Comment by freddyym | Hacker News Reader

Comment by freddyym | Hacker News Reader

The best agrument is that privacy is power.[0] It is the power to influence you, show you adverts and predict your behaviour. Our personal data is being used as knowledge against us - as power against us. It is used to make us do things we otherwise would not do: to buy a certain product or to vote a certain way.

As companies share more information with governments, they are able to learn more and more about their citizens. Take Facebook, a company that Laura Poitras described as 'a gift to intelligence agencies'[1]. Facebook allows governments to arrest people planning to participate in protests before they have even begun. This is just the tip of the iceberg.

Our privacy is eroding. As a society, we are beginning to accept this lack of privacy as normal: and this is extremely dangerous. Privacy provides a place for us to be ourselves, to express ourselves in new ways without fear of being watched by preying eyes. If we lose privacy then we lose this ability to experiment, and, more importantly, we lose our power.

[0]https://aeon.co/essays/privacy-matters-because-it-empowers-u...

[1]https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2014/10/23...

> The best agrument is that privacy is power.

I am reminded of the TV series "The Prisoner" out of BBC, especially the final episode "Fall Out Pt2".

Expounds about "the individual's right to be individual", community, the status quo, and so forth.

And over that "no" is a complete sentence that needs no more explanation.

A classic from the 60s, worth watching (I'm from the 80s). Starring Patrick McGoohan. Obligatory link [1]. "Quote: The final episode, "Fall Out", received a Hugo Award nomination for Best Dramatic Presentation in 1969." This specific episode also has its own Wikipedia entry, [2].

A quote from that article: "There are numbers here, there are no names, so you can't expect it to end like James Bond, so you have to have an allegorical ending. Now (...) what is the most evil thing on earth? Is it jealousy? Is it hate? Is it revenge? Is it the bomb? What is it? When one really searches it's only one thing, it's the evil part of oneself that one is constantly fighting until the moment of our demise. The Jekyll and Hyde if you like, but on a much larger scale." —Patrick McGoohan. Which reminds me of Sad But True by Metallica.

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

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_Out_(The_Prisoner)

Adverts and telemetry suggest a third party. The more parties you introduce to any transaction the less private it becomes.

Actual real privacy would be between two parties that trust each other and encrypt their communications in both directions. That means no Facebook servers to intercept your commentary, send you advertisements, and send friend suggestions.

I would also argue that it's hard to have freedom without privacy. I think we do all have a right to be forgotten.

I think this does need to be balanced with the public benefit to know things though. One of the bad side effects of counties that have such "right to be forgotten" laws is that their primary beneficiaries seem to be corrupt politicians who want the public to forget about their scandals by suppressing Google searches about them.

On the point of arresting people planning to protest, many protest around the world were fueled by the use of social media/messaging apps. So in that case its not obvious that it has a negative effect on democracy.

These happened due to networks, not our loss of privacy.

I understand your point is that our loss of privacy didn’t lead to arrests or in these instances, but there has almost certainly been arrests in other instances, and we’d be losing sight of the bigger picture if we deluded ourselves into believing oppressive governments, companies, billionaires, etc.. weren’t already heavily using mined data to counter dissidence movements in more ways than just arrests.

Governments responded to the Arab spring by taking social media much more seriously. There are a lot of ways to use social media to suppress and discourage dissent, outside of arrests; it's a very powerful counterintelligence tool.

Unless you count the arrests that happened after the protests, where the social media feeds were the intel which lead to the arrests...

Playing the devil's advocate here but there could be a good side. It can also help us buy things we didn't know we needed, bringing our unconscious forward and making us realise things about ourselves we didn't know. I wouldn't mind that, if only I knew only I had access to that information though.

> It can also help us buy things we didn't know we needed, bringing our unconscious forward and making us realise things about ourselves we didn't know

There is no commercial incentive to do any of that

Most commercial incentive I have witnessed is to do precisely that.

I think there's a clear distinction to make between clicking on links to other people's content - that's like walking into a store and the proprietor sharing his video footage of you in there with other vendors - vs. having your own personal expression (photos, personal sentiments, friend networks) shared without your consent.

>It can also help us buy things we didn't know we needed

It is remarkably difficult for such a thing to happen. Very little is needed and that that is tends to be rather obvious.

In Maslov's model the volume of needs would probably graph to an ellipse instead of a triangle.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs

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