US authorities can see more than ever, with Big Tech as their eyes
proton.me
proton.me
> And because giants like Meta, Google, and Apple must collect as much of your personal data as possible, there’s little they can do to protect your privacy.
I quite disagree with the "must" there. They choose to collect as much data as possible, because that's their business model.
And the good news is, it's fairly easy to opt out of quite a lot of that.
Turn location services off, turn your phone off when moving about, and pay cash without "personal tracking cards" associated with you. Just about everywhere has [local area code] 867-5309 registered, if you care.
It was the entire "Klondike-5" block, but got narrowed.
Which means they know everything you have posted, everywhere you've gone, everywhere you've worked, what you think politically, and almost certainly have AI profilers trying to "precog" you.
To say nothing of camera surveillance, gait analysis, facial recognition, license plate tracking, cell phone signal interceptors.
All it takes is for one authoritarian to walk in and turn the key and POOF we have perfect.
Are we in danger of that? Oh right, no politics on HN. Don't worry, be happy folks.
Priority #1 seems to be defending state moneymaking interests and state adjacent/intertwined BigCos
Priority #2 seems to be expanding their own power
Priority #3 seems to be micromanaging in social issues at the behest of various special interests to distract from #1 and #2
Keeping us all from keeling over from heavy metal poisoning or whatever is way, way, way down the list unless it bleeds up to #3 for whatever reason.
The is a Systemic problem. Doesn't matter what the individuals do.
Safety comes from dysfunctional governance. Surveillance is a property of functional governance. Embrace disfunction.
Plenty of ineffective dictatorships will happily line you up against the wall with bogus surveillance. And shitty surveillance states will happily fake surveillance or data to look more effective.
The danger with these types of State organs is they are constantly trying to justify their existence and cover up their mistakes, and if you can be thrown in the gears, some places are happy to do that.
And unlike an effective/accurate surveillance system, you can’t be safe by just not being the AK weilding guys. In fact, sometimes you’re safer because you’re more dangerous, and they’d rather find someone easier to pick on.
Third world places aren’t what they are because of a lack of rules or systems (usually), but rather because the rules and systems aren’t fit for purpose and produce the wrong outcomes.
Sure, but that's the exception. Governments have a pyramid of needs too. Governments don't throw a bunch of resources on things with poor returns, like shooting people who haven't done much wrong, when there's easier fruit to pick. Sure, you can go full jackboot on specific issues here and there but that's not sustainable on a "will I retire in peace of will I hang from the overpass" timeline. And even if you're the dictator's henchman and want to go down some rabbit hole of killing people you don't like the the fact that the dictator may have you shot for waste or as a sacrifice when that provokes unrest or dissatisfaction among the people generally keeps the government in line. And the government really doesn't want to be killing people because it needs people to do things and pay taxes.
Look at all the historically violent dictatorships that lasted a long time and for many leaders. They all provide for their people generally. They might not be competitive absolutely but they keep things generally moving in a positive direction decade over decade and keep the country doing at least as well as its peers. The ones that don't tend to fall apart after a couple bad leaders.
I really shouldn't need to be explaining this. This is how every European monarchy worked just with god and birthright as justification instead of backroom dealing and politics and false elections.
In a country with the rule of law like the USA, the government can know you committed a crime, you know you committed a crime, society may suspect you of committing a crime, but criminal law requires a jury to convict beyond reasonable doubt. With a good lawyer this is a very tough bar, it's how organized crime gets away with so much (and despite the mafia being out of the news, they operate extremely well to this day).
So selectively you choose when to be anonymous. You pick your battles.
As a practical matter that may help the average HN normie, if you have a family you likely have life insurance. Never, ever, buy alcohol, marijuana, or cigarette / vapes / nicotine products with a credit card. Always pay cash. If you die the insurance company will go through everything to try and deny.
In the reverse case, the modern day can help you. If you drive, get a dashcam. You don't have to reveal video if you are at fault. But if not at fault, the video is gold. Put cameras around your house.
If you have rental property attached to your primary domicile, never have the internet under your own primary internet, lest you give reason for a wayward tenant to cause a search of your own home.
You aren't protecting yourself for the 99.99% time, you are prepared for the 0.01% case
The problem is that we really need something like herd immunity. If you opt out, but the rest of the people in your life do not, then it's possible to discover most of your data most of the time. You might have location services off, but your friends and family don't, so much of the time there's a good guess where you are at. Or you might not share your phone #, but it can be collected by those that you text or call and shared that way. Creating "shadow accounts" is very advanced these days.
Not to mention, "opt out" has to be actually true and not just a facade.
I used to play with Twitters firehose back in the day and there's quite a lot of personal data you derive from private accounts. We could tell the city someone likely lived if they followed a certain amount of people from a specific city, etc. Could also guess their gender with 95% accuracy with just using n-grams from their tweets. We'd test our algorithms with public accounts.
I think there's too much power and money in personal information for it to stop.
Ironically, we told you all for years that if you abused terms like fascist, Nazi, racist, etc then they would lose their power and their impact and people would ignore them in future. You were warned what would happen if you cried wolf.
MAGA is a right-wing political movement that:
-seeks to return the nation to a mythical superior past, by
-empowering an extraordinary leader who represents the will of the people, in order to
-expel inferior/unworthy ethnicities, and
-expunge left/“Marxist” influences from art and culture.
These are all characteristics of Fascism specifically, not the authoritarian actions that people casually call fascist.
Is this happening? Or a stated goal?
I know they're deporting people who aren't here legally (that's a whole other debate), but I'm not aware of them actively targeting anyone based on race of ethnicity regardless of their legal status.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/05/politics/biden-administration...
Now if they go off script and act outside the law, that's a whole other story.
There has also been posts from schools in Texas recommending kids on field trips keep legal documentation on them because ICE is stopping school buses for investigations.
https://www.newsweek.com/texas-school-district-bus-immigrati...
At what point do you pull your head out of the sand and stare into reality.
However, your third point is a bit breathless. They aren't expelling anyone based on ethnicity. They want to deport illegal aliens. It isn't their fault so many of those aliens are from one country. The Nazis were expelling and killing Jews that had been in Europe for centuries lawfully. And, yknow, the whole killing them thing! The human experiments. The slave labour camps.
You are forgetting that fascist regimes go to war with their neighbours for territory, ignore the law, suspend democracy and have secret police to enforce political orthodoxy. Trump is an isolationist and he hasn't done any of the rest, yet at least.
Also don't forget that for all the stick Trump gets about immigration, all the Democratic presidents I can remember claim that they want to control the border too, and claim they can do so better. Hardly illustrative of fascism...
Changing the name of some water isn't territorial expansion or authoritarianism.
Solemeni was a terrorist. A dead terrorist is a good terrorist. If you attack a sovereign country then you should expect to be targeted. Fuck around? Find out.
Obama closed Gitmo. He promised to, remember, so he must have. And he withdrew from Afghanistan, remember? He said so in between claiming that marriage was only between a man and a woman. What a hero of the left.
Feel free to tell me I am wrong when I actually am instead of just when your imagination runs wild and you see "authoritarianism" in your cereal. Killing terrorists is authoritarianism lol. And drone striking children isn't?
Like there is no threat to Medicaid? Here’s the authoritarianism: Trump is clearly setting us up for a major constitutional crisis by way of his lying bullshit. Go see the way he talked to the governor of maine and tell me you dont hear the threats? You might not be a Nazi, but you’re sure damn close.
One of the problems with this community is there are no mechanisms for intellectual accountability beyond the span of a news cycle.
Germans loved Hitler until Stalingrad.
The Hank Show https://www.amazon.com/dp/1250209277/
Has been since 9/11. Remember, there's the omnipresent neverending war on terror.
However, to call the UK “totalitarian” is just an abuse of language. The country is not run by a single all-powerful party or dictator. It’s especially odd to use this word and then make a comparison to the US, which (though it is not totalitarian either by any stretch of the imagination) is currently in the midst of an executive power grab, with demands for a level of partisan loyalty from civil servants that remains unthinkable in the UK.
I don’t know what your goal is here, but if you want to persuade the average person in the UK to change their minds about the extent to which the government should be able to access surveillance data, it helps not to bundle your arguments together with wild misstatements.
If so, that was a judgment about legislation that is no longer current (and wasn’t when the judgment was issued). It may be that current legislation is also incompatible with EU law (IANAL, I’m not arguing that point), but AFAIK there is no court judgment to that effect.
> It may be that current legislation is also incompatible with EU law (IANAL, I’m not arguing that point), but AFAIK there is no court judgment to that effect.
Quite possibly but that wasn't my point. The point is that the UK is by far more of a surveillance state than any EU country, at least to my knowledge. UK legislation is not typical for a European country in that respect. People can go to prison in the UK for not handing over an encryption password and the UK has just effectively banned end-to-end encryption (if you put a backdoor in it, it's no longer end-to-end encryption).
There are EU countries with key disclosure laws. See e.g. France and Ireland on this list: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_disclosure_law
What I do know is that I won't be able to sell my software in the UK or to any UK citizens or to any citizens who want to use to to communicate with UK citizens because it uses secure end-to-end encryption. That's the important bit for me personally.
Every rich country is a surveillance state.
Stopped reading there. If someone tries to sell a lie like that in their first five sentences, I can't trust anything they say.
Apple does collect some of your data, but their business doesn't depend on it, and I have some degree of control over how much I participate.
I think it's a category error to include all three in the same sentence, but I don't think the author is lying. I do agree somewhat with the sentiment that such a lack of distinction calls the content into question, or at least the author's framing of it.
No one is being precious about it. They're debating whether or not the article is written in good faith. Jumping to a bad faith-based defence isn't going to change the mind of people who are concerned about things being done in bad faith.
The point here is that bad faith is doing exactly that: making the legitimacy of the argument presented by the author fundamentally questionable. Comparing the core business model of a company that has invested in capabilities like Advanced Data Protection with Meta in an article highlighting the ways authorities can get your data...seems disingenuous at best, and just plain wrong/misleading.
> we're skipping past that entirely to deconstruct a single sentence as a "gotcha"
When someone sets up a false premise, then yes, everything that comes after it is suspect.