Who Is Watching You? | Hacker News Reader

Who Is Watching You?

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131 pointsr0h1n20 comments

Every online service needs to make money ('if the product is free, you are the product'). But people do not expect/want to pay for online forums.

I'm rather pessimistic about online privacy. My wife's family is Jewish. The Germans were very successful wiping out Jews in The Netherlands, mostly thanks to the fact we (the Dutch) kept track of religion in city records. Jews have become very privacy-aware here, but it needs to get this bad before people finally understand the dangers.

We need more articles like this, we need a flood, until all the non-technical people in my life take their privacy more seriously than they do at present.

Pointless. They do not care. Even in totalitarian states like the former DDR, most people didn't care. People only start caring when it's too late, when they themselves get affected.

Besides, the technical people don't care either. Many of us may care about our own privacy, but on the whole, we really don't care about what we do to others.

Most of us work for or own companies that directly or indirectly willfully violate people's privacy without thinking twice about the consequences. If only by adding yet another tracker to our apps.

We have no problems feeding our gullible users to the Google beast, yet we should be the ones warning others to take their privacy serious?

> People only start caring when it's too late, when they themselves get affected.

You might be right but I prefer to be less fatalistic. If an article (like this one) hits close enough to make someone think "it could have been me" then perhaps that is enough.

I don't understand your last sentence.

>I don't understand your last sentence.

I think he's saying that (some? most?) programmers are unknowingly being hypocrites if they add Google Analytics [1] javascript to their web pages while at the same time trying to educate people on being aware of privacy leaks. Adding tracking analytics not only provides the web authors the traffic insight, it also provides Google Inc with another vector to gather more data about users.

Even non-web programmers do a variation of feeding the google beast. The IT support staff have contempt for stupid user questions and think "can't they just google that?!?! That's what I do!". User: "how do I disable Adobe flash?". ITGeek: "let me google that for you"[2]

The xkcd comic[3] about it is also well-known.

When you send helpless users to google.com, Google Inc also adds users' searches to the profile they're accumulating. What do we expect IT advice to realistically be in response? Is it reasonable to advise people like this: "If you want to know how to disable flash, first install Tor client, and then a VPN client, sign up for a VPN provider, then start your web browser in private or incognito mode then use that as tunnel into google.com and then type in 'disable flash' as the keywords."

[1] https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection...

[2] http://lmgtfy.com/?q=disable+flash

[3] http://xkcd.com/627/

People have empathy. Non-tech people can understand the issues when they're presented like this. And an article like this makes me think seriously about the ethics of my job. Not that it carries real weight, but see: http://www.acm.org/about/code-of-ethics

Maybe empathy alone will be enough to effect change?

> We have no problems feeding our gullible users to the Google beast, yet we should be the ones warning others to take their privacy serious?

I've found Piwik to be a great open-source (+ self-hosted) alternative - http://piwik.org/

I think we should let people not care without us aggressively trying to change their lifestyle. Are we so superior that we can decide what they should think? Or are they too dumb/uniformed to make their own choices? That's just as condescending. I'm pretty sure a lot of people are perfectly aware of all this and still choose not to care about privacy.

It is called advertising, making propaganda, lobbying. It works for a wide range of topics along any axes of the moral compass. For why it works, you probably hinted it in your post, but I don't see why it shouldn't be used for a good cause.

By and large, the main product of the Web industry is the user. Content or code that is sold as a property or a service is used to lure in the product (the user) and sell the most-commercially viable aspect of the product (that is the information about their "categories") to the highest bidders (advertisers).

Is it too much of a stretch to say that this mode of user-segregation-and-information-selling is pretty much a new form of "commoditization" of human beings.

IMHO best comment on hackernews of 2014. Eyeballs is an inaccurate description, it was imported from the tv era. Online privacy is fading because it's the source of user information commodity that is being mined/traded/exploited. A brave new world.

I would say it's more like the commoditization of the potential to extract profit from human beings. It is hard to blame the big Co though; most people happily give up information voluntarily for the services the websites provide. I am routinely chided for shunning social networks. Meanwhile, do-nothing congress are set upon legislating a new sanction on Iran.

Quite a long article, with different types of monitoring methods and scenarios mentioned.

In the end, we can only do so much to shield ourselves.

Granted, we can and should stop posting personal/sensitive information all over the internet (even on supposedly private forums), but with new and improving tracking technologies (both in the virtual and the physical world), we cannot have total control over our privacy.

> Google has developed Glass, tiny cameras embedded in eyeglasses that allow people to take photos and videos without lifting a finger.

I know this is tangential to the article and probably not something the author thought a lot about, but this is my little pet peeve. Google did not developed "tiny cameras embedded in eyeglasses" - those you could already buy for years anywhere for cheap. There's a whole plethora of surveillance tools anyone can buy on-line or even off-line in "detective stores". Cameras hidden in glasses, pens, buttons - you name it. Cameras you wouldn't notice if someone talking with you was wearing.

What Google did develop is a wearable HUD, which is an awesome and potentially very useful piece of technology. Technology that was apparently halted because the only thing people noticed was the camera. They complained because they noticed. This is, IMHO, stupid.

Difference is, those non-glass cameras don't come bundled up with Google services fed down your throat and automatically upload your data.

You have a very different take on privacy compared to most "hackers". I remember you're a "some active" and think that everyone loves taking selfies and that shameless self promotion is some sort of a calling for every person, regardless what the cost is to privacy.

I shouldn't dwell on this subject more, as you got my real HN account hellbanned the last time I pointed this out.

> Difference is, those non-glass cameras don't come bundled up with Google services fed down your throat and automatically upload your data.

It's not what the discussion in media was about though; people were mostly upset by someone having a camera on them. The connection to Google Services is a fair point, though it's a bit orthogonal and the Glass doesn't change the equation much after everyone has a smartphone connected to those same services.

> I remember you're a "some active" and think that everyone loves taking selfies and that shameless self promotion is some sort of a calling for every person, regardless what the cost is to privacy.

If you're refering to the thread about Facebook from some time ago, I'm pretty sure statements like this were what got you hellbanned; you apparently still have a very false view of my person and on-line activities. HN doesn't discourage disagreement on topics (hell, my attitude to privacy is non-mainstream around here) - it does however discourage personal attacks.

Still, it sucks to get hellbanned; I'm sorry.

I can't find anything on the internet with my real name and there are no pictures of me anywhere, I love it.

I have a fairly common surname so I enjoy the same thing. I don't use social media sites either, which probably helps considerably.

Funny thing, just few years ago (before Facebook and Linkedin were hot) making sure you're googlable (and managing your "google presence") was a typical career advice kind of thing ;).

>no pictures of me anywhere

Sure there are. You've had a picture taken for an ID at some point.

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