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Comment by simonw | Hacker News Reader

The thing about privacy is you never know when future politics is going to come into play.

Maybe a medical procedure will suddenly become illegal, such that your location history is now subject to warranted search.

Maybe your country will take a sharp turn towards authoritarianism, electing politicians who are ready and willing to use law enforcement to "punish" their enemies.

Maybe your monarch will die, and a recently passed bill will be used to arrest people who protest the existence of the monarchy.

Having "nothing to hide" isn't necessarily a fixed state.

View on HN

I work with prosecutors, and some of them will straight up misrepresent innocent facts to paint them as evidence of malicious intent and pressure parties to plead guilty.

I have seen stuff like "defendant had TOR installed - a popular program for criminals" in court filings. ...and judges and juries accept that as fact because they just don't understand the technology. For example, having a bookmark for "Hacker News" would absolutely show up in court. Crazy stuff meant to bias judges and juries that don't know tech.

The point is that the situation is 100x worse in tech where prosecutors, judges, and juries simply do not understand the evidence. ANYTHING can be painted as incriminating evidence.

I have seen saved credentials on automation jobs being used to incorrectly establish people's network activity. I have seen routine maintenance being used to establish obstruction charges just to intimidate possible witnesses... Like stuff you would not believe happens, happens.

It's even worse in civil suits, where opposing counsel will subpoena as much as possible (mountains of data) just to give you more work and fish for trade secrets or anything they can twist in court.

When I was junior, I proudly told my legal team "good news, I added space to keep our transaction records for 20 years!" and was aghast when they said they wanted files deleted THE DAY the legal requirement to hold it expired because it increased legal liability.

Now I totally get it. Today we only store the bare minimum - everything else is deleted immediately. ... and I have to re-explain this to junior employees each year to their disgust.

> having a bookmark for "Hacker News"

I was punished in school for having NetHack source code in my home dir. And it was not because it was a game but because it allegedly was a hacking tool.

"No, wait, I can explain! You see, I'm just a tourist in search of an amulet..."

At least they didn't sanction you for eating corpses...

In highschool I was sent to detention and almost suspended because a study hall teacher overheard me talking about the "black market" feature of an roleplaying game I was writing on my graphing calculator. It took an hour of trying to explain TI-BASIC to my principle (and I think some angry phonecalls from my mother, a teacher in that district) before they relented with the insane mafioso accusations.

the principal's your pal

I'd like to request a change to that mnemonic: your principal is not your pal!

At least you didn't have Dopewars installed!

This reminds me of an article (re-)posted recently here on HN:

https://web.archive.org/web/20031114161830/http://www.adequa...

Your Honor, we were horrified to discover the largest collection of "PDF files" we have ever seen on the defendant's hard drive!

> Today we only store the bare minimum - everything else is deleted immediately. ... and I have to re-explain this to junior employees each year to their disgust.

Same in software-land. Nobody wants to have years of who-knows-what subpoenaed.

Bigtech will happily store data on their users indefinitely so they can mine it in the future, should they think of new profit-generating ideas. But they will absolutely delete their employee's emails after N months unless they are on litigation hold (i.e. legally required not to do so). Complete double standard.

The data is their business model so I don’t see how it’s a double standard

> I have seen routine maintenance being used to establish obstruction charges just to intimidate possible witnesses

You're talking about Hillary Clinton, right? That's literally one of the arguments they used against her.

Same thing occurred to me. The Bleach Bit BS.

Was it really routine maintenance to BleachBit an entire server after you receive a subpoena from the FBI?

Yes, it really was. The FBI investigated and found as much.

https://www.denverpost.com/2016/09/03/fbi-report-platte-rive...

I don't see this really addressing the fact that deleting data permanently after you find out the FBI wants to look at those devices is a bit weird.

A plausible justification was given. It makes sense. It also has nothing to do with Hillary's decision-making. You can call all the people involved liars, or just deny the facts that have been presented to you - but the facts, as presented, do portray innocent behavior.

> In July, FBI Director James B. Comey said while the investigation revealed potential violations, “our judgement is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case.”

In other words, crimes were probably committed but the FBI dropped the investigation because they figured that no prosecutor would file charges in the case.

>Was it really routine maintenance to BleachBit an entire server after you receive a subpoena from the FBI?

I would hope so, since presumably the storage devices on that server would either be resold or sent to a dump.

The info on those storage devices (assuming backups/existence of that data elsewhere for government data retention purposes) should not be let out into the wild.

In fact, I (and I don't work/exist in areas with confidential data) have a dozen or so hard drives that sit in a closet as I don't have the interface cards (any more) to hook them up and securely delete the data.

Eventually I'll probably purchase a bulk eraser[0], but until then, those disks will sit in my closet as my business is my business and no one else's.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Degausser-Electricity-Required-Mainte...

I understand why people want to erase hard drives permanently and totally. My point was more about, isn't it a little weird to do so after the FBI says they want to look into the status of said devices.

More info on that degausser. https://www.mediaduplicationsystems.com/sd-1-hard-drive-tape...

On sale, now only $3,990.00 (previously $6,999.99).

If the OP only has a dozen drives to wipe, I think a drill and some liquid to pour over the platters would be a sufficient alternative.

>If the OP only has a dozen drives to wipe, I think a drill and some liquid to pour over the platters would be a sufficient alternative.

An interesting idea and one I hadn't considered. Thanks!

lol, dude, just take out the screws and toss the platters in the oven. you need software to retrieve data, but not necessarily to destroy it.

I made a cool spiral chandelier out of fishing wire and hard drive parts. The platters don't chime as harmoniously as I had hoped, but it still worked out great - and I have enough super fridge magnets to last the rest of my life.

No, I was not talking about any politically driven case at all.

> I have seen stuff like "defendant had TOR installed - a popular program for criminals" in court filings. ...and judges and juries accept that as fact because they just don't understand the technology. For example, having a bookmark for "Hacker News" would absolutely show up in court.

Both of those are really good examples of how a statement of fact that is literally true can still be a lie. Politicians do this kind of stuff all the time especially in their attack ads that make TV unwatchable around this time of year in every even numbered year. Amazingly what gets a politician called out by the other party's press as a "liar" is the opposite of this kind of statement: something that is fundamentally true but where the politician got one minor irrelevant detail wrong. That's also a major reason why it isn't a good idea to represent yourself in court or to explain yourself to the police when you get arrested because people are prone to accidentally getting minor details wrong or misspeaking even when they're telling the truth to the best of their ability.

> ... prone to accidentally getting minor details wrong

I know a prosecutor who had to investigate the statements made by the husband of a person who (presumably) had drowned themself in their pool (she used workout weights to keep herself at the bottom). The statement to be investigated: "Those were her weights. I never touched those weights!"

Now all of a sudden maybe his fingerprints are on the weights and that statement is untrue...

I also got to learn that they scoop the weights into a bucket because I guess they need to keep them submerged in water, otherwise the prints will wash off.

Ah, too bad he could not use the Slick Willie defense and make the claim that it depends on what the definition of "touch" is.

> explain yourself to the police when you get arrested

Cannot emphasise this enough.

Unless you live a criminal lifestyle (if so, you can learn nothing from me) you may encounter cops once. They do it every day.

Often police job advancement is helped by making your life hell. Say nothing you are not legally obliged to.

For anyone that isn't convinced, here is a talk by a lawyer and a police officer discussing the idea of never talking to the police [0]. It's interesting that they largely agree that talking to the police is not a good idea.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE

I was just about to post this. It's long, but so good.

Don't forget the followup...

"Don't Talk to the Police Part 2" - https://youtu.be/tIt-l2YmH8M

> having a bookmark for "Hacker News" would absolutely show up in court

And would the defense be allowed to show the legal and harmless conversations we have here? Or ask the prosecutors which HN posts they believe influenced the accused to commit a crime?

wisdom and experience. TIL

Yeah. Medical procedures, like abortions in the states, are a very real example of how things can dramatically change on a whim to an unbelievable level. Or syncing your cycle data to a smart device and later having a retro-scan to detect cycle anomalies to charge women with probable crimes.

We do that with speed cameras, why not just automate health data mining too? Why did you stop updating your cycle data, is it because you knew you were pregnant and wanted an abortion? Sounds like suspicious activity to me, exactly identical to turning around at a DUI checkpoint.

What I find most ironic is that those people who are now realizing the same privacy platforms they used to defend with "I have nothing to hide" are the ones complying against their interests.

It's a poignant example of what others have pointed out. "I have nothing to hide" until political landscape changes to make it something to hide.

It's like people pushing for liberal drug laws and legalizing homeless tents and then one day its in their backyard.

While I feel for women part of groups that are impacted by Roe vs Wade being overturned, their apathy against privacy concerns have boomeranged, the same of which proportion of men who aren't having to deal with abortion are looking at this issue as "I don't need an abortion so it doesn't concern me".

Those women caught up in this struggle also looked on, along with men and everybody else as Uyghur women were sterilized and forced to abort using the very surveillance mechanism that were developed and custom tailored to fit the needs of the abusers.

It's almost like the land of CCP is a testing ground for what's in store for Western civilization. Remember what caused Latin America's shift towards tyranny and dictatorship, it was inflation. Nothing about our land that makes it any less susceptible or resilient. Inflation has deep remifications to privacy and this Roe vs Wade situation is only the beginning.

> men who aren't having to deal with abortion are looking at this issue as "I don't need an abortion so it doesn't concern me".

... maybe we shouldn't have spent years telling them they weren't allowed to have an opinion because it didn't concern them.

Was there a Pope of Abortion Rights that pronounced such an edict? As a man, I haven't encountered this in an abortion discussion, but it sounds like something an asshole would say and I try not to hang out with assholes.

I've heard variations on it many times, usually by the people who frame it entirely as "right to choose" (-> "if you're not capable of getting pregnant you have no right to input on this"). I get what they're going for, conceptually, but wow that is not how you get allies.

It turns out assholes come in all genders.

> ... maybe we shouldn't have spent years telling them they weren't allowed to have an opinion because it didn't concern them.

that never stopped women from doing what they want. you are completely brushing past the main issue which is apathy towards privacy which is not remotely related to women's rights portrayed by mainstream media and your language generalizes 100+ years of women, who regardless societal expectations, went on their own because they believed they had same rights as any other human. It's sad that the same spirit is now being used as shields to derail completely unrelated issues that by mere association of gender, calls for a complete review of a certain political lens that we are all familiar with. Save us the grace here honey.

> Medical procedures, like abortions in the states, are a very real example of how things can dramatically change on a whim to an unbelievable level.

Change, but not retroactively.

This assumes the rule of law holds. America has a pretty good track record in this regard, better than most countries I think, but there can be no guarantees for the future.

> exactly identical to turning around at a DUI checkpoint.

Has anyone actually got in trouble for that? I turned around those checkpoints all the time because it's just faster to go around.

Sometimes they pull over people Turing around

Oh hell yes they do. At least on rural highways in the Southeastern US.

You don’t get in trouble just for turning around, I think its that turning around gets you pulled over and breathalyzed and you get in trouble for DUI. I realize this is kind of a classic “why worry if you have nothing to hide” argument, but everything is a balance and I’m ok with this intrusion to reduce DUI deaths. It is not equivalent to other privacy invasions.

Canonical example here are the records (that included religion) kept by the Dutch that enabled the nazis to easily round up all the jews in The Netherlands during WWII

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust

And French Jewry was spared to a large extent not because of the compassion of Vichy administration, who even sent French children to the death camps over German objections, but due to a complicated bureaucracy and disorganized recordkeeping that made it a real challenge for French collaborators to round Jewish people up. They'd have no such roadblock these days.

Came here to point IBM out which is a sign of how it was: Many Americans supported Nazi.

There is this rose tinted glass view that Americans rose up to defeat Nazism taught in textbooks and mainstream media but was far from the truth. Not only did Nazism was cool then, American corporations like IBM directly aided Nazi party with surveillance efforts, very much like they have funded the persecution of uyghurs by purchasing American software and hardware.

What is constant is that the US looks out for its interest first and foremost, even if it means doing business with authoritarian or tyrannical regimes. Is it moral from a humane perspective? No. But is the state subject to humane? are corporations? The accepted view is that they have no consciousness and is not bound by the same moral/ethical afflictions unless they are shamed out of it that it impacts their bottom line.

Most people were unaware/indifferent, and a nonnegligible number thought it was cool/alright, and tens of thousands openly showed up for it, untold numbers directly/indirectly supported it- undoubtedly some never stopped.

https://anightatthegarden.com/

There's an interesting discussion in the book The Sum of the People which argues that the disorganized recordkeeping in France was a ruse and a deliberate attempt by Rene Carmille to embrace the concept of population registry but to undermine the Nazi policy (Chapter 4, "Paper People"). In particular, Carmille apparently didn't enter the religion data from the census on the punchcards and never delivered lists. Carmille was arrested by the SS in 1944. It's not an entirely happy story though because there were absolutely others in France who collaborated to produce as many lists as they could, especially of Jewish immigrants who were easier to find in the records.

IBM's Holocaust collaboration became all the more significant when I ran across this justification / defence of pervasive data surveillance by Herbert Simon, Nobel laureate in economics and one of the fathers of AI. This is in his 1977 essay "What Computers Mean for Man and Society". In it, he addresses concerns:

The privacy issue has been raised most insistently with respect to the creation and maintenance of longitudinal data files that assemble information about persons from a multitude of sources. Files of this kind would be highly valuable for many kinds of economic and social research, but they are bought at too high a price if they endanger human freedom or seriously enhance the opportunities of blackmailers. While such dangers should not be ignored, it should be noted that the lack of comprehensive data files has never been the limiting barrier to the suppression of human freedom. The Watergate criminals made extensive, if unskillful, use of electronics, but no computer played a role in their conspiracy. The Nazis operated with horrifying effectiveness and thoroughness without the benefits of any kind of mechanized data processing.

<https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/a9e7/33e25ee8f67d5e670b3b7d...> (PDF)

There is, of course, one slight problem with Simon's argument: The Nazis did make heavy use of mechanised data processing, provided and supported by an American company, IBM.

Another Edwin Black IBM and the Holocaust link:

<https://ibmandtheholocaust.com>

McCarthyism was how this played out in the states. Not as brutal and bloody, but lives were still ruined.

In theory it’s unconstitutional here to prosecute someone for an act they committed before there was a law against it. But there are other ways to convict someone, for better or worse.

Corporations leverage this all the time, so they go unpunished unless it’s in the court of public opinion. The toolset is necessary but the power dynamics are important.

I'd include the Jim Crow / opposition to civil rights movements. Which were bloody and brutal.

Today is the 59th anniversary of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing, in which four girls aged 11--14 were killed, and another 14--22 injured.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/16th_Street_Baptist_Church_bom...>

excuse me, could you clarify if your statement about marks and blocks here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12118609) was about WordStar or Emacs?

thank you

PS I'm sorry for digressing; there was no reply button on that post.

Neither. vi / vim.

See: <https://vim.fandom.com/wiki/Using_marks> <https://www.marksanborn.net/software/using-markers-in-vim/>

(Six year old comment comes back to haunt me ... Could've been worse ;-)

nice, thank you

The way to hell is paved with good intentions.

I'm looking at the European Union and at Apple and Google. Good intentions? That doesn't mean that you're the good guys! History has shown that the bad guys always believe strongly that they were the good guys. Privacy and security is not only about protection from criminals and companies but especially about protection from our governments. It doesn't matter wether you voted for your government or not or you like them or not or they like you or not.

So far, the only jurisdictions in the developed world who seem to be on a trajectory towards increased or at least not decreased privacy of any type are in Europe.

My government evaluates police work by number of cases. What does the police do if there is not enough crime? For example they look at energy usage of people and try to spot patterns that might indicate something like a weed farm. If the pattern match your home will be searched. This is a supposedly civilized western country that managed to start two dictatorships in just one century and had massive problems with surveillance. You can guess the country now...

Today people with similar mindsets control politics and surveillance is increased at every step. A frightful older demographic is part of this. Someone said it would be insanity to repeat the same mistakes over and over again and expect different results...

I'm not sure why it's especially governments. I find this propensity for privacy focused people to overlap with more conservative thinking individuals very perplexing. Especially since typically the more prominent feature of conservatism is support towards large corporations - which are the largest entities removing our privacy.

It's not especially governments for which you need to keep the integrity of your privacy - it's everyone. And I would imagine if we're trying to estimate the entities that pry the most, it's corporations. Sure, they may feed it to governments, but there's an energy barrier there (in at least some circumstances) - but the trust of corporations is one of the bigger issues here.

A steelman of that perspective (full disclosure: I'm leaning more libertarian, but my stance is complicated, and nuanced), is that you can just not use facebook, but government's laws are full liability -they enforce (rather than describe) norms, and stances which can suffocate non-represented minorities, and you can not opt out in ways other than moving.

People are many, and weird, and different; the attention of lawmakers & govs are limited, and this can (and have repeatedly made) roadkill of you, with no recourse other than privacy.

In security, to make an assessment of overall risk of a potential vulnerability, we take into account both the probability, and the impact of exploiting such vulnerability. Facebook, and corporations in general, ultimately want to move merch, and, at worst, make you vote for candidates of their choice: probability of being successful is medium, but impact for the individual is relatively low. Goverment laws can roadkill you: probability of this ranges from low to medium, but impact is super high. This advises for being especially vigilant for gov interventions, especially where freedom, and liberties are concerned.

> just not use facebook,

Good luck on getting Facebook to stop using you though [1].

In a similar vain, how does Equifax fit into this mythical world where government is the problem but corporations are not?

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_profile

I think that is slowly shifting. The misguided trust of conservatives in corporations as an antithetical opponent to government that is.

Governments have sovereignty, which basically means unlimited capacity to make your life hell.

But, yes, corporations will quite readily sell all that information to the government, anyway, so it doesn't really matter in the end.

Exactly, that's my usual response to "I have nothing to hide: You don't decide what's worth hiding.

Mine is: "I will be expecting your credit card and bank information on my table in the morning"

I think the reason most people are wary of sharing banking information is that they are worried you would exploit it or because of social norms not to talk about money, not that they have something to hide.

What better reason to hide something than because you think people will exploit that knowledge to harm you? You don't even need to think the party you're giving the information to will abuse it. Can you trust them to not pass it on or have it stolen from them? We have many many examples of why you should not.

>"I will be expecting your credit card and bank information on my table in the morning" I've shared this (or similar info) with landlords and realtors and platforms that I don't trust. That's life.

The point is that just because you have something to hide doesn't mean you've done anything wrong. You might end up sharing that information in certain situations, but carefully. The framing those who promulgate that phrasing want to push is that not wanting to share information with the government makes you suspicious, because your only possible reason could be wrongdoing. This notion is hostile to liberty and security.

That's a arbitrary limiting of "something to hide."

A: "I have nothing to hide."

B: "Give me your bank details."

A: "Not like that! That's not something to hide because I'm hiding them to protect my savings."

B: "The reason other people hide things is also to protect themselves, their property, and their loved ones."

"Hiding them to protect my savings" is a result of our broken identity system, I'd say that's tangential to privacy.

As Mitchell and Webb pointed out, "identity theft" is actually bank theft that's blamed on the account holder. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CS9ptA3Ya9E

I completely agree with you about "identity theft" but I also keep the keys to my house private, although anybody who would burglarize me if I didn't would clearly be in the wrong and legally liable for my things.

Notwithstanding any legal or ethical judgement, being burglarized would cause me significant inconvenience and at the very least some sentimental losses, even if I were ultimately compensated years later with interest. Therefore, I keep my keys private to protect myself.

What people mean is that they've done nothing wrong, not that there's nothing they'd rather keep secret. "Not like that!" means they're annoyed you're focused on their words instead of their meaning. They're about to write you off and walk away with their beliefs even stronger.

The point is to break the incorrect notion that "having something to hide" means "wanting to hide wrongdoing."

There are also a ton of bewildered Boomers out there who believe they have done nothing wrong and are completely bewildered their children have gone no contact. I’d say if your kids won’t talk to you’ve seriously fucked up, and at least for some of them it’s over conversations they could have taken to their grave but instead their “truth” was more important than meeting their grandkids.

I told my father something about myself years ago and he tried to make the case that I hadn’t brought it up because I was ashamed.

I wasn’t ashamed. But if you share certain things about yourself, being gay being one of the most obvious examples, some people want to define you by it, or talk about it to the exclusion of all other things. I’d much rather talk about trees, for that matter tax law.

One of my mentees had a bit of a persecution complex about several things, orientation one of them. When late in our relationship I finally mentioned that my kid had come out, she was shocked I hadn’t brought it up before (which in retrospect I think she may have been recalculating her opinions of me on the fly, like the Key & Peele skit, “Oh I see, I’m just an asshole.”)

Without a pause I answered that it’s because it’s not the most interesting thing about them, which just made the eyebrows go up even higher. But I think it finally sunk in.

> you're focused on their words instead of their meaning.

If I were focused on that meaning, I'd call talking about whether they're doing right or wrong things completely unresponsive. We're talking about privacy and protection, not their personal assessments of the merit of their private lives.

Instead, I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt and remind them that the people who are dangerous to them may not share their standards or ethics.

‘Something to hide’ in English often has a negative connotation meaning deliberately trying to deceive or something bad they did and don’t want you to know about.

Better would be to not use that phrase as most people have something they wish to remain private or secret, without it being anything sinister. Like their password for example !

Or "describe all your past sexual encounters". Granted, some might be ok with it, but most won't feel comfortable.

In any case, your phone provider knows - co-occurring presence of the same two phones in the same grid cell at the same time (esp. night).

By implication, what your provider knows, governments also know - they have a direct line.

That is not a record of a sexual encounter.

"close enough for government work"

Dude basically sign a document cosenting to consenting to any document.

Sell your soul.

I like "then why are you wearing clothes?"

Mine is "Do you close the door when you go to the bathroom?"

This is my favourite take.

Seeing the arrests in Edinburgh this past week has been heart wrenching. It's just... I thought we were better than that?

We're not, never were. We're seeing the slow decline in the hard fought rights gained over decades because we were never ever a live and let live country.

> we were never ever a live and let live country.

The UK is one of the most "live and let live" countries in the world.

However I think there is a marked difference between 2010 and 2022, especially in Scotland, who I used to think of as usually the sensible ones; the land of David Hume.

Free speech is being curtailed by legislation that is auspiciously about preventing "hate crime", but in actuality is being used as a tool to shut down dissenting opinions, such as the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Bill.

It's difficult for me to grasp why you suggest that the UK is "is one of the most 'live and let live' countries in the world." You realise that it wasn't that long ago that Alan Turing, a war hero to say the least, was chemically castrated, which lead to his death, for being gay. The Age of Consent wasn't equalised to 16 UK wide until 2008. Section 28 (and its legacies) were not outlawed until 2010. Homosexual acts stopped being grounds for dishonourable discharge from the armed forces in 2016. Same sex marriage wasn't permitted UK wide until 2020. The blanket ban against sexually active gay men from donating blood wasn't relaxed until 2020. Etc. People forget how extremely recent these things are. So it's hard for me to understand why you think the UK was and continues to be "one of the most 'live and let live' countries in the world"... is it just because our punishments were less severe? That Alan Turing was chemically castrated instead of thrown off a building? That constitutes us being a 'live and let live' society?

And this is just the history I'm personally connected with. There's plenty of other examples of how the UK has treated other minorities poorly, notably the Windrush Generation. Being a 'live and let live' society isn't, and shouldn't, just mean being the least worst country, if we can even claim that title... it's about being a permissive society, of letting people get on with their own lives unmolested and in return you can expect the same. But as I've already shown, that was in no way the case for us... if you ever wonder why there's so few gay men around the age of 60+, it's because so so many of them were left to die of the gay disease.

We were never ever a live and let live country.

It's also some of the best evidence in favor of the anti-monarchist position I've yet seen.

Hardly... the powers used to make those arrests were passed by our elected Parliament.

I don't see how "there are monarchists in Parliament" is a refutation of "this treatment of people protesting the monarchy is a strong argument in favor of abolishing the monarchy"...?

Those Monarchists were elected. I'm sorry that sometimes people you disagree with get elected. Regardless, it's the police who are enforcing this law passed by Parliament... I don't believe the law even mentions republican protests. You are blaming the Monarchy for the acts of the Government and Parliament.

Were they arrested for "protesting the monarchy" or breaching the peace? Context is important. Silently holding up a banner: fine. Yelling at passing royals at a moment of deep solemnity: not fine, and stretching the free speech defence IMO. A bit like yelling at women entering an abortion clinic, or yelling loyalist slogans at an IRA funeral. There's a time & place.

Edit: Also, this is OT anyway from the matter of privacy and "nothing to hide".

Well, there’s also people getting arrested for memes ;)

But I do agree somewhat, if what you’re saying is true. People should be able to hold a funeral in peace.

And this is something you want enforced by the state? What other unenumerated rights should be enforced by security forces? In North Korea, security forces have the responsibility of making sure that people express the appropriate amount of worry and fear when a Kim might be ill, and the appropriate amount of rage when a Kim has been insulted by a foreign leader.

Let's say it is your mom's funeral.

One person, probably not invited, makes a scene, shouts a bunch of stuff. Perhaps they have a mental illness, perhaps they had a grudge against your mom - she might have been a judge or a teacher.

Are you just going to ignore it? Would you expect some security to remove that person so that you and others can have a peaceful funeral?

You would be right to find saying such things offensive and deeply vile.

But it's far more offensive and far more vile to suggest that the State has any right to regulate public speech based on its content.

If you want to control what is said at the funeral, don't have the funeral in public. End of.

The risk is that if the state have no power to forcibly remove someone causing such a disturbance then those present may lose faith in institutions such as the police who they may not unreasonably see as being responsible for "keeping the peace" and worse, take matters into their own hands (in fact it very much looked like this was likely in one such case in Edinburgh). As long it's not considered criminal and the only "punishment" is being physically denied access to the scene in question I wouldn't be overly concerned about it being an overreach of the government. None of which is to say I accept the police did everything right in this particular occasion.

> But it's far more offensive and far more vile to suggest that the State has any right to regulate public speech based on its content.

Why? Offensive to whom? There seems to be general agreement that some speech crosses lines that are not okay and should be regulated. This is why all countries that have freedom of speech protections also have a list of exceptions. In the US, certain things like ads, pornography, slander, sedition, and lies are generally not considered protected speech. It depends on the specifics in any given case, but I’m not offended at all by the suggestion that the State should be allowed to regulate these kinds of speech when they cause harm.

Queen Elizabeth is not just "somebody's mom".

She was the head of state who presided over genocides, resisted the independence many dozens of British colonies, got carveouts in laws to shield her personal possessions from scrutiny for stolen antiquities...

I could go on.

Public figures in general, and heads of state in particular, lose the right to be treated as "just somebody's mom". They get treated by the public based, at least in part, on their treatment of the public.

And even apart from all that, this funeral, at a time when many, many UK residents are facing skyrocketing costs for everything from food to electricity to heat—as in, increases of 5-10x, not just a few percent—is projected to cost upwards of half a billion pounds, from what I've heard.

So no, let's not "say it is your mom's funeral".

> She was the head of state who presided over genocides, resisted the independence many dozens of British colonies, got carveouts in laws to shield her personal possessions from scrutiny for stolen antiquities...

Then it is pretty damning that not almost everyone is shouting! I'll go even further, then it is outrageous that people around the world mostly, including in the US, are saying what a great person she was.

So I wonder why is that?

Also, my understanding is that the person who got arrested for heckling was doing so because Andrew had sex with a 17 year old. So he was more upset about that than the queen overseeing genocides.

And if people really think she was evil, why wait until death? Why not speak up very loudly while the person is alive in order to affect change.

Weird priorities, or misdirection.

> Let's say it is your mom's funeral.

False equivalence.

This is the accession to the throne of a monarch wrapped around a funeral.

That doesn't happen when anyone else's mom dies.

And the people being arrested were in public places.

> the people being arrested were in public places.

Funerals are reasonably often held at public cemeteries. FWIW I disagree the arrests were justifiable unless the protestors refused to be non-violently lead away from the scene, assuming they presented a genuine risk of provoking a violent response from the mourners etc.

Were any of the arrests at a cemetery?

In this case no, but the question remains to the GP as to whether having the police remove the man from the crowd would have been justifiable if it were a cemetery. (To be clear, I don't especially have a problem with the police taking Prince Andrew's heckler away, if nothing else for his own safety given members of the public were also manhandling him. I do have an issue with him being arrested and expected to face court.)

> as to whether having the police remove the man from the crowd would have been justifiable if it were a cemetery.

Of course it would be wrong for the police to arrest people for being disrespectful in a cemetery. What would be alright is if the owners of that cemetery wanted them to leave the property, they refused, and the police were called. That's why all of the photos of Westboro protesting at funerals were them on the sidewalk facing a cemetery.

So if I choose to hold my mother's funeral at a public cemetery owned and administered by a governmental body and our gathering is interrupted by an unruly mob of hooligans determined to disrupt proceedings as much as possible barring physical violence, you're saying I should have no right to request that the police escort them from the scene? (We have "public nuisance" common law in Australia exactly to deal with that sort of scenario, which allows that "The action endangered the life, health, property, morale or comfort of the public". Surprisingly it can be treated as a criminal offense, though I'm not sure how often it really is).

> So if I choose to hold my mother's funeral at a public cemetery owned and administered by a governmental body

Just because City Hall is public doesn't mean that there aren't rules that you have to follow when you're there, or that you can't be kicked out when you break those rules. What it means is that you can't make up rules, because those are just the whims of the ruler.

If there are no rules at a publicly-owned cemetery against verbally abusing your recently dead mother in front of her grandchildren, you have to face that the abuser, as part of the public, has as much a right to be there as you do. But in real life there will be posted rules, just like there are rules at the public pool.

If Britain wants to pass a blanket law criminalizing all criticism of the royal family, they should. Plenty of dictatorships and monarchies already have lèse majesté laws, they can just copy them. They won't have to make up rules or improvise.

The abuser has as much a right to be there as I do, but I disagree they have a right to act in a clearly harassing/heckling manner. If they have something important to say that's worth protecting with free speech laws, that's not the way to say it. If that's the sort of behaviour that's protected by the 1st amendment in the US, you're welcome to it. On the other hand, nor do I ever wish to live in a country that criminalises criticism of anyone, esp. those in positions of power.

> Let's say it is your mom's funeral.

This is extremely compatible with Juche thought. Let's say that the Kim family is the mother of North Korea.

>Are you just going to ignore it? Would you expect some security to remove that person so that you and others can have a peaceful funeral?

Having someone removed for being loud and obnoxious is a much different thing than being arrested and potentially incarcerated for same.

Someone’s mothers funeral is a private event. Is this not a public event? Does it seem fair to compare the funeral of an individual citizen to that of a “royal”?

Well, I think I would have to think on it more but it seems like not having a funeral disrupted is a reasonable request.

I would say this for _anyone_, today it just happens to be a famous person.

A public funeral is, well, public. Everyone can come to the “celebration” and “celebrate” however they want.

If the family wanted to control the show, they should organize a private event with only invited guests who signed a code of conduct.

Fair enough. I have no idea the laws or customs of the UK.

> People should be able to hold a funeral in peace.

This very obviously isn't "just a funeral".

Anyone else dies and they don't cancel the EPL for the weekend.

I honestly have 0 idea what is going on over there, or what the EPL is, so I have to take everyone at their word :)

I assumed based on what OP said, it was akin to a funeral being disrupted. That’s a big “if” though.

"God save the queen, the fascist regime, make you a moron, potential H-bomb, ..."

Unlike in the 80-es, singing that today would make you arrested. Maybe the song is now more true than then, maybe the regime really became more fascist?

> a moment of deep solemnity

The state shouldn't get to declare mandatory solemnity.

They didn't. It was the thousands of people gathered in silence and respect who did.

Did you ask them all? I have top secret inside information that if they broke that silence and respect, they would be arrested.

> The state shouldn't get to declare mandatory solemnity.

Of course they can - for example, remembering those who died in a terrorist attack, victims of genocide, victims of the diseases such as the AIDS epidemic, etc. Lots of groups can declare solemn events for a lot of different reasons, and they shouldn't have to deal with obnoxious and thoughtless individuals purposely trying to disrupt those events.

Holding "not my king" poster has nothing to do with "deep solemnity" and does not prevent anyone from grieving. Yet they still got arrested or questioned.

You mean this guy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6iokoD85_vg

In a civilized society, it's the child-rapist – and not the person calling him out – who gets arrested.

You mean Andrew having sex with a 17 year old? https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/feb/15/prince-andre...

I don't view it as mitigating that the rape victim was almost not a child.

Legal age of consent in the US is 16 in many states, 17 in some, and 18 in others - https://www.bhwlawfirm.com/legal-age-consent-united-states-m...

And to put a fine point on it, the age of consent in New York is 17 and is 16 in New Jersey.

So I think the focus on "child" is not only misplaced, but untrue. Rape is the real issue, so that's the real thing to focus on.

I don't think folks are upset with Andrew because he disobeyed a law, they're upset with him because they believe what he did was morally repugnant.

Perhaps, but we not unreasonably see it as behaviour where a man was clearly taking advantage of his position of wealth and power over someone of an impressionable age who's unlikely to be in a position to give meaningfully informed consent. At any rate the "sick old man" accusation made by heckler was pretty well justified on its own terms, even if choosing that exact moment to make it did little to help the cause.

I know nothing of the particular case, but this argument isn't very convincing to me; the existence of a disparity does no work to show that disparity was actually part of the decision making process for the 17 year old in the way you're insinuating. The more we start removing the agency of late adolescents by calling them 'impressionable', the less sensible this conversation becomes, as though nobody can remember when they themselves were once 17, I know I can.

The argument is flawed because we generally tolerate power differences in relationships: men and women (institutional power), certain cases of coworkers of different ranks, an able-bodied person with a disabled person, a depressed person with a mentally healthy person, a suicidal person with a happy person, etc.

There are also a lot of adults who vary, due to personal characteristics or experiences with relationships (or lack thereof) who are far more easily snared into a relationship; the average 17 year old has had many more relationships than I have as a 25 year old, and sexual ones too, usually with peers. If anything, I'm the naive one who would fall into a very convincing snare with an older man.

I'm not attempting to make any sort of legal argument, just positing why it's widely seen as being an especially egregious act of sexual predation (and I'll admit that's how it appears on the surface to me, but ultimately it's up to the criminal justice system to decide).

I simply struggle to see it as an 'especially egregious' act of sexual predation when the facts are on the ground, or rather, obscured and unknown. I'm saying that the assumption that a difference in power is enough to turn a relationship from 'weird but OK' to 'egregious sexual predation' does not always hold, and it's hard to see where it does hold without removing all agency from the 'victim'.

Um, the facts aren't really that obscure or unknown - the evidence Ms Giuffre was a pawn in Epstein's sex-trafficking ring, one that Prince Andrew was happy to take advantage of, is pretty compelling, even if not proven beyond reasonable doubt. Yes, she admitted to being involved in recruiting for it (while under 18), which was almost certainly a decision made out of immaturity, given her role now running Speak Out/Act/Reclaim.

17 is not a child, but a teenager. Yeah, still creepy as hell, still wrong, but let's not mix the two things as it only serves to dilute the meaning and severity of actual child abuse.

Has everyone just magically forgotten Charles was besties with Jimmy Saville, a notorious necro-pedo?

It's so hard to keep straight, dead children, dead pigs, live children, other politicians... the upper wrung of British society seems to be two thirds disturbing fringe sex stuff and one third terrible decision making.

Different occasion. The guy holding the poster definitely shouldn't have been arrested. The guy shouting at Prince Andrew during the procession was breaching the peace. Different context, which was my point.

> Yelling at passing royals at a moment of deep solemnity: not fine, and stretching the free speech defence IMO

lol, my country's concept of free speech is in part based on the idea everyone should be able to tell your country's nobility things they don't want to hear.

Well sure. But the point of my argument was there's a time and a place for that.

And who decides what the right times and places are?

You take a guess, and if you guess wrongly, you get arrested.

Any time and place other than a funeral or memorial service would be a good start. I can't believe there are adults here arguing that it's somehow ok to crash someone's funeral or memorial service to hurl insults at their relatives.

There is no better time and place than when royals are in earshot to hear it. And doubly so when those royals wish you would be silent.

Username checks out?

A protest that is not irritating is not a protest.

And as for time & place, finding the right moment and location to be maximally irritating is part of the art of protest.

>"A protest that is not irritating is not a protest.... finding the right moment and location to be maximally irritating is part of the art of protest. "

Which school of thought is this from? Protesting can take many forms and they need not be offensive and/or irritating to be effective. I personally respect calm, dignified, and persistent protestors far more than the loud, disruptive, and in-your-face ones.

If your calm and dignified protest achieves a meaningful result, it's because you were a better option compared to someone else who was not calm and dignified. There's some value in that, but not without that other guy to unlock it.

Royals getting yelled at? How horrible!

Maybe the common British people should take notes from their French neighbors and teach these royal shits what true persecution feels like.

You left out the context, not only was Andrew walking right behind the coffin, the man was yards away and surrounded by mourners.

Their moment for grief was severely impacted by the protestor.

It's nowhere near as simple as you or other people in this thread are pretending it is. Even though I think Andrew should be stripped of his titles, it's right that guy was arrested.

> You left out the context, not only was Andrew walking right behind the coffin, the man was yards away and surrounded by mourners.

>Their moment for grief was severely impacted by the protestor.

>It's nowhere near as simple as you or other people in this thread are pretending it is. Even though I think Andrew should be stripped of his titles, it's right that guy was arrested.

Clearly that guy was being an asshole, but being a loud jerk shouldn't be a crime, IMHO.

If that's the prevailing attitude there, I'm glad I don't live in the UK.

Not because I think it's right to intrude on the mourning/grief/funerary rights of others (cf., Westboro Baptist Church[0]), much to the contrary, but because it shouldn't be illegal (as much as I despise such folks) to be an asshole.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westboro_Baptist_Church

Of course it should.

It's not just the protestors that have rights, the mourners do too.

Just like you've got no human right to stab people as much as you like, you can't cause other people distress at a funeral.

You're the one being incredibly unreasonable here.

Also, you can't freely protest a soldier's funerals in America, so you're also ridiculously hypocritical, sort your own country out first if you feel so strongly about this!

If you're not actively protesti g The Respect for America's Fallen Heroes Act then you need to get off your high horse.

If being an asshole was a crime, we wouldn't have enough prisons to keep all the convicts, yourself included.

Possibly me, too. Maybe we could be cell mates. What do you say, handsome?

>Just like you've got no human right to stab people as much as you like, you can't cause other people distress at a funeral.

Right. Because words that are unpleasant are exactly the same as violence, right?

Shall we jail anyone who says something that annoys, disturbs or is unpleasant to anyone else? Based on the unpleasantness in your comment, let's start with you.

Yes, it's rude and obnoxious to intrude on others, especially at gatherings like funerals. And most of us (myself included) try not to do so.

However, some folks are jerks, and will do so anyway. But making such a thing a crime rather than just removing the disruptive individual from the area is a recipe for abuse.

Who decides what's a crime or not in a given circumstance? You?

I'd note that I'm neither angry nor insulted by you. Rather, I'm trying (I hope successfully this time) to get you to see that making someone a criminal for being a jerk is a really bad idea.

Remove such a person from your sight. Shun them. Verbally abuse them right back. But the idea that someone should be criminalised for being insensitive and/or obnoxious is risible at best.

I expect you will continue to disagree with me and think I'm being nasty, disruptive and a jerk. Shall we arrest me too? How long should I spend in prison for pissing you off?

Edit: Fixed typo.

Police can't just grab people as they choose. Removing someone is achieved by arresting them. That's how the police work.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrest

To arrest someone, the behaviour they're engaging in has to be criminal (i.e. chargeable).

Then the police can ask the prosecution service to charge them (the US equivalent of the DA I guess), which is the discretionary bit. This seems to be the thing you're taking issue with.

So although you don't realize it, you're basically saying you want to give the police brand new powers to grab anyone they want. That's an incredibly dangerous and seriously poorly thought out suggestion.

>So although you don't realize it, you're basically saying you want to give the police brand new powers to grab anyone they want. That's an incredibly dangerous and seriously poorly thought out suggestion.

Nope. Not intentionally or otherwise. Police have always had the "move along citizen" (with no arrest/detention at all) power. In fact, I'd say they use it far too often, at least in the US.

I'm not in the UK, and when I've visited I haven't interacted with the police, so that may not be true there. Is it?

What's more, being asked/encouraged to leave if someone is being disruptive is pretty normal and certainly doesn't require detention and/or arrest. Or even police for that matter.

Even more, (again, I'm not in the UK so not sure if this applies there) arrest records are public records and can negatively affect one's ability to get a job or housing due to the stigma around "criminals" even if they aren't actually charged/convicted in relation to such an arrest.

So no. I'm not advocating (wittingly or otherwise) for any new powers for the police. Rather, I'm agreeing with your premise that folks shouldn't disrupt solemn occasions like funerals, but I'm disagreeing with your premise[0] that such activity should be criminalised.

And I also take issue with your assertion (perhaps I misunderstood, but that's the impression I got. Please enlighten me if I've misunderstood) that the only options for police are either arrest or do nothing at all. That's absurd on its face.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32848029

I'd say that the British have started beheading kings way before the French, with Charles I being beheaded by parliamentarians in 1649

Clearly they missed a few.

The people getting arrested in the streets of Edinburgh were the same people who have been arguing to take away free speech and privacy rights from others. They got very little sympathy from the pro-free-speech crowd because they are decidedly anti-free-speech. They are now reaping what they have sowed.

The sad part is that they, and all of their supporters, will probably go back to agitating against free speech after this whole thing blows over.

> They got very little sympathy from the pro-free-speech crowd because

Every officially designated 'pro free speech warrior' I've seen in recent times has been strongly for authoritarianism if it suits their agenda. Just ask many of them for their opinion on say Palestine or Yemen and you'll lots of ugly things come out, none of which are consistent with the image of 'freedom' these types like to portray themselves as.

In fact, many of them seem to support anti-BDS laws and such.

I do not endorse censorship attempts, but also let's not kid ourselves about the nature of many of the people who market themselves free speech advocates, please.

> Every officially designated 'pro free speech warrior' I've seen in recent times has been strongly for authoritarianism if it suits their agenda.

Huge sweeping claim, with exactly nothing to back it up.

> In fact, many of them seem to support anti-BDS laws and such.

This is a fairly easily to verify claim. Now of course it's not going to be all of them, but a large chunk from what I've seen.

It's certainly more concrete than OP saying:

> The people getting arrested in the streets of Edinburgh were the same people who have been arguing to take away free speech and privacy rights from others.

Then providing nothing to back up the claim.

There is a risk to using "not private" services. And like all risks, it has to be measured and balanced against what you gain from taking that risk.

For instance, if you go hiking, you my get attacked by a bear, is it a risk worth taking? Usually yes, bear attacks are rare, unless you do stupid things like going where you know there is a bear. Same thing for privacy, you can take some risks, for example by letting Facebook follow you doing mundane things for targeted advertising, but not be so stupid as to post picture of yourself doing stupid things for everyone to see. The concrete example in the article is in the second category: some guy gets fired because he posts a picture of doing stupid things at his job.

Personally, I consider the political risks you cited low for the US or EU. Not zero, it is never zero, but low enough to be negligible compared to what Google, Amazon or Facebook offer me. Maybe it is not your case.

There are some privacy high risks, and that's, I think, mostly about things you publish online. Police doesn't need a warrant to look at your public profile, neither does your boss or the spouse you are cheating. Others include doing stupid things on your employer's corporate network, or doing things that are seriously illegal right now in your country without necessary precautions.

I think you can even attack this position immediately. When a person (or politician) say they have nothing to hide, ask them to hand you their unlocked phone. You will promise to not tell anyone about anything that you learn or see. I've found that this triggers people desire for privacy even if they haven't committed any "crimes" or what not.

The future politic of other country to. I love to travel, so I try not critic other country online just because I scared that can be use against me when visiting a country with a authoritarian regime.

My take on this is, even if you trust [insert data holding brand name], do you:

- (access) trust every individual employee who has immediate access. Forever? And every individual employee of the government agencies that could compel access? Forever?

- (policy from above) trust every executive who could change policy on where your data goes and how it is held. Forever? Trust the relevant national government regarding laws about your data. Forever?

- (security) trust the Security set up is at least great. Forever?

Forever, because data can last that long. And auditing data handling is hard.

Edit: tried to make it clearer.

Exactly.

You have nothing to hide... yet.

Right. The Jewish before the Holocaust had nothing to hide either. Their ethnicity was outed by things like census data that people divulged and the state collected. Nothing to hide after all. It's not a crime to be Jewish.

Mountains of personal data is too juicy and is inevitably misused.

> The Jewish before the Holocaust had nothing to hide either.

Actually it started much earlier than that.

Christian started going after Jews since at least the fourth century, inspired by the hatred written in the Gospel of John. In particular, it was a Christian ritual to physically attack Jews around Easter in the Middle Ages.

More detail: https://theconversation.com/why-good-friday-was-dangerous-fo...

I don't consider myself a paranoid person, but I realized 20 years ago that we were all losing our privacy to online entities. When I first read about "the cloud", I knew that what I put on it was no longer mine. Government regulators don't care at all about our privacy, so what makes anyone really think they have nothing to hide? Honestly though, I can't imagine my life without these entities stealing my data, that's how bad it has become!

You also don't know what future you will be doing. Lots of activists where people with pretty boring lives until someone happened with them that triggered their indignation and revolt. Or maybe some relative of yours, or a friend. It doesn't matter, you don't know future you.

I have nothing to hide. If government wants to lock me up for viewing interracial porn, so be it.

You're reframing the desire for privacy as a dystopian paranoia. That doesn't do much good tbh

I always try to break privacy concerns down because when everything is lumped together I think people that aren't into privacy get confused.

There's concerns about: hackers, surveillance capitalism, foreign state actors, and domestic state actors. People that say they have nothing to hide are usually unconcerned about one or two of these (surveillance capitalism and domestic state actors) but often are actually concerned with at least one.

The truth of the matter is, though, that if you're concerned about one, you need to be concerned about all of them. There is no door that only good guys can use and bad guys can't. Breaking it down has often led to more successful conversations for me. Even in a group of highly tech literate people (CS graduate students) I often see the "I don't care" or "what can I do" sentiments. So I suggest when talking about all this, break it down into these categories. Maybe if more of us did this then we'd have more success as a community.

Eh, you may not “know” something like this, but considering it’s never happened in my country in my lifetime at any appreciable scale, it’s probably not very likely, and doesn’t realistically factor into my threat model.

If you want to “worst case” scenario something, that’s your choice, but it’s not very predictive.

Lucky you. I've lived in the UK and the US and seen examples of this happening in both.

No you haven’t, not to any meaningful degree.

Who are you to decide what is "to any meaningful degree" for others?

A guy who cares about evaluating the likelihood and significance of an event taking place.

I'm not value judging this, I'm just trying to determine if it's worth reacting to, and based on the number of folks effected, the severity of the impact, and the frequency, privacy violations seem pretty minor overall as a threat, not worth considering within my personal attack surface.

"I'm not value judging this, I'm just trying to determine if it's worth reacting to"

Sorry... but some nice contradiction you have there. I think your "algorithm" might be a bit off ;)

Contradiction?

contradiction: An inconsistency or discrepancy.

Yet. That's the whole point.

It's kind of ridiculous to anticipate an event that's never happened before.

There have already been examples given here. And also, that's absolutely untrue. Things have firsts.

Those examples are isolated incidents and not any indication of a larger risk.

Go tell that to the population of Germany in the 1930s.

They didn't have a "Germany in the 1930s" example like we do now, so it's different.

You're right, they didn't have an example of their exact situation, so they should have felt perfectly safe. They could see that pogroms happened in other places, to other people, a long time ago, obviously not even relevant in hypermodern civilized 1930s Germany.

I'm glad you recognize how fundamentally different the world is today than how it was in the 1930s, because not realizing that would probably confuse the hell out of you a lot of the time.

We live in a time distinct from anything that has come before, just like they did in the 1930s. Exactly like the 1930s, really. Totally different.

I see you have never worked in the insurance industry then.

No forced sterilization of women based on race/class/other background, for example? No exclusion from education, medical care etc? Surely?

Anyways, something like 40% of the EU citizens lived through communism, so it's not exactly unusual.

It's sad that these conversations devolve into, "A lack of privacy actually means anything generally bad that I can think of."

Kind of makes it seem like privacy itself can't stand on its own as meritous, and needs to be propped up by overgeneralizations and FUD.

To me, privacy is first and foremost protection. That's from my upbringing, I guess. It's hard to argue with anything other to people who don't seem like they care about their privacy at all - and I get it, some people just don't care and trust their government etc. What else would you bring up to these people other than the bad things that have already happened due to less privacy than possible?

You could try bringing up relevant situations where a breach of privacy was the proximate cause of a systemic negative consequence on a large scale, rather than irrelevant-but-also-terrible things that weren't directly caused by a lack of privacy.

You mean like when the KGB murdered my grandparent based on class origin and corporation ownership? Or the time when the Gestapo did the same to my great-grandparent, also based on ownership of the same corporation?

To me, it seems like there are much longer periods of problems than periods of peaceful life. Only 30 years out of the last 100 were in lived in relative freedom here, and still excesses are happening today. Protect yourselves people. Nobody will return your health and life back once an excess happens to you.

Again, I get that bad things happen, but none of what you've brought up would have been prevented with better privacy in practice. It's well beyond "privacy" to believe that ownership of a corporation should be hidden information, that'd be exceedingly easy to abuse.

I'm sorry those things happened to your family, but they're not relevant to a modern privacy conversation.

No who you were talking to. But all corporate shares should be bearer shares. Corporate and income taxes are the real "abuse."

It's nowhere beyond, it's exactly privacy. My country still (since the 90s) has numbered shares - meaning not tied to a person. The fight is not over yet, even though the EU is really trying hard to destroy all privacy here. And it's not really that simple to abuse - someone has to show up with the shares in hand to do that.

Nope, not privacy related at all. I should know who I'm doing business with.

You're doing business with a corporation - it's a legal person after all. There are reporting requirements etc so you can check all you need about that corporation very precisely. You don't need to know the owners at all. It's not like you can know with US/EU corps - go check and see how many paper trails end in Virgin Islands numbered corporations ;-)

That's your opinion, and fortunately not one that nearly anyone shares.

You're doing a common Internet Thing by twisting a conversation into the topic you actually want to talk about, even though it's wholly unrelated.

Just because something bad happened to your family doesn't mean the entire planet should adjust fundamental aspects of how humans interact. That's just your trauma speaking, and not a rational thought.

Regardless of opinions, you can't know the owners of many corporations today. Are you sure you're not doing business with businesses that have owners hidden behind Virgin Islands numbered shares? I wouldn't be, it's actually very common. And if you're actually doing business with them - where's the problem?

Yes, because you can easily know the owners of every American corporation today.[0] This policy was updated in December of 2021.

But, again, completely irrelevant to the broader topic of conversation, privacy.

[0] https://www.fincen.gov/news/news-releases/fact-sheet-benefic...

> You could try bringing up relevant situations where a breach of privacy was the proximate cause of a systemic negative consequence on a large scale

The US Government directly used census data to target families and neighborhoods to send to internment camps within living memory.

Something ongoing: prosecutions are currently underway to parties who have abortions or assist in abortions based off of private correspondences such as texting, calling, or facebook messages.

So your most recent widespread example is 80+ years ago, and then a very tiny hypothetical set of lawsuits that have not been filed (zero prosecutions are "under way")?

My most recent widespread example was so recently that there are people still alive who were subjected to it, yes. Regarding the other point: this is not a hypothetical set of lawsuits. People are getting prosecuted, criminally, right now.

> People are getting prosecuted, criminally, right now.

Name one person who is being prosecuted for obtaining an abortion, and that prosecution is moving forward due to evidence collected from any kind of extrajudicial breach of privacy.

Woah, what's this about the breach of privacy needing to be extrajudicial? There was nothing about that originally. These are goalposts being moved. I refuse to continue this line of discussion if the discussion is happening in bad faith with moving goalposts.

Because we all agree that warrants do need to exist to catch bad guys...

I refuse to continue a discussion with someone who doesn't believe in the concept of a warrant.

Out of interest if this is your position, why does your profile list a protonmail account instead of something on US soil?

I can both believe in the concept of a warrant and wish to hide my identity from people like you.

A Gmail account would also do that. Feels more like "privacy for me, not for thee" to be honest.

The fact that you equate "privacy" with "warrants as a concept" is kind of sad, but I doubt you're capable of learning better, given your pretty terrible attitude thusfar.

On the other hand, people from every country which has had dictatorships (like many if not most in Latin America) should be wary of this kind of scenarios.

It just happened in the US. A lady and her daughter were arrested for taking a federally approved abortion pill based on information found when they subpoenaed their Facebook messenger chat.

If my government wants to know something about me, they will be able to find out and that's whether I use DuckDuckGo or Google, Chrome or Firefox, Facebook or no Facebook, Gmail or my own private server, and whether or not I use a VPN service.

Some people (especially here on HN) are so into privacy for the sake of privacy, more like a hobby than a practical exercise in improving their quality of life. And that's completely fine. But I'm more interested in convenience. I'm at the point where I would legitimately prefer my Social Security Number to be leaked on the dark web than have to deal with the proposed three-factor authentication for my banking and brokerage accounts.

> If my government wants to know something about me, they will be able to find out and that's whether I use DuckDuckGo or Google, Chrome or Firefox, Facebook or no Facebook, Gmail or my own private server, and whether or not I use a VPN service.

In the case of a targeted investigation, yeah, you're probably right. Thing is, that's not the only (or even most likely) threat unless you're some kind of wannabe DPR. Dragnet/geofence-style investigations are getting more common and while not using Google likely won't save you from the CIA, it may very well avoid your technically-incompetent local LEOs accidentally framing you for a bank robbery or something when you win the location-data lottery.

But that's an individual-level argument, which imo isn't the main point - privacy is a societal-level good.

> But I'm more interested in convenience.

This is basically the "I have nothing to say, so I have no need for freedom of expression" argument transplanted into the privacy sphere. The effectiveness of privacy methods scale both technically and socially: an example on the technical front is how tor is more useful the more "normal" traffic ends up on it, and an example on the social front is how encrypted messaging capabilities aren't suspicious if they're integrated by default into widely used apps. So, I see privacy as less about me and more about participating in creating an environment where those who truly require it can have it, and that's something that's way harder if privacy is only conceived as being "for" dissidents or fetishists or whatever.

Is it inconvenient sometimes? Sure, but it's also a civic duty. I'd honestly call it analogous to jury selection: quite possibly nothing but a burden to you personally, but an important part of maintaining a healthy society.

> > But I'm more interested in convenience.

> This is basically the "I have nothing to say, so I have no need for freedom of expression" argument transplanted into the privacy sphere.

Not at all. It's "I do not have infinite time and energy to spend in trying to protect myself against every remote possible negative outcome."

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