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Should they? The vast quantity of users find it incredibly useful and have no reason to be concerned about governments or third parties being able to determine

Should they? The vast quantity of users find it incredibly useful and have no reason to be concerned about governments or third parties being able to determine their geographic location, because governments or third parties don't generally care.

drb91 8y ago
Any source for this claim?
- fixermark 8y ago
  The general public and repeatedly-reported-upon understanding of how data collection can be leveraged to find unexpected insights not obvious from the data, coupled with the Snowden leaks, coupled with the ever-increasing user count for cellphones, Facebook, Twitter, and the Internet in general. If people were deeply individually concerned about the risks vs. rewards of these technologies, they'd stop using them. That's the rubber-meets-the-road calculus I see.
  - losteric 8y ago
    Do you trust the public is informed about these technologies? I think you might be overestimating individuals... most folks still don't know about Cambridge Analytica.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  - OrganicMSG 8y ago
    > "If people were deeply individually concerned about the risks vs. rewards of these technologies, they'd stop using them." Why do you think that? It clearly doesn't apply to stuff like oil, for instance. I could give up my phone, but I would be in deep shit if I did it tomorrow. It would take a lot of arrangement to do so and it would piss off my family and lose me work.
    - fixermark 8y ago
      Actually, I'd argue that it does apply to stuff like oil. People say they're concerned. But the actual number of people attempting to zero the amount of oil they use? Much lower than claimed concern. Words are easy. Actions have costs that people would prefer not to take on.
      - OrganicMSG 8y ago
        >the actual number of people attempting to zero the amount of oil they use? Much lower than claimed concern. How do you know how many there are? Anyone doing that couldn't travel except by foot, buy any commercial products or use any available communication services. edit - alternatively, there are loads of people attempting to zero the amount of oil they use. They are just using oil to get there.
  - Floegipoky 8y ago
    Kind of like how automobiles are a luxury, and if people cared about the 4th Amendment they just wouldn't drive anywhere. Nevermind that our way of life is literally not possible without the technologies in question. Every single one of the revelations you've mentioned was met with public backlash, followed by either a misinformation campaign or intense dog-wagging. This is called manufactured consent. For example, let's look at Cambridge Analytica. When it was revealed that a military contractor was hired to subvert the 2016 Presidential election, the dominant story in the alphabet-soup media was a twitter tantrum from Trump. As it became clear over the next few days that the story wasn't going to be buried easily, the narrative was quickly shifted away from the subversion of democracy to blaming Facebook for leaking user data, culminating in parading The Zuck before Congress. He played his part perfectly: no bread, but enough circus to keep the masses from thinking too hard about what it means for an election to be free.
    - fixermark 8y ago
      You'll have to unbox how driving is related to the 4th Amendment; I would have assumed you were going to observe people continue to drive even though 40,000 people a year die in car accidents. People do the calculus to decide if risk is greater than reward all the time. It appears ubiquitous connectivity, for most people, is far more rewarding than risky.
      - gowld 8y ago
        In short, doing anything that requires a Driver's License severely restricts your freedom from search and seizure while traveling on public highways. To gain those rights back, you have to (de facto) forfeit your Driver's License and stop driving on public highways.
      - haZard_OS 8y ago
        >People do the calculus to decide if risk is greater than reward all the time. Technically you're right but what you seem to be missing is that people (in general) suck at risk assessment. Although they are doing "the calculus", most of their calculations are based on heuristics that just don't reflect a rational analysis. That is why so many people fear plane travel more than car travel, immigrants more than cigarettes, and pharmaceuticals more than "raw water".
  - rosser 8y ago
    Tu quoque. See also: "Ayn Rand collected Social Security benefits." (And I abhor her oeuvre and "movement".)
    - fixermark 8y ago
      Tu quoque requires someone to have made a claim in the first place. I'm saying people make the claim on the average person's behalf that they want privacy and information such as their location (as triangulated by cellphone towers) kept generally secret from governments and corporations who can offer them benefits, and that claim is not actually supported by much evidence. I think the digital intelligentsia cares deeply; the average cell user, not so much.
      - rosser 8y ago
        And I'm saying that lack of care is a product of ignorance — ignorance in no small way imposed upon them by the shady behavior of the people who are doing this. As such, it can't be reason to blame them for that "choice". It's a passive choice. It's opt-out, without being told there's a option. And there isn't actually an option. That is, if Verizon was unambiguous with Joe Customer, "We may sell your real-time location information to companies known to re-sell that kind of information to the government, and you can't do anything about it" how many of them would be pissed? Isn't the state being restrained from un-warranted — literally — snooping into people's lives a core American value? Your position is that most people would "meh". I think you're wrong. You're probably right that there's scant evidence either way, though.
908087 8y ago
If they "don't generally care", they wouldn't be collecting that data to begin with.
- fixermark 8y ago
  They collect the data because they can find themselves needing to care in the future, at which point nobody wants to be kicking themselves for failing to collect the data.
  - ionised 8y ago
    So they do care.
- wilsonnb 8y ago
  It's possible that they care about the aggregated data and not about the individual data.
trendia 8y ago
Cambridge Analytica did far more with far less.
- hanspeter 8y ago
  Did they? They're sales pitch claimed they could but what we've heard of actual methods and impact didn't appear more effective than regular FB ads.
TechieKid 8y ago
Several recent HN stories have had this kind of comment (first noticed with the Securus submission) that's a weird mix of "You have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide" and "They will never come for you, you're too unimportant." Is this a sustained campaign or just a way for folks who have contributed to these issues to feel good about themselves?
- wilsonnb 8y ago
  It's just how a lot of people feel about the issue. I'm not sure why you would jump to concluding that it's a sustained campaign or some kind of reaction to guilt.
- dang 8y ago
  > Is this a sustained campaign This breaks the site guidelines. Could you please read and follow them when commenting here? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Insinuations of astroturfing or shilling without evidence (an opposing view does not count as evidence) are an internet toxin that turns out to be worse than the things it insinuates, because it's so widespread. I've written a ton about why we don't allow that here, if anyone wants to read more: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0&query=by:dang%20astroturfing https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
  - TechieKid 8y ago
    Welp, sorry.
- pubutil 8y ago
  Wilsonnb hit the nail on the head, it’s just how some people feel. Though I don’t doubt that some people involved in the creation of this phenomenon use the argument to justify their work. I had a hard time understanding why people wouldn’t be more conscientious of their privacy, until I had discussions about the issue with people close to me. My folks had a very similar sentiment to the typical “if you have nothing to hide, then why do you worry about it”. My girlfriend had the same thought, but took it a step further and asked why I cared so much about people uninvolved in my life knowing personal details about it, then said I was “the most paranoid person [she’d] ever met” Once the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke, they all understood my point. I think the majority of people who don’t work in tech don’t understand the massive implications that our lack of privacy has. They don’t know how cookies or backends or tracking pixels work, and may not even know they exist. They imagine an NSA agent sitting in a room looking for keywords, not companies that they entrust their digital lives to selling off every little piece of info about them. It’s so much more than your Facebook or Twitter posts being public, it’s data that we might not even know about ourselves being kept in the hands of unknown entities. To sum up this rant, some people have to see it to believe it because this is outside their scope of knowledge
gordyf 8y ago
You can be upset about an aspect of a product, and seek to change that aspect, without abandoning use of the product. For example, 1.3 million people are killed by cars every year, and while we recognize the risk, we also constantly improve them through safety regulations, training and improved technology. Just because people use cell phones and apps today doesn't mean we're okay with the downsides and should stop trying to improving them.
- fixermark 8y ago
  It's an interesting example you've chosen, since one of the dimensions along which car safety improvement is being researched is ubiquitous GPS signalling to share data about road and traffic conditions (and since every self-driving car is basically a panopticon and recording device rolled into one).
jadedhacker 8y ago
1) Users get no benefit from information resale. 2) COINTELPRO
- fixermark 8y ago
  Keep in mind: most users are not part of a domestic political organization targeted by the FBI, so again, when the rubber hits the road, they'd rather not be inconvenienced for a risk that applies to other people. They don't care about COINTELPRO (disregarding, of course, the percentage of the population that actually thinks the FBI digging into "subversive" groups is part of its job). Users get no benefit from the information resale directly, but they also aren't generally harmed by it. And the benefit they get from having a ubiquitously-connected device in their pocket outweighs the (apparently calculated to be low) per-person cost to their information being resold. The fact that you or I may do the calculus differently for ourselves (because we have different risk sensitivity) doesn't impact those who don't reach the same conclusions.
  - rosser 8y ago
    A potential victim's ignorance of their risk doesn't mean they aren't at risk. Because I'm not specifically aware there's a cross-town bus with my name on it, I'm somehow not about to get pancaked?
  - jadedhacker 8y ago
    What I'd say is that until somewhat recently, I was interested in politics but not engaged. I took your position during that part of my life. Now that I'm actually engaging in political activities, COINTELPRO and its current incarnations scare the bejesus out of me, and I'm not doing anything that radical, just left of the Democratic Party. YMMV. There may come a time in your life when you wish to have a say in the political system or are wronged by a powerful corporation. You'd care in that case. When your political rights disappear, they aren't easy to get back.
    - fixermark 8y ago
      I agree that one in that context cares, but I think you can agree that most people are not in that context. So on the whole, they receive benefits from deep data integration and no immediate downsides. Which circles back to the original question: should a person feel guilt over creating tools that help the average user and harm the political dissident? Seems an open question. Perhaps one heavily dependent upon whether the actor agrees with the political dissident's position.
OrganicMSG 8y ago
Mass surveillance is not really for investigating individuals. The game being played is not '1984', it is 'Foundation'. It is for steering entire societies, and this works far better on the boring people who think they have nothing to hide as they are the easiest to model
- AlexCoventry 8y ago
  I agree the greater emphasis is Foundation-style analysis, but really, it's for both.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - OrganicMSG 8y ago
    I've been working a theory that what we are seeing in the last 10 years or so is the escape of these techniques from government into private industry. With a single powerful player, you get a consistent, but slightly false narrative. If you have lots of players though, you get multiple competing narratives and the news stops making sense. Is partly why I still think Gibson is one of the people who got it closest to the mark.
hanbura 8y ago
>have no reason to be concerned about governments ... Many aren't, but everyone has reason to. Governments change. Telling your government your religion in 1920s Germany was harmless, in 1940 many would have preferred if the government didn't have their religion on file. Circumstances change to. In 1920 being a Japanese in the US wasn't special. After Perl Harbor came the internment camps. And then there's the mundane stuff. You protest a government policy, someone in the government takes issue and tries to put some of these annoying people in jail. Given that you don't know when you might become an enemy of the state it's always a good idea to keep the power of the state over its citizens in check.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
CamperBob2 8y ago
It's not about being able to track everybody. You're right, nobody cares about that. It's about being able to track anybody.
8bitsrule 8y ago
It would be better if they did, yes.

drb91 8y ago

Any source for this claim?

fixermark 8y ago
The general public and repeatedly-reported-upon understanding of how data collection can be leveraged to find unexpected insights not obvious from the data, coupled with the Snowden leaks, coupled with the ever-increasing user count for cellphones, Facebook, Twitter, and the Internet in general. If people were deeply individually concerned about the risks vs. rewards of these technologies, they'd stop using them. That's the rubber-meets-the-road calculus I see.
- losteric 8y ago
  Do you trust the public is informed about these technologies? I think you might be overestimating individuals... most folks still don't know about Cambridge Analytica.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- OrganicMSG 8y ago
  > "If people were deeply individually concerned about the risks vs. rewards of these technologies, they'd stop using them." Why do you think that? It clearly doesn't apply to stuff like oil, for instance. I could give up my phone, but I would be in deep shit if I did it tomorrow. It would take a lot of arrangement to do so and it would piss off my family and lose me work.
  - fixermark 8y ago
    Actually, I'd argue that it does apply to stuff like oil. People say they're concerned. But the actual number of people attempting to zero the amount of oil they use? Much lower than claimed concern. Words are easy. Actions have costs that people would prefer not to take on.
    - OrganicMSG 8y ago
      >the actual number of people attempting to zero the amount of oil they use? Much lower than claimed concern. How do you know how many there are? Anyone doing that couldn't travel except by foot, buy any commercial products or use any available communication services. edit - alternatively, there are loads of people attempting to zero the amount of oil they use. They are just using oil to get there.
- Floegipoky 8y ago
  Kind of like how automobiles are a luxury, and if people cared about the 4th Amendment they just wouldn't drive anywhere. Nevermind that our way of life is literally not possible without the technologies in question. Every single one of the revelations you've mentioned was met with public backlash, followed by either a misinformation campaign or intense dog-wagging. This is called manufactured consent. For example, let's look at Cambridge Analytica. When it was revealed that a military contractor was hired to subvert the 2016 Presidential election, the dominant story in the alphabet-soup media was a twitter tantrum from Trump. As it became clear over the next few days that the story wasn't going to be buried easily, the narrative was quickly shifted away from the subversion of democracy to blaming Facebook for leaking user data, culminating in parading The Zuck before Congress. He played his part perfectly: no bread, but enough circus to keep the masses from thinking too hard about what it means for an election to be free.
  - fixermark 8y ago
    You'll have to unbox how driving is related to the 4th Amendment; I would have assumed you were going to observe people continue to drive even though 40,000 people a year die in car accidents. People do the calculus to decide if risk is greater than reward all the time. It appears ubiquitous connectivity, for most people, is far more rewarding than risky.
    - gowld 8y ago
      In short, doing anything that requires a Driver's License severely restricts your freedom from search and seizure while traveling on public highways. To gain those rights back, you have to (de facto) forfeit your Driver's License and stop driving on public highways.
    - haZard_OS 8y ago
      >People do the calculus to decide if risk is greater than reward all the time. Technically you're right but what you seem to be missing is that people (in general) suck at risk assessment. Although they are doing "the calculus", most of their calculations are based on heuristics that just don't reflect a rational analysis. That is why so many people fear plane travel more than car travel, immigrants more than cigarettes, and pharmaceuticals more than "raw water".
- rosser 8y ago
  Tu quoque. See also: "Ayn Rand collected Social Security benefits." (And I abhor her oeuvre and "movement".)
  - fixermark 8y ago
    Tu quoque requires someone to have made a claim in the first place. I'm saying people make the claim on the average person's behalf that they want privacy and information such as their location (as triangulated by cellphone towers) kept generally secret from governments and corporations who can offer them benefits, and that claim is not actually supported by much evidence. I think the digital intelligentsia cares deeply; the average cell user, not so much.
    - rosser 8y ago
      And I'm saying that lack of care is a product of ignorance — ignorance in no small way imposed upon them by the shady behavior of the people who are doing this. As such, it can't be reason to blame them for that "choice". It's a passive choice. It's opt-out, without being told there's a option. And there isn't actually an option. That is, if Verizon was unambiguous with Joe Customer, "We may sell your real-time location information to companies known to re-sell that kind of information to the government, and you can't do anything about it" how many of them would be pissed? Isn't the state being restrained from un-warranted — literally — snooping into people's lives a core American value? Your position is that most people would "meh". I think you're wrong. You're probably right that there's scant evidence either way, though.

908087 8y ago

If they "don't generally care", they wouldn't be collecting that data to begin with.

fixermark 8y ago
They collect the data because they can find themselves needing to care in the future, at which point nobody wants to be kicking themselves for failing to collect the data.
- ionised 8y ago
  So they do care.
wilsonnb 8y ago
It's possible that they care about the aggregated data and not about the individual data.

trendia 8y ago

Cambridge Analytica did far more with far less.

hanspeter 8y ago
Did they? They're sales pitch claimed they could but what we've heard of actual methods and impact didn't appear more effective than regular FB ads.

TechieKid 8y ago

Several recent HN stories have had this kind of comment (first noticed with the Securus submission) that's a weird mix of "You have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide" and "They will never come for you, you're too unimportant." Is this a sustained campaign or just a way for folks who have contributed to these issues to feel good about themselves?

wilsonnb 8y ago
It's just how a lot of people feel about the issue. I'm not sure why you would jump to concluding that it's a sustained campaign or some kind of reaction to guilt.
dang 8y ago
> Is this a sustained campaign This breaks the site guidelines. Could you please read and follow them when commenting here? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Insinuations of astroturfing or shilling without evidence (an opposing view does not count as evidence) are an internet toxin that turns out to be worse than the things it insinuates, because it's so widespread. I've written a ton about why we don't allow that here, if anyone wants to read more: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0&query=by:dang%20astroturfing https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
- TechieKid 8y ago
  Welp, sorry.
pubutil 8y ago
Wilsonnb hit the nail on the head, it’s just how some people feel. Though I don’t doubt that some people involved in the creation of this phenomenon use the argument to justify their work. I had a hard time understanding why people wouldn’t be more conscientious of their privacy, until I had discussions about the issue with people close to me. My folks had a very similar sentiment to the typical “if you have nothing to hide, then why do you worry about it”. My girlfriend had the same thought, but took it a step further and asked why I cared so much about people uninvolved in my life knowing personal details about it, then said I was “the most paranoid person [she’d] ever met” Once the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke, they all understood my point. I think the majority of people who don’t work in tech don’t understand the massive implications that our lack of privacy has. They don’t know how cookies or backends or tracking pixels work, and may not even know they exist. They imagine an NSA agent sitting in a room looking for keywords, not companies that they entrust their digital lives to selling off every little piece of info about them. It’s so much more than your Facebook or Twitter posts being public, it’s data that we might not even know about ourselves being kept in the hands of unknown entities. To sum up this rant, some people have to see it to believe it because this is outside their scope of knowledge

gordyf 8y ago

You can be upset about an aspect of a product, and seek to change that aspect, without abandoning use of the product. For example, 1.3 million people are killed by cars every year, and while we recognize the risk, we also constantly improve them through safety regulations, training and improved technology. Just because people use cell phones and apps today doesn't mean we're okay with the downsides and should stop trying to improving them.

fixermark 8y ago
It's an interesting example you've chosen, since one of the dimensions along which car safety improvement is being researched is ubiquitous GPS signalling to share data about road and traffic conditions (and since every self-driving car is basically a panopticon and recording device rolled into one).

jadedhacker 8y ago

1) Users get no benefit from information resale. 2) COINTELPRO

fixermark 8y ago
Keep in mind: most users are not part of a domestic political organization targeted by the FBI, so again, when the rubber hits the road, they'd rather not be inconvenienced for a risk that applies to other people. They don't care about COINTELPRO (disregarding, of course, the percentage of the population that actually thinks the FBI digging into "subversive" groups is part of its job). Users get no benefit from the information resale directly, but they also aren't generally harmed by it. And the benefit they get from having a ubiquitously-connected device in their pocket outweighs the (apparently calculated to be low) per-person cost to their information being resold. The fact that you or I may do the calculus differently for ourselves (because we have different risk sensitivity) doesn't impact those who don't reach the same conclusions.
- rosser 8y ago
  A potential victim's ignorance of their risk doesn't mean they aren't at risk. Because I'm not specifically aware there's a cross-town bus with my name on it, I'm somehow not about to get pancaked?
- jadedhacker 8y ago
  What I'd say is that until somewhat recently, I was interested in politics but not engaged. I took your position during that part of my life. Now that I'm actually engaging in political activities, COINTELPRO and its current incarnations scare the bejesus out of me, and I'm not doing anything that radical, just left of the Democratic Party. YMMV. There may come a time in your life when you wish to have a say in the political system or are wronged by a powerful corporation. You'd care in that case. When your political rights disappear, they aren't easy to get back.
  - fixermark 8y ago
    I agree that one in that context cares, but I think you can agree that most people are not in that context. So on the whole, they receive benefits from deep data integration and no immediate downsides. Which circles back to the original question: should a person feel guilt over creating tools that help the average user and harm the political dissident? Seems an open question. Perhaps one heavily dependent upon whether the actor agrees with the political dissident's position.

OrganicMSG 8y ago

Mass surveillance is not really for investigating individuals. The game being played is not '1984', it is 'Foundation'. It is for steering entire societies, and this works far better on the boring people who think they have nothing to hide as they are the easiest to model

AlexCoventry 8y ago
I agree the greater emphasis is Foundation-style analysis, but really, it's for both.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- OrganicMSG 8y ago
  I've been working a theory that what we are seeing in the last 10 years or so is the escape of these techniques from government into private industry. With a single powerful player, you get a consistent, but slightly false narrative. If you have lots of players though, you get multiple competing narratives and the news stops making sense. Is partly why I still think Gibson is one of the people who got it closest to the mark.

hanbura 8y ago

>have no reason to be concerned about governments ... Many aren't, but everyone has reason to. Governments change. Telling your government your religion in 1920s Germany was harmless, in 1940 many would have preferred if the government didn't have their religion on file. Circumstances change to. In 1920 being a Japanese in the US wasn't special. After Perl Harbor came the internment camps. And then there's the mundane stuff. You protest a government policy, someone in the government takes issue and tries to put some of these annoying people in jail. Given that you don't know when you might become an enemy of the state it's always a good idea to keep the power of the state over its citizens in check.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

CamperBob2 8y ago

It's not about being able to track everybody. You're right, nobody cares about that. It's about being able to track anybody.

8bitsrule 8y ago

It would be better if they did, yes.