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Comment by kornhole | Hacker News Reader

Author does not mention the major reason I care which is that allowing others to know what we are doing, thinking, saying, where we are going.. either individually or collectively anonymously or not, gives them power over us in many ways to predict, manipulate, dispossess.. which leads to the imbalances we have today of the haves and have nots of data.

The people who say big tech already has so much data on them so why care are missing the valence of time. What you did, thought, said.. last year is much less valuable and useful than what you are doing today.

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It also leads to manipulation. People don't want to hear that - they think, as imagine many people reading this are thinking, that they aren't manipulated.

People are manipulated on a large scale. States, advertisers, political movements, and others are investing a lot of money in it. They are getting something for their money.

That is the most important issue; that is the power in our society. Propaganda was effective before the Internet. Now, with incredible amounts of information about your behavior, interests, needs, situation, etc., and with expertise and A/B testing, it's certainly possible to move the needle. Yes, for you and me too.

In the old country, there was a story ( which since I heard variants of ) my parents told me trying to explain why it is not a good idea to share details of your life with strangers, which goes something like this.

Secret police was trying to recruit a dissident to be their informer, but he was resisting. They tried to bribe him. They tried to cajole him. They tried to threaten him. He did not break.

One day a senior agent went by to introduce himself. When the dissident started to protest, the senior agent waved him away. 'We already know everything there is to know about you. We even know you drink tea and not coffee.' The treats, speeches and monetary gain had no hold on the dissident, but when he learned someone close to him betrayed him, he internally gave up.

The moral of the story is and always has been the same. Information is valuable. You may not think it is, but someone does. Do you think that someone has your best interest at heart?

I don't disagree with your anecdote in general. But it is somewhat interesting that, in the modern world, the implicit threat of an authority figure knowing this bit of trivia about you wouldn't be all that threatening. To the person in the story, it implies someone fairly close to him is giving information. To us it would be like "did get that bit of information from my Google searches, Facebook likes, or did you go through the effort of asking my bank where I shop?"

This is the part that interests me the most. In a way, its a thousand times worse now. In a practical sense, if the story was told today the story would suggest that any agent would get this information just by asking ISP, banks and maybe Amazon for your history with them. We don't just know that you drink tea. We can predict your daughter is pregnant and know wife is cheating on you. Full blown surveillance requires little to no effort. The amount of mind games you can play with that treasure trove is why you hear concerns IC about people 'going dark'.

I suppose to me how the information is obtained is secondary. The fact that it is obtained at all is an issue. We are only recently becoming better at analytics and seeing patterns that would be considered a little creepy only few decades ago. It is normalized now.

To your point that in the story, the trivia is truly irrelevant. By itself it means nothing. State knows I drink tea. Big whoop. Tons of people these days voluntarily show off eating pastas of all kinds. It is just serves as a way overwhelm the target with a feeling of helplessness ("They know everything"), abandonment("Someone close gave them information"),hopelessness("What is the point?").

So the trivia is not threatening by itself. It is the implication that the agent knows you very well indeed and that knowledge includes trivia.

Now imagine a person visiting you with a short listing of your detailed interests, search history, suspected health issues and inferred psychological profile.

It is a lot less subtle, but it conveys same message ( I know you better than your family, doctor, bookie.. ).

Sorry for the long response, but I just wanted to make sure it is clear that trivia is just a small part of it. As Dennis Reynolds would have said: It is the implication.

This is a fantastic comment. And it perfectly answers why the idea of "having nothing to hide" is so dangerous. Everyone will one day have something worth hiding, and probably not something illegal at all.

This really can't be overstated. Propaganda was highly effective even as words on pieces of paper distributed once a week or infrequent AM radio broadcasts.

I believe the old idea that would hold even more so now is that the only defense against propaganda is essentially to be illiterate. It is really hard to propagandize a person who can't read. The more informed a person believes themselves to be about the world from text, the more propagandized they are. I believe that is from Edward Bernays.

Illiterate people can listen to radio (or now, videos) just fine, though. Text isn't special, the content is.

Illiterate people can also be lured into crowds marching with photos of their leaders, de facto becoming themselves part of the propaganda.

There are some who have argued that crytopcurrency is an effort to make everyone's spending habits public. Imagine virtually anyone having access to global purchase history. No need to approach VISA, etc. to purchase the data. This seems like Nirvana for "tech" intermediaries sitting on the internet.

A crypto proponent might argue that transactions are anonymous. However it is impossible to remove entries from the ledger, which is of course public. Hence even if this anonymity was true today it would also have to withstand ever-increasing capabilities of "chain analysis" for an infinite amount of time.

The existence and use of "crypto mixers", e.g., by criminals, suggests identities are indeed traceable.

What about Monero, which is supposedly completely anonymous even with chain tracking?

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/09/09/mastercard-to-buy-blockchain...

Lets assume Monero is untraceable. Did MasterCard buy a company that cannot deliver on its promise of Monero tracing. In 2020, it was announced that American tax dollars were paid by DHS to CipherTrace for "tools" to trace Monero transactions.

Thought experiment: What is the financial incentive to keep transactions "untraceable". Is it greater than the financial incentive to make transactions traceable.

CipherTrace didn't even win the actual contract from the IRS; Chainalysis did.

CipherTrace's tools - by their own admission - can only provide probabilistic analysis and not deterministic analysis.

They'll help in an investigation, but are hardly a silver bullet.

For example, IRS paying $625,000 award to company who can help trace Monero

https://sam.gov/opp/5ab94eae1a8d422e88945b64181c6018/view

> No need to approach VISA, etc. to purchase the data.

Surely for a government, approaching VISA is far more conveneint

"When I search for ways to improve my online privacy, I find two extremes: people who think it's not worth it because Big Tech already have all our data, or complicated suggestions to flash my phone with a modded version of Android."

To be clear, like the OP, I am not referring to privacy from the government, i.e., so-called "state actors". I am referring to privacy from "tech" companies. Regardless of who develops the methods to trace crypto, or why they do so, history has shown it is "tech" companies, collectively, that have the greatest desire for internet surveillance data and pose the greatest risk to online privacy.

>either individually or collectively anonymously or not, gives them power over us in many ways to predict, manipulate, dispossess

The thing is, is that actually true? What always comes to mind for me is the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which involved their self-declared 'psychometric targeting', which it turned out, after scientists did some studies had a measurable effect of zero on people's behaviour[1].

People love this idea of 'big data' as some powerful ominous tool, even big companies themselves seem to push it explicitly to seem more towering than they are. It's much more boring and unfashionable to think that people are a little more complex and have more agency and that companies push it because it makes them sound more sophisticated than they are.

[1]https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/3/23/17152564/ca...

Yes and no, cross source info allows people to know bulneravility that help change behaviors,much time big data means better and cheaper data tools, like easy accea to optimize internal proces or better ui

If you think you're not being manipulated, you're deluded. Advertising works. It worked before the Internet and there's even more of it now. We do still have individual agency but don't you want a cool refreshing Coca-Cola right about now?

Actually the research is fairly mixed as we’re dealing with N-variable systems of technology, communication, economics, and a non trivial amount of fraud.

Is it mixed because the effect is mixed? Low effect?

Or is it mixed because it is resistant to observation? Hard to test for?

Nobody is denying advertising works. But most of the time ads are trying to win you over vs competitors in the market. Most of it is predicated on the fact that you are in the market for something, and they want you to choose them over someone else. I doubt coca-cola is targeting non-soda drinkers in their advertisements. But they want you to pick coke over Pepsi.

Even if you create an open source drug that cures cancer and give it away for free, you’re gonna need a marketing campaign so that doctors know about it, or that patients know to ask their doctor about it. Not because you’re malicious and trying to manipulate people but because otherwise people who would benefit from your product won’t know it exists.

I think the mechanism of advertising is more fundamental than that, I think it's intimately hooked into the same path as spaced repetition.

I feel Marketing isn't so much crafted to compete with other signals on any merits but rather crafted to compete with recall.

Once a message hooks into an effective spaced repetition pattern it doesn't matter which is the 'better' product; because you'll search first for the one you recall the easiest. At which point it's an entirely different marketing team who tries to make the sale.

My opinion is that some companies craft messages to carry additional product metadata not because it's a necessary component of advertising but because they think it makes it simpler to recall.

I think this is evidenced by more than a handful of marketing campaigns that don't explain their product at all in any meaningful way and yet still enjoy immense popularity.

All that to say I think the worries alluded to by fragmede are justifiable, since the mechanism of impact could involve so little personal agency.

Coca-Cola competes not with Pepsi. If you chose Pepsi, you will not suddenly choose Coca-Cola if if shows a flashier ad.

Coca-Cola competes with: a glass of water, a cup of tea or coffee, an actual meal, a walk outside, a meditation, a nothing (just you chilling and keeping watching YT), your vision of yourself as someone who is not a Coke drinker (so e.g. Coke drinkers in adverts tend to be active, adventure-seeking, well-socialized and loved).

It advertises most certainly not to make the product known, that's done by putting it on shelves in stores. Invading your attention at home or while doing anything other than shopping is strictly banking on triggering an impulse and/or trying to adjust your self-image to allow the possibility of you seeing yourself as the type of a person who uses the product.

Similarly McD and SBX compete with local parks and benches, Netflix competes with woodwork (and indeed sex), YouTube competes with going out (and thus Uber, in locations with poor public transport), Uber competes with not going out (and thus YouTube), etc. to various degrees.

(Things are different with advertisements especially for lesser known products without IRL presence. An advert != an advert.)

IIRC a liter of Coca-Cola contains ~120g of sugar, and they need to add phosphoric acid to make it all go into solution. In fact, so much phosphoric acid that it makes a good de-rusting agent, i.e. any iron oxide (rust) will, after being soaked in Coca-Cola overnight, be converted to iron phosphate, which is easily removed with a light scrub. In addition, regularly consuming that much sugar puts you at high risk for type II diabetes, heart disease due to obesity, liver malfunction, and probably other things.

So no, absolutely do not want to drink what amounts to a toxic industrial solvent... though I did drink the stuff as a teenager before I learned all that, I must admit.

Point being, such advertising only works that effectively if you have a dumbed-down population ignorant of science, math, history and similar matters.

Here's a viable conspiracy theory, on that could very well be true: the attacks on American public education over the past 40 years are part of a deliberate effort to create a dumbed down population more susceptible to manipulation by corporate advertisers and state propagandists.

It’s an interesting comment, and a nice line about Coca Cola that I’ll definitely steal!

But the conspiracy theory part is obviously untrue. A less educated population is a less productive population, and a less productive population is a poorer population. Less income means less spending on products and less tax revenue. A group with sufficient skill to implement this conspiracy would know this, so wouldn’t do it.

(A counter is that the group could be made up of advertisers pushing inferior goods (income elasticity of demand is negative) and government authoritarians - but why would they be so much more competent than the luxury goods pushers and libertarians?)

You don't need any additives to dissolve 120g/l of sugar into water. Wikipedia lists sucrose solubility as approximately 2000g/l at 25C, and HFCS has even higher solubility. The phosphoric acid is to make it taste better. 120g/l would taste unpleasantly sweet without the acidity.

Right that makes sense.

Pepsi is number 1, because it's the choice of a new generation!

Advertising works in the sense it makes a product's existence known, everything beyond that is advertising of advertising ...

I'm slightly surprised that no company like CocaCola has made cost-free subsidised eye glasses with their logo watermarked in the lens so you see it everywhere you look. They can't all be waiting for AR/VR to take off before racing each other for that, surely?

"High fidelity targeting" working and "having a lot of data about people's choices and habits allows you to better manipulate them" are related but not identical things. It seems at least plausible to me that pre-internet advertising wasn't really much worse than what we have now, there's just more ways to attach cost to outcome.

But the amount of data companies have on their markets now is astounding, and can be used in more ways than just directly targeted ad serving.

I’d follow the money as opposed to some study.

Social media isn’t a boogeyman responsible for everything but it is a critical channel to influence. My mom gets bombarded with crazy tales of Joe Biden taking gasoline away, etc. I get lots of crazy dramatic fundraising requests from EFF, broadband advocates, etc.

It’s real and it works.

I don't doubt that what you're describing is real, I'm just skeptical that this is unique or has much to do with Facebook, advertisement or "the algorithm tm" in particular.

Thirty years ago your mom would likely be listening to talk radio, if that's the kind of media diet she's looking for. There's lots of deep reasons why people consume what they consume, I just think it's wrong to attribute a lot of agency to these platforms.

It's actually comforting to think that twitter, FB etc are destroying discourse when in reality it's people on the sites, out of their own volition, or through (lack of) education, socialization, etc.

That’s the thing. She wouldn’t.

My mom is in her 70s. She was a peace corps volunteer, a health care provider and an advocate for regulation of certain medical providers. She carried petitions for Al Gore. Not somebody that republicans would knowingly talk to.

But places like Facebook push content that your friends like. Sometimes that’s so and so’s new baby. Other times it’s Uncle Bob’s manifesto on why critical race theory is doing whatever.

> It's much more boring and unfashionable to think that people are a little more complex and have more agency and that companies push it because it makes them sound more sophisticated than they are.

I wonder if, when it comes to marketing at least, the opposite is true.

Facebook have x million data points on each person, but at the end of the day everyone fits into a very finite number marketing buckets based on gender, age and location. In terms of selling you a netflix series, razor, theragun or some other gadget people are predictable with just regular data, it just sounds fancier if you call it big data with a twist of AI and a quantum neural network chaser.

> What you did, thought, said.. last year is much less valuable and useful than what you are doing today.

This isn't true for biodata or medical related data.

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