Your Phone Is Your Private Space
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
> The logic of catching a few evil actors by denying the cloak of privacy to everyone will inexorably expand to more and more areas that powerful societal factions want to target.
With War on Terror and also War on Drugs everyone bought into the premise. Now twenty years later it's more of a stalemate than anything else.
Then came the Corona epidemic where most accepted very serious limits in their freedom, e.g. Ireland introduced curfew.
Now Apple is trying to introduce surveillance of your device. I believe that this idea from Apple is a step too far, in that the public will not accept it on any terms.
Apple has long been promoting privacy, but now they also want to promote surveillance. They can choose one but not both, which is the dilemma Apple is in.
So my hope is that the public will no longer accept overreaction due to a large-scale event and it starts with Apple and phone privacy.
I was a teenager when the "War on Terror" was announced and even back then I thought that this is a silly concept, because:
1) Terror is a concept. How can you fight and win a war against a concept?
2) The goal of Terror is to use violence and fear to rally a political point. If we change our entire way of living because of terrorists, doesn't that somehow mean we give them more leaverage over our way of living than we should?
As it now turned out, the whole "War on Terror" didn't work out, couldn't have worked out etc. People are kinda fed up with this "we all have to give up $freedom to gain a slight edge against $virtual_threat". I mean there are even people who wouldn't give up a bit of comfort for a real and imidiate threat like Covid.
Lies have consequences. Big lies have big consequences.
There are no terrorist possible in feudal states. Because acts of terrorism back then would be just a drop in the bucket. And any benefit would quickly disappear in ensuing retaliation.
You don't get rid of terrorism by choosing a power structure where terror is the norm.
I'd say you can never get rid of terror per se until you establish absolute power and absolute control. That means any free society has to accept a certain amount of terrorism and therefore has to focus work on preventing root causes of terrorism as well as preventing the fallout a single terrorist attack can have.
Terrorism is using violence to achieve political aims.
If state is built on terror and control, then others can't use it against it, since state has near monopoly on that.
There is a probably a nice write-up somewhere of how that is the point; some sort of tribe bonding exercise or something. Showing that people pull together as a community because they are a community rather than because of a rational reason. The fact that the premise is farcical isn't a factor. Don't expect logical consistency.
However this statement:
> There is no connection at all between 9/11 and the necessity for the US to have launched what turned out to be a 20 year occupation of Afghanistan. None.
Is simply not true.
Of course there is a connection. Poltics felt obligated to do something. In purely practical terms the US (and the world) might have been better off if instead of going for a war in Afghanistan, the US did nothing instead (except for a proper investigation of course).
But wars are not often about purely practical matters anyways. Sometimes they are more domestic politics than foreign, sometimes they are more about telling and selling stories than about survival.
Why do you think they picked Afghanistan?
One day you might find yourself on a secret government no fly list because you checked out the wrong book at the library or spent too much time watching lock-picking videos. And there will be nothing you can do because we spent the last several decades building a highly efficient array of surveillance and population control systems.
And this cartoon: https://i.redd.it/ifb8agngc7dy.jpg
I guess Tim Cook isn’t the sort to have anyone tell him what to do.
Tim Cook receives zero respect from me.
Even Apple is not capable of being able to sell a product that can’t take advantage of the economies of scale of Chinese/southeast Asian electronics manufacturing, or the metals that come from the middle of Africa.
No one is going to pay $10k for an iPhone versus a $1k Samsung. One company might be able to push the wages and quality of life a little bit, and be able to sell at a 10% or 30% premium. But it is not going to be enough.
Gervais was probably wearing clothes made of materials coming from some Asian country from factories with even worse wages. Easy to criticize and make “smart” comments as a comedian, certainly easier than working in the supply chain and managing logistics for 3 decades and actually knowing what is and is not possible.
A better use of time would have been if Gervais asked Cook what can be done to speed up the improvement in working conditions or what the roadblocks are that prevent it from happening.
Impressive, usually that type of "no u" argument needs a specific target; how much more useful it is when one can tar anyone wearing clothes with the easy certainty that somewhere in the supply chain substandard working conditions exist.
Even more impressive is the snuck premise that, since Gervais is implicitly OK with his clothes (probably) originating in some sweatshop, he should be OK with the state of modern electronics in both their manufacture and their role as panopticon.
The argument is that even something as simple as clothing is difficult to have an economically viable business in if not sourcing from places around the world with low wages and lax labor and environmental laws. I would expect Gervais to recognize this, and understand that Tim Cook cannot be expected to have the power to completely rectify the situation regarding the inputs of the most complicated devices every made in history.
>Even more impressive is the snuck premise that, since Gervais is implicitly OK with his clothes (probably) originating in some sweatshop, he should be OK with the state of modern electronics in both their manufacture and their role as panopticon.
I do not agree with this interpretation of my premise due to the ill defined word "OK". It is possible to be realistic and expect solutions to take time, but that does not mean one would be "OK" with labor conditions if they did not have to be.
People like to blame big corporations, politicians, other countries, anyone but themselves. But push comes to shove, where is the political support for higher fossil fuel taxes? Where is the patronizing of local businesses that use local labor to make goods?
What is the purpose of asking Tim Cook about child labor when people in society destroyed every business that did not offer products at the lowest possible prices? I have known about clothing made with child labor since I was in grade school, and I am in my mid 30s, and clothes still come from Bangladesh and we (society as a whole) still buy it from there. Nobody is going to pay the premium required to make an iPhone outside of SE Asia or without the metals from Africa, it is probably not even possible.
There are many companies that produce and sell american made apparel. [0] I buy from several of them (on the the rare occasions when I buy more clothes.)
> Where is the patronizing of local businesses that use local labor to make goods?
Perhaps if you spent less time making assumptions about where other people buy their clothes and more time looking for local options you would actually be helping.
The end goal should not be the end of international trade but an insistance that we do not allow international trade to facilitate abuses. The core problem is that people like you and Tim Cook brush off legitimate concerns about the practices of international trade partners as "just the way things are".
Edit: I would hope that Ricky Gervais, when confronted with a question about the source of this clothing, would respond thoughfully and even consider changing where he buys his clothes. Ethical business practices may be a niche market today, but the way we expand that market share isn't by just accepting the way things are.
[0] https://www.rather-be-shopping.com/blog/american-clothing-ma...
Same for Sony, LG, etcetra.
https://www.pcworld.com/article/2023286/foxconn-samsung-face...
But Samsung has facilities in China too:
https://www.samsung.com/semiconductor/about-us/location/manu...
Another 2012 article about labor practices at Samsung factories:
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/09/these...
The point is everyone uses cheap labor for manufacturing if possible, whether it's China or elsewhere. If they did not, then their mass market products would probably be priced too high and customers would reward competitors and they would go out of business. No one is paying higher paid people in South Korea or Japan to assemble phones if it can be done drastically cheaper elsewhere.
Another article about Sony using Foxconn and other ODMs:
http://www.xperiablog.net/2012/06/19/sony-mobile-partners-wi...
I assume LG and Samsung are big enough to have their own facilities and be ODMs themselves, but I would guess the smaller players like Sony have to outsource to them.
Fact is, they do manufacture phones in South Korea. Not all their phones, but they do manufacture them. Evidently it's still profitable enough to do so, and evidently they do not charge $10K for their top-of-the-line Galaxy S phones made in SK. https://www.businessinsider.com/samsung-gumi-factory-2014-5?...
Sony has also made phones in SK and Japan.
Obviously these are not contenders for the cheapest phone, but we weren't talking about the cheap Xiaomis and Huaweis anyway. And evidently lots and lots of people are happy to pay for more expensive phones. Apple has ridiculous profit margins and people still pay for it.
I assume if Samsung had figured out how to make phones with better labor practices than Apple, then they would be advertising it. Seems like pretty easy PR points to win business, so I would have to wonder why not? I am guessing it is either inconsistent across their product lines or labor practices are increasing over the years.
They dont. The only model they did that was some specific Chinese Model. And even that was small volume.
His point was dont act like you are Saint and lecturing the public when you not Saint.
Their marketing was starting to get to me as far as being the privacy company. I was really considering buying my first iphone. They had to know they were throwing all that marketing/effort down the drain.
There is no way they are going back on this. They will just wait out the collective short term memory to move on to something else. In a year this will just be normal. In 5 years all the other things that have been added to scan for will also just be normal.
For me, I am old and just accept we will live in an ever growing dystopian surveillance state. I am so grateful I was able to live my youth the way it was. If you are young? Yea, I have no answers.
May you live in interesting times? At least we have that going for us.
I.e. Manual labor continuously gets automated, so less low education positions available each year.
Upcoming climate crises that's going to displace a lot of people that won't have jobs anymore.
Air quality continuously worsening. We're globally at 415 CO2 now, up from below 300 before industrialization. With each sizeable increase people will statistically perform worse on intellectual tasks. If current trends continue we'll be at 500 before 2100.
Continuously improving neural networks/"ai" will make fully automated armed defenses on private properties viable, so this is likely the first time in history in which people in power won't be dependent on their guards, making worker uprisings basically impossible
I am glad as well that Im always well into my 30th and make an effort to enjoy each day without thinking too much about the future. It's looking grim, so all the more reason to enjoy the present
Urban areas are already regularly over 500ppm. I know because my dad certified hospital air systems with a 500ppm limit. Hospitals are having to put carbon filter on their air intakes.
That bright future and empowering innovation that most of us expected from tech companies was really a mirage…
Went the other day to an old friend's house. At the door, a Ring eye unblinkingly stared at me. For a few moments I felt like crushing the metallic monstrosity under the heel of my boot: I never consented to have my face uploaded in the Cloud. Then realized how powerless we truly are: every other house, every other shop, every other car have such an eye, all connected to the AllSeeingCloudEntity. With vision tech cheap enough to match our faceprint every single step every single one of us takes in a public space. Heracles at least had a fighting chance against the Hydra. Where do we even begin reclaiming our right to not be continuously watched?
'Don't use a browser'. 'Don't carry a cellphone'. 'Wear a mask'.
Next: 'Don't go outside'. 'Don't speak'. 'Don't think'.
Soon we are back to:
Don't write when you can speak, don't speak when you can nod, don't nod when you can wink - or something to that effect.
Don't think.
If you think, don't speak.
If you speak, don't write.
If you write, don't sign.
If you think, speak, write and sign, don't be surprised.
Fortunately for the Soviet subjects, in-person surveillance was expensive and didn't scale once the system started to crack and the number of dissidents increased from a handful to thousands.
Not so in the tech utopia. We have multiple megacorporations competing in doing every evil trick in the Soviet surveillance textbook, 24/7, at scale. Aaah, progress.
We can likely all come up with novel technology ideas to help ourselves, but it's a blight on all of society not just those who are conscious of it. They are our governments after all, we should be using them as tools for good as best we can.
Re tech solutions, I've been hearing this for 20 years. The panopticon has been built. Anti-surveillance technologies failed to materialize.
For example, the horrific Therac-25 incidents led to IEC 62304, a standard which specifies life cycle requirements for the development of medical software and software within medical devices:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEC_62304
I hope analogous standards will be formulated for privacy on devices etc.
How do we move the needle of public opinion?
"The Cardholder must not disclose the assigned PIN, nor any personally chosen PIN (see Item 17.8.), nor the Secure Code to anyone, not even to employees of card complete. The Cardholder is responsible for ensuring strict secrecy concerning all card security details – PIN, Secure Code and mobileTANs received on his/her telephone (to be used for authenticating a ViS/MCID transaction and valid for a maximum of 5 minutes afterreceipt) – and must take all reasonable precautions to ensure that they cannot be discovered by others. The Cardholder must refrain from writing them down on the card, keeping them in the same place as the card, telling them to anyone, or acting in any other way that would allow others to discover these details."
Hence, if you have a credit card, you must hide something. A bank, for example, would likely benefit from requiring a secure device for transactions as part of their conditions of use, otherwise it is unclear how exactly we can satisfy this contract as customers, and who is liable in case of problems. A common way to ensure such technical requirements is to refer to a technical standard that the device must conform to.
As a closely related example, here is a recent Austrian law, the Registrierkassensicherheitsverordnung (regulation for security of cash registers):
https://www.ris.bka.gv.at/GeltendeFassung.wxe?Abfrage=Bundes...
Note to how many technical standards the law refers to in order to ensure the security of these devices, including AES-256, SHA-256 etc. These technical standards ensure that multiple vendors can participate in bidding and all adhere to the required specifications regarding security etc.
Most people really don't get how much processing is happening and how much of it is a mechanical turk by the way of minimum wage contractors.
A problem for places like USA is that the legislators are unwilling to regulate against the interest of big companies unless the needle of public opinion is very, very, very strong to the point of it becoming the primary issue (which IMHO is not going to happen, privacy is important but there are and will be other priorities as well) - but if we're simply looking at the preferences of the population, then the public opinion is already there.
Unfortunately, as evidenced by the ubiquity of Google’s services, almost nobody is willing to give up an iota of convenience for their privacy.
Which is, in other words, due in large part to what is referred to as "myopic engineering" or "engineering myopia": this idea that, as Heidegger writes in What is Called Thinking?, "[t]he most thought-provoking thing in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking."
Also, sometimes I expect a Tesla to go full “Assuming Control” mode and continue aggressive behavior of previously encountered one. Surely they record/analyze everything encountered and pass it onto central server, so no issues “remembering” me…
I notice this in the media a lot. It’s so frequent I struggle to believe it isn’t on purpose. To make people think a problem isn’t as widespread or as severe as it actually is.
It could be more like: "My computer won't start" (it currently does not start), or "don't leave this unattended or the cat will eat it" (it's actually happening right now as soon as you do).
Not doing this provides a substantial amount of motivation for choices I make in small projects I do.
While yet to think of a blog post or snazzy term for this, which won't be posted on Medium, every action, every feature, is one to consider for the value it adds, not just it for the sake of it. And every choice not to do something is equally a choice.
Should login be via Google, Facebook, email, other? Why is login necessary? Could value for services be provided with no need for login, 80% of value, 60%, then if so, and if integrating to 3rd party services what value does that add? And what does it take away in getting padlocked to a walled ecosystem that can be slammed shut with no recourse, be that Alphabet, Tencent, or any other?
Do I need to access your location and photos for a todo app? If so, that's not a todo app, or some pretty poorly thought-out feature creep is being build in from the start. Is having access to your contacts going to make me the next unicorn? It's been done already. Too competitive today for the next big thing which will be something different anyway, the next big iteration in the sense of not being very revolutionary at all. Has the potential for liability been thought of when sloppy code deletes valuable pictures, or causes a device failure that does so?
The noun that was 'creativity' has been replaced by the corporate-safe one-step-at-a-time 'innovation'. Nobody got fired for innovating. Marketers get bonuses for dressing up the mediocre-inducing term innovation as something remotely creative.
The future is here and was here all along. It's for us to see.
Then you can gleefully watch Apple getting on its knees very fast.
For those without a samsung it's basically an encrypted sandbox environment.
sure its not perfect but it is a good way to wall of a private environment for yourself.
This is my own conclusion after owning several Galaxy devices and eventually giving up trying to get them secure. At this point, they can't be trusted more than Xiaomi or Huawei.
I was determined not to have a Samsung account to use the phone, so I never got try it out, but I assume that anyone with access to the Samsung account have access to the secure folder
That’s the explanation HNers gave to me last time I pointed this out regarding some iCloud features.
How about companies stop adding backdoors to security features with the excuse of “data safety”?
I’m done reading.
Now today we know certain things to be true. If Apple, the world’s largest company, deploys this scanning technology on a billion handsets then many offenders will be caught and they will go to jail, and as a consequence a large number of children will be spared the type of abuse that totally destroys lives. Those victims lose everything.
I’d wager that for the majority of people on this forum, if they witnessed an adult sexually assault a child in person then they would intervene. Even if considerable risk was involved. There’s plenty of reward in saving a helpless child. But take that reward away, without the incentive, different colors show.
Do you care so little about the wellbeing of children you’d let child rapists walk free around the community rather than let a company scan your cellphone for contraband?
Perhaps we need to think less about how much we trust the government we elected or fear the potential negative future consequences of technology, and think more about being remembered as a human being that simply cared for others.
https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/laughing-at-auschwitz-1942/
Then, same as anyone can plant heroin in your apartment, anyone can plant "evidence" on your iPhone. Possession laws are extremely dangerous. In the simplest case, someone sends you a spam with an attachment that ends up on iCloud.
Physical problems need to be addressed at the physical level, even if that means that the authorities have to get up from their comfortable chairs again and have to stop staring at monitors.
Of course Apple's scanning isn't the only thing that encourages such creation, but it's a newly publicized thing.
Child abuse happens within families in the majority of cases. People who commercialize child abuse will move to a different platform if they even
If you really want to enforce policies that protect children from abuse then you'll have to speak up for improved social work, professionalized points of contact for school children and so on and so on. I'm not a professional in this field but I'm sure there is a lot of literature on this.
The implication of what Apple does, on the other hand, is officially giving up on protecting their users' data. If people oppose this, they don't oppose protecting children. They oppose a policy that has no proven effectiveness against child abuse while having high potential to becoming a generalized surveillance tool.
Yes I do believe this illustrates a similar social dynamic. People here could care less about the extreme suffering these children stand to experience.
Email privacy is more important than preventing child rape. Does that sound right to you?
Personally, I believe that those policies have good intentions, and that ending them will cause great harm to children on a significant scale.
Almost all child abuse happens at the hands of parents and siblings. The simplest way to prevent it isn't to scan photos on iPhone. Most people at this point have webcams and microphones in their homes. Device vendors could simply make these always on and flag recordings of possible abuse to manually review and send to law enforcement.
As far as I can tell, exactly no one thinks we should do this. But it's completely analogous. People who abuse children often have recording devices of some sort near them. Forcing those recording devices to automatically scan and detect abuse in their data streams would almost certainly prevent some amount of abuse.
It is trivial to stop any and all crime with a sufficiently invasive police state, provided you redefine covert surveillance and the psychological harm done to people who know they are always being watched as not being crimes. So why do we accept some panopticons and not others? What is the actual difference here? People have a right to privacy and we have a formal process whereby law enforcement need to convince a judge of probable cause and only then can they be surveilled to find evidence against them. It has never been acceptable in American jurisprudence to just surveil everyone in case they might be a criminal. When did that change?
Obviously, there is a tradeoff here. We allow people privacy and dominion in their homes. As a result, stronger people who live with weaker people quite often abuse them. Great harm to children and spouses and girlfriends and pets on a significant scale absolutely happens because we allow presumption of innocence and privacy in one's own home. But that has always been considered worth it.
I'm thinking it has to do with the idea that "you" are the one that owns "your" device, whose subversion is the cause of a lot of the backlash.
But I think that if governments are able to compel companies to not let thir data warehouses become private spaces that allow criminal enterprises to flourish, they would do so. Corporations wouldn't become triggers for outrage if other forces surveil their physical or virtual premises - regulation is expected. They can grow to have too much power, and in order to continue existing they have to cooperate with external forces that keep them in check. The standards of individual liberty seem to be applied differently between individuals' private spaces and corporations.
But a lot of times, I think that there isn't an equivalent distinction between a hard drive in one's own room and one out of millions in a remote data center. Exposing a personal hard drive to the internet and breaking down someone's door both carry the possibility of criminal liability, but the former has many more legitimate use cases. It has always been possible to incriminate oneself from a sealed room with only an Internet connection depending on what kind of data you're trafficking, and maybe the possibility of on-device scanning will cause more people to learn of that fact.
I believe the misunderstanding is that Apple assumes that the impression they're giving is that only those that consent to allowing the corporation to assist them in their lives will be subjected to that corporation's policies that prohibit the assistance from being criminal in nature, and it's irrelevant if that process is moved to the device. But Apple's assumption was wrong, and many people stopped trusting them. And because of that severe loss of trust in particular, their promises stopped being effective in dismissing counterarguments. Almost everything about this issue revolves around who will be compelled to implement what technological controls by whom else, and about the only things that are being used to refute the worst case scenario are what have essentially become meaningless promises because of the significant loss of trust. But even so, meaningless promises are all that reassure us that any given corporation won't go rogue at any time, regardless of what laws or morals exist, and promising that these features will save children from harm has, up to this point, been a promise that has been accepted and forgotten about.
To be clear, I think Apple's strategy is a mistake, and that the scan should be kept off the device. That is from the standpoint of how to effectively hold corporations accountable, who hold a significant amount of power in incentivizing human behavior, be it addictive or criminal. And in the current society where corporations need to know if they're enabling criminals by learning about the nature of their interactions, complete privacy can never be achieved. There will have to be a loss of some amount of privacy at some step in the process, but there is still such a thing as losing too much privacy.
The ‘all or nothing’ ‘here comes the 1984 dystopia’ argument is fear mongering. Let’s give Apple a chance and see if they can pull it off.