8 ms·

I disagree, RMS. For the same reason you've argued that open source is better than closed source, so is transparency better than privacy. What democracy needs

by tslug 10y ago

I disagree, RMS. For the same reason you've argued that open source is better than closed source, so is transparency better than privacy. What democracy needs isn't privacy. Privacy has always been a false value. Privacy is disappearing- period. No amount of gum-flapping, law-making, or attempts to complicate our lives or burn more CPU cycles and create more latency with more layers of security will change that. What democracy needs is respect and tolerance. Specifically, we need: 1. Surveillance being broadcast instead of going to monolithic corporations and governments, 2. To learn to tolerate and respect each others' wishes as to what is done with that surveillance. We're living in a closed system, no different than the International Space Station. No one on the ISS wants privacy. They want sensors covering every God damn millimeter of the space station 24/7, and they want mission control analyzing that data around the clock, so that if there's an issue with atmospheric or hull integrity, they get plenty of warning. What they want in lieu of privacy is respect from each other to be left alone when they want alone time and to not be judged for what they do with their down time. That's respect, which is very different from privacy. Hawking is dead wrong about us needing to get off the planet in 1000 years. What we need is to learn how to live in smaller closed systems, such as underground bunkers, undersea habitats, and sealed buildings, because no matter what planet colonists end up on, that's what they're going to have to do. After we destroy our ecosystem here, it's what we're going to have to do to survive this planet keeping the pollutants and excessive weather and heat on the outside. This is a much more profound psychological challenge than it is a technical one, but we can't make that first step until we come to understand that privacy is not a virtue. Privacy is asymmetric ignorance. It is a cheap hack workaround for what really matters: tolerance and respect.

throwawayIndian 10y ago
One of the foundations of democracy is "secret ballot". If it's possible to algorithmically deduce who you're going to vote for, a tyranny can easily take you down or try to influence* you in ways you shouldn't be. I think you have no idea about what you're taking here. Other option being you benefitting off of surveillance in some form (Don't want to be rude, only addressing the concern.). * We experienced this first hand in the 2016 elections -- which is why it always felt weird to most of us all the time.
- hga 10y ago
  One reason to utterly and totally oppose mail-in and on-line balloting. That non-secret ballots also allow paid and coerced voting are other traditional reasons.
  - throwawayIndian 10y ago
    Absolutely! It is possible to deduce pretty accurately who somebody is going to vote for without even looking at the ballot or peeping into the booth box. All actions people do online like sharing a newspiece on their Facebook walls, likes or dislikes, chats, mails, texts, add up to something that makes the person -- and that information is quite valuable.
  - Frondo 10y ago
    Oregon has had vote-by-mail for years and it's been nothing but a positive thing. Their turnout is consistently higher than the national average. There are simply no issues around access to voting (like long lines at polling places, people who can't get time off work, etc), because every registered voter gets a ballot and a couple of weeks to fill it in. The claims and fears around voter fraud have been studied, and have been found to be entirely without basis in reality. Voter fraud and coercion simply hasn't been an issue in a vote-by-mail state. It's also a lot of fun to take part in voting parties, where you get to hash out the issues with your friends and fill in your ballot as you do so.
    - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 10y ago
      You are aware that there are countries that manage to run elections on sundays and with sufficient polling places to not have any lines to speak of at all? That might be too advanced a technology for the US, but, unbelievable as it may sound, countries like that do indeed exist!
      - Frondo 10y ago
        Well, good for them, but why should I have to go anywhere? What's the point? From experience, I enjoyed vote-by-mail for years, and I can tell you it's a huge step backwards to have to go somewhere again to vote.
EliRivers 10y ago
Hello. I am human and I live on this planet and I want privacy, and I want my democracy to come with privacy. You do not speak for me. What happens now? Should I and others like me be rounded up for re-education? Privacy is one of the things that helps prevent the horrible failure state of democracy; two wolves voting to eat the sheep for dinner. My comment above expresses exactly the kind of fear non-conformists have in zero privacy democracies.
- tslug 10y ago
  Let's start with your mistaken premise. You don't actually have privacy, and you won't be getting it back. Just by analyzing how you worded your public post, which post you responded to, and the time you posted it, entities you have no awareness of are already learning more about you than you can imagine, and they're using big data techniques to mine that and lots of other sources of data in order to get an incredibly detailed picture of you. They're making money off that information, and they're gaining power from it. Do you want to know more about those entities and what they're doing with that information? Would you like to be one of the beneficiaries of your information, or would you like to continue to be left out? If you embrace privacy, you're also embracing their privacy, and you're reinforcing the increasingly asymmetric, and non-democratic advantage they have over you. Obviously, no one should be rounded up for anything, but yes, you and I had better open our minds to a better way to live together- and quickly. If you have a solution, by all means, offer it up, but privacy is dead, and if your answer is to try to stuff that genie back in the bottle, it's a non-starter. We need to embrace another path.
  - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 10y ago
    Assuming your hypothesis were correct that making the data more widely accessible would diminish the power of those who are doing the surveillance now: Please explain why you think that it is easier to get those doing the surveillance now to open up their data and thus lose their power instead of getting them to not collect the data in the first place and thus lose the power?
    - 10y ago
FrancoDiaz 10y ago
privacy is asymmetric ignorance. There's just too much of this creepy thinking on HN these days. Way too many statists, autocratic people on here.
pmarreck 10y ago
Privacy is pretty important for a functioning democracy... simple examples, investigative journalism and whistleblowing. It's apparent you haven't read Martin Fowler's excellent thoughts on this topic: http://martinfowler.com/articles/bothersome-privacy.html http://martinfowler.com/articles/bothersome-privacy.html
- eveningcoffee 10y ago
  By GP, there is no need for this as everything would be public. Well, this is how I understood it.
eveningcoffee 10y ago
Very clever, we just rename the things and call it a day. See, privacy is the right for this kind of respect instead of other people mercy.
exo762 10y ago
How much have you made in 2015 and where are you living? Why do you not want to share this information with me?
Angostura 10y ago
Citizen, it has come to our attention that you have expressed an opinion without placing your postal address, phone number and place of employment within your profile. Please remedy this immediately
icebraining 10y ago
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19880011858.pdf https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/198800...
philipov 10y ago
Surveillance is not the same as transparency. In fact, the people doing the surveilling work very hard to protect their own privacy.
johnny99 10y ago
New realities engender binary responses. We haven't had time to develop checks and balances on the seismic shifts in what's possible with privacy, and intrusions into it. I think we'll land somewhere in the middle--carving out privacy in some places, adapting to less of it in others. I don't think we can just declare "privacy is disappearing," full stop. It has always waxed and waned. We don't have to look 1,000 years ahead to see the cost of lack of transparency though. False news and obfuscation of his ties to Russia are big parts of what got Trump elected; if there had been transparency about those, it might not have happened. It's connected to privacy--obfuscation is a form of privacy (maybe not in code, but in politics). Clinton's loss of privacy through hacked emails set up a false equivalence. Almost everything in Wikileak's release of the Podesta emails was either nonsense or small potatoes, but it got way more press than Trump's ties to a hostile foreign government--successful Russian maskirovka. That's totally nuts. And Comey's flip-flopping, in the name of transparency, was the coup de grace--there was absolutely nothing there, as he himself admitted after the damage was done. "Transparency" about the wrong things is a distraction and a weapon. I couldn't agree more about the need for respect and tolerance.
pipio21 10y ago
Ohh, so the only thing that you have to do is change every single human being to do what your ideal of world is? The closest thing I have been to the ISS is living on a small phishing boat for a week. I could warrantee you EVERY SINGLE PERSON THERE WANTS PRIVACY. And it is crazy if you do not respect it, this people can throw you out of the boat, you could not imagine how difficult it is to live in a small space with other people for a long time. You say nobody on the ISS wants privacy, based on what? Have you asked them, I bet you do not. You have just thought about it based on your own prejudices on the comfort of your home. I have lived in China with so many people everywhere, after that living on Norway or Alaska or Argentina feels so great. Vast Spaces just for you. In my opinion it is just the animal inside with her territory, as simple as that, gorillas have it, lions have it, and we have it as animals. When they remove privacy from us they are removing our personal territory: We are not free anymore, we are in someone else territory(the country masters, or the big companies). Without Privacy we can be judged at any time for any reason. They are observing us and they could hunt us like prey when we are weaker, they can take advantage of our vices in order to profit, they could blackmail us. Remember Bill Clinton or Kennedy having sex with young women, Hillary holding mails in her personal accounts(probably so she could sell it to someone else), prime ministers holding accounts in fiscal heavens. This is only what we know, and it is a normal thing even on people on charge, people are not perfect. The people that know all of this have power and they could and actually legally blackmail those in power and they do. We can go for Utopia and try to change every single human for it, which is impossible. "Tolerance and respect" how much tolerance and respect have you seen in the last elections for example, when the people in power risked loosing their power? Zero. All politicians have personal dossiers of all adversaries and friends and no doubt they will use it if you are on their way to power, money or glory.
- tslug 10y ago
  I don't know where you get the Utopian / changing-everyone conclusion from. I don't see any Utopian solutions, but I do see the potential for dramatic improvement. Improvement requires more information, not less. Democracy is about equality. You don't have equality when you don't have equality of information. The only way to have a level playing field is to have everyone's information publicly available. Once you do that, you have to emulate the benefits of privacy in some other way. Tolerating more and respecting the wishes of others is I think the best way forward. If you've got a better way to emulate the benefits of privacy, I'm all ears, but don't try to convince me we can have privacy back, not in this age of the internet of things, drones, Uber, Google, Facebook, smart cars, cell phones, big data, big corporations, big government. It's just not going to happen.
scalio 10y ago
I would tend to agree in theory. Data is a very valuable thing that is necessary to improve beyond a certain point. Complete, unrestricted transparency of every facet of everything gives the data-wielders (humanity) unprecedented insight. It's also, however, a complete pipe dream only possible in a perfect world. Otherwise, some people will see the data in question, realize the immense power it holds, and do bad things. Privacy is necessary because some people are dicks and constantly strive to get an advantage over others. Ideally, it's only a temporary solution until humanity can figure its shit out, whatever that would be. Until then, it's the only way to minimize oppression, which is the biggest risk to human development there is. So for now, RMS is right. There's just no way of getting rid of privacy that would not severely hurt.
- tslug 10y ago
  We're on a progression curve, right? Privacy is melting away over time with more sensors and advances in big data analysis techniques. We'll never get to where everything is 100% transparent. Too many photons. But I believe we're already at the point that privacy is effectively gone. It's just a question now of whether the people who have the information is only the big corporations, big governments, the best hackers, and/or whoever paid for it, or whether we want to pull this privacy band-aid off and just disarm their power in the first place by broadcasting the information and changing our behaviour and rules on the back-end of what our responsibility is to others with the information we have on them. If you broadcast everything, then if some people are dicks, you see that, too, right? And if we still get to be judged by a jury of our peers (hope-hope), then with any luck, there are enough nice people out there to say, "Yup, dick move. Stop that." Privacy is just an eggshell defense. When/if it's breached, that's that. The dicks win. We currently have so little recourse, because it's so badly asymmetric. The dicks now have the information and proceed to hurt you with it, but you don't necessarily have the information showing them hurting you.
  - type0 10y ago
    > If you broadcast everything, then if some people are dicks, you see that, too, right? There are 3 kinds of people: https://youtu.be/sEJ7l0kfDic?t=39 https://youtu.be/sEJ7l0kfDic?t=39
ignoramceisblis 10y ago
I appreciate your posting of this comment. I understand the sentiment, and the perception of what's possible. I do value privacy, however. But I appreciate discussion. You're right in that the challenge is much more psychological than technical. Many of us living creatures have an urge to thrive, and more of us have an urge to survive. Taking privacy as asymmetric ignorance: often, humans, in possession of some information they see as advantageous to them, will want to exploit that information, and if it's only (or more) advantageous while in only their possession, then they will wish to keep that information private. (Not always. Often.) Growth of tolerance and respect will go against those ingrained urges.

by tslug 10y ago

throwawayIndian 10y ago

One of the foundations of democracy is "secret ballot". If it's possible to algorithmically deduce who you're going to vote for, a tyranny can easily take you down or try to influence* you in ways you shouldn't be. I think you have no idea about what you're taking here. Other option being you benefitting off of surveillance in some form (Don't want to be rude, only addressing the concern.). * We experienced this first hand in the 2016 elections -- which is why it always felt weird to most of us all the time.

hga 10y ago
One reason to utterly and totally oppose mail-in and on-line balloting. That non-secret ballots also allow paid and coerced voting are other traditional reasons.
- throwawayIndian 10y ago
  Absolutely! It is possible to deduce pretty accurately who somebody is going to vote for without even looking at the ballot or peeping into the booth box. All actions people do online like sharing a newspiece on their Facebook walls, likes or dislikes, chats, mails, texts, add up to something that makes the person -- and that information is quite valuable.
- Frondo 10y ago
  Oregon has had vote-by-mail for years and it's been nothing but a positive thing. Their turnout is consistently higher than the national average. There are simply no issues around access to voting (like long lines at polling places, people who can't get time off work, etc), because every registered voter gets a ballot and a couple of weeks to fill it in. The claims and fears around voter fraud have been studied, and have been found to be entirely without basis in reality. Voter fraud and coercion simply hasn't been an issue in a vote-by-mail state. It's also a lot of fun to take part in voting parties, where you get to hash out the issues with your friends and fill in your ballot as you do so.
  - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 10y ago
    You are aware that there are countries that manage to run elections on sundays and with sufficient polling places to not have any lines to speak of at all? That might be too advanced a technology for the US, but, unbelievable as it may sound, countries like that do indeed exist!
    - Frondo 10y ago
      Well, good for them, but why should I have to go anywhere? What's the point? From experience, I enjoyed vote-by-mail for years, and I can tell you it's a huge step backwards to have to go somewhere again to vote.

EliRivers 10y ago

Hello. I am human and I live on this planet and I want privacy, and I want my democracy to come with privacy. You do not speak for me. What happens now? Should I and others like me be rounded up for re-education? Privacy is one of the things that helps prevent the horrible failure state of democracy; two wolves voting to eat the sheep for dinner. My comment above expresses exactly the kind of fear non-conformists have in zero privacy democracies.

tslug 10y ago
Let's start with your mistaken premise. You don't actually have privacy, and you won't be getting it back. Just by analyzing how you worded your public post, which post you responded to, and the time you posted it, entities you have no awareness of are already learning more about you than you can imagine, and they're using big data techniques to mine that and lots of other sources of data in order to get an incredibly detailed picture of you. They're making money off that information, and they're gaining power from it. Do you want to know more about those entities and what they're doing with that information? Would you like to be one of the beneficiaries of your information, or would you like to continue to be left out? If you embrace privacy, you're also embracing their privacy, and you're reinforcing the increasingly asymmetric, and non-democratic advantage they have over you. Obviously, no one should be rounded up for anything, but yes, you and I had better open our minds to a better way to live together- and quickly. If you have a solution, by all means, offer it up, but privacy is dead, and if your answer is to try to stuff that genie back in the bottle, it's a non-starter. We need to embrace another path.
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 10y ago
  Assuming your hypothesis were correct that making the data more widely accessible would diminish the power of those who are doing the surveillance now: Please explain why you think that it is easier to get those doing the surveillance now to open up their data and thus lose their power instead of getting them to not collect the data in the first place and thus lose the power?
  - 10y ago

FrancoDiaz 10y ago

privacy is asymmetric ignorance. There's just too much of this creepy thinking on HN these days. Way too many statists, autocratic people on here.

pmarreck 10y ago

Privacy is pretty important for a functioning democracy... simple examples, investigative journalism and whistleblowing. It's apparent you haven't read Martin Fowler's excellent thoughts on this topic: http://martinfowler.com/articles/bothersome-privacy.html http://martinfowler.com/articles/bothersome-privacy.html

eveningcoffee 10y ago
By GP, there is no need for this as everything would be public. Well, this is how I understood it.

eveningcoffee 10y ago

Very clever, we just rename the things and call it a day. See, privacy is the right for this kind of respect instead of other people mercy.

exo762 10y ago

How much have you made in 2015 and where are you living? Why do you not want to share this information with me?

Angostura 10y ago

Citizen, it has come to our attention that you have expressed an opinion without placing your postal address, phone number and place of employment within your profile. Please remedy this immediately

icebraining 10y ago

https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19880011858.pdf https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/198800...

philipov 10y ago

Surveillance is not the same as transparency. In fact, the people doing the surveilling work very hard to protect their own privacy.

johnny99 10y ago

New realities engender binary responses. We haven't had time to develop checks and balances on the seismic shifts in what's possible with privacy, and intrusions into it. I think we'll land somewhere in the middle--carving out privacy in some places, adapting to less of it in others. I don't think we can just declare "privacy is disappearing," full stop. It has always waxed and waned. We don't have to look 1,000 years ahead to see the cost of lack of transparency though. False news and obfuscation of his ties to Russia are big parts of what got Trump elected; if there had been transparency about those, it might not have happened. It's connected to privacy--obfuscation is a form of privacy (maybe not in code, but in politics). Clinton's loss of privacy through hacked emails set up a false equivalence. Almost everything in Wikileak's release of the Podesta emails was either nonsense or small potatoes, but it got way more press than Trump's ties to a hostile foreign government--successful Russian maskirovka. That's totally nuts. And Comey's flip-flopping, in the name of transparency, was the coup de grace--there was absolutely nothing there, as he himself admitted after the damage was done. "Transparency" about the wrong things is a distraction and a weapon. I couldn't agree more about the need for respect and tolerance.

pipio21 10y ago

Ohh, so the only thing that you have to do is change every single human being to do what your ideal of world is? The closest thing I have been to the ISS is living on a small phishing boat for a week. I could warrantee you EVERY SINGLE PERSON THERE WANTS PRIVACY. And it is crazy if you do not respect it, this people can throw you out of the boat, you could not imagine how difficult it is to live in a small space with other people for a long time. You say nobody on the ISS wants privacy, based on what? Have you asked them, I bet you do not. You have just thought about it based on your own prejudices on the comfort of your home. I have lived in China with so many people everywhere, after that living on Norway or Alaska or Argentina feels so great. Vast Spaces just for you. In my opinion it is just the animal inside with her territory, as simple as that, gorillas have it, lions have it, and we have it as animals. When they remove privacy from us they are removing our personal territory: We are not free anymore, we are in someone else territory(the country masters, or the big companies). Without Privacy we can be judged at any time for any reason. They are observing us and they could hunt us like prey when we are weaker, they can take advantage of our vices in order to profit, they could blackmail us. Remember Bill Clinton or Kennedy having sex with young women, Hillary holding mails in her personal accounts(probably so she could sell it to someone else), prime ministers holding accounts in fiscal heavens. This is only what we know, and it is a normal thing even on people on charge, people are not perfect. The people that know all of this have power and they could and actually legally blackmail those in power and they do. We can go for Utopia and try to change every single human for it, which is impossible. "Tolerance and respect" how much tolerance and respect have you seen in the last elections for example, when the people in power risked loosing their power? Zero. All politicians have personal dossiers of all adversaries and friends and no doubt they will use it if you are on their way to power, money or glory.

tslug 10y ago
I don't know where you get the Utopian / changing-everyone conclusion from. I don't see any Utopian solutions, but I do see the potential for dramatic improvement. Improvement requires more information, not less. Democracy is about equality. You don't have equality when you don't have equality of information. The only way to have a level playing field is to have everyone's information publicly available. Once you do that, you have to emulate the benefits of privacy in some other way. Tolerating more and respecting the wishes of others is I think the best way forward. If you've got a better way to emulate the benefits of privacy, I'm all ears, but don't try to convince me we can have privacy back, not in this age of the internet of things, drones, Uber, Google, Facebook, smart cars, cell phones, big data, big corporations, big government. It's just not going to happen.

scalio 10y ago

I would tend to agree in theory. Data is a very valuable thing that is necessary to improve beyond a certain point. Complete, unrestricted transparency of every facet of everything gives the data-wielders (humanity) unprecedented insight. It's also, however, a complete pipe dream only possible in a perfect world. Otherwise, some people will see the data in question, realize the immense power it holds, and do bad things. Privacy is necessary because some people are dicks and constantly strive to get an advantage over others. Ideally, it's only a temporary solution until humanity can figure its shit out, whatever that would be. Until then, it's the only way to minimize oppression, which is the biggest risk to human development there is. So for now, RMS is right. There's just no way of getting rid of privacy that would not severely hurt.

tslug 10y ago
We're on a progression curve, right? Privacy is melting away over time with more sensors and advances in big data analysis techniques. We'll never get to where everything is 100% transparent. Too many photons. But I believe we're already at the point that privacy is effectively gone. It's just a question now of whether the people who have the information is only the big corporations, big governments, the best hackers, and/or whoever paid for it, or whether we want to pull this privacy band-aid off and just disarm their power in the first place by broadcasting the information and changing our behaviour and rules on the back-end of what our responsibility is to others with the information we have on them. If you broadcast everything, then if some people are dicks, you see that, too, right? And if we still get to be judged by a jury of our peers (hope-hope), then with any luck, there are enough nice people out there to say, "Yup, dick move. Stop that." Privacy is just an eggshell defense. When/if it's breached, that's that. The dicks win. We currently have so little recourse, because it's so badly asymmetric. The dicks now have the information and proceed to hurt you with it, but you don't necessarily have the information showing them hurting you.
- type0 10y ago
  > If you broadcast everything, then if some people are dicks, you see that, too, right? There are 3 kinds of people: https://youtu.be/sEJ7l0kfDic?t=39 https://youtu.be/sEJ7l0kfDic?t=39

ignoramceisblis 10y ago

I appreciate your posting of this comment. I understand the sentiment, and the perception of what's possible. I do value privacy, however. But I appreciate discussion. You're right in that the challenge is much more psychological than technical. Many of us living creatures have an urge to thrive, and more of us have an urge to survive. Taking privacy as asymmetric ignorance: often, humans, in possession of some information they see as advantageous to them, will want to exploit that information, and if it's only (or more) advantageous while in only their possession, then they will wish to keep that information private. (Not always. Often.) Growth of tolerance and respect will go against those ingrained urges.