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Comment by gwbas1c | Hacker News Reader

Back when I was in college, in a fraternity, we always assumed that the phones were tapped. Specifically, we never spoke about alcohol or marijuana (now legal) on the phone.

Even today, I generally assume that my phone could be tapped; even when talking with my trusted work colleagues, friends, and family. I'm extra careful about dirty jokes or "grey morality" in video conferences and email.

The same applies to speaking with lawyers. You never know when some motivated asshole wants to twist your words out of context, and the possibility of a recording just enables that behavior.

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I know enough about security and encryption to know that unless I've exchanged keys physically with someone else, there really is no guarantee that someone hasn't compromised a certificate somewhere. (IE, a "secure" connection on the internet is secure enough for a credit card.)

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> Even today, I generally assume that my phone could be tapped; even when talking with my trusted work colleagues, friends, and family. I'm extra careful about dirty jokes or "grey morality" in video conferences and email.

This is horrifying. Why do you feel the necessity to self-censor? What consequences do you anticipate?

Not the person who said this, but it's easy: Grow up in a country where the government listening in is common (without any transparent due process), and it becomes second nature.

And then add to that how easy it is to record phone conversations with today's phones (I've done it), it's easier on the brain to assume it's being recorded as opposed to wondering if it is.

But yes, I don't care about my dirty jokes being recorded :-) Illegal activity? Sure. But I solve that problem by not doing illegal things.

Not necessarily. Snowden has proven the US intelligence agencies can basically intercept anyone's electronic communications, and that they do this is a giant scale.

And yet, we still see comments of people horrified when you said you assume as default that someone (or more likley, something) is listening.

The normalcy bias is too strong.

I'm not horrified that they think someone is listening, the horror was from them self censoring out of fear of surveillance.

I apologize for mis-reading you. but, being careful with this stuff can't hurt. Well, yes, it can hurt the society, but keep you safe from the powers that be.

It's a good policy, generally. Treat anything written down, email, etc, as something that could become public later. Anything that could be recorded and saved for later can be used against you if it's taken the wrong way. A questionable joke could become an HR complaint, as an example.

Consider Person A, who is self-interested and may use a secret recording against you, even if you're following all rules and acting ethically. Additionally, consider if Person A is neutral but shares the recording with Person B, who unbeknownst to Person A, is actually out to get you.

"Anticipate" is strong. Even the mere possibility of something bad happening, even if unlikely, is probably enough to outweigh the positives. In this case, that's just "saying things of grey morality in recorded settings."

My primary worry would be things being taken out of context when circumstances change later. Maybe there's lawsuit discovery, or maybe you have a falling out with a coworker who tries to defame you. The last thing you want is a motivated adversary to be given access to a wide trove of things that could be reframed to be used against you.

And it's not just off-color jokes or insensitive comments. At one job, we had a project that involved "fudging" billable numbers for a completely legitimate purpose. I was the one insisting that we don't use that term in writing at all to avoid any potential future misunderstandings. Call it an "adjustment" or "algorithmic modification" or something, but not "fudging" or "fabricating." Same kind of reasoning.

Why bother, if the bad actors was that good it could just make up the conversation using your voice and AI.

Adding on to this question, do you anticipate the same people capable of tapping phones to think less of you for a dirty joke? The people whose opinion of me would lower for something off-color and the people who possess the ability to wiretap me are a disjoint set lol.

The point is it would be usable against you, but at the point you are wiretapped and can be used in court all bets are off you are probably in too much trouble may as well tell the joke!

yeah exactly haha; the threat model implies a level of "you're hosed" that something private I'd say to a friend isn't moving the needle on.

Have you missed the last decade and a half of people having their lives ruined by social media mobs for minor slights?

By their friends or government agents recording telephone conversations where they say an off-color joke?

Because the vast majority of things I self-censor I'm very careful about where and when I discuss it...

And I make a point of seeing the people I care about face to face.

> I'm extra careful about dirty jokes or "grey morality" in video conferences and email.

That's a good policy when interacting with any human or device in a work context.

When I say something inappropriate on the phone or over Discord, I always tell the NSA guy listening it was a joke.

This is an old joke, but as AI becomes more and more capable it becomes increasingly likely that the government will have some kind of intelligence sifting though every post you make and message you send.

the private sector is already doing it (based on the puppetted dead people profiles of facebook, and people being banned on discord for messages they sent a few years ago). given that data is quite easily handed over from private corporations to public goverment, id go a step further and say AI profiling is probably already happening at a certain level of governance. can you imagine the dystopia of when this is properly linked together? the system will be able to completely delete independant action from its limbs. "officer XYZ accessed nondeterministic AI summary of the perp's facebook messages based on an involuntary facial scan. AI summary stated the perp to have presented anti <current regime> views. officer XYZ made the decision to shoot on sight, based on heightened danger presented by the AI assessment. no further investigation required, system functioned correctly, case closed"

And we can guess that recordings for have stored for years back before it got feasible to actually process.

> Even today, I generally assume that my phone could be tapped; even when talking with my trusted work colleagues, friends, and family.

Adding to that: If you live in a one-party consent state assume you're being recorded by any of the parties in a face-to-face conversation, too.

Yeah-- it sucks that the world is this way. I deal with it. What I don't want to see are draconian controls on technology (which will ultimately be ineffective) in an attempt to put the genie back in the bottle.

> If you live in a one-party consent state assume you're being recorded by any of the parties in a face-to-face conversation, too.

Even if you don't live in a one-party consent state, assume you're being (perhaps illegally) recorded by any of the parties in a face-to-face conversation too.

It just seems so unhealthy to live in a low-trust society. Is there a way out?

Maybe AI agents that work in our personal best interests?

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