4 ms·

The days of legally-enforced privacy are at best numbered, if not gone completely. Even if we win one fight, it's going to be a constant battle against powers

The days of legally-enforced privacy are at best numbered, if not gone completely. Even if we win one fight, it's going to be a constant battle against powers who do want more and better surveillance, and the capability to do so is just getting easier and cheaper. The only real solution is to have technologically enforced privacy, in ways that can not be blocked legally. While we shouldn't stop the first fight, we really should be focusing on the second one.

digi_owl 10y ago
Frankly it went bye bye with the fall of the wall. Back then they needed to appear to be better than the soviets, and thus upheld the laws on privacy. But now there is no comparative low water mark, and whats worse they now have one or more snitch in every home. And that is compromised computers. Every phone, every laptop, and soon enough every IOT device, will be a potential snitch on our activities. And where they earlier needed large staffs to listen, watch, and take notes, they can now automatically transcribe every conversation with timestamps down to the second. And soon enough they can even do it with video (if not already). Keep in mind that this is all tech that the likes of Google and Amazon is working on to provide more services for us all...
baybal2 10y ago
>The days of legally-enforced privacy are at best numbered, if not gone completely. Well, if not other legal means left, you have other options. You happy Americans can buy guns legally, and "right to revolution" is pretty much written in your constitution.
- awinder 10y ago
  It honestly shocks me when people think that the individual still has this much power. The power of government has changed a bit since the 1700s, unless people plan of acquiring a large fleet of planes and tanks, this is just farsical.
  - mooseburger 10y ago
    I recall Vietnam managing to survive the US Army despite lacking planes and tanks. Holding land ultimately requires boots on the ground, so unless the government plans to engage in total war against an insurrection (mass bomb American cities), guerrilla will be possible. It's also highly likely a portion of the army would defect if things get that far, making it less a revolution and more a civil war.
    - throwaway46983 10y ago
      In my experience Americans get (rightfully) nervous just by the presence of police officers, the thought of protesting or even talking about politics. A US conflict involving guns is more likely to resemble Cambodia than Vietnam.
      - mooseburger 10y ago
        That's true. The situation needs to get very dire before random Americans are willing to take up arms. Personally, I think a civil war is likelier than a revolution, due to the army dividing. Though to be clear, both seem rather unlikely.
  - mi100hael 10y ago
    I'm pretty surprised when people think the US government is essentially omnipotent. Look how poorly they fared against a bunch of people living in dirt houses and caves with rusted Soviet rifles. It's easy to win when you can just steamroll a country, but it's far harder when you need to balance the need for support & legitimacy from the non-fighting majority.
  - pdkl95 10y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10752635#10753894 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10752635#10753894 You should read my comment from a year ago that addressed why the situation would be much more complicated, and certainly not "farcical".
- reverend_gonzo 10y ago
  To be fair, while we have "right to revolution" we do not have the "ability to revolt", at least not militarily. Like another poster said, the strength of the government has come a long way since the 1700s. On the same note, what is happening right now in the States is pretty much half of the country revolting, for better or for worse.
pdkl95 10y ago
> it's going to be a constant battle against powers Yes. The price of freedom is vigilance. If you are not creating your future, others will create it for you. This is true not only for privacy, but every freedom we enjoy. In the last few decades there has been a trend toward more people taking a lot of our comfortable modern lives for granted. Some with a better understanding of the current political landscape have seen the people trying to dismantle the foundations of the freedoms and comfort we enjoy. The enemy is organized and powerful, so the battle seems hopeless. Everyone needs to remember that previous generations had to fight the same powers, and they won. It was hard work, but we only have the many of the freedoms, civil rights, and middle class lifestyle thanks to the previous generations that fought power. We can win the war against privacy, but it will require a lot more solidarity and focus and a lot less infighting. The smart way to win battles has always been to trick your enemy into choosing not to fight. Maintaining power is easy when the enemy gives up the fight or fights among themselves. > the capability to do so is just getting easier and cheaper. Then the technology should be fought (civil war), or its manufacture prohibited (Butlerian Jihad), or even better, put to use in the other direction. The latter may require a lot of creativity. > The only real solution is to have technologically enforced privacy, in ways that can not be blocked legally. Except that doesn't exist except in specific situations. If the political side is ignored, technology doesn't matter because the boot, rubber hose, and rifle can prevent technology from being used. With modern methods of social manipulation (e.g. Sesame Credit), the firearm can be replaced with peer presure and social standing. Both the technological and political battles need to be fought, becaujse they support each other and cannot stand on their own.
throwaway46983 10y ago
What "legally-enforced privacy" are you talking about? In most of the world, at least until recently, Internet traffic has been in the same category as radio traffic i.e. essentially unprotected. Who is this "we" you're talking about? The people who are upset over privacy are journalist, lawyers and politicians not geeks making bank at tech companies. Why do you think "technologically enforced privacy" will work when there's already been 20 years to criticize standard agencies and companies for their failures to establish privacy in Internet communication? Take a look at any given day on HN. Programmers want freedom to program in unrestricted languages like C, they want to make the high salaries of data mining companies, they want to continue using protocols that are hard to make secure like e-mail etc. I don't think you have to decide much over which fight to fight considering there isn't really one in the first place.
jaredklewis 10y ago
> While we shouldn't stop the first fight, we really should be focusing on the second one. This seems crazy. The only fight is the first one. If use of encryption is made illegal (for example), and the penalties involved include going to prison, will you, reverend_gonzo, personally still continue to use encryption? If so, I applaud you, but my intuition is that only a tiny percentage will be willing to take that risk. Any technological advancement, even breakthroughs that took decades to make, can be made illegal in a day. What use is privacy technology if you can be put in jail for using it? Even if the risk is small, it will always be there, and a proper boot-on-face government like China will easily squash adoption of even the most miraculous privacy innovations.
- reverend_gonzo 10y ago
  First, if the use of encryption is made illegal, we are going to have much bigger problems than privacy. My point is that it is not possible to eternally prevent the government for from surveillance. The technology is quickly getting easier and cheaper, and will very shortly, if not already, be available to any company who wants it. Look at things like Siri and Alexa. As those technologies get further refined, what's to prevent them being added to your smart TV, your smart refrigerator, your smart light bulb? What's to prevent somebody, whether its your government, another government, or marketing firms, to pay other companies to add this technology to their products? To various extents, this has already happened. If you want you information to not be available to the highest bidder, the only way will be to hide it, and that will require increasing vigilance and technology.
  - jaredklewis 10y ago
    Sure. Without government intervention you will need privacy technology to keep your life private. My point is that any of that technology can be made illegal in an instant, making it completely irrelevant. Without political rights and protections, privacy technology is worthless.
  - drinkjuice 10y ago
    > What's to prevent somebody, whether its your government, another government, or marketing firms, to pay other companies to add this technology to their products? If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when? -- Hillel the Elder
pizzetta 10y ago
That genie is not getting put back in the bottle. What we need to do is have laws which protect us against not only government surveillance but company as well as private individual surveillance. Government surveillance is but one aspect of surveillance. One way to mitigate the effects is to dull the effects legally. The day will come when not only governments can snoop, but just about anyone who wants to and has means will be able to; so just preventing the gov from doing it will be at most a pyrrhic victory. But you're welcome to try but you won't stop foreign governments from their abilities to snoop on you. Eventually we'll just have to live knowing just about everything about us is known but that that knowledge cannot be held against the individual, in a legal manner. I don't think the cold-war tactics of escalation and countering with new measures is the ultimate outcome.
- canadian_voter 10y ago
  Eventually we'll just have to live knowing just about everything about us is known but that that knowledge cannot be held against the individual, in a legal manner. That's the optimistic endgame. I don't think there is a technological solution to this. The more pessimistic view suggests a future totalitarian surveillance state. It's going to be an interesting four years.
akvadrako 10y ago
I agree with you and think the longer it takes for people to realise it, the harder it'll become. Sometimes stuff gets grandfathered in and someday it may become a criminal offence to build privacy protecting tools. But I don't think that'll be enough. We should focus on the 3rd fight, which is equal access to information. If loss of privacy is bad, a one-sided situation is worse. My professional feeling is pervasive surveillance will outpace privacy tech and policy wise. So the best available option long term (100+ years) is to make everything completely open. Don't allow only those in power to have privacy because it will solidify their position.
- frankydp 10y ago
  I agree that long term data value will outweigh privacy on some level. I think that meta data will be the middle ground in that decision long term. I do not know how governments(any form) can provide services to a user base of hundreds of millions/billions without detailed usage data. Attempting to guess the usage patterns of a user base that large is improbable. At some point in the future society will be faced with a decision to collect data for the improvement of resource allocation in all of its forms. We are currently in the before you can crawl period of data collection, of which we now collect just enough data to draw mostly incorrect or narrow hypothesis about its nature. A realistic example is road construction. The public charges the government with constructing resource intensive roads, with only superficial data about their usage, traffic counts and building permits. In this scenario we ideally hope to get roads that support the most common traffic patterns, while providing decision makers with the results of the current system and not the actual patterns that created them. While I am sure they can deduce some form of meaningful analysis from something like traffic counts they are obviously an after the fact data set, that when used to plan future development lead to false analysis. The alternative data set would be all GPS meta data for all connected devices, and then applied to the decision process. The from where and to where piece of geo-analysis would fundamentally change the planning process. A similar example would be for the Facebook UI team or networking team to provide new features and continuously optimize current features, while being only provided page views and raw user growth. No referral data, click tracking, dwell times, return frequency, workflow analysis, network paths, geographic usage data, browser info, or bandwidth data. Simply allocate the resources of the teams based on pageviews and raw user growth numbers. You would be able to research new features, but only by asking 100 users what they want or where they are from. Each feature you create cost $10mil and once launched can only be changed for $100mil, and the new feature deletes 1% of your user accounts. I am not saying that privacy is not relevant, but I am saying that at some point in the future data will be more important, critically in the health sciences and public works(globally).

digi_owl 10y ago

Frankly it went bye bye with the fall of the wall. Back then they needed to appear to be better than the soviets, and thus upheld the laws on privacy. But now there is no comparative low water mark, and whats worse they now have one or more snitch in every home. And that is compromised computers. Every phone, every laptop, and soon enough every IOT device, will be a potential snitch on our activities. And where they earlier needed large staffs to listen, watch, and take notes, they can now automatically transcribe every conversation with timestamps down to the second. And soon enough they can even do it with video (if not already). Keep in mind that this is all tech that the likes of Google and Amazon is working on to provide more services for us all...

baybal2 10y ago

>The days of legally-enforced privacy are at best numbered, if not gone completely. Well, if not other legal means left, you have other options. You happy Americans can buy guns legally, and "right to revolution" is pretty much written in your constitution.

awinder 10y ago
It honestly shocks me when people think that the individual still has this much power. The power of government has changed a bit since the 1700s, unless people plan of acquiring a large fleet of planes and tanks, this is just farsical.
- mooseburger 10y ago
  I recall Vietnam managing to survive the US Army despite lacking planes and tanks. Holding land ultimately requires boots on the ground, so unless the government plans to engage in total war against an insurrection (mass bomb American cities), guerrilla will be possible. It's also highly likely a portion of the army would defect if things get that far, making it less a revolution and more a civil war.
  - throwaway46983 10y ago
    In my experience Americans get (rightfully) nervous just by the presence of police officers, the thought of protesting or even talking about politics. A US conflict involving guns is more likely to resemble Cambodia than Vietnam.
    - mooseburger 10y ago
      That's true. The situation needs to get very dire before random Americans are willing to take up arms. Personally, I think a civil war is likelier than a revolution, due to the army dividing. Though to be clear, both seem rather unlikely.
- mi100hael 10y ago
  I'm pretty surprised when people think the US government is essentially omnipotent. Look how poorly they fared against a bunch of people living in dirt houses and caves with rusted Soviet rifles. It's easy to win when you can just steamroll a country, but it's far harder when you need to balance the need for support & legitimacy from the non-fighting majority.
- pdkl95 10y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10752635#10753894 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10752635#10753894 You should read my comment from a year ago that addressed why the situation would be much more complicated, and certainly not "farcical".
reverend_gonzo 10y ago
To be fair, while we have "right to revolution" we do not have the "ability to revolt", at least not militarily. Like another poster said, the strength of the government has come a long way since the 1700s. On the same note, what is happening right now in the States is pretty much half of the country revolting, for better or for worse.

pdkl95 10y ago

> it's going to be a constant battle against powers Yes. The price of freedom is vigilance. If you are not creating your future, others will create it for you. This is true not only for privacy, but every freedom we enjoy. In the last few decades there has been a trend toward more people taking a lot of our comfortable modern lives for granted. Some with a better understanding of the current political landscape have seen the people trying to dismantle the foundations of the freedoms and comfort we enjoy. The enemy is organized and powerful, so the battle seems hopeless. Everyone needs to remember that previous generations had to fight the same powers, and they won. It was hard work, but we only have the many of the freedoms, civil rights, and middle class lifestyle thanks to the previous generations that fought power. We can win the war against privacy, but it will require a lot more solidarity and focus and a lot less infighting. The smart way to win battles has always been to trick your enemy into choosing not to fight. Maintaining power is easy when the enemy gives up the fight or fights among themselves. > the capability to do so is just getting easier and cheaper. Then the technology should be fought (civil war), or its manufacture prohibited (Butlerian Jihad), or even better, put to use in the other direction. The latter may require a lot of creativity. > The only real solution is to have technologically enforced privacy, in ways that can not be blocked legally. Except that doesn't exist except in specific situations. If the political side is ignored, technology doesn't matter because the boot, rubber hose, and rifle can prevent technology from being used. With modern methods of social manipulation (e.g. Sesame Credit), the firearm can be replaced with peer presure and social standing. Both the technological and political battles need to be fought, becaujse they support each other and cannot stand on their own.

throwaway46983 10y ago

What "legally-enforced privacy" are you talking about? In most of the world, at least until recently, Internet traffic has been in the same category as radio traffic i.e. essentially unprotected. Who is this "we" you're talking about? The people who are upset over privacy are journalist, lawyers and politicians not geeks making bank at tech companies. Why do you think "technologically enforced privacy" will work when there's already been 20 years to criticize standard agencies and companies for their failures to establish privacy in Internet communication? Take a look at any given day on HN. Programmers want freedom to program in unrestricted languages like C, they want to make the high salaries of data mining companies, they want to continue using protocols that are hard to make secure like e-mail etc. I don't think you have to decide much over which fight to fight considering there isn't really one in the first place.

jaredklewis 10y ago

> While we shouldn't stop the first fight, we really should be focusing on the second one. This seems crazy. The only fight is the first one. If use of encryption is made illegal (for example), and the penalties involved include going to prison, will you, reverend_gonzo, personally still continue to use encryption? If so, I applaud you, but my intuition is that only a tiny percentage will be willing to take that risk. Any technological advancement, even breakthroughs that took decades to make, can be made illegal in a day. What use is privacy technology if you can be put in jail for using it? Even if the risk is small, it will always be there, and a proper boot-on-face government like China will easily squash adoption of even the most miraculous privacy innovations.

reverend_gonzo 10y ago
First, if the use of encryption is made illegal, we are going to have much bigger problems than privacy. My point is that it is not possible to eternally prevent the government for from surveillance. The technology is quickly getting easier and cheaper, and will very shortly, if not already, be available to any company who wants it. Look at things like Siri and Alexa. As those technologies get further refined, what's to prevent them being added to your smart TV, your smart refrigerator, your smart light bulb? What's to prevent somebody, whether its your government, another government, or marketing firms, to pay other companies to add this technology to their products? To various extents, this has already happened. If you want you information to not be available to the highest bidder, the only way will be to hide it, and that will require increasing vigilance and technology.
- jaredklewis 10y ago
  Sure. Without government intervention you will need privacy technology to keep your life private. My point is that any of that technology can be made illegal in an instant, making it completely irrelevant. Without political rights and protections, privacy technology is worthless.
- drinkjuice 10y ago
  > What's to prevent somebody, whether its your government, another government, or marketing firms, to pay other companies to add this technology to their products? If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when? -- Hillel the Elder

pizzetta 10y ago

That genie is not getting put back in the bottle. What we need to do is have laws which protect us against not only government surveillance but company as well as private individual surveillance. Government surveillance is but one aspect of surveillance. One way to mitigate the effects is to dull the effects legally. The day will come when not only governments can snoop, but just about anyone who wants to and has means will be able to; so just preventing the gov from doing it will be at most a pyrrhic victory. But you're welcome to try but you won't stop foreign governments from their abilities to snoop on you. Eventually we'll just have to live knowing just about everything about us is known but that that knowledge cannot be held against the individual, in a legal manner. I don't think the cold-war tactics of escalation and countering with new measures is the ultimate outcome.

canadian_voter 10y ago
Eventually we'll just have to live knowing just about everything about us is known but that that knowledge cannot be held against the individual, in a legal manner. That's the optimistic endgame. I don't think there is a technological solution to this. The more pessimistic view suggests a future totalitarian surveillance state. It's going to be an interesting four years.

akvadrako 10y ago

I agree with you and think the longer it takes for people to realise it, the harder it'll become. Sometimes stuff gets grandfathered in and someday it may become a criminal offence to build privacy protecting tools. But I don't think that'll be enough. We should focus on the 3rd fight, which is equal access to information. If loss of privacy is bad, a one-sided situation is worse. My professional feeling is pervasive surveillance will outpace privacy tech and policy wise. So the best available option long term (100+ years) is to make everything completely open. Don't allow only those in power to have privacy because it will solidify their position.

frankydp 10y ago
I agree that long term data value will outweigh privacy on some level. I think that meta data will be the middle ground in that decision long term. I do not know how governments(any form) can provide services to a user base of hundreds of millions/billions without detailed usage data. Attempting to guess the usage patterns of a user base that large is improbable. At some point in the future society will be faced with a decision to collect data for the improvement of resource allocation in all of its forms. We are currently in the before you can crawl period of data collection, of which we now collect just enough data to draw mostly incorrect or narrow hypothesis about its nature. A realistic example is road construction. The public charges the government with constructing resource intensive roads, with only superficial data about their usage, traffic counts and building permits. In this scenario we ideally hope to get roads that support the most common traffic patterns, while providing decision makers with the results of the current system and not the actual patterns that created them. While I am sure they can deduce some form of meaningful analysis from something like traffic counts they are obviously an after the fact data set, that when used to plan future development lead to false analysis. The alternative data set would be all GPS meta data for all connected devices, and then applied to the decision process. The from where and to where piece of geo-analysis would fundamentally change the planning process. A similar example would be for the Facebook UI team or networking team to provide new features and continuously optimize current features, while being only provided page views and raw user growth. No referral data, click tracking, dwell times, return frequency, workflow analysis, network paths, geographic usage data, browser info, or bandwidth data. Simply allocate the resources of the teams based on pageviews and raw user growth numbers. You would be able to research new features, but only by asking 100 users what they want or where they are from. Each feature you create cost $10mil and once launched can only be changed for $100mil, and the new feature deletes 1% of your user accounts. I am not saying that privacy is not relevant, but I am saying that at some point in the future data will be more important, critically in the health sciences and public works(globally).