Comment by pavon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pavon | Hacker News Reader

The bill they are talking about[1] was completely worthless and deserved to be vetoed. All it did was require browsers and mobile OSes to have a "setting that enables a consumer to send an opt-out preference signal to businesses with which the consumer interacts through the mobile operating system".

It didn't refer to any standard about how this signal should be sent so different browsers could send completely different information.

It didn't put any requirements on businesses who receive this signal. They are free to completely ignore it just like Do-Not-Track, and most will.

Even if a company wanted to comply out of good will it doesn't define even vaguely what people are opting out of by toggling this setting which would lead to confusion as different sites would implement different things, and different browsers and OSes would describe it differently.

It was literally mandating a dummy button.

[1] https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml...

> They are free to completely ignore it just like Do-Not-Track, and most will.

That is not correct. Please see my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41711728

"enforced" in one location on the entire globe.... so yes... the original statement is correct.

Thanks, what an awful article. I gave up after eight paragraphs in and it had said absolutely nothing.

Which begs the question, why are we constantly trying to off load personal security to others? Where is your personal responsibility to secure your own information? If you want better privacy, why not just not use Google or Apple? There are several phones and mobile OS's which are hyper focused on privacy. They all come with compromises, but even decent OpSec is hard.

We've become such a lazy society, its depressing.

Thanks for pointing out how worthless this bill was.

Because not everyone is an expert in security and privacy and yet benefits from having some. This is why we regulate things.

> This is why we regulate things.

Unless by "we" you mean "the EU economic zone" then no, "we" really don't. As an American I have been exposed, for the past 15 years, to the blatant failure of any genuine attempt to protect consumer rights or privacy in the nation where both Android and iOS originated. We, the progenitors of the smartphone, have failed to impose any form of substantial regulation that would seriously enable privacy for the end-user.

It's no coincidence. Phone hardware is only worth so much, but the data it generates is priceless. The secondhand market for information enabled by the NSA and industrial contractors like Palantir provides the intelligence backbone of the global economy. The United States' negligence towards Google and Apple is a proven quid-pro-quo agreement.

I don't have to be an expert. I already have a literal super computer in my pocket:

Bing: "How do I protect my privacy online?" Results: 11,700,000

I don't need to smart enough to build a rocket to go to Mars. I just need to type a basic query into a search engine. Not only do I get 11M results, I now have an AI assistant telling me how I can do that. The results also list ads from companies who can do that for you, written tutorials on how do that, articles on how to do that and a bunch of videos as well.

Is this the insurmountable obstacle you talk about when you say not everybody is an expert in security and privacy??

C'mon man.

Searching up how to protect your privacy online and then clicking on a targeted ad is, well, basically my point.

Terrible take. Our modern world is hopelessly complicated and we don't ask every citizen to personally defend their physical security from outside threats, nor personally manage their water and food security.

How do you even square these adjacent statements?

> even decent OpSec is hard.

> We've become such a lazy society

The plain and obvious response to our situation is that digital privacy and security should be opt-out, not opt-in. It's not as simple as adding a button that does nothing, but it actually is relatively simple for browser vendors et al to reverse their assumptions.

If you don't agree, are you knocking on doors and teaching your neighbors how to manage their security? I hope you've got a lot of patience.

I think you missed the point.

> even decent OpSec is hard.

Its hard to maintain because most people have to give something up in order to get the privacy they want. 99% of the users these days don't care about privacy. Privacy is a "boomer" thing.

Its not hard when you have literally generations of technological knowledge at your fingertips and still want something automated to do all of this for you, without any compromises on your own part - which inevitably leads to:

> We've become such a lazy society

THAT is a terrible take? Putting some onus on the user to get out of their lazyboy chair and do some research?

And your conclusion to OP talking about users taking some actual responsibility for their own privacy is this:

> If you don't agree, are you knocking on doors and teaching your neighbors how to manage their security? I hope you've got a lot of patience.

Seriously. Thanks for confirming OP's point:

> We've become such a lazy society

> Seriously. Thanks for confirming OP's point

What was implied in my previous comment is that someone who doesn't know anything about digital privacy and security can't be called lazy for not investing in it. And lots of people know very little about it. "Society is lazy" is in fact a lazy excuse to wash one's hands of a problem and pretend they're better than other people.

> Its hard to maintain because most people have to give something up in order to get the privacy they want. 99% of the users these days don't care about privacy. Privacy is a "boomer" thing.

Its not hard when you have literally generations of technological knowledge at your fingertips and still want something automated to do all of this for you, without any compromises on your own part - which inevitably leads to:

Sorry... I have literally no idea what the point you're making here is. Is it hard or easy? Do people want meaningful privacy or do they not?

Because “personal responsibility” only goes so far. It doesn’t account for how people in a society actually interact.

If your friend doesn’t jump through all of this month’s hoops in BigCorp’s shiny new privacy policy (so lazy for not opting out yet again!) then your privacy might become collateral damage.

My personal opinion is that framing problems as personal responsibility rather than collective action is a conspiracy to stunt actual solutions. It is effective because it shifts blame from offending companies to unknowing individuals.

For the same reason it's not my job to make sure my food doesn't have arsenic or lead in it, or for that matter to avoid buying from corporations that propagate bird flu.

In many ways, privacy violations fit the public health model better than the user features model - my privacy can be infringed upon through no action of my own if a contact of mine fails to secure theirs. Surely I shouldn't be expected to carefully vet and interview all acquaintances, neighbors, third party partners to my grocery store, security cameras I happen to walk past, and friends of friends to make sure they follow best practices?

Right now you can't drive on public freeways without commercial entities capturing your license plate, and they can retain it as long as they want and do whatever they want with it, as long as it has the potential for profit. That's not the world I want to live in.

Ironically enough your username is from a short story in which some hackers take down someone with supposedly very tight security.

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