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Comment by havblue | Hacker News Reader

I don't entirely follow the logic of this article: abortion is illegal in some states and Google knows your search and location history. So it seems like it's saying police will scour account data to target women with the intention of getting an abortion. How?

We know that at the federal level the government can dig into our Google profile data or that a police officer might ask you to hand over your phone. Short of a court order I don't see how our data is compromised like this article implies.

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States can pass laws requiring, eg., google to provide location data relevant to the crime (in that state) of abortion.

It's also pretty trivial to "suspect" someone of a crime for "being in some area" and then get a warrent for the data.

Abortion being illegal in some states seems like it might be a shock to the privacy system that's needed. If US states are clearly abusing their citizens en-mass in a way most people disagree with, corporate american enabling this will not be seen positively.

> ... corporate american enabling this will not be seen positively.

I don't think this is true in red states or for the minority views that determine what is and is not illegal in this country, or at least it won't play out like you wish. Certainly I don't see this playing out along this optimistic path. Politicians in Texas and Mississippi will frame it as companies helping dutiful law enforcement investigate evil crimes and ergo it's fine that Google was tracking everybody all along. Single-issue voters would be happy to see abortion providers or seekers behind bars and couldn't care less if the fourth amendment was violated along the way.

Just look at how conservatives (ok, well, a good chunk of all mainstream politicians) and voters viewed the FBI vs. Apple conflict from a few years ago - it was "we have to make sure the cops can get the bad guys so of course the cops should have access to whatever information they need" not "I have a right to privacy - time to stop using these services until they respect it"

I think the implication is that local police would seek court orders for this kind of data. That’s not a particularly difficult step for them, and Google is unlikely to resist a lawful court order. Hence the need to make those lawful orders as fruitless as possible.

It's unfortunately kind of a backwards solution. Any convenience or technology can be exploited by an unjust government. Saying the solution for cruel abortion law is to stop carrying user data is like saying the solution for overarmed police is to stop manufacturing bullets, or saying that the solution for unfettered wiretapping is to tear up the telephone system.

A society is not going to backstop the lack of a virtuous government by regressing its technological resources. The right solution is to insist on a virtuous government and wield all power necessary to cause that to exist.

No. What we're saying is that if you build a gigantic surveillance and propaganda machine it will be used by the powerful to hurt the powerless.

The solution is not to build the giant surveillance and propaganda machine just because you perceive it is merely helping the powerful at some particular moment in time.

Your telephone example is also dead wrong. The solution is to use an e2ee voice communication platform in addition to reigning in the rampant abuse by cops and domestic spying. Or in a counterfactual alternate past hefore that was possible, it would be to break up the large telephone providers that anything like a clipper chip or bulk wiretapping at the exchange without a warrant is impossible to coordinate and keep secret.

Similarly the overarmed police would be far less of a problem if there wasn't a massive corporate arms industry.

An e2ee solution is no good if the government is unjust, they just declare end-to-end encryption illegal and start arresting people the moment the signal hits the wire. Similarly, one can't expect an unjust government to reign in wire tapping, nor can one expect an unjust government to break up a telephone monopoly to enforce decentralization of potential surveillance threats.

And that's the problem with trying to solve an unjust government in this way. For any technological countermeasure, you can just imagine that the government is sufficiently unjust to render that countermeasure's use itself a threat to the user.

People, not technology, reign in governments.

> People, not technology, reign in governments.

Yes, and having the richest and most powerful companies, all their employees, and all their shareholders on the opposite team with the systems required for opression and surveillance already built is a non starter.

Your social solutions must be stable. And a solution with a giant centralised surveillance and social manipulation machine just waiting for someone even eviller to take control isn't a viable one.

Technical solutions aren't stable with the wrong social and political conditions, but social and political solutions are not stable with the wrong material conditions.

If I take you at your word, then we both want the same thing: a legal and social environment where google cannot exist and a technical and material environment where the type of tracking and censorship they do is impossible to implement unilaterally. But one of the major barriers to getting there is the existence of google so we have to fight on both fronts.

> on the opposite team

How do you figure? Companies are made up of the people the government oppresses.

> then we both want the same thing: a legal and social environment where google cannot exist

Hardly. My argument is that in the absence of Google, the government would still be a mess, and in the absence of the Google datasets, they'd use others (online cycle trackers, credit card data, toll road records, the photos taken by people standing outside Planned Parenthoods and volunteered to the authorities).

Larry Brin's "The Transparent Society" makes the excellent case that with the surveillance genie out of the bottle, you don't fix the way it can be abused by trying to cram it back in. Rather, the solution may be more surveillance... The wives and mistresses of politicians seek abortions too...

> How do you figure? Companies are made up of the people the government oppresses.

The people in control of the companies are the ones steering the government towards being more oppressive.

> Hardly. My argument is that in the absence of Google, the government would still be a mess, and in the absence of the Google datasets, they'd use others (online cycle trackers, credit card data, toll road records, the photos taken by people standing outside Planned Parenthoods and volunteered to the authorities).

With the exception of the last, those are all examples of surveillance capitalism that would be solved with the same legal and technological structures. The overwhelming majority of current commercial software would have been considered malware or a virus in the 90s. Real privacy laws (rather than half measures or controlled opposition like gdpr) that prevent gathering any data that isn't essential and pro-cash rather than anti-cash policies would solve these.

Even the last is either surveillance capitalsim (cloud based security cameras) or failure of general privacy law and social norms.

I don't think Google are anti birth control.

We should blame the American voters for this mess.

> Even the last is either surveillance capitalsim (cloud based security cameras) or failure of general privacy law and social norms.

I don't think you have fully grasped the position of the people who support the laws that ban abortion. From their point of view they're photographing murderers. Capitalism doesn't enter into it; they are volunteering their time to do this. It's not a failure of privacy law from their point of view, and they think that normalizing murder was a failure of social norms.

So long as these laws stand, all of society's technological advancements (communications technologies, surveillance technologies, transportation technologies) are turned against women because the society is turned against women. The solution is to correct the laws.

> A society is not going to backstop the lack of a virtuous government by regressing its technological resources.

Prioritizing privacy would not be a regression.

The regression was the constant erosion of privacy and ownership in pursuit of consolidating power and wealth.

> The right solution is to insist on a virtuous government and wield all power necessary to cause that to exist.

Virtuous government is a lot harder to achieve when we’ve made it easy to be anything but.

A court subpoena to Google for my calendar to figure out if I'm planning a trip out of town, or my Maps data to see if I've gone to an abortion clinic, is something that Google could choose to honor given the authority of the demaning court.

That possibility doesn't imply they should do away with offering Calendar, or with providing Map history; that's a feature the user takes advantage of to figure out where they've been (you'd be surprised how often I use that). The solution isn't to stop offering features; it's to fix the bad law.

None of those features require a cloud vendor with access to your calendar data or Map history.

The solution isn’t to pretend abusive data collection is safe if the only thing protecting against misuse is one law.

The solution is to stop abusive data collection from occurring in the first place.

What is the alternative to a cloud vendor having access to that data that provides me with

- zero user setup beyond creating an account

- data portability across devices, including mobile and desktop

- zero maintenance burden on the part of the user?

> Saying the solution for cruel abortion law is to stop carrying user data is like saying the solution for overarmed police is to stop manufacturing bullets, or saying that the solution for unfettered wiretapping is to tear up the telephone system

Depends on how compromised the “neutral” resource is. You can insist on virtuous whatever until you’re blue in the face, but they can keep waiting for your suffocation.

If we're talking realpolitik though, an electorate that lacks the power to overturn law that is only popular with 39% of the public certainly lacks the power to compel software megacorps to do anything, especially anything that benefits the existing power structure.

One way mentioned in the article: geofenced subpoenas. E.g. Ohio police tell Google to give them the information of all the people who went to an abortion clinic in Indiana (the geofenced) because they are suspected of a crime, then the Ohio police can check the list of those people and see if any of them fall under their jurisdiction

Surely such fishing and dragnets have Constitutional boundaries?

How many surveillance-state abuses have we said this about in the last 21 years? Always the answer is “yes in theory, but in practice the state does it anyway and courts usually defer to its judgment”.

A few years ago, not far from where I live, a pregnant woman was given a water bottle by her ex boyfriend. The water tasted bitter, so she spit it out. She took it to the police. Her ex-boyfriend had ground up an abortion pill and put it in her water.

How did he get the pill? From a website that sold the pills to “pregnant women” who couldn’t get them legally, no questions asked.

The police seized the website owners assets, and her client list.

She was sentenced to probation, but decided to spent her time in probation smoking pot, and so got a slightly longer probation with more drug tests.

The police had no problem hunting down a black market purveyor at abortion pills using DNS and email.

In this area abortion is now illegal. If this same situation had happened now, that list of clients would become a list of future defendants.

I heard the police did check the client list to make sure the site wasn’t primarily a way for men to force women to have abortions.

If you told me in 1996 (first year on the internet, quite a hopeful young lad) that in the future, $MEGACORP would know where I was within meters every minute of every day, I would have told you it was a dystopia, regardless of what they planned to use that data for.

This is a digital dystopia that we sleepwalked into.

My (someone uncharitable) interpretation of the article is:

- People who thing big corps and the government are their friend are not worried about data privacy. - The government suddenly made a change that made a lot of people realize that is is not necessarily their friend (aka they are no longer comfortable with the government have access to there entire life's worth of data). - Now we have to end surveillance capitalism because it is dangerous...

I agree with the conclusion, but it is depressing that it has taking this long for people to reach it.

Court orders are obtainable by police from local and state governments. Google is not a criminal defense firm.

> How?

> [...]

> Short of a court order

You cannot give data you do not have in response to a court order.

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