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Comment by the_snooze | Hacker News Reader

You're probably joking, but the TSA has made that exact argument for their full-body scanners.

>"The (body image scanning) technology is sent to the airports without the ability to save, transmit or print the images," said Greg Soule, TSA spokesman, in an interview with CBSNews.com. "At airports, the images are examined by a security officer in a remote location, and, once the image is cleared, they're deleted."

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/naked-body-scan-images-never-sa...

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Of course, the images may not be deleted. Unless someone notices, such as with these 35,000 from Orlando:

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2010/11/100_images_from_the_...

And an alleged insider discussion of how those "remote" viewers respect passenger privacy:

"Personally, in the I.O. room, I witnessed light sexual play among officers, a lot of e-cigarette vaping, and a whole lot of officers laughing and clowning in regard to some of your nude images, dear passengers."

https://takingsenseaway.wordpress.com/2012/12/19/letter-from...

> The (body image scanning) technology is ... without the ability to ... transmit ... the images,"

> the images are examined by a security officer in a remote location

oh dear.

More seriously, at least TSA can at least make a proportionality type of argument, along the lines of, this invasion of privacy is justified on the grounds that it might save lives.

Adtech is just going to use it to try and figure out how to convince me to buy a motorized turnip twaddler.

I don’t see why the TSA having awful reasons they can get away with is any better or any better hedge than any other player invading privacy unnecessarily.

Even if it may be awful on an absolute scale, on a relative scale, I find egregious privacy violations more justifiable if the claimed intention is mitigating supposed risk of bodily harm or death rather than showing me advertisements.

I have the right to simultaneously hate and be disgusted by the TSA yet hate and be disgusted by advertisers and ad tech even more.

Interesting. I feel the opposite. Theater and bad faith lying or trickery are far worse to me. The intent from the get go isn’t even trying to do the right thing while also trying to show themselves as the “good”.

Of the data that I've seen, adtech has about as much legitimacy in claiming they "might" save lives as the TSA does.[1] The last year the TSA released the stats on their Red Team tests, they failed to detect 95% of threats. Some of the threats that made it through were fully assembled handguns, fully assembled bombs, and partially disassembled versions of both. As many have pointed out, the TSA is largely security theater. It makes people feel better that we're doing something, and apparently the greater the intrusion on privacy, the more secure people feel.

https://www.latimes.com/nation/nationnow/la-na-tsa-screeners...

FWIW, I'm not necessarily saying that TSA's argument works out in practice. I'm just saying that they can at least try to make it.

Versus, even if we give adtech a similar benefit of the doubt, and accept for the sake of argument that they really could more effectively convince me to buy the world's greatest fidget cube, there's still just no way that such an outcome is a great enough social good to justify the means they used to achieve it.

(Except perhaps from the perspective of the adtech and fidget cube people. And, even then, only if we assume that they have a slightly deranged opinion of the social utility of their fidget toy relative to all other fidget toys. Or that they're solipsists.)

So, this is a weird one. I mean, all of this stuff is pretty much automated, there isn't a team of people at adtech companies going hmmm user 621163091 is looking for PC's serve him an ad for Lenovo. Its a series of complicated ML models with large amounts of inputs and outputs that no human understands at a level where they could predict which ad a human gets.

In the above scenario, I'm not sure that I see a violation of privacy, but I suspect you would. If you could enlighten me as to why, that would be super helpful.

Data has a way of being used in ways other than the one for which it was ostensibly originally collected. Especially once you let data scientists get in there and start having fun with it. (Source: I should know, I am one.) Or maybe you've got a unscrupulous employee who uses their access to the data to dox people. (Source: I used to work at a company where that happened.) And since, in a country like the USA, they are not subject to any particularly effective data protection laws, they're also really easy to sell to just whoever, or maybe liquidate at a bankruptcy auction, or whatever. The buyer may or may not intend to use it for better or worse purposes than the original collector. There's no real way of knowing.

There's also the security question. Data breaches are real and happen all the time. I think that the crackers' perspective on this subject may be, if I may misappropriate the famous IRA statement, "remember we only have to be lucky once. You will have to be lucky always."

In short, the mere existence of these pools of data is a threat, not only to people's privacy, but to their personal security. Even when you can't demonstrate that a specific harm has occurred yet. It's like hazardous waste: given enough time, it will leak out and cause damage.

So, I totally agree with everything you've said, (I am also a data scientist, so appreciate that part especially).

OTOH, ads pay for a lot of stuff, so if you could delete the raw data after some short time, and only retain the model which was used for serving/prediction, then I think a lot of those concerns go away, and the whole infrastructure around data is made an awful lot safer.

Lots of your other points only really apply to the US (the cavalier attitude towards data and privacy, especially), so I wonder if this is something that would work better in the EU, because you do have much stricter laws around the use of personal data.

you see this wrong. TSA is infringement of our civil liberty by government, avoid flying is not much option in this day. comparatively easier for to avoid ad surveilance and install ublock.

>> >"The (body image scanning) technology is sent to the airports without the ability to save, transmit or print the images,...and, once the image is cleared, they're deleted."

Perhaps from the machine, but what prevents a TSA viewer in the remote location from snapping an image of the screen with their smartphone, or wearing an always-on logging camera to the workstation?

The TSA's proud culture of professionalism and integrity, of course.

... well, there ya go! Why didn't I think of that?

I mean, at least the putative negative consequences they're trying to avoid are exploded jetliners and hundreds of deaths, not "advertising would be somewhat less effective and profitable" (similar to all advertising before about 2002).

it's very charitable for you to accept at face value that that's what the TSA security theater is for

He doesn't. That's why it said putative.

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