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Comment by amatecha | Hacker News Reader

> Most people don't do anything worth privacy protecting.

That rationale sounds great (albeit dismissive/invalidating) until something you've done (and have provided ample digital evidence of) becomes illegal or is otherwise used against you.

Oh actually, what's your email password? I mean, since you're not doing anything worth keeping private, right?

You think there isn't a human reviewing the data of what each user is doing, but there absolutely could be, and there's no reason there can't be, like when Tesla employees were viewing and exfiltrating footage/imagery from customers' vehicles. Not just one or two people but apparently disparate _groups_ of employees. https://www.reuters.com/technology/tesla-workers-shared-sens...

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It's a common debate hole that privacy = hiding something bad/illegal, whether now or something deemed to be in the future. While this can be true it's only an aspect. Take benign examples where privacy would be useful and it's unrelated to that.

Eg: was reading recently in WSJ how various insurers are using satellite and drone imagery of customer's roof conditions and using it to deny them coverage. However this has been abused where even brand new roofs have been marked as bad even despite evidence provided and push-back. The insurers were collecting imagery and making decisions but not providing evidence on their end. According to someone working for an insurer they're expecting soon to take images daily for such purposes.

Here various incorrectly affected parties have done nothing illegal/bad/wrong but they're losing control and insight into processes that are affecting them in real ways. These aspects are part of what Daniel Solove outlined in their privacy taxonomy, where they broke down privacy into different things that comprise it (where information collection is distinguished from processing, etc).

> much of the data gathered in computer databases is not particularly sensitive [...] Frequently, though not always, people’s activities would not be inhibited if others knew this information. I suggested a different metaphor to capture the problems – Franz Kafka’s The Trial, which depicts a bureaucracy with inscrutable purposes that uses people’s information to make important decisions about them, yet denies the people the ability to participate in how their information is used.

Good point about future exposure.

A counter-argument: people already do all sorts illegal (misdemeanor?) things every day, tracked by big tech, and nothing happens. Some examples:

• speeding: your smart phone knows what road you're on, what the speed limit is, and that you're over it

• movie piracy: Chrome knows, your OS knows, your ISP knows, your VPN provider knows, any device that is listening can tell you're watching a movie that you shouldn'be able to watch at a non-cinema GPS location

• ..

20 years ago, legal firms sending out threatening letters to people they could identify on torrent trackers was commonplace.

It's still quite commonplace in Germany in 2024. Typically, they claim around 1000€ in said letters, and refusing will have the case go to court, which usually rules in favor of said legal firms.

Have there never been cases where law enforcement requested that sort of information and used it? I don’t think we know.

Yep. Even NSA agents spy on their ex’s. So of course Microsoft employees will be spying on people.

It’s not about privacy, it’s about having control of your own destiny. Not having some shitty OS maker think they are God in a 1984 world.

This is the warped kind of stuff which happens to companies who join the NSA Prism program… give it a few years and all they care about is power and money and playing spy.

There’s probably an NSA agent rubbing the higher ups at these companies off and telling them they are God as they finish. Or taking them on tours of the office and showing their cool exploding pens and other James Bond tech. Whatever it is, Microsoft is more than just invested.

Recall? Give me a break. That is the most in your face global surveillance tech I have heard of to date.

I worked at Tinder and we had full access to all the messages in plaintext, and ability to look up users by phone number, email, etc.

> You think there isn't a human reviewing the data of what each user is doing, but there absolutely could be, and there's no reason there can't be

I'm not sure there is a solution to this problem, unless we accept to lose a lot of features in our products and switch to E2E services.

the only alternative I can think about is some required audit about the measure in place to prevent employees from accessing data, but I'm not sure how effective that would be

> I'm not sure there is a solution to this problem, unless we accept to lose a lot of features in our products and switch to E2E services.

I'm not so sure.

Based on the figures I could find for 2021, Google's ad revenue was about $60B with approx 3B users (I asked various chat bots...).

So, if you extrapolated and did some slightly dodgy maths (there were other factors but I can't be arsed typing them) it would cost about $6-$7 per month per user if Google stopped all ads, and by extension, tracking & data mining - This is for Google to maintain their current figures.

Take these figures with a big pinch of salt though...

That $ figure is across the whole of Google. So that is for every single product they have but if you just use Gmail then it might only be $2 a month.

So, if Google wanted to make the same money without tracking, ads etc, they could but the temptation to sell your data and mine it would be strong!

Anyway, my point is that it's possible to do it but would people pay for it? I pay for my email with Fastmail so there is a single data point for you :)

Likewise. I pay for Fastmail, I contribute to Signal. Hell, I'm even paying for Kagi even tho' its results are fairly useless, in the hope that paying for privacy will lead to a better service over time.

n+2

I pay for all apps and services I regularly use as a matter of principle even if they have a fine free version. It's not even that much, a couple dozens bucks a month, so here's a second data point.

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