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Comment by college_physics | Hacker News Reader

On other news, 80% of young people aged 13 to 17 years old from the same 13 EU Member States floked to tiktok, before that to instagram and youtube and before that to facebook. All along they were actively encouraged by authorities who are also there to "engage", endorsing and encouraging the new era of privacy is dead.

Can we please stop beating about the bush? Surveillance, whether with commercial or political motives is a critical issue. Society is malfunctioning "at scale" while a sort of sheepish stalemate has taken hold. People are uninformed. Vested interests would rather keep it this way. These are grave risks and they must be taken seriously / discussed with the outmost transparency, objectivity and urgency.

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> endorsing and encouraging the new era of privacy is dead.

You're being absurdly reductionist, because you're overloading the term 'privacy', which has two very distinct meanings, here, each of which are hit by three different threat vectors.

The two meanings are:

1. Control over which information you actively communicate about yourself, and to whom - private correspondence, photographs, social media posts, tweets, etc. Are you actively peacocking your social life to your friends, and to extension, the world? [1]

2. Control over which information is passively gathered around you - tracking cookies, records made about you, cell location data, etc.

The three threat vectors are:

1. Your peers, relatives, stalking strangers, boss, etc.

2. Some random company that wants to market to you.

3. Your domestic (and very, very, very rarely, a foreign) government. Police, spies, etc.

There's a different set of rules, social norms, expectations, and laws, and expected benefit/harm outcomes around each of the six combinations in this matrix. There's a little bit of overlap between them (For example, #3 subpoenaing data gathered in #2 and #1), but it's silly to lump all of them together wholesale.

[1] Everyone's doing it, if you're not doing it to some extent or other[2], most peer groups will socially ostracize you to some degree.

[2] You can control the extent to which you are doing so.

Even if you are informed, it's hard to take action. Running solely FLOSS software is an option, but this is very impractical for many use cases, so your options are essentially 'make your life harder to preserve privacy' or 'privacy is dead'.

You don't have to solely run FLOSS software. There's a lot of middle ground between between walking into the TikTok/Meta/Alphabet brain grinder for convenience's sake and Stallman-level fanaticism.

Well, do you have any suggestions? (earnest question)

I have been thinking/reading about this a lot in the past months (to the detriment of my mental health, unfortunately), and it seems like even non-FLOSS operating systems are somewhat invasive when it comes to privacy, let alone the software you run on them.

FOSS is not a guarantee of privacy by any means. For example there is the confusion about mastodon / fediverse type social media and what sort of firewalls its creates, for posts, for direct messages etc.

I think FOSS means there is more transparency about what is going on, which is very important but not the whole story.

It's totally possible to use multiple forms of media an knowing that some of them are more survived than others and act accordingly.

The issue is when there is no more private type of media left.

I think that democracies won't survive AI, because they can't work when mass manipulation is that cheap. And it will be for the better because majorities end up increasingly oppressive. We ll have to invent a different adversarial mechanism that keeps people from starting civil wars while allowing individuals to be safe from mobs

True, dictators are the norm for human rule. Every book and movie out there has already pinned down the future as being one of a single, corrupt, world-wide government run by a psycho.

Every now and then some group of people end up making a democracy, but most don't put as many power-checks up as the US did when it was created (3 different branches) so must only last about one generation.

America's time is coming to an end. Crowds just aren't able to combat propaganda and other tactics from focused groups.

Dictators are authoritarians. I dont think we re heading there, the western world is still on the same Liberalism program that started with the enlightenment. However it is also clear that the most liberal places reap the biggest rewards because creative people tend to flock there (US). Maybe democracy has ran its course and we need to invent something better to continue on this centuries-long program

Lol!! France literally shut itself down today because of a general strike in response to raising the eligibility age for a state pension from 62 to 64, and somehow the US is one of “the most liberal places” in the world.

Damn, I think you made my day

https://apnews.com/article/france-retirement-age-strike-prot...

Yeah modern democracies are worthless. Take the Republican form of Government outlined in the constitution and make it where you have to be a stakeholder to vote. That means you're voting because you have an interest, not because you have a heartbeat.

By "stakeholder" do you mean "landowner"? It's hard to tell.

landowner. its been done before and should be done again. im done commenting though because i dont wanna read their commenting guidelines and the admins already started whining at me. buhbye, dont worry, nobody will ever care about actually fixing democracy, so this landowner thing wont go anywhere.

I get that you're leaving because the "admins are whining at you" but before you go I just want to say that I think your idea that only landowners should vote is unhinged and not democracy at all, but rather feudalism.

Good luck.

speaking of unhinged, that isnt feudalism and isn't even close. its being qualified to vote. but like i said, nobody will make any serious effort to fix democracy, so i wouldn't worry about suddenly becoming a medieval peasant subject to the local lord.

Being a citizen is the qualifier to vote. Democracy means everyone votes - taking the right to vote away is the opposite of fixing democracy.

> Every book and movie out there has already pinned down the future as being one of a single, corrupt, world-wide government run by a psycho.

I'd take that as a mix of internalized propaganda (democracy is Da Best, therefore the dystopia must be the opposite - a psycho dictator at the top), mass-market appeal (most people seem to like basic character stories best, therefore let's' do a character-focused good vs evil story) and tendency to follow established tropes.

And if you feel that fiction "has already pinned down the future", I feel like I should warn about generalizing from fictional evidence, but I guess at this volume it's more of a self-fulfilling prophecy now. Everyone dreading but also expecting a dystopia is a sure way to walk straight into one.

> America's time is coming to an end. Crowds just aren't able to combat propaganda and other tactics from focused groups.

Could this be a maintenance issue? Most citizens - in the US or elsewhere - are just users of democracy, understanding it even worse than they understand phones and computers. It's not an easy system to grok - it's unstable on its own, and requires feedback control to function long-term. Most people never learn a good mental framework to understand such concepts - so perhaps putting more effort into teaching people not just history and political sciences, but actual control theory (or some handwavy simplification) would enable more people to both appreciate the system and help resist its subversion?

I'd like to think it would, but then the last few years have dispelled the illusion I had, that broad knowledge, proficiency with complex mental models, and good epistemic hygiene, are qualities that make people less likely to spew obvious bullshit in favor of their preferred political ideology. I suppose you can't easily teach people to treat intellectual honesty as a virtue.

I tend to think that fear and greed are the main issues. People afraid of things give up their liberties easily and people greedy for things are willing to do stuff they wouldn't otherwise to get ahead (take bribes, destroy the environment, endorse bad laws, etc..)

It only takes a few hundred/thousand people in key places in a government to lower their standards or get scared about something and they can easily drag/persuade the entire country to come with them.

I dont think the biggest republican democracy can survive mobile phones. AI will make it impossible.

Pure democracy has always been a disaster. AI didn't invent yellow journalism. The most stable governments are the ones with the strongest checks and balances in place to constrain the populist fury du jour.

The real question is how to keep the checks and balances strong and stable instead of having them erode over time, as has been happening e.g. in the US.

We need a system that can consistently inhibit a privacy-eroding response to a 9/11-type event.

> On other news, 80% of young people aged 13 to 17 years old from the same 13 EU Member States floked to tiktok, before that to instagram and youtube and before that to facebook

This group isn't static; people who were 13-17 years old when Facebook became popular are not the same ones who are 13-17 years old and using TikTok today. I'm not saying that hurts your argument, but it feels a little misleading to phrase it in a way that sounds like the group of people who flocked to Facebook back in the day are the same ones flocking to TikTok now. The teens who flocked to Facebook when it was new and popular with teens are now in their 20s and 30s; some of them might even be in government by now.

> some of them might even be in government by now.

it seems to be more of a non-issue than the critical issue. people think they care, in reality, they don't. you walk into a mall, cameras everywhere. no problem. 1 guy points a phone at you to take a video. major issues. people are uninformed and misinformed, which is why EU websites sacrifice user experience for some arbitrary confirmation of "yes ill use cookies cause we know this website needs them". anyone that does conversion optimizations knows those "cookie consent" notices are for nothing and only serve to lower the user engagement on websites.

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