"Privacy may be an anomaly", says Google's Vint Cerf (2013) | Hacker News Reader

"Privacy may be an anomaly", says Google's Vint Cerf (2013)

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25 pointsfdeage20 comments

> "In a town of 3,000 people there is no privacy. Everybody knows what everybody is doing."

Technically true but they weren't documenting everything, measuring everything inside and outside your home, keeping it indefinitely, broadcasting it to the rest of the world, and making it available to law enforcement at any time.

The "lack of privacy" was a small scale, limited situation and falls apart now.

> The "lack of privacy" was a small scale, limited situation and falls apart now.

It wasn't industrialized and indelible. There have already been adults with real world suffering from someone digging up some old tweet they made as a pre-teen.

Right, without Google facilitating and automating the loss of privacy at scale you could pick up and move to another town and become anonymous again.

The data is stored in people's brains for a lifetime. The data is worthless afterwards, so this is indefinite storage for all intents and purposes. Law enforcement can retrieve the information by asking for it.

Further, there wasn’t a giant asymmetry of information.

I don’t actually completely agree with the premise, but even taking it at face value, everyone knew what everyone else is doing. That is very different than some far off entity subtly cataloging everything about you in the background, where you only have a mere notion of the full scope of its existence.

Well, to be honest, one does not need to do so. You collect for half a generation, you drive mental models from the collected data- after that you can simulate most stuff with minimal data collected. Human lifes are not that unique after all. And the individual is actually pretty sure behave like a arche-type when simulated and measured.

> he used to live in a small town without home phones where the postmaster saw who everyone was getting mail from. "In a town of 3,000 people there is no privacy. Everybody knows what everybody is doing."

That's just simplistic nonsense. First, the postmaster didn't know the content of those mails, which is a huge lot to miss for the "no privacy" claim

Also, people don't get x-ray vision to see what's happening behind closed doors of the town is small, and rumors is a poor substitute for knowledge even though they do give you the illusion thereof

> First, the postmaster didn't know the content of those mails

Are you sure? Perlustration was common practice during WWI. These people developed sophisticated techniques to open letters and then seal them back up so that it appears completely unopened.

Yes, I am, I'm living within his fantasy, in which he didn't mention the much stronger loss

Also, he isn't that ancient, he was growing up post WWII

That’s such an incredibly bad take.

> In a town of 3,000 people there is no privacy. Everybody knows what everybody is doing.

Yeah that was called community. Conflating that with adtech surveillance capitalism lack of privacy is asinine

It’s also simply untrue. Even in such small, tight knit communities people have privacy and secrets.

First, they're never "tight knit". That's probably impossible with anything over Dunbar's number. Second, with absolute certainty, the vast majority of those people hate the vast majority. There, the social and political life of those people id structured so that maybe about 3-5% of them can be important and have high status, and they're all willing and capable of murder to take that high status away from those who already have it. Finally, they really do know everyone's secrets, including who murdered who to achieve the high status.

If you lived in such a town as a child, you might not have picked up on any of this, because there's this thin veneer of civility. It's not so much a community, as it is a collection of people who, by accident of birth and geography, happen to live within distances of each other where municipal incorporation was inevitable.

Whether this meets your personal definition of community or not is a matter of opinion, but it probably correlates really well with whether you are cynical or hopeful.

Perhaps my experience in such a place has been more fortunate than yours, but I don’t recognize the majority of what you’ve written as accurate.

This is an insane and sad view of community life. Even with inequalities and ruling elites people are still able to find joy and share a sense of community.

No, they're unable to do those things with any population larger than Dunbar's number. Occasionally they put on a show that things are different, for people who will be gone in a few hours, if it would be embarrassing for people to see what it's really like.

You do know about Dunbar's number, right? It's why you didn't fall asleep last night sobbing in grief at the 10 gorillion people who died horrible deaths last week. You're incapable of caring about anyone except for a very small number of people (probably fewer than 250), but it seems slightly shameful if you publicly acknowledge that you don't care about anyone (except that small number I cited) so you ignore it or lie about it.

There is nothing insane about my view, though I suppose it might be sad. Humanity doesn't scale, now we can't be termite-people like the hivemind had its heart set on. Tragic.

I might not care for the people but I can care for the community. You are maybe too used to American ghettos.

That's an even weirder concept. You don't care for humans, but you care for the gigantic monstrosities that they sometimes collectively create, the ones that cause misery, sorry, and kafkaesque dystopias?

I have morals which prohibit me from deliberately or recklessly cause human individuals harm. But I have no such morals towards communities... if it were possible to murder communities without harming the humans that were part of those, I might just do it for the fun of it.

Yes, in their houses, and never out in public.

The tension here is the expectation of privacy for signals broadcast outside of one’s property and into the commons.

We don’t yet have a firm grasp on how to handle the issue of extending privacy into these shared spaces. There just seems to be two unreconcilable polar extremes at the current moment without a clear path forward.

You know already which way these forums lean and in an environment with populist karma and up and down votes there’s not much room for compromise.

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