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Comment by angelzen | Hacker News Reader

'will chew'?? The use of future tense is somewhat strange. We already live in a tech panopticon.

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?

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I know it's boring and in many places unlikely, but government is essentially the only tool that could ever be effective at quelling the continued expansion of corporate surveillance.

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.

How are we going to pressure the government, when regular people vastly underestimate the surveillance capabilities of modern ML + Cloud and willingly install surveillance endpoints in exchange of marginal convenience?

Re tech solutions, I've been hearing this for 20 years. The panopticon has been built. Anti-surveillance technologies failed to materialize.

One consequence of previous software failures with tragic outcomes was the development of technical standards that are now referred to and required in government procurement procedures, in laws and certifications, in education etc.

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.

There have been 24 years between Therac-25 and IEC 62304, with a clear smoking gun that everybody agreed it was a horrific smoking gun. With privacy, we're still in 'if you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear' stage, and we may be stuck here perpetually.

How do we move the needle of public opinion?

I strongly hope we are not stuck here perpetually: There are powerful companies that require privacy even in their conditions of use. For instance, to obtain a credit card from a bank, you have to sign a document stating that you will hide the PIN of your card. For example, quoting from Section 5.5 in the contract you have to sign to get a Visa Card or Mastercard https://www.cardcomplete.com/media/medialibrary/2021/03/AGBs...:

"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.

but it's just the algorithms of the nice corporation, they are only looking for crime and don't care about my pin

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.

If I look at EU legislation (not only GDPR but in general) then it seems that the needle of public opinion with respect to privacy is already there and well known to the legislators.

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.

If we could pressure governments to implement privacy laws we could just pressure the corporations directly by not using privacy-invading products.

Unfortunately, as evidenced by the ubiquity of Google’s services, almost nobody is willing to give up an iota of convenience for their privacy.

> We already live in a tech panopticon

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."

Ha, wait until you visit a house where there are surveilling devices blinking at your in every room.

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…

> 'will chew'?? The use of future tense is somewhat strange.

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.

I don't think it is distant future.

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).

Wear a mask? They have several benefits currently.

This is getting better by the year.

'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.

To quote Harlan Ellison: I have no mouth. And I must scream.

I recall a "meme" from USSR times that goes something like this:

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.

I remember Soviet block dissidents being assigned a 24/7 surveillance detail to monitor all their moves and contacts. I remember Soviet dissidents having their correspondence systematically violated by the surveillance apparatus. I remember US funded Radio Free Europe (and British BBC International) being utterly revolted by this state of affairs. Human Rights, Freedom, Democracy, Constitution, Rule of Law, Dignity. Exhibit A on why the Soviets were morally corrupt and had to go to the dustbin of history.

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.

Note that the Soviets, living in a communist society, had the state watch them free of charge. I live in a capitalist society. We purchase our own surveillance here.

I'm pretty sure that doesn't work. They just match you on the upper half of your face: https://www.facewatch.co.uk/2020/05/11/facewatch-launches-fa...

Can't do this indefinitely in some countries :/ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-mask_law)

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