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Comment by JimmieMcnulty | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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