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Comment by WarOnPrivacy | Hacker News Reader

> We need to amend the constitution to guarantee our privacy. It should be a fundamental right.

As far as government intrusion into our privacy, it's addressed by the 4th Amendment's guarantee - that the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects and that our rights against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated.

The challenge is that courts repeatedly and routinely support and protect the government in it's continual, blatant violation of our 4A protections.

This has allowed governments at every level to build out the most pervasive surveillance system in human history - which has just been waiting for a cruelty-centric autocrat to take control of it.

And for the most part, we have both parties + news orgs to thank for this. They've largely been united in supporting all the steps toward this outcome.

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> As far as government intrusion into our privacy, it's addressed by the 4th Amendment's guarantee that the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects and that our rights against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated.

The Pennsylvania High Court recently ruled that the Pennsylvania local police don't need a warrant to access your search history.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46329186

Clearly, those protections have already been violated.

> The Pennsylvania High Court recently ruled that the Pennsylvania local police don't need a warrant to access your search history. Clearly, those protections have already been violated.

Absolutely. And to keep court-sanctioned violations from getting challenged, a state can utilize a number of tactics to shroud the methods in secrecy. This makes it very difficult for the violated to show standing in a challenge.

The state has nearly every possible advantage in leveraging gov power against the public.

>The Pennsylvania High Court recently ruled that the Pennsylvania local police don't need a warrant to access your search history.

How does this work? Does that mean if Pennsylvania police ask google nicely for it, then google isn't breaking the law in complying? Or that Google has to hand over the information even without a warrant?

You don't understand that news item. The police didn't search a specific person's account, they asked Google (who gave it to them voluntarily) anyone who searched the victim's address in the past week. Nothing unconstitutional about that.

But in the absence of a warrant it _ought_ to be.

Then your complaint should be with google for handing it over without a warrant.

Sure, I also dislike corporate policy that doesn't require a warrant for such things. But at the end of the day that is their choice.

My complaint is that Google should not have been permitted that choice in the first place. The entire sequence of events - from requesting the data without a warrant through to handing the data over without a warrant and any following data mining that was done with it should have been forbidden on constitutional grounds. Both parties ought to have been in violation of the law here. We need to fix the gaping hole in our constitutional rights that the third party doctrine represents.

It seems like the equivalent of reading everyone's journals every home in the entire nation. Cartoonishly unconstitutional.

But yes, I'm aware of the Third Party doctrine ruled on by judges whose conception of people making phone calls involved an individual talking to another human being (a.k.a. an operator) to connect you to who you wanted to talk to.

A practice antiquated when the ruling was made and a bygone relic by this point.

The other challenge is that in the modern era the houses, papers, and effects of most people have been partially signed off to corporate entities who are more than happy to consent away their access into our effects.

> The other challenge is that in the modern era the houses, papers, and effects of most people have been partially signed off to corporate entities who are more than happy to consent away their access into our effects.

Do you mean those who rent their homes?

I rented for a long time. I bought a house. None of my house, papers, or effects are owned by anyone but myself. I guess a credit union owns the mortgage, but they haven't and won't sell it.

To those who will jump to disagree with me about the credit union selling my mortgage: they won't. They don't engage in that market, never have.

> None of my house, papers, or effects are owned by anyone but myself.

Do you self host your own email? No? Those are "papers" that your email hosting provider can consent to providing law enforcement access to without a warrant.

Do you use search engines? Your search history is in the same boat with the search engine company.

Don't use a VPN? All of your internet traffic is in the same boat with your ISP

You use a VPN? All your internet traffic is in the same boat with the VPN.

The list goes on and on. It is almost certainly true that some company has private information about you that they can turn over without a warrant.

You forgot “houses” there, boss.

Amazon's echo and other such IoT devices do extend this to "houses" but isn't quite as ubiquitous.

My house, papers, and effects aren’t not tied to whatever you’re calling out about the internet, not in the sense you’re insinuating.

You’re conflating ideas to make a point. I admire the effort, you’re just not correct.

> You’re conflating ideas to make a point

I am talking specifically about the ideas you are disputing:

>> partially signed off to corporate entities who are more than happy to consent away their access into our effects.

I haven't conflated anything. You may be confused and think we're talking about ownership or physical access though.

You forgot to respond to anything except the "houses" part of this.

It's obvious what GP and others are saying - that the concept of things like "papers" and "effects" are no longer as concrete as they used to be. What used to be physical letters stored in one's home are now emails stored on any number of servers.

> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Oh, sorry. None of my papers or effects are in jeopardy either.

I think he meant things like his personal notes and files stored in an app like Evernote, which law enforcement can request copies of. I don't like the idea of someone reading my private notes...

Me either.

You can write them down on paper.

If we all acknowledge that the internet is a beautiful disaster that shan’t be trusted, which it always has been and always will be, we can all collectively get over ourselves about privacy on the internet. “Hey world I went overseas for vacation/holiday! I cooked this amazing dinner! I’m cheating on my SO using an online chat app!”

Maybe stop doing all 3 of those things. I can’t tell you how liberating it’s been since I got off all social media in ~2008. It’s super easy to be very private if you so choose. Having any kind of internet presence is a voluntary sacrifice of privacy.

Renters are one (large) category. No wasn't referring to mortgaged houses, iiuc those belong to the owner, the lender merely maintains certain rights to reposses in the case of a default.

I was more referring to the average US resident or American who agrees to broad terms and conditions with, their ISP, Microsoft 1 drive, Roomba of the year, microphoned smart TV, email provider, cell service provider, etc. Many of which are essential for navigating modern society.

> The other challenge is that in the modern era the houses, papers, and effects of most people have been partially signed off to corporate entities

There are two issues here, each harms us on it's own and both are intertwined toward our detriment.

The first is the deeply problematic 3rd Party Doctrine with established that we lose our rights when a 3rd party has control over our private content/information. What few stipulations there are in the precedent are routinely ignored or twisted by the courts (ex:voluntarily given). This allows governments to wholly ignore the 4th amendment altogether.

The second is the utter lack of meaningful, well written privacy laws that should exist to protect individuals from corporate misuse and exploitation of our personal and private data.

And even worse than Governments willfully violating our privacy rights (thanks to countless courts) and worse than corporations ceaseless leveraging our personal data against us - is that both (of every size) now openly collaborate to violate our privacy in every possible way they can.

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