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Comment by ricardobayes | Hacker News Reader

Change my mind on this, but in countries with freedom of speech, the only reason to have this much 'privacy' is if you're doing something shady. Again, looking for a conversation here. edit: By 'this much' I mean going extreme lengths to secure privacy, the online equivalent of using a numbered swiss bank account. Nice discussion so far, thoroughly enjoying it. I don't mind the dislikes, if that makes your day better, dislike away.

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This inevitably came up back when I taught privacy and security classes. I always asked everyone with kids to raise their hands (most hands went up).

Then I would ask "don't raise your hands, but when dealing with your kids, have any of you ever acted in a way wasn't captured on camera?"

I don't mean beating or physical abuse or anything that horrible, and everyone knew it. Combine young tired kids with a cranky, tired adult, and it's almost guaranteed that the adult will have had at least one rage meltdown.

They probably only yelled and ranted. But they probably looked like a monster doing it.

How quickly would such an image or film go viral? And how condemned would the person be?

We are all foibly humans, we all have moments that we regret or that fill us with shame. And we're all glad they weren't recorded for posterity.

Privacy isn't about protecting your best face, your public face. It's about protecting all of your faces, all of your moods, your knowledge, your relationships, etc.

We have free speech, but do we have freedom from judgementalism? Until we do, we all need privacy.

Thanks for the example there. I should have clarified better I meant more like the online equivalent of numbered swiss bank accounts, not a simple visit to the doctor's office or yelling at kids. I think one of the key discussions of this decade will be how much is too much privacy - and how little is too little privacy. We will see products and services triumph and fall based on this discussion.

It's about trust. If someone is trying to find out what I'm doing, I'm going to hide what I am doing because they are acting suspicious. The more asymmetric the power balance, the less trust can exist.

A less biological, more modern concern, is that a potentially super-intelligent actor (e.g. an ML team dedicated to finding human weakness and exploiting it, like marketing depts do) could find out things about me that even I didn't know and use it against me.

In the modern world complete paranoia and distrust in is the only strategy with guaranteed sucess which respects our drive to survive. Mass-manipulation of elections is a symptom of the disease.

One aspect to this is that cultural norms, and those in power, change over time. There are tons of people who said or believed things 10 years ago that would get them fired today. And that’s in countries with freedom of speech.

I’d be shocked if most people would be ok with public disclosure of every inconsiderate, off-color, or poorly worded joke you’ve ever made in private. That’s leaving aside things like intimate conversations with a spouse/SO, etc.

That said, I wouldn’t be using a service like this to get there, but I do value the ability to use a privacy-focused messaging app in my day-to-day life.

Not sure of the provenance of the quote, but I heard it from Steve Gibson: "I don't have anything to hide when I'm using the toilet, but I still like my privacy when doing so."

Exactly this, +1. I definitely have nothing to hide but I really don't want my photos of my kids to end up in some dark web location used by pedophiles, just because google is an idiot and let it slip while backed my photos without my consent in their cloud (true story, I had to fight 3 months to have that backup deleted from their server).

Example: someone has an abusive spouse that they’re trying to get away from a needs a way to communicate for help without them being able to find out

Interesting - around here they have a code word that can be said to the pharmacist and they will know what to do (call the cops).

That's nice but it can't work in every circumstance. Perhaps the abusive spouse is a cop, for example, or someone with connections to the local government who would be likely to find out if the police were involved. Perhaps the victim simply isn't convinced that they would be taken seriously or receive sufficient (and timely) protection against retaliation. It's good that there is a system in place which should help the majority of victims, but sometimes unique circumstances call for unique solutions.

The key word in what you wrote is "shady" because that word is going to be open to interpretation by the enforcers who are almost certainly corrupt to some extent. So, it's better to just limit the power of the enforcers as much as possible (in other words, the maximum limit that you can convince your society to allow).

Can you look up emails or listen to phone calls of a high ranked politicians or the rich elite? You can't because they think it's none of your business and have power to do their business in secrecy. There's a lot of shady people doing some large scale crime.

You can want to keep something secret without doing something shady.

How you want your doctor to tell you that you've got gonorrhea: in a private conversation in their office, or through shouting it at you in the waiting room?

Some great ideas thanks. But I feel most of the examples given are not adequate. By 'this much privacy' I meant going out of way to use 'untraceable' software. I don't think a doctor's office is relative to this, more like a numbered swiss bank account.

Ok, think of someone in a situation where the cost of being discovered is too great, even if unlikely.

Whistleblowers, human rights activists, people in abusive or dangerous living situations they can’t immediately escape, sexual assault victims seeking support in private, a well known person who has personal issue they want to keep to themselves.

If you stand to lose a lot by being identified, then you’re a use case.

Why is using untraceable software something that should be considered as "going out of your way", in your opinion? I think it's just because it's relatively uncommon today. But if all software was close to the untraceable end of the spectrum by default, the world would be better place for it.

Do you have blinds on your windows?

Interesting point. In the Netherlands, many houses don't have curtains, you can see directly into the living room from the street. It stems from the old tradition of wives being accountable when their husbands were at sea. I learned from your comment (perceived) privacy is also cultural.

Privacy is skewed to the disadvantage of women in the Netherlands? Am I reading you correctly?

Used to be in the middle-ages, not anymore. It's a tradition from that era to not have curtains.

I think examples presented in the thread are edge cases, and we never design systems based on edge cases. I think we should stop normalizing advocating for extreme privacy. Protecting personal information is a different level of privacy than total privacy/anonimity. The first is reasonable, and covered by GDPR and the like. By asking for total privacy you are just asking to make it simpler for crooks. Also, people are always asking for total transparency from governments, so why is a little reciprocity so bad?

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