Germans piece together millions of lives spied on by Stasi (2011) | Hacker News Reader

Germans piece together millions of lives spied on by Stasi (2011)

theguardian.com

38 pointsdavidbarker10 comments

And all of the information collected by the Stasi, we now voluntarily give to social media companies.

But that's different, right? I mean, it's not the government so its okay.

I know some people who took a look at their StaSi files. Today's really different compared to what happened then: There wasn't someone from inside your inner circle transmitting every joke and every utterance to "law enforcement" for them to build kompromat. Sure, nowadays your every move is sold to god-knows-who but this will not impact your ability to choose a course of study (which may or may not suit you academically). You can get a job anywhere provided you have clearance and education needed. You will not look at pictures from your childhood and realize that three out of five people sold you out to get ahead in the queue to acquire a car. Your most intimate thoughts and acts aren't recorded for random bureaucrats to get a laugh out of. Please think again before equivocating "den Realen" with modern democracy. Neoliberal, consumerism societies definitely have their flaws but you're definitely better off on the freedom scale.

"Your most intimate thoughts and acts aren't recorded for random bureaucrats to get a laugh out of"

Actually they are all the time, the phone is always listening, Alexa is always listening, Ring is always listening. You don't know what happens to that data as it goes through the layers.

The bureaucrats are not laughing but the analysts are.

"You will not look at pictures from your childhood and realize that three out of five people sold you out to get ahead in the queue to acquire a car."

Right... You will just look at your LinkedIn network and ponder which one of your co-workers sold you out to get ahead. But they call it "competition" now. Even though its augmented with all this data that is available.

How would you “sell someone out” on LinkedIn to get ahead?

Make 10 fake accounts and comment stupid shit on their posts usually does the trick or better make 1 account and play a disgruntled mistress add some AI lewds as receipt, there are easy ways to ruin someones reputation...

The concern shouldnt be about where things are in the now, but how these things will eventually be adapted for similar purposes in the future.

> Today's really different compared to what happened then: There wasn't someone from inside your inner circle transmitting every joke and every utterance to "law enforcement"

They also didn't stay around you 24 hours a day, 7 days a week like your phone or computer and didn't record every move (using GSM, GPS and accelerometer).

Sp yes. It is different.

It seems initially they wanted to automate this process but it failed (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasi-Schnipselmaschine). The software meant to handle this grew in cost without a lot of results. They stopped the software development and now they continue to assemble the documents per hand. Current status (in german):

https://www.stasi-unterlagen-archiv.de/archiv/rekonstruktion...

I hope they get at least some more people closure on this before they die.

It is becoming very difficult to have a private conversation in our modern world. It is a shame.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com