rockskon

That's their problem that they're trying to make my problem.

I don't care about their problem. It's their problem, not mine. They should not make their problem into my problem.

In the 2010's, there was an instance of a late-teens/early-20's girl targeted by a group of too-online people for a racist chat log made when she was around 12 or 13 years old. The people went after her dad's business too because of his association with her.

Aside from getting her fired from her job, they also tried to destroy her dad's business.

I get that less-than-10 years isn't a ton of time, but it also represented nearly half her life. People tend to grow up a lot in their teens even if it's still common for there to be some immaturity leftover in their early 20's

In response to someone in another thread who argued against personal privacy, who said "Why do people feel they can behave in a way that can be blackmailed", I responded with the following:

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Yeah, how dare someone do or say anything that some random crazy asshole could use to threaten that person's personal or professional life or even put them in danger of physical harm. To hell with gay kids growing up in very traditional religious areas in much of the world.

That person who made a racist joke on Discord when they were 13 years old? That should be able to ruin them when they're 30!

Someone confiding to a friend over social media DMs that they're in an abusive relationship with someone violent? Well - she shouldn't be surprised when her partner beats her within an inch of her life when he finds out. If only she did what she was told, right?

And let's not forget the cringiest or most sexual thing you've ever said online - make sure that your every utterance in private would pass scrutiny by your employer's HR department!

Seriously...I don't understand people like you. What a small, listless, and unusually safe world you must live in.

You may as well have asked why can't everyone think and act like you as well as live in your particular region of the world with the same friends, family, romantic, and professional opportunities that you've been provided throughout your life.

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I recall at an old place of work, the security office having a poster on the wall that said something to the effect of "if your facial biometrics get compromised, you must change your face".

Silly as they were trying to be, the concept still holds -

Facial biometrics can and do get compromised too. Your example of IDs taken from the homeless - what the heck prevents organized criminals from taking pictures or recordings of their faces too?

Already there's malware out there stealing facial recognition data from infected devices (ESET reported on this nearly two years ago). Unlike changeable passwords, once your facial recognition data is compromised then that's it. Scammers can now impersonate you on top of having defeated this additional layer of fraud prevention.

While I agree with your claim that it is likely the number of third parties info is being routed to is likely related to per-query economics, I want to note that ZKP are not magic. They tend to either be worthless at preventing fraud or require so much additional context as to question how much privacy is really being preserved.

While ZKP is more useful in limiting how much info is provided and, depending on implementation letting you make sure of the full scope of information acquired....if it literally only validates age then there's nothing other than logistics preventing a single adult from authenticating the entire world.

They will be disruptive to your life if you, as a U.S. citizen, refuse to unlock your phone on the U.S. border. But it is my understanding they cannot constitutionally mandate you provide a passcode to unlock your phone. But they may confiscate your phone from you.

Expanding the scope of it is new.

Perhaps you should ask your super secret source how he reconciles statements from several generations of NSA leadership, the IC Attorney General, PCLOB, and FISA Court that the NSA regularly acquires U.S. person communications "incidentally" and why, if they don't have U.S. person communications, they have publicly published procedures on querying their stores of data with U.S. Person "selectors".

Presumably there'd be no point in having procedures in querying for U.S. persons communications if they didn't have the information to begin with.

The sad thing is....talking with LEOs that cause panics like this when they're apologizing after the fact....they have zero consideration for doing anything relating to schools taking action on their public statements and statements made to news outlets. Schools aren't their remit (and yet talking with news outlets is?). So as far as I can tell, school children being punished for the crime of having or using a toy that looks scary are unfortunate externalities from well-meaning LEOs.

My sources are the prior leadership of the NSA's public statements, the specifics of the legal opinions released by the FISA court, PCLOB reports, and me actually paying attention to what intelligence officials have stated in public testimonies. They are not sourced from fear-mongering from paranoid schizophrenics or activist lawmakers who are making assumptions of what the NSA is doing.

You are doing the equivalent of telling me to ignore all of those sources - to include the FISA court - and to trust you - random-person-on-Hacker-News-alluding-to-working-for-the-NSA.

If you are correct and everything else - to include the FISA court - are wrong - then that begs the question of why they would all publicly make material misrepresentations about the NSA's acquisition of U.S. persons' information.

Shall I assume that the NSA no longer collects information if one-end of a communication is foreign and the other American?

Or what of Americans that use VPNs even if the exit node is within the U.S.?

What of "incidentally" collected information (collected without a probable-cause warrant) on U.S. citizens' communication contained evidence of a crime?

What about Americans living on the coasts whose information may end up crossing a fiber line going overseas and then back again even if the source and destination are U.S. citizens? Are their communications acquired?

Don't you all still share unminimized data (to include what U.S. person data was not filtered out at the time of initial acquisition) with the CIA, FBI, and NCTC - agencies with their own rules on how long they get to retain U.S. persons' information they acquired from NSA-sourced data.

The 2023 PCLOB report on FISA Section 702 (see page 78) maintains that agents and analysts at the NSA and the three agencies they share raw data with typically do not affirmatively purge U.S. persons' information that has been incidentally collected that is not immediately recognized as having foreign intelligence or criminality information. Out of the possibility that the information might later-on be interpreted as being relevant to their agency mission, instead the information is generally kept until it ages out. Depending on an agency's individual procedures they may be retained for 5 years. Or 15 years. Or indefinitely.

I'm to understand it used to be a real significant problem for analysts to spy on U.S. citizens indirectly by looking up a foreign national the U.S. citizen was known to be communicating with.

I could keep going on, but I'd like to think I made my point.

Your agency's mission statement is not a shield to hide behind. Your actions are what matter. And a legal Rube Goldberg machine that results in an enormous amount of U.S. persons information being acquired by the NSA (and, by association, the FBI and CIA and NCTC) does not engender confidence that the agency actually gives a damn about the privacy of U.S. citizens.

Never say never.

Germany seems to have recovered quite a lot of trust following World War 2, to provide an extreme example of bad foreign policy.

Intentionally collecting everything to include millions of U.S. persons data, say the collection was "incidental", put the computer equivalent of a removable sticky-note over their name to say it's been "minimized" and thus a-okay for the NSA to use...

There is a debate the bulk of NSA's leadership has been wholly uninterested in having over what they do with regards to acquiring and parsing U.S. persons' private communications, instead preferring to use word-games and rhetorical sleight-of-hand.

Everything I've seen about the NSA domestic collection debate and publishings and statements from officials have boiled down to:

*The NSA taps communication sources they know with absolute certainty contains an enormous amount of U.S. persons' information because these sources also contain non-U.S. persons communications. An effort is made to remove U.S. persons' information from this programmatically but this step frequently leaves an enormous amount leftover. Despite this - the NSA intentionally parses these private communications - that include that of of millions of U.S. citizens - in bulk. That it isn't their intent or mission to specifically acquire and parse U.S. persons' communications are not germane considerations. Actions matter more than words.

*The NSA justifies this by dint of "it's okay, everyone! We trust ourselves to never do anything bad with your information! We never meant to acquire it! But we did. And we will keep acquiring more of your info 'incidentally' as your privacy is something we are willing to sacrifice in our efforts to acquire foreign intelligence."

*The NSA shares an enormous amount of U.S. persons' private communications with other intelligence agencies to include the FBI. Again - that it was not the NSA's intent nor mission to acquire the information to begin with is not relevant when they, nevertheless, keep getting the information!

That's not going to work out the way you think it will when a student won't even know how to ask questions.

But then you're not acting as a billboard promoting AI. Isn't that partly the point?

Sounds like a punishment. Extra-paranoid work culture and be mistrusted by your counterparts on the outside.

Well, to be fair, the public has been going through a multi-year forced beta-test of AI all while CEOs keep going on national television and posting on social media how there will be mass unemployment because of AI. To say nothing of all the companies that have (and soon will) close up shop due to increased prices from the global memory shortage unrelated to the proclaimed job-replacing benefits of AI.

And let's not forget many of the remaining independent websites on the Internet closing up shop due to being unable to afford the substantial increase in hosting costs resulting from aggressive scrapers getting data to keep training AI on.

Or the massive improvement in bots and click-fraud due to AI, pushing an increasing number of companies to embrace heinous practices such as mandatory facial recognition for users to be allowed to engage in socialization.

Or the increased electricity prices already realized around much of the country due to AI both so much of the existing grid's supply and requiring expensive upgrades to the infrastructure - the latter of which is frequently paid for by taxpayers.

All for the wondrous promises of unproven future capabilities.

The real mystery to me is how it's a mystery to so many people why there's a large and enduring anti-AI sentiment.

Somehow I don't see arguments comparing powering AI with producing food to go over well with them.

Many opponents to AI do not view the tech as having a net benefit. Comparing it to food production would serve to make you look more the fool to them despite their claims about water consumption frequently being wacky.

No, but there's rough heuristic that are generally reliable. Psychologists talk. If a problem is recurring - they talk a lot amongst each other regarding the prevalence of the problem.

I don't recall there ever being a trending issue among psychologists - child or otherwise - dealing with clients who have been traumatized about the minimally restricted Internet of the 90's and 00's.

But if you don't trust this heuristic, then tell me - what distinguishes the belief that seeing horrible content on the Internet in the 90's and 00's led to a large number of traumatized individuals vs the belief that the ready availability of horrible content hurt a statistically negligible number of people and that it was a significant net benefit?

Actions and policies should be based on something more than intuition and belief alone.

Statistical anomalies exist, sure. But if there was any meaningful negative impact at scale, you'd think it would've shown up over the decades in trending therapy topics, to people bringing up traumatic memories of the old Internet, to....to something at scale.

Hope you were never a part of Helldump or FYAD on Something Awful, then.

Large-scale exposure caused no discernible degree of trauma. That's not a small phenomena that seems to have been ignored by policymakers and those who inform them.

As others in this thread have commented - there are scammer hubs where a single person controls hundreds if not thousands of phones at a time.

The people who this method is most hoping to stop are the least likely to be impacted by it in the long run.

Much to the often-reported chagrin of judges across the country.

The xz utils issue very likely included intentional efforts on the state actor to burn them out. That isn't something a culture change among users can fix.

Sadly the law Maryland passed contains enough loopholes and preemptions that it is literally worse than having passed nothing at all.

The endless copilot integrations and promotions and insistence of nudges from Microslop, Google search mandating AI usage without going well beyond what most users know to avoid it, misleading YouTube video summaries.....these are all examples you cannot meaningfully opt out of that goes well beyond advertising to executives.

Funny how Gemini generally takes into account all the words you type whereas Google search tends to ignore most words you type or otherwise direct you to results for thematically (or grammatically or semantically) similar words to what you searched but otherwise wholly irrelevant.

Google crippling search to bolster AI is a dangerous game. But without people going to competitors, what's the recourse?

Someone discovering and making this public it doesn't mean others haven't independently discovered it.

I am not positing any sort of conspiracy. The sentiment is also frequented by people who have no commercial incentive to say it - possibly a result of a successful marketing campaign, possibly a conclusion they came to independently, or possibly some other reason - the reason is not something I would know. But I stand by my assertion that the argument is primarily an appeal to emotion - fear. And I do not see how acknowledging that (albeit in a less emotive way than I initially did) is beneath the standards of discussion for HN.

That said - I can keep my fulminations to myself and phrase my posts in a less confrontational manner. Those aren't exactly conducive to productive discussion.

I'm not sure half the country would agree!