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Comment by cs702 | Hacker News Reader

No one sane would ever want their relatives, friends, work colleagues, and neighbors to be able to know (quoting from the OP):

> who you sleep with because both you and the person you share your bed with keep your phones nearby

> whether you sleep soundly at night or whether your troubles are keeping you up

> whether you pick up your phone in the middle of the night and search for things like "loan repayment"

> your IQ based on the pages you "like" on Facebook and the friends you have

> your restaurant visits and shopping habits

> how fast you drive, even if you don't have a smart car, because your phone contains an accelerometer

> your life expectancy based on how fast you walk, as measured by your phone

> whether you suffer from depression by how you slide your finger across your phone’s screen

> if your spouse is considering leaving you because she's been searching online for a divorce lawyer

No one sane is OK with corporations, governments, and other third parties being able to obtain and save this information either -- especially if their only hurdle is to get you to click "OK" to agree to some legal agreement almost no one has the time to read or expertise to understand in its full implications.

We need a New Declaration of Human Rights for the 21st century that takes into account rapidly advancing technologies for collecting and acting on data at mass scale.

View on HN

This is a great list. SO many times people have said to me, "Let them track me, I've got nothing to hide." And you hit them with a few things off this list and they immediately change their mind. There should be a tinurl for website I can send people to that shows a simple list of all the ways personal information can be used.

Yes, great list. But salary and bank balance should probably be added.

But salary and bank balance should probably be added.

ADP is one of the largest paycheck processors in the United States. But almost no one realizes that if their paycheck comes through ADP, their salary information is being sold. Remember, this is also a company that knows when you've been hired, fired, has your Social Security Number, and a lot of other very personal financial information. According to a New York Times article from a few years ago, ADP is selling you out worse than even the cell phone companies. Yet, there was zero uproar about it that I noticed.

As for bank balances, I was very surprised to learn recently that bank balances are not part of credit scoring. I have a substantial amount of emergency savings. The last time I pulled my credit reports, it wasn't on any of them.

Bank information does appear in some other lesser know reporting agencies - but savings aren’t “credit” so it’s understandable they don’t appear on a credit report.

I feel like there should be more outcry for credit bureaus and ISPs having even more life-affecting information than what is listed.

I think this list makes a case for better sharing/access controls but I can see applications for most of the things listed here. I might just want the insights for myself but not want to share it with anyone or my data being sold without my consent e.g. monitor and improve my sleeping habits, monitor my expenditure by tracking my restaurant and shopping habits, my health data and/or insights into it. Maybe not your spouse but some parents might want to keep track of what their kids do online. I know people who want to have the ability to find/track the location of family members etc.

I suppose calls for better regulation, purpose oriented data collection and stricter enforcement and penalties but by no means does simply don't track/collect data is an answer where there are actual practical applications.

don't track/collect data

Only two of your examples (parental controls and location sharing) require any kind of network, and those could be done with a private VPN running at home.

The design of cloud-based services is purely for convenience and collection. Sometimes if the collection can be controlled, the convenience is worth it, but every beneficial algorithm could be run locally.

An example here for "run locally" would be Apple Health, which uses end-to-end encryption to sync data between your devices, does all the analytics stuff locally, and has a extensive permissions scheme for voluntary sharing of info with doctors or research programs.

The funny thing is that the rise of cloud computing coincides with the rise of really powerful cheap personal computation, you'd think it would be the opposite.

I'm not so sure about that.

Smartphones are a massive leap forward in low-power/energy-efficiency, but my 2013 desktop machine (KGPE-D16) still creams every smartphone ever manufactured on any metric other than power consumption.

I'm kinda tired of hearing nontechnical people congratulate themselves on having a "supercomputer" in their pocket.

Compared to the supercomputers of the 1980s (if I remember right my dad had an old copy of Journal of the American Meteorological Society I found as a kid, with an ad for Cray talking about one gigaflop being state of the art), they're not wrong.

Nobody calls graphing calculators "supercomputers" even though that's what they would've been in the 1960s.

What "the cloud" offers that personal servers don't is:

- Reliability. The cloud is available with little or no downtime, to 5-8 nines (5 minutes to 1/3 of a second of downtime per year). Each nine costs roughly 10x the previous one.

- Bandwidth. Residential service may work for your own personal file transfer needs, but if you're sharing to the world, even a modest degree of traffic results in a hug-of-death.

- Security. Ideally, cloud systems are managed and monitored against network attacks, as well as affording physical security practices.

- Updates. This becomes Somebody Else's Problem.

- Ongoing development. Dittos.

It's not that these aren't addressible by individuals, but it's a lot of effort to do so, and at population levels, people are simply unlikely to be able or willing to do so. A small percentage, yes. The vast majority? No.

Raw compute power is a tiny fraction of the concerns involved in service hosting.

> SO many times people have said to me

I'm sure that's happened.

> to some legal agreement almost no one has the time to read or expertise to understand in its full implications... New Declaration of Human Rights

In the same breath: complain about long documents that no one reads, propose authoring an unenforceable, even longer document that no one will read.

True, no one reads the constitution or charter of human rights - way too long, unenforceable and niche. /s

I think these concerns still need to be translated into real world repercussions before the average person is convinced. Right now it is certainly creepy, but does it really have a negative impact on my life for a company to know these things?

I remember an interview with Edward Snowden where it was shown how little people cared about privacy. The interviewer then translated the concern into "the gov can see your dick pics". That was a no-no for most people

It was John Oliver, great episode by the way. https://youtu.be/XEVlyP4_11M?t=1382

> There should be a tinurl for website I can send people to that shows a simple list of all the ways personal information can be used.

I just now set up a small site for it at https://whynottrack.com/! It's open source -- GitHub link in the footer -- so anyone can PR changes / reasons / etc.

Perfect!

Thanks :D

> "Let them track me, I've got nothing to hide."

Interestingly, this attitude used to be default even here on Hacker News ~5 years ago. I am so glad to see it's changing. Why I'm finding this interesting? Because this audience always knew what's going on even without layman articles like this, but did not care for some reason. This shows how just knowing isn't enough sometimes. Public sentiment matters.

I think HN rules are still behind the times. One of the rules discourages multiple accounts, in an attempt to create a community. OTOH: a longer paper trail means more easy to identify. This is why I create a new account every few months. Since I cannot delete old posts to "cover my tracks", I have no choice if I want to use the site. Maybe I just shouldn't use HN. I dunno. I learn a lot from discussions, but I don't always tell the truth because I don't want to be traced.

Another take is that those running HN know what kind of forum they want (one that promotes community) and understand and accept that trade-off. 'dang has written about this at length, so I think that's very likely the case.

That's not one you're willing to make and you adjust your behavior accordingly. HN can't be all things to all people. And that's okay.

You clearly find some value in HN as it is because you continue to use it. Something to consider: changes you might like to see may very well change the community as a whole to make it less a place you want to be. Hard to say, without running the experiment, but one of the hazards is that running the experiment could irreparably damage/change HN. And rebooting it would be likely nigh impossible. (If it were easy, we'd all create the fora we wanted.)

I've got some sympathy with this viewpoint, and have used HN myself under a pseudonym I take pains not to associate with my real-world identity.

But at the same time, the practice of regularly and routinely recycling user identities is ... well, it really does prevent the formation of a community.

The most toxic community I'd ever encountered was a supposedly "kinder and gentler Reddit", the late and unlamented Imzy. A core feature was that individuals could spin up a new pseudonym on each individual thread.

The result was both absolutely disorienting and gave rise to vicious bandwagon and brigade attacks.

Whatever problem Imzy was trying to solve, that was the wrong solution.

(I'm aware that chans often follow a similar tactic, and that ... they tend not to engender highly constructive behaviours.)

On the other hand, Twitter may be one of the greatest evils with regard to social media, and is well populated with non-anonymous accounts.

And of course, HN stands at odds with this theory as well. No one "knows" me on HN. I don't have a reputation, or a real identity, and I'm cordial enough. (I hope) HN enforces conduct, and this enforcement is not defeated by anonymity.

And public sentiment is not the same everywhere - for instance, the US tends to be more suspicious of government than of (large, public) corporations whereas elsewhere it's the complete opposite.

Framing seems to matter. If someone was following you all around town and you could physically see them taking notes I don't know a single person that wouldn't feel uncomfortable with this. But as soon as you can't see that person, people care less. But we all essentially have a world class private investigator following us at all times and this is a bit weird to think about.

>No one sane would ever want their relatives //

People close to you probably know all these things already. Even if you don't.

>No one sane is OK with corporations, governments, and other third parties being able to obtain and save this information either //

This is a popular view here. I don't think it's true of the population as whole.

> This is a popular view here. I don't think it's true of the population as whole.

I think you're right. They can get to the point where they care, but my intuition is that it'd take a real crisis, and even then there's plenty of incentive with this topic to move on as fast as possible. We (the public) are pretty fickle, and it's psychologically threatening to admit we've had a voyeur living in our bedroom for a decade.

It could be argued (pretty convincingly) that the collection of PSYCHOMETRIC data, (like what Cambridge Analytica did in 2011-2015; via innocent-seeming "personality quizzes" on social media - then the weaponization of that data by foreign intelligence services to target ads directly at people with certain personality types, in order to subvert the democratic election process on a massive scale, in order to affect a nation's foreign policy, and therefore the strategic balance of powers in the world - does, indeed represent "a real crisis".

(the real horror here, is they only had to sample a small subset of social media users, then compare their profiles with everyone else via "likes" and whatnot to develop accurate personality profiles of users who had no fucking idea they were being profiled because they never took a personality test).

I assume that data like that, unless refreshed, gets stale and useless fairly rapidly. But holy shit we're just sitting here, blind to the dangers of this data collection.

Or it could be as mundane as Russia's CozyBear group hacking a Ukrainian app store to insert malware into popular messaging apps, and using that app installed on a Ukrainian soldier's phone to direct artillery fire. Maybe THAT'S "a real crisis"?

Yes, absolutely. Because in the general case: computers are more dangerous than guns.

You can literally do far more harm with data than with automatic weapons.

Because that data gives you access to narrow-band propaganda. Instead of hope-for-the-best broad messaging you can target specific groups with content, signifiers, and emotional tone that is known to be effective for them, and encourage specific collective beliefs and behaviours.

It's not even persuasion any more in the ad tech sense. When it's done by hostile troll farms or state actors with a covert political agenda it's literally psychological warfare.

IMO the industry needs to take a long hard look at itself and start asking questions about whether this is really where it wants to go.

Hacker culture has a benign, goofy, on-the-spectrum, somewhat arrogant but mostly harmless reputation.

The reality couldn't be further from the truth. Data collection and social media systems are psychological weapons. They're absolutely hostile to rational informed choice and participative democracy.

And given the temptation to abuse that power in various ways, we should be having more of a conversation about this than we have so far.

I think it is true of the population as a whole (when the subject of such tracking is brought up most people are not comfortable with it.) But the population as a whole has the attitude of “what can you do” and aren’t willing to give up their fun apps and smart phone in exchange for this tracking going away; truth be told neither am I.

Add to this... everything you said is a forever kept thing. So over decades this stuff can be mined and a tiny needle can be found if it's meaningful to the searcher. It's terrifying.

Add to this that no one cares about whether the data is even correct. A glitch in the location tracking and, bam, you have an affair. Some wrongly assigned search queries or speech requests and suddenly you are a pedophile. A terrorist selecting you as a cover identity and you wake up in Guantanamo.

Add to this that no one cares about whether the data is even correct.

It's interesting how our culture has adopted the mantra that "computers are never wrong." Yet, every day in the media there are dozens or hundreds of articles about computers and systems making mistakes. I wish we could break that cycle of believing anything that comes off a screen.

I fight my own minor battles against this weekly. As part of my job, I maintain an online directory of about 70,000 businesses related to the one I work for. I regularly get e-mails from people saying things like, "The phone number for X is wrong. Google says it's this...!"

Then when I look into it, Google is wrong. But because it's Google, people assume it's right, and my web sites are wrong. We need to teach people that not only do computers make mistakes, but Google is the king of all mistake-generating engines.

I asked google about data in google my business and they told me that it's just people's opinions. Go figure

Hopefully Daniel Kahneman's new book will spread the way people talking about bias is common now.

It couldn't be more timely as our society has no concept of measurement noise.

"What I read is 100% true and based on "science" so to have any uncertainty means you are anti-science".

There is an astounding number of people using that as their main heuristic.

And as we already see happening, when cultural values shift over time, you will definitely be judged by things you did or said decades ago. Even if by contemporary standards they were typical.

Would you please demonstrate to me how I, Joe Q. Public, can find out, via collected data that I can access, with whom another person is sleeping with?

Or, in lieu of that, walk me through how that would be done with Facebook's, Google's, or Apple's data via your first-hand knowledge of those data and where and how they are stored and accessed?

These fear mongering comments about data collection have never demonstrated real world harms, AFAIK. It reminds me of the genetically engineered foods bogeyman that, in spite of a complete lack of empirical evidence, continues to be trotted out as a huge danger.

I'm undecided on this topic, but playing devil's advocate: Does the fact that this knowledge exists, and only in the hands of some of the largest (and most pervasive) tech companies in the world, make this information 'safer', or does it mean that it's a 'force multiplier' that increases the risk that this information will be used a) to enable anti-competitive behavior or b) be co-opted by authoritarian governments to suppress dissent.

I personally think that if I give this data to a company, and they keep it "safe" and only to support features that are beneficial to me, that's totally OK, but I wouldn't like companies reselling my mobility data to health insurers (without aggregation or cohorting) to give me a 100% customized insurance rate, regardless of how beneficial that would be.

Data that's used to distill people down to a number and value them precisely seems to have a potential to enforce systematic inequalities and further improve the lives of "haves" at the cost of "have nots".

Or on the flip side of that question: is it safer in the hands of the user, to be shared as desired, by explicitly opting in, or would it be safer in the hands of a corporate entity?

Safer in what sense ? What would be your take on government tolerance to the existence of such data ? Someone from the clandestine teams would always want to utilise it ? How well could the businesses resist.

Anti competitive behavior, I would think comes automatically with such massive centralisation. What's scary is the ability to mass incite riots, using knowledge of the most susceptible audience to fake news and pushing it out incendiary posts to exactly that audience. India has faced multiple such incidents already. Deliberate ? Maybe in the sense of affinity algorithms.

With the backdrop of the Stanford experiment, and a host of other biases giving almost tribal warrior behavior, should such affinity data be allowed for collection ?

My apologies if this sounds drastic, but data collection generates micro nukes, generated based on turning individuals into an array of microcrucibles.

Here you go…

https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/public_comments/2...

If you think the problem is merely Facebook, Google, or Apple, then I think you are underestimating the amount of data and who is processing it. There is an entire industry of companies you have never heard of that are thinking up ever more creative ways to put data together from various sources, identify it, correlate it, and then sell the 'insights' to whoever wants to pay.

At the very least, at a bare minimum, I think we need legislation that covers how this kind of data processing happens by third-party companies and we need to provide a way for citizens to at least see what data has been collected about them and what 'insights' it has generated.

Which company, apart from Facebook, Google and Apple, would remotely have access to any of the data on that list? Facebook Google and Apple don't share data with data brokers.

Dating sites would have that kind of data and have been breached in the past (Ashley Madison was one high profile instance, as I recall).

I've somehow never heard of this, that's a wild story.

I don't recall the Ashley Madison leak having anything remotely similar to the data on OP's list.

I was replying a later comment that was considering whether that list should include knowing who you’ve slept with.

I have a bridge to sell you.

"Gmail messages 'read by human third parties'" https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-44699263

"One company told the Wall Street Journal that the practice was "common" and a "dirty secret". ...Google indicated that the practice was not against its policies."

That article is just describing gmail APIs, which requires explicit user consent via oauth to enable. This is no more shocking than gmail supporting IMAP.

"The companies said they had not asked users for specific permission to read their Gmail messages, because the practice was covered by their user agreements."

Regardless of what those third party companies told their users, users would have had to accept a pretty clear dialog [1] delegating access to their Gmail accounts. That's just how google oauth works.

[1] https://i.stack.imgur.com/aBTMm.png

You cellular company has first party signal data, that even the big tech companies don't have.

All the internet access examples on that list would use encrypted connections, so a cellular company wouldn't be privy. Cellular companies do have course location data, but to be pedantic that doesn't really apply to any of OP's list.

Server name indicator from ssl is not encrypted and neither are most dns queries.

> use encrypted connections

TLS SNI.

Akamai and Microsoft.

When your Apple device communicates with "Apple", many/most of those IP addresses are owned by Akamai.

Even when you search DuckDuckGo, both the search results (Bing) and web servers that serve the content are owned by Microsoft (Azure).

That covers one or two of the list I suppose, but is there any reason to believe Akamai is lying to its customers and harvesting their users' data? I can't think of any incentive for them to do that, it would be brazen fraud for an insignificant revenue source.

Akamai's privacy policy on personal data: https://www.akamai.com/us/en/privacy-policies/privacy-shield...

I wasn't trying to make a point other than sharing examples of companies, like Akamai, that store a lot of personal data on behalf of others. Storing data with Apple is storing it with Akamai, and all of the other third parties involved--where "third parties" becomes a blanket term in privacy policies and not an exhaustive list. The "chain of trust" in this regard has some missing links.

So far as their businesses are concerned, the data is safeguarded and I would never expect it to be sold--not by the top of the data food chain in any case.

But there's the issue of data being stored with US companies requiring being subject to US laws, such as the USA PATRIOT Act.

Up until very recently, a lot of this could be done by any of a number of innocuous looking apps with tracking toolkits installed. Sometimes knowingly, sometimes not.

Even now, the problem is that you want the data sometimes. Like maybe you use Life360 because it's handy for your family. Well, it knows how fast you drive (it likes to tell me my wife's top speed after she goes somewhere...). It has enough accelerometer access to decide if you've been in a wreck. It's a GPS app so of course it has pretty tight location information. And maybe you consent to all this, but hidden somewhere in the TOS it says Life360 may share this info with selected partner companies. Now it gets slurped up by big data warehouses.

Maybe you install a sleep tracking app. Now they know how well you sleep, and I would bet they could pretty accurately figure out if/when you're having sex. Depending on the device, they might even be able to guess whether or not it was solo.

Perhaps you don't like the limited options Apple has for pedometer data, so you install Pedometer++. Another possible avenue for data collection.

Or Instacart, Uber, Uber Eats, etc.

So. Much. Data.

This is a good point and a good reason to prefer first-party apps!

No need to hide it, Life360 clearly states right near the top of its privacy policy "In order to keep our Service free for most users, we generate revenue through trusted data partnerships. We share device data, including location and movement data, with trusted data Partners for tailored advertising"

Facebook, Google, et. al. might not make the data available to you, but they have it.

If the information is stored on servers in China, then the Chinese government has it as well. Maybe you aren't a Chinese citizen so you don't care, but it's at least worth considering.

The politicians we elect to craft and enact legislation that affects the big data companies are always at risk of being essentially blackmailed by those companies with the incredibly detailed and personal information that those companies have on politicians.

I am very skeptical about the implications of this take. You paint this as "big data companies are actively lobbying/threatening politicians to enact legislation helpful for big data using their big data troves." There are politicians who work in good faith and have non-controversial backgrounds who would not be liable to these blackmails and still don't work hard enough to enact legislation to protect citizens. This is not a big data conspiracy as much as lack of political willpower.

Think along the lines of dating apps that show your distance to other users. That could be mined for changes in proximity over time - one day you are miles apart, then next day you are within 500ft of each other for the whole night.

Not all of it is data you can access as the public. However as the author of a program with access to internet and location you can easily upload where the phone is at all times and thus figure out when two are near each other. (this is why newer phones OSes let users choose if the program can access these things all the time or only when active)

You need to know something about your person of interest, other than a name. Then you need access to multiple data sets.

Use a list like this as a starting point.

https://www.oag.ca.gov/data-brokers

Commuter data is good, so is foot traffic. Data sets centered around health and income or quality of life can be beneficial as well. The game is to use publicly available information about your person to tie them conclusively to set of entries in an 'anonymized' data set.

If you aren't at least investigative journalist tier or the resources you need cost too much/require a corporate presence, then hire someone to do it for you who already has the pipeline set up. PI's have been available to Joe Q. for years and they still are. This all just makes them even more efficient.

There have been a number of instances here in .au where centralised location/health/etc data has been misused (stalking, checking out potential dates, domestic abuse or aiding domestic abusers) through inappropriate access. I doubt we're unique.

I'd argue that it doesn't need to be "Joe Q. Public", because companies are made up of Joe Q. Publics.

You don't get it. It's not just FAANG and the risk adds everyday. Eventually some of those companies will go bankrupt, be hacked and the data will get in the hands of malicious actors and will be use to commit fraud, to blackmail, etc. Also even if it's used legally and 'ethically' it means things like: 1- we will pay you less because you only earned X at your last job, 2 - we will increase your healthcare costs because you bought a pregnancy test online.

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/largest-personal-data-leaka...

> These fear mongering comments about data collection have never demonstrated real world harms

Notable examples:

* Strava revealed the position of US military bases

* Muslim prayer apps sharing location data with US military

In my own experience, I work for a call center. We have many important American companies as clients. They give us access to their systems so that we can service their clients. I am overseas dealing with their customers and I can access their personal information. I can see their face linked to their Facebook profile. I admit I've been tempted to misuse the information any time a customer makes me angry.

There was Uber's "God View" which showed travel history of customers, which was at one point available to anyone who could pass Uber's driver onboarding process.

Venture capitalist Peter Sims wrote about being tracked in a blog post this September. Back in 2011, he wrote, he was in an Uber car in Manhattan when he started receiving text messages from someone he barely knew telling him exactly where he was. That person later told him that she was at an Uber launch party in Chicago, where Sims' movements were being tracked via God View on a large public screen.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/johanabhuiyan/uber-is-i...

https://www.theverge.com/2016/1/6/10726004/uber-god-mode-set...

https://www.vice.com/en/article/ypw5n7/ubers-god-view-was-on...

> No one sane would ever want all their relatives, friends, work colleagues, and neighbors

I'd happily share basically all of that information with that specific group of people - except maybe my neighbor that keeps reporting me to the city, they don't need to know my life, but if in turn I could know who was googling city ordinances in the middle of the night it might make up for it.

At worst I get a funny look for something I googled in the middle of the night?

To your point, it's 100% the government I'm worried about. They've got legal and lethal authority to do far worse than a weird look.

But how would you trust any company to properly respect who you share stuff with? There's a multitude of anti-patterns that make some things public already with social media.

I think we should all be looking at this as either they're getting -all- of your data and sharing it with -everyone- (because that means more $$$) or they're NOT getting your data and they CANT share it cuz they don't have it.

We cannot trust companies to respect our privacy because it goes against their core value of turning a profit.

turning a profit depends to some extent on our trust, so we can expect companies to do some good for us too

Either they sell the data, or they keep it protected as a fuck you to google (aka apple) or they potentially get a data leak because they aren't following best practices in the slightest (aka Experian).

I remember being out of college and finally being able to buy adobe products to do photography and then Adobe got hacked and my un/pw was out in the wild. It was safer to pirate their stuff and trust some crazy keygen software that's definitely doing something nefarious cuz at least I could run that in a VM.

> They've got legal and lethal authority to do far worse than a weird look.

Society scares me more. The government has the authority, but society has the power and the inclination to weaponise it. The government would never bother reacting to anything that RMS said but people did.

You realize the government is made of people, right?

Not really. The government is more of a system that's run by people. The government doesn't change much even if all the people running it change.

Society scares me more

Agreed. For example, it's unlikely a government agency is going to care about your personal web page talking about how you're open to theories about UFOs. But a potential employer may decide not to hire you because your mind is open to the possibility. Or worse, an employment screening company's "algorithm" will score you lower because of it.

It appears you and I have very different relationships with work colleagues...

If you Facebook friend your work colleagues and introduce your wife then they already have easy access to what you like and who you're sleeping with, no?

Search history and medical info would be more concerning than that information, on average, I would guess.

> how fast you drive, even if you don't have a smart car, because your phone contains an accelerometer

Minor nitpick: you can't measure speed with an accelerometer, at least not with a cheap one like the one in your phone. I mean, in theory you can numerically integrate the acceleration to get the speed, but in practice the noise will be so big as to render the result useless after a few seconds. It's much better to have a GPS and derive the speed from the position.

Signed: someone who spent too long programming an IMU and fighting with stupid bosses full of misconceptions.

Other than that, I totally agree with your comment.

I'm pretty sure it'd be easy to at least fingerprint/classify your "driving style" given enough of even crappy accelerometer data.

TBH it's very routinely done with onboard GPS tracking instruments which also have accelerometers, (or apps running on phones) - used by insurance companies, car rental agencies, and other fleet operators.

>your IQ based on the pages you "like" on Facebook and the friends you have

That's got to be extremely noisy, does anyone have any links about this?

Paper has some flaws, but this is a good seed point.

https://www.pnas.org/content/110/15/5802?sid=98dc0a8b-4443-4...

IQ:

https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/suppl/2013/03/07/121877211...

Its location is a bit more obscure, but I think there's a much simpler list of privacy practices to follow: whatever Mark Zuckerberg does. Anything he does to protect himself in the data realm is what we should be doing. Yes, I know there was the "Mark's FB has better defaults than yours" story some years ago, but this is outside of FB (though applicable anywhere).

So what is it? Exploding email addresses? Making friends with someone with DMV database access? Temporary credit-card numbers? Tinted windows? Never carrying a wallet? Having an entourage take care of all of this for you? All of the above? Anyway, it would be nice if the zillionaires who have put a lot of resources into personal safety told us what they've learned. Heck, if adopted wide enough their practices might put the crunch on data criminals (though probably also data businesses, which would maybe be a reason they'd resist it.)

"Decoy House"

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/12/technology/how-to-disappe...

> your life expectancy based on how fast you walk, as measured by your phone

Shit I would love to know this for myself! Is there a service or app that can crunch the numbers and tell me?

Just to respond seriously for a second: it's good to remind ourselves that ML isn't magic. If it knew your weight and age it would use those for predicting life expectancy instead. Same for smoking history, sleep habits, etc. But all it has access to is the accelerometer, and a weak correlation is better than nothing, so that's what it uses.

Someone previously illustrated sceneries where the algorithm hiccupped on your data and erroneously labeled you as a pedophile and/or terrorist (at the same time!).

If you think about it, bad ML (or your words: "...ML isn't magic.") is just as bad, if not worse, than infallible ML.

Apple Health and many fitness tracker apps can estimate your Vo2Max score based on your height, weight and how your heart rate varies during brisk walks and runs.

It's not incredibly accurate but Vo2Max is regarded as an important indicator of your cardiovascular health.

I thought that was interesting too. Looks like the research on it came out 10 years ago. A couple of links from some quick searching. The second link has some charts and graphs, though it limits its estimates to 65+ age groups.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/walking-speed-sur...

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/644554

Edit: I'd add that you likely don't need any tracker to get a rough estimate.

If you walk faster than people around you who are roughly the same age, then you'll likely outlive them.

That may be a reason to take it slow and smell the roses, since you have more time :)

They only know in a statistical sense. Useful for insurance companies, but not on a personal level.

>No one sane would ever want their relatives, friends, work colleagues, and neighbors to be able to know (quoting from the OP):

The things you mentioned are kind of how it was before the advent modern civilization. Before Facebook tracking it was old biddy tracking. Through gossip everyone knew pretty much everyone's business.

That said, there's not an immediately obvious connection between surveillance and our neighbors knowing things. I have 0 information about who my neighborhors are sleeping with based on their cell phone tracking.

I downvoted this because I can’t read this as anything but a disingenuous comparison. Surely you can understand the difference in scale and motive behind village gossip and global surveillance by profit-seeking corporations.

"global surveillance by profit-seeking corporations" is a string of scary words, but gossip is much more likely to cause the average person clear, tangible harm. Just pointing out that digital tracking is creepy doesn't do much to convince most people to inconvenience themselves at all.

The point is that everyone knowing everyone's business is the "natural" state of human society. For most of human history all my neighbors would know who I'm banging. It doesn't take some sort of insanity to live like that.

And you've only addressed half my argument. I don't know who my neighbor is banging because of cell phone tracking. You don't know who your neighbor is banging. Nobody in this thread knows who their neighbor is banging. It's an entirely theoretical danger that has not yet come to pass.

>Before Facebook tracking it was old biddy tracking. Through gossip everyone knew pretty much everyone's business.

As already noted the difference in scale, but obviously if you didn't like what the old biddies tracked about you in your small town you could move to a new one and start over - you can't with the global surveillance system.

finally it should be obvious that not everyone lived in a small enough town that the old biddy network was actually useful for tracking you.

Yeah, it's in grandma's forgetful brain, and to be fair she probably (a) has usually learned the value of discretion, (b) will pass away in a few years and (c) can sometimes be dismissed as a fibber.

The computer on the other hand, is an eternal record and can be dumped into the open by any hacker or wannabe-hacker for ill intent or just for fun.

I guess, there's no appropriate reputation scale for what we see on the internet (it's either perfectly trustworthy or a total sham), there's no forgetfulness in terms of minor misdeeds, and there's no way to argue with the public consensus once they've made up their hivemind...

"No really, I've changed in the 10 years since I wrote that post!"

The author of this article, Carissa Véliz, also wrote Privacy Is Power: Why and How You Should Take Back Control of Your Data

https://www.amazon.com/Privacy-Power-Should-Take-Control/dp/...

I'd advise reading pretty much everything that they write on privacy, its all very worthwhile.

If one were to buy that book (or even visit the link) - some new interesting ‘data points’ have now been collected ;)

Actually no, not a wink, it’s terrifying :D D:

Privacy for me, but not for thee.

Imagine trying to be a new author, marketing a book before Amazon, before Twitter and Facebook.

If spying is tomorrow's only viable "economy" we are in trouble.

This is why "Big Tech" is a joke. Spying, like legally selling opiates, is not a legitimate business. It does not matter how much money can be made doing it.

Or even just a constitutional amendment that specifically defines rights of privacy.

>> Many of these companies call themselves “data brokers.” I call them data vultures.

Perfect. Except it is insulting to vultures, who at least put carrion back in the food chain.

This is straight-up theft of our data and privacy, for profit, and it needs to be both outlawed and shamed.

Seriously, but these slime should be more despised than common burglars (tho maybe a notch above mobsters). Seriously, these people are not respectable, and should not be respected or tolerated in polite society. So, don't.

> We need a New Declaration of Human Rights for the 21st century that takes into account rapidly advancing technologies for collecting and acting on data at mass scale.

Sir Tim Berners Lee already came up with "The Contract for The Web": https://contractfortheweb.org/

Spread it around.

I actually look through that and see quite a few things on that list I would be fine with my friends and relatives knowing. The difference between them and my work colleagues is that they are people who truly have my best interests at heart.

As opposed to most companies that are tracking me to try to take advantage of me.

I had a wedding to make sure everyone closest to me knew who I was sleeping with (Emily as is already public record). It took a fair bit of time and money to coordinate and hold that event.

When people ask how I'm doing, I tell them and that includes whether my problems are impacting my daily routines and needs. (Not lately)

I've shared the results of my IQ tests and had plenty of discussions about the validity and lack thereof of those results (145-160+ depending on test). Facebook likes are the least good mechanism to work that out by.

I think one of the helpful things I do is share really good places to eat and find things I want. (Nirmal's is my favorite in Seattle)

I hope driving monitoring helps us shift from a penalize infrequent rule breaking instances to helping manage attention and grow skill. I speed when conditions let that be safe.

I suffer depression and have my whole life as everyone I know is aware and now is more public on the internet.

You'll have to ask her but I'm not looking to leave. I'm very honest and want that in my closest relationships so if we were going that direction she'd be among the first people I spoke with. If she feels she needs to leave I'll try and help us both find happier lives but I hope it never comes to that.

I respect that you have a different level of openness. I think a good criticism of my post is that I have a ton of privilege to feel safe sharing these things. I've chosen to live a life I feel entirely comfortable sharing. Clearly I'm not handing out credentials but... I prefer a world that is more honest and intimate and that simply requires I be open, honest, and self-reflective.

Good of you to offer concrete examples. I don't mean these as ad hominems since I don't know you, more as counter examples:

> I've shared the results of my IQ tests (145-160+)

I wonder if the part of the population with <100 IQs are similarly open with their results.

> I speed when conditions let that be safe.

Admitting to breaking the law is an excuse for higher insurance premiums and for the police to hassle you.

> I suffer depression

This is one of the few relatively "safe" mental health conditions to announce. Who's lining up to hire someone who's openly struggling with addiction or has psychopathy?

> I'm very honest and want that in my closest relationships

Let's say your partner gets served ads about how your single, attractive co-worker has been googling you late at night, how your location histories have significant overlap, and by clicking the ad they can find out more. Not everyone will get suspicious, but some people definitely will click.

~~~

It would be great if we could all be open like you say you are, but society isn't even close to ready for that. Any rapid transition (like wide-scale encryption breaks) would be traumatic on so many levels.

You have my gratitude for this comment. I don't take it as ad hominem at all but rather excellent challenges and realities that move the conversation forward. These are good examples of the privilege I mentioned and I appreciate them being raised.

I agree that there is a long way to go before pervasive feelings of safety will exist. You also seem right that the transition, if we choose it, will more positively be consensual and gradual. This conversation seems to be often spoken of with binary models. Further, the preference clusters are implied to be in opposition so I hoped to offer a counter to that in case it might have a positive effect over the long term.

That's not gonna happen. But there are services out there that are vastly more private such as ProtonMail, Telegram, Signal, etc.

If you want privacy, quit Facebook and Gmail. News flash: they're NOT gonna stop spying on you. You need to stop using them.

But the only penalty is “seeing” personalized ads.

It’s not exactly a problem for most people. Even I who’s privacy conscious don’t particularly care I block ads with ad blockers anyway.

This naturally invites the question, what percentage of the general populace is in fact sane? (sincerely curious to know what number hn readers would assign to that.)

I would be curious to know my inferred IQ.

What an awesome list of examples!

No, I am okay for them to be able to know.

Them knowing is not the problem. Them using it to harm me is the problem. These are different thing, latter is a problem, former is not.

Let pick this one example :

'your restaurant visits and shopping habits'

Just them knowing is not problem, in fact them knowing can also benefit me: e.g when they want to give me gift.

They will frame it as you harming yourself.

"If invasive tracking is outlawed then only outlaws will use invasive tracking." The problem is that symmetry is impossible.

I'm not advocating to outlaw invasive tracking, rather advocating on solving the problem of the use of invasive tracking to harm people.

> how fast you drive, even if you don't have a smart car, because your phone contains an accelerometer

Any car 2010 and later "smart/stupid": https://www.businessinsider.com/ford-exec-gps-2014-1, so even if you leave your phone at home, don't assume that you aren't tracked.

you don't like to hear the truth, but that's ok

There’s still billions of people who believe in helicoptering.

Being watched by sky wizard and judged at all times is their expectation. It is their agency.

Write down whatever you want, how does one resolve the reality? We have documents in place to cover all these things.

Yet here we are still.

You’re doing what the people you aren’t ok with do; expect everyone to undertake creating and importing some wholly new perspective.

We know how to regain our agency: take control of it away from the aristocracy.

The species has done this again and again. It’s not new.

From reading this list, I can deduce OP just made up most of them, because over half of them contains details that are total BS.

Also I happen to think we'd be a better society if we all knew everything about each other. Instead of discouraging companies from analyzing us, encourage them to publish everything all the time. Let governments join in on the fun. Everyone should be tracking an analyzing everyone else.

Solves the issue with companies manipulating us to sell our data, because if they publish it they can't sell it. Solves the ransomware problem as well. Publish everything, no privacy for anyone. You can't blackmail someone for data everyone has.

I wanna know what you think right now. I'm not asking you to tell me, I'll scan your brain instead. And I'll know what your dream last night was. And you'll know the same for me as well.

That's the future, prove me wrong.

The worst thing about the information economy of today is absolutely the inequality of access. We would be better off if everything that is collected was public.

I don't think that means we don't need privacy. It absolutely has value.

The problem is when privacy is only available to the rich and powerful, while the details about the rest of us are hoarded and used by the very same powerful people who pay such a premium for their privacy.

If we allow the collection of information, that information should absolutely be public, but that doesn't mean we should allow everything to be collected.

>I don't think that means we don't need privacy. It absolutely has value.

I never heard any convincing argument about why privacy has value.

>but that doesn't mean we should allow everything to be collected.

Why ?

Perhaps you'd like some privacy to surprise a significant other with your purchase, rather than it show up on their Venmo feed in real-time.

Good example but there so much information a person can keep up with so surprise can still possible.

People spend money on privacy. This gives it value.

I don’t know anyone that would want to spend money on a hotel if there was a security camera in the room. I would get the more expensive room without the camera, probably go to a different hotel.

Doctor and patient confidentiality is implicitly understood. Do you think doctors should be able to tell advertisers what their patients are going through.

Maybe your own individual privacy doesn’t have value to you, and that’s okay, but other people value their privacy, and these corps profiting off data definitely find value in lack of privacy.

>I don’t know anyone that would want to spend money on a hotel if there was a security camera in the room

why do you think is that ?

>Do you think doctors should be able to tell advertisers what their patients are going through

Why do you think they shouldn't ?

>these corps profiting off data definitely find value in lack of privacy.

Yes of course there is value in lack of privacy, but what is value in privacy ?

The basic problem is that people undervalue data about themselves. They don’t imagine the kinds of conclusions that can be made, or the consequences.

It’s been more than a decade, but I was impressed by this research from Allessandro Acquisti that suggested people valued their data only in the pennies.

When 25 Cents is too much: An Experiment on Willingness-To-Sell and Willingness-To-Protect Personal Information, Jens Grossklags, Alessandro Acquisti, Workshop on the Economics of Information Security (WEIS), 2007

> I never heard any convincing argument about why privacy has value.

You have either _never_ had to keep a secret (which I highly doubt, unless you happen to be a literal child) or you simply aren't arguing in good faith.

Assuming that you are arguing in good faith, let's consider a potential reason why someone might value their privacy:

Some people are born attracted to the same-sex (gay, lesbian, bi, pan, etc.).

There are some countries where being gay is a criminal offense; there are even some countries where you can face the death penalty for this. [1]

If a gay person lives in one of those countries, don't they have a right to keep this fact about themselves private simply in order to protect themselves? Or does their life have less value than the profit that can be generated by the "Data Economy"?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_for_homosex...

Obviously the problem is laws that outlaw homosexuality and not a lack of privacy.

To the people whose lives are at stake, what difference does it make?

None, but if we're looking at this situation (where the government is finding secret homosexuals and prosecuting them) and asking "what policies ought we enact to fix this" if your answer is "better privacy" that seems like it's looking at the wrong problem.

You are assuming that perfect and fair governance is a reasonably achievable state. Reality begs to differ. In reality, there are people in the USA who are in the closet or of fear of persecution by their communities.

Privacy provides a fundemental protection from persecution by your government. This is precisely why the constitution includes specific privacy protections.

So while we should fight governments that persecute homosexuality, we also need to protect at least some aspects of privacy to keep protections for the next persecuted group.

And what if it's a domestic company that is destroying those people's privacy and a foreign government that is using this to prosecute them?

Should we avoid preventing further damage that the domestic company is doing? Or should we limit ourselves to dealing with the issue diplomatically, and not do anything else for fear of "looking at the wrong problem"?

I don't understand why you'd seriously suggest that reducing the likelihood of known harm (by ensuring some level of privacy) is the wrong thing to think about when it doesn't prevent other actions from being taken too. It's possible for groups of people to do different things at the same time, after all.

Ultimately, your argument will never result in a situation where privacy is taken seriously because you could substitute in any issue and your conclusion could just as easily be that "better privacy is looking at the wrong problem."

>There are some countries where being gay is a criminal offense;

So that is the actual problem, not the privacy.

Without some expectation of privacy it would have been impossible for people to gather together with others who had been similarly criminalized.

Without those gatherings, organizing against anti-gay propaganda (equating it to pedophilia, claiming it would be the downfall of civilization, etc.) would have been impossible and it's unlikely that the laws criminalizing homosexuality would have ever been changed.

If you kill privacy then you'll also kill the ability of marginalized groups to organize against any future oppression.

I doubt you actually believe that privacy doesn't matter however, because you're posting here under a pseudonym and haven't linked any social media accounts or anything which could reveal "private" details like your full legal name, place of residence/work, etc.

>Without some expectation of privacy it would have been impossible for people to gather together with others who had been similarly criminalized..

Impossible is a really strong word. I'm not saying that its going to be easy but I doubt that its impossible. That's my point lets spend the effort to figure out/solve this problem instead of trying to hide information.

>I doubt you actually believe that privacy doesn't matter however, because you're posting here under a pseudonym and haven't linked any social media accounts or anything which could reveal "private" details like your full legal name, place of residence/work, etc.

I would love to have everything for everyone to be public so that I don't have to worry about hiding those information. The problem is right now I can't. That's why I'm advocating we spent the effort on solving the problem that arise when the information is public rather than trying to hide information.

Likewise, if I'm gay I would much much prefer to have gay to be decriminalized rather than hiding my sexual orientation.

> I'm not saying that its going to be easy but I doubt that its impossible.

So you're willing to concede that people being unable to make the choice to keep something about themselves private will make it harder for them to promote their own rights? Can you understand how a lack of the ability to have private conversations, relationships, etc. could cause serious problems for some people?

Because earlier in the thread you said: "I never heard any convincing argument about why privacy has value." but now you are seem to be implying that privacy actually does have value to some people, correct?

> That's why I'm advocating we spent the effort on solving the problem that arise when the information is public rather than trying to hide information.

That would be a reasonable statement if you weren't also earlier criticizing the concept of privacy and stating that it had no value. You can choose to reject the idea that people should have individual privacy and try to push for a world where people didn't feel that they had to keep secrets, but you'd need to fix all the systemic issues before you could ethically promote the sort of radical transparency that you're talking about.

Trying to claim that privacy doesn't matter because it'd "be better if everything was public" without first addressing these other issues is terribly callous and could only seek to increase the amount of trauma in the world.

>Can you understand how a lack of the ability to have private conversations, relationships, etc. could cause serious problems for some people?

Yes it could cause serious problem but not the privacy itself that the problem, its other people using it to harm other people is the problem.

My conversation being public by itself is not a problem, the problem is when people use it to harm me.

>but now you are seem to be implying that privacy actually does have value to some people, correct?

In any case its not the privacy itself that has value.

> Yes it could cause serious problem but not the privacy itself that the problem, its other people using it to harm other people is the problem.

So is it OK to advocate for the destruction of people's privacy in this situation or not?

If it is, then you're admitting that you just don't care about the harm that could occur (and trying to minimize the responsibility you'd have by hand-waving the issue as being "other people")

If it is not OK to destroy people's privacy in this situation, then your entire argument about how the coerced loss of privacy isn't a problem is contradictory.

>If it is, then you're admitting that you just don't care about the harm that could occur (and trying to minimize the responsibility you'd have by hand-waving the issue as being "other people")

No, to minimize harm is my eventual goal.

There are multiple way to achieve that.

You can try to by privacy or by fixing the actual issue.

I would much prefer the actual issue to be fixed.

When you fix the actual problem, the privacy become irrelevant.

>If it is not OK to destroy people's privacy in this situation, then your entire argument about how the coerced loss of privacy isn't a problem is contradictory

My argument is the loss of privacy by itself its not a problem.

So I gave you a real-world example of a situation where someone could be harmed by loss of privacy, and then asked if you thought it was OK to advocate the destruction of a person's privacy in that situation.

Your response was that you would "much prefer the actual issue to be fixed" and that "When you fix the actual problem, the privacy become irrelevant".

Which (presumably intentionally) sidesteps the question of whether you think it is reasonable to advocate for the destruction of someone's privacy when it is likely to cause them harm.

In your advocacy for the destruction of privacy in this thread, you haven't proposed anything which could minimize harm for people who rely on privacy; in fact you have taken great steps to even acknowledge that there are people who could be harmed by the destruction of their privacy.

At the same time, you're willing to acknowledge that you don't want to post comments here using anything other than a pseudonym because "the problem is right now I can't". So you are admitting that you'd prefer to keep some privacy around your identity.

This could be a reasonable position if you were willing to acknowledge that people (other than you) could be harmed by the loss of their privacy. You have refused to acknowledge this and so that argument is untenable.

Finally, you stated that your argument was that "the loss of privacy by itself is not a problem". You haven't provided any evidence nor explanation of why you believe this to be the case and have refused to acknowledge the value of privacy, despite multiple examples and the obvious hypocrisy of not "practicing what you preach" (though I'd be willing to accept this if you didn't claim that privacy has no value whatsoever)

I did give an example of a situation where someone could be harmed and you didn't bother to address it.

I think you're just being disingenuous and I don't see the point in engaging any further in this discussion.

> From reading this list, I can deduce OP just made up most of them, because over half of them contains details that are total BS.

Care to specify which list entries you have trouble believing?

What a complete and utter nightmare.

You say that you think this would lead to a better society. That aside, how would you personally feel if this vision was to become reality?

For me, I’m certain my mind being totally exposed like that would lead to debilitating mental illness and possibly even the loss of the will to live. I can’t imagine human beings, either as individuals or a collective, being fundamentally equipped to deal with such a thing.

Did you ever read David Brin's The Transparent Society (used to be a web article, I think it might be a book now). He argues that as networking and miniaturization progress, and given the curiosity of 9 year olds, we have 2 choices: everyone has all data about everyone else, or, the powerful (gov't corps rich) have all data about everyone else, and the powerful have privacy. I'm not sure if I think that's true, but I can't really think of a counter-argument.

If someone can slip cameras into what looks to me like gnats and film my bathing, well, my bathing isn't so exciting, but how can we prevent it? Some weird EM shielding arms race on nano-bots or something? And still all the sound I utter will be recorded. I wouldn't want to live on a planet with no insects. If I were 9 and I had a "build your own flying gnat" kit, pretty sure I might try to find out about what naked people look like. Now I grew up in a relatively repressed family and society, so maybe the cool Europeans have a different take on it. Maybe if there's 10M "watch people all the time" public channels with video feeds from all over the planet, peoples mental health would adjust somehow. I suspect we'll find out. Most people (that I talk to in real life) are stolidly uninterested in the "omg, do you know what the data people are gathering thru your phone" facts.

I for sure don't want to live in a society where the powerful have privacy and none of the regular people do.

All I can say is that this line of thinking makes me feel that we might be in for a bleak future indeed.

i'd be happy to be hung from the gallows than live in such a world

This is the way to go in the future. It will be more and more impractical, very costly, and inconvenient to hide information as technology get better.

The problem that need to be solves is not how to hide information but how to fix the issue that arise when the information are public.

Lets talk about one example :

Right now it is a problem if my credit card number become public because it can be used for unauthorized purchase.

Simply having my credit card number become public is not an issue perse but for it to be used for unauthorized purchase is the problem.

But what if I can have my credit card number public while nobody can use it for unauthorized purchase ? then I won't have issue for it being public.

You'd still need to keep something private like a PIN or private key.

Why ? because some one could stole my money or because someone else could log in without my authorization? What if there is a way to prevent that without PIN or private key ?

Both because someone could stole your money or authorize unwanted action.

What other way of preventing that do you propose? Fingerprint? I will will send the data of fingerprint. Facial recognition? I will just grab your profile picture. What kind of method do you envise that could prove you are you and not somebody malicious?

I'm obviously not the expert, my point is we should try to seek the solution to the problem that arise when the information is public instead of trying to hide the information.

Here is another example: some people argue for privacy because the information can be used to criminalized gay people.

Well then fix the criminalization of gay people instead of trying to hide the fact that they are gay.

Don't change the example. I want to know how do you imagine a method of authentication not requiring any privacy could work. What could be the way to prevent a theft without PIN or private key if your credit card number leak to public?

> I want to know how do you imagine a method of authentication not requiring any privacy could work

>Facial Recognition?

That could be one way

> I will just grab your profile picture.

Then maybe fix it to detect whether its a real person or just a picture.

Or maybe there are better way, I don't know.

Like I said, I'm not the expert, I wouldn't know every solution to every problem.

My point is we should spent the effort on figuring out that problem instead of trying to keep thing hiding.

Since you yourself said you are not an expert, then ask yourself, why do experts make security based on hidden passwords instead of focusing on creating those public-indifferent solutions? Could it be that passwords/PINS/secrets are one of the easiest, cheapest and reliable way of preventing unauthorized access since the ancient times?

There are tons of problem with secret being leaked, forgotten, thats why we should start figuring out a better way.

You know, before anybody starts working on something, they need to at least have a hint it may work and not be easily compromised - e.g. what's preventing hacker from just copying the expected data from facial recognition system and pasting it themselves since it's public?

You say "just fix it to detect whether it's legit data" - how? Deep fakes are getting better by the day, we already have problems with recognizing them ourselves.

>You say "just fix it to detect whether it's legit data" - how? Deep fakes are getting better by the day, we already have problems with recognizing them ourselve

Again, I'm not the expert, every situation will may require its unique solution.

>You say "just fix it to detect whether it's legit data" - how

Yes this my attempt to at least give a hint with my far from expert knowledge.

My point is we should spend our effort to solve this instead of trying to make information private.

> Yes this my attempt to at least give a hint with my far from expert knowledge.

No, this isn't a hint, because I already stated why it wouldn't work: thief will just use publicly available data and create deep fake to mimic the owner of the bank account.

If we had technology which could magically determine whether received data is genuine, the only safety check would be "Are you an owner? [y/n]"

> My point is we should spend our effort to solve this instead of trying to make information private.

Again, nobody sane ever have spend any effort on something without even a hint for it being possible. I am asking: what's your argument to even think it's possible?

Unfortunately I don't think you'll get a genuine response.

It'd be fascinating to watch someone to try and recreate concepts from cryptography without the crypto though!

SSI

Upvoted, not because I agree with you but because it makes important points.

Anyone who thinks such transparency is a good idea should read Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter's Light of Other Days: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Light_of_Other_Days

I happen to think we'd be a better society if we all knew everything about each other.

You should set the example. Go ahead and post your e-mail address and password for us.

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