24 ms·

Why privacy is important, and having “nothing to hide” is irrelevant

697 points by synesso 11y ago

exodust 11y ago
Very good, but it's funny how on the "why IPVanish" page he links to, the first reason given for using a VPN is, to watch Netflix from any location! Oh the horror of limited localised Netflix content. We must protect ourselves. (Really it is awful, I use a VPN for that purpose too). But the point is, it doesn't seem popular to hide metadata from ISPs with VPNs. Will it ever be popular? I'm not so sure. For good or bad, I'm suggesting most people don't care that their IPs are recorded. Email content is not seen, nor what I type into this comment form. Also, when I send an email to my friend "laserpants@something.com", sure the data captures the send-to email address. But the data doesn't know who laserpants actually is, nor does the email content get saved. I'm not saying laserpants can't be found if the law decides to investigate, but I doubt it's a matter of pressing a button to bring up the real name of laserpants. Especially if laserpants uses different email addresses and a shared internet.
- tdyen 11y ago
  I think Snowden showed that it is as easy as pressing a button which is why he went and blurted it out. The NSA were also working to make it easier to track people. My take on it is privacy is dead or nearly and we have to have good legal protections of who can use what data and when. The privacy arms race will mostly be won by big government with lots of resources and enough willing/foolish patriots (Depending on your point of view).
  - cm2187 11y ago
    I agree. And the logical next step is that there will be inevitably abuses, that some of the victims of these abuses will ultimately access power, and that we will have proper privacy protection after that, like we do for regular mail or like we do for your physical home. It is just a shame that we have to go through the whole cycle given that we just know it should happen. But in a way, the more extensive the surveillance is, the quicker this cycle will happen. And right now we are in a pretty bad place already. So let's be optimistic!
- ohthehugemanate 11y ago
  But the problem is, it IS easy. Even anonymized at assets are de-anonymized trivially,using secondary datasets. You can uniquely identify more than 87% of the US population with gender, birthday, and zip code. For more than 50%, you can use the municipality name instead of zip. If your friend uses a separate, privately maintained email address for everyone and every service, that will help a lot. Then we only know his identity because email is sent in the clear, even between his own server and home computer. Of course, everyone uses separate email addresses for everyone, right?
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 11y ago
  Who cares about a "real name"? A "real name" doesn't tell you anything about a person. Or at least nearly nothing. It's an arbitrary label. If I know how much money you spend on what, which other people you communicate with, how often, and at which times, I know way more about you than if I knew just your name. And I don't need to know your name to recognize you by your cookies. Or your email address. Or your IP address. If you regularly send emails back and forth with a specific doctor, I have a pretty good idea which condition you have. If you regularly call a specific company at specific times, I have a pretty good idea that you work there. ... Also, private surveillance is not about "finding you", but about influencing groups of people. For business purposes. Or maybe for political purposes. If I know that you are likely to be receptive to a specific kind of emotional message, I don't care what your birth certificate says, I care about how to get that message onto your screen in front of your eyes. And finally, as other have mentioned: Yes, it is a matter of pressing a button. That is the essence of what Snowden revealed, if you will.
deleted 11y ago
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Laaw 11y ago
I have two unrelated thoughts. "Chilling effect" has always been a profound term for me, because I imagine the "cold" (numbness really) sensation a human body often senses when something truly awful (disembowlment/dismemberment) occurs. The body's way of protecting itself is to go "cold", and in many ways that's exactly the effect taking place here, as well. There's also an undeniable part of this conversation that rarely gets addressed simultaneously, and I'd like to see it sussed out more in concert; what about the folks who are doing Evil in these private channels? It's unacceptable to me that TOR gets used for child pornography, and it's unacceptable to me that my government finds out I'm gay before I come out to my family. I don't want to provide those who would do Evil any safety or quarter. I also want to give people a powerful shield to protect themselves against judgement and persecution from the public and sometimes the law. We should talk about achieving both of these goals, but we generally don't.
- vezzy-fnord 11y ago
  what about the folks who are doing Evil in these private channels? Evil is agnostic of location. Your question is of no significance. You might as well be perturbed over "Evil" people living in houses or eating food. Unsurprisingly, evil people are people and will tend towards the same activities people generally engage in.
  - Laaw 11y ago
    Yours is a defeatist attitude, I think, and there is plenty of evidence that Evil can be stopped/averted in many cases. It's beyond obvious that there is no complete solution for Evil, but if you keep ignoring this question/problem, then people will continue to pick the "no Evil/no privacy" option over your "Evil/privacy" alternative, which is ultimately devastating to everyone. We need to talk about how to create "no Evil/privacy", or at least how to approach something of that kind, even if an absolute version doesn't exist.
    - vezzy-fnord 11y ago
      I'm really curious what you think evil is since you keep capitalizing and speaking of it as some spiritual essence that can be eradicated. You have not established the slightest bit of an operational definition, and resort to pathologizing neutral transmission channels as hosts of "Evil". This is a complete non-starter and not worthwhile to deliberate. "Evil uses Tor" is as useful as "Evil uses paper".
x5n1 11y ago
Privacy is less important than the ability to trust your government won't do blatantly illegal things like put innocent people behind bars, steal their money or property, when they actually know that they are innocent. The biggest problem with America is that the government can not be trusted to follow the rules, their own rules. I don't live in the US, but the stuff the government whether local, state, or federal gets away with is very scary to me. What scares me even more is how the United States encroaches on everyone else's legal system. That's the underlying problem. Under such governments that are actually out to get people at times without much cause breaking all sorts of rules, that's what's scary. The type of soft totalitarianism that exists and passes as common place is very scary. And that's really the people you should be scared of, and that's who you really want to protect your information from. Your run of the mill government that's actually trying to do a good job and not break its own rules, that sort of government like my government, scares me a lot less. Despite the fact that they encroach on my privacy. I know heads are going to roll if it comes out that they do things that are blatantly wrong or abusive with the information that they are collecting. Not so in the US. They always have a half-ass lie that still somehow passes muster.
- opo 11y ago
  >...The biggest problem with America is that the government can not be trusted to follow the rules, their own rules. Isn't that the problem with all governments? Like they say "Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty”
  - robmcm 11y ago
    Governments are also made up of individuals.
- marcosdumay 11y ago
  You can never completely trust your government won't abuse its power. Privacy is a necessary tool for opposing those abuses of power and organizing a change.
Mendenhall 11y ago
Many would trade their privacy for what they think is safety.
- andersonvom 11y ago
  Many have done things that were common place in the past and are not anymore; or are plain illegal; or were found to be wrong. Sustaining something just because many people still do it doesn't really seem reasonable.
- baddox 11y ago
  And they're more than welcome to trade their own privacy, although I think it's unwise. The trouble is when they trade my privacy.
blitzprog 11y ago
"This affects all of us. We must care." is not an effective way of convincing someone. I personally do not care about privacy. I see no reason why I should. It's just my opinion. I know other people do but please don't generalize.
- dsacco 11y ago
  I think your opinion is valid and should be fairly represented, but consider that your reasons for not caring about privacy may be flawed or inconsistent. Assuming that you don't care about privacy because you're apathetic, do you also not care about free speech because you don't say anything controversial? Do you care about your right to assembly even if you don't protest anything? As an extreme example upon which to build a baseline, would you mind if a neighbor had unmitigated access to watching you lounge in your underwear, take a shower or have sex? Why do you not care about privacy? Do you feel that you don't need it because you have nothing to hide, or are you willing to sacrifice it for some greater good (e.g. terrorism etc.)? Are you merely indifferent or do you aggressively oppose the concept?
  - blitzprog 11y ago
    First of all thank you for respecting my opinion. I appreciate it. 1.) Free speech is a completely different topic. Snowden's quote on this page makes no sense to me no matter how often I re-read it. If free speech didn't exist I wouldn't be able to express my opinion about privacy :) 2.) Privacy means hiding the truth. Hiding what really happened. Hiding who you really are. I believe it is a flaw of the human personality that makes us want to hide information and eventually lie about it. I don't care if Google or the government knows that I'm searching "[insert embarassing keywords for you here]" or if Facebook knows my location, or if Twitter knows what I like based on the people I follow. Who is the government? It's people. People like you and me. If people decide to make assumptions based on data they collected and the assumptions aren't correct it's their own fault for assuming something in the first place (because...you know...it's an assumption...it can be wrong). I am not aggressively opposing the concept of privacy. I respect other people's opinion.
jkonowitch 11y ago
This issue always boils down to the LOTR argument for me: the surveillance power is too great, and no individual or group can or should be trusted with it, regardless of its actual current or potential future benefits. The crux of the debate then is where to draw the line between safe and unsafe amounts of power?
- enraged_camel 11y ago
  It's not the amount of power that makes it unsafe, but rather its nature. In order for it to be safe: 1. It must be granted through democratic means. 2. It must be under strict oversight by an independently elected or appointed group that's free from both private conflict of interest and popular pressure. 3. There must be reliable mechanisms to quickly and efficiently strip said power away from the authority if they are determined to have used it irresponsibly.
  - fweespeech 11y ago
    #2 doesn't happen with US democracy now at any level. It also inherently contradicts #1.
- rhino369 11y ago
  One fact that mitigates the risk of large scale abuse by government is that the power to surveil is easily gained by a bad faith government. Bush administration is a good example. They just did warrant-less wiretapping. It wasn't hard or particularly expensive. No public debate. And that was a government that more or less followed the rule of law. Imagine one that no longer follows the rule of law. You don't even need an apparatus. Just send an FBI analyst to pick up Sundar Pichai and Zuckerberg. Have the companies run queries on their own database. Our government already has the power to mass murder. Obama can order entire continents destroyed. The air force can drop a JDAM on any house in America. The police can arrest any political enemy of the state. The government already has immense power. Comparatively the sort of privacy issues we are talking about are smaller powers. And like I argued above, they are easy to acquire. Any government willing to abuse the power of surveillance would be willing to flaunt the law to create a surveillance program overnight (well not literally, but they could do it in months). I'm not arguing that there is no downside to surveillance power, just that it's not as dangerous as many make it out to be. For example, there is still risk in official abuse by government employees acting rouge. There is risk of data leaks. And smaller scale abuses that can be covered up or that the public wouldn't care about. But I think the fear that we shouldn't give the government power to surveil because they might go full nazi/communist/theocracic/etc. is silly.
SFjulie1 11y ago
Wishing privacy on the internet is like wishing no turmoil while shagging during a massive religious events of paranoid gunned puritans. If privacy is such a problem for some it is not a technological problem, it is a political problem. If so, people concerned should make their revolution in an appropriate place: the real world, and let internet stay a public media. PS noticed another fun topic there are blacklisted keywords on HN, like F words. Isn't censorship more concerning than privacy on a media? And funnily enough all the "lite" censorship nowadays are first about sex and gross words. Are sex and slang that dangerous?
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- SFjulie1 11y ago
  made a test, strong words have been erased in the past in one of my comment, but it was not an automated blacklist
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 11y ago
  > Wishing privacy on the internet is like wishing no turmoil while shagging during a massive religious events of paranoid gunned puritans. Why do you think that? > If privacy is such a problem for some it is not a technological problem, it is a political problem. Why do you think that? > If so, people concerned should make their revolution in an appropriate place: the real world, and let internet stay a public media. The internet is the real world. Also, who wants to make the internet a non-public media?
  - SFjulie1 11y ago
    Because main manufacturers of equipment are also from paranoid puritans country ? (Huawey, Cisco, juniper, alcatel, nortel, ericson ...) And that it make MITM easy for agencies since government heavily subsidise telecoms maybe? ($$ for a backdoor) And since Internet is globally like a very fast Gutenberg press, it has the same property as printed paper: privacy is not a problem of the media, but of the institutions/organizations trying to control it. It is controled by law or force. Law/force comes from/is backed by government, so if you don't have privacy then complain to your government for his actions (or lack of). Sum up: privacy is not an internet problem (media). It is a problem between the citizens and their governments (use of media). Had you opened a good history book you should know it. And also in the same books you should discover that the concern for privacy has already existed before internet : the more governments are authoritative the more they both tend to love secrecy for themselves and hate public debate for the others and want to control media. Control of media by the government do not always align with the public's best interests. DMCA, patents, IP laws, "censorship for the protection of the kids" ? Does it ring a bell? Google who wants you to read only sites that have nice ads so they filter out as non relevant some information. Want to overthrow your government in the shadow? commit a crime? Sext your gf? I don't care about these usage and consider them accessory. They divert people from real problems like accessing the information vehicled by the media. By the way, they make very nice tinfoil hats nowadays. There are successful crowdfundings for it. Ho, and internet is the real world? Ah ah ah. As much as "war and peace" is the real world.
raminf 11y ago
The issue with the 'nothing to hide' argument is that it puts the burden of proof and determination of whether something is 'hide-worthy' on the target of the inquiry. If you subscribe to the 'presumed innocent' premise of the law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presumption_of_innocence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presumption_of_innocence) then the burden of proof is on the inquisitor. Either you believe in presumed innocence or you don't. Pick one.
- mverwijs 11y ago
  My respons to the 'nothing to hide' argument is: "Why are you so scared of things that are hidden?" That puts them on the defensive. Since now they have to justify their fear for the unknown. And then we're onto the real topic: fear.
  - Casseres 11y ago
    Someone who pushes the "nothing to hide" argument probably wouldn't understand the implication of your response. I suggest a different approach: say "Okay, in that case what prescriptions are you taking, how much money do you have in your bank account, and how often do you have sex? After all, you have nothing to hide right?" That also puts them on the defensive side of the argument.
    - m1sta_ 11y ago
      Are those really sensitive questions for most people?
      - Casseres 11y ago
        For some people, no. I tried to cover several different bases, but you get the idea: ask sensitive personal questions. Maybe the money one should be about credit card debt.
logicallee 11y ago
meh, I want to have my cake and eat it too. (I'm not making fun of someone, this is actually how I feel, and there is some tension between requirements.) I don't want any surveillance whatsoever, I want to just be able to do whatever I want, jeez. To live freely. I shouldn't even think about being watched. At the same time, take something like the Dell database that was just stolen, and criminals starting to do their criminal crimes. Then I want courts to be able to flip a switch and say, you know what, if you're brazenly stealing a private company's database and calling its customers trying to defraud them, at some point there is some probable cause to make you stop doing that or figure out who you are. You're not just going to stay anonymous behind a skype number while you're defrauding people halfway across the world. Also I don't want some bitcoin asshole to pay off an old soviet general and get a nuclear bomb, just because they think it would be a fun troll to blow up a major city, trololo. These aren't theoretical concerns - ransomware, kidnapping, all these yucky things that civilized societies don't have, all happen absent rule of law. There's a reason there wasn't a period in the Constitution (specifically the fourth amendment) after the words "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects shall not be violated." (Extra points for what is there.) Even absent an anonymous Internet, way back in the eighteenth century, there were limits on privacy. Think of it like an operating system - a good kernel isn't reading my memory contents and slowing me down, but if I start performing illegal operations I might very well get shut down :) It's not an easy line to find. Also, I don't want tens of thousands of people employed doing this crap. It's a minimal thing we need to live safely and sanely, not some fun snooping. Frankly I don't see why humans even need to be involved, until crimes start getting committed and the courts are trying to figure out why or where.
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 11y ago
  > Then I want courts to be able to flip a switch But you also don't want anyone else to flip the switch, or it being flipped for any other purpose. That might just be impossible. So you might be better of without the switch. > You're not just going to stay anonymous behind a skype number while you're defrauding people halfway across the world. Also, for this problem, as for many others, there are many possible solutions that don't involve surveillance. > Also I don't want some bitcoin asshole to pay off an old soviet general and get a nuclear bomb, just because they think it would be a fun troll to blow up a major city, trololo. So, you would prefer them to use USD cash instead, then? > These aren't theoretical concerns - ransomware, kidnapping, all these yucky things that civilized societies don't have, all happen absent rule of law. Except they very much do happen in "civilized societies". And sometimes with the help of the powers of authorities. > It's not an easy line to find. No. But it's quite easy to see that the direction we are heading is completely at the wrong end of the spectrum. > a good kernel isn't reading my memory contents and slowing me down, but if I start performing illegal operations I might very well get shut down :) Which is very much the opposite of mass surveillance. > Frankly I don't see why humans even need to be involved, Humans who see the potential of the collected data will get involved. People who want to abuse power don't usually wait until someone gives them permission to.
Pharaoh2 11y ago
Personally I really think that encryption is a matter of second amendment and in the day of knowledge and communication the right to bear encryption should fall under the second amendment. Hell, the US even classifies encryption as a munition. We should be using the same argument for encryption that we are using for the right to own guns and form militias. I wonder if the encryption will be recognized as a right under the second amendment by the court if it goes to that.
- ploxiln 11y ago
  meh - the second amendment isn't very popular these days, and outside the US (well of course it doesn't apply but additionally) people really don't seem to appreciate it
tobbyb 11y ago
I think the tech crowd is in denial about their role in surveillance. We expect professionals to behave ethically. Doctors and companies working on genetics and cloning for instance are expected to behave ethically and have constraints placed on their work. And with consequences for those behaving unethically. Yet we have millions of software engineers working on building a surveillance society with no sense of ethics, constraints or consequences. What we have instead are anachronistic discussions on things like privacy that seem oddly disconnected from 300 years of accumulated wisdom on surveillance, privacy, free speech and liberty to pretend the obvious is not obvious, and delay the need for ethical behavior and introspection. And this from a group of people who have routinely postured extreme zeal for freedom and liberty since the early 90's and produced one Snowden. That's a pretty bad record by any standards, and indicates the urgent need for self reflection, industry bodies, standards, whistle blower protection and for a wider discussion to insert context, ethics and history into the debate. The point about privacy is not you, no one cares what you are doing so an individual perspective here has zero value, but building the infrastructure and ability to track what everyone in a society is doing, and preempt any threat to entrenched interests and status quo. An individual may not need or value privacy but a healthy society definitely needs it.
- Sir_Substance 11y ago
  I'm inclined to agree. I'd like to see more active ostracisation against software developers that have worked for organisations like the NSA and GCHQ. If we can make it a career ending job, it will dramatically reduce their ability to recruit. However, I'd also like to see general software development think more closely about the role it has in normalising these things. Next time you start to create an account system for your project, ask yourself whether you really need it. Could you engineer around it, perhaps by letting the user store their data, or using a stored key to identify them? Let's go beyond don't store what you can't protect, and aim for don't store what you don't strictly need.
  - rhino369 11y ago
    How is Google or Facebook any better? They are spy agencies for advertising purposes instead of national security. Or companies that deploy ad sense or otherwise depend on companies like Google or Facebook.
hellofunk 11y ago
The definition of "privacy" very much differs significantly among different generations and cultures. Compare the Dutch to the Americans, or anyone over 35 with anyone in their teens or early 20s. There is a smaller overlap in what they all consider "private" than you'd at first think.
kmonad 11y ago
Whenever I read one of these articles I am wondering why the examples of WHY mass surveillance affects ME as average Joe negatively have to be so weak / contrived: For example, imagine someone convinced by the argument "nothing to hide nothing to fear". Would this example convince them that in fact they do have to fear something? "You might think twice about contacting or meeting people (exercising your freedom of association) who you think might become “persons of interest” to the state". I do not think so, after all, average Joe does not know such people. The solution, in my experience when talking to sceptical people not convinced of the risks is talking about money. Imagine someone with the kind of knowledge we are talking about with mass surveillance. And imagine this person could inform your insurance companies. Do you still think that you have nothing to hide? One then must only show that data is never "safe" and could always be "leaked" to make a very simple, everyday example of why it is not in my (average Joe's) interest to be continuously monitored.
- robmcm 11y ago
  Ask to read through someone's bank statement, look at their photo library, access their medical history or read all their messages. I doubt anyone would be comfortable with someone doing that. Another good example is the use of shredders at home, perhaps you should suggest people leave their sensitive data in a box on the pavement outside rather than shredding it.
  - EliRivers 11y ago
    I generally tell such people that I'll come round to their house next week to install the webcams in their bedroom. No need to wait for me; I'll just let myself in.
- karmacondon 11y ago
  Still not convincing, at least not to me and many of the people that I know. I'm pretty sure my insurance company has already calculated my premiums based on my demographics and claim history. I made not have told them "I have more than five drinks almost every weekend", but they know. They were making inferences from Big Data since back when it was just "data". And practically, I don't think most insurance companies have an infrastructure set up for handling snitching, especially not the smaller ones. I'm really still waiting to hear a convincing argument as to why I have something to hide, ideally something practical as opposed to hypothetical or philosophical.
hasukimchi 11y ago
I really like the phrase "I have nothing to hide, so I don't care about privacy" is equivalent to "I have nothing to say, so I don't care about freedom of speech" .
ck2 11y ago
The problem is people who have never been on the wrong side of an encounter with law enforcement have no clue about why all these "super tools and powers" given to police, TSA, FBI etc. are so incredibly dangerous. They just watch the news and get fear-mongered into thinking, oh we better arm the hell out our "protectors". Usually the first experience with abuse by police is enough to wake people up but if they are white and middle-class, such an encounter may take years to happen.
sreejithr 11y ago
Don't mix misuse of private information and privacy. All the "chilling effects" listed here are implications of misuse of private information. On the other hand, in a world where we have weapons which can single handedly wipe out whole civilizations, we need to make sure it doesn't get used by some lunatic. From that angle, a tight security apparatus (which may include surveillance), is necessary for our survival. I think we should think more about how we can prevent the "misuse" of private information than preventing surveillance completely.
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 11y ago
  Well, yeah, how can we prevent misuse of private information other than by keeping it out of the hands of those who might abuse it? It's simple: You have to create a perfect test that can tell good people from bad people, and then build a police force that only hires good people. The fact is that there are people in this world who are willing to hurt other people for their own advantage. You cannot fix that by giving huge amounts of power to some more or less random selection of the general population. There is no silver bullet, and trying to construct one nonetheless tends to end badly.
elrodeo 11y ago
There are very few topics where I just cannot get the point of the discussion among smart people, but this is one of them. Look at the real world NOW, 15 years after all the surveillance. You still can explode bombs and kill people middle in a european capital without any encryption at all. Is this the kind of surveillance you are afraid of? If you want to hide something, there are infinitely many ways to do this. No surveillance can (or ever will) read the one time pad encrypted communication. So you have (and always will have) your freedom and capabilities to hide — what's your problem? Arguments like "well then show me your bank account" are just plain stupid: I have no interest in sharing this information with my work colleagues, my neighbours or my friends just because it would have implications in some social aspects (it's not about security!). But his information is only sensitive in context of a personality. I'd neither have problem to show anything to a random stranger nor would I be interested myself in this information coming from a random stranger. If somebody uses my information in an unethical way, it is not the problem of a surveillance, but that it's possible at all. Exposing my personal data to a government during an investigation could also protect me by verifying my alibi. We have nothing to hide, right? The comparison with free speech is ridiculous. Free speech is the opposite of hiding and doesn't imply breaking the law. Hiding implies playing by other rules, than commonly established. Free speech is important because eventually I might have something to say. But no one would ever agree that he or she will have something to hide eventually (without getting criminal). So I'm still missing the point...
- robmcm 11y ago
  Yes because you assume the people who are collecting your data are ethical, secure and will always share your opinions and beliefs. Say your bank account information was stolen and someone used it to blackmail you because as you said it would have, "implications in some social aspects". Say the country you live in converted to a religion you are not part of or want to be any part of. Imagine if they had a record of your beliefs and used it as a handy tool in mass genocide. Say someone working for the government or a start up was jealous of something you had, and used their access to take your information in order to discredit you. Say you medical information was sold by a fitness start up that went bust and sold to insurance companies to bump your premium.
mattlutze 11y ago
I forget why now, but I was reading this article[0] by Moxie Marlinspike, from 2013, just a few days ago. Interesting how the same argument can take so long to take hold, and how long some truths need to be told before they gain the traction needed to make a change. 0: http://www.wired.com/2013/06/why-i-have-nothing-to-hide-is-the-wrong-way-to-think-about-surveillance/ http://www.wired.com/2013/06/why-i-have-nothing-to-hide-is-t...
rplnt 11y ago
This is an interesting post on the topic from reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/1fv4r6/i_believe_the_government_should_be_allowed_to/cd89cqr https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/1fv4r6/i_beli...
- dopu 11y ago
  That was incredible to read. Thanks for linking to it.
- uptown 11y ago
  The thread under that comment just serves to reinforce the OP's point.
bitL 11y ago
It pains me to see that power-hungry people used most techies as useful idiots to implement their own goals - how many politicians with dirty hands are now getting on board of prime tech companies? They finally understood what technology can offer to them. It seems like the end game is who is going to control everything - those types can finally see the time when technology is sufficiently advanced to control every aspect of our lives. It seems like technology would enable a special caste above law, with power unlike anyone before them. Instead of using technology to improve living conditions of all, establishing new, unseen before, more democratic and free society, we seem to be hell bent on preserving all the nasty traits of previous societies and even doubling down on them by having almost complete control. Seems like some dystopian sci-fi novel is happening now :-(
- marcosdumay 11y ago
  I'm always suspicious of that specific dystopy. It's not that they aren't trying, or that we are not letting them. The problem is that technology is very "stubborn", "subordinating" only to those it chooses to, and those are always almost impossible to predict. No elite was ever successful on that kind of coup.
miguelrochefort 11y ago
Why don't privacy proponents don't go all in and just ask to get rid of the Internet? Surely, privacy is easier to maintain when communication is inefficient. Perhaps that's because privacy is actually an archaic and backward idea that maintains all of our problems alive. I can't think of a less progressive (more conservative) idea than privacy. The next most important revolution in human history will be our transition to a completely transparent society.
- m1sta_ 11y ago
  How do we get to a completely transparent society without massive collateral damage? I understand the rationale for the goal but the transition is so very difficult. I wish more thought was being put into it.
  - miguelrochefort 11y ago
    My only concern at the moment is to get people to realize that privacy is not good. Only when people understand that our goal is transparency can we come up with a strategy to make the switch. Considering that we need to get to a transparent society, contributions to the privacy movement only ensures that the transition will be even more difficult and violent.
    - maxerickson 11y ago
      Have you written anywhere about how you arrived at such a radical position? (I mean radical in the traditional sense, not as a slur)
      - miguelrochefort 11y ago
        I don't see how it's radical. It's the only logical conclusion. Many people have written about this. I haven't read a single convincing argument in favor of privacy as anything other than a defensive measure.
        11y ago
amelius 11y ago
Don't trust someone who says "I have nothing to hide". And certainly don't trust them with your secrets!
blfr 11y ago
This is correct but appeals to freedom of speech/expression and association won't work. People don't believe in these any more if they ever did. They're being paid lip service at most. Both professional and amateur politicians are taking notice. "We support freedom of expression, however" there's always something more important: safety, inclusivity, respect, diversity, civility... We have dozens of examples, in the west, with hate speech laws, discrimination laws, mobs organizing online over some tweet, employers firing people because of offhand remarks, even opensource projects being assaulted over unrelated comments made by contributors.
enginn 11y ago
"Our digital lives are an accurate reflection of our actual lives" Which of course presumes we have a digital life, and which of course has been proven repeatedly to not be the case. It is also not accurate. Take data warehousing companies who are profiling home IP addresses and hoovering up any digital breadcrumbs people leave behind, like user agent strings, length of time spent on a page, any previous cookies stored locally on the machine: an enormous store of value for anyone who decides to purchase such information, except for the fact that it has no value. The 'info' exists without any context, and could even be poisoned by a small portion of users who decide to stuff the system full of disinformation to control market share or lobby for certain products. Also - IPV4 addresses (now more than ever) can be attributed to several hundred people because ISPs grant a subnet to multiple customers. This is not saying everything's fine and our digital doppel is a fuzzy haze of nonsense. But it does say that privacy advocates are apt to overestimate how accurate such information is, and that the people who buy such information are finding out this too and have probably decided to pay more to other collection points to get a finer-grained doppel of some person. I say let them spend more, but I will cry tears of joy when I find that money has been ill spent too and doesn't accurately portray a person digitally.
bitL 11y ago
"I have nothing to hide, and what I am keeping private is encrypted by a quantum- and $5-wrench-method-resistant encryption."
bitL 11y ago
Is there any polymorphic encryption toolkit that could enable a custom encryption method tailored for your own use? Kinda like security by obscurity for encrypting your own important files by deviating from the established standard encryption schemes in order to overwhelm capabilities of Mallory's/Trudy's reverse engineering?
blaze33 11y ago
If you are interested in this topic, I highly recommend you read Tradition of Freedom by Bernanos (original title in French: La France contre les robots). Written in 1944, there is a specific passage where he argues against this "but I have nothing to hide!" argument, only criminals benefits from hiding, right ? He talks about how a simple citizen who never had trouble with the law should stay perfectly free to conceal his identity whenever he likes for whatever reason, and laments how this very idea already died. The extract is available online [1] in French, the google translation [2] is not that good. [1] http://www.books.fr/quand-bernanos-predisait-une-societe-sous-surveillance/ http://www.books.fr/quand-bernanos-predisait-une-societe-sou... [2] https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=auto&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.books.fr%2Fquand-bernanos-predisait-une-societe-sous-surveillance%2F https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=auto&tl=en&u...
erikb 11y ago
There are so many unproven ideas and theses in the first (argumenting) sentence alone. Maybe privacy is a right granted by someone. But do I need to fight for all rights? Can I not trade some for some others? E.g. I don't want to live in a completely free market, becaues in a completely free market thiefs and bullies always win. In our real life markets at least they need a lawyer's license first, which stops some of them from succeeding. Does it really underpin freedom of expression? Is complete freedom of expression something that is worth fighting for, something people want? Look at something where expression is nearly completely free: Clothes. Most people tend to wear what other people wear. Free society. What is that? Why do I need it? Democratic society. Doesn't the current global development show that democracy is failing us? Every system comes to an end, and democracy certainly is behind the top of the hill. I stopped reading after that sentence. If a blog post doesn't even think about the nuances of what they are talking about, there won't be much content anyways. Just a little side note: I was in China three times now. Many people consider China very unfree, very undemocratic. But I see people there having more hope, more optimism and more opportunity to develop their dreams than we have in the west. And mobile internet is developing bigger and faster there than anywhere else, despite having nearly everything run via one mobile, government observed app: Wechat. In some regards I wonder if it is really "despite" government control or "because".
yuhong 11y ago
My goal is more modest, to fix the problems with posting using real names if possible (and not by using real name policies).
ozim 11y ago
Thing is that everyone have things to hide. I think there should be extensive list of what you have to hide and reasons why. I would start with two: -salary : thieves, kidnappers (do you really trust that everyone in law enforcement is trustworthy they can cooperate with thieves) check your contract, you might get even fired because you leaked your salary, and it is your duty to keep it secret and explaining that some hacker did that does not matter -contacts : maybe someone will be stalking your friend and he might get access to your friend because you were hacked. You also should not share your friends mails and numbers without their consent. They might be at least angry at you because you shared their contact info. ------------------ Maybe you guys have better or more ideas. But nothing to hide applies to hermit on top of the mountain. If someone thinks otherwise he is an as*le because he does not think about people around him.
edpichler 11y ago
This read changed my mind. Even I don't have nothing to hide, I need to care about my privacy.
bcg1 11y ago
A tragicomedic irony of course is that most "nothing to hide" advocates demand secrecy and legal cover for their own actions. This sort of doublethink leads to things like a "Freedom of Information Act" in the US that provides a legal framework for concealing information that should otherwise be out in the open. If you apply the "nothing to hide" principle to states' own actions, I can think of two possible conclusions: 1) It is not true that if you have done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide (i.e., there is a legitimate right to privacy) 2) State actors have something to hide, so they must be doing something wrong.
CurtMonash 11y ago
Bravo! I've been making the chilling effects argument for several years: http://www.dbms2.com/2013/07/08/privacy-data-use-chilling-effects/ http://www.dbms2.com/2013/07/08/privacy-data-use-chilling-ef... http://www.dbms2.com/2013/07/29/very-chilling-effects/ http://www.dbms2.com/2013/07/29/very-chilling-effects/ http://www.dbms2.com/2015/06/14/chilling-effects-revisited/ http://www.dbms2.com/2015/06/14/chilling-effects-revisited/ This article makes it with reasonable, appropriate breadth.
danielam 11y ago
The reasons given are largely consequentialist. There are deeper philosophical reasons why privacy is important in this context. The essential reason it is important concerns the proper relationship between the individual and the state. Surveillance and intrusion violate the proper relationship and establish an improper relationship between the two. In other words, to justify the relation and thus intrusion, one hold concepts of state and individual that are anti-individualistic and place the state above the individual. The undesirable effects follow. To borrow Koneczny's terminology, a surveillance state is move away from Latin civilization perhaps towards Byzantine civilization.
bobby_9x 11y ago
In a recent study I read, millenials overwhelminly didn't think that the fredom of speech should be upheld, so why would privacy? Many people have already gotten in trouble or fired all based on private conversations. Most people didn't care about the privacy implacatons, because of personal feelings. I feel like our civilization has gone backwards: online mobs determine guilt and the ends justify the means.
chevas 11y ago
It's government that has something to hide and it's them I don't trust, which is why privacy is important. I wouldn't want government searching my home on a whim and neither my digital content because they're the ones with the track record of planting evidence, seizing assets, and perpetuating falsehoods for their agendas.
zero1954 11y ago
What an irony that the link is missing the "s".
ternbot 11y ago
Truth prevails; it is not mass surveillance but mass data manipulation we must be concerned about now.
secfirstmd 11y ago
(Apologies for the blatant plug) On this subject, if anyone is interested, we just launched a free, open source, Android mobile app to help people manage the complex issues of digital and physical security. It's got simple lessons on everything from sending a secure mail to dealing with a kidnap. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.secfirst.umbrella https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.secfirst.u...
mirimir 11y ago
OK, so now David Chaum is proposing PrivaTegrity.[0] It's "meant to be both more secure than existing online anonymity systems like Tor or I2P and also more efficient". But it includes a "carefully controlled backdoor that allows anyone doing something 'generally recognized as evil' to have their anonymity and privacy stripped altogether". Just exactly how the bloody hell can a backdoored design be styled as more secure than Tor and I2P? There's no fool like an old fool, as they say. Sad :( [0] http://www.wired.com/2016/01/david-chaum-father-of-online-anonymity-plan-to-end-the-crypto-wars/ http://www.wired.com/2016/01/david-chaum-father-of-online-an...
rubberstamp 11y ago
People of the U.S lost it because they allowed this to happen by "not caring about it". And the whole privatized everything is bollocks. See what the costs of "health care", "college education" and most importantly "how the cops" have become. Health care and education has to be free if the people in the society is to remain intelligent. Even by the scale of economics, providing with good health care for free would cost much less that what it currently costs. The police is severely lacking accountability that it much needs. Read the original article linked in here. Think about it.

697 points by synesso 11y ago

Very good, but it's funny how on the "why IPVanish" page he links to, the first reason given for using a VPN is, to watch Netflix from any location! Oh the horror of limited localised Netflix content. We must protect ourselves. (Really it is awful, I use a VPN for that purpose too). But the point is, it doesn't seem popular to hide metadata from ISPs with VPNs. Will it ever be popular? I'm not so sure. For good or bad, I'm suggesting most people don't care that their IPs are recorded. Email content is not seen, nor what I type into this comment form. Also, when I send an email to my friend "laserpants@something.com", sure the data captures the send-to email address. But the data doesn't know who laserpants actually is, nor does the email content get saved. I'm not saying laserpants can't be found if the law decides to investigate, but I doubt it's a matter of pressing a button to bring up the real name of laserpants. Especially if laserpants uses different email addresses and a shared internet.

tdyen 11y ago
I think Snowden showed that it is as easy as pressing a button which is why he went and blurted it out. The NSA were also working to make it easier to track people. My take on it is privacy is dead or nearly and we have to have good legal protections of who can use what data and when. The privacy arms race will mostly be won by big government with lots of resources and enough willing/foolish patriots (Depending on your point of view).
- cm2187 11y ago
  I agree. And the logical next step is that there will be inevitably abuses, that some of the victims of these abuses will ultimately access power, and that we will have proper privacy protection after that, like we do for regular mail or like we do for your physical home. It is just a shame that we have to go through the whole cycle given that we just know it should happen. But in a way, the more extensive the surveillance is, the quicker this cycle will happen. And right now we are in a pretty bad place already. So let's be optimistic!
ohthehugemanate 11y ago
But the problem is, it IS easy. Even anonymized at assets are de-anonymized trivially,using secondary datasets. You can uniquely identify more than 87% of the US population with gender, birthday, and zip code. For more than 50%, you can use the municipality name instead of zip. If your friend uses a separate, privately maintained email address for everyone and every service, that will help a lot. Then we only know his identity because email is sent in the clear, even between his own server and home computer. Of course, everyone uses separate email addresses for everyone, right?
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 11y ago
Who cares about a "real name"? A "real name" doesn't tell you anything about a person. Or at least nearly nothing. It's an arbitrary label. If I know how much money you spend on what, which other people you communicate with, how often, and at which times, I know way more about you than if I knew just your name. And I don't need to know your name to recognize you by your cookies. Or your email address. Or your IP address. If you regularly send emails back and forth with a specific doctor, I have a pretty good idea which condition you have. If you regularly call a specific company at specific times, I have a pretty good idea that you work there. ... Also, private surveillance is not about "finding you", but about influencing groups of people. For business purposes. Or maybe for political purposes. If I know that you are likely to be receptive to a specific kind of emotional message, I don't care what your birth certificate says, I care about how to get that message onto your screen in front of your eyes. And finally, as other have mentioned: Yes, it is a matter of pressing a button. That is the essence of what Snowden revealed, if you will.

deleted 11y ago

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Laaw 11y ago

I have two unrelated thoughts. "Chilling effect" has always been a profound term for me, because I imagine the "cold" (numbness really) sensation a human body often senses when something truly awful (disembowlment/dismemberment) occurs. The body's way of protecting itself is to go "cold", and in many ways that's exactly the effect taking place here, as well. There's also an undeniable part of this conversation that rarely gets addressed simultaneously, and I'd like to see it sussed out more in concert; what about the folks who are doing Evil in these private channels? It's unacceptable to me that TOR gets used for child pornography, and it's unacceptable to me that my government finds out I'm gay before I come out to my family. I don't want to provide those who would do Evil any safety or quarter. I also want to give people a powerful shield to protect themselves against judgement and persecution from the public and sometimes the law. We should talk about achieving both of these goals, but we generally don't.

vezzy-fnord 11y ago
what about the folks who are doing Evil in these private channels? Evil is agnostic of location. Your question is of no significance. You might as well be perturbed over "Evil" people living in houses or eating food. Unsurprisingly, evil people are people and will tend towards the same activities people generally engage in.
- Laaw 11y ago
  Yours is a defeatist attitude, I think, and there is plenty of evidence that Evil can be stopped/averted in many cases. It's beyond obvious that there is no complete solution for Evil, but if you keep ignoring this question/problem, then people will continue to pick the "no Evil/no privacy" option over your "Evil/privacy" alternative, which is ultimately devastating to everyone. We need to talk about how to create "no Evil/privacy", or at least how to approach something of that kind, even if an absolute version doesn't exist.
  - vezzy-fnord 11y ago
    I'm really curious what you think evil is since you keep capitalizing and speaking of it as some spiritual essence that can be eradicated. You have not established the slightest bit of an operational definition, and resort to pathologizing neutral transmission channels as hosts of "Evil". This is a complete non-starter and not worthwhile to deliberate. "Evil uses Tor" is as useful as "Evil uses paper".

x5n1 11y ago

Privacy is less important than the ability to trust your government won't do blatantly illegal things like put innocent people behind bars, steal their money or property, when they actually know that they are innocent. The biggest problem with America is that the government can not be trusted to follow the rules, their own rules. I don't live in the US, but the stuff the government whether local, state, or federal gets away with is very scary to me. What scares me even more is how the United States encroaches on everyone else's legal system. That's the underlying problem. Under such governments that are actually out to get people at times without much cause breaking all sorts of rules, that's what's scary. The type of soft totalitarianism that exists and passes as common place is very scary. And that's really the people you should be scared of, and that's who you really want to protect your information from. Your run of the mill government that's actually trying to do a good job and not break its own rules, that sort of government like my government, scares me a lot less. Despite the fact that they encroach on my privacy. I know heads are going to roll if it comes out that they do things that are blatantly wrong or abusive with the information that they are collecting. Not so in the US. They always have a half-ass lie that still somehow passes muster.

opo 11y ago
>...The biggest problem with America is that the government can not be trusted to follow the rules, their own rules. Isn't that the problem with all governments? Like they say "Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty”
- robmcm 11y ago
  Governments are also made up of individuals.
marcosdumay 11y ago
You can never completely trust your government won't abuse its power. Privacy is a necessary tool for opposing those abuses of power and organizing a change.

Mendenhall 11y ago

Many would trade their privacy for what they think is safety.

andersonvom 11y ago
Many have done things that were common place in the past and are not anymore; or are plain illegal; or were found to be wrong. Sustaining something just because many people still do it doesn't really seem reasonable.
baddox 11y ago
And they're more than welcome to trade their own privacy, although I think it's unwise. The trouble is when they trade my privacy.

blitzprog 11y ago

"This affects all of us. We must care." is not an effective way of convincing someone. I personally do not care about privacy. I see no reason why I should. It's just my opinion. I know other people do but please don't generalize.

dsacco 11y ago
I think your opinion is valid and should be fairly represented, but consider that your reasons for not caring about privacy may be flawed or inconsistent. Assuming that you don't care about privacy because you're apathetic, do you also not care about free speech because you don't say anything controversial? Do you care about your right to assembly even if you don't protest anything? As an extreme example upon which to build a baseline, would you mind if a neighbor had unmitigated access to watching you lounge in your underwear, take a shower or have sex? Why do you not care about privacy? Do you feel that you don't need it because you have nothing to hide, or are you willing to sacrifice it for some greater good (e.g. terrorism etc.)? Are you merely indifferent or do you aggressively oppose the concept?
- blitzprog 11y ago
  First of all thank you for respecting my opinion. I appreciate it. 1.) Free speech is a completely different topic. Snowden's quote on this page makes no sense to me no matter how often I re-read it. If free speech didn't exist I wouldn't be able to express my opinion about privacy :) 2.) Privacy means hiding the truth. Hiding what really happened. Hiding who you really are. I believe it is a flaw of the human personality that makes us want to hide information and eventually lie about it. I don't care if Google or the government knows that I'm searching "[insert embarassing keywords for you here]" or if Facebook knows my location, or if Twitter knows what I like based on the people I follow. Who is the government? It's people. People like you and me. If people decide to make assumptions based on data they collected and the assumptions aren't correct it's their own fault for assuming something in the first place (because...you know...it's an assumption...it can be wrong). I am not aggressively opposing the concept of privacy. I respect other people's opinion.

jkonowitch 11y ago

This issue always boils down to the LOTR argument for me: the surveillance power is too great, and no individual or group can or should be trusted with it, regardless of its actual current or potential future benefits. The crux of the debate then is where to draw the line between safe and unsafe amounts of power?

enraged_camel 11y ago
It's not the amount of power that makes it unsafe, but rather its nature. In order for it to be safe: 1. It must be granted through democratic means. 2. It must be under strict oversight by an independently elected or appointed group that's free from both private conflict of interest and popular pressure. 3. There must be reliable mechanisms to quickly and efficiently strip said power away from the authority if they are determined to have used it irresponsibly.
- fweespeech 11y ago
  #2 doesn't happen with US democracy now at any level. It also inherently contradicts #1.
rhino369 11y ago
One fact that mitigates the risk of large scale abuse by government is that the power to surveil is easily gained by a bad faith government. Bush administration is a good example. They just did warrant-less wiretapping. It wasn't hard or particularly expensive. No public debate. And that was a government that more or less followed the rule of law. Imagine one that no longer follows the rule of law. You don't even need an apparatus. Just send an FBI analyst to pick up Sundar Pichai and Zuckerberg. Have the companies run queries on their own database. Our government already has the power to mass murder. Obama can order entire continents destroyed. The air force can drop a JDAM on any house in America. The police can arrest any political enemy of the state. The government already has immense power. Comparatively the sort of privacy issues we are talking about are smaller powers. And like I argued above, they are easy to acquire. Any government willing to abuse the power of surveillance would be willing to flaunt the law to create a surveillance program overnight (well not literally, but they could do it in months). I'm not arguing that there is no downside to surveillance power, just that it's not as dangerous as many make it out to be. For example, there is still risk in official abuse by government employees acting rouge. There is risk of data leaks. And smaller scale abuses that can be covered up or that the public wouldn't care about. But I think the fear that we shouldn't give the government power to surveil because they might go full nazi/communist/theocracic/etc. is silly.

SFjulie1 11y ago

Wishing privacy on the internet is like wishing no turmoil while shagging during a massive religious events of paranoid gunned puritans. If privacy is such a problem for some it is not a technological problem, it is a political problem. If so, people concerned should make their revolution in an appropriate place: the real world, and let internet stay a public media. PS noticed another fun topic there are blacklisted keywords on HN, like F words. Isn't censorship more concerning than privacy on a media? And funnily enough all the "lite" censorship nowadays are first about sex and gross words. Are sex and slang that dangerous?

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
SFjulie1 11y ago
made a test, strong words have been erased in the past in one of my comment, but it was not an automated blacklist
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 11y ago
> Wishing privacy on the internet is like wishing no turmoil while shagging during a massive religious events of paranoid gunned puritans. Why do you think that? > If privacy is such a problem for some it is not a technological problem, it is a political problem. Why do you think that? > If so, people concerned should make their revolution in an appropriate place: the real world, and let internet stay a public media. The internet is the real world. Also, who wants to make the internet a non-public media?
- SFjulie1 11y ago
  Because main manufacturers of equipment are also from paranoid puritans country ? (Huawey, Cisco, juniper, alcatel, nortel, ericson ...) And that it make MITM easy for agencies since government heavily subsidise telecoms maybe? ($$ for a backdoor) And since Internet is globally like a very fast Gutenberg press, it has the same property as printed paper: privacy is not a problem of the media, but of the institutions/organizations trying to control it. It is controled by law or force. Law/force comes from/is backed by government, so if you don't have privacy then complain to your government for his actions (or lack of). Sum up: privacy is not an internet problem (media). It is a problem between the citizens and their governments (use of media). Had you opened a good history book you should know it. And also in the same books you should discover that the concern for privacy has already existed before internet : the more governments are authoritative the more they both tend to love secrecy for themselves and hate public debate for the others and want to control media. Control of media by the government do not always align with the public's best interests. DMCA, patents, IP laws, "censorship for the protection of the kids" ? Does it ring a bell? Google who wants you to read only sites that have nice ads so they filter out as non relevant some information. Want to overthrow your government in the shadow? commit a crime? Sext your gf? I don't care about these usage and consider them accessory. They divert people from real problems like accessing the information vehicled by the media. By the way, they make very nice tinfoil hats nowadays. There are successful crowdfundings for it. Ho, and internet is the real world? Ah ah ah. As much as "war and peace" is the real world.

raminf 11y ago

The issue with the 'nothing to hide' argument is that it puts the burden of proof and determination of whether something is 'hide-worthy' on the target of the inquiry. If you subscribe to the 'presumed innocent' premise of the law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presumption_of_innocence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presumption_of_innocence) then the burden of proof is on the inquisitor. Either you believe in presumed innocence or you don't. Pick one.

mverwijs 11y ago
My respons to the 'nothing to hide' argument is: "Why are you so scared of things that are hidden?" That puts them on the defensive. Since now they have to justify their fear for the unknown. And then we're onto the real topic: fear.
- Casseres 11y ago
  Someone who pushes the "nothing to hide" argument probably wouldn't understand the implication of your response. I suggest a different approach: say "Okay, in that case what prescriptions are you taking, how much money do you have in your bank account, and how often do you have sex? After all, you have nothing to hide right?" That also puts them on the defensive side of the argument.
  - m1sta_ 11y ago
    Are those really sensitive questions for most people?
    - Casseres 11y ago
      For some people, no. I tried to cover several different bases, but you get the idea: ask sensitive personal questions. Maybe the money one should be about credit card debt.

logicallee 11y ago

meh, I want to have my cake and eat it too. (I'm not making fun of someone, this is actually how I feel, and there is some tension between requirements.) I don't want any surveillance whatsoever, I want to just be able to do whatever I want, jeez. To live freely. I shouldn't even think about being watched. At the same time, take something like the Dell database that was just stolen, and criminals starting to do their criminal crimes. Then I want courts to be able to flip a switch and say, you know what, if you're brazenly stealing a private company's database and calling its customers trying to defraud them, at some point there is some probable cause to make you stop doing that or figure out who you are. You're not just going to stay anonymous behind a skype number while you're defrauding people halfway across the world. Also I don't want some bitcoin asshole to pay off an old soviet general and get a nuclear bomb, just because they think it would be a fun troll to blow up a major city, trololo. These aren't theoretical concerns - ransomware, kidnapping, all these yucky things that civilized societies don't have, all happen absent rule of law. There's a reason there wasn't a period in the Constitution (specifically the fourth amendment) after the words "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects shall not be violated." (Extra points for what is there.) Even absent an anonymous Internet, way back in the eighteenth century, there were limits on privacy. Think of it like an operating system - a good kernel isn't reading my memory contents and slowing me down, but if I start performing illegal operations I might very well get shut down :) It's not an easy line to find. Also, I don't want tens of thousands of people employed doing this crap. It's a minimal thing we need to live safely and sanely, not some fun snooping. Frankly I don't see why humans even need to be involved, until crimes start getting committed and the courts are trying to figure out why or where.

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 11y ago
> Then I want courts to be able to flip a switch But you also don't want anyone else to flip the switch, or it being flipped for any other purpose. That might just be impossible. So you might be better of without the switch. > You're not just going to stay anonymous behind a skype number while you're defrauding people halfway across the world. Also, for this problem, as for many others, there are many possible solutions that don't involve surveillance. > Also I don't want some bitcoin asshole to pay off an old soviet general and get a nuclear bomb, just because they think it would be a fun troll to blow up a major city, trololo. So, you would prefer them to use USD cash instead, then? > These aren't theoretical concerns - ransomware, kidnapping, all these yucky things that civilized societies don't have, all happen absent rule of law. Except they very much do happen in "civilized societies". And sometimes with the help of the powers of authorities. > It's not an easy line to find. No. But it's quite easy to see that the direction we are heading is completely at the wrong end of the spectrum. > a good kernel isn't reading my memory contents and slowing me down, but if I start performing illegal operations I might very well get shut down :) Which is very much the opposite of mass surveillance. > Frankly I don't see why humans even need to be involved, Humans who see the potential of the collected data will get involved. People who want to abuse power don't usually wait until someone gives them permission to.

Pharaoh2 11y ago

Personally I really think that encryption is a matter of second amendment and in the day of knowledge and communication the right to bear encryption should fall under the second amendment. Hell, the US even classifies encryption as a munition. We should be using the same argument for encryption that we are using for the right to own guns and form militias. I wonder if the encryption will be recognized as a right under the second amendment by the court if it goes to that.

ploxiln 11y ago
meh - the second amendment isn't very popular these days, and outside the US (well of course it doesn't apply but additionally) people really don't seem to appreciate it

tobbyb 11y ago

I think the tech crowd is in denial about their role in surveillance. We expect professionals to behave ethically. Doctors and companies working on genetics and cloning for instance are expected to behave ethically and have constraints placed on their work. And with consequences for those behaving unethically. Yet we have millions of software engineers working on building a surveillance society with no sense of ethics, constraints or consequences. What we have instead are anachronistic discussions on things like privacy that seem oddly disconnected from 300 years of accumulated wisdom on surveillance, privacy, free speech and liberty to pretend the obvious is not obvious, and delay the need for ethical behavior and introspection. And this from a group of people who have routinely postured extreme zeal for freedom and liberty since the early 90's and produced one Snowden. That's a pretty bad record by any standards, and indicates the urgent need for self reflection, industry bodies, standards, whistle blower protection and for a wider discussion to insert context, ethics and history into the debate. The point about privacy is not you, no one cares what you are doing so an individual perspective here has zero value, but building the infrastructure and ability to track what everyone in a society is doing, and preempt any threat to entrenched interests and status quo. An individual may not need or value privacy but a healthy society definitely needs it.

Sir_Substance 11y ago
I'm inclined to agree. I'd like to see more active ostracisation against software developers that have worked for organisations like the NSA and GCHQ. If we can make it a career ending job, it will dramatically reduce their ability to recruit. However, I'd also like to see general software development think more closely about the role it has in normalising these things. Next time you start to create an account system for your project, ask yourself whether you really need it. Could you engineer around it, perhaps by letting the user store their data, or using a stored key to identify them? Let's go beyond don't store what you can't protect, and aim for don't store what you don't strictly need.
- rhino369 11y ago
  How is Google or Facebook any better? They are spy agencies for advertising purposes instead of national security. Or companies that deploy ad sense or otherwise depend on companies like Google or Facebook.

hellofunk 11y ago

The definition of "privacy" very much differs significantly among different generations and cultures. Compare the Dutch to the Americans, or anyone over 35 with anyone in their teens or early 20s. There is a smaller overlap in what they all consider "private" than you'd at first think.

kmonad 11y ago

Whenever I read one of these articles I am wondering why the examples of WHY mass surveillance affects ME as average Joe negatively have to be so weak / contrived: For example, imagine someone convinced by the argument "nothing to hide nothing to fear". Would this example convince them that in fact they do have to fear something? "You might think twice about contacting or meeting people (exercising your freedom of association) who you think might become “persons of interest” to the state". I do not think so, after all, average Joe does not know such people. The solution, in my experience when talking to sceptical people not convinced of the risks is talking about money. Imagine someone with the kind of knowledge we are talking about with mass surveillance. And imagine this person could inform your insurance companies. Do you still think that you have nothing to hide? One then must only show that data is never "safe" and could always be "leaked" to make a very simple, everyday example of why it is not in my (average Joe's) interest to be continuously monitored.

robmcm 11y ago
Ask to read through someone's bank statement, look at their photo library, access their medical history or read all their messages. I doubt anyone would be comfortable with someone doing that. Another good example is the use of shredders at home, perhaps you should suggest people leave their sensitive data in a box on the pavement outside rather than shredding it.
- EliRivers 11y ago
  I generally tell such people that I'll come round to their house next week to install the webcams in their bedroom. No need to wait for me; I'll just let myself in.
karmacondon 11y ago
Still not convincing, at least not to me and many of the people that I know. I'm pretty sure my insurance company has already calculated my premiums based on my demographics and claim history. I made not have told them "I have more than five drinks almost every weekend", but they know. They were making inferences from Big Data since back when it was just "data". And practically, I don't think most insurance companies have an infrastructure set up for handling snitching, especially not the smaller ones. I'm really still waiting to hear a convincing argument as to why I have something to hide, ideally something practical as opposed to hypothetical or philosophical.

hasukimchi 11y ago

I really like the phrase "I have nothing to hide, so I don't care about privacy" is equivalent to "I have nothing to say, so I don't care about freedom of speech" .

ck2 11y ago

The problem is people who have never been on the wrong side of an encounter with law enforcement have no clue about why all these "super tools and powers" given to police, TSA, FBI etc. are so incredibly dangerous. They just watch the news and get fear-mongered into thinking, oh we better arm the hell out our "protectors". Usually the first experience with abuse by police is enough to wake people up but if they are white and middle-class, such an encounter may take years to happen.

sreejithr 11y ago

Don't mix misuse of private information and privacy. All the "chilling effects" listed here are implications of misuse of private information. On the other hand, in a world where we have weapons which can single handedly wipe out whole civilizations, we need to make sure it doesn't get used by some lunatic. From that angle, a tight security apparatus (which may include surveillance), is necessary for our survival. I think we should think more about how we can prevent the "misuse" of private information than preventing surveillance completely.

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 11y ago
Well, yeah, how can we prevent misuse of private information other than by keeping it out of the hands of those who might abuse it? It's simple: You have to create a perfect test that can tell good people from bad people, and then build a police force that only hires good people. The fact is that there are people in this world who are willing to hurt other people for their own advantage. You cannot fix that by giving huge amounts of power to some more or less random selection of the general population. There is no silver bullet, and trying to construct one nonetheless tends to end badly.

elrodeo 11y ago

There are very few topics where I just cannot get the point of the discussion among smart people, but this is one of them. Look at the real world NOW, 15 years after all the surveillance. You still can explode bombs and kill people middle in a european capital without any encryption at all. Is this the kind of surveillance you are afraid of? If you want to hide something, there are infinitely many ways to do this. No surveillance can (or ever will) read the one time pad encrypted communication. So you have (and always will have) your freedom and capabilities to hide — what's your problem? Arguments like "well then show me your bank account" are just plain stupid: I have no interest in sharing this information with my work colleagues, my neighbours or my friends just because it would have implications in some social aspects (it's not about security!). But his information is only sensitive in context of a personality. I'd neither have problem to show anything to a random stranger nor would I be interested myself in this information coming from a random stranger. If somebody uses my information in an unethical way, it is not the problem of a surveillance, but that it's possible at all. Exposing my personal data to a government during an investigation could also protect me by verifying my alibi. We have nothing to hide, right? The comparison with free speech is ridiculous. Free speech is the opposite of hiding and doesn't imply breaking the law. Hiding implies playing by other rules, than commonly established. Free speech is important because eventually I might have something to say. But no one would ever agree that he or she will have something to hide eventually (without getting criminal). So I'm still missing the point...

robmcm 11y ago
Yes because you assume the people who are collecting your data are ethical, secure and will always share your opinions and beliefs. Say your bank account information was stolen and someone used it to blackmail you because as you said it would have, "implications in some social aspects". Say the country you live in converted to a religion you are not part of or want to be any part of. Imagine if they had a record of your beliefs and used it as a handy tool in mass genocide. Say someone working for the government or a start up was jealous of something you had, and used their access to take your information in order to discredit you. Say you medical information was sold by a fitness start up that went bust and sold to insurance companies to bump your premium.

mattlutze 11y ago

I forget why now, but I was reading this article[0] by Moxie Marlinspike, from 2013, just a few days ago. Interesting how the same argument can take so long to take hold, and how long some truths need to be told before they gain the traction needed to make a change. 0: http://www.wired.com/2013/06/why-i-have-nothing-to-hide-is-the-wrong-way-to-think-about-surveillance/ http://www.wired.com/2013/06/why-i-have-nothing-to-hide-is-t...

rplnt 11y ago

This is an interesting post on the topic from reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/1fv4r6/i_believe_the_government_should_be_allowed_to/cd89cqr https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/1fv4r6/i_beli...

dopu 11y ago
That was incredible to read. Thanks for linking to it.
uptown 11y ago
The thread under that comment just serves to reinforce the OP's point.

bitL 11y ago

It pains me to see that power-hungry people used most techies as useful idiots to implement their own goals - how many politicians with dirty hands are now getting on board of prime tech companies? They finally understood what technology can offer to them. It seems like the end game is who is going to control everything - those types can finally see the time when technology is sufficiently advanced to control every aspect of our lives. It seems like technology would enable a special caste above law, with power unlike anyone before them. Instead of using technology to improve living conditions of all, establishing new, unseen before, more democratic and free society, we seem to be hell bent on preserving all the nasty traits of previous societies and even doubling down on them by having almost complete control. Seems like some dystopian sci-fi novel is happening now :-(

marcosdumay 11y ago
I'm always suspicious of that specific dystopy. It's not that they aren't trying, or that we are not letting them. The problem is that technology is very "stubborn", "subordinating" only to those it chooses to, and those are always almost impossible to predict. No elite was ever successful on that kind of coup.

miguelrochefort 11y ago

Why don't privacy proponents don't go all in and just ask to get rid of the Internet? Surely, privacy is easier to maintain when communication is inefficient. Perhaps that's because privacy is actually an archaic and backward idea that maintains all of our problems alive. I can't think of a less progressive (more conservative) idea than privacy. The next most important revolution in human history will be our transition to a completely transparent society.

m1sta_ 11y ago
How do we get to a completely transparent society without massive collateral damage? I understand the rationale for the goal but the transition is so very difficult. I wish more thought was being put into it.
- miguelrochefort 11y ago
  My only concern at the moment is to get people to realize that privacy is not good. Only when people understand that our goal is transparency can we come up with a strategy to make the switch. Considering that we need to get to a transparent society, contributions to the privacy movement only ensures that the transition will be even more difficult and violent.
  - maxerickson 11y ago
    Have you written anywhere about how you arrived at such a radical position? (I mean radical in the traditional sense, not as a slur)
    - miguelrochefort 11y ago
      I don't see how it's radical. It's the only logical conclusion. Many people have written about this. I haven't read a single convincing argument in favor of privacy as anything other than a defensive measure.
      - 11y ago

amelius 11y ago

Don't trust someone who says "I have nothing to hide". And certainly don't trust them with your secrets!

blfr 11y ago

This is correct but appeals to freedom of speech/expression and association won't work. People don't believe in these any more if they ever did. They're being paid lip service at most. Both professional and amateur politicians are taking notice. "We support freedom of expression, however" there's always something more important: safety, inclusivity, respect, diversity, civility... We have dozens of examples, in the west, with hate speech laws, discrimination laws, mobs organizing online over some tweet, employers firing people because of offhand remarks, even opensource projects being assaulted over unrelated comments made by contributors.

enginn 11y ago

"Our digital lives are an accurate reflection of our actual lives" Which of course presumes we have a digital life, and which of course has been proven repeatedly to not be the case. It is also not accurate. Take data warehousing companies who are profiling home IP addresses and hoovering up any digital breadcrumbs people leave behind, like user agent strings, length of time spent on a page, any previous cookies stored locally on the machine: an enormous store of value for anyone who decides to purchase such information, except for the fact that it has no value. The 'info' exists without any context, and could even be poisoned by a small portion of users who decide to stuff the system full of disinformation to control market share or lobby for certain products. Also - IPV4 addresses (now more than ever) can be attributed to several hundred people because ISPs grant a subnet to multiple customers. This is not saying everything's fine and our digital doppel is a fuzzy haze of nonsense. But it does say that privacy advocates are apt to overestimate how accurate such information is, and that the people who buy such information are finding out this too and have probably decided to pay more to other collection points to get a finer-grained doppel of some person. I say let them spend more, but I will cry tears of joy when I find that money has been ill spent too and doesn't accurately portray a person digitally.

bitL 11y ago

"I have nothing to hide, and what I am keeping private is encrypted by a quantum- and $5-wrench-method-resistant encryption."

bitL 11y ago

Is there any polymorphic encryption toolkit that could enable a custom encryption method tailored for your own use? Kinda like security by obscurity for encrypting your own important files by deviating from the established standard encryption schemes in order to overwhelm capabilities of Mallory's/Trudy's reverse engineering?

blaze33 11y ago

If you are interested in this topic, I highly recommend you read Tradition of Freedom by Bernanos (original title in French: La France contre les robots). Written in 1944, there is a specific passage where he argues against this "but I have nothing to hide!" argument, only criminals benefits from hiding, right ? He talks about how a simple citizen who never had trouble with the law should stay perfectly free to conceal his identity whenever he likes for whatever reason, and laments how this very idea already died. The extract is available online [1] in French, the google translation [2] is not that good. [1] http://www.books.fr/quand-bernanos-predisait-une-societe-sous-surveillance/ http://www.books.fr/quand-bernanos-predisait-une-societe-sou... [2] https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=auto&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.books.fr%2Fquand-bernanos-predisait-une-societe-sous-surveillance%2F https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=auto&tl=en&u...

erikb 11y ago

There are so many unproven ideas and theses in the first (argumenting) sentence alone. Maybe privacy is a right granted by someone. But do I need to fight for all rights? Can I not trade some for some others? E.g. I don't want to live in a completely free market, becaues in a completely free market thiefs and bullies always win. In our real life markets at least they need a lawyer's license first, which stops some of them from succeeding. Does it really underpin freedom of expression? Is complete freedom of expression something that is worth fighting for, something people want? Look at something where expression is nearly completely free: Clothes. Most people tend to wear what other people wear. Free society. What is that? Why do I need it? Democratic society. Doesn't the current global development show that democracy is failing us? Every system comes to an end, and democracy certainly is behind the top of the hill. I stopped reading after that sentence. If a blog post doesn't even think about the nuances of what they are talking about, there won't be much content anyways. Just a little side note: I was in China three times now. Many people consider China very unfree, very undemocratic. But I see people there having more hope, more optimism and more opportunity to develop their dreams than we have in the west. And mobile internet is developing bigger and faster there than anywhere else, despite having nearly everything run via one mobile, government observed app: Wechat. In some regards I wonder if it is really "despite" government control or "because".

yuhong 11y ago

My goal is more modest, to fix the problems with posting using real names if possible (and not by using real name policies).

ozim 11y ago

Thing is that everyone have things to hide. I think there should be extensive list of what you have to hide and reasons why. I would start with two: -salary : thieves, kidnappers (do you really trust that everyone in law enforcement is trustworthy they can cooperate with thieves) check your contract, you might get even fired because you leaked your salary, and it is your duty to keep it secret and explaining that some hacker did that does not matter -contacts : maybe someone will be stalking your friend and he might get access to your friend because you were hacked. You also should not share your friends mails and numbers without their consent. They might be at least angry at you because you shared their contact info. ------------------ Maybe you guys have better or more ideas. But nothing to hide applies to hermit on top of the mountain. If someone thinks otherwise he is an as*le because he does not think about people around him.

edpichler 11y ago

This read changed my mind. Even I don't have nothing to hide, I need to care about my privacy.

bcg1 11y ago

A tragicomedic irony of course is that most "nothing to hide" advocates demand secrecy and legal cover for their own actions. This sort of doublethink leads to things like a "Freedom of Information Act" in the US that provides a legal framework for concealing information that should otherwise be out in the open. If you apply the "nothing to hide" principle to states' own actions, I can think of two possible conclusions: 1) It is not true that if you have done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide (i.e., there is a legitimate right to privacy) 2) State actors have something to hide, so they must be doing something wrong.

CurtMonash 11y ago

Bravo! I've been making the chilling effects argument for several years: http://www.dbms2.com/2013/07/08/privacy-data-use-chilling-effects/ http://www.dbms2.com/2013/07/08/privacy-data-use-chilling-ef... http://www.dbms2.com/2013/07/29/very-chilling-effects/ http://www.dbms2.com/2013/07/29/very-chilling-effects/ http://www.dbms2.com/2015/06/14/chilling-effects-revisited/ http://www.dbms2.com/2015/06/14/chilling-effects-revisited/ This article makes it with reasonable, appropriate breadth.

danielam 11y ago

The reasons given are largely consequentialist. There are deeper philosophical reasons why privacy is important in this context. The essential reason it is important concerns the proper relationship between the individual and the state. Surveillance and intrusion violate the proper relationship and establish an improper relationship between the two. In other words, to justify the relation and thus intrusion, one hold concepts of state and individual that are anti-individualistic and place the state above the individual. The undesirable effects follow. To borrow Koneczny's terminology, a surveillance state is move away from Latin civilization perhaps towards Byzantine civilization.

bobby_9x 11y ago

In a recent study I read, millenials overwhelminly didn't think that the fredom of speech should be upheld, so why would privacy? Many people have already gotten in trouble or fired all based on private conversations. Most people didn't care about the privacy implacatons, because of personal feelings. I feel like our civilization has gone backwards: online mobs determine guilt and the ends justify the means.

chevas 11y ago

It's government that has something to hide and it's them I don't trust, which is why privacy is important. I wouldn't want government searching my home on a whim and neither my digital content because they're the ones with the track record of planting evidence, seizing assets, and perpetuating falsehoods for their agendas.

zero1954 11y ago

What an irony that the link is missing the "s".

ternbot 11y ago

Truth prevails; it is not mass surveillance but mass data manipulation we must be concerned about now.

secfirstmd 11y ago

(Apologies for the blatant plug) On this subject, if anyone is interested, we just launched a free, open source, Android mobile app to help people manage the complex issues of digital and physical security. It's got simple lessons on everything from sending a secure mail to dealing with a kidnap. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.secfirst.umbrella https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.secfirst.u...

mirimir 11y ago

OK, so now David Chaum is proposing PrivaTegrity.[0] It's "meant to be both more secure than existing online anonymity systems like Tor or I2P and also more efficient". But it includes a "carefully controlled backdoor that allows anyone doing something 'generally recognized as evil' to have their anonymity and privacy stripped altogether". Just exactly how the bloody hell can a backdoored design be styled as more secure than Tor and I2P? There's no fool like an old fool, as they say. Sad :( [0] http://www.wired.com/2016/01/david-chaum-father-of-online-anonymity-plan-to-end-the-crypto-wars/ http://www.wired.com/2016/01/david-chaum-father-of-online-an...

rubberstamp 11y ago

People of the U.S lost it because they allowed this to happen by "not caring about it". And the whole privatized everything is bollocks. See what the costs of "health care", "college education" and most importantly "how the cops" have become. Health care and education has to be free if the people in the society is to remain intelligent. Even by the scale of economics, providing with good health care for free would cost much less that what it currently costs. The police is severely lacking accountability that it much needs. Read the original article linked in here. Think about it.