the audio, defaults matter.)
Now you’re talking about the specific features located in CH and then talking about “scam artists” with, of course, no meaningful definition or description of what that could possibly mean in this context.
At least try to be coherent and consistent.
Making Clubhouse record the calls is, of course, the wrong solution.
...Only if what they are doing involves a part of their public duties. (Like that covered in the Brown Act in CA) Otherwise, the journalist is not entitled to hear and repeat arbitrary conversations held in confidence between the politician and others. For instance, they aren't entitled to hear conversations between the politican and their spouse about what they like in the bedroom, or their anonymous post on a bathroom furnishings enthusiast forum about which type of toilet can handle massive poops the best. That's simply none of your business.
This is about politicians using Clubhouse to talk to their constituents. It qualifies.
https://cyber.fsi.stanford.edu/io/news/clubhouse-china#appen...
One case, personal: my friend’s ex-gf is on Clubhouse. He has her unfollowed on Facebook, and he would prefer to see her as little as possible. And yet clubhouse keeps recommending him the rooms she is in, even though he didn’t follow her.
The opposite is true as well - there is no way to subtly hide yourself from someone on Clubhouse (as in: don’t show the other person I’m in the room unless they enter).
As for GDPR - as soon as an app has your private data (like phone number, a list of followers and so on), certain laws apply - having a right to be forgotten for example, or a right to receive what the service has on you. I’m not sure if Clubhouse adheres to GDPR, but there definitely are things that apply.
Think of it this way: it's not a wiretap to record a public speaker.
Even in all party consent states, a clubhouse session might qualify as public speaking and not be subject to any recording restrictions.
Although a wrinkle is a single user in a two-party jurisdiction overrides and all parties would need to be notified, and if you don't know for sure where each end user is, then you're taking a gamble on the legality.
There is a sharp schism between subscription journalism and ad-supported content. For the most part, the former are doing investigatory work. For the most part, the latter are not.
A policy of staying off-record by default is not an unreasonable countermeasure to that problem.
Well, the counterargument is that it's indicative of taking actions that you know will be met with general criticism and can be justified.
For politicians I'm going to guess that a lot of stuff they don't want on record is specifically related to their self-betterment by somehow (even minorly) compromising their duty.
“You know what the E in email stands for? Evidence.”
Not that it really matters. His predecessors have all had plenty of evidence of corruption, have never been as productive as him and they still kept their jobs, so he probably just didn’t want to deal with checking his inbox.
An email that, for example, threatens bad performance reviews if an employee doesn't show up at an optional after-hours company fundraiser, is something someone wouldn't want on record. That doesn't mean you should say it in-person in the break room where you're not on record instead of emailing it. It means you shouldn't use performance reviews as a weapon to coerce things you can't or won't contractually demand from employees.
Two tools are great for combating this sort of malfeasance:
First, slip an acknowledgement for the verbal request in an email. Something like "Hey, the company event Friday night which you mentioned was critical to my performance review. Is that business casual?" or "You told me to get this internal request for your project done before taking care of my urgent customer tickets, here it is." can help you keep a paper trail with implicit acknowledgement.
Second, as long as you're not in California, Delaware, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, or Washington, and you have an Android, install a call recorder app: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.callrecord... was an app I used for a while in a sensitive situation. Even if you never use it, it's nice to have if something was to blow up.
The media doesn't work for us. It works for its shareholders and most media shareholders are pretty alright with corruption in government because they're part of it.
And that's not even taking into account that we'd likely require a trail for accounting to know exactly where money went, so that it can't simply be "cash spent" to give back $50 untraceable to a bunch of people.
Why don't you think that would work?
It is also generally recognized that there is such a thing as dangerous speech but I don't think we even need to start including that category of speech to hit a contradiction - that said we can and should strive to allow as much freedom in expression as possible.
What people are nostalgic for is the ability to have semi-anonymous semi-ephemeral speech.
For example: The ability to have a private conversation in public without fear someone is recording you and can easily use that recording to identify you.
And while that is all horrible, I have played Dungeons and Dragons my entire life without persecution and none of the bands I listen to who are the same age as me have been harassed by the government. Not something I can say about the lates 80s and 90s from my understanding of it. (I am referring to the DnD panic and the legal harassment that destroyed the Dead Kennedys among other bands who the Govt pursued)
The dog doesn't either. Cats, an empty room, same story.
Add anotger human to the equation, and my, how circumstances change.
People love gossipping, and they always have. It's just that offline the news won't spread as quickly and the rumors wont reach your boss quite as easily.