19 ms·

The New Wilderness

249 points by OrwellianChild 7y ago

kennethfriedman 7y ago
Great points here. We definitely don't have the language to discuss these problems currently. "ambient privacy" is a good start. "I’ve lost something by the fact of being monitored." is very true, but deniers will say: "what's the something?" and we just don't have the language to explain it yet.
- tobr 7y ago
  That’s where the comparison to environmental protection is so powerful. For the longest time, if you would say “We lose something by exploiting natural resources”, people would have just pointed out that there’s a seemingly infinite supply of unexploited nature left. We’ve always been monitored in some situations, but never before around the clock, in the bedroom and the bathroom, at the doctor, etc. There’s no way to know what we lose, when we don’t even know how the information will be used. It is a passive blackmail situation. These companies have compromising information about all of us, and we really don’t have any idea who can or will be able to see it.
  - skybrian 7y ago
    Perhaps ironically, environmental protection often requires sophisticated monitoring of nature. If nobody is watching, you don't know what's lost.
  - hoseja 7y ago
    Part of it is of course that moral panics and societal attitudes make every human blackmailable. Maybe it would be nice if we could learn to just not care.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
  - jakelazaroff 7y ago
    I use the analogy of letting strangers record you using the restroom. Same questions: Do you lose anything? Why not let them do it?
    - vageli 7y ago
      > I use the analogy of letting strangers record you using the restroom. Same questions: Do you lose anything? Why not let them do it? There is a lot of cognitive dissonance in a society that is embarrassed to fart in public but claims they have nothing to hide. Somehow, "hide" became a bad word.
throwanem 7y ago
"Liberty" might not be completely off the mark. You can get into the habit of looking over your own shoulder all the time, interrogating your every expression and action for what an unsympathetic stranger might make of it and how it might be used against you. And that consciousness doesn't only extend to spaces where you know you're being monitored, because you can't know where and when and how you're being monitored. So you eventually experience it all the time.
- skybrian 7y ago
  This isn't intended as a shallow dismissal, but this sounds strikingly similar to the experience of paranoia. Nobody would say that the feeling that the Invisible Other is watching us is a good feeling. But unless something happens, it's also "just" a feeling. Might the feeling be doing more harm than the reality? On the other hand, our ancestors would probably wonder at our obsession over the danger of invisible entities getting into our food or water, but germ theory is still real. The problem with guarding against invisible dangers, even when they're real, is that they can be hard to distinguish from superstition. It's easy to point at some religious customs and say they are irrational, but is today's folk understanding of nutritional science all that much better? Badly understood science can create especially virulent memes. When the harms are hard to demonstrate, privacy disputes sometimes feel similar.
  - throwanem 7y ago
    It’s funny: to you this reads as paranoia, but if anything I’m drawing on my experience of social anxiety. Which, yes, is irrational, because no one is watching. The point of the discussion at hand is that, in an environment pervaded by automated, recorded invasion of privacy, such feelings may cease to be irrational.
  - 50656E6973 7y ago
    The harms are not hard to demonstrate, if you study history, or have programming knowledge.
- Sophistifunk 7y ago
burlesona 7y ago
Submitted this previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20188689 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20188689 How does HN de-dupe stuff? In the past when I’ve submitted something that was a dupe it took me to the already posted link instead of making a new one. Curious why that didn’t happen here. Really good article, gave me a lot to think about. I think the nature metaphor is a good one, though it doesn’t fill me with optimism for the future of ambient privacy.
- dang 7y ago
  This is in the FAQ: we don't count submissions as dupes if the story hasn't had significant attention yet. In other words, reposts are ok until the article has had a significant discussion, or at least significant upvotes. This is to give good articles more than one chance at getting attention, since it can be pretty random which articles get noticed on /newest. In this case, we actually boosted the submission into the second-chance pool (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380), which lobbed it on the front page. The reason we picked this post rather than yours is that it was the first submission of the article. (It doesn't look like it right now, because the timestamp was adjusted to be the resubmission time, but you can tell from the ID in the URL.) In the future we want to do some sort of karma sharing so multiple submitters can get credit, but that's not implemented yet.
  - tobr 7y ago
    If I may, I would like to request a little more transparency when this happens, as it can be confusing. For example, my comment elsewhere in the thread was written days ago, and I only happened to see that it has bubbled back up with a modified timestamp. When someone replies to a comment that appears to be posted mere hours ago they might expect to get a reply.
    - dang 7y ago
      I'm not sure how to do it in any way that wouldn't be too complicated. The status quo leads to confusion, which is bad, but other things we've tried have led to more, or to a lot of distracting meta comments.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
nonwifehaver3 7y ago
The dragon with its hoard of gold (private user data) is a great description of Facebook and Google's regulatory goals. As Maciej has also put it, "privacy is an essential right — your most intimate moments should be kept strictly between you and Google". The terror that could be unleashed by their already existing hoard is almost unimaginable. For all the concern about rising authoritarian politics, few have figured out how bad it would be for the future equivalent of the Gestapo or the Red Guard (pick your country) to get a hold of a decades long dump of medical and financial data, metadata on relationships, posting history, browsing and location history, behavioral fingerprints, stylometry, device IDs, reading history, private photos, and on and on. The tech industry's "vow" to not create a Muslim registry for the US government had a touch of absurdity to it, since there are already companies that could plausibly give you a list of almost all Muslims in the US with a few queries, along with far more personal information than any census or registry has ever asked for.
- cm2012 7y ago
  Google or FB don't matter for this stuff, since the government goes straight to the ISPs (which covers incognito mode, etc)
  - hoseja 7y ago
    But ISPs have access to much less detailed data. Or do you think encryption is trivially broken by them?
- simonebrunozzi 7y ago
  "Brave New World" is about a coercion that you don't see as malevolent; what you are depicting is more in line with "1984". I think the "Brave New World" approach is the most likely to happen / is starting to happen / has been happening for a while now.
AlphaWeaver 7y ago
The nature analogy is useful, but it's also worth thinking about where this new problem differs. Nature is a large interconnected system that, in some cases, has the benefit of being self correcting. Population control and food chains are examples of this. I worry that, in the case of privacy, there are far fewer natural "self correcting" aspects. How will this impact our response to this problem? (My personal prediction is that it will simply make it possible to do more damage before we begin seeking a solution en masse.)
cpeterso 7y ago
> Facebook’s early motto was “move fast and break things” (the ghost of that motto lives on as the Facebook guest wifi password). What is the password?
- ljlolel 7y ago
  Sounds like something like `m0vefast`
  - idlewords 7y ago
    That's what it is.
- cmod 7y ago
  Menlo Park Visitor Information: https://3qdigital.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/MPK-Visitor-Information.pdf https://3qdigital.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/MPK-Visitor...
komali2 7y ago
I always wondered why Google or Facebook or hell Comcast didn't start just Owning senators - "Mr. Senator, we want to be the fiber contractor for the new Vet building. Here's pages of logs of you attempting to learn how to use the darknet to access child pornography." Any anti-choice politician whose mistress or daughter has had an abortion, some tech company probably knows about it. Any anti-LGBT politician that's actually gay, Google, Facebook, hell maybe even Grindr is aware. Any White Knight with a heinous secret fetish, Pornhub knows. People were able to map out military bases using smartwatch GPS data. Imagine if you had straight up access to the databases of this information. I guess individuals at these companies are caught within rigid corporate power structures? Maybe the internal tooling prevents that sort of thing (didn't prevent someone from deleting Trump's twitter feed that one time), or just rule of law in the USA is still too strong and the risk of being annihilated by the legal system is too great. Still, I bet the temptation is strong.
- dv_dt 7y ago
  What can Google or Facebook do that Verizon or Comcast or other traditional telecom couldn't have done already as entities who own the physical mobile and broadband equipment that data is flowing to Google or Facebook already.
  - glangdale 7y ago
    End-to-end encryption isn't perfect, but it would at least make it considerably harder to track people on someone else's service - especially as compared to the owner of the service. Plus, Google or Facebook can cross-correlate tons of different users behavior rather than narrowly spying on one single link (or several links, but still).
- YUMad 7y ago
  How do you know they haven't?
- skybrian 7y ago
  Someone tried that on Jeff Bezos and it didn't work out so well. Why would someone comfortably in a position of power take that sort of risk, given the likelihood of it backfiring? For the movie plot to work, they need a good motive.
emtel 7y ago
> The large tech companies point to our willing use of their services as proof that people don’t really care about their privacy. But this is like arguing that inmates are happy to be in jail because they use the prison library. I used to really enjoy Maciej as a writer, but I've become really bothered by how bad some of his recent arguments are. This is just an amazingly bad analogy. Structurally, it's on the level of the standard libertarian "proof" that income tax is morally equivalent to slavery. Even though there seems to be some analytical validity in both cases, they are obviously bad analogies because slavery is obviously not the same as income tax, and ad tracking networks are obviously not the same as being in prison. This is a cute rhetorical flourish, but nothing more. The truth is, most people don't care about this stuff. They really just don't. You might want them to, and you might think they would if they had the same understanding of the issues as you do, but as of today, they don't. And I don't see any benefit to the mental gymnastics people go through to avoid accepting this obvious truth.
- jodrellblank 7y ago
  you might think they would if they had the same understanding of the issues as you do, but as of today, they don't. How many ordinary people had a good understanding of the neurological effects of leaded petrol before it got legislated against? How many ordinary people have a good understanding of which furniture padding materials give off noxious fumes when burned before that was legislated about? How many ordinary people understood Thalidomide or Vioxx - or had even heard of them - before they got removed from the market? Why is “it has to get to the level where everyone understands it before experts can recommend action” any more valid regarding tech surveillance?
  - emtel 7y ago
    I never said it did, nor do I think that. I said people don't care. If we want legal privacy protections even though people don't care, that's a reasonable thing to want. What I'm reacting against is the claim I see so often which is basically "people actually care about this but they have no choice". I think people care much less, yet have much more choice than is normally claimed.
- 7y ago
kzrdude 7y ago
More choice is misleading, we need to get more freedom by raising the bar of what is protected, and this minimum should not be possible to negotiate away.

Great points here. We definitely don't have the language to discuss these problems currently. "ambient privacy" is a good start. "I’ve lost something by the fact of being monitored." is very true, but deniers will say: "what's the something?" and we just don't have the language to explain it yet.

tobr 7y ago
That’s where the comparison to environmental protection is so powerful. For the longest time, if you would say “We lose something by exploiting natural resources”, people would have just pointed out that there’s a seemingly infinite supply of unexploited nature left. We’ve always been monitored in some situations, but never before around the clock, in the bedroom and the bathroom, at the doctor, etc. There’s no way to know what we lose, when we don’t even know how the information will be used. It is a passive blackmail situation. These companies have compromising information about all of us, and we really don’t have any idea who can or will be able to see it.
- skybrian 7y ago
  Perhaps ironically, environmental protection often requires sophisticated monitoring of nature. If nobody is watching, you don't know what's lost.
- hoseja 7y ago
  Part of it is of course that moral panics and societal attitudes make every human blackmailable. Maybe it would be nice if we could learn to just not care.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
- jakelazaroff 7y ago
  I use the analogy of letting strangers record you using the restroom. Same questions: Do you lose anything? Why not let them do it?
  - vageli 7y ago
    > I use the analogy of letting strangers record you using the restroom. Same questions: Do you lose anything? Why not let them do it? There is a lot of cognitive dissonance in a society that is embarrassed to fart in public but claims they have nothing to hide. Somehow, "hide" became a bad word.

throwanem 7y ago

"Liberty" might not be completely off the mark. You can get into the habit of looking over your own shoulder all the time, interrogating your every expression and action for what an unsympathetic stranger might make of it and how it might be used against you. And that consciousness doesn't only extend to spaces where you know you're being monitored, because you can't know where and when and how you're being monitored. So you eventually experience it all the time.

skybrian 7y ago
This isn't intended as a shallow dismissal, but this sounds strikingly similar to the experience of paranoia. Nobody would say that the feeling that the Invisible Other is watching us is a good feeling. But unless something happens, it's also "just" a feeling. Might the feeling be doing more harm than the reality? On the other hand, our ancestors would probably wonder at our obsession over the danger of invisible entities getting into our food or water, but germ theory is still real. The problem with guarding against invisible dangers, even when they're real, is that they can be hard to distinguish from superstition. It's easy to point at some religious customs and say they are irrational, but is today's folk understanding of nutritional science all that much better? Badly understood science can create especially virulent memes. When the harms are hard to demonstrate, privacy disputes sometimes feel similar.
- throwanem 7y ago
  It’s funny: to you this reads as paranoia, but if anything I’m drawing on my experience of social anxiety. Which, yes, is irrational, because no one is watching. The point of the discussion at hand is that, in an environment pervaded by automated, recorded invasion of privacy, such feelings may cease to be irrational.
- 50656E6973 7y ago
  The harms are not hard to demonstrate, if you study history, or have programming knowledge.
Sophistifunk 7y ago

burlesona 7y ago

Submitted this previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20188689 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20188689 How does HN de-dupe stuff? In the past when I’ve submitted something that was a dupe it took me to the already posted link instead of making a new one. Curious why that didn’t happen here. Really good article, gave me a lot to think about. I think the nature metaphor is a good one, though it doesn’t fill me with optimism for the future of ambient privacy.

dang 7y ago
This is in the FAQ: we don't count submissions as dupes if the story hasn't had significant attention yet. In other words, reposts are ok until the article has had a significant discussion, or at least significant upvotes. This is to give good articles more than one chance at getting attention, since it can be pretty random which articles get noticed on /newest. In this case, we actually boosted the submission into the second-chance pool (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380), which lobbed it on the front page. The reason we picked this post rather than yours is that it was the first submission of the article. (It doesn't look like it right now, because the timestamp was adjusted to be the resubmission time, but you can tell from the ID in the URL.) In the future we want to do some sort of karma sharing so multiple submitters can get credit, but that's not implemented yet.
- tobr 7y ago
  If I may, I would like to request a little more transparency when this happens, as it can be confusing. For example, my comment elsewhere in the thread was written days ago, and I only happened to see that it has bubbled back up with a modified timestamp. When someone replies to a comment that appears to be posted mere hours ago they might expect to get a reply.
  - dang 7y ago
    I'm not sure how to do it in any way that wouldn't be too complicated. The status quo leads to confusion, which is bad, but other things we've tried have led to more, or to a lot of distracting meta comments.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

nonwifehaver3 7y ago

The dragon with its hoard of gold (private user data) is a great description of Facebook and Google's regulatory goals. As Maciej has also put it, "privacy is an essential right — your most intimate moments should be kept strictly between you and Google". The terror that could be unleashed by their already existing hoard is almost unimaginable. For all the concern about rising authoritarian politics, few have figured out how bad it would be for the future equivalent of the Gestapo or the Red Guard (pick your country) to get a hold of a decades long dump of medical and financial data, metadata on relationships, posting history, browsing and location history, behavioral fingerprints, stylometry, device IDs, reading history, private photos, and on and on. The tech industry's "vow" to not create a Muslim registry for the US government had a touch of absurdity to it, since there are already companies that could plausibly give you a list of almost all Muslims in the US with a few queries, along with far more personal information than any census or registry has ever asked for.

cm2012 7y ago
Google or FB don't matter for this stuff, since the government goes straight to the ISPs (which covers incognito mode, etc)
- hoseja 7y ago
  But ISPs have access to much less detailed data. Or do you think encryption is trivially broken by them?
simonebrunozzi 7y ago
"Brave New World" is about a coercion that you don't see as malevolent; what you are depicting is more in line with "1984". I think the "Brave New World" approach is the most likely to happen / is starting to happen / has been happening for a while now.

AlphaWeaver 7y ago

The nature analogy is useful, but it's also worth thinking about where this new problem differs. Nature is a large interconnected system that, in some cases, has the benefit of being self correcting. Population control and food chains are examples of this. I worry that, in the case of privacy, there are far fewer natural "self correcting" aspects. How will this impact our response to this problem? (My personal prediction is that it will simply make it possible to do more damage before we begin seeking a solution en masse.)

cpeterso 7y ago

> Facebook’s early motto was “move fast and break things” (the ghost of that motto lives on as the Facebook guest wifi password). What is the password?

ljlolel 7y ago
Sounds like something like `m0vefast`
- idlewords 7y ago
  That's what it is.
cmod 7y ago
Menlo Park Visitor Information: https://3qdigital.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/MPK-Visitor-Information.pdf https://3qdigital.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/MPK-Visitor...

komali2 7y ago

I always wondered why Google or Facebook or hell Comcast didn't start just Owning senators - "Mr. Senator, we want to be the fiber contractor for the new Vet building. Here's pages of logs of you attempting to learn how to use the darknet to access child pornography." Any anti-choice politician whose mistress or daughter has had an abortion, some tech company probably knows about it. Any anti-LGBT politician that's actually gay, Google, Facebook, hell maybe even Grindr is aware. Any White Knight with a heinous secret fetish, Pornhub knows. People were able to map out military bases using smartwatch GPS data. Imagine if you had straight up access to the databases of this information. I guess individuals at these companies are caught within rigid corporate power structures? Maybe the internal tooling prevents that sort of thing (didn't prevent someone from deleting Trump's twitter feed that one time), or just rule of law in the USA is still too strong and the risk of being annihilated by the legal system is too great. Still, I bet the temptation is strong.

dv_dt 7y ago
What can Google or Facebook do that Verizon or Comcast or other traditional telecom couldn't have done already as entities who own the physical mobile and broadband equipment that data is flowing to Google or Facebook already.
- glangdale 7y ago
  End-to-end encryption isn't perfect, but it would at least make it considerably harder to track people on someone else's service - especially as compared to the owner of the service. Plus, Google or Facebook can cross-correlate tons of different users behavior rather than narrowly spying on one single link (or several links, but still).
YUMad 7y ago
How do you know they haven't?
skybrian 7y ago
Someone tried that on Jeff Bezos and it didn't work out so well. Why would someone comfortably in a position of power take that sort of risk, given the likelihood of it backfiring? For the movie plot to work, they need a good motive.

emtel 7y ago

> The large tech companies point to our willing use of their services as proof that people don’t really care about their privacy. But this is like arguing that inmates are happy to be in jail because they use the prison library. I used to really enjoy Maciej as a writer, but I've become really bothered by how bad some of his recent arguments are. This is just an amazingly bad analogy. Structurally, it's on the level of the standard libertarian "proof" that income tax is morally equivalent to slavery. Even though there seems to be some analytical validity in both cases, they are obviously bad analogies because slavery is obviously not the same as income tax, and ad tracking networks are obviously not the same as being in prison. This is a cute rhetorical flourish, but nothing more. The truth is, most people don't care about this stuff. They really just don't. You might want them to, and you might think they would if they had the same understanding of the issues as you do, but as of today, they don't. And I don't see any benefit to the mental gymnastics people go through to avoid accepting this obvious truth.

jodrellblank 7y ago
you might think they would if they had the same understanding of the issues as you do, but as of today, they don't. How many ordinary people had a good understanding of the neurological effects of leaded petrol before it got legislated against? How many ordinary people have a good understanding of which furniture padding materials give off noxious fumes when burned before that was legislated about? How many ordinary people understood Thalidomide or Vioxx - or had even heard of them - before they got removed from the market? Why is “it has to get to the level where everyone understands it before experts can recommend action” any more valid regarding tech surveillance?
- emtel 7y ago
  I never said it did, nor do I think that. I said people don't care. If we want legal privacy protections even though people don't care, that's a reasonable thing to want. What I'm reacting against is the claim I see so often which is basically "people actually care about this but they have no choice". I think people care much less, yet have much more choice than is normally claimed.
7y ago

kzrdude 7y ago

More choice is misleading, we need to get more freedom by raising the bar of what is protected, and this minimum should not be possible to negotiate away.