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Comment by greatgib | Hacker News Reader

Sadly I think that it is the slippery slope for Telegram. Instead of the spirit of privacy first, they start to concede little by little for commercial interests.

First it is just the IP and phone number. Then, it will be extended to contacts. Because, why not, that can be useful also for "terrorist investigations". Then it will be chat history,because it makes sense, the police has a warrant... And telegram is technically able to...

Also, clever poll tactic to put the option 1 as looking 'moderate' in front of other extreme options.

Also, for the fighting "terrorism" argument, just remember that we are all terrorists for Russia, and that even in Europe (Germany, France, ...), A lot of high ranking gov and police officials were found guilty of corruption or abusing the system for their own interests!

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Do you really think that corruption uses court orders of fabricated terrorism cases as regular means to abuse the system? If that’s true, Europe is screwed up regardless of how a popular messenger handles your ip.

Anyway, “slippery slope” is an extrapolation and not an argument, cannot be used as such. You can naively extrapolate everything, e.g. I was too lazy to take out the trash today … and then I’ll try heroin. I couldn’t get a raise and switched jobs … and then I will be trafficking humans. I disagreed with my spouse … the divorce is imminent. I asked customers what they think of a complex issue … I will sell their laundry to everyone. This is all nonsense.

If a system can be abused, it will be abused. We have seen this play out in America and people are still not learning from these events. There are other ways to investigate suspects without sacrificing principals of privacy and spoiling it for the majority of 99.5% innocent human beings.

This is a sufficiently general argument against all law enforcement capabilities, though. Give the police any power at all and it's inevitable that someone will abuse it at some point in the future. Typically, most communities nonetheless decide on some level of rules, checks, and capabilities somewhere between "nothing" and "everything," accepting that which risks and tradeoffs are worth it might change over time. It seems to be largely only Hacker News that thinks law enforcement should never get any access to any data at all, ever.

What are these other ways to investigate suspects you're thinking that are preferable to building out networks from Telegram metadata? Bugging houses? Threatening family members to rat people out? Deep cover covert agents? Are any of those less subject to abuse?

This is a strange place to end up; you make a convincing argument against the somewhat unsophisticated and very common capstone of digital privacy. But if you really want to be private online, there are always ways, if not existent, possible, and if not possible, likely being worked on or a product of some future innovation. We end up at the “well you can’t stop it anyways,” point.

Do we only then use digital services to spy on those not savvy enough or careful enough to be private? What if everyone achieves Signal level privacy, or better? We end up having to answer the same question as before: what other methods are possible.

What if everyone achieves Signal level privacy, or better?

They get banned of it eventually, exactly the reason why this thread exists (telegram evaluates an idea of staying in Germany by relaxing some privacy rules, remember? It’s not their decision, but Germany’s). When reality changes, so do rules, they are not set in “capstone”. A couple of demolished buildings and the general public starts asking: why do we have so much of <whatever comes to mind> when it’s clearly dangerous.

> Court orders of fabricated terrorism cases as regular means to abuse the system

Yes literally all the time in the United States.

The horseman of the privacy apocalypse is roughly - Terrorism, Drugs, and CP.

Slippery slopes are a logical fallacy for a reason.

We live in a society, I don’t see how giving out basic information to law enforcement with a court order is somehow a fault of the company - first of all, your mobile service provider knows orders of magnitude more info on you (and quite likely sells it as well), second of all, your employer will do the same without a second thought as well as your bank, etc.

Slippery slope arguments should not be regarded as logical arguments. They are predictions. Calling it a logical fallacy is a strawman argument because in reality, slippery slopes have been observed.

Slippery slope because the first step is hard to pass: share any data.

Then, just share a few of them, not a big step but it starts the machine of making it easy to share more and more little by little.

First IP, then IP and phone nb, then IP, phone nb, and connection log, then IP, phone, connection log, and geodata; then IP, phone nb, connection log, location data; then IP, phone nb, connection log, location data, contacts; Then IP, phone nb, connection lots, location data, contacts, chats ...

If you look at the "because terrorism" reason, it can apply at any of these data.

No one will say: we think they are terrorist, share their IP but not their location or their chat.

Someone needs to coin the “We live in a society” fallacy already. We could call it the “Mark Renton Fallacy” for short. There’s no such thing as society, and even if there is I most certainly have nothing to do with it. Save for at tax time.

The majority is currently for a court order, which doesn't indicate a slippery slope. If they wanted to be shady, they wouldn't have made a poll at all, which also implies the expectation of discussion around the topic.

In part I am curious about how these requests are made; I would expect that the 2 most common kind of request are from law enforcement following public channels/groups, from individual reports of private conversations, and from previous investigations.

That is I imagine requests would be in the shape of "here is a username give us IP and phone number".

It is also relevant to know whether German courts can order to collect this information, it is also relevant that German courts apply German jurisdiction universally (an example there are African war lords convicted of war crimes that have no relation to Germany or German citizens).

Personally I would prefer privacy first companies to focus on lobbying the idea that these kind of court orders are to be used sparingly rather than enter an adversarial arm race with regulators.

What do you mean by "for commercial interests"?

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