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Comment by petcat | Hacker News Reader

> This is opaque to the service

The "service" is irrelevant. I think most people would trust Porno Hub to be discreet about their visits. That's in their business interest. But now they have to tell your government about all the times you're visiting Porno Hub.

And nobody should trust their government.

Also, keep in mind that western governments share with each other. There will come a time when Australians will try to enter USA but they'll get flagged at the border because the AUS government shared that this particular individual visited Porno Hub and a few other age-restricted websites 7,000 times in the last 30 days. Red Flag!

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> And nobody should trust their government.

Nobody should trust a billion dollar corporation, that's why we have democratically elected governments. All these power hungry fucks counter balance each-other, to some extend at least.

> democratically elected governments.

51% of a vote can go the wrong way now and then.

Yes but winner takes all is not the only voting system in existence, and democracy goes beyond just voting once every few years.

> democracy goes beyond just voting once every few years.

What else is there? You are effectively only asked to choose between bad and worse candidates at a fairly low frequency.

You're equating democracy to presidential elections, that's not the full extent of it. Free press, transparency, independent justice, referendums, etc. are all part of a democratic system. Norway / Denmark / Switzerland do it better than US / UK / France for instance.

Hot take, nobody should trust anybody. Trustless systems could certainly exist for this, if the government took the time to care.

Trust is key to modern society. Any measure aimed at supplanting trust increases transaction costs in the economy.

To be entirely fair, a government that would abuse your vague "am I allowed to access porn" history seems well into the territory of a government that would just make it up. A nefarious, powerful entity has no real requirement to be honest in their maliciousness.

They also have more direct means of accessing more specific data via ISPs, audits, banks, etc.

I think the government making stuff up is worth considering, but isn't it a kind of different threat model?

The hypothetical government isn't going to make stuff up about me, some nobody, on a flight to the US to be a tourist or something. They statistically don't care about me. However, the US morality police might decide to statistically care about everyone who watches porn.

But if I'm a somebody, say a former or potential whistleblower, or a local politician, etc. then a government might have a specific motive to do me dirty and not care about being honest.

I guess there's a wide and blurry line between being a "nobody" the government has no motivation to lie about and being a "somebody" that deserves special malicious treatment.

The moral outrage crowd in the US have no power. The people who can and will act against you will only use morality as an excuse, not a cause. Being some nobody, the government has no interest in you anyway. You can watch porn, they can know it, and nothing changes, because you're still a nobody.

(If you watch porn online, you can be pretty sure they already "know" it, because you're not doing it in the privacy of your own home, you're doing it on a public network with next to no secrecy about who you are or what you're doing).

That is an assumption. The games the powerful play leverage truth and provable things. I think there is a lot of need for privacy and abuse of dragnet information before you get to the government framing people.

Like January 6th and vaccines causing autism and climate change denial and election rigging and Haitians eating dogs and Venezuela drug boats?

Are you and I living in the same reality? They're constantly just making things up out of nowhere from nothing and refusing to back down. Now to the point of arresting US citizens with a secret police and committing international war crimes in open waters.

I didn't say people don't lie and do bad shit. Not sure where that came from.

Just because people lie, doesn't mean we need to shrug ok lets just hand over all our private data everywhere.

But I dig ya! What the current US government does is abhorrent.

> Like January 6th and vaccines causing autism and climate change denial and election rigging and Haitians eating dogs and Venezuela drug boats?

That you categorize all of those things in the same boat is very partisan. And it is exactly why a government controlling access to information is a very bad idea. Some of those things aren't real phenomena, others are just over hyped and some are real and very much proven. The news sources you got those opinions from are highly partisan but you trust them implicitly even though you have access to the Internet and can cross check many of them. That you can make such blind mistakes is exactly why elected officials should never control the flow of information. And to give you an example of an opinion that very much matters, consider is nuclear power green or not? The wrong answer about that is doing more damage than your most hated official could ever do.

Reality isn't partisan.

- January 6th was an attempted coup of the government coordinated by Republican interest groups and antagonized by Trump.

- Vaccines do not cause autism.

- Climate change is real and anthropological in origin.

- The 2020 election was not rigged for Biden and there exists no evidence of impropriety of any kind.

- Haitians did not eat people's pet dogs in the USA. This was just plain, out-in-the-open racism.

- The US military is using the WMD, sorry, I mean the "drug boat" excuse on vessels 1,200 miles away from US waters to execute a dozen people at a time. They are providing no evidence and performing no seizures or investigations. Then they are violating international law and their own documents on war crimes and service member's duty to refuse by having them execute shipwreck survivors.

Everything above is a fact. Not an opinion. Not partisan. A fact.

You mean like Epstein? We've got a bunch of truths about rich people and nothing happens.

The fear of an evil government misusing something, more often than not, is a thought terminating cliche. It means we cannot regulate, or create any laws about anything, because evil people could abuse those laws. In reality, evil people do evil shit, irrespective of the laws available for abuse.

Right... but I don't think I was suggesting anarchy.

Cops do it all the time even when bodycams show otherwise

Not just the US, but image entering Qatar or Indonesia with them having that knowledge of your access to "adult content".

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