Giving Up on Privacy (2011)
jefftk.com
jefftk.com
Edward Snowden summarized it well.
"Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say."
What's interesting is he generally is aware of groups of people that should not do so, like those who are abused, but does not consider the possibility that everyone can become a target (through regime change for instance).
I suppose the most frustrating part is his example of employers turning down people for sharing too much on social media, which should be normalized, but someone not sharing on social media should be penalized for hiding. It's a tad concerning, especially as we're coming to terms with the real damaging effects of social media mentally.
This is exactly right. You can hold a view that is perfectly acceptable within mainstream society right now, and find that 10 years from now that view is considered extreme or dangerous. If you have a public and searchable history espousing that view, you could suffer very really consequences as a result, even if you no longer hold that particular view.
I think you would have a pretty hard time finding examples of this in somewhere like the US:
* Few things go from 'mainstream' to 'extreme' anywhere near that quickly.
* If something does make that transition, there would be hundreds of millions of people who previously held the view and millions of people who previously endorsed it publicly.
* People care about your current views, especially on topics where lots of people have changed their minds. In cases where I wrote about something and then later retracted it, I've never had anyone treat that as if I still hold my previous view.
On the contrary, you can have a live example in the US today, and you could have found another one six years ago.
My time and safety are more valuable to me than my privacy, and I think everyone should consider their priorities.
If you want to use Tor and degoogle, I have no problem with that, I'm glad someone is studying that stuff in case it ever becomes truly necessary for people.
But not every person can join every protest. In terms of good done for the world compared to inconvenience to myself, I'm not convinced staying private is the most effective thing.
So enjoy the locally optimal time and safety you're able to get out of it, but please consider the global downsides of pushing the public perception in the wrong direction.
Come to think, the situation is rather similar to enjoying the conveniences of modern, energetically wasteful life without considering the climate problems this will cause for future you or future generations.
Many modern conveniences reduce resources use, because they replace real things with ones and zeros, and for better or worse many industries are getting forgotten.
I'm still hopeful the future will be a place where privacy is readily available but not strictly needed, but I can see why people would think otherwise.
> Many modern conveniences reduce resources use, because they replace real things with ones and zeros, and for better or worse many industries are getting forgotten.
I agree, I didn't mean to relate it to all aspects of modern life, just the energetically wasteful ones.
Although aside from the baseline things like refrigeration and plumbing, a lot of them aren't real conveniences, they're just traditions that evolved as displays of wealth. I wouldn't call nonnative lawns or large houses(Aside from maybe people with kids) or not being able to repeat an outfit within the same week or two convenient.
Some of them might be hedonistic in some way, but a lot of things that make pollution are pretty high effort.
For example when your therapist emails you from their Gmail account to set appointments, now Google knows you see a therapist. I never signed up to give that information to Google. Pay your bill your credit card, now Mastercard knows you see a therapist.
There needs to be some reasonable expectation of privacy written into law and a reasonable limit to how data can be captured and used.
Or does everyone share your priorities and beliefs, but those of us who act differently are just lazy, and so we construct justifications to defend our different actions?
I believe there should be due process and warrants before they can use data against you, and that people have a right to know how secure something is or isn't.
That doesn't mean I personally need to keep Google from knowing when I go to the store.
Not that he cares, of course, but if it helps his bottom line, I figured "why not?"
He and Google (who are Good) will notice me any day now!
(posted from iPhone 6.9.3+d4e2a0b3ef at 37.986776, -76.187412 while drinking a refreshing Coke Zero and having my morning cigarette like you know i do everyday)
Warrants are easily acquired, and you will be charged based on a far lower standard of evidence than the state must meet to convict you.
While you can then avail yourself of due process, the deck is stacked against you — the cost to adequately defend yourself is astronomical.
You’re likely to take a plea deal to avoid the expense and risk of a trial; an enormous number of innocent people take plea deals or are wrongfully convicted every single day.
Better to keep the fox out of the hen house in the first place.
But you also have to look at the risk of getting fired because you missed an email if your self-hosted solution goes down, losing your wallet because you didn't have Tile tracking, extra risk of getting sick because you didn't get enough sleep while dealing with some last minute tech issue to make your more-private system work, getting lost because the open source app had worse data or compass calibration algorithms than Maps, getting money stolen because you used crypto that can't be reversed, etc.
The current suite of nonprivate tech offers an insane amount of power, especially for those of us without a good memory or navigational skills.
I guess it's the same issue with unions and protests, people who are one paycheck away from the streets won't risk a strike, because they'll lose everything by the time they get the benefits.
Do you think relying on these tools has made your memory better (allowing you to wean yourself off them), or worse (creating a customer for life)? I firmly believe it creates a sort of learned helplessness in people, in the same way the commercial internet in general is bad for ones memory or attention span.
Given how many people seem to believe Google Maps has gotten much more in-your-face (instead of doing its job and getting out of the way) over the last few years, but so few are willing to abandon it, I suspect I'm right: using the tools you find (and are!) so helpful creates a dependence on them.
For example: personalizing pricing based on how much you’re likely to be willing to pay.
I’m flying to a tropical destination in a couple weeks, I live in a cold climate, and I just ordered a bunch of new warm weather clothes and some swim suits for my trip.
Any corporation with access to my email would know about my trip, my home address, any previous online clothing purchases, and how much I paid for given articles of clothing.
Using that, they can make a decent estimate of how elastic my demand is for the new clothes, and how much I’m willing to pay — especially if they leverage detailed financial information that’s readily available from data brokers.
How much would retailers by willing to pay for that kind of pricing insight?
How much would you overpay for goods and services thanks to that massive information asymmetry, in exchange for free e-mail hosting?
That’s not a far-fetched future; giving corporations, data brokers, and the government access to the most intricate inner-most details of your life hastens its arrival, and is dangerously and willfully naive.
I'll always be a fan of open source tech, and I 100% support right to privacy in private spaces. But we can't join every single protest in the world.
Five minutes delay fussing with buggy apps could mean missing a bus. Not having Google Services would probably mean I couldn't use important work apps. Not having location history could mean not being able to find something you dropped.
And not using Amazon prime would almost make some areas into prisons if you can't drive.
Exactly. This is 100% cowardice. It's the mentally of a broken man who's too beaten to fight anymore. Very depressing.
To your broader point, you are correct. We do, and I'm guilty of it here, tend to use the specter of mental illness to silence or discredit people we disagree with.
Some things I've done that I think have a much better cost benefit trade off than fighting for increased privacy:
* Switching careers to work on pandemic mitigation: https://www.jefftk.com/p/leaving-google-joining-the-nucleic-...
* Donating half my income for the last 10 years: https://www.jefftk.com/donations
* Advocating for cheaper housing: https://www.jefftk.com/news/housing
It takes social courage, and more importantly courage of one's own convictions, to face the tide of conditioned and packaged social truths. "Truths" that will be repeated from friends, family, coworkers, such as "if you have nothing to hide .."
It is so much easier to go with the flow and takes not even a tiny bit of courage to do so.
It is difficult (but important) to self examine one's motive to insure it is not pleasure that is motivating one's standing in contradiction to (asserted) social pressures. And after that determination, it takes courage to be true to one's self.
Just disagreeing with the mainstream view on a topic often requires courage, trusting your reasoning and evidence over external sources. Then it typically requires additional courage to be public in your disagreement, especially in areas where it's common for people to criticize others for diverging from the mainstream view.
Still, I've found it really valuable to disagree publicly and then engage with the criticism, because that reduces the risk that my disagreement was due to a mistake.
"So if there was anything I was considering doing where if it became public I would be hurt, I wouldn't do it."
There is a great book Bonhoeffer[1] by Eric Mataxas which deals with this and a lot of other issues
> This corresponded almost exactly with things I shouldn't have been doing anyway, so it wasn't too hard.
The writer appears to be saying that there is no conflict between what he thinks is right and what the general public thinks is right. This is why I suggested naive or foolish might be better terms. I love Bonhoeffer, though!
Examples, explaining why I:
* Often let my kids do things alone at ages when other people wouldn't: https://www.jefftk.com/p/whats-the-alternative-to-independen...
* Disregard the warning on baby formula that says not to use the microwave: https://www.jefftk.com/p/stop-discouraging-microwave-formula...
* Work(ed) on ads: https://www.jefftk.com/p/why-i-work-on-ads
The challenging thing about reading books like Bonhoffer is that it compels you to questioning what your response would have been if placed in the same situation.
I don't think we'll be able to prevent the disappearance of privacy as technology continues to get cheaper and more widespread. I'm not saying "this is good", I'm saying "this is coming, adapt".
Because this is often a standard emotional response to very large problems. It's one of the reasons so many people (mainly conservatives) downplayed the risks of COVID. It can be mentally easier to downplay or ignore a scary problem rather than acknowledge it.
There are huge numbers of things that are wrong in the world: should I call someone a coward for not working on malaria prevention or pandemic mitigation? For living well while others suffer?
To reference the Snowden quote again, it would be like giving up your freedom of speech because it's too annoying to defend. That is cowardice.
My argument is not that I have nothing to hide. Instead, it's that hiding has enough chance of not working that none of us should rely on it.
I've written two articles about my position on this, way too long for a comment here.
https://jacquesmattheij.com/if-you-have-nothing-to-hide/
and
https://jacquesmattheij.com/trackers/
The latter got made into a play and still results in regular mail. "Giving up on Privacy" is the easy way out.
[0] https://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2013/06/09/using-metad...
Metadata tends to be easily gathered. Much easier than the contents themselves and very amendable to network analysis. That's why each and every online provider would love to have access to your phone's contact list.
edit: fantastic article you linked by the way.
Does he apply his personal approach when handling my mother’s maiden name, my birthday, etc.
This often means running blog posts past my housemates, or phrasing experiences in ways that reduce identifiability or at least give plausible deniability.
Personally, I've gone a pretty different way: I've generally given up on privacy. After considering the ongoing effort necessary to get actually useful reductions in the level of risk from realistic threats, I think most "private option" recommendations are very far from worth it for me. Instead, I default to public: I'll include even somewhat personal details in blogging if they seem like they'd be helpful to others, draft company-internal emails as if they may someday be leaked, and try hard to make choices such that if they became public I'd be comfortable standing behind my actions. This approach isn't for everyone, and I'm glad there are people working on various privacy technologies, but I think it would be a better fit for a lot more people than currently practice it.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation must now maintain tips for security and privacy for those visiting abortion clinics:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/06/security-and-privacy-t...
Have you seen any change in the relationship between security and privacy based on political landscape?
A lot of people here are reacting to this post based on political considerations. I think people are missing the personal and moral aspect. I don't expose my life to the internet unnecessarily (my username here is courtesy of pwgen), but I do practice, as best I can, the principal of trying to never do things I would be ashamed for others to know about. I don't mean in terms of kinks or whatever, but in terms of how I treat other people. In particular, I try not to say things about people that I would not say to them directly. This pushes me to more considerate when talking to other people about someone not present, and more open when talking to that person directly. It also minimizes painful blow-back when my words reach further than I intended.
There are certain things I say that I don't want people to associate with me, not because I'm ashamed of them, but because I know I would either be misunderstood, or harmed by people with different morals than myself. But even so, I try to express these things in such a way that I would not be ashamed to have said them, consequences aside.
...and this is indeed where all this privacy destruction leads: people changing their behavior first, their words second, and finally, their thoughts.
Isn't it universally accepted that free societies breed innovation and repressive ones stagnate and wither? Isn't it clear that mass privacy violation will lead to a global repressive society?
Some form of rebellion is essential for citizens to overcome repressive societies. Repressive societies empowered by the kinds of surveillance that technology enables at scale will become nearly impossible to rebel against.
Following this train of thought, it seems that privacy destruction is potentially an existential threat to humanity.
When I came to this conclusion, I decided that my personal act of rebellion was to leave my high paying tech career to work in the non-profit space promoting peace for 1/5 the income. I have never been happier. I am doing my little part and that makes it easier to not worry about this insanity.
This is an unserious argument from a privileged and unserious person.
If the author had given this even the briefest of consideration, or had even a modicum of knowledge of abuse, stalking, or the criminal justice system, it would have been clear to them how such a system would inevitably lead to a carceral hellscape.
The author should hand his unlocked phone, location history, and audio recorded from his in-house microphones to a hostile police officer and see just how long it takes for them to find something actionable.
Some time in county jail, spending $10-$20k on an attorney just to (hopefully) get the charges dropped, and some time in court might disabuse him of his dangerous, deeply ignorant, and grossly misplaced faith in governmental authority.
I don't know what "ashamed" encompasses, but an angle I think this word doesn't cover is how your information can be exploited. I think a while back this was less understood but has definitely come to light over the past few years.
I have nothing to hide but also don't want to be unknowingly taken advantage of somehow, which is why I do care about privacy. I may take this to the extreme because I hardly ever hand out my information, even to people in real life - it's not just about online services, but rather any source that can "leak" your information intentionally or unintentionally.
> My schedule has been public as long as I've been keeping one
This is mind blowing to me. Think of what someone could do with this information (although I see it is obsolete and he now uses Google Calendar (!))
"I need privacy, not because my actions are questionable, but because your judgement and intentions are."
I think the apparence of giving up on privacy is slowly becoming essential and so is a system to bypass the Orwellian nightmare.
Sounds like a pretty boring life and you will miss pretty much chances in life and also would be a nightmare for every buddy who has a premium account on fetlife.
Privacy is hard to gain these days, but it's possible. Some private data is safed on small book, which is hidden under my floor and some on an older laptop with Qubes installed and internet is only accessed over Whonix VMs. (Depends on the threat scenario)
>I might as well take advantage of it by making things public on my own.
This is a great way to make yourself an easy target. There's a difference if big tech & three-letter agencies have access to your private data and being totally exposed on the internet for every identity thief and Kiwifarms-Stalker. You should share as less data as possible or create as much fake data as possible about yourself. Fake shedule, fake pictures with fake exif-data, fake friends, etc.
>location based restraining orders can be automatically checked (automatically alert the police if this person comes within X distance of this other person) then keeping locations secret may become unimportant
Except the stalker is smart enough to follow you outside a big city (or wearing a mask) where no cams are placed and doesn't use a tracking device like a Smartphone. Also a data leak of the position data will happen. Stalkers will use these data to track their victims even better.
>parents that worry that the foolish things their middle schoolers write on the internet might come back to haunt them. Right now, their concerns may be correct. Longer term, our society has some adjusting to do to a world where more information is public
No, there will be always more boring people than you, who do nothing of that. These people will be the fools who get hired in future and you have become more boring like them to compete on the job market. This means no porn, drugs and politically-incorrect jokes with to your friends and family.
I would rather be dead than live in a world where the most boring people judge the most intimate moments of my life.
When I see how authoritarian tendencies thrived under the COVID "episode" I'd rather go more private than ever!
I do the same thing with their phones. I ask them to unlock their phone and then hand it over to me so I can look through it. Oddly enough, none of these folks who have "nothing to hide" have ever handed over their phone to me. Watch what people do, not what they say.
He’s not saying he wants to spam the world with every private detail while giving away anything of value to anyone who asks, he’s saying he’s not going to let fear of private details escaping keep him from living the way he wants to.
I also don’t have the privacy obsession. But I wouldn’t get anything of value from handing my phone to someone I don’t trust, especially if they’re a zealot who mistakenly thinks that action is necessary to justify my choice of email provider.
If they ask what you’re doing tell them “I have a buyer for all of this…”
Some people are happy to sell their souls because they assume they’re virtuous enough to get universal approval.
Some people are naive.
Forget about sharing their phone, they won't even share their phone number (or charge it from my laptop). Cowards.
But this is not that I have nothing to hide, it's that a strategy of hiding is much more risky than most people think it is.
At least you're living by your rules.
Have you ever wondered what you lost by not having any embarrassing things to hide?
Let me know if you happen to be in the area at some point, though, and I'd be happy to meet up!
> Have you ever wondered what you lost by not having any embarrassing things to hide?
I can't think of anything; I'm very happy with my life.
So, no online banking of any sort, because if your account number and passwords became public, that would be bad? No use of credit cards for the same reason?
This however is interesting:
> "Applicants with very little information available might come to be the ones that employers and schools worry about: what are they trying to keep us from finding out about?"
In espionage-thinking, this is a known issue and calls for the creation of a cover story, i.e. spies 'hide in plain sight' by constructing apparently normal lives that raise no red flags even upon extensive background investigations, and conduct all their covert activities using offline channels.
Keep on with this and you end up with Gestapo/STASI run societies, in which even family members and neighbors living side by side view one another with distrust and suspicion - because everyone is doing something or other that might be construed as illegal under a system of selective political prosecution.
As the head of Stalin's secret police, Lavrentiy Beria, said:
"Show me the man, and I'll show you the crime."
No, I do use secrecy there. Defaulting to public is compatible with having a few specific small pieces of information secret (passwords, the pattern on my house keys, the numbers on my credit cards).
I don't expect these to remain private long term, for the same reasons I've said above, so we'll eventually need to move away from these as the attacks get cheaper and easier. I already use securitykeys on my most important accounts, credit cards are switching to chips when possible, RFID keys are replacing traditional ones etc; this process is already in progress.
Consider LGBT youths who are closeted and whose parents would not not approve. Consider those with abusive current spouses who feel trapped and need support without their spouse interfering.
No. We still need privacy.
Hardly anyone besides an accessory to the abuse would argue that someone shouldn't have ready access to privacy from their abuser.
The problem with spying is when you don't have a choice in the matter.
When is comes to privacy: Hope for everything. Expect nothing.
Instead, I like the GDPR approach, the data you hold is mine, and I only give you a temporary right to process it for the stated purposes.
Now we need another generation of tech to evolve where managing this data becomes seamless.
First, to get it out of the way, I hate where things stand, today. Location privacy basically doesn't exist. A permanent license plate reader was just installed at an intersection bordering my neighborhood[0]. They're installed in every police cruiser, they're automatic and they flag problems/trigger being pulled over.
On three occasions, over 20 years (evenly spaced), I was pulled over for vehicle registration problems. The first, someone had scraped the tag off of my car and I was driving without tags. I showed the cop my registration/insurance and 10-60 minutes later I was on my way. The second (about 7-10 years ago) was my new motorcycle who's registration expired six months later than my cars, I rode for almost the entire summer with the wrong tabs on my car, passing several police (sometimes driving directly behind me) until I was finally pulled over. I was written the ticket because "it was six months past-due" (he waived the charge when I showed up renewed to the hearing).
The last was this year: my car was in my ex-wife's name and the registration expired in July. I still had insurance and I was aware that it was past due but couldn't resolve the problem, myself. I drive with Waze and in my area "if the cop isn't on the road driving with you" they're lit up on Waze. I avoided driving. When I had no choice, I avoided routes that showed cops and altered my route when they showed up unexpectedly[2].
This worked for two weeks after the expiration date and two days into the following month. The first time a cop ends up behind me I got pulled over[3]. The wording he chose was "Your vehicle was flagged as having expired plates" or something like that[3].
The unintentional follow-up to this, though, is that when I received my tabs it was unusually cold outside, I was running late for a date and my plate was too dirty to just "spit shine/affix" the sticker, so I put it in my winter jacket pocket and went on my way (figuring if I got pulled over, I'd show them the tab and explain my situation). I had no less than three police cars happen into range of being able to read my plate electronically or visually and not one budged. Maybe a coincidence, I thought? Perhaps they had something better to do/get to? The route to my girlfriend's house passes a police station; it's rare for me to take that route without encountering a cop on the road or in a speed trap. It's been 6 months since I put those tabs in my pocket. They're still there.
[0] Full disclosure: My information is from a neighbor mentioning it and my noticing it afterward as I drove past; I have not inspected/researched but it's not relevant as these installations are being rolled out at an increasing pace.
[1] The first was my new motorcycle which renewed on a different day than my cars and I missed it, the second was a car that was in my ex-wife's name which she failed to renew.
[2] It was a very weird place for me ... I've never had that "avoid the cops" feeling in my life. It's unnerving.
[3] The guy saw the car was in my wife's name, I said "divorce", he said he "totally understands" (and was incredibly sympathetic). He did write the ticket, but told me to ask for a hearing, show up with current registration and he'd request the ticket be invalidated. It was. I wasn't even given court fees.
Good boy.
This is great when you're in middle school and your biggest concern is maybe how to talk your parents into buying you a videogame or ask out your first crush.
But in the world of grownups we are sometimes pulled into serious situations and we have to do these things. Sometimes we can only choose the lesser evil. And then privacy is all you have.
In today's world where basic human rights are questioned, abortions aren't legal everywhere and some people lose their minds when confronted with different opinions, privacy is about the only thing you have to protect in order to get through life without being constantly troubled.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/28/opinion/jack-dorseys-twit...
I wonder if this is a preparation for pushing Clipper Chip 2.0. Given that most of the general population is lethargic and docile, it could be dangerous.
These fights take a lot of time and resources and software engineers have to push back hard from the beginning.