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""If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place."" ... Says the billionaire to the gay man in Ni

""If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place."" ... Says the billionaire to the gay man in Nigeria who could be killed if this were public knowledge? ... Says the billionaire to the journalist with private sources doing legit work? ... Says the billionaire to the person who votes 'ABC' but works in company who votes 'XYZ' and hate those 'ABC voters' and who could lose their job due to blatant political discrimination? I quite fundamentally disagree with this concept as it abnegates the very nature of privacy. Different words, ideas, have utterly different meanings in different social contexts and in different cultures, different regimes. It's a deeply cynical quote from him, I think, that facilitates his own 'bottom line' i.e. as someone who makes billions from the exchange of 'public' information. "We've lost our ability to keep secrets." It's true that privacy is harder but it's definitely not true that we can't keep secrets. We control technology and the internet, and we can definitely 'choose privacy', it's mostly a matter of will, and the pragmatic acceptance that it won't be perfect. Privacy was taken for granted, but I believe we should recognize it as a basic right. It'll be a little bit harder for example in the digital age, but we can absolutely have it, we just need to make the choice.

VikingCoder 8y ago
I think everyone here is misinterpreting what I meant, and I take full responsibility for that. I think we thought of computers and the internet as our allies in privacy. They are not. They are our enemies. I think we should stop trusting computers, any computers, as much as we possibly can. Especially if you're in a minority that your government may try to punish. --- I care deeply about all those people. I hate that computers have been weaponized against them. It's a tragedy to go from the optimism of improving the world with computers and networks, to where we are today. I fundamentally disagree with you that we can achieve privacy. Your ISP knows too much. Your phone carrier knows too much. Your DNS knows too much. The Credit Agencies know too much. Your CPU is too insecure. Your OS, browser, and other apps are, too. We keep turning decentralized / federated services into centralized ones. Every ad network knows too much. Your browser knows too much. It's too easy to identify you nearly uniquely from your browser, even if you try to stop it. TOR has a lot of problems, and exit nodes are the devil. Blockchain is too easy to track. Keyloggers are far too common. SMS verification and recovery are the worst things ever. Face Tracking is entirely too viable. License Plate tracking is entirely too viable. Credit Card companies know too much. Banks know too much. Employers know too much. Every online commerce site knows too much. Our phones know too much. Polling companies know too much. The political parties know too much. The NSA knows entirely too much. Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Microsoft, all know too much. I think things like Kenton Varda's Sandstorm are a good step. I hope to see more things like them. If you want something to be secret, don't let a computer know you're doing it. Any computer. When you say "we just need to make the choice," I don't believe you any more. I think that's kind of like saying Communist Utopia, or Libertarian Utopia can exist. All that needs to happen is all of human nature needs to change. :( I think tech folks like us need to work our asses off to create systems with real privacy that are just as good or better than the ones that destroy privacy. Because if they're remotely worse, in basically any way, they won't catch on. Note that Facebook will be almost entirely impossible to replace. Because of the Network effect.
- sonnyblarney 8y ago
  "All that needs to happen is all of human nature needs to change" No, just some legislation, policies, some new architecture, possibly some technology changes. If the government for example banned any org from collecting any personal information at all without specific explicit permission, and applied the same to sharing, it would quite fundamentally change the landscape. In fact, just taking a 'closed' approach to privacy instead of 'open' in most systems, then most privacy problems would be addressed. Obviously, a 'hacker' could steal stuff, but those are generally marginal cases, and there's no reason that we need to live with that either. How often to hackers steal money from your regular banks? Not very often. If we treated personal information like private data then we'd be living in a new world, about the 1990's.
  - VikingCoder 8y ago
    "Click here to surrender your privacy so you can see pictures of cats." ->click<- People will click the button ever time. I think human nature needs to change. Or else we need to work our asses off to invent better technology, but we're nowhere close.

VikingCoder 8y ago

I think everyone here is misinterpreting what I meant, and I take full responsibility for that. I think we thought of computers and the internet as our allies in privacy. They are not. They are our enemies. I think we should stop trusting computers, any computers, as much as we possibly can. Especially if you're in a minority that your government may try to punish. --- I care deeply about all those people. I hate that computers have been weaponized against them. It's a tragedy to go from the optimism of improving the world with computers and networks, to where we are today. I fundamentally disagree with you that we can achieve privacy. Your ISP knows too much. Your phone carrier knows too much. Your DNS knows too much. The Credit Agencies know too much. Your CPU is too insecure. Your OS, browser, and other apps are, too. We keep turning decentralized / federated services into centralized ones. Every ad network knows too much. Your browser knows too much. It's too easy to identify you nearly uniquely from your browser, even if you try to stop it. TOR has a lot of problems, and exit nodes are the devil. Blockchain is too easy to track. Keyloggers are far too common. SMS verification and recovery are the worst things ever. Face Tracking is entirely too viable. License Plate tracking is entirely too viable. Credit Card companies know too much. Banks know too much. Employers know too much. Every online commerce site knows too much. Our phones know too much. Polling companies know too much. The political parties know too much. The NSA knows entirely too much. Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Microsoft, all know too much. I think things like Kenton Varda's Sandstorm are a good step. I hope to see more things like them. If you want something to be secret, don't let a computer know you're doing it. Any computer. When you say "we just need to make the choice," I don't believe you any more. I think that's kind of like saying Communist Utopia, or Libertarian Utopia can exist. All that needs to happen is all of human nature needs to change. :( I think tech folks like us need to work our asses off to create systems with real privacy that are just as good or better than the ones that destroy privacy. Because if they're remotely worse, in basically any way, they won't catch on. Note that Facebook will be almost entirely impossible to replace. Because of the Network effect.

sonnyblarney 8y ago
"All that needs to happen is all of human nature needs to change" No, just some legislation, policies, some new architecture, possibly some technology changes. If the government for example banned any org from collecting any personal information at all without specific explicit permission, and applied the same to sharing, it would quite fundamentally change the landscape. In fact, just taking a 'closed' approach to privacy instead of 'open' in most systems, then most privacy problems would be addressed. Obviously, a 'hacker' could steal stuff, but those are generally marginal cases, and there's no reason that we need to live with that either. How often to hackers steal money from your regular banks? Not very often. If we treated personal information like private data then we'd be living in a new world, about the 1990's.
- VikingCoder 8y ago
  "Click here to surrender your privacy so you can see pictures of cats." ->click<- People will click the button ever time. I think human nature needs to change. Or else we need to work our asses off to invent better technology, but we're nowhere close.