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The privacy being discussed in the context of this topic is online privacy. The point is that attempting to have online privacy through obscurity is increasingl

The privacy being discussed in the context of this topic is online privacy. The point is that attempting to have online privacy through obscurity is increasingly ineffective. All traffic through the web is monitored, and I'd even suspect that some common methods of encryption will have been compromised (and even when they haven't been, some governments have made it clear that using VPNs and similar privacy protecting measures are close to an admission of guilt).

danso 10y ago
This is a fair argument. Actually, I don't think we're really arguing, in that I agree with you, particularly on the technical parts. My main complaint was that privacy is a quasi-legal and technical matter. Whereas security, at least in the context of the motto, "Security through obscurity is not security", is a near-binary, either-or claim -- which I agree with. To elaborate, for many people, the concept of privacy is already compromised when they discover sites like pipl.com. Pipl.com already has data-mined information for every American with a SSN. If you have a credit history, like the kind you provide to a landlord when applying to rent -- Pipl has that too, that's why it can list where you have lived in the past, and who you lived with. But that's a fairly old situation; private investigators have been using LexisNexis/Accurint to do those searchers for more than a decade. And fancy things like satellite photos of where you live? Reason Magazine did that back in 2004: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1870509 http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1870509 (the impressive feat, IMO, was not the photos, but the ability to custom publish 40,000 print covers, using the technology and infrastructure at that time) But does that mean privacy has been compromised? Sure. Or, maybe. The ambiguity in possible answers is a huge contrast compared to the answers you'd get if you asked "Is Dual_EC_DRBG secure?". But if you think that privacy is unambiguously compromised, given what I've described...here's what I mean. There's a difference between LexisNexis/Accurint/etc. (never mind ad companies, which is a whole different thing) having your normal next door neighbor's information. It's another thing if a highly-followed Twitter account tweets a link to Pastebin with all of that information. Perhaps the original commenter didn't mean that, but that's what I think of when I think of the average person's privacy being compromised.

danso 10y ago

This is a fair argument. Actually, I don't think we're really arguing, in that I agree with you, particularly on the technical parts. My main complaint was that privacy is a quasi-legal and technical matter. Whereas security, at least in the context of the motto, "Security through obscurity is not security", is a near-binary, either-or claim -- which I agree with. To elaborate, for many people, the concept of privacy is already compromised when they discover sites like pipl.com. Pipl.com already has data-mined information for every American with a SSN. If you have a credit history, like the kind you provide to a landlord when applying to rent -- Pipl has that too, that's why it can list where you have lived in the past, and who you lived with. But that's a fairly old situation; private investigators have been using LexisNexis/Accurint to do those searchers for more than a decade. And fancy things like satellite photos of where you live? Reason Magazine did that back in 2004: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1870509 http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1870509 (the impressive feat, IMO, was not the photos, but the ability to custom publish 40,000 print covers, using the technology and infrastructure at that time) But does that mean privacy has been compromised? Sure. Or, maybe. The ambiguity in possible answers is a huge contrast compared to the answers you'd get if you asked "Is Dual_EC_DRBG secure?". But if you think that privacy is unambiguously compromised, given what I've described...here's what I mean. There's a difference between LexisNexis/Accurint/etc. (never mind ad companies, which is a whole different thing) having your normal next door neighbor's information. It's another thing if a highly-followed Twitter account tweets a link to Pastebin with all of that information. Perhaps the original commenter didn't mean that, but that's what I think of when I think of the average person's privacy being compromised.