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People have really bad intuitions around privacy. The predominant mental model is that there is a single, motivated adversary who is uniquely interested in atta

People have really bad intuitions around privacy. The predominant mental model is that there is a single, motivated adversary who is uniquely interested in attacking them. In reality, privacy almost always involves large, impersonal systems ingesting masses of data to either increase profits or commit crimes. It may sound bad that some random person is hearing your sex sounds but that person has heard a thousand other equally anonymous sex sounds and truly could not give less of a shit that the sound is of someone having sex. Similarly with leaking financial information, anyone capable & willing to defraud people based on this information has much better ways of generating ROI than hoping on the one snippet of information in a million that could lead to a breach. It's similar to that time it was revealed a bunch of iOS apps were screen recording users using the app. Having worked at companies that collected that data, the only conceivable use we had for it was to help diagnose bugs for individual users having issues with the app. Every other question we wanted answered, it was much easier to use aggregated data collated specifically for that purpose. A bunch of videos of people tapping the screen was less than useless for that. And yet when I told people about that, in general, they refused to believe me and believed there must be some super secret nefarious reason we were collecting such "invasive" information.

kmlx 7y ago
yes, in reality no-one cares about you and that might sting a bit. but it gives people a sense of importance when you tell them they’re spied upon.
- ehnto 7y ago
  You my not care about me, but I care that you (company/developer) are abusing private data. That makes it your problem, because I (and cohorts) are your customers. My privacy is your problem and your obligation as a developer or company. It's on you to be ethical.
  - kmlx 7y ago
    wut? you caring about what i do with your data doesn’t mean i have to care about you or your private data. a lot of people care about the environment. that doesn’t mean there aren’t gold mining companies. even better, right now in russia there are companies forming that will take advantage of the new transportation routes once the ice completely melts. so i can assure you that you caring about stuff amounts to close to nil. the majority doesn’t care.
calcifer 7y ago
> People have really bad intuitions around privacy. > Having worked at companies that collected that data [...] No, you just have a different personal definition of privacy. The fact that you think your use of my data is innocuous doesn't mean you are not violating my privacy. If your use was really, trully unobjectionable you'd be fine with getting clear and explicit consent. Somehow, I don't think an honest consent prompt like "Can our app silently record your screen and send it to us?" would get you the results you want.
- joshuamorton 7y ago
  > If your use was really, trully unobjectionable you'd be fine with getting clear and explicit consent. This ignores human nature: requiring people to make a decision, any decision, is a friction point that will lose users. Something like "we'd like to increment a counter when our app crashes, we won't log anything else than that single bit". So first of all, you'll have people who will claim that you could be lying, and they'll opt out, or not install your app, or whatever. Fine. But now all the people who truly didn't and don't actually care will have to make a decision. And making choices takes effort. So some people will just refuse to make a choice, and you'll lose users. Consider the other side of this: I'm from the US but currently in Europe. GDPR requires explicit consent for the various trackers, it has defaults. I don't change them. I don't want to think about them. I don't care enough. And it's just effort I have to expend before I actually get to the stuff I'm interested in. Like a government mandated paywall (think the "we use cookies..." but more extreme, with checkboxes to decide which cookies they can store). Even as someone who truly actually doesn't care, and is happy to, in the abstract, give explicit consent to all the tracking these sites do, I don't want to have to explicitly consent, because its work to do something I don't care about. I expect, though I'm by no means certain, that most people who aren't on HN are in that bucket. And that means that requiring explicit consent for otherwise innocuous things is just bad for business with little gain, and it numbs people for explicit consent on actually important things.
  - calcifer 7y ago
    > requiring people to make a decision, any decision, is a friction point that will lose users One could argue that's a good thing. > you'll have people who will claim that you could be lying That's not a claim, that's a fact. You could very well be lying and I wouldn't know as I don't have access to the internals of your company. > But now all the people who truly didn't and don't actually care will have to make a decision. And making choices takes effort. The horror! > So some people will just refuse to make a choice, and you'll lose users. Good, people shouldn't blindly sign up to services they don't understand just because it's a new shiny thing. > I don't change them. I don't want to think about them. I don't care enough. Good for you. I'm also in Europe and I think GDPR is fine and I do change the cookie settings instead of just clicking through. > And it's just effort I have to expend before I actually get to the stuff I'm interested in. Like a government mandated paywall Music to my ears. > requiring explicit consent for otherwise innocuous things is just bad for business with little gain I couldn't care less about what's good or bad for a data collecting business, I care about the people whose data will inevitably be leaked by said business in a future breach.
taneq 7y ago
Excellent point. I'm way more creeped out about some shadowy corporate spook digging through my photos, but I'm way more likely to actually be materially disadvantaged by $search_company analysing my search terms, realising I'm really REALLY interested in buying [X], and quietly dropping from their results any mention of [X] vendors who haven't paid at least $y for advertising this quarter (including, most likely, my best deals for [X]).
- atoav 7y ago
  And if you zoom out and watch the impact of privacy violations on a state level? Privacy violation is power. And all power that isn‘t elected should be limited by those who are, so we can shape our future. The way things are now companies like facebook or google could easily threaten any elected leader with annihilation simply by using the gathered data and sending the right messages to the right people. They wouldn’t even have to use fake news for that. Privacy never really was a individual problem, it is a systemic one.
  - taneq 7y ago
    > Privacy violation is power. This is the crux of it. Life is an asymmetric-information game, and the person with the most information (and the most ability to process that information) always wins. Any discussion of why privacy violation matters always comes down to this: The more your adversary knows about you, the weaker your bargaining position.
ThePhysicist 7y ago
My privacy should not depend on your disinterest to abuse my data. There were many cases where workers abused access to sensitive information like tracking data, and people that illegitmately access data don't always do a ROI calculation to see if it's economical to do so, often they do it e.g. for revenge or personal interests. Also, I think Apple did not stop this practice because it is in general unethical or illegal to collect and analyze such data (it is not), but because they are marketing themselves as champions of user privacy, and crowdsourcing speech-to-text translation of potentially sensitive user data without properly informing their users just does not correspond to that image. In addition, they might be afraid of facing regulatory action in the EU, which could greatly damage their image as well, so it's a reasonable decision to halt all data processing until they can ensure full compliance.
pluma 7y ago
Sure, corporate privacy abuse is a different beast and bad for different reasons but your mistake is thinking of this as an either-or scenario. Yes, you may not care about whose audio you're listening to. But someone might. They may not even know the person prior to listening to that audio and still pose a threat. Stalking is an obvious problem. But what if they think they recognise a voice and then act on that information when they meet the person they (mis-)identified? Or in your sex noises scenario: sure, they may be anonymous to the listener, but so is revenge porn to most consumers of it: the ethical issue isn't whether they can be recognised but they lacked (or withdrew) consent. People in tech generally seem to have an extremely hard time to grasp a basic premise: consent. Consent must be given. Consent must be informed. Consent can be withdrawn at any time. Whether it's consent for physical interactions, social interactions or storing and processing my data -- and make no mistake, it is my data, even if I only shared it passively or explicitly gave you permission to use it. This isn't about security. This isn't about intellectual property. This is entirely about consent.
- pluma 7y ago
  BTW, this is what most feminists[0] mean when they talk of "rape culture". It's not about women being dragged into the bushes and sexually violated. It's about a widespread lack of understanding of consent. If I allow you to touch my shoulder, that means you're allowed to touch my shoulder, not my groin. It also doesn't mean I allow you to touch me any time you want or that it was okay when you touched me before without asking. Likewise if I allow you to process my e-mail address to send me an invoice, that doesn't mean I allow you to track how many times (and when) I opened the e-mail or to send me marketing e-mails or to give my e-mail address to someone else or that it was okay when you previously stored my e-mail address without telling me. In tech we like to say "it's easier to ask for forgiveness than for permission" and on HN we praise disruption, but remember that these things are meant to be about technology and established business practices, not people. Technology can't give consent and corporations aren't people (no matter how much certain politicians in the US try to convince you) but people are people and you should respect their consent above all else[1]. [0]: No, I'm not talking about Buzzfeed and its ilk. Mainstream journalism cares more about clickbait stories than about academic discourse, so don't base your opinion on feminist issues on the yellow press. [1]: Obvious caveat that there is a whole separate discussion to be had about respecting consent when people present a threat to themselves or others.
atoav 7y ago
In fact this isn’t the reason I have privacy concerns, it is actually the least concerning point. My points are: - while I might be an uninteresting target, this doesn’t mean others are not. Lawyers, Doctors, Jiurnalists, Activists and so on certainly are targets that are and will be spied on if it is easily possible for adverseries to get the data (e.g. without a real.court ruling etc). I profit from a society where these groups and their communications are protected. The chance that this can be used against these groups in form of kompromat for example is enough for privacy rules to exist. - Privacy rules also try to counteract a inbalance of power. In the age of complexity those with more and better information have more and better power. “We are the good ones” or “But we would never do such a thing” are cute arguments, but ultimatively I want to live in a state where the accumulation of power by unelected forces is limited by design. When a company knoes all about you while they themselves tell you only the marketing version, there is a extreme inbalance in power that benefits them against you. In practice it would look a bit like the cambridge analytica thing where every individual saw only (fake) things that nudged them into one or the other direction by using facebooks targeted adverticement, but on a bigger scale it was targeted manipulation by false imformation. This is not only unethical, but potentially dangerous to the instable societies we live in. - privacy is about marketing. The big californian giants are so good to make things simple for all of us. But when it comes to the question how much data they collect when, they cannot give a straight simple answer, but a wall of legalese that doesn’t tell anybody what’s going on. If you actively decept people by downplaying the potential impact of the privacy violations you profit from, that is unethical for sure. That beeing said you can have the standpoint that making money is more important than a functioning society with trust between citizen and the companies they are customers of — but don’t be surprised when the accumulation of power and the erosion of democratic principles show devastating results. Tech companies do shape our future if they wan’t or not. The question is, if they do it by critically following up onto their good intentions, or by blindly giving in to their incentives? Right now it looks like the latter.
- lawfulcactus 7y ago
  while I might be an uninteresting target, this doesn’t mean others are not And though you might be an uninteresting target now, there's no guarantee that will be the case in the future. The sorts of personal information people would like to keep private change with the society around them, and generally speaking, it's not possible to retroactively conceal information.
raxxorrax 7y ago
But I don't get anything from people hearing my sex sounds and I do not care if they are interested in it or not. It still is a privacy invasion. Most people I know use these services to switch radio stations. That is nothing that would require the voice to be recorded and processed anyway. Microsoft sold me a their telemetry with the argument that it would offer better support. Support today is even worse than a few years ago, when they at least had some competent support staffers around. The only info they get is probably that people don't really like their services. How strange. With this disposition to private information, I would not want to give it. Simple as that. It is a tragedy that today people employed and trusted with this information seem to lack the foresight it would require to handle it responsibly. That hasn't always been the case. Frankly, if I knew in which company you had access to data, I would be certain to limit my exposure. Completely without seeing you as a nefarious actor that wants to do something bad. Because I just need people in those places that understand privacy and why it is required in many cases.
mikeash 7y ago
Even if your intentions are completely benign, you’ll lose the data in a security breach and then I’m depending on a bunch of criminals deciding I’m not worth their while.
colpabar 7y ago
What did you do with the data long term? You may not have a use for it now, but what happens when advertising agencies want it, and management decides to start selling it? I see this argument all the time and I just don't understand how people can miss the entire forest for their individual tree. iPhones were silently recording people and it was sent to some remote location, and the user was unaware. You can make all the arguments you want about how it was safe, how the data was only used for X, blah blah blah. Nobody should care about details like that. Users were silently recorded and that data was sent somewhere, period. Cann you imagine if someone broke into your home, was caught on video, arrested, brought to court, and argued something like "well all I did was sweep the floors! I didn't cause any damage!"?

kmlx 7y ago

yes, in reality no-one cares about you and that might sting a bit. but it gives people a sense of importance when you tell them they’re spied upon.

ehnto 7y ago
You my not care about me, but I care that you (company/developer) are abusing private data. That makes it your problem, because I (and cohorts) are your customers. My privacy is your problem and your obligation as a developer or company. It's on you to be ethical.
- kmlx 7y ago
  wut? you caring about what i do with your data doesn’t mean i have to care about you or your private data. a lot of people care about the environment. that doesn’t mean there aren’t gold mining companies. even better, right now in russia there are companies forming that will take advantage of the new transportation routes once the ice completely melts. so i can assure you that you caring about stuff amounts to close to nil. the majority doesn’t care.

calcifer 7y ago

> People have really bad intuitions around privacy. > Having worked at companies that collected that data [...] No, you just have a different personal definition of privacy. The fact that you think your use of my data is innocuous doesn't mean you are not violating my privacy. If your use was really, trully unobjectionable you'd be fine with getting clear and explicit consent. Somehow, I don't think an honest consent prompt like "Can our app silently record your screen and send it to us?" would get you the results you want.

joshuamorton 7y ago
> If your use was really, trully unobjectionable you'd be fine with getting clear and explicit consent. This ignores human nature: requiring people to make a decision, any decision, is a friction point that will lose users. Something like "we'd like to increment a counter when our app crashes, we won't log anything else than that single bit". So first of all, you'll have people who will claim that you could be lying, and they'll opt out, or not install your app, or whatever. Fine. But now all the people who truly didn't and don't actually care will have to make a decision. And making choices takes effort. So some people will just refuse to make a choice, and you'll lose users. Consider the other side of this: I'm from the US but currently in Europe. GDPR requires explicit consent for the various trackers, it has defaults. I don't change them. I don't want to think about them. I don't care enough. And it's just effort I have to expend before I actually get to the stuff I'm interested in. Like a government mandated paywall (think the "we use cookies..." but more extreme, with checkboxes to decide which cookies they can store). Even as someone who truly actually doesn't care, and is happy to, in the abstract, give explicit consent to all the tracking these sites do, I don't want to have to explicitly consent, because its work to do something I don't care about. I expect, though I'm by no means certain, that most people who aren't on HN are in that bucket. And that means that requiring explicit consent for otherwise innocuous things is just bad for business with little gain, and it numbs people for explicit consent on actually important things.
- calcifer 7y ago
  > requiring people to make a decision, any decision, is a friction point that will lose users One could argue that's a good thing. > you'll have people who will claim that you could be lying That's not a claim, that's a fact. You could very well be lying and I wouldn't know as I don't have access to the internals of your company. > But now all the people who truly didn't and don't actually care will have to make a decision. And making choices takes effort. The horror! > So some people will just refuse to make a choice, and you'll lose users. Good, people shouldn't blindly sign up to services they don't understand just because it's a new shiny thing. > I don't change them. I don't want to think about them. I don't care enough. Good for you. I'm also in Europe and I think GDPR is fine and I do change the cookie settings instead of just clicking through. > And it's just effort I have to expend before I actually get to the stuff I'm interested in. Like a government mandated paywall Music to my ears. > requiring explicit consent for otherwise innocuous things is just bad for business with little gain I couldn't care less about what's good or bad for a data collecting business, I care about the people whose data will inevitably be leaked by said business in a future breach.

taneq 7y ago

Excellent point. I'm way more creeped out about some shadowy corporate spook digging through my photos, but I'm way more likely to actually be materially disadvantaged by $search_company analysing my search terms, realising I'm really REALLY interested in buying [X], and quietly dropping from their results any mention of [X] vendors who haven't paid at least $y for advertising this quarter (including, most likely, my best deals for [X]).

atoav 7y ago
And if you zoom out and watch the impact of privacy violations on a state level? Privacy violation is power. And all power that isn‘t elected should be limited by those who are, so we can shape our future. The way things are now companies like facebook or google could easily threaten any elected leader with annihilation simply by using the gathered data and sending the right messages to the right people. They wouldn’t even have to use fake news for that. Privacy never really was a individual problem, it is a systemic one.
- taneq 7y ago
  > Privacy violation is power. This is the crux of it. Life is an asymmetric-information game, and the person with the most information (and the most ability to process that information) always wins. Any discussion of why privacy violation matters always comes down to this: The more your adversary knows about you, the weaker your bargaining position.

ThePhysicist 7y ago

My privacy should not depend on your disinterest to abuse my data. There were many cases where workers abused access to sensitive information like tracking data, and people that illegitmately access data don't always do a ROI calculation to see if it's economical to do so, often they do it e.g. for revenge or personal interests. Also, I think Apple did not stop this practice because it is in general unethical or illegal to collect and analyze such data (it is not), but because they are marketing themselves as champions of user privacy, and crowdsourcing speech-to-text translation of potentially sensitive user data without properly informing their users just does not correspond to that image. In addition, they might be afraid of facing regulatory action in the EU, which could greatly damage their image as well, so it's a reasonable decision to halt all data processing until they can ensure full compliance.

pluma 7y ago

Sure, corporate privacy abuse is a different beast and bad for different reasons but your mistake is thinking of this as an either-or scenario. Yes, you may not care about whose audio you're listening to. But someone might. They may not even know the person prior to listening to that audio and still pose a threat. Stalking is an obvious problem. But what if they think they recognise a voice and then act on that information when they meet the person they (mis-)identified? Or in your sex noises scenario: sure, they may be anonymous to the listener, but so is revenge porn to most consumers of it: the ethical issue isn't whether they can be recognised but they lacked (or withdrew) consent. People in tech generally seem to have an extremely hard time to grasp a basic premise: consent. Consent must be given. Consent must be informed. Consent can be withdrawn at any time. Whether it's consent for physical interactions, social interactions or storing and processing my data -- and make no mistake, it is my data, even if I only shared it passively or explicitly gave you permission to use it. This isn't about security. This isn't about intellectual property. This is entirely about consent.

pluma 7y ago
BTW, this is what most feminists[0] mean when they talk of "rape culture". It's not about women being dragged into the bushes and sexually violated. It's about a widespread lack of understanding of consent. If I allow you to touch my shoulder, that means you're allowed to touch my shoulder, not my groin. It also doesn't mean I allow you to touch me any time you want or that it was okay when you touched me before without asking. Likewise if I allow you to process my e-mail address to send me an invoice, that doesn't mean I allow you to track how many times (and when) I opened the e-mail or to send me marketing e-mails or to give my e-mail address to someone else or that it was okay when you previously stored my e-mail address without telling me. In tech we like to say "it's easier to ask for forgiveness than for permission" and on HN we praise disruption, but remember that these things are meant to be about technology and established business practices, not people. Technology can't give consent and corporations aren't people (no matter how much certain politicians in the US try to convince you) but people are people and you should respect their consent above all else[1]. [0]: No, I'm not talking about Buzzfeed and its ilk. Mainstream journalism cares more about clickbait stories than about academic discourse, so don't base your opinion on feminist issues on the yellow press. [1]: Obvious caveat that there is a whole separate discussion to be had about respecting consent when people present a threat to themselves or others.

atoav 7y ago

In fact this isn’t the reason I have privacy concerns, it is actually the least concerning point. My points are: - while I might be an uninteresting target, this doesn’t mean others are not. Lawyers, Doctors, Jiurnalists, Activists and so on certainly are targets that are and will be spied on if it is easily possible for adverseries to get the data (e.g. without a real.court ruling etc). I profit from a society where these groups and their communications are protected. The chance that this can be used against these groups in form of kompromat for example is enough for privacy rules to exist. - Privacy rules also try to counteract a inbalance of power. In the age of complexity those with more and better information have more and better power. “We are the good ones” or “But we would never do such a thing” are cute arguments, but ultimatively I want to live in a state where the accumulation of power by unelected forces is limited by design. When a company knoes all about you while they themselves tell you only the marketing version, there is a extreme inbalance in power that benefits them against you. In practice it would look a bit like the cambridge analytica thing where every individual saw only (fake) things that nudged them into one or the other direction by using facebooks targeted adverticement, but on a bigger scale it was targeted manipulation by false imformation. This is not only unethical, but potentially dangerous to the instable societies we live in. - privacy is about marketing. The big californian giants are so good to make things simple for all of us. But when it comes to the question how much data they collect when, they cannot give a straight simple answer, but a wall of legalese that doesn’t tell anybody what’s going on. If you actively decept people by downplaying the potential impact of the privacy violations you profit from, that is unethical for sure. That beeing said you can have the standpoint that making money is more important than a functioning society with trust between citizen and the companies they are customers of — but don’t be surprised when the accumulation of power and the erosion of democratic principles show devastating results. Tech companies do shape our future if they wan’t or not. The question is, if they do it by critically following up onto their good intentions, or by blindly giving in to their incentives? Right now it looks like the latter.

lawfulcactus 7y ago
while I might be an uninteresting target, this doesn’t mean others are not And though you might be an uninteresting target now, there's no guarantee that will be the case in the future. The sorts of personal information people would like to keep private change with the society around them, and generally speaking, it's not possible to retroactively conceal information.

raxxorrax 7y ago

But I don't get anything from people hearing my sex sounds and I do not care if they are interested in it or not. It still is a privacy invasion. Most people I know use these services to switch radio stations. That is nothing that would require the voice to be recorded and processed anyway. Microsoft sold me a their telemetry with the argument that it would offer better support. Support today is even worse than a few years ago, when they at least had some competent support staffers around. The only info they get is probably that people don't really like their services. How strange. With this disposition to private information, I would not want to give it. Simple as that. It is a tragedy that today people employed and trusted with this information seem to lack the foresight it would require to handle it responsibly. That hasn't always been the case. Frankly, if I knew in which company you had access to data, I would be certain to limit my exposure. Completely without seeing you as a nefarious actor that wants to do something bad. Because I just need people in those places that understand privacy and why it is required in many cases.

mikeash 7y ago

Even if your intentions are completely benign, you’ll lose the data in a security breach and then I’m depending on a bunch of criminals deciding I’m not worth their while.

colpabar 7y ago

What did you do with the data long term? You may not have a use for it now, but what happens when advertising agencies want it, and management decides to start selling it? I see this argument all the time and I just don't understand how people can miss the entire forest for their individual tree. iPhones were silently recording people and it was sent to some remote location, and the user was unaware. You can make all the arguments you want about how it was safe, how the data was only used for X, blah blah blah. Nobody should care about details like that. Users were silently recorded and that data was sent somewhere, period. Cann you imagine if someone broke into your home, was caught on video, arrested, brought to court, and argued something like "well all I did was sweep the floors! I didn't cause any damage!"?