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I don’t understand. This seems pretty innocuous to me.

>“If you’re an average internet user, you may not think too much about your privacy when you visit a random website” Surely you don’t dispute that? Like, maybe the average user should think about their privacy when they visit a random website, but it’s not dizzying to say that they probably don’t.

And the rest of statement is just saying that some users are more at risk of what is a targeted exploit. Probably both in terms of the chance it is used against them, and the consequences of that use.

Your point that unmasking gets used against a wide range of people is well taken, but it hardly invalidates the argument being made here, does it?

You believe it’s more important to emphasize that everyone should care about privacy. The author seems to believe that it’s more important to emphasize the impact on populations more likely to be targeted. Both are fair perspectives.

The best data point we have for opting into invasive privacy violations is the iOS thing, where over 90% of people opted out.

Therefore, it is more than safe to conclude the 50th percentile of all users would prefer to opt out of web tracking.

You seem to be claiming that half of the users that turned on private mode don’t care about tracking, or that it doesn’t matter if the industry doesn’t respect their explicit attempts to opt out of tracking.

The difference is Apple has the muscle to make that happen without, ya know, breaking the internet.

In the next sentence, by saying that minorities etc. are more significantly impacted the author is implying that average internet users are justified in not worrying about privacy. This is what GP is arguing against.

Is that what the author is implying? That certainly wasn’t my takeaway. If that was the author’s intended message, I’d certainly agree it’s not a good one. But I doubt that was the intended message, to be honest. One population being more significantly impacted by something does not imply that other populations are not also meaningfully impacted.

Maybe the author's intent wasn't that, but the phrasing is a bit apologetic, like (exaggerating here...) "we're sorry to bother you, the average internet user with this discovery, but just so you know there ARE minorities that care about privacy"

It's impossible to know the author's intent of course, but I think the problem/confusion is the choice of the word 'impacted' - GP is saying essentially 'everyone is impacted, even if only a few are aware/care'.

Your reading I assume is impacted in the sense of thinking and worrying about it; affected (strictly speaking) by it.

The article says there “certain categories of internet users who may be more significantly impacted by this”.

I think that’s probably true. And regardless of whether or not everyone is impacted at some level, I think it’s reasonable to point out that some may be impacted more significantly. Regardless of which version of “impacted” you mean.

Think about it from the researcher's perspective. They're used to being asked all the time to justify why their research matters. In fact, it's critical that they do so in order to get funding.

If they answer, "well, privacy is important for everyone" or "corporations can use this to serve more targeted ads," most people are going to say, "who cares?" -- or at least that it's less important than other projects the agency or foundation could be funding. If they talk about political dissidents and journalists, then it becomes much easier to make the case that it matters.

maybe its late, but this sounds utterly contradictory to me.

we are well passed the time and millions in fines from a time when nobody cared about GDPR.

> "we are well passed the time ... when nobody cared about GDPR"

You probably meant that now giant providers care about GDPR because of risk of (mostly small) fines, but most users do not care, because of GDPR fatigue, they just click on "accept all", which is defeating the purpose of GDPR.

GDPR is not about cookies.

You really should at least make an effort to get what the author is telling instead of just reading their words. It's astonishing how narrow minded people can be when the fixate on unrelated things that the author is saying instead of understanding what they meant.

Particularly academics use the language the author used. It narrows who is severely affected by a lack of privacy to small groups. It's akin to the folks who say, "Privacy? I have nothing to hide!"

The reality is that as the fragile pillars of privacy that exist in most governments are eroded the impact radius grows exponentially. I'd really like them to be stressing that losing privacy is life or death for just about everyone.

I can't tell you what the author meant other than what they said, but I can tell you that there's an abundance of folks who believe privacy is a niche issue for small groups which is far from the truth.

We should assume that what someone says is unrelated to what they meant? That's an interesting viewpoint. I have to guess at your meaning since I can't fixate on what you're saying, but I think you mean that language is meaningless?

If you can’t see yourself possibly being on in a protest in the future, you’re not someone who cares about the world and you’ll never care about privacy no matter what arguments they use.

This says only about a specific attack vector. Privacy should not be trivialized to the issue of only one attack vector (However, it is unclear who trivialized it).

It really isn't that important for most people though, most people are only looked at in terms of large aggregate metrics, most people don't feel that participation in a survey constitutes a violation of one's privacy, why are large aggregate marketing statistics any different?

> Frankly I'm not even sure the statement about minority groups is true anymore

I think gay people in most of the world are still legally persecuted by their states. At least in a number of countries, the penalties for being homosexual or engaging in homosexual activities range from imprisonment to execution.

That sentence is explicitly with respect to privacy, it does not negate aggregate oppression trends. A lack of privacy opens new doors for oppression, and that harms everyone is more my point. Many people here, if you read the thread entirely, think the status quo is a constant.

> but it should be a priority for everyone

It's not black and white, though. There are a lot of people who accept that some levels of sacrificing privacy is an acceptable price for security (i.e. street cameras that allow police to track a criminal who attacked you, plus add some deterrence value). The question, of course, is how to keep this sacrifice under checks and balances to prevent/minimize abuse, but that's another discussion.

I really don't think privacy is something everyone should value equally.

"Unmaskings" don't generally happen to most folks, and these "dangerous outcomes" are exceedingly rare.

If your threat model includes the possibility of things you do online having negative consequences for you should they be discovered, that's one thing. But the vast majority of people do not fall into that category, and pretending like they do is a great way to numb folks to the very real risk some people carry.

Having something to hide or not, privacy doesn't mean the same thing to everyone, and that's completely okay.

The other side of the question is too often left out: a vast majority of people are empowering surveilling entities.

They're giving a trove of information to establish a baseline that will impact anyone diverging from there, while also helping further manipulation as the feedback loop between what they're pushed and how they react to it is transparent.

So IMHO, privacy should be enforced by default if we look at it from the group's perspective.

Except that's not happening.

Could my DNA be used to scan for racial anomalies in newborns? Yes. Is that actually happening? Hell no.

Doomsday screeching is not a productive activity, and privacy is not the issue here. It's how people are using their collected data.

Besides, caring about other people's treatment of privacy is, if you actually believe what you're saying, none of your business.

> that actually happening? Hell no.

I'm kinda tired of blanket dismissal of anything that could be mildly tinfoil hat looking.

Not falling into a panic every thursday about random corporate action is a thing, being ultra confident that no one is ever doing anything harmful on a specific subject is unwarranted.

Eugenism was a thing baked into laws not that long time ago and is still in the books depending on where you live. Patients are still suing govs for reparation because their claims were memoryholed. You can't just throw around "Is that actually happening? Hell no." rhetoric as if you were due a demonstration served on a plate before accepting that the world is 't as skweeky clean as you seem to assume it is.

And I'm kinda tired of blanket chicken littling over privacy from folks who refuse to accept the general situation of the vast majority of people.

Eugenics is not a thing modern humans in Western society need to realistically worry about, and the main reason you're not getting the traction you think you should be getting is because you keep pretending like it is. People tune this attitude out, because of how patently absurd it is.

The average person operates in their own best interest. The reality is that caring deeply about privacy is not in their best interest, no matter how many boogeymen you try to pull out. It just doesn't come up nearly as often or as severely as you apparently wish.

> Eugenics is not a thing modern humans in Western society need to realistically worry about,

Hard disagree, the facts are against you.

My father was born in 1935 and is still alive and very healthy, during his lifetime here in Australia, a modern Western Society, a Eugenics based carding and restricted movement system was in force.

https://culture.wa.gov.au/feature/perths-prohibited-area

Looking about the world there are still many examples of divided rules for colonists and indigenous peoples, if you're in North America ask your nearest Indigenous American whether any significant issues still hang on bloodlines, you'll hear a range of answers some of which might suprise you.

All that aside .. never forget that what has happened in the past can happen in the future and perhaps faster than many expect.

With a rise in far right policy and the US still somewhat shocked by the overturning of Roe V Wade with womens search data wrt reproductive health now a hot topic in security and law enforcement it's not at all outlandish to posit that it wouldn't take much to see the emergance of policy to seperate those that are different in some manner .. the intersex, arabs and chinese and have all been recent and current tarets of the US right.

What you’re describing isn’t eugenics, and what you’re fear mongering for isn’t realistic or relevant to 99% of people.

You really want to make privacy everyone’s problem, but it simply isn’t.

It looks like you need it spelled out very clearly, so here a whole piece on Autralia and eugenics:

https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/rearvision/aus...

I don’t think you understand how damaging it is to your argument that you need to refer to events that took place before the invention of the microchip in order to make this point.

> the main reason you're not getting the traction you think you should be getting

I'm not sure to understand. What traction ?

If you're doing nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide from the giant surveillance apparatus the government's been hiding.

-Stephen Colbert

Bruce Schneier put it quite succinctly in his article The Eternal Value of Privacy (from 2006):

Some clever answers: “If I'm not doing anything wrong, then you have no cause to watch me.” “Because the government gets to define what's wrong, and they keep changing the definition.” “Because you might do something wrong with my information.” My problem with quips like these – as right as they are – is that they accept the premise that privacy is about hiding a wrong. It's not. Privacy is an inherent human right, and a requirement for maintaining the human condition with dignity and respect.

— <https://www.wired.com/2006/05/the-eternal-value-of-privacy/>

> If your threat model includes the possibility of things you do online having negative consequences for you should they be discovered, that's one thing.

Let's start with you then, Zetice. Post your name, face, and home address.

My threat model includes negative consequences for me should I be discovered.

> I really don't think privacy is something everyone should value equally.

> "Unmaskings" don't generally happen to most folks, and these "dangerous outcomes" are exceedingly rare

Can you provide a source for this claim? I have some sources that say otherwise:

- https://www.safehome.org/family-safety/doxxing-online-harass...

- https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/30/technology/doxxing-protes...

However, doxxing/"unmasking" are really only part of the problem when talking about privacy. It opens doors for new and unfounded forms of oppression. Prior to the internet there was at least some inherent privacy in that aspects of your life were self-contained in private activities. In a world where many/most of your activities have some form of connectedness, whether shared with the public or not, "privacy" or the choice to share more widely and/or with the government becomes more paramountly important: https://learningcenter.ecnl.org/learning-package/surveillanc...

> If your threat model includes the possibility of things you do online having negative consequences for you should they be discovered, that's one thing. But the vast majority of people do not fall into that category, and pretending like they do is a great way to numb folks to the very real risk some people carry.

An interesting take. I'm part of online gun forums; I promote good gun and safety culture among other things. One of those forums is queer-centric/leftist. The people who doxx gun owners could care less whether they're doxxing via a state agency, a leftist gun forum, or a righty gun forum - the objective is the same: guns are the enemy they're targeting and people are a mere consequence. If I ideologically allow people to doxx one part of the gun community, I have opened the door for alternative approaches, so I relinquish that right to the state who requires cause for such a thing. That is a bit at odds with my (dis-)trust towards the government to maintain cause uniformly and justly, but that's a different discussion and a different approach.

Key to your argument is that privacy is one in the same with eschewing consequences, which is far from the truth. In fact, technologies like PGP prove you can maintain privacy and ensure accountability given more mainstream adoption and tooling. Who holds those people accountable and the ability to engage in moderation of online discussions are equally important parts of privacy because it involves the how of a lot of those things. Saying the vast majority of people deserve the unmasking, and the inevitable violence, they received is a lot like saying I deserved being beat as a kid. My dad would tell you that he had the best of intentions in mind and he thought he knew what we was doing and that I deserved it. My siblings and I have a life of experiences that prove why the best of intentions and his knowledge were acutely wrong. The change he wanted in each of us could've been attained in entirely different and more healthy ways.

You miss the point here entirely; the real life experiences of the vast majority of the population of Western society precludes the need for absolute privacy.

What you would need are not anecdotes about how individuals who legitimately require privacy, but a systemic and successful push to use data collected by browser fingerprinting (the topic of this submission) to meaningfully harm more than a random handful of people.

You lack this evidence, because it doesn’t happen, and cannot happen, in society as it’s structured today. Anyone attempting to do the things you’re afraid of would be stopped.