Comment by zwkrt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zwkrt | Hacker News Reader

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Facebook et al want the privacy discussion to revolve around “keeping your personal data safe” but that is just bald-faced propaganda that covers up the fundamental issue. It’s not like Facebook’s digital model of my behavior is really “mine” and they are just borrowing it or protecting it. They don’t even care about my data in the singular.

What they do have is a giant corpus of behavioral data spanning everyone on the planet. Companies can (statistically) detect that you are going to get a divorce, or that you are going to be pregnant. They know everyone who has been to jail, our sexual fantasies, how likely it is that our children will go to college.

Right now we say they sell ads, but you could just as correctly say that they take advantage of this incredible, unprecedented information advantage to directly change the world in their favor and in the favor of whoever can pay. It used to be used to sell clothing and frippery, but already SM is plastered with ads for political campaigns and brain-altering drugs. Their cultural hegemony will only increase over time, as the data gets better and the methods become more effective.

In this regime, what does it even mean for Facebook to “leak my data”? If anything I’d rather it was out in the open. (Although I’d much rather it didn’t exist!)

I generally think along your lines, but I think there is an actually a fundamental question here: do we care about privacy?

My feeling is that surveillance states are more or less the norm, and it tends to become controversial as a sort of stand-in for other issues. So, for instance, the DDR's extreme surveillance apparatus becomes a sort of explanation for why this relatively bland state was actually a historic example of evil.

In england, there's a (very mild) controversy about the use of secret police to surveil activists - it became controversial because several of them had sexual relationships, and even children, while in their undercover role. One of the curious features of all this was who merited attention. One group of vegan restaurant connoisseurs, who met on fridays to review welsh vegan diners, discovered that one of their members was a police officer, for example.

This surveillance, which really had no bounds, including the surveillance of sitting government ministers (always labour, fwiw), is actually very typical, historically speaking.

So, while I'm broadly in agreement with you when it comes to the dangers of surveillance, I think we've all had and lost this argument in the past, and the fact is, if the state historically wanted to destroy or persecute a specific group, paper records were always enough. That means that if you want to make meaningful progress in the face of this information asymmetry, you have to find wedge issues.

"We have lost this argument in the past so what are we talking about" is a dangerous attitude in this context. Helping the 'average citizen' understand the extent of surveillance and facing the consequences is an ongoing process. Public awareness is still very low about these issues, but the norms are changing - many, including myself are working hard on framing the issue in a way that reaches wider audiences. We cannot just put up our hands and accept that this battle is lost and the power imbalance is too entrenched to be changed. If you are interested in recent studies that demonstrate that people who become aware of the privacy issues do care about them, email me.

I just feel like when you have a problem like this, where the interests of business and state are aligned (data collection is useful for both), taking a principled stance allows people to marginalize you.

Obviously, people don't like invasive data collection. People don't like wars either. People generally have the kind of common sense that institutions and businesses lack.

My feeling is that you don't win fights like this by making a principled stance, then trying to get the public on board. You do it by finding wedge issues, where the argument is so strong that opposition is very difficult, then using victories there to build momentum for the next fight. That's what the civil rights movement did. That's what you have to do if you're fighting from a weaker position, and I think privacy will always be a weak value in western-style democracies because there are just so many compelling incentives for actors to erode privacy, and the threat of losing privacy is generally abstract, and only felt by already marginalized groups.

I do not understand where you get the impression that the interest of business and state are aligned when it comes to data collection. I would say that in a lot of cases, it is rather the opposite. You seem to assume that the state always has access to the data collected. That is likely not true. There are laws that limit state´s use of data without cause. That seems to be missing for Big Tech, which is why we need regulation.

A few years ago the Norwegian Spy Chief was taking questions from the media. He actually pointed out that we should be more worried about the data collection of private companies than that of the Norwegian state. Their data collection was regulated and small in scope. Big tech data collection is seemingly neither.

Data collected by Big Tech can be misused by others. In many ways this is a significant security risk. Not just from data breaches, but also that people can be manipulated in groups. This is a significant problem and the easiest way to resolve it is to stop the tracking and ban surveillance-based ads.

Well, a state is the entity that has sovereignty in a given country. So in principle, it always has access to all of the resources of that country, even though in practice it's bound by all sorts of laws and customs. Also in practice, these laws and customs tend to have exceptions in exigent circumstances.

Personally, I think dividing between the state and business is simplistic. Most businesses and most states have a symbiotic and codependent relationship, that is more or less explicit depending on the country you're talking about, but that's by the by. In practice, states generally have access to collected data through subpeonas.

I do not know which country you come from and maybe what you describe is correct in your country. I can say that it is not in my countries, Norway and Iceland and this has not been my experience running an international company either.

In any case, I think mixing the two is not helpful in any shape or form. What we need is to regulate what private companies can do. I think that is enough scope for this particular discussion and I think this is such an important matter that it needs to be addressed.

Unless you're a sheep farmer or something (in which case, you still rely on the state for security) you need an enormous number of state services to run even a very simple business, but on a more basic level, property rights are defined and guaranteed by the state, currency is produced and given value by the state, employment relations and legal structures also, and so on.

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