[HN Gopher] Privacy vs. "I have nothing to hide" (2019)
___________________________________________________________________
Privacy vs. "I have nothing to hide" (2019)
Author : throwoutway
Score : 275 points
Date : 2022-09-14 12:02 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (kevquirk.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (kevquirk.com)
| azangru wrote:
| So he moves from Android phones that are bad on privacy to Apple
| iPhone, which is bad on web browser engines.
|
| I wish there was a better choice; but I think I would still pick
| Android for now...
| Defletter wrote:
| Currently replying on my newly deGoogled Android phone (/e/OS).
| It's a bit awkward in a few ways but it definitely feels like
| I'm not handing over all my data to Google.
| desindol wrote:
| The most annoying part is the hybris if they would really care
| they would go for the real alternatives like a pine or phones
| with plasma or sailfish. Nope most of these articles take the
| comfort option over what they preach.
| dmm wrote:
| A degoogled pixel phone with CalyxOS or GrapheneOS is a good
| alternative. You can choose not to use cloud services and
| better control what runs on your phone.
| hooby wrote:
| There actually ARE other choices - like Librem, PinePhone, etc.
|
| These other choices definitely are better when it comes to
| privacy. But probably worse in every other regard.
|
| I personally am not quite willing to make that tradeoff (yet).
| But I sure am highly grateful to everyone who does, and helps
| make those alternatives better, and helps them gain momentum.
| mrweasel wrote:
| > There actually ARE other choices - like Librem, PinePhone,
| etc.
|
| The trade offs pretty much rules out the alternatives for
| most people. I need just a few apps, but they are for payment
| and government stuff, so they are only ever going to be
| available in the official app stores. For others it's going
| to be messaging apps, social media or something local, like
| an app for the supermarket. If those apps are not available,
| then the point of a smartphone goes away. At least of me.
| BlargMcLarg wrote:
| Not just you. Loads of countries are pushing further
| digitalization and pseudo-require a smartphone to not make
| things a complete hassle. If you're lucky, their APKs are
| distributed outside the playstore and you get to manually
| update everything once a month.
|
| The whole thing is making people dependent on the common
| app stores. Not actually dependent, but practically.
| mojzu wrote:
| I agree, given how much I rely on my phone/computer to just
| work, I'd not personally be willing to make the usability and
| reliability tradeoffs with switching to something like a
| PinePhone. Plus there are some other steps you can take to
| reduce the privacy/security risks of relying on
| Google/Apple/etc., for example I use PiHole/Tailscale for DNS
| and Cryptomator for files stored in the cloud
| butterNaN wrote:
| There's also /e/ os
| seanw444 wrote:
| Android is just worse from a security perspective, and I'm not
| an Apple fan.
|
| If you're going to use Android, use an open source AOSP fork.
| Lineage, Graphene, Calyx... how can you be sure that you're
| actually secure and private if you can't even be sure exactly
| what firmware your phone is running? You can't.
| lizardactivist wrote:
| I wonder how long before large, over-reaching and paranoid
| governments begins declaring the notion of privacy as an anomaly,
| or mental disorder.
| sendfoods wrote:
| Have you thought about GrapheneOS? Pixel hardware, No Google, but
| android app compatibility?
| Bakary wrote:
| How practical is it in daily life? Does it allow you to just
| install apps and not have to tinker too much like a "regular"
| phone?
| sendfoods wrote:
| It does, either via AuroraStore (complete Google Play Store
| replacement without google account) or Sandboxed Google Play
| [1]. My banking apps works, and everything else I can think
| of.
|
| Hard to say what a "normal" level of tinkering is with
| Android, as I have switched directly from iOS to Graphene and
| have never used Stock Android. I am sure some things are a
| little bit more cumbersome, but for me the tradeoff is worth
| it.
|
| Also the stock g-cam (with internet access disabled) and
| g-photos (with internet access disabled) make a pretty
| amazing photo and photo editing experience.
|
| [1] https://grapheneos.org/usage#sandboxed-google-play
| talkingtab wrote:
| I think there is a simpler way to understand this. If you have
| nothing to hide, then post all of your crucial information (this
| is facetious) including your address, your phone number, the
| names and ages of all members of your family. Then post the
| history of all your browser usage. Then your place of work, your
| driver's license, where you shop, all of your Amazon purchases
| for the last year ... You get the picture. We don't have
| something to hide when we don't reveal this information. We are
| just protecting ourselves and our loved ones in a world where
| there are many bad actors.
| roody15 wrote:
| Sadly in the US there is not really a privacy debate. Essentially
| the "I have nothing to hide" line of reasoning has been pressed
| ahead and the nation continues in the direction of China.
|
| We have a bit of a pretend debate from now and then ... and a few
| technical elite are able to protect their own privacy to some
| degree... but for the masses privacy debate was over before it
| began. If anything it is just a marketing campaign by a few
| companies like Apple.
|
| (Side Note: Apple fully complies with all warrants and decrypts
| all icloud data and hands it over)
| scarface74 wrote:
| Apple doesn't and can't "decrypt" data that it says it doesn't
| have the encryption keys for like your health information.
| Apple lists the data that isn't encrypted and the data that is
| danaris wrote:
| > Apple fully complies with all warrants and decrypts all
| icloud data and hands it over
|
| You say this like it's some kind of gotcha, rather than Apple,
| a major corporation, refusing to _actively break the law_ of
| the country where they 're headquartered.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Taking every legal means to resist a warrant is your right,
| not _actively breaking the law._
|
| At the very least, it's obviously _passively_ breaking the
| law, unless you consider refusing to obey an activity.
| raxxorraxor wrote:
| Sloppy excuse. Breaking the law seems to be no problem for
| any form of security service. The case of privacy has long
| been an issue outside of the law.
|
| Of course I don't expect companies to break the law, it is to
| no benefit to them, but we should not pretend that the rule
| of law has much value when it comes to government
| surveillance. And I would argue that to protect your privacy
| the legality of the means are secondary.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| The same Apple that had gotten into a feud with the FBI over
| refusing to sign software for unlocking a mass-shooter's
| phone?
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| > refusing to actively break the law of the country where
| they're headquartered.
|
| it is not illegal to allow users to hold their own keys such
| that Apple would have nothing to hand over to the government
|
| Apple chooses to run icloud in such a way that they can
| provide data on request.
| danaris wrote:
| Apple chooses to run iCloud in basically the same way every
| mainstream cloud company does, plus some additional privacy
| features.
|
| Expecting them to operate a service like iCloud like a
| tech-expert-focused privacy-first-even-before-usability
| service is just utterly unrealistic.
| mouzogu wrote:
| > Apple fully complies with all warrants and decrypts all
| icloud data and hands it over
|
| nooo, the same Apple that had "never heard of the NSA". it
| can't be...
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| If you have nothing to hid, then you probably have nothing of
| substance to say.
| SergeAx wrote:
| Dismissing privacy on a basis of "I have nothing to hide" is an
| equivalent of dismissing freedom of speech on a basis of "I have
| nothing to say".
| the_snooze wrote:
| Let's say I don't have anything to hide. Even so, my devices
| contain lots of sensitive information about my friends, family,
| colleagues, and employer. I wouldn't want to put them in a bind.
|
| Privacy is actually a group-level challenge. Trying to reduce it
| to individual action (i.e., " _I_ don 't mind if they look
| through my stuff") is nonsensical because it's not just your
| data.
| motohagiography wrote:
| There is a view of "rights and freedoms" that is related to
| privacy, where rights are positively defined, and freedom is a
| limit on the scope and ability or powers of the state or other
| party to encroach on it, a kind of "shall make no law" clause. It
| makes more sense in the context of a freedom, where a platform
| provider would simply not be entitled to collect, use, disclose,
| or retain information without the express consent of the data
| subject. This is how health information privacy works, and
| privacy legislation around some governments and agencies using
| PII. Freedom is something for people, not the transnational
| conspiracies we call "platforms" these days. As arms of policy,
| the FAANGs are in effect, modern Hudsons Bay and the British and
| Dutch East India Companies.
|
| Somehow we've made corporations sovereign on the internet, and
| the only mitigations we have on it are from free software and
| encryption tech - which they routinely evade and sabotage on
| behalf of their advertisers, but also for government agencies
| whose activities are otherwise regulated by constitutional and
| other guaranteed freedoms. This axis of state and industry
| colluding against citizen "users," has a bunch of ugly
| precedents.
|
| Imo, addressing the "I have nothing to hide," argument at all is
| a tarpit. These are neutralized and disengaged people who are
| content to bargain and live as liquid subjects, and expecting
| anything more than repeating official talking points and bromides
| from them misunderstands their survival strategy. I don't think
| you change anyones mind, you can only activate or neutralize them
| based on their existing beliefs. I'd recommend letting the "I
| have nothing to hide" people alone, and instead, encourage active
| minds to develop the skills to build technology and products that
| shape the future.
| salawat wrote:
| Even PHI is monetized, btw. You know those HIPAA forms you
| sign? They tend to authorize sharing of your info with insurers
| and their partners, and often the sponsors of the plan if it is
| through an employer indirectly through metrics and reporting.
| If enough attention is paid, and data correlated carefully
| enough, one can deanonymize on that alone if one cared to.
| motohagiography wrote:
| Indeed, recording consent in healthcare has become a joke and
| the incentives for regulators to enforce it aren't there
| either. I worked on a platform for consent directives
| management, and the problem wasn't technical, it was
| "deprioritized" by the agency responsible for it because it
| put limits on their discretion.
|
| I'd even say health information is worse than monetized now,
| it's actively politicized. I know that C19 vaccination
| records (names/addr/date/dosenumber) were shared with
| PR/oppo-research firms working for politicans involved in the
| rollout, and there was no consent for collection or use of
| that data either. We live in interesting times.:)
| zhichu wrote:
| I am in an authoritarian country. Our speech is censored, and
| online chat is monitored. We have to consider whether it is
| appropriate when typing words and speaking to friends.
|
| I care about privacy, but not that much. The author gave me the
| feeling that I would not drink water for fear of choking to
| death. Providing private information to some big companies has
| brought a lot of convenience to our lives at the same time. When
| making a choice, I will weigh the gains and losses. As far as I
| am concerned, I loss more while over-considering the privacy.
| raxxorraxor wrote:
| I am pretty sure that almost all conveniences are possible
| without any surveillance. The benefit would be even more
| security without any downsides.
| myth2018 wrote:
| Another very concerning aspect: It's been a long time since it's
| widely known Google, Facebook and other bigtechs are collecting
| users' data and profiting from it. That "inspires" a huge number
| of other companies to try doing the same.
|
| The dark sides of the practice are intentionally overlooked and,
| in places like entrepreneurship-related media, linkedin etc, one
| constantly reads praises to their ability to (allegedly) improve
| their services and offers based on predictions out of users data.
|
| That worldview results in some "interesting phenomena" in my
| country. You go to a restaurant and they ask you your document
| ID, it's a "convenience" they offer you so that you don't need to
| worry if you loose your consumption card -- and now they know
| what, when and where you eat.
|
| Insurance companies now offer their insurance policies and
| emergency info in a convenient app, so that you don't need to
| worry about carrying the docs in your car, and you help saving
| the planet by not wasting paper -- and now they know where you
| drive over, the speed and accelerations you usually employ etc.
|
| Drugstores offer you discounts in exchange for your ID -- and now
| they know or can estimate extremely private info about you, like
| diseases you may be about to develop, the size of your weenie and
| god knows what. And I'm pretty sure this data is going to health
| insurance companies.
| tomrod wrote:
| Yes to every single one of these notes.
| worik wrote:
| "I have nothing to hide"
|
| Until you do, and then it is too late
| prometheus76 wrote:
| You may have nothing to hide in the current political climate or
| under the current political leaders, but what is allowed now
| might become anathema later, and those records can be searched
| and retroactively prosecuted.
|
| We already see hints of this when someone gets canceled for
| something they tweeted 10 years ago. Imagine that, but on a
| broader scale with more violent consequences. That's why privacy
| is important for everyone.
| Defletter wrote:
| True but your arguments here largely regard deliberate speech,
| whereas the post is more about personal data. What OS is
| running on your phone doesn't really make a difference in
| whether you get cancelled over something your posted on social
| media 10 years ago.
| prometheus76 wrote:
| But were you in a certain building at the time the opposition
| party was having a meeting? Did you have dinner with this
| certain person who was part of an underground resistance (of
| which you had no idea at the time)? Your phone was turned off
| for 10 hours, during which this murder happened and someone
| saw you in the area.
|
| I could go on like this. I think you underestimate the story
| someone can build from your data (even if the story they
| invent is completely untrue) and I think you underestimate
| the frenzied desperation that can overtake people in power
| who are desperate to stay in power. Reading historic accounts
| of life in totalitarian regimes is worth the effort.
| P5fRxh5kUvp2th wrote:
| to add to that, were you in the area of the capitol riots
| while it was happening?
|
| Hope you can prove your innocence!
|
| The point to be made is that you don't know because you
| can't predict.
| emiliobumachar wrote:
| Give the iOS fans vs. Android fans rivalry 15 more years.
| robswc wrote:
| This is actually my argument for the 2nd amendment too.
|
| I don't believe we need guns atm... but we are unsure of what
| the future holds and surrendering such a monumental right would
| be next to impossible to "undo" if the time ever comes.
| rocket_surgeron wrote:
| >I don't believe we need guns atm... but we are unsure of
| what the future holds and surrendering such a monumental
| right would be next to impossible to "undo" if the time ever
| comes.
|
| No freedom has ever been won or guarded with the types of
| firearms legal under the 2nd amendment.
|
| Ever. Anywhere.
|
| Literally every single example you're going to reply with is
| wrong.
|
| Not even the American Revolution was "won" using personally-
| owned weapons. It was won using artillery, naval vessels,
| mercenaries from overseas, and the first thing that happened
| when a patriot showed up for his patriotic duty with his
| pappy's musket was throw it in the trash and issue a soldier
| a Brown Bess or Committee of Safety musket so that the
| caliber, rate of fire, effective range, and operating
| procedures were the same amongst all soldiers.
|
| Not in Vietnam, not in Afghanistan, not anywhere at any time
| has a conflict against a government either foreign or
| domestic been defeated using personally-owned weapons.
|
| The few times in America where it was tried, post
| Revolutionary War, the tax/whiskey/voting rights
| rebellioneers were crushed under the might of a pathetically
| small standing army that used cavalry and artillery to
| intimidate them.
|
| The various slave rebellions and civil rights conflicts
| changed nothing. Lawyers, peaceful protest, not-so-peaceful-
| protest, and public opinion changed things.
|
| In terms of ethnic violence, everywhere, every time, in each
| and every case where a smaller population has armed itself to
| protect itself the only result has been the employment of
| mechanized terror against them with horrific results.
|
| "Oh but the Warsaw Ghetto.." nope. The germans went in,
| received fire from personal weapons, left and leveled the
| ghetto with tanks and mortars.
|
| "Oh but if the Tutsis had had rif.." nope. Both sides had
| rifles. When the Tutsis started scrouging AKs, the Hutus
| responded with grenades, automatic weapons, and bulldozers.
| The government didn't even do most of the killing, instead
| ordering the Hutu majority population to do it for them, at
| the point of a belt-fed machine gun. During the Kibeho
| massacre guns were too slow so they just mortared the sea of
| refugees with 60mm mortars. If every single Tutsi had
| possessed an automatic rifle with infinite ammunition, they
| would have all still been murdered. A rifle is useless
| against 60mm mortars and air-mobile military forces.
|
| The only protection against tyranny is strong civic
| organizations and the rule of law. When those break down
| whoever has the most cash to buy the most heavy weapons,
| usually the government, wins.
|
| The only thing the wide availability of weapons has done in
| areas WITHOUT strong civic organizations and the rule of law
| has been to turn vast swathes of Pakistan and Afghanistan
| into lawless zones of chaos and misery, ruled by whichever
| warlord can get the most RPGs or convince their followers to
| become suicide bombers.
|
| Ten million personal AR-15s are useless against ten thousand
| mechanized infantrymen.
|
| Firearms protecting rights is a myth.
| notch656a wrote:
| 2A as written doesn't just cover firearms. It covers
| 'arms.' Like nukes and cruise missiles. The fact that one
| may need these to overthrow tyranny is also a strong
| argument to the literal interpretation.
|
| >When those break down whoever has the most cash to buy the
| most heavy weapons, usually the government, wins.
|
| There is more wealth in private hands in the US than
| government hands.
| unbalancedevh wrote:
| > 2A as written doesn't just cover firearms. It covers
| 'arms.' Like nukes and cruise missiles.
|
| That's a matter of interpretation, especially since
| weapons like those didn't exist when the 2A was written.
|
| What really matters isn't what rights people who lived
| 200+ years ago thought that we should have today; it's
| what rights we, who are alive now, think we should have.
| We shouldn't accept the meaning, or even the existence,
| of the 2nd amendment simply because it's there. We should
| continually be scrutinizing and improving the entire
| document.
| notch656a wrote:
| I agree 100%, which is if we now don't want 'arms' to be
| protected generally, the constitution should be amended
| to exclude nukes or whatever. Not just make shit up on
| the fly and say 'well it says arms but nah, we'll just
| ignore that because if it sounds absurd I can just re-
| interpret it at will'
| rocket_surgeron wrote:
| There is no reasonable person who would think that a
| private citizen should be permitted to store plutonium in
| their home.
| zb1plus wrote:
| I hate to say it but all these examples seem to be implying
| is that the ordinary people should be able to purchase
| artillery, RPGs and tanks under the 2nd amendment. Indeed,
| the second amendment's language regarding well regulated
| militias would seem to suggest the formulation of civic
| organizations outside of the direct control of the state
| and federal government with such weapons. The evidence
| cited here would strengthen this notion that armed civic
| organizations that can go toe to toe with an army corps and
| are not under the command of the state or federal
| government are one the best ways to prevent the state from
| abusing the monopoly on violence that has somehow been
| normalized in western political thought.
| rocket_surgeron wrote:
| There is no reasonable person who would think that a
| private citizen should be permitted to store massive
| quantities of explosives in their home.
| notch656a wrote:
| My 4chan favorite:
|
| -------------- "Listen, you fantastically
| retarded motherfucker. I'm going to try to explain this
| so that you can understand it. You cannot
| control an entire country and its people with tanks,
| jets, battleships and drones or any of these things that
| you so stupidly believe trumps citizen ownership of
| firearms. A fighter jet, tank, drone,
| battleship or whatever cannot stand on street corners.
| And enforce "no assembly" edicts. A fighter jet cannot
| kick down your door at 3AM and search your house for
| contraband. None of these things can maintain
| the needed police state to completely subjugate and
| enslave the people of a nation. Those weapons are for
| decimating, flattening and glassing large areas and many
| people at once and fighting other state militaries. The
| government does not want to kill all of its people and
| blow up its own infrastructure. These are the very things
| they need to be tyrannical assholes in the first place.
| If they decided to turn everything outside of Washington
| D.C. into glowing green glass they would be the absolute
| rulers of a big, worthless, radioactive pile of shit.
| Police are needed to maintain a police state, boots on
| the ground. And no matter how many police you have on the
| ground they will always be vastly outnumbered by
| civilians which is why in a police state it is vital that
| your police have automatic weapons while the people have
| nothing but their limp dicks. BUT when every
| random pedestrian could have a Glock in their waistband
| and every random homeowner an AR-15 all of that goes out
| the fucking window because now the police are out
| numbered and face the reality of bullets coming back at
| them. If you want living examples of this look
| at every insurgency that the U.S. military has tried to
| destroy. They're all still kicking with nothing but
| AK-47s, pick up trucks and improvised explosives because
| these big scary military monsters you keep alluding to
| are all but fucking useless for dealing with them.
| Dumb. Fuck"
| rocket_surgeron wrote:
| >They're all still kicking with nothing but AK-47s, pick
| up trucks and improvised explosives because these big
| scary military monsters you keep alluding to are all but
| fucking useless for dealing with them.
|
| This is incorrect.
|
| The United States military became very skilled at dealing
| with them to the point that Taliban activity was near-
| zero.
|
| Analyzing the causes of death of US servicemembers during
| the conflict, a surprisingly low number was due to
| firearms. All of the AKs in the world were useless
| against the US military and the Taliban knew it so they
| decided to wait the US out instead.
|
| The moment the US left? That's a different story.
|
| The moral of this should be that patience is more
| empowering than firearms.
| prometheus76 wrote:
| Patient use of firearms and other guerrilla tactics, I
| would say. If they weren't armed, it wouldn't have
| mattered how long they just sat there and waited for
| American troops to leave.
| robswc wrote:
| >The moment the US left? That's a different story.
|
| So in what scenario can the US military "leave" the US?
| You are pretty much proving the guy's point, no?
|
| Yes, the US military could scorch earth its backyard.
| Nobody really denies that. What would be impossible is
| maintaining that control for any meaningful amount of
| time. This is also assuming somehow that 100% of the
| military and 100% of its assets are on board with
| whatever "regime" comes to be, which I just don't see
| happening.
| robswc wrote:
| > Literally every single example you're going to reply with
| is wrong
|
| Well, this is a very extraordinary claim... also, one that
| makes me feel like any potential example will be dismissed
| by you, as you seem to have essentially considered every
| single instance of armed conflict involving firearms.
|
| The rest of your comment goes over several examples but I
| think the foundation is flawed. There is no scenario where
| there would be 10 million AR-15s vs 10k "mechanized
| infantrymen." It's also akin to saying matches are useless
| in a competition to see who can detonate the biggest sick
| of dynamite.
|
| Just touching on your first example. Of course to win an
| international war against the largest empire on earth, you
| will need more than just firearms. However, the mere
| existence of an access to firearms is an undeniable factor
| in the way things turned out.
|
| Do you really believe independence would have been gained
| through "strong civic organization and rule of law" - as
| you claim? You then follow that by saying if that doesn't
| work, whoever has more cash and weapons usually wins...
| certainly not what happened in the revolutionary war... nor
| the next big conflict (war of 1812).
| omgomgomgomg wrote:
| Everyone who says "I have nothing to hide" is a bold faced liar.
|
| Porn browsing history,bank credentials, intimacy,that one drug
| fueled party you wish didnt happened,medical records, own kids
| images, hell, people do not even speak about their salaries.
|
| The only ones worse than these are the people saying "If you do
| not have anything to hide".
|
| No, thanks. If you want to share your things with the world and
| governments and private companies, go ahead, but leave me alone.
| titzer wrote:
| > medical records
|
| particularly mental health.
| parker_mountain wrote:
| You would be surprised at how many people are completely and
| utterly boring. How many have so few assets, vanilla history,
| no embarrassing health issues, and believe all drugs are for
| wastrels.
|
| Do not count on being able to embarrass the enemy :) :(
| nobody9999 wrote:
| >Do not count on being able to embarrass the enemy
|
| Why are you making folks that disagree with you "the enemy?"
|
| Just because some doesn't agree with you about a particular
| issue doesn't mean they are your enemy.
|
| They just disagree with you on a particular issue. Assuming
| they live in the same culture, it's likely that they agree
| with you on more stuff than they disagree.
| TillE wrote:
| Lot of people look boring in public but really aren't in
| private.
|
| Also, pretty much everyone is guilty of, at the very very
| least, numerous traffic violations.
| parker_mountain wrote:
| > Lot of people look boring in public but really aren't in
| private.
|
| Of course.
|
| I am referring to the people who are boring in private,
| clearly.
| JohnFen wrote:
| Even the most boring person has information they want to keep
| secret. Banking activity is the obvious one.
| parker_mountain wrote:
| There's a huge difference between secret because it's
| embarrassing and secret because it's a pain to deal with
| fraud. Many of them would have no problem turning all of
| that banking info over to "the authorities" :)
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| "Everybody lies". Even if the majority of people's history
| and proclivities are considered "vanilla", those individuals
| themselves don't want that information being made public,
| would likely feel some sense of shame if the information got
| out, and want to avoid any situation where they would be
| judged or teased. _Even if_ that content is considered
| relatively tame by a tolerant society.
| SamuelAdams wrote:
| Actually it's not that hard for companies to get salary
| information about new hires. Equifax has a tool called the Work
| Number that lots of employers subscribe to. Each report lists
| every company an employee worked for, total salary, and every
| paycheck dollar value they received. You can request your
| report for free.
|
| So yeah, now employees looking for a salary boost can't even
| lie about their current salary anymore.
|
| https://theworknumber.com/
| omgomgomgomg wrote:
| That is in the US, though.
|
| Maybe in the UK too, but no in the EU,I think Sweden or
| Norway have total transparency on tax returns etc, though.
|
| Or just say some percentage is a bonus or equity. And
| especially, ask them for what you want anyway.
|
| I have guessed too low a couple times before, so now I simply
| go for current rate *1.5 and see if it sticks.
| mclightning wrote:
| On a side note, never let past salaries dictate your salary
| negotiation. Always stand your ground, and sell your
| pricetag. Your past low salary or lack of successful
| negotiation, does not warrant them a discount. Negotiators
| always try to talk down your value, even when you're already
| paid high. You need to own your pricetag.
| mattnewton wrote:
| I believe you have a right to "freeze" your work number
| profile so that they cannot share your past employment and
| salary information, at least if you live in California. They
| warn you that other jobs may not be able to verify your
| employment but I have never had an issue since asking for and
| being granted a hold on selling my information.
| qwerty3344 wrote:
| doesn't include equity though which is usually a large chunk
| of comp
| forbiddenvoid wrote:
| The vast majority of people do not get equity as part of
| their compensation. So, yes, there are cases when this
| information is inaccurate or incomplete, but for most
| people, this type of data can artificially cap your earning
| ability.
| tomquirk wrote:
| hey kev quirk i'm tom quirk. great article!
| hooby wrote:
| quirky
| falcolas wrote:
| Spicy take: "I have nothing to hide" is another way of saying
| "I've got mine, fuck you."
|
| It's used by people who are comfortable with the current status
| quo. They're also probably your stereotypical cis/het white
| males.
|
| Since the status quo favors them, why would they care who looks
| upon their "society approved" lives? It'd probably even flatter
| them.
| seanw444 wrote:
| The sexuality and race is kind of irrelevant to the point, but
| I agree with the rest. It is really just a "I'm too comfortable
| and lazy to do anything to better the rest of civilization."
|
| It's the same thing with guns. If you're a fudd and you have
| your grandpa's old hunting rifle, but you think AR-15s are
| "stupid and pointless and only the uncorruptable government
| should be trusted with them!" and you refuse to stand up for
| their rights when tyrannical law strikes, then they won't be
| there to back you up when they inevitably come for your hunting
| rifle.
|
| Same for privacy and encryption, and getting off of big tech
| services and platforms. If enough of us get off now, we can be
| a force for change. But most people are content with sharing
| everyone they hang out with, what food they eat for every meal,
| and all of their life details publicly every day.
| falcolas wrote:
| > The sexuality and race is kind of irrelevant to the point
|
| FWIW, adding sexuality and race was intentional. Why? Because
| of the briefs by the justices associate with the Supreme
| Court's decision on Roe v Wade. Specifically because the same
| privacy protections which protected RvW also protected gay
| and interracial marriages.
|
| And that privacy protection was explicitly and intentionally
| nullified, as called out by Justice Clarence Thomas.
|
| So, in the immediate term, one's sexuality and race is
| explicitly at risk.
| gorjusborg wrote:
| > The sexuality and race is kind of irrelevant to the point,
| but I agree with the rest.
|
| Thank you for speaking up. For some reason, some people think
| that generalizing negative attributes to _some_ groups is
| fine. It is not. If you claim that behaviors /attributes are
| had by race/gender/other-unrelated-attribute you are part of
| the problem.
| bee_rider wrote:
| This comment was way too low, IMO. Lots of other comments re-
| state the "ok do you _really_ have nothing to hide " point,
| which is a funny rhetorical point, but this one seems much
| stronger.
|
| I may be boring. In fact I am pretty boring, looking at my
| characteristics, I pretty much rolled straight successes on the
| "nobody wants to oppress me" table. But those of us who are
| generally safe ought to consider it an obligation to protect
| our data, so that the more vulnerable populations don't stick
| out when they try to protect themselves.
|
| The "needle in a haystack" needs the haystack.
| rosmax_1337 wrote:
| Straight white men are arguably no longer the group which is
| most favored by the status quo. The remainder of your post is
| sound though, the "I have nothing to hide" translates well into
| saying "I am in a position of power, fuck you".
| falcolas wrote:
| My argument on this point is detailed in a response to a
| sibling comment, but the TL;DR: is that they _are_ favored by
| the Supreme Court, which is actively judging on the
| protections afforded by the privacy clauses by the
| constitution to people who are non-heterosexual, non-white,
| and not-men.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| "Tech" companies have soemthing to hide.
|
| For example, consider the recent 11th hour settlement by
| Facebook, for the second time. Meta will pay anything to keep
| Zuckerberg from having to answer questions under oath in federal
| court.
|
| http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/aug/27/facebook-c...
| pg314 wrote:
| Even if you have nothing to hide, others do. You don't want
| somebody to be able to blackmail a politician or a judge who e.g.
| had an affair.
| simonw wrote:
| The thing about privacy is you never know when future politics is
| going to come into play.
|
| Maybe a medical procedure will suddenly become illegal, such that
| your location history is now subject to warranted search.
|
| Maybe your country will take a sharp turn towards
| authoritarianism, electing politicians who are ready and willing
| to use law enforcement to "punish" their enemies.
|
| Maybe your monarch will die, and a recently passed bill will be
| used to arrest people who protest the existence of the monarchy.
|
| Having "nothing to hide" isn't necessarily a fixed state.
| [deleted]
| tomkaos wrote:
| The future politic of other country to. I love to travel, so I
| try not critic other country online just because I scared that
| can be use against me when visiting a country with a
| authoritarian regime.
| koheripbal wrote:
| I work with prosecutors, and some of them will straight up
| misrepresent innocent facts to paint them as evidence of
| malicious intent and pressure parties to plead guilty.
|
| I have seen stuff like "defendant had TOR installed - a popular
| program for criminals" in court filings. ...and judges and
| juries accept that as fact because they just don't understand
| the technology. For example, having a bookmark for "Hacker
| News" would absolutely show up in court. Crazy stuff meant to
| bias judges and juries that don't know tech.
|
| The point is that the situation is 100x worse in tech where
| prosecutors, judges, and juries simply do not understand the
| evidence. ANYTHING can be painted as incriminating evidence.
|
| I have seen saved credentials on automation jobs being used to
| incorrectly establish people's network activity. I have seen
| routine maintenance being used to establish obstruction charges
| just to intimidate possible witnesses... Like stuff you would
| not believe happens, happens.
|
| It's even worse in civil suits, where opposing counsel will
| subpoena as much as possible (mountains of data) just to give
| you more work and fish for trade secrets or anything they can
| twist in court.
|
| When I was junior, I proudly told my legal team "good news, I
| added space to keep our transaction records for 20 years!" and
| was aghast when they said they wanted files deleted THE DAY the
| legal requirement to hold it expired because it increased legal
| liability.
|
| Now I totally get it. Today we only store the bare minimum -
| everything else is deleted immediately. ... and I have to re-
| explain this to junior employees each year to their disgust.
| Buttons840 wrote:
| > having a bookmark for "Hacker News" would absolutely show
| up in court
|
| And would the defense be allowed to show the legal and
| harmless conversations we have here? Or ask the prosecutors
| which HN posts they believe influenced the accused to commit
| a crime?
| titzer wrote:
| Bigtech will happily store data on their users indefinitely
| so they can mine it in the future, should they think of new
| profit-generating ideas. But they will absolutely delete
| their employee's emails after N months unless they are on
| litigation hold (i.e. legally required not to do so).
| Complete double standard.
| bdw5204 wrote:
| > I have seen stuff like "defendant had TOR installed - a
| popular program for criminals" in court filings. ...and
| judges and juries accept that as fact because they just don't
| understand the technology. For example, having a bookmark for
| "Hacker News" would absolutely show up in court.
|
| Both of those are really good examples of how a statement of
| fact that is literally true can still be a lie. Politicians
| do this kind of stuff all the time especially in their attack
| ads that make TV unwatchable around this time of year in
| every even numbered year. Amazingly what gets a politician
| called out by the other party's press as a "liar" is the
| opposite of this kind of statement: something that is
| fundamentally true but where the politician got one minor
| irrelevant detail wrong. That's also a major reason why it
| isn't a good idea to represent yourself in court or to
| explain yourself to the police when you get arrested because
| people are prone to accidentally getting minor details wrong
| or misspeaking even when they're telling the truth to the
| best of their ability.
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| > ... prone to accidentally getting minor details wrong
|
| I know a prosecutor who had to investigate the statements
| made by the husband of a person who (presumably) had
| drowned themself in their pool (she used workout weights to
| keep herself at the bottom). The statement to be
| investigated: "Those were her weights. _I never touched
| those weights_! "
|
| Now all of a sudden maybe his fingerprints are on the
| weights and that statement is untrue...
|
| I also got to learn that they scoop the weights into a
| bucket because I guess they need to keep them submerged in
| water, otherwise the prints will wash off.
| Jalad wrote:
| For anyone that isn't convinced, here is a talk by a lawyer
| and a police officer discussing the idea of never talking
| to the police [0]. It's interesting that they largely agree
| that talking to the police is not a good idea.
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE
| kQq9oHeAz6wLLS wrote:
| I was just about to post this. It's long, but so good.
| [deleted]
| worik wrote:
| > explain yourself to the police when you get arrested
|
| Cannot emphasise this enough.
|
| Unless you live a criminal lifestyle (if so, you can learn
| nothing from me) you may encounter cops once. They do it
| every day.
|
| Often police job advancement is helped by making your life
| hell. Say _nothing_ you are not legally obliged to.
| knodi123 wrote:
| > I have seen routine maintenance being used to establish
| obstruction charges just to intimidate possible witnesses
|
| You're talking about Hillary Clinton, right? That's literally
| one of the arguments they used against her.
| phpthrowaway99 wrote:
| Was it really routine maintenance to BleachBit an entire
| server after you receive a subpoena from the FBI?
| nobody9999 wrote:
| >Was it really routine maintenance to BleachBit an entire
| server after you receive a subpoena from the FBI?
|
| I would hope so, since presumably the storage devices on
| that server would either be resold or sent to a dump.
|
| The info on those storage devices (assuming
| backups/existence of that data elsewhere for government
| data retention purposes) should not be let out into the
| wild.
|
| In fact, I (and I don't work/exist in areas with
| confidential data) have a dozen or so hard drives that
| sit in a closet as I don't have the interface cards (any
| more) to hook them up and securely delete the data.
|
| Eventually I'll probably purchase a bulk eraser[0], but
| until then, those disks will sit in my closet as my
| business is my business and no one else's.
|
| [0] https://www.amazon.com/Degausser-Electricity-
| Required-Mainte...
| knodi123 wrote:
| Yes, it really was. The FBI investigated and found as
| much.
|
| https://www.denverpost.com/2016/09/03/fbi-report-platte-
| rive...
| Wistar wrote:
| Same thing occurred to me. The Bleach Bit BS.
| drewcoo wrote:
| > Today we only store the bare minimum - everything else is
| deleted immediately. ... and I have to re-explain this to
| junior employees each year to their disgust.
|
| Same in software-land. Nobody wants to have years of who-
| knows-what subpoenaed.
| nephrite wrote:
| > having a bookmark for "Hacker News"
|
| I was punished in school for having NetHack source code in my
| home dir. And it was not because it was a game but because it
| allegedly was a hacking tool.
| Bakary wrote:
| "No, wait, I can explain! You see, I'm just a tourist in
| search of an amulet..."
| westmeal wrote:
| At least they didn't sanction you for eating corpses...
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| In highschool I was sent to detention and almost suspended
| because a study hall teacher overheard me talking about the
| "black market" feature of an roleplaying game I was writing
| on my graphing calculator. It took an hour of trying to
| explain TI-BASIC to my principle (and I think some angry
| phonecalls from my mother, a teacher in that district)
| before they relented with the insane mafioso accusations.
| Zuider wrote:
| Your Honor, we were horrified to discover the largest
| collection of "PDF files" we have ever seen on the
| defendant's hard drive!
| snarf21 wrote:
| I think you can even attack this position immediately. When a
| person (or politician) say they have nothing to hide, ask them
| to hand you their unlocked phone. You will promise to not tell
| anyone about anything that you learn or see. I've found that
| this triggers people desire for privacy even if they haven't
| committed any "crimes" or what not.
| sjaak wrote:
| Canonical example here are the records (that included religion)
| kept by the Dutch that enabled the nazis to easily round up all
| the jews in The Netherlands during WWII
| hinkley wrote:
| McCarthyism was how this played out in the states. Not as
| brutal and bloody, but lives were still ruined.
|
| In theory it's unconstitutional here to prosecute someone for
| an act they committed before there was a law against it. But
| there are other ways to convict someone, for better or worse.
|
| Corporations leverage this all the time, so they go
| unpunished unless it's in the court of public opinion. The
| toolset is necessary but the power dynamics are important.
| pessimizer wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust
|
| And French Jewry was spared to a large extent not because of
| the compassion of Vichy administration, who even sent French
| children to the death camps over German objections, but due
| to a complicated bureaucracy and disorganized recordkeeping
| that made it a real challenge for French collaborators to
| round Jewish people up. They'd have no such roadblock these
| days.
| iisan7 wrote:
| There's an interesting discussion in the book _The Sum of
| the People_ which argues that the disorganized
| recordkeeping in France was a ruse and a deliberate attempt
| by Rene Carmille to embrace the concept of population
| registry but to undermine the Nazi policy (Chapter 4,
| "Paper People"). In particular, Carmille apparently didn't
| enter the religion data from the census on the punchcards
| and never delivered lists. Carmille was arrested by the SS
| in 1944. It's not an entirely happy story though because
| there were absolutely others in France who collaborated to
| produce as many lists as they could, especially of Jewish
| immigrants who were easier to find in the records.
| shabbatt wrote:
| Came here to point IBM out which is a sign of how it was:
| Many Americans supported Nazi.
|
| There is this rose tinted glass view that Americans rose up
| to defeat Nazism taught in textbooks and mainstream media
| but was far from the truth. Not only did Nazism was cool
| then, American corporations like IBM directly aided Nazi
| party with surveillance efforts, very much like they have
| funded the persecution of uyghurs by purchasing American
| software and hardware.
|
| What is constant is that the US looks out for its interest
| first and foremost, even if it means doing business with
| authoritarian or tyrannical regimes. Is it moral from a
| humane perspective? No. But is the state subject to humane?
| are corporations? The accepted view is that they have no
| consciousness and is not bound by the same moral/ethical
| afflictions unless they are shamed out of it that it
| impacts their bottom line.
| daniel-cussen wrote:
| Well right now the president-elect of America is walking
| back the bitchvictim media's full-court press demonizing
| Nazism from 1941 to March, because of the War in Ukraine
| first off, second off because they are like very iffy on
| Israel. Say they love Israel, say they help Israel, claim
| to be pro-Israel, take huge campaign contributions from
| American Jews--they take the money, they say yes to the
| money, they get it again the following year like they
| actually did their job good--plus all the favorable media
| coverage n in writing in papers or blogs, then it's
| like...what? Like what? Like they look at Israel
| mortality rates they're like nah let's kick it up a
| notch. Don't get it, when the mortality is low it's
| because those Israelis are doing a great job and pulling
| all the stops doing all kinds of shit to keep their
| favorite color on the map from bleeding. A few deaths is
| a lot, successful terrorism is gross, and it's a very
| slippery slope. Like American media thinks Israel belongs
| like halfway down a cliff, forgetting about the actual
| deaths they say, no, like they can't stay on the
| mountaintop, boring. How do you know you're on the edge
| of a cliff? Did you see the cliff wall? Did you measure
| the altitude at the bottom?
|
| It's not for or against purely it's like they want
| perpetual war in the Levant because they can't eat their
| popcorn without it. Like can't repeat stale bullshit and
| lay the same traps and tropes if they fix problems. Then
| they would have to think.
|
| Maybe it's an American Jew thing of like needing
| persecution to feel alive. I went through that, lived in
| a very safe neighborhood fuck that shit never again.
| fritztastic wrote:
| Most people were unaware/indifferent, and a nonnegligible
| number thought it was cool/alright, and tens of thousands
| openly showed up for it, untold numbers
| directly/indirectly supported it- undoubtedly some never
| stopped.
|
| https://anightatthegarden.com/
| bgro wrote:
| Yeah. Medical procedures, like abortions in the states, are a
| very real example of how things can dramatically change on a
| whim to an unbelievable level. Or syncing your cycle data to a
| smart device and later having a retro-scan to detect cycle
| anomalies to charge women with probable crimes.
|
| We do that with speed cameras, why not just automate health
| data mining too? Why did you stop updating your cycle data, is
| it because you knew you were pregnant and wanted an abortion?
| Sounds like suspicious activity to me, exactly identical to
| turning around at a DUI checkpoint.
| 0x457 wrote:
| > exactly identical to turning around at a DUI checkpoint.
|
| Has anyone actually got in trouble for that? I turned around
| those checkpoints all the time because it's just faster to go
| around.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| > Medical procedures, like abortions in the states, are a
| very real example of how things can dramatically change on a
| whim to an unbelievable level.
|
| Change, but not retroactively.
| shabbatt wrote:
| What I find most ironic is that those people who are now
| realizing the same privacy platforms they used to defend with
| "I have nothing to hide" are the ones complying against their
| interests.
|
| It's a poignant example of what others have pointed out. "I
| have nothing to hide" until political landscape changes to
| make it something to hide.
|
| It's like people pushing for liberal drug laws and legalizing
| homeless tents and then one day its in their backyard.
|
| While I feel for women part of groups that are impacted by
| Roe vs Wade being overturned, their apathy against privacy
| concerns have boomeranged, the same of which proportion of
| men who aren't having to deal with abortion are looking at
| this issue as "I don't need an abortion so it doesn't concern
| me".
|
| Those women caught up in this struggle also looked on, along
| with men and everybody else as Uyghur women were sterilized
| and forced to abort using the very surveillance mechanism
| that were developed and custom tailored to fit the needs of
| the abusers.
|
| It's almost like the land of CCP is a testing ground for
| what's in store for Western civilization. Remember what
| caused Latin America's shift towards tyranny and
| dictatorship, it was inflation. Nothing about our land that
| makes it any less susceptible or resilient. Inflation has
| deep remifications to privacy and this Roe vs Wade situation
| is only the beginning.
| blep_ wrote:
| > men who aren't having to deal with abortion are looking
| at this issue as "I don't need an abortion so it doesn't
| concern me".
|
| ... maybe we shouldn't have spent years telling them they
| weren't allowed to have an opinion because it didn't
| concern them.
| Andrex wrote:
| Was there a Pope of Abortion Rights that pronounced such
| an edict? As a man, I haven't encountered this in an
| abortion discussion, but it sounds like something an
| asshole would say and I try not to hang out with
| assholes.
| blep_ wrote:
| I've heard variations on it many times, usually by the
| people who frame it entirely as "right to choose" (-> "if
| you're not capable of getting pregnant you have no right
| to input on this"). I get what they're going for,
| conceptually, but wow that is not how you get allies.
|
| It turns out assholes come in all genders.
| missedthecue wrote:
| If my government wants to know something about me, they will be
| able to find out and that's whether I use DuckDuckGo or Google,
| Chrome or Firefox, Facebook or no Facebook, Gmail or my own
| private server, and whether or not I use a VPN service.
|
| Some people (especially here on HN) are so into privacy for the
| sake of privacy, more like a hobby than a practical exercise in
| improving their quality of life. And that's completely fine.
| But I'm more interested in convenience. I'm at the point where
| I would legitimately prefer my Social Security Number to be
| leaked on the dark web than have to deal with the proposed
| three-factor authentication for my banking and brokerage
| accounts.
| livueta wrote:
| > If my government wants to know something about me, they
| will be able to find out and that's whether I use DuckDuckGo
| or Google, Chrome or Firefox, Facebook or no Facebook, Gmail
| or my own private server, and whether or not I use a VPN
| service.
|
| In the case of a targeted investigation, yeah, you're
| probably right. Thing is, that's not the only (or even most
| likely) threat unless you're some kind of wannabe DPR.
| Dragnet/geofence-style investigations are getting more common
| and while not using Google likely won't save you from the
| CIA, it may very well avoid your technically-incompetent
| local LEOs accidentally framing you for a bank robbery or
| something when you win the location-data lottery.
|
| But that's an individual-level argument, which imo isn't the
| main point - privacy is a societal-level good.
|
| > But I'm more interested in convenience.
|
| This is basically the "I have nothing to say, so I have no
| need for freedom of expression" argument transplanted into
| the privacy sphere. The effectiveness of privacy methods
| scale both technically and socially: an example on the
| technical front is how tor is more useful the more "normal"
| traffic ends up on it, and an example on the social front is
| how encrypted messaging capabilities aren't suspicious if
| they're integrated by default into widely used apps. So, I
| see privacy as less about me and more about participating in
| creating an environment where those who truly require it can
| have it, and that's something that's way harder if privacy is
| only conceived as being "for" dissidents or fetishists or
| whatever.
|
| Is it inconvenient sometimes? Sure, but it's also a civic
| duty. I'd honestly call it analogous to jury selection: quite
| possibly nothing but a burden to you personally, but an
| important part of maintaining a healthy society.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Right. The Jewish before the Holocaust had nothing to hide
| either. Their ethnicity was outed by things like census data
| that people divulged and the state collected. Nothing to hide
| after all. It's not a crime to be Jewish.
|
| Mountains of personal data is too juicy and is inevitably
| misused.
| andsoitis wrote:
| > The Jewish before the Holocaust had nothing to hide either.
|
| Actually it started much earlier than that.
|
| Christian started going after Jews since at least the fourth
| century, inspired by the hatred written in the Gospel of
| John. In particular, it was a Christian ritual to physically
| attack Jews around Easter in the Middle Ages.
|
| More detail: https://theconversation.com/why-good-friday-was-
| dangerous-fo...
| [deleted]
| GuB-42 wrote:
| There is a risk to using "not private" services. And like all
| risks, it has to be measured and balanced against what you gain
| from taking that risk.
|
| For instance, if you go hiking, you my get attacked by a bear,
| is it a risk worth taking? Usually yes, bear attacks are rare,
| unless you do stupid things like going where you know there is
| a bear. Same thing for privacy, you can take some risks, for
| example by letting Facebook follow you doing mundane things for
| targeted advertising, but not be so stupid as to post picture
| of yourself doing stupid things for everyone to see. The
| concrete example in the article is in the second category: some
| guy gets fired because he posts a picture of doing stupid
| things at his job.
|
| Personally, I consider the political risks you cited low for
| the US or EU. Not zero, it is never zero, but low enough to be
| negligible compared to what Google, Amazon or Facebook offer
| me. Maybe it is not your case.
|
| There are some privacy high risks, and that's, I think, mostly
| about things you _publish_ online. Police doesn 't need a
| warrant to look at your public profile, neither does your boss
| or the spouse you are cheating. Others include doing stupid
| things on your employer's corporate network, or doing things
| that are seriously illegal right now in your country without
| necessary precautions.
| wooque wrote:
| I have nothing to hide. If government wants to lock me up for
| viewing interracial porn, so be it.
| smcn wrote:
| This is my favourite take.
|
| Seeing the arrests in Edinburgh this past week has been heart
| wrenching. It's just... I thought we were better than that?
| Defletter wrote:
| We're not, never were. We're seeing the slow decline in the
| hard fought rights gained over decades because we were never
| ever a live and let live country.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| The people getting arrested in the streets of Edinburgh were
| the same people who have been arguing to take away free
| speech and privacy rights from others. They got very little
| sympathy from the pro-free-speech crowd because they are
| decidedly anti-free-speech. They are now reaping what they
| have sowed.
|
| The sad part is that they, and all of their supporters, will
| probably go back to agitating against free speech after this
| whole thing blows over.
| Matl wrote:
| > They got very little sympathy from the pro-free-speech
| crowd because
|
| Every officially designated 'pro free speech warrior' I've
| seen in recent times has been strongly for authoritarianism
| if it suits their agenda. Just ask many of them for their
| opinion on say Palestine or Yemen and you'll lots of ugly
| things come out, none of which are consistent with the
| image of 'freedom' these types like to portray themselves
| as.
|
| In fact, many of them seem to support anti-BDS laws and
| such.
|
| I do not endorse censorship attempts, but also let's not
| kid ourselves about the nature of many of the people who
| market themselves free speech advocates, please.
| danaris wrote:
| It's also some of the best evidence in favor of the anti-
| monarchist position I've yet seen.
| Defletter wrote:
| Hardly... the powers used to make those arrests were passed
| by our elected Parliament.
| danaris wrote:
| I don't see how "there are monarchists in Parliament" is
| a refutation of "this treatment of people protesting the
| monarchy is a strong argument in favor of abolishing the
| monarchy"...?
| Defletter wrote:
| Those Monarchists were elected. I'm sorry that sometimes
| people you disagree with get elected. Regardless, it's
| the police who are enforcing this law passed by
| Parliament... I don't believe the law even mentions
| republican protests. You are blaming the Monarchy for the
| acts of the Government and Parliament.
| kitd wrote:
| Were they arrested for "protesting the monarchy" or breaching
| the peace? Context is important. Silently holding up a
| banner: fine. Yelling at passing royals at a moment of deep
| solemnity: not fine, and stretching the free speech defence
| IMO. A bit like yelling at women entering an abortion clinic,
| or yelling loyalist slogans at an IRA funeral. There's a time
| & place.
|
| Edit: Also, this is OT anyway from the matter of privacy and
| "nothing to hide".
| robswc wrote:
| Well, there's also people getting arrested for memes ;)
|
| But I do agree somewhat, if what you're saying is true.
| People should be able to hold a funeral in peace.
| tut-urut-utut wrote:
| "God save the queen, the fascist regime, make you a
| moron, potential H-bomb, ..."
|
| Unlike in the 80-es, singing that today would make you
| arrested. Maybe the song is now more true than then,
| maybe the regime really became more fascist?
| lamontcg wrote:
| > People should be able to hold a funeral in peace.
|
| This very obviously isn't "just a funeral".
|
| Anyone else dies and they don't cancel the EPL for the
| weekend.
| robswc wrote:
| I honestly have 0 idea what is going on over there, or
| what the EPL is, so I have to take everyone at their word
| :)
|
| I assumed based on what OP said, it was akin to a funeral
| being disrupted. That's a big "if" though.
| pessimizer wrote:
| And this is something you want enforced by the state?
| What other unenumerated rights should be enforced by
| security forces? In North Korea, security forces have the
| responsibility of making sure that people express the
| appropriate amount of worry and fear when a Kim might be
| ill, and the appropriate amount of rage when a Kim has
| been insulted by a foreign leader.
| andsoitis wrote:
| Let's say it is your mom's funeral.
|
| One person, probably not invited, makes a scene, shouts a
| bunch of stuff. Perhaps they have a mental illness,
| perhaps they had a grudge against your mom - she might
| have been a judge or a teacher.
|
| Are you just going to ignore it? Would you expect some
| security to remove that person so that you and others can
| have a peaceful funeral?
| pessimizer wrote:
| > Let's say it is your mom's funeral.
|
| This is extremely compatible with Juche thought. Let's
| say that the Kim family is the mother of North Korea.
| torstenvl wrote:
| You would be right to find saying such things offensive
| and deeply vile.
|
| But it's _far more_ offensive and _far more_ vile to
| suggest that the State has any right to regulate public
| speech based on its content.
|
| If you want to control what is said at the funeral, don't
| have the funeral in public. End of.
| wizofaus wrote:
| The risk is that if the state have no power to forcibly
| remove someone causing such a disturbance then those
| present may lose faith in institutions such as the police
| who they may not unreasonably see as being responsible
| for "keeping the peace" and worse, take matters into
| their own hands (in fact it very much looked like this
| was likely in one such case in Edinburgh). As long it's
| not considered criminal and the only "punishment" is
| being physically denied access to the scene in question I
| wouldn't be overly concerned about it being an overreach
| of the government. None of which is to say I accept the
| police did everything right in this particular occasion.
| danaris wrote:
| Queen Elizabeth is not just "somebody's mom".
|
| She was the head of state who presided over genocides,
| resisted the independence many dozens of British
| colonies, got carveouts in laws to shield her personal
| possessions from scrutiny for stolen antiquities...
|
| I could go on.
|
| Public figures in general, and heads of state in
| particular, lose the right to be treated as "just
| somebody's mom". They get treated by the public based, at
| least in part, on their treatment _of_ the public.
|
| And even apart from all that, this funeral, at a time
| when many, many UK residents are facing skyrocketing
| costs for everything from food to electricity to heat--as
| in, increases of 5-10x, not just a few percent--is
| projected to cost upwards of half a _billion_ pounds,
| from what I 've heard.
|
| So no, let's _not_ "say it is your mom's funeral".
| andsoitis wrote:
| > She was the head of state who presided over genocides,
| resisted the independence many dozens of British
| colonies, got carveouts in laws to shield her personal
| possessions from scrutiny for stolen antiquities...
|
| Then it is pretty damning that not almost everyone is
| shouting! I'll go even further, then it is outrageous
| that people around the world mostly, including in the US,
| are saying what a great person she was.
|
| So I wonder why is that?
|
| Also, my understanding is that the person who got
| arrested for heckling was doing so because Andrew had sex
| with a 17 year old. So he was more upset about that than
| the queen overseeing genocides.
|
| And if people really think she was evil, why wait until
| death? Why not speak up very loudly while the person is
| alive in order to affect change.
|
| Weird priorities, or misdirection.
| lamontcg wrote:
| > Let's say it is your mom's funeral.
|
| False equivalence.
|
| This is the accession to the throne of a monarch wrapped
| around a funeral.
|
| That doesn't happen when anyone else's mom dies.
|
| And the people being arrested were in public places.
| wizofaus wrote:
| > the people being arrested were in public places.
|
| Funerals are reasonably often held at public cemeteries.
| FWIW I disagree the arrests were justifiable unless the
| protestors refused to be non-violently lead away from the
| scene, assuming they presented a genuine risk of
| provoking a violent response from the mourners etc.
| lamontcg wrote:
| Were any of the arrests at a cemetery?
| wizofaus wrote:
| In this case no, but the question remains to the GP as to
| whether having the police remove the man from the crowd
| would have been justifiable if it were a cemetery. (To be
| clear, I don't especially have a problem with the police
| taking Prince Andrew's heckler away, if nothing else for
| his own safety given members of the public were also
| manhandling him. I do have an issue with him being
| arrested and expected to face court.)
| pessimizer wrote:
| > as to whether having the police remove the man from the
| crowd would have been justifiable if it were a cemetery.
|
| Of course it would be wrong for the police to arrest
| people for being disrespectful in a cemetery. What would
| be alright is if the owners of that cemetery wanted them
| to leave the property, they refused, and the police were
| called. That's why all of the photos of Westboro
| protesting at funerals were them _on the sidewalk_ facing
| a cemetery.
| wizofaus wrote:
| So if I choose to hold my mother's funeral at a public
| cemetery owned and administered by a governmental body
| and our gathering is interrupted by an unruly mob of
| hooligans determined to disrupt proceedings as much as
| possible barring physical violence, you're saying I
| should have no right to request that the police escort
| them from the scene? (We have "public nuisance" common
| law in Australia exactly to deal with that sort of
| scenario, which allows that "The action endangered the
| life, health, property, morale or comfort of the public".
| Surprisingly it can be treated as a criminal offense,
| though I'm not sure how often it really is).
| nobody9999 wrote:
| >Are you just going to ignore it? Would you expect some
| security to remove that person so that you and others can
| have a peaceful funeral?
|
| Having someone removed for being loud and obnoxious is a
| _much_ different thing than being arrested and
| potentially incarcerated for same.
| robswc wrote:
| Well, I think I would have to think on it more but it
| seems like not having a funeral disrupted is a reasonable
| request.
|
| I would say this for _anyone_, today it just happens to
| be a famous person.
| tut-urut-utut wrote:
| A public funeral is, well, public. Everyone can come to
| the "celebration" and "celebrate" however they want.
|
| If the family wanted to control the show, they should
| organize a private event with only invited guests who
| signed a code of conduct.
| robswc wrote:
| Fair enough. I have no idea the laws or customs of the
| UK.
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| Royals getting yelled at? How horrible!
|
| Maybe the common British people should take notes from
| their French neighbors and teach these royal shits what
| true persecution feels like.
| mattmanser wrote:
| You left out the context, not only was Andrew walking
| right behind the coffin, the man was yards away and
| surrounded by mourners.
|
| Their moment for grief was severely impacted by the
| protestor.
|
| It's nowhere near as simple as you or other people in
| this thread are pretending it is. Even though I think
| Andrew should be stripped of his titles, it's right that
| guy was arrested.
| nobody9999 wrote:
| > You left out the context, not only was Andrew walking
| right behind the coffin, the man was yards away and
| surrounded by mourners.
|
| >Their moment for grief was severely impacted by the
| protestor.
|
| >It's nowhere near as simple as you or other people in
| this thread are pretending it is. Even though I think
| Andrew should be stripped of his titles, it's right that
| guy was arrested.
|
| Clearly that guy was being an asshole, but being a loud
| jerk _shouldn 't_ be a crime, IMHO.
|
| _If_ that 's the prevailing attitude there, I'm glad I
| don't live in the UK.
|
| Not because I think it's right to intrude on the
| mourning/grief/funerary rights of others (cf., Westboro
| Baptist Church[0]), much to the contrary, but because it
| shouldn't be _illegal_ (as much as I despise such folks)
| to be an asshole.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westboro_Baptist_Church
| baud147258 wrote:
| I'd say that the British have started beheading kings way
| before the French, with Charles I being beheaded by
| parliamentarians in 1649
| pessimizer wrote:
| > a moment of deep solemnity
|
| The state shouldn't get to declare mandatory solemnity.
| [deleted]
| kitd wrote:
| They didn't. It was the thousands of people gathered in
| silence and respect who did.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Did you ask them all? I have top secret inside
| information that if they broke that silence and respect,
| they would be arrested.
| drewcoo wrote:
| A protest that is not irritating is not a protest.
|
| And as for time & place, finding the right moment and
| location to be maximally irritating is part of the art of
| protest.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| >"A protest that is not irritating is not a protest....
| finding the right moment and location to be maximally
| irritating is part of the art of protest. "
|
| Which school of thought is this from? Protesting can take
| many forms and they need not be offensive and/or
| irritating to be effective. I personally respect calm,
| dignified, and persistent protestors _far_ more than the
| loud, disruptive, and in-your-face ones.
| dogleash wrote:
| > Yelling at passing royals at a moment of deep solemnity:
| not fine, and stretching the free speech defence IMO
|
| lol, my country's concept of free speech is in part based
| on the idea everyone should be able to tell your country's
| nobility things they don't want to hear.
| kitd wrote:
| Well sure. But the point of my argument was there's a
| time and a place for that.
| yibg wrote:
| And who decides what the right times and places are?
| khyryk wrote:
| You take a guess, and if you guess wrongly, you get
| arrested.
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| There is no better time and place than when royals are in
| earshot to hear it. And doubly so when those royals wish
| you would be silent.
| lmm wrote:
| Username checks out?
| FpUser wrote:
| Holding "not my king" poster has nothing to do with "deep
| solemnity" and does not prevent anyone from grieving. Yet
| they still got arrested or questioned.
| andsoitis wrote:
| You mean this guy:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6iokoD85_vg
| torstenvl wrote:
| In a civilized society, it's the child-rapist - and not
| the person calling him out - who gets arrested.
| andsoitis wrote:
| You mean Andrew having sex with a 17 year old?
| https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/feb/15/prince-
| andre...
| torstenvl wrote:
| I don't view it as mitigating that the rape victim was
| _almost_ not a child.
| andsoitis wrote:
| Legal age of consent in the US is 16 in many states, 17
| in some, and 18 in others -
| https://www.bhwlawfirm.com/legal-age-consent-united-
| states-m...
|
| And to put a fine point on it, the age of consent in New
| York is 17 and is 16 in New Jersey.
|
| So I think the focus on "child" is not only misplaced,
| but untrue. Rape is the real issue, so that's the real
| thing to focus on.
| wizofaus wrote:
| Perhaps, but we not unreasonably see it as behaviour
| where a man was clearly taking advantage of his position
| of wealth and power over someone of an impressionable age
| who's unlikely to be in a position to give meaningfully
| informed consent. At any rate the "sick old man"
| accusation made by heckler was pretty well justified on
| its own terms, even if choosing that exact moment to make
| it did little to help the cause.
| JimmieMcnulty wrote:
| I don't think folks are upset with Andrew because he
| disobeyed a law, they're upset with him because they
| believe what he did was morally repugnant.
| [deleted]
| arminiusreturns wrote:
| Has everyone just magically forgotten Charles was besties
| with Jimmy Saville, a notorious necro-pedo?
| kitd wrote:
| Different occasion. The guy holding the poster definitely
| shouldn't have been arrested. The guy shouting at Prince
| Andrew during the procession was breaching the peace.
| Different context, which was my point.
| godelski wrote:
| I always try to break privacy concerns down because when
| everything is lumped together I think people that aren't into
| privacy get confused.
|
| There's concerns about: hackers, surveillance capitalism,
| foreign state actors, and domestic state actors. People that
| say they have nothing to hide are usually unconcerned about one
| or two of these (surveillance capitalism and domestic state
| actors) but often are actually concerned with at least one.
|
| The truth of the matter is, though, that if you're concerned
| about one, you need to be concerned about all of them. There is
| no door that only good guys can use and bad guys can't.
| Breaking it down has often led to more successful conversations
| for me. Even in a group of highly tech literate people (CS
| graduate students) I often see the "I don't care" or "what can
| I do" sentiments. So I suggest when talking about all this,
| break it down into these categories. Maybe if more of us did
| this then we'd have more success as a community.
| recursivedoubts wrote:
| Exactly.
|
| You have nothing to hide... yet.
| JimmieMcnulty wrote:
| Eh, you may not "know" something like this, but considering
| it's never happened in my country in my lifetime at any
| appreciable scale, it's probably not very likely, and doesn't
| realistically factor into my threat model.
|
| If you want to "worst case" scenario something, that's your
| choice, but it's not very predictive.
| the_af wrote:
| On the other hand, people from every country which has had
| dictatorships (like many if not most in Latin America) should
| be wary of this kind of scenarios.
| scarface74 wrote:
| It just happened in the US. A lady and her daughter were
| arrested for taking a federally approved abortion pill based
| on information found when they subpoenaed their Facebook
| messenger chat.
| simonw wrote:
| Lucky you. I've lived in the UK and the US and seen examples
| of this happening in both.
| JimmieMcnulty wrote:
| No you haven't, not to any meaningful degree.
| WHATDOESIT wrote:
| No forced sterilization of women based on
| race/class/other background, for example? No exclusion
| from education, medical care etc? Surely?
|
| Anyways, something like 40% of the EU citizens lived
| through communism, so it's not exactly unusual.
| FireSparrowWeld wrote:
| It's sad that these conversations devolve into, "A lack
| of privacy actually means anything generally bad that I
| can think of."
|
| Kind of makes it seem like privacy itself can't stand on
| its own as meritous, and needs to be propped up by
| overgeneralizations and FUD.
| WHATDOESIT wrote:
| To me, privacy is first and foremost protection. That's
| from my upbringing, I guess. It's hard to argue with
| anything other to people who don't seem like they care
| about their privacy at all - and I get it, some people
| just don't care and trust their government etc. What else
| would you bring up to these people other than the bad
| things that have already happened due to less privacy
| than possible?
| JimmieMcnulty wrote:
| You could try bringing up relevant situations where a
| breach of privacy was the proximate cause of a systemic
| negative consequence on a large scale, rather than
| irrelevant-but-also-terrible things that weren't directly
| caused by a lack of privacy.
| PuppyTailWags wrote:
| > You could try bringing up relevant situations where a
| breach of privacy was the proximate cause of a systemic
| negative consequence on a large scale
|
| The US Government directly used census data to target
| families and neighborhoods to send to internment camps
| within living memory.
|
| Something ongoing: prosecutions are currently underway to
| parties who have abortions or assist in abortions based
| off of private correspondences such as texting, calling,
| or facebook messages.
| JimmieMcnulty wrote:
| So your most recent widespread example is 80+ years ago,
| and then a very tiny hypothetical set of lawsuits that
| have not been filed (zero prosecutions are "under way")?
| PuppyTailWags wrote:
| My most recent widespread example was so recently that
| there are people still alive who were subjected to it,
| yes. Regarding the other point: this is not a
| hypothetical set of lawsuits. People are getting
| _prosecuted_ , _criminally_ , _right now_.
| JimmieMcnulty wrote:
| > People are getting prosecuted, criminally, right now.
|
| Name one person who is being prosecuted for obtaining an
| abortion, and that prosecution is moving forward due to
| evidence collected from any kind of extrajudicial breach
| of privacy.
| PuppyTailWags wrote:
| Woah, what's this about the breach of privacy needing to
| be extrajudicial? There was nothing about that
| originally. These are goalposts being moved. I refuse to
| continue this line of discussion if the discussion is
| happening in bad faith with moving goalposts.
| JimmieMcnulty wrote:
| Because we all agree that warrants do need to exist to
| catch bad guys...
|
| I refuse to continue a discussion with someone who
| doesn't believe in the concept of a warrant.
| WHATDOESIT wrote:
| You mean like when the KGB murdered my grandparent based
| on class origin and corporation ownership? Or the time
| when the Gestapo did the same to my great-grandparent,
| also based on ownership of the same corporation?
|
| To me, it seems like there are much longer periods of
| problems than periods of peaceful life. Only 30 years out
| of the last 100 were in lived in relative freedom here,
| and still excesses are happening today. Protect
| yourselves people. Nobody will return your health and
| life back once an excess happens to you.
| JimmieMcnulty wrote:
| Again, I get that bad things happen, but none of what
| you've brought up would have been prevented with better
| privacy in practice. It's well beyond "privacy" to
| believe that ownership of a corporation should be hidden
| information, that'd be exceedingly easy to abuse.
|
| I'm sorry those things happened to your family, but
| they're not relevant to a modern privacy conversation.
| Woeps wrote:
| Who are you to decide what is "to any meaningful degree"
| for others?
| JimmieMcnulty wrote:
| A guy who cares about evaluating the likelihood and
| significance of an event taking place.
|
| I'm not value judging this, I'm just trying to determine
| if it's worth reacting to, and based on the number of
| folks effected, the severity of the impact, and the
| frequency, privacy violations seem pretty minor overall
| as a threat, not worth considering within my personal
| attack surface.
| seanw444 wrote:
| Yet. That's the whole point.
| FireSparrowWeld wrote:
| It's kind of ridiculous to anticipate an event that's
| never happened before.
| simonw wrote:
| Go tell that to the population of Germany in the 1930s.
| FireSparrowWeld wrote:
| They didn't have a "Germany in the 1930s" example like we
| do now, so it's different.
| pessimizer wrote:
| You're right, they didn't have an example of their exact
| situation, so they should have felt perfectly safe. They
| could see that pogroms happened in other places, to other
| people, a long time ago, obviously not even relevant in
| hypermodern civilized 1930s Germany.
| JimmieMcnulty wrote:
| I'm glad you recognize how fundamentally different the
| world is today than how it was in the 1930s, because not
| realizing that would probably confuse the hell out of you
| a lot of the time.
| [deleted]
| seanw444 wrote:
| There have already been examples given here. And also,
| that's absolutely untrue. Things have firsts.
| FireSparrowWeld wrote:
| Those examples are isolated incidents and not any
| indication of a larger risk.
| WHATDOESIT wrote:
| [deleted]
| ho_schi wrote:
| _The way to hell is paved with good intentions._
|
| I'm looking at the European Union and at Apple and Google. Good
| intentions? That doesn't mean that you're the good guys!
| History has shown that the bad guys always believe strongly
| that they were the good guys. Privacy and security is not only
| about protection from criminals and companies but especially
| about protection from our governments. It doesn't matter wether
| you voted for your government or not or you like them or not or
| they like you or not.
| Bakary wrote:
| So far, the only jurisdictions in the developed world who
| seem to be on a trajectory towards increased or at least not
| decreased privacy of any type are in Europe.
| raxxorraxor wrote:
| My government evaluates police work by number of cases. What
| does the police do if there is not enough crime? For example
| they look at energy usage of people and try to spot patterns
| that might indicate something like a weed farm. If the
| pattern match your home will be searched. This is a
| supposedly civilized western country that managed to start
| two dictatorships in just one century and had massive
| problems with surveillance. You can guess the country now...
|
| Today people with similar mindsets control politics and
| surveillance is increased at every step. A frightful older
| demographic is part of this. Someone said it would be
| insanity to repeat the same mistakes over and over again and
| expect different results...
| chaxor wrote:
| I'm not sure why it's _especially_ governments. I find this
| propensity for privacy focused people to overlap with more
| conservative thinking individuals very perplexing. Especially
| since typically the more prominent feature of conservatism is
| support towards large corporations - which are the largest
| entities removing our privacy.
|
| It's not _especially_ governments for which you need to keep
| the integrity of your privacy - it 's _everyone_. And I would
| imagine if we 're trying to estimate the entities that pry
| the most, it's corporations. Sure, they _may_ feed it to
| governments, but there 's an energy barrier there (in at
| least some circumstances) - but the trust of corporations is
| one of the bigger issues here.
| sdrinf wrote:
| A steelman of that perspective (full disclosure: I'm
| leaning more libertarian, but my stance is complicated, and
| nuanced), is that you can _just not use facebook_ , but
| government's laws are _full liability_ -they enforce
| (rather than describe) norms, and stances which can
| suffocate non-represented minorities, and you _can not opt
| out_ in ways other than moving.
|
| People are many, and weird, and different; the attention of
| lawmakers & govs are limited, and this can (and have
| repeatedly made) roadkill of you, with no recourse other
| than privacy.
|
| In security, to make an assessment of overall risk of a
| potential vulnerability, we take into account both the
| probability, and the impact of exploiting such
| vulnerability. Facebook, and corporations in general,
| ultimately want to move merch, and, at worst, make you vote
| for candidates of their choice: probability of being
| successful is medium, but impact for the individual is
| relatively low. Goverment laws can roadkill you:
| probability of this ranges from low to medium, but impact
| is super high. This advises for being especially vigilant
| for gov interventions, _especially_ where freedom, and
| liberties are concerned.
| yonaguska wrote:
| I think that is slowly shifting. The misguided trust of
| conservatives in corporations as an antithetical opponent
| to government that is.
| codethief wrote:
| Exactly, that's my usual response to "I have nothing to hide:
| You don't decide what's worth hiding.
| IX-103 wrote:
| I like "then why are you wearing clothes?"
| marlowe221 wrote:
| Mine is "Do you close the door when you go to the
| bathroom?"
| philipov wrote:
| Mine is: "I will be expecting your credit card and bank
| information on my table in the morning"
| yibg wrote:
| Or "describe all your past sexual encounters". Granted,
| some might be ok with it, but most won't feel comfortable.
| jll29 wrote:
| In any case, your phone provider knows - co-occurring
| presence of the same two phones in the same grid cell at
| the same time (esp. night).
|
| By implication, what your provider knows, governments
| also know - they have a direct line.
| jbay808 wrote:
| That is not a record of a sexual encounter.
| daniel-cussen wrote:
| Dude basically sign a document cosenting to consenting to
| any document.
|
| Sell your soul.
| kritiko wrote:
| I think the reason most people are wary of sharing banking
| information is that they are worried you would exploit it
| or because of social norms not to talk about money, not
| that they have something to hide.
| beermonster wrote:
| 'Something to hide' in English often has a negative
| connotation meaning deliberately trying to deceive or
| something bad they did and don't want you to know about.
|
| Better would be to not use that phrase as most people
| have something they wish to remain private or secret,
| without it being anything sinister. Like their password
| for example !
| philipov wrote:
| What better reason to hide something than because you
| think people will exploit that knowledge to harm you? You
| don't even need to think the party you're giving the
| information to will abuse it. Can you trust them to not
| pass it on or have it stolen from them? We have many many
| examples of why you should not.
| kritiko wrote:
| >"I will be expecting your credit card and bank
| information on my table in the morning" I've shared this
| (or similar info) with landlords and realtors and
| platforms that I don't trust. That's life.
| philipov wrote:
| The point is that just because you have something to hide
| doesn't mean you've done anything wrong. You might end up
| sharing that information in certain situations, but
| carefully. The framing those who promulgate that phrasing
| want to push is that not wanting to share information
| with the government makes you suspicious, because your
| only possible reason could be wrongdoing. This notion is
| hostile to liberty and security.
| pessimizer wrote:
| That's a arbitrary limiting of "something to hide."
|
| A: "I have nothing to hide."
|
| B: "Give me your bank details."
|
| A: "Not like that! That's not something to hide because
| I'm hiding them to protect my savings."
|
| B: "The reason other people hide things is also to
| protect themselves, their property, and their loved
| ones."
| bulatb wrote:
| What people mean is that they've done nothing wrong, not
| that there's nothing they'd rather keep secret. "Not like
| that!" means they're annoyed you're focused on their
| words instead of their meaning. They're about to write
| you off and walk away with their beliefs even stronger.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > you're focused on their words instead of their meaning.
|
| If I were focused on _that_ meaning, I 'd call talking
| about whether they're doing right or wrong things
| completely unresponsive. We're talking about privacy and
| protection, not their personal assessments of the merit
| of their private lives.
|
| Instead, I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt
| and remind them that the people who are dangerous to them
| may not share their standards or ethics.
| JohnFen wrote:
| The point is to break the incorrect notion that "having
| something to hide" means "wanting to hide wrongdoing."
| hinkley wrote:
| There are also a ton of bewildered Boomers out there who
| believe they have done nothing wrong and are completely
| bewildered their children have gone no contact. I'd say
| if your kids won't talk to you've seriously fucked up,
| and at least for some of them it's over conversations
| they could have taken to their grave but instead their
| "truth" was more important than meeting their grandkids.
|
| I told my father something about myself years ago and he
| tried to make the case that I hadn't brought it up
| because I was ashamed.
|
| I wasn't ashamed. But if you share certain things about
| yourself, being gay being one of the most obvious
| examples, some people want to define you by it, or talk
| about it to the exclusion of all other things. I'd much
| rather talk about trees, for that matter tax law.
|
| One of my mentees had a bit of a persecution complex
| about several things, orientation one of them. When late
| in our relationship I finally mentioned that my kid had
| come out, she was shocked I hadn't brought it up before
| (which in retrospect I think she may have been
| recalculating her opinions of me on the fly, like the Key
| & Peele skit, "Oh I see, I'm just an asshole.")
|
| Without a pause I answered that it's because it's not the
| most interesting thing about them, which just made the
| eyebrows go up even higher. But I think it finally sunk
| in.
| kritiko wrote:
| "Hiding them to protect my savings" is a result of our
| broken identity system, I'd say that's tangential to
| privacy.
|
| As Mitchell and Webb pointed out, "identity theft" is
| actually bank theft that's blamed on the account holder.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CS9ptA3Ya9E
| pessimizer wrote:
| I completely agree with you about "identity theft" but I
| also keep the keys to my house private, although anybody
| who would burglarize me if I didn't would clearly be in
| the wrong and legally liable for my things.
|
| Notwithstanding any legal or ethical judgement, being
| burglarized would cause me significant inconvenience and
| at the very least some sentimental losses, even if I were
| ultimately compensated years later with interest.
| Therefore, I keep my keys private to protect myself.
| bloomingeek wrote:
| I don't consider myself a paranoid person, but I realized 20
| years ago that we were all losing our privacy to online
| entities. When I first read about "the cloud", I knew that what
| I put on it was no longer mine. Government regulators don't
| care at all about our privacy, so what makes anyone really
| think they have nothing to hide? Honestly though, I can't
| imagine my life without these entities stealing my data, that's
| how bad it has become!
| antonymy wrote:
| Nobody is ever concerned about privacy until it's too late to be.
| It's just a question of when you learn this lesson, and how
| damaging it is. If you're very lucky you only suffer
| embarrassment.
| [deleted]
| barrysteve wrote:
| Recording everything doesn't actually erode privacy. What happens
| in your mind, body and soul is still yours forever. Your
| relationship to truth and <$DEITY> is only known to you and
| <$DEITY>, at the end of the day.
|
| It's increasingly difficult to communicate what you actually mean
| to people.
|
| People are emptying out their contextual and relational
| knowledge. They are leaving it in facebook profiles and politics.
| There's no need to _understand_ someone 's life context and how
| it might influence the meaning of their communications.
|
| The more we seek to know in data, the more we see someone's data
| as their primary context in the world. We see less of what they
| mean as a person, or what they mean to tell us.
|
| You could record every pore of my skin, every hair on my head, my
| bank account and my programming code. I'll go out and buy a
| camel, invest in the next crypto fad and move to africa, and
| you'll have no idea why.
|
| Frankly some people are more private than ever, in plain sight,
| thanks to the Sauron eye (or eyes) of data harvesting.
|
| If you 'brought back' privacy, our everyday view of people would
| require empathy and relating to the person, so that you
| understand what's different about them. People would make their
| direction more clear, simply to facilitate communicating
| something worthwhile.
| Bakary wrote:
| One of the humiliating aspects of the connected, data-driven
| world is that reveals how much of our behavior is predictable,
| even without access to our inner mental world.
| barrysteve wrote:
| Norm McDonald had a great joke about writing his own
| biography.
|
| He asked himself, well what would it be about? His average
| day, he gets up, he is hungry, so he makes some eggs, has
| breakfast. By the time he's done with breakfast he goes to do
| something and it's nearly lunch! So he goes looking for some
| food for lunch and eats it... annd long story short he
| concludes that life is mostly about thinking of food,
| searching for food and eating food.
|
| The uninteresting stuff is predictable. I can tell you where
| a monk lives, what he does every day. But not what it means
| to live like he does, nor do I know what he'll write next.
|
| Humble yes, humiliating? No?
| renewiltord wrote:
| Something is wrong about this post. If you have Google Timeline
| turned on (I do), you get the following:
|
| > _Rene, here 's your new Timeline update You're receiving this
| monthly email because you turned on Location History, a Google
| Account-level setting that saves where you go in your private
| Timeline. Location History data also helps give you personalized
| information on Google, including better restaurant
| recommendations, and suggestions for a faster commute. You can
| view, edit, and delete this data anytime in Timeline._
|
| Personally, I have it turned on because I like looking at where I
| was etc. I have an iPhone and I still have it turned on. There's
| nothing surreptitious about it. It's quite open and sends you a
| monthly email if you turned on Location History (though I've
| forgotten if that's opt-in)
| Paul-E wrote:
| A great paper on this topic is 'I've Got Nothing to Hide' and
| Other Misunderstandings of Privacy
|
| https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=998565
| [deleted]
| BrainVirus wrote:
| It's a matter of making people use a dumb mental model that
| benefits someone else. Even better if the dumb mental model goes
| viral.
|
| "I have nothing to hide" mental model is dumb on many levels. The
| most obvious one has already been mentioned here. Leaked
| information is stored indefinitely, while standard of behavior in
| our society currently change at an insane pace (by design).
|
| Another big misconception is that you as an individual can
| realistically evaluate how someone else will perceive your
| private information. You don't control the context in which your
| information will be consumed. (Not to mention that the context
| can be manipulated.) You conversation with a friend will sound
| very different to a paranoid federal agent whose only job is to
| find terrorists.
|
| With the advent of global communications you can't even predict
| who will be using your information and for which purpose. (E.g.
| tons of people know your home address and it's not a problem, yet
| doxxing is still a thing. The fact that 99% of the people are
| benign doesn't mean anything if the information is accessible to
| 100% of the people.)
|
| Etc, etc. It's the same bad reasoning at all levels, neatly
| packaged in a short virtue-signaling phrase. It so neat, it seems
| engineered.
|
| The same goes for "You can't be truly private online!" It's
| another dumb mental model. "Truly private" is a fake standard
| used solely because it's unattainable. In reality, the more
| information you uncontrollably leak, the worse off you are.
| mrweasel wrote:
| If people say they have nothing to hide, ask them if they
| close/lock the door when they use the bathroom. It's not like
| their doing anything secret in the bathroom, I mean there's only
| a few number of things people realistically do in there and we
| all know what they are.
|
| This is the best way I've been able to illustrate the difference
| between privacy and secrecy. Some things I do are just private,
| doesn't mean that they are secret.
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| This is actually an interesting question. If I lived alone, I
| would rather unlock my door on purpose when taking a shower, so
| that in case I fell and knocked myself out, my neighbors and
| the ambulance personnel had an easier time getting in.
| the_af wrote:
| I don't think anybody who lives alone locks the door to the
| shower (or toilet), because what's the point?
|
| People who live with roommates or family do, sometimes. I
| considered this. In the end, I decided if I faint while
| taking a shower and hit my head, I want someone to be able to
| rescue me, so: door unlocked.
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| No, not only the shower. I would unlock the apartment
| itself.
| karaterobot wrote:
| I'd say the security concerns are more pressing than the
| privacy concerns in that case. Though of course the two
| are related because the person who robs you also learns
| quite a lot about you.
| asdff wrote:
| The things people do in there are sometimes smelly or splashy
| so a closed door is preferred even when you are all alone at
| home
| Kiro wrote:
| That argument has never convinced anyone, ever. It's almost as
| bad as "then give me your credit card number".
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| How about "Do you keep any secrets?"
| mrweasel wrote:
| Is there really anything you can do or say that will change
| peoples mind? If people don't see the problem, then
| explaining it is one thing, and I think the bathroom thing
| works okay. It won't cause them to change their mind, but you
| can convince them of the problem. Even if their privacy is
| blatantly misused a large number of people wouldn't change
| their mind.
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| Privacy is a fundamental right. I don't want people even knowing
| what setting I use for the dishwasher, because it's my right to
| have it private.
| MrMan wrote:
| I don't think privacy, in the sense of a right not to be
| observed, is a right at all. its like saying you have the right
| for people not to look at you or remember you, it may sound
| like a great idea but its fundamentally unworkable.
| Bakary wrote:
| I think what people mean by privacy is what might be
| considered private within reasonable expectations. Not being
| seen in public like you have Potter's cloak is not realistic.
| But there's no clear reason why an American tech company
| should have so much access to everything you do.
| [deleted]
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| What do I have to hide? Legally, nothing. In my day-to-day life,
| I don't do anything that is a crime. I'm not using lots of drugs,
| I'm not into illegal porn, I'm not committing fraud, robbing
| banks, or planning anything illegal. But I still don't want
| everyone to know what porn I view, what I did as a child, what I
| plan on doing next year, or when I am or I am not at home.
|
| While I may having nothing I need to hide, I have lots of things
| I want to hide. It's just happens that all the stuff I don't care
| about hiding are all the things these privacy consuming companies
| want. For others, they want to hide more and that's ok too.
| crooked-v wrote:
| You don't have anything you need to hide now, but as seen with
| Republicans in the US, there are major political parties that
| will happily criminalize and prosecute basic aspects of bodily
| function if they get the chance.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| You have no idea whether you are currently committing any
| crimes. The US code is something like 80,000 pages and includes
| several felonies like carrying a sharpie or a screwdriver
| around in public or using a fake name on the internet. In the
| EU, the situation is similar. Nobody has any idea what they
| have to hide legally.
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| No, I'm really certain I'm not committing crimes. Living a
| rather boring life, where I work almost non-stop and use the
| internet. Many of the laws you are referring to are basically
| dead laws. You couldn't convict someone if you tried.
| 0x457 wrote:
| You telling you never got a cent that you haven't reported
| to IRS? Doubt it.
| iudqnolq wrote:
| Have you ever deposited a large sum of cash less than
| $10,000 in a bank account? Whether or not that's a crime
| depends on the state of your mind when you did it, which
| can be hard for you to produce to defend yourself.
| Minor49er wrote:
| It would be up to a plaintiff to prove that they knew his
| state of mind at the time of the deposit
| Arrath wrote:
| Three Felonies a Day is a very interesting read, and I
| highly recommend it.
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Three-Felonies-Day-
| audiobook/dp/B07J4...
|
| > Many of the laws you are referring to are basically dead
| laws. You couldn't convict someone if you tried.
|
| That is really immaterial to the discussion, as charges
| being brought alone can royally fuck up a life, whether or
| not a conviction is made in the end.
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| " I don't do anything that is a crime"
|
| You may be doing something right now that may be viewed as a
| crime in the future. Abortion comes to mind but I am sure there
| are more.
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| I think you miss the point, I said I have nothing to hide yet
| still want to hide things.
|
| Also, there is only one time I can think of where someone has
| been convicted of a crime while it was legal when they did it
| and it was The Pirate Bay conviction. Everything else, it's
| always been if it's legal while you do it, it's legal. That
| holds true for abortion.
| JAA1337 wrote:
| I fundamentally disagree with the premise.
|
| I believe a hacker, or bad actor in general, will gain access to
| my data if they really really wanted it. I believe stealing data
| is just a function of time and resources (money). Based on this
| premise, I don't keep anything truly valuable available
| digitally. Sure, I have my bank accounts secured, but nothing
| past start practices.
|
| I do not believe my feelings on this mean I do not care about
| free speech, nor do I not care about privacy. I believe our
| reality is that no one should be surprised if their data is
| stolen. People should plan on this happening and be prepared.
| Just as corporations have Incident Response and Business
| Continuity plans.
| Bilal_io wrote:
| When we talk about privacy, we are not only talking about what
| you can control. Your bank info is secure until it's not,
| meaning that without privacy regulations the bank sells your
| info and habits to anyone who's willing to pay, the same thing
| goes for your phone company and many other essential services.
|
| Whether we accept it or not, the cloud is our "home" now. We
| have little to no control on who keeps our information on their
| servers. (i.e. employer, government, school, bank, phone
| company...)
|
| And I'll use the home as an analogy here. A bad actor can
| access your house anyway, why have a door? Why have laws that
| criminalize burglary? Using your example, you could say not to
| keep anything valuable at home.
|
| I agree with your point that we shouldn't be surprised if our
| information is hacked, but the point about privacy isn't to
| necessarily protect you against hackers, but to regulate those
| that keep your information. Prohibit them from selling your
| info, store it when not needed and as an extra benefit make it
| more difficult for hackers to access your info.
| JAA1337 wrote:
| Good response. I believe the right counter is "diminishing
| returns".
|
| Yes, the bad actor can break in my door, but they actually
| have to do it. Walking through without a door is sooooo much
| easier.
|
| But then when they get inside, what will they find? Will I
| have silver and gold bars? Or will it be random HN posts?
|
| My advice is to take reasonable precautions. However, if you
| have your entire life savings in an offshore back account
| with Venmo access which doesn't require 2FA ... then yea, I
| would worry.
|
| I believe things that are valuable, like truly valuable,
| should be hard to change. Like liquidating a 401k life
| savings shouldn't be a couple mouse clicks. It should be a
| long and hard process because you are prolly only going to
| once or twice in your life. There is nothing wrong IMO with
| requiring being present at a bank to perform significant
| value transfers. Sure, wouldn't it be nice to only have to
| click a button? Sure ... but requiring physical (think MFA)
| slows the process down for the sake of security.
| Bilal_io wrote:
| I agree, and I think your examples of Venmo, and
| liquidating your 401k are examples of where regulation is
| needed. Same goes for storing data, while many people hate
| the GDPR, I think forcing companies to delete personal data
| is an important piece of legislation. The same thing goes
| for the right to be forgotten even if it's by manual
| request.
| JAA1337 wrote:
| Completely agree on GDPR. Unfortunately there is so much
| money to be made in selling to people. I hope legislation
| wins out.
| simonw wrote:
| I'm honestly having trouble imagining anything valuable in my
| life that isn't digital at the point. My pets I guess?
|
| Do you have physical notebooks full of information that you
| don't like to keep in digital format?
| JAA1337 wrote:
| I guess the biggest thing is passwords. I use passphrases,
| but yea - I don't use any single point of failure with
| respect to access.
|
| As far as physical, while a lot of your footprint exists on
| line, still having the physical matters. A property deed is a
| good example of this. Another example is my will. I might be
| aging myself out of this conversation, but it's a point of
| view for consideration. And yes, these are in a fireproof
| safe along with birth certificates, passports, etc. So yes,
| if someone steals my identity, I still have physical proof.
| Standard MFA stuff (from wikipedia) "knowledge (something
| only the user knows), possession (something only the user
| has), and inherence (something only the user is)"
|
| I'll end with another opinion ... digital wallets which are
| not backed by the FDIC are super scary. Im sure this is
| another conversation, but just because I choose not to have a
| digital wallet doesn't mean I don't care about free speech :)
| deepstack wrote:
| Yup. For serious people like military, etc they do keep
| important info in NON-digital form. When Snowden revelations
| came out, Russians switched to type writer for their internal
| memos.
|
| For personal use, just have to say offline USB drive is a
| good investment if you can make the physical switch.
|
| Until we can have something like the quantum entanglement
| communication.
| JAA1337 wrote:
| Im not a conspiracy theorist or eternal cynic, but yes to
| the above stuff. I simply dont trust anyone. In the
| software world its the same concept as never trusting
| anything client side.
| deepstack wrote:
| I don't think it has anything to to conspiracy theory or
| anything like that, it just a matter of fact, that nation
| state actors just simply DO NOT trust anything digital
| for important stuff ATM.
| ramtatatam wrote:
| Hacker will not gain access to your data if there is no data,
| that's what article is really advocating.
|
| With regards to not caring about free speech, I am trying to
| picture myself being in this hypothetical situation: lets
| imagine I was ran by a car and was denied the right to do or
| say anything about it because the driver was some prominent
| person, I'm picturing myself in such situation and I'm glad we
| still have free speech...
| Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote:
| The same argument could be made about your home. A dedicated
| burglar will get your possessions (including data drives) given
| time and resources so you should not be surprised to have
| everything you own taken and your identity stolen.
|
| Again, the same argument could be used about your physical
| person. Given time and resources someone could kidnap and
| torture you so you shouldn't be surprised if that happens.
| JAA1337 wrote:
| Great response. But the purpose of the article was about
| digital footprint IMO and not what is maintained in IRL.
| pydry wrote:
| The only time I've ever gotten someone "with nothing to hide"
| interested in data privacy was when I made an idle comment about
| ads I saw after sharing their IP address that were clearly
| targeted at them. That idle comment was accidentally 10x more
| convincing than any amount of rigorous argument.
|
| IME people who have "nothing to hide" get suddenly more
| interested in data privacy if it stops being an abstract threat.
| They see Google knowing their intimate secrets in much the same
| way they would their hairdryer. Until they dont.
|
| Unfortunately, that will probably happen for most people about
| two weeks before a stasi-like secret police takes full control
| over the country and by that point it'll have been about 10 years
| too late to start taking data privacy seriously.
| Defletter wrote:
| "[People] get suddenly more interested in data privacy if it
| stops being an abstract threat."
|
| That's true for almost everything, unfortunately.
| sh4un wrote:
| mrjin wrote:
| I have nothing to hide indeed, but I have nothing that I want to
| let THEY know neither!!
| 0xbadc0de5 wrote:
| Even for those with "Nothing to hide (tm)", the only rational
| approach is privacy maximization.
|
| Suppose your future circumstances change and you find yourself in
| a situation where you do have something to hide. The mere fact
| that you have "gone dark" can be observed and used as evidence
| that you are now engaging in activities you believe need to be
| hidden.
|
| Anyone with kids will recognise this - you're not worried when
| they're yelling and screaming. You're worried when they stop
| yelling and screaming and suddenly become too quiet.
| nixpulvis wrote:
| I'll just chime in with this bit of my own personal musings on
| the subject.
|
| I perform very differently in public and when I'm being recorded
| vs when I'm alone and in private. The psychology behind this is
| not hard to imagine. Just like I code differently when I think
| I'm publishing my git logs vs just hacking together a prototype.
| The act of performance imposes itself on the actor just as it
| does on the audience, if not more!
|
| Privacy is therefor almost less about the recorded data as it is
| about the recording itself. The implication of the data or the
| memory is enough to change everything.
| dzink wrote:
| My rule of thumb for privacy as a founder and a voter: If you've
| created an online product, or are a interacting with people in
| any kind of life-critical capacity (doctor, lawyer, landlord,
| electrician, financial professional, life partner, politician,
| you name it, etc), you WILL have a very broad swath of clients
| and some may anger with you due to no fault of your own and try
| to hurt you in different ways (from murder attempts to scammers).
| After seeing several friends in different capacity getting
| attacked for completely unrelated cases, my rule of thumb for
| privacy is - if a stranger wants to physically hurt you or loved
| ones, how easy would it be for them to find you and get to you or
| them. If you are behaving illegally, the law can reach more
| information and they should, but it should not be so easy for a
| deranged foe. Privacy is life-saving in that case and it needs to
| be respected as such.
| yboris wrote:
| A worthwhile book on Privacy is: _Privacy is Power: Why and How
| You Should Take Back Control of Your Data_ by Carissa Veliz
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Privacy-Power-Should-Take-Control/dp/...
| cortic wrote:
| Posted this two years and five months ago, but its still
| relevant: My nothing to hide argument;
|
| Nothing to hide is an incomplete sentence. Nothing to hide from
| who? surely you want to hide your children from abusers and
| predators? Don't you want to hide your banking details from con
| artists and fraudsters? Your identity from identity thieves..
| Your location from burglars, your car keys from car thieves or
| your blood type from rich mobsters with kidney problems..
|
| we don't know who are any of these things. So we should protect
| ourselves from all of them, in effect we have everything to hide
| from _someone_ , and no idea who someone is.
|
| edit; let me just add the obvious, that the government and
| police, Google and Facebook, are made up of many _someones_.
| youerbt wrote:
| I have even more trivial examples: love letters, nude photos,
| political articles you don't intend to publish, medical
| records, attempts at poetry, porn collection, business plans,
| drawings etc
|
| Plenty to hide from basically everyone.
| robswc wrote:
| Perfect rebuttal, imo. Everyone has something to hide. It
| doesn't mean you're actively committing crimes... those who say
| they don't care the NSA are reading everything they write lack
| imagination, imo.
| gcanyon wrote:
| It seems pretty inevitable we're headed toward a reality where
| there is no privacy. As one example, people are concerned about
| face recognition, but researchers have had success identifying
| people simply by their gait when they walk. As machine learning
| becomes more powerful, more and more of what we do will be
| exposed even if we close off the most obvious sources of
| information.
|
| If the above is true, then the choice isn't between privacy and
| not-privacy; it's between fake-privacy where some people know All
| The Things but others don't, and openness.
|
| It will be painful to get used to (depending on how fast the
| transition is) but I'd choose openness.
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| There's the recent story about a man texting pictures of his
| son's infected <groin area> to his wife and doctor, then Google
| deletes his account and won't give it back. Oh, and the local law
| enforcement had a case on him about it. Tell me what evil this
| man did to deserve what happened.
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/21/technology/google-surveil...
|
| He had nothing illegal to hide, but got screwed anyway. Privacy
| would have been useful in this situation, wouldn't it?
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| Privacy would help here but more importantly these big
| companies need to provide a way to fix errors. Seems once you
| get caught by one of the filters you get suspended and are
| offered no path to clarify the situation.
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| Not really. You can't 'fix' an error that you've reported to
| the cops. That's kind of on a criminal record at that point.
| This man could have been suspended by the government, and he
| would have had to clarify the situation to a judge. Granted,
| the judge would be infinitely more receptive to arguments
| than Google, but it shouldn't have to come to that.
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| " You can't 'fix' an error that you've reported to the
| cops. That's kind of on a criminal record at that point. "
|
| If the legal system works you can "fix" an error with the
| cops. It's not like Google reporting something will
| automatically go on your criminal record. Once the legal
| system also starts using AI and automated systems to
| convict people without further explanation then we are in
| serious trouble.
| raxxorraxor wrote:
| These companies should not police pictures in the first
| place. The user should have privacy from these corporations
| as well. This is not a vehicle to fight crime. If it becomes
| that criminals will quickly find out and switch channels and
| you are left with false allegations.
| titzer wrote:
| Catching child predators is _always_ the tip of the sword
| in the advancing frontier of surveillance.
|
| It _just so happens_ that it 's a cover for outsourcing and
| scaling up the intelligence apparatus's ability to track
| everyone, everywhere, all the time. Just in case they do
| something _really bad_ like steal state secrets or try to
| blow the whistle on a crime committed by a powerful person.
| It 's always about cover stories for the state's
| unrelenting paranoia.
| FpUser wrote:
| This whole talk is utterly useless. We as a society in most part
| have accepted multiple 24x7 electronic spies in our lives. It is
| only a matter of time until governments will start prosecuting us
| en masse using the results of always on surveillance.
| ramtatatam wrote:
| Problems related to privacy are making wider circles, more
| people who would normally not care are being made aware and
| this is changing the society on scale which is hard to imagine.
|
| > It is only a matter of time until governments will start
| prosecuting us en masse using the results of always on
| surveillance.
|
| I know many who chose not to opt in to technical means allowing
| surveillance, and I come from the country where people were
| historically going very far to protect their freedom, including
| ending up in torture room... we have this in our blood. Many
| will simply stop using or even owning devices mandated by
| government, even if the price is very high.
| DharmaPolice wrote:
| While I do know that people do literally say "I have nothing to
| hide" this still feels like a strawman as I'm not sure how many
| people are seriously putting that forward in debates. Most people
| have something to hide.
|
| I find privacy advocates tend to put things in a needlessly
| binary state when really this is a matter of risk assessment. I
| have plenty to hide, and I've confessed to various crimes in
| emails that I've saved on Google's servers. So yes, at some point
| in the future the government could piece that information
| together and come arrest me. That could happen. But how likely is
| it?
|
| Similarly, with location history - yes, Google could be
| compromised and they could sell this information. Yes, it does
| mean that people (in this scenario) could piece together my
| schedule and work out the best time to burgle my home but any
| routine I have is (or was) me going into the office at about 8
| and coming home at about 6. What my job is available via LinkedIn
| and is a matter of public record anyway. My name and address is
| on the electoral roll. Since I have almost nothing worth
| stealing, this sophisticated criminal operation would be going to
| a fair amount of effort for questionable benefit.
|
| The analogy with speech doesn't fit for me - it feels much more
| like that other American passion - self-defence. I could
| definitely boost the defences of my home - traps and
| strategically located knives and so on. I could master several
| martial arts in case I am attacked on the street. But that's all
| more effort than I can be bothered with. That doesn't mean I
| leave my front door wide open but a secure front door (that I
| close and lock) is enough at home and some basic awareness is
| enough on the street. Likewise, I don't tell everyone I meet my
| passwords or bank details but yes, I let Amazon save my payment
| details because the risks seem acceptable.
| teddyh wrote:
| Bruce Schneier put it quite succinctly in his article _The
| Eternal Value of Privacy_ (from 2006):
|
| _Some clever answers: "If I 'm not doing anything wrong, then
| you have no cause to watch me." "Because the government gets to
| define what's wrong, and they keep changing the definition."
| "Because you might do something wrong with my information." My
| problem with quips like these - as right as they are - is that
| they accept the premise that privacy is about hiding a wrong.
| It's not._
|
| -- https://www.wired.com/2006/05/the-eternal-value-of-privacy/
| nonethewiser wrote:
| I agree 100% with the conclusion but I don't think this one is
| a good argument (although it sounds clever).
|
| > "If I'm not doing anything wrong, then you have no cause to
| watch me."
|
| Because they couldn't know you're not doing anything wrong
| unless they watch you. Not doing anything wrong does not get
| rid of their "need" to watch.
| thunkshift1 wrote:
| + 1
| butterNaN wrote:
| I feel Apple has succeeded in marketing themselves as somehow
| more private. They are worse than even android, IMHO.
|
| They fight for your data like a lion fights for a deer.
|
| Anyone thinking apple has no advertising prospects is deluding
| themselves.
|
| Advertising is a curse on humanity.
| 62728494929 wrote:
| Worse than Android for privacy? A simple GDPR data request
| shows Android is FAR worse. If you disable tracking on Google,
| the user experience is severely limited, while it's not on iOS,
| as the services is build around less data collection.
|
| Besides that, iOS E2E encrypt a lot more like health data,
| browsing history, maps data, HomeKit data etc.
| [deleted]
| raxxorraxor wrote:
| Sometimes having a strong competitor has an advantage. It
| becomes a team game on who is worse and the question if both
| are terrible doesn't get the focus it might need.
| amatecha wrote:
| The author should update this post to describe about abortion
| stuff in US. Perfect example of how data privacy (or lack
| thereof) is a literal direct risk to individuals.
| RunSet wrote:
| "If you have nothing to hide you have no need for privacy."
|
| "If I have nothing to hide you have no need to violate my
| privacy."
| dayvid wrote:
| Zero-privacy is revolutionary if it applies to everyone. If it's
| privacy for me and not for you, then it's BAU power dynamics.
| deadcore wrote:
| The thing which always irks me about the "I have nothing to hide"
| comment is would you behave the same if you were being observed.
| The conversations we all have in the pub, in the car and even in
| the privacy of our home - would they be the same knowing there is
| a camera or audio device listening.
|
| May just be my tin foil hat speaking, but I believe a lot of
| things would change knowing you're always being listened to even
| when you think it's just two people in the room
| krono wrote:
| My standard response to "I have nothing to hide" is "then why
| are you wearing clothes?". It seems to work relatively well to
| put things into the exact perspective you describe.
| [deleted]
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| Society seems to have largely accepted those airport nudie
| scanners though...
| vlod wrote:
| There is a choice to not go through them and get a 'pat-
| down'.
| pg_bot wrote:
| My response is to "I have nothing to hide", is that isn't
| what you're giving up when you give away your privacy. You
| should be comfortable with "never needing to hide anything in
| your past, present, or future". The future is impossible to
| predict and actions that could be innocuous today may cause a
| great deal of trouble for you in the future. You give up that
| right forever when you lose privacy.
| JimmieMcnulty wrote:
| That's a silly response, as clothes aren't worn for "hiding",
| but for the negative social consequences of the alternative.
|
| Ignoring the role social taboo plays in that interaction
| isn't intellectually honest.
| fineIllregister wrote:
| Social taboo is a reason we hide things. We know there are
| social taboos against many things that are harmless, like
| nudity, so we conceal them. I feel it's a pretty good
| analogy.
| the_af wrote:
| I disagree. A lot of what people would "hide" are in fact
| equivalent to "clothes" worn because of social norms or
| taboos.
|
| A comment I make to a friend sitting next to me would be
| inappropriate to make to the policeman in the corner, or to
| my boss. Inappropriate to the point of there being
| consequences.
| Arrath wrote:
| 100%. I have group chats with friends where we express
| views that would be viewed askance, to put it lightly, by
| those that don't share the same opinions. Something to
| hide? Not particularly, but its private discussion so
| fuck off thank you kindly.
| Bakary wrote:
| Well there can be multiple reasons. Think of those
| overweight kids who wear shirts at the pool.
| jedberg wrote:
| > but for the negative social consequences of the
| alternative
|
| You mean like hiding your bank balance because the social
| consequences of people seeing it? Or hiding your medical
| records because of the social consequences of people seeing
| it?
| [deleted]
| treis wrote:
| That's a sword that cuts both ways though. Probably a lot less
| likely to diddle a kid or beat your wife if it's on camera.
| Silverback_VII wrote:
| I believe there is a much more powerful control mechanism than
| recording devices. It's in your own brain created by years of
| socialization and there is no way to hide form it, no thought
| without it. Some may call it conscience but I think may of its
| parts are simply surveillance software. It's why most people
| unconsciously signal it to others when they lie or have done
| some socially unacceptable things. It can even lower your own
| self-esteem. That is to say that it has real power.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| mgraczyk wrote:
| IMO this is just a bad counterargument. I do in fact have nothing
| to hide and it's not worth it for me to worry about very unlikely
| potential changes in geopolitics 10+ years from now. I know how
| companies like Facebook and Google use data, I know how the US
| government uses data. I'm fine with it, I have nothing to hide
| FROM THEM.
|
| The probability of something bad happening to me is low and the
| expected value I get from sharing data is high. It's a perfectly
| reasonable preference and I'm pretty well informed about the
| history of oppressive governments and the current state of data
| usage.
|
| Personally I would never pretend to lick somebody's food. However
| I've don't equally bad shit and left a paper trail online, but I
| trust both Google and the government with that data. It's
| possible in 10+ years it could be used against me, but so
| unlikely that it doesn't offset the benefits I receive from
| freely sharing data.
| EliRivers wrote:
| I have a lot to hide.
|
| I want to hide what sandwich I had for lunch. I want to hide what
| book I'm reading at the moment. I want to hide what my favourite
| mug is.
|
| I want to hide lots of things about my life that are legal and
| socially completely acceptable.
|
| Why do I want to hide these legal and socially acceptable
| activities? That's also something I choose not to divulge.
|
| Should I be allowed to hide these things?
| nyxtom wrote:
| Privacy is inherently also a security problem - the more
| identifying information a company has on me, the more vulnerable
| I am to being targeted (well intention or not). In a world where
| data breaches are pretty frequent, I'd say less is is preferred.
| anonym29 wrote:
| When you use a stall in a public restroom, do you close the stall
| door or leave it open?
|
| Everyone knows what you are doing. You aren't doing anything
| immoral or unethical. But you want (and deserve) privacy anyway.
| DubiousPusher wrote:
| If you have nothing to hide, you just be rather dull. I don't
| mean that only unlawful behavior is fun but if you've never had a
| thought or written something you would rather not share I can't
| imagine how either passive or manipulable you must be.
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| I think the discussion around privacy is too often framed in a
| defensive manner. Instead, I think the conversation should be
| reframed as a matter of a right to know. In other words, the
| burden of proof is not on those whose information is being
| sought, but those who seek that information about others or from
| others. If you want to know something, you must have a
| justification for knowing. The presumption is in favor of
| privacy. Furthermore, consent alone is not enough to justify
| seeking or sharing some kinds of information. (This should be
| read in a common sense way. I am not proposing a society of
| antisocial and hostile loners terrified to have a conversation
| with anyone.)
|
| Take medical information. Who has a right to know that you have
| cancer? Depression? A spouse, the parent of a young child are
| entitled to health information as a general principle because of
| the nature of those relationships. But is Google, some guy at
| Google, your grocer, some colleague entitled? No. However, a
| criminal case may require obtaining such information and so the
| state may have a legitimate, conditional, and very selective
| claim to that kind of information in certain circumstances.
|
| Privacy is necessary for human beings to flourish, at least in
| this life. As a practical matter, knowing something about someone
| can impede the good of both the person about whom something is
| known as well as the knower. It can negatively affect human
| relationships. Knowing the boundaries does require sound
| prudential judgement, of course, which is why if you're unsure,
| it can help to ask yourself what the justification for inquiring
| or disclosing is in a given situation. (Gossips are people who
| lack this sort of prudence and suffer from intemperate
| curiosity.)
| amatecha wrote:
| I totally agree. I [knowingly] divulge personal information
| only when I choose to, and protest pretty vocally when
| information I don't feel like divulging is requested or
| "required". You can imagine the scathing feedback I gave to the
| _legally-mandated_ federal census I got subjected to last year.
| It asked stuff like my religious beliefs, gender identity,
| stuff that honestly the government has zero business even
| asking me, let alone knowing.
| stakkur wrote:
| A: "I have nothing to hide!"
|
| B: "Then stop wearing clothes."
|
| A: "That's stupid, it's against the law to run around naked in
| public!"
|
| B: "So what if we had privacy laws like that?"
|
| A: "That's stupid, I have nothing to hide!"
| kkfx wrote:
| I have nothing to hide BUT I need to know from others what they
| know from me to remain in a balance of power situation.
|
| SO if Alphabet know what I'm doing I need to know equally what
| they are doing. In this case I have nothing to hide. If they know
| much about me and me nothing about them, then I have much to
| hide.
|
| Knowledge is power. Power need to be balanced to be in peace.
| M2Ys4U wrote:
| Privacy is all about having _agency_ over information about one
| 's life.
|
| Unless there is some clear and genuine overriding interest, I
| should be the one to decide whether or not, to whom, when, and
| how that information is disclosed.
|
| That doesn't mean I am necessarily opposed to any piece of
| information being disclosed (i.e. I have nothing to hide), but
| these decisions shouldn't be made for me.
| EncomLab wrote:
| "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest
| of men, I will find something in them which will hang him." -
| Cardinal Richelieu
|
| Nothing has really changed since.
| robswc wrote:
| Forget who said it but it was something like "show me the man
| and I'll find the crime." I never _really_ understood that
| quote until after high school.
| WATTRE wrote:
| Hapos
| hinkley wrote:
| The argument I always make is that people who think they don't
| care about privacy probably don't want everyone to know what they
| bought at the drugstore. Does everyone need to know you have
| hemorrhoids? And if you're not a nudist you were on pretty shaky
| ground to begin with.
|
| For me I knew people who had been harassed or stalked. Stalking
| is much worse when they know where you are all the time, and I
| don't buy the argument that knowing where the stalker is
| (symmetric information) works because the two people have
| different values.
| TedShiller wrote:
| Laws change. Do you want your data out there knowing that?
| shadowgovt wrote:
| The major challenge to developing a robust philosophical model of
| privacy protection isn't the possible worst-case scenario. It's
| how to weigh the trade-offs of the worst case scenario versus the
| benefits of the average case scenario. Because when one is in the
| loop, i.e. when data aggregation is working in one's favor, the
| benefits are strong and direct.
|
| Modern high quality spam filtering is based on big data analysis
| of what spam looks like. Modern voice recognition is based off of
| millions of samples of queries in real world scenarios. Much of
| the power of the modern internet comes from the ability to
| aggregate data from distributed sources, centralize it, analyze
| it, and act on analysis, and those capacities aren't limited to
| the corporations doing the aggregation.
|
| So the question becomes not whether one values privacy or not. It
| becomes how one values privacy relative to the other things one
| values... Cheap hotel rooms, information on neighborhoods, public
| and private accountability, the time it will take to cure cancer.
| All of these benefit from data aggregation and centralization.
|
| One should consider worst case scenarios, but stopping at that
| consideration is like deciding not to invent the airplane because
| somebody could crash it into a building some day.
| scarface74 wrote:
| Yes and Apple has publicly available papers about how they use
| big data and still ensure users privacy.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| In the short run, shifting from Google to Apple is probably
| the best of both worlds: Apple can provide those Big Data
| benefits without the data landing in Google's warehouse.
|
| (In the long run, of course, if the set of Apple users
| approaches "everyone" the risk model shifts considerably and
| simply becomes, not unlike Google, "How much do you trust
| Apple isn't just lying to you?" Google also publishes various
| documents on how they protect user privacy, for example
| https://www.google.com/chrome/privacy/whitepaper.html... The
| issue they encounter is people just don't believe them).
| scarface74 wrote:
| It's not about trusting that Google is telling the truth. I
| believe Google is telling the truth. You know that they are
| collecting your data to advertise to you and the only way
| they can do that is by having access to your unencrypted
| data.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Surprisingly, they've actually solved the issue of
| keeping the data secure while using it for advertising
| (at least for display ads). The secret is
| compartmentalization, which is one of the reasons your
| web client makes so many damn calls to render a page
| these days.
|
| I can't find a paper describing the whole process right
| now, but the broad-strokes flow as it was once described
| to me is
|
| - a third-party site resolves who you are based on their
| knowledge of you.
|
| - they send a cookie representing your interests (but
| anonymized) to Google, where it's collated with similar
| interest data to figure out what kind of ad someone with
| your interests should see (but the system doesn't know
| who you are; you're just "someone with some interests").
| So yes, individual sites track your interests on those
| sites, but they don't hand that data raw to Google; it's
| valuable to them and (this is key) _on this dimension,
| Google is a competitor in the ad space_. These companies
| don 't want to hand Google raw user / interest
| correlation data because _they_ don 't trust Google not
| to roll it into better advertising products. Your privacy
| is, ironically, protected by third-party corporate
| paranoia.
|
| - nonces representing the ads that should be displayed
| are generated and bounced to the third-party, where
| they're routed to your client as the data your client
| should fetch
|
| - your client gets the list of ads to display from the
| third party's display ads integration, then makes the
| request for ads from the ads server with the relevant
| nonce
|
| The third party can't learn more about you because they
| don't see what ads you got, and Google doesn't know _you_
| got those ads; only that someone with a profile like the
| one the third party sent you got those ads. The only
| place in the world enough information is consolidated to
| deanonymize you is on your client.
|
| (Hypothetically, Google could do a timing attack on its
| own nonce-generator + ad server on a low-traffic site to
| make an educated guess if they also had your browsing
| history, but they basically pinky-swear they don't
| correlate the signal that way and it's warehoused in
| different places; someone trying to do that correlation
| would raise red flags because it threatens the privacy
| guarantees Google relies upon).
| scarface74 wrote:
| I don't know whether to be impressed about the design or
| saddened because of the inefficiency and latency of
| loading a web page because of the design.
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