11 ms·

How to fight the surveillance economy

150 points by burnaway 8y ago

nerdponx 8y ago
Addendum to the solution 1: "Don't assume that, because you paid for something, they aren't harvesting your data anyway". Example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19113960 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19113960
bogle 8y ago
> Look for businesses that accept anonymous payment options and don’t force everyone to share personal information with a third-party payment provider. What anonymous payment options are there (other than many cryptocurrencies)? I do remember the days of sending cash through the post but I don't think that's what the author is suggesting.
- elif 8y ago
  i think they are referring to vpn services that don't require you to create an account with name/contact/etc. For instance, the one I use, they create a bitcoin wallet, once that wallet receives coins, it generates a random string username and random string password, and that is the entire "signup" process.
  - shadowprofile76 8y ago
    If it's not too much trouble which VPN would this be? I know of some that offer crypto payments but a real user recommendation is always welcome.
    - elif 8y ago
      I don't recommend it since it's a security-sensitive topic and I don't know anything about their backend or their exit nodes or their custom vpn client... but to answer the first question i use Private Internet Access.
      - shadowprofile76 8y ago
        Thanks for the reply and caveat though.
- the_jpg 8y ago
  On my country at least there is a trend that only registered costumers have promotions and discounts, but what really happens is that the price of the things go up and the registered costumers pay the 'normal' price. I'm not buying anymore on theses type of stores (markets and restaurants mostly), but this is keeping growing difficult because every other week more and more business are starting to ask for my 'credentials'.
  - myself248 8y ago
    Use fakes. In the US there's a famous song called Jenny with the phone number 867-5309 in the lyrics. Everyone over age 30 knows that number by heart, and a fair number younger too. Simply give (your local area-code)-867-5309 and there's a very good chance that someone's already signed up with that number. If not, I'll complete the signup with that number and whatever bogus name comes to mind. Jacob Blues, 1060 W Addison 60613 works well. Just like AdNauseam, simply chaff the system until it's futile. I'm sure there are similar characters in the public consciousness of every country.
    - 29083011397778 8y ago
      Shouldn't the first name always be Jenny for 857-5309? Otherwise the next person is screwed when the cashier (potentially) asks for a name.
- AlexandrB 8y ago
  > I do remember the days of sending cash through the post but I don't think that's what the author is suggesting. That may be exactly what he's suggesting. The VPN provider he works for (IVPN) allows payment by mail by cash.
- exit 8y ago
  this use case is a huge part of why bitcoin exists, it's hard to exclude from the conversation.
ajaxaddicted 8y ago
Some valid points. At the end of the day, until the governments around the world reign in the offenders with regulations and potential jail time (GDRP and such), nothing is going to change for the masses. Just like every other cycle in the human history - abuse until a breaking point is reached, regulations come in, find some other niche ripe for "disruption", repeat the cycle. Unrelated to the main topic - writing about the surveillance economy in a Medium post, which itself is a textbook example of the surveillance economy devaluates the core message a little bit for me.
- avmich 8y ago
  Judging by how fast advertisers left some political outlets, it could be possible to discourage cooperation with aforementioned corporations. For software engineers to work in those may become career-limiting.
matz1 8y ago
Or instead make the information public/transparent as possible. To level the playing field. Yes there are going to be many issue arise from this, so it's these issue that need to be fixed instead of trying to fight to make information private. >They know more about us than we know about ourselves or than we know about them Right so we need to fight for knowing more information about them as much as they know about us Governments want surveillance the citizen, fine, the citizen should fight for ability to surveillance the government as well.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- JohnFen 8y ago
  > Right so we need to fight for knowing more information about them as much as they know about us I don't see how that actually solves the problem.
3pt14159 8y ago
If you're a software developer the way to fight this is financial. Make a ton of money then pay journalists to write about it and pay other software developers to build the tools to evade it.[0] Regarding VPNs: What I want is a very small, open source program that I can give my credit card. It will light up little DigitalOcean droplets (and other VPSes to stop potential monitoring from them) and create VPNs here and there. I also want to build my own browser that will be capable of making the rendering happen on these rented-for-a-minute servers then pipe back just the PNG. I also would make certain things local. I can use machine learning to predict which areas of Wikipedia I will probably want to read in the future. This should just be local and occasionally synced. Same with Stack Overflow. Fingerprint me now bitches. (They still probably can, at least partially. It just raises me up to the top of the trees in the jungle.) [0] Though I will say I see the downsides. Surveillance is how we stop malice and per-individual power is going up.
- blotter_paper 8y ago
  >I also want to build my own browser that will be capable of making the rendering happen on these rented-for-a-minute servers then pipe back just the PNG. I think you want a browser running on a servet you access over a VNC, which will pipe back just the parts of the screen that have updated.
  - pnutjam 8y ago
    x2go is perfect for this. I used to run an instance on AWS, but I just keep one at home now. It pipes everything through a PIA vpn.
    - darpa_escapee 8y ago
      How does x2go compare with xpra?
      - pnutjam 8y ago
        As far as I can tell, xpra uses the X protocol, which is laggy over links under 10 Mb/s. X2go uses the NX protocol, which is designed for slower links, so it works better across the internet.
AndrewKemendo 8y ago
The surveillance economy is a direct result of advertising becoming the default business model for Internet companies. At its root, advertising is attempting to predict an individual's preferences and subtlety nudge their preferences toward specific buying behaviors. With more granular and pervasive data inputs, you can arguably do better predictions and thus better targeting. The only counter to this is either: 1: proof that more individual data /= better ad targeting as DDG is attempting to do Or 2. Changing the default business model for internet companies Surveillance capitalism is a natural result of our form of consumption driven economy. The most interesting thing here actually is that there's an argument to be made that this is also a good approach to building very complex artificial intelligence, effectively aggregating how people respond to input.
- Retric 8y ago
  It’s much worse than that. Companies you pay significant amounts of money to like ISP’s also reolized selling your data made them just slightly more money so now all large companies do so.
  - AndrewKemendo 8y ago
    Right, except they are selling it to ad networks/companies, so it all comes back to the Ad market being the end consumer.
    - Retric 8y ago
      Online advertising is only a slice of this. From political campaigns to chains picking locations, collecting and interpreting vast amounts of data has become the norm.
- amelius 8y ago
  > The surveillance economy is a direct result of advertising becoming the default business model for Internet companies. This is sad because advertising is a poor monetization scheme. For instance, let's say you make $0.10 per user through ads. Now let's say you want to increase the price to $2.00 per user. Then oops, you can't, because ads don't allow you to make that much for any given user. So depending on your preferred price-point, which may be variable, you may have to switch monetization schemes, which is terrible.
pmlnr 8y ago
> How to fight the surveillance economy (medium.com) Step 0: publish on your own platform without trackers, not on medium.
- exhilaration 8y ago
  From TFA: Install Privacy Badger by EFF that uncovers and blocks scripts on websites that track you; this Medium page has 2 active trackers that would have been blocked if you did - Google Analytics and Parse.ly
  - pmlnr 8y ago
    That is the wrong attitude. Yes, I know how to shield myself; nobody else in my family does. There's nothing wrong pushing links to the article to platforms like HN, Reddit, etc, but the source shouldn't be medium. If you write a piece like this, it deserves to go on a platform without trackers; otherwise it's a bit hard to take it seriously. I'm aware that medium.com might bring in a broader audience and that it's simple to "publish without starting a blog", but so is doing an HTML export from a text editor these days. It's also similar to adding "why quit Facebook" on Facebook itself - it doesn't work. The article itself is decent though.
    - avmich 8y ago
      > otherwise it's a bit hard to take it seriously. This is the wrong attitude. You should realize that you may not be able to do all possible or necessary measures to protections all at once. That doesn't mean you should avoid doing some of them, and the article talks about that. So, in other words, if you didn't do step 0, let it not stop you from doing other steps.
    - avmich 8y ago
      > Yes, I know how to shield myself; nobody else in my family does. Another thing is that we should both educate those who don't know how to shield themselves - and make it easier to be protected. The latter is related to network protocols and processes and to client (and server) software. Can we simplify Internet?
sorokod 8y ago
Poison the well - generate noise. By generating false signals you will devalue the harvested data hopefully to a point it is not worth harvesting.
- arethuza 8y ago
  emacs has had M-x spook for a long long time....
- ilikehurdles 8y ago
  Speaking of which, AdNauseum is a useful extension for Firefox for devaluing the ad economy. Google of course banned it from the chrome store.
- crucialfelix 8y ago
  We need Scramble Suits, like Through a Scanner Darkly, but as a VPN.
rootusrootus 8y ago
I suspect this is an inseparable part of the wide open Internet we love to talk about. Changing revenue to something more direct and less invasive is an extremely difficult task. I wonder if we will see the return of big walled gardens (e.g. Prodigy, Compuserve, etc from the old days) with all-you-can eat subscriptions to content within.
nabnob 8y ago
>Searching for and writing about topics online deemed inappropriate are known to authorities within a second thanks to cooperating companies. This is already happening. I used to mock conservatives and free-speech advocates who claimed that Twitter, Reddit, Facebook etc. were censoring speech unecessarily. I'm pretty far to the left, and obviously I think racist and sexist harassment are bad things...however, these platforms have automated any features that allow users to report "problematic" posts or comments, which makes it VERY easy for people to abuse and mass-report anything they disagree with. Why would I trust a corporation to correctly determine whether a comment is abusive, or just an opposing point of view? What does it mean when corporations are in charge of determining what speech is offensive, and effectively control the "acceptable" range of discourse? In the UK a man was investigated by the police for retweeting an offensive limerick - https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/01/24/man-investigated-police-retweeting-transgender-limerick/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/01/24/man-investigated... I don't really agree with what he retweeted, but it still seems kind of ridiculous to investigate someone for a tweet that isn't threatening or violent.
tannhaeuser 8y ago
How about F/OSS communities, programming blogs, and forums like HN stop allowing Google, Fb et al to index and link to their pages? Soon Google and co will find out there's not much content of value left in their garden. I for one can get along well with a couple sites such as github, stackoverflow, arstechnica, some EU quality journalism sites, etc. Most other stuff turns out to be self-promotion or ad-ladden feedbuzz for the digital precariat anyway (the kind of which you see on the subway and who can't stop fumbling with their smartphone for a even a second).
paulpauper 8y ago
I understand the concern but it does not bother me much. You are much more likely to have you data logged and used against you by visiting a small website than twitter or Facebook. CIA/FBI agents are known to hack websites and install trackers. The Firefox tor JavaScript exploit comes to mind.
lucas_membrane 8y ago
Oppression is always structural. Organize.
KaiserPro 8y ago
VPNs do literally nothing to protect your privacy. if anything they make it _more_ obvious who is using your internet connection. Yes, your ISP will be less able to snoop, but you are now exchanging your ISP's complete oversight, with a VPN provider's. Now, if you VPN is based in the EU, then you have GDPR to help you. However the burden of proof is still on you. So what can you practically do? 1) container tabs Each service you _have_ to sign into has its own container. This stops each service like google, facebook, ebay et al form a complete picture of you. 2) check your unique browser ID, https://panopticlick.eff.org/ https://panopticlick.eff.org/ 3) trash your browser's profile every month. 4) on your phone, keep in private mode
kwoff 8y ago
How do you reconcile the novel "1984" (published 1949) with the comments about the internet and millenials?
AngryData 8y ago
Step 1: Don't use a smart phone. The problem is it seems to increasingly become a necessity for participating in modern society.
charliebrownau 8y ago
- Stop using platforms, companies and services that leak data, dont respect your privacy or support censorship - Stop voting the LEFT into power - Hold companies accountable - Remove Diversity & Duluth model from LAW/Justice/Courts - Hold everyone individually to the SAME EQUAL STANDARD - Be wiling to Admit USA based companies are censoring people GLOBALLY - Be wiling to Admit the LEFT is about Global Socialism - Be wiling to admit that feminism is socialism for WOMEN * The current direction of most of the West is towards a single Globalist socialist government:- * USA Dems = Global Socialist LEFT * AU Labor + Greens = Global Socialist LEFT * NZ Current Government = Global Socialist LEFT * UK Current Government = Global Socialist LEFT * CA Current Government = Global Socialist LEFT

150 points by burnaway 8y ago

Addendum to the solution 1: "Don't assume that, because you paid for something, they aren't harvesting your data anyway". Example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19113960 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19113960

bogle 8y ago

> Look for businesses that accept anonymous payment options and don’t force everyone to share personal information with a third-party payment provider. What anonymous payment options are there (other than many cryptocurrencies)? I do remember the days of sending cash through the post but I don't think that's what the author is suggesting.

elif 8y ago
i think they are referring to vpn services that don't require you to create an account with name/contact/etc. For instance, the one I use, they create a bitcoin wallet, once that wallet receives coins, it generates a random string username and random string password, and that is the entire "signup" process.
- shadowprofile76 8y ago
  If it's not too much trouble which VPN would this be? I know of some that offer crypto payments but a real user recommendation is always welcome.
  - elif 8y ago
    I don't recommend it since it's a security-sensitive topic and I don't know anything about their backend or their exit nodes or their custom vpn client... but to answer the first question i use Private Internet Access.
    - shadowprofile76 8y ago
      Thanks for the reply and caveat though.
the_jpg 8y ago
On my country at least there is a trend that only registered costumers have promotions and discounts, but what really happens is that the price of the things go up and the registered costumers pay the 'normal' price. I'm not buying anymore on theses type of stores (markets and restaurants mostly), but this is keeping growing difficult because every other week more and more business are starting to ask for my 'credentials'.
- myself248 8y ago
  Use fakes. In the US there's a famous song called Jenny with the phone number 867-5309 in the lyrics. Everyone over age 30 knows that number by heart, and a fair number younger too. Simply give (your local area-code)-867-5309 and there's a very good chance that someone's already signed up with that number. If not, I'll complete the signup with that number and whatever bogus name comes to mind. Jacob Blues, 1060 W Addison 60613 works well. Just like AdNauseam, simply chaff the system until it's futile. I'm sure there are similar characters in the public consciousness of every country.
  - 29083011397778 8y ago
    Shouldn't the first name always be Jenny for 857-5309? Otherwise the next person is screwed when the cashier (potentially) asks for a name.
AlexandrB 8y ago
> I do remember the days of sending cash through the post but I don't think that's what the author is suggesting. That may be exactly what he's suggesting. The VPN provider he works for (IVPN) allows payment by mail by cash.
exit 8y ago
this use case is a huge part of why bitcoin exists, it's hard to exclude from the conversation.

ajaxaddicted 8y ago

Some valid points. At the end of the day, until the governments around the world reign in the offenders with regulations and potential jail time (GDRP and such), nothing is going to change for the masses. Just like every other cycle in the human history - abuse until a breaking point is reached, regulations come in, find some other niche ripe for "disruption", repeat the cycle. Unrelated to the main topic - writing about the surveillance economy in a Medium post, which itself is a textbook example of the surveillance economy devaluates the core message a little bit for me.

avmich 8y ago
Judging by how fast advertisers left some political outlets, it could be possible to discourage cooperation with aforementioned corporations. For software engineers to work in those may become career-limiting.

matz1 8y ago

Or instead make the information public/transparent as possible. To level the playing field. Yes there are going to be many issue arise from this, so it's these issue that need to be fixed instead of trying to fight to make information private. >They know more about us than we know about ourselves or than we know about them Right so we need to fight for knowing more information about them as much as they know about us Governments want surveillance the citizen, fine, the citizen should fight for ability to surveillance the government as well.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
JohnFen 8y ago
> Right so we need to fight for knowing more information about them as much as they know about us I don't see how that actually solves the problem.

3pt14159 8y ago

If you're a software developer the way to fight this is financial. Make a ton of money then pay journalists to write about it and pay other software developers to build the tools to evade it.[0] Regarding VPNs: What I want is a very small, open source program that I can give my credit card. It will light up little DigitalOcean droplets (and other VPSes to stop potential monitoring from them) and create VPNs here and there. I also want to build my own browser that will be capable of making the rendering happen on these rented-for-a-minute servers then pipe back just the PNG. I also would make certain things local. I can use machine learning to predict which areas of Wikipedia I will probably want to read in the future. This should just be local and occasionally synced. Same with Stack Overflow. Fingerprint me now bitches. (They still probably can, at least partially. It just raises me up to the top of the trees in the jungle.) [0] Though I will say I see the downsides. Surveillance is how we stop malice and per-individual power is going up.

blotter_paper 8y ago
>I also want to build my own browser that will be capable of making the rendering happen on these rented-for-a-minute servers then pipe back just the PNG. I think you want a browser running on a servet you access over a VNC, which will pipe back just the parts of the screen that have updated.
- pnutjam 8y ago
  x2go is perfect for this. I used to run an instance on AWS, but I just keep one at home now. It pipes everything through a PIA vpn.
  - darpa_escapee 8y ago
    How does x2go compare with xpra?
    - pnutjam 8y ago
      As far as I can tell, xpra uses the X protocol, which is laggy over links under 10 Mb/s. X2go uses the NX protocol, which is designed for slower links, so it works better across the internet.

AndrewKemendo 8y ago

The surveillance economy is a direct result of advertising becoming the default business model for Internet companies. At its root, advertising is attempting to predict an individual's preferences and subtlety nudge their preferences toward specific buying behaviors. With more granular and pervasive data inputs, you can arguably do better predictions and thus better targeting. The only counter to this is either: 1: proof that more individual data /= better ad targeting as DDG is attempting to do Or 2. Changing the default business model for internet companies Surveillance capitalism is a natural result of our form of consumption driven economy. The most interesting thing here actually is that there's an argument to be made that this is also a good approach to building very complex artificial intelligence, effectively aggregating how people respond to input.

Retric 8y ago
It’s much worse than that. Companies you pay significant amounts of money to like ISP’s also reolized selling your data made them just slightly more money so now all large companies do so.
- AndrewKemendo 8y ago
  Right, except they are selling it to ad networks/companies, so it all comes back to the Ad market being the end consumer.
  - Retric 8y ago
    Online advertising is only a slice of this. From political campaigns to chains picking locations, collecting and interpreting vast amounts of data has become the norm.
amelius 8y ago
> The surveillance economy is a direct result of advertising becoming the default business model for Internet companies. This is sad because advertising is a poor monetization scheme. For instance, let's say you make $0.10 per user through ads. Now let's say you want to increase the price to $2.00 per user. Then oops, you can't, because ads don't allow you to make that much for any given user. So depending on your preferred price-point, which may be variable, you may have to switch monetization schemes, which is terrible.

pmlnr 8y ago

> How to fight the surveillance economy (medium.com) Step 0: publish on your own platform without trackers, not on medium.

exhilaration 8y ago
From TFA: Install Privacy Badger by EFF that uncovers and blocks scripts on websites that track you; this Medium page has 2 active trackers that would have been blocked if you did - Google Analytics and Parse.ly
- pmlnr 8y ago
  That is the wrong attitude. Yes, I know how to shield myself; nobody else in my family does. There's nothing wrong pushing links to the article to platforms like HN, Reddit, etc, but the source shouldn't be medium. If you write a piece like this, it deserves to go on a platform without trackers; otherwise it's a bit hard to take it seriously. I'm aware that medium.com might bring in a broader audience and that it's simple to "publish without starting a blog", but so is doing an HTML export from a text editor these days. It's also similar to adding "why quit Facebook" on Facebook itself - it doesn't work. The article itself is decent though.
  - avmich 8y ago
    > otherwise it's a bit hard to take it seriously. This is the wrong attitude. You should realize that you may not be able to do all possible or necessary measures to protections all at once. That doesn't mean you should avoid doing some of them, and the article talks about that. So, in other words, if you didn't do step 0, let it not stop you from doing other steps.
  - avmich 8y ago
    > Yes, I know how to shield myself; nobody else in my family does. Another thing is that we should both educate those who don't know how to shield themselves - and make it easier to be protected. The latter is related to network protocols and processes and to client (and server) software. Can we simplify Internet?

sorokod 8y ago

Poison the well - generate noise. By generating false signals you will devalue the harvested data hopefully to a point it is not worth harvesting.

arethuza 8y ago
emacs has had M-x spook for a long long time....
ilikehurdles 8y ago
Speaking of which, AdNauseum is a useful extension for Firefox for devaluing the ad economy. Google of course banned it from the chrome store.
crucialfelix 8y ago
We need Scramble Suits, like Through a Scanner Darkly, but as a VPN.

rootusrootus 8y ago

I suspect this is an inseparable part of the wide open Internet we love to talk about. Changing revenue to something more direct and less invasive is an extremely difficult task. I wonder if we will see the return of big walled gardens (e.g. Prodigy, Compuserve, etc from the old days) with all-you-can eat subscriptions to content within.

nabnob 8y ago

>Searching for and writing about topics online deemed inappropriate are known to authorities within a second thanks to cooperating companies. This is already happening. I used to mock conservatives and free-speech advocates who claimed that Twitter, Reddit, Facebook etc. were censoring speech unecessarily. I'm pretty far to the left, and obviously I think racist and sexist harassment are bad things...however, these platforms have automated any features that allow users to report "problematic" posts or comments, which makes it VERY easy for people to abuse and mass-report anything they disagree with. Why would I trust a corporation to correctly determine whether a comment is abusive, or just an opposing point of view? What does it mean when corporations are in charge of determining what speech is offensive, and effectively control the "acceptable" range of discourse? In the UK a man was investigated by the police for retweeting an offensive limerick - https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/01/24/man-investigated-police-retweeting-transgender-limerick/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/01/24/man-investigated... I don't really agree with what he retweeted, but it still seems kind of ridiculous to investigate someone for a tweet that isn't threatening or violent.

tannhaeuser 8y ago

How about F/OSS communities, programming blogs, and forums like HN stop allowing Google, Fb et al to index and link to their pages? Soon Google and co will find out there's not much content of value left in their garden. I for one can get along well with a couple sites such as github, stackoverflow, arstechnica, some EU quality journalism sites, etc. Most other stuff turns out to be self-promotion or ad-ladden feedbuzz for the digital precariat anyway (the kind of which you see on the subway and who can't stop fumbling with their smartphone for a even a second).

paulpauper 8y ago

I understand the concern but it does not bother me much. You are much more likely to have you data logged and used against you by visiting a small website than twitter or Facebook. CIA/FBI agents are known to hack websites and install trackers. The Firefox tor JavaScript exploit comes to mind.

lucas_membrane 8y ago

Oppression is always structural. Organize.

KaiserPro 8y ago

VPNs do literally nothing to protect your privacy. if anything they make it _more_ obvious who is using your internet connection. Yes, your ISP will be less able to snoop, but you are now exchanging your ISP's complete oversight, with a VPN provider's. Now, if you VPN is based in the EU, then you have GDPR to help you. However the burden of proof is still on you. So what can you practically do? 1) container tabs Each service you _have_ to sign into has its own container. This stops each service like google, facebook, ebay et al form a complete picture of you. 2) check your unique browser ID, https://panopticlick.eff.org/ https://panopticlick.eff.org/ 3) trash your browser's profile every month. 4) on your phone, keep in private mode

kwoff 8y ago

How do you reconcile the novel "1984" (published 1949) with the comments about the internet and millenials?

AngryData 8y ago

Step 1: Don't use a smart phone. The problem is it seems to increasingly become a necessity for participating in modern society.

charliebrownau 8y ago

- Stop using platforms, companies and services that leak data, dont respect your privacy or support censorship - Stop voting the LEFT into power - Hold companies accountable - Remove Diversity & Duluth model from LAW/Justice/Courts - Hold everyone individually to the SAME EQUAL STANDARD - Be wiling to Admit USA based companies are censoring people GLOBALLY - Be wiling to Admit the LEFT is about Global Socialism - Be wiling to admit that feminism is socialism for WOMEN * The current direction of most of the West is towards a single Globalist socialist government:- * USA Dems = Global Socialist LEFT * AU Labor + Greens = Global Socialist LEFT * NZ Current Government = Global Socialist LEFT * UK Current Government = Global Socialist LEFT * CA Current Government = Global Socialist LEFT