17 ms·

The Fantasy of Opting Out

611 points by pshaw 7y ago

fouc 7y ago
>Those who know about us have power over us. Obfuscation may be our best digital weapon. Interesting, we could use tools like deepfake to fake images & videos of ourselves in order to increase the level of obfuscation. Perhaps we can even analyze our writing styles and then use GPT-2 to produce writing that matches our styles, and flood the web with that. Anonymity through noise.
- pixl97 7y ago
  Not really, you're still giving them the real signal.
RobPfeifer 7y ago
I actually sort of thought this was the common POV for anyone within tech. Controlling google searches for your name, putting fake content on social media, etc. are obviously only way to create enough noise to direct algorithms to outcomes you’d prefer no?
- buboard 7y ago
  Yet i can see your full name, your linked in profile, twitter etc etc. Use pseudonyms, people
- Nasrudith 7y ago
  It is a viewpoint of the SEOers. Others prefer not to bother with that arms race of bullshit and never "opted in" to the dancing monkey trap in the first place.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
llarsson 7y ago
I cannot help but wonder if the use of such tools as the ones listed in the article are not just "privacy theater", in the same sense that we have come to realize that much of what happens in the name of security is just "security theater". Ironically, of course, is that much of what happens in the name of security is exactly what takes away our privacy in the first place. What is needed is for people to tangibly suffer from lack of privacy. It is obvious to people how they suffer from lack of security. Germans remember what a lack of privacy can do (Stasi in East Germany), and as a consequence, they are much more privacy-minded than in many other places. What will be the wake up call for other nations?
- stiray 7y ago
  Ther is a wakeup call already but it needs to come from us (tech workers). We do understand what is going on, we do use use adblockers, application firewalls, obfuscate our online fingerprints, use multiple accounts etc. On the other side we also produce tools for mass survailance, ads networks, tracking, implement telemetry, adding ads providers frameworks to our applications. In same breath we are protesting against selling technology to military, ICE, disallow their children playing online games where gambling is the revenue (opening boxes and similar), gitlab enforced telemetry,... I see a huge discrepancy between what we want for ourself (privacy), what we preach and on the other side, what we do and we fuel the survailance society. The solution is to stop on our side and dont do to the others what we dont want to be done to us. (... and even if there is always going to be someone "selling drugs to kids", most of people dont do it).
  - hirako2000 7y ago
    Do to others anything they accept to take. But tell them about what you do. One way or another, don't hide what you do, explain what you do. On your drug analogy: sell drugs, and tell exactly what drug you are making. Or others, less scrupulous will make all sort of drugs, hiding what's exactly in them. Do what you are good at, and make sure to inform, if whoever you are doing it for isn't playing transparency then whisleblow what they do. Then quit or stay, that part will depend on what impact you want to make to this world.
  - 7y ago
eindiran 7y ago
Definitely check out the browser extension TrackMeNot, mentioned in the article: it runs searches in the background to obfuscate what internet behavior is actually yours. https://trackmenot.io/ https://trackmenot.io/
ddiq 7y ago
It's the year 2027. You get a notification from the H8Watch™ by the ADL app, default installed on every phone, and can't be deleted without jailbreaking. You open the notification, and it shows a video of you from 2 weeks ago, from a camera embedded in the table of the fast food restaurant from where you were eating lunch with your friend. Your voice has been reconstructed through lipreading software and played back to you. "You're such a feandra, I paid last time!" you said to your friend playfully, using the new insult people just started using to refer to someone thrifty. After the video and reconstructed voice plays back to you twice, it changes to a message. "Minor class-based insult detected." The nonsense word "feandra" had been added to the H8Watch™ database 2 hours ago, and your offense had come up as part of their program to catch racists and classists retroactively. This prevents the use of new words or euphamisms that may otherwise be used to bypass H8Watch™ detection. Moments later, you get more notifications. Twitter: account suspended for 1 day, your bank: $25 has been deducted from your account for terms of service violation, Facebook: 2 offenses so far this month, 1 more and all three videos will be posted to your Facebook feed. You quickly swipe away the rest of the notifications, you'll deal with them later, and text the friend you were going to meet for dinner. "Hey John, I can't make it tonight. Cash is a little tight after another violation, and I can't risk a public conversation this week."
- varjag 7y ago
  It's remarkable how someone living in 2019 still finds grounds to complain about stiffing political correctness.
  - ddiq 7y ago
    If you think this story is limited to, or even about, political correctness, you are mistaken. It could be your insurance rates going up for jaywalking, even with no cars around. It could be your credit score dropping if you have too many drinks at a bar. It's about your personal activities all being tracked, measured, and in the end, controlled by corporations.
    - chillwaves 7y ago
Altheasy 7y ago
The author: Privacy does not mean stopping the flow of data; it means channeling it wisely and justly to serve societal ends and values and the individuals who are its subjects, particularly the vulnerable and the disadvantaged. You are wrong, privacy mean stopping the flow of the data completely. No one should spy on your life.
- theaeolist 7y ago
  "Should". But they do nevertheless. It's a fact.
- onion2k 7y ago
  No one should spy on your life. Absolute statements are always wrong. ;) The problem with this way of thinking is that it's very hard to define what 'spying' is, and what 'your life' is. This is best illustrated with an example - when you read this comment you'll have loaded a page on HN. That means HN's server probably has a log of your IP address, browser agent string, etc. There's a complete history of every article you've ever read, upvoted, commented on there for you (and the public at large for some things) to see; Your profile: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=Altheasy https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=Altheasy Your comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=Altheasy https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=Altheasy Your favourited articles: https://news.ycombinator.com/favorites?id=Altheasy https://news.ycombinator.com/favorites?id=Altheasy Taking the first page of your comments and that favourite I can reasonably assume that you're a developer, you don't like testing much, you have a cat, you have a judgemental attitude about how other people spend money, you have a smart phone, etc. Not great insights but you're pretty new here. If I trawled through the comments of someone who has 20,000 comments I could learn a lot. So... is HN spying on you? Am I spying on you when I read those pages? I don't think so. You put that data out there in the open. The same is technically true for most data that people say is spying - eg Google Analytics isn't spying on you when it tracks everything you do on 50% of the websites you visit. You're giving that data away. That's fine. It's useful. It makes the internet better. The flow of data in itself is OK. It only really becomes spying when the data is misused. That's what people want to control.
  - 7y ago
pdkl95 7y ago
> Obfuscation may be our best digital weapon. From Dan Geer's talk "Cybersecurity as Realpolitik" (which everyone should hear[1]/read[2]): >> There are so many technologies now that power observation and identification of the individual at a distance. They may not yet be in your pocket or on your dashboard or embedded in all your smoke detectors, but that is only a matter of time. Your digital exhaust is unique hence it identifies. Pooling everyone's digital exhaust also characterizes how you differ from normal. Privacy used to be proportional to that which it is impossible to observe or that which can be observed but not identified. No more -- what is today observable and identifiable kills both privacy as impossible-to-observe and privacy as impossible-to-identify, so what might be an alternative? If you are an optimist or an apparatchik, then your answer will tend toward rules of data procedure administered by a government you trust or control. If you are a pessimist or a hacker/maker, then your answer will tend towards the operational, and your definition of a state of privacy will be my definition: the effective capacity to misrepresent yourself. >> Misrepresentation is using disinformation to frustrate data fusion on the part of whomever it is that is watching you. Some of it can be low-tech, such as misrepresentation by paying your therapist in cash under an assumed name. Misrepresentation means arming yourself not at Walmart but in living rooms. Misrepresentation means swapping affinity cards at random with like-minded folks. Misrepresentation means keeping an inventory of misconfigured webservers to proxy through. Misrepresentation means putting a motor-generator between you and the Smart Grid. Misrepresentation means using Tor for no reason at all. Misrepresentation means hiding in plain sight when there is nowhere else to hide. Misrepresentation means having not one digital identity that you cherish, burnish, and protect, but having as many as you can. Your fused identity is not a question unless you work to make it be. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nT-TGvYOBpI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nT-TGvYOBpI [2] http://geer.tinho.net/geer.blackhat.6viii14.txt http://geer.tinho.net/geer.blackhat.6viii14.txt
- jelliclesfarm 7y ago
  Thanks for sharing this. I subscribe to this notion but this is very elegantly put.
- worldsayshi 7y ago
  Misrepresentation is a good way to improve the training data sets for intelligence agencies.
mojuba 7y ago
What an irony that I open the page source of this article and see this literally on the second line: var mi_track_user = true Then there are all the usual suspects: Google Analytics, Facebook, Twitter and a few others at the bottom. Is this the price I should pay for reading this article for free?
- buboard 7y ago
  i like the poetry of the third line too: var mi_no_track_reason = ''; We have no reason not-to track people, so let's track everyone
  - YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago
    Could be worse: var mi_track_reason = '';
- playpause 7y ago
  It’s good that authors are free to write about things that might reflect negatively on the underlying technology or business practices of the platform they are being published on.
- ErikAugust 7y ago
  No tracking on this: https://beta.trimread.com/articles/356 https://beta.trimread.com/articles/356
paulmd 7y ago
With a clamor of bells that set the swallows soaring, the Festival of Summer came to the city Omelas, bright-towered by the sea. The rigging of the boats in harbor sparkled with flags. In the streets between houses with red roofs and painted walls, between old moss-grown gardens and under avenues of trees, past great parks and public buildings, processions moved. Some were decorous: old people in long stiff robes of mauve and grey, grave master workmen, quiet, merry women carrying their babies and chatting as they walked. In other streets the music beat faster, a shimmering of gong and tambourine, and the people went dancing, the procession was a dance. Children dodged in and out, their high calls rising like the swallows' crossing flights, over the music and the singing. All the processions wound towards the north side of the city, where on the great water-meadow called the Green' Fields boys and girls, naked in the bright air, with mud-stained feet and ankles and long, lithe arms, exercised their restive horses before the race. The horses wore no gear at all but a halter without bit. Their manes were braided with streamers of silver, gold, and green. They flared their nostrils and pranced and boasted to one another; they were vastly excited, the horse being the only animal who has adopted our ceremonies as his own. Far off to the north and west the mountains stood up half encircling Omelas on her bay. The air of morning was so clear that the snow still crowning the Eighteen Peaks burned with white-gold fire across the miles of sunlit air, under the dark blue of the sky. There was just enough wind to make the banners that marked the racecourse snap and flutter now and then. In the silence of the broad green meadows one could hear the music winding through the city streets, farther and nearer and ever approaching, a cheerful faint sweetness of the air that from time to time trembled and gathered together and broke out into the great joyous clanging of the bells. Joyous! How is one to tell about joy? How describe the citizens of Omelas? They were not simple folk, you see, though they were happy. But we do not say the words of cheer much any more. All smiles have become archaic. Given a description such as this one tends to make certain assumptions. Given a description such as this one tends to look next for the King, mounted on a splendid stallion and surrounded by his noble knights, or perhaps in a golden litter borne by great-muscled slaves. But there was no king. They did not use swords, or keep slaves. They were not barbarians. I do not know the rules and laws of their society, but I suspect that they were singularly few. As they did without monarchy and slavery, so they also got on without the stock exchange, the advertisement, the secret police, and the bomb. Yet I repeat that these were not simple folk, not dulcet shepherds, noble savages, bland utopians. They were not less complex than us. The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can't lick 'em, join 'em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold; we can no longer describe a happy man, nor make any celebration of joy. How can I tell you about the people of Omelas? They were not naive and happy children – though their children were, in fact, happy. They were mature, intelligent, passionate adults whose lives were not wretched. O miracle! but I wish I could describe it better. I wish I could convince you. Omelas sounds in my words like a city in a fairy tale, long ago and far away, once upon a time. Perhaps it would be best if you imagined it as your own fancy bids, assuming it will rise to the occasion, for certainly I cannot suit you all. .. .......... https://canvas.wayne.edu/files/3466337/download?download_frd=1 https://canvas.wayne.edu/files/3466337/download?download_frd... https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:IZDmzkZ0u5sJ:https://canvas.wayne.edu/files/3466337/download%3Fdownload_frd%3D1+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-b-1-d https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:IZDmzk...
bananatron 7y ago
In Germany recording folks without their consent is illegal (or at least not admissible in courts) in many contexts. It is possible to build incentives that don't lead towards mass surveillance.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- SamuelAdams 7y ago
  I think this is the correct solution. The author's recommendation - a cocktail of browser extensions and other technologies - is only a temporary fix. This needs to be fixed at an institutional level, but there are entire industries (facebook, other ad-service companies) that depend on bulk data collection so a bill like what Germany has will be fought against tooth and nail.
- ensignavenger 7y ago
  Do stores there not use security cameras? Or is a sign at the door considered consent?
- a3n 7y ago
  That's great, but not much protection if the surveillor has no intention of bringing the information to court.
axilmar 7y ago
Most of the actions referred to in the article are mundane: you left your home, you got cash from the ATM, you used the subway, etc. I can't see how that can be used for anything against us. The real problem is the internet: when we express our political interests online, when we visit certain sites, a profile is built for us about not what we do but what we believe in.
imgabe 7y ago
> But if we are nearly as observed and documented as any person in history, our situation is a prison that, although it has no walls, bars, or wardens, is difficult to escape. The defining characteristic of a prison is a loss of freedom. What is it that you want to do that these technologies are preventing you from doing? It's unlikely that we're going to put the technology genie back in the bottle. Instead we need to preserve freedom by sharply curtailing government and corporate power, and demanding radical transparency from any organization that is collecting data.
- antocv 7y ago
  > What is it that you want to do that these technologies are preventing you from doing Organizing tea parties without being surveilled and oppressed? Inviting friends to a meeting, without tech giants knowing about it, and taking actions against said meeting.
  - imgabe 7y ago
    Which actions are tech giants taking against people organizing meetings? Does Google have a goon squad that is busting people's doors down and breaking up meetings? It seems like something like that would be in the news somewhere.
    - vincnetas 7y ago
      it's a bit like global warming probably. untill it has no obvious effect. but it's too late to do something when goon squad is already knocking.
    - antocv 7y ago
      > Which actions are tech giants taking against people organizing meetings? Feeding the data straight to NSA, which then feeds FBI, which then crashes the party with pepper spray and dogs. Sometimes the Feds can send under-cover agents to join the party, then stirr dissent and division. See Occupy Wallstreet. Another example is, tech giants forbid/censor messages (try sending a torrent link with wikileaks data in it to your friends), making your party so small you think no-body is actually interested. But the message is just silently dropped. Spooky eh.
macspoofing 7y ago
Yes, there is some friction in opting out just like there is friction in any action you want to take (from going to the grocery store to voting). So what? The reality is that some people really care about this stuff but the wider population doesn't. The people that care tend to get really frustrated at the wider population and attribute the population's uncaring attitude to the small amount of friction that it takes to opt out and/or to ignorance and/or low-intelligence. This is followed by a push for a government policy to adjust the behaviour. If people won't care by themselves or are too stupid to do it, we'll make them care through laws ... and that usually results in idiotic policies like a cookie warning on every webpage on the internet.
d3nj4l 7y ago
This article talks about the cost of opting out, but doesn't go into some of the more insidious ways in which companies have made it harder and harder to do so. I recently opened the Downloads app on my new Mi phone only to find a notice asking me to grant authorization to Xiami to "... collect, process and use [my] personal data" in order to use the app[1]. Why does a basic downloads app need to gather and analyze my personal data? Why can't I use a version of the app that doesn't collect that data, and why is the agreement framed almost as a carte blanche for Xiaomi to collect personal data? I can see that the downloads app is running in the background, because it sends me notifications every now and then about recent downloads, which was what prompted me to open the app in the first place as I wanted to disable those on the app level. Now there's an app on my phone that's constantly running in the background whose behaviour I cannot control except by blocking all permissions and internet access unless I decide to give Xiaomi the keys to my data. I won't even go into the "Security" app that comes pre-installed that cannot be removed and has permissions to record audio granted by default! Similarly, Gitlab recently prevented people from logging in and even deleting their own repos unless they agreed to data collection[2]. They had the feature to "opt-out" by setting DNT on your browser - but only if you granted them permission to collect data first. They did turn that feature back, but only after widespread criticism from all quarters. I might just be cynical, but I think we might see more and more companies use basic features as Trojan horses for data collection that is unnecessary to the functioning of those basic features themselves, with options to "opt-out" as cover and PR. [1] https://i.imgur.com/yxokdzY.jpg https://i.imgur.com/yxokdzY.jpg [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/dm72oa/gitlab_mandating_thirdparty_telemetry_locks_out/ https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/dm72oa/gitlab_...
- sokoloff 7y ago
  > Why can't I use a version of the app that doesn't collect that data Because that particular developer hasn’t chosen to offer you that deal. If you don’t like the deal vendor X is offering, don’t use vendor X. Particularly in the case of a phone app, you tend to have a lot of choice. If vendor Y provides you a deal you like better, why not use them? You might find that vendors who offer those terms might bundle them with other terms you don’t prefer (like charging money directly for the app or service).
Merrill 7y ago
Security by obscurity is no security at all. What is needed is stronger individual rights to access, correct, delete, and control the use of any information collected about us, as well as strong prohibitions on the use of data against our individual and collective interests.
- hrktb 7y ago
  The point is not security though, but privacy. At its base privacy is obscurity. Also you seem to advocate for every single individual to run a race against the rest of the world to not misuse their data. We both wish there was decent safeguards, I am way more pessimistic about any effective rights regulation though (I think it’s just way too hard for any legislation body). Not saying nothing should be done on the elgal anr regulation side, but that it’s only a tiny drop in what is needed for us to preserve privacy.
  - Merrill 7y ago
    The problem with privacy by obscurity is that once broken it cannot be fixed. Once information is released and becomes public, there is no way to retrieve or expunge it from the public record. The only remedy is law, regulation, and a social compact that the continued dissemination and use against your interests is forbidden.
    - Nasrudith 7y ago
      The real issue historically hasn't been privacy itself in many cases so much as people unduly giving a fuck about things they shouldn't because it doesn't actually affect them at all or their "requirements" are objectively barking mad. While surveillance is full of evils the true root of most damage from releases. Society's stupid reactions are and it would prefer to change anything execpt their dumb presumptions in the face of reality and morality. It brings to mind the stacked absurdity of pagent winners losing their crown over nude picture releases. Clearly they should inspect the models to beforehand to be sure they have Barbie Doll crotches beforehand if having a naked body is a disqualifier. It would save them all embarassment once they realize there are no qualified human models which meet their standards and they will have to make due with giving trophies to department store mannequins. Or the many who suffered from being outed as gay including dumbass tautologies where making a secret firing worthy because of a risk of blackmail - that they created.
qubex 7y ago
AdNauseam and similar obfuscation mechanisms strongly remind me of Neal Stephenson’s ‘bogons’ he introduced in his cinderblock-sized (and eminently enjoyable) novel Anathem. In that regard, he appears to have been highly prescient: hiding signal in reams of random noise (and random meta-noise about both signal and noise). http://www.virtustate.com/fake-news-advertising-and-bogons-science-fiction-manifesting http://www.virtustate.com/fake-news-advertising-and-bogons-s...
stereolambda 7y ago
This is one of the better articles on the subject, not written in inside-tech-bubble terms. I think they also describe something we may call "obfuscation of power": formally you can opt out, in practice you cannot, and people who have power over you are lost in a soup of legal entities. So first, you are alienated to face surveillance alone as an individual, taking all blame for losing your freedom because you "chose" it. Second, it's hard to even name the surveillers (one of the 500 "trusted partners"?). There's now a parallel discussion on AI black boxes which can further serve similar purposes. ("It was not our decision, some AI did it".) The sooner it will be commonly framed as a question of freedom (i.e. absence of arbitrary power of other people above you [1]), and as a question in the interest of society as a whole, the better. [1] I'd take the opportunity to plug Quentin Skinner's "How should we think about freedom", "A genealogy of liberty" or a similar talk, where he challenges the tradition of understanding freedom as absence of direct interference. I think this stuff would be beneficial for politics nowadays.
- dsfyu404ed 7y ago
  >The sooner it will be commonly framed as a question of freedom (i.e. absence of arbitrary power of other people above you [1]), and as a question in the interest of society as a whole, the better I agree but I don't think I'd use the word "soon" There's a reason this is an opinion piece by a person who specifically cares about these issues and not an article. Things are going to have to get worse before they get better. Right now the slices of society closest to these issues (tech and academics) don't seem to care at all as long as it's not overtly being used to oppress the poors or some specific minority. Said slices of society are also mostly wealthy enough that they can comply with most laws most of the time, they're not gonna get robo-tickets for not having their car inspected. Nobody's gonna care until it hits them personally or has the potential to do so imminently.
  - Loughla 7y ago
    >Nobody's gonna care until it hits them personally or has the potential to do so imminently. It's for this reason that I really, really want the US to implement some kind of formal, stated facial recognition across the board. I honestly don't think we'll see any mass movement on privacy issues from regular folks until something that big happens.
SysINT 7y ago
The use of the word Privacy is misleading the conversation. We should be setting the goal to make it illegal to collect. It should be illegal for commercial entities to collect information that can be considered personally identifiable information without explicit consent. Additionally, that should not be allowed within a commercial terms of service agreement, and if automated must also provide means to remove with the same timeliness of the automated subscription.
- foxhop 7y ago
  Additionally if we agree to have our data collected, we should still own that data, meaning the 3d x-ray that the othodontist generates is your data, and you should have access to it (from anywhere if digital, or a copy of it if physical), and the choice of it's removal, when said data no longer serves you.
- yeahforsureman 7y ago
  Consent is a poor tool for such a wide category of data. If you're looking for actual informed consent, we are talking about something either practically impossible or at least a massive strain on people's time and decision-making capabilities over things they often couldn't care less about. See e.g. F.J. Zuiderveen Borgesius, Security & Privacy, ‘Informed Consent. We Can Do Better to Defend Privacy’, IEEE (Volume 13, Issue 2, p. 103-107).
  - SysINT 7y ago
    In context of the cited article, the assumption is the data was already collected. My posit is that should not be allowed. I do not expect companies should be able to collect and then ask for consent. They should be subject to criminal behavior if they do so before and without explicit request.
- infinitezest 7y ago
  This would be a huge step in the right direction but I think it's important to limit surveillance by government entities as well. After all, you have _no_ opt-out options where they are concerned.
jefftk 7y ago
Their proposals for obfuscation are a mix of real solutions and things that are easy to work around in an automated way: * Tor: real workaround, though it does have some vulnerabilities (ex: correlation of ingress and egress) * Browser plugins that block trackers: real * Browser plugins that click on ads: super easy to filter out, since you're a massive outlier * Browser plugins that choose random FB reacts: even easier to filter out since FB has a strong system of identity * Clothes that fool facial recognition: they can update the software faster and cheaper than everyone can update their clothes
motohagiography 7y ago
It raises the interesting question: how do other employees of platform companies protect their own privacy to prevent being put on a list after a political conflict of some sort? When you work in security, this kind of thing is always a distant blip on the radar, but it's there. I know when I did work for a platform company, I didn't trust the internal controls or quality of people enough to keep their app on my devices. I was also sure there were people with access to user data who could not be depended upon to be noble. These aren't faceless government agencies monitoring you, when it's someone doing a favour or using it to support some cause, it's people you know.
wruza 7y ago
Obfuscating your personal profile is like obfuscating an entrance to your house so that thieves to have hard time to find it. If that is a concern, a society should consider a strict law and legal trouble for them, not hiding tactics. Opting out is a thing created by fraudsters, and why is it tolerated is mysterious. The way EU implemented it, allowing sites to drag a user through a burden of un-checking a dozen of checkboxes, is also ineffective en masse. It is still easier to just use complete ad-blocking (passive measures) and clicking “okay” to get rid of a popup.
YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago
I'm very pessimistic about all this. It seems to me that the horse has already bolted: we are all under constant surveilance and there is not much we can do about it at all. Many of us don't even think it's a problem and even many who do think it is don't want to lose the benefits that are attached to the constant automated surveilance. As citizens of democratic countries we have uttely failed to protect our rights against private and public intrusions. We have failed to vote against politicians who introduce legislation to legalise pervasive automated surveilance. In the UK, Theresa May, who brought the Snooper Charter into law became Prime Minister instead of being kicked out of her political career in disgrace.* A majority of citizens of Western democracies continue to use social media and online services like Amazon and Netflix etc. The EU has introduced some legislation of course, but even in the EU state institutions are free to spy on citizens and non-citizens alike. Everytime I take the Eurostar for the continent I'm offered a "fast track" through a set of automated gates that use facial recognition. I keep declining, but my partner who also normally declines was coerced to go through by a border guard. Pseudo-scientific deep-learning lie-detectors are deployed at the borders of my own country, Greece, as well as Hungary and Latvia. But all this started long ago. When surveilance cameras were first put up on every shop and every street corner in every major EU city, only hippies and weirdoes opposed them. And now we're all watched by them and there's no changing that. Who is going to stand up against the new threat to our rights? A few dispersed academics that nobody listens to? Anonymous? ___________ * She was, but only later, because of Brexit.
- whatshisface 7y ago
  History has consistently shown that the rights tend to arise after the violations, not the other way around. The Magna Carta was written in response to an awful king, the FDA was established as a response to widespread problems with people getting poisoned, slavery wasn't abolished until millenia after it was invented, and labor organization (leading to such modern niceties as the 40 hour week) did not arise until well after the industrial revolution. Give it time.
  - mikelyons 7y ago
    There will have to be time, but also immense harm and death before something will be done. It wont just take decades of the discomfort of wondering what they're doing with the data. It will take some sort of massive act against the people done with the data before the outcry will happen, as with any technology. People didn't invent and require seatbelts becasue "you could die" people did die. The question is what will happen, or how bad will it get? The worst fear is some sort of automated genocide.
shadowgovt 7y ago
Cost of ubiquitous surveillance is going down, and at the end of the day, that's the dominant effect. Given the intersection of low cost and demonstrated utility, we're seeing a sea-change in society of significant scale, such that "opting out of surveillance" really does being to equate to "opting out of society." Imagine if you had a moral objection to, say, walking on roads. What percentage of society would you have to avoid to maintain your personal constraint? Rather than asking how we opt out, it's probably best to ask how we live in. How do we all get along and feel safe and secure given the new existence of multiple cheap-to-maintain panopticons? David Brin's "The Transparent Society" is a bit dated, but I think it provides a decent starting framework to consider the question. Because the genie's out of the bottle, and "being in the community" is going to be synonymous by "being seen by the community." We have some liberty to determine as societies what that means. (Consider, as a bad example but perhaps a useful framing of thought: nobody in Star Trek worries about the fact that the computer on a ship knows what they're doing, continuously, at all times, and can report that to anyone who asks. Why? And how does that fictional reality differ from what people actually want?)
- philwelch 7y ago
  Everybody in Star Trek is serving in the military and has no expectation of privacy while on duty. Plus it only tracks their commbadges. Another consideration might be: what privacy would someone have had living in a premodern or early modern village or even a small town at the turn of the century? Aside from being surveilled in our own homes by Alexa and her kind, are we worse off today?
  - shadowgovt 7y ago
    Not to rabbit-hole too far on this, but in the Next Generation, civilian families are also aboard-ship. However, that's almost certainly modeled as "military families and contractors," and the analogue to modern life is some autonomy is understood by those groups to be given up for the privileges of direct military support (i.e. you have to abide by some policies set by the military when you're granted on-base housing). But we're talking a fictional universe, so best not to unpack this bad analogy too far. ;)
shadowgovt 7y ago
I think it's reasonable to turn the philosophical question around and look at it from the other direction. Why should a person interacting within society have the option to opt out of surveillance? We don't imagine that in pre-industrial-age communities, people believed in a right to not be seen by, say, the butcher or blacksmith when they went in to buy meat or metalwork, or a right to not have their commerce recorded in books of accounting. And people weren't immune to town gossip---the low-speed, high-latency, low-accuracy equivalent of having your disparate data points aggregated. Has society changed or has what it means to be seen changed? Is gossip qualitatively different now because it's fast, low-latency, and high-accuracy? Framed from this angle, I think the question is less about opting out and more about "How much gossip is it polite to engage in before people should see one as an asshole for being that nosy?"
- kgwxd 7y ago
  To me, it's the lack of personal responsibility. Once it's automated, there's basically no single person to call an asshole.
- danShumway 7y ago
  > Why should a person interacting within society have the option to opt out of surveillance? A non-exhaustive list of a few specific reasons: - Private, unregulatable actions are historically large components of social change, particularly for minority groups. - Historically, powerful groups (both governments and societies as a whole) have used surveillance to harass critics and undesirable parts of the population. - People have a natural tendency to self-select and avoid honestly engaging with controversial ideas when they know they're being watched. I tend to sum most of that up into a more general point: People have the Right to Hide because society can be cruel, vindictive, and arbitrary, and because people have the right to protect themselves from others in the same way that a deer has the right to camouflage itself from wolves. Opting out of society is not a real choice that anyone here can realistically take, so a just society must balance collective and individual rights. That means respecting individual rights of privacy and self-autonomy.
  - swader999 7y ago
carapace 7y ago
I've been saying for ages now that the ubiquitous surveillance panopticon is inevitable: technology makes it possible and politics and economics drive it. (BTW, FWIW, I don't like it. I just don't see any way around it.) So, given that, the obvious problem becomes making sure it is self-referential: the powerful must be subject to it as well as the "little guys". Otherwise you get Morlocks and Eloi, a split-level society with most people living as de facto slaves. Ask the people of Hong Kong about it, eh? (If they can still speak freely by the time you read this?) If we and our children and grandchildren and their progeny are going to be irretrievably strapped into this global machine we'd better make sure it's humane, eh?
BerlinMarkets 7y ago
One of the issues with Nissenbaum and Brunton's Obfuscation book is that there has been an extensive argument made that it actually supports pro-state forces, not opposes them [0] [0] http://computationalculture.net/poisoned-fruit-booby-trapped-privacy-guides-as-state-sponsored-propaganda-a-case-study-of-obfuscation/ http://computationalculture.net/poisoned-fruit-booby-trapped...
arminiusreturns 7y ago
Start taking you privacy seriously, and opting out of bad services where you can. This sometimes means not getting to be on $latestplatform, and missing a few conversations, etc. Sticking to your principles is never easy or costless. Even then, verify that what you are using isn't spying on you. That means read the EULAs and TOSs. That means packet sniff your network regularly to find potential issues. etc etc It requires work. I think there will be a huge market for entities to help individuals without these skills do these things.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  The article's point is that individual actions really don't scale. This is a general problem of race-to-the-bottom dynamics -- a form of Gresham's Law. At best, personal resistance simply opens more space for the bad actors / RTTB dynamic. Instituting systemic blocks, through regulation, legislation, taboo, or other mechanisms, is required. Individual action can help spread awareness. But it's a first step, not a last.
  - arminiusreturns 7y ago
    I guess in that case I'd be interested in hearing more about the "other mechanisms".
    - dredmorbius 7y ago
      Anything that's systemic and collective rather than individual. A few come to mind, but the primary intent was to indicate my list was not comprehensive.
      - arminiusreturns 7y ago
        I understand that, I just feel like the others in your list have tended to fail to produce change (regulation, legislation, taboo), via regulatory capture, K-street and money influence on congress, and media manipulation, respectively. So I am more interested in anything you might consider to go in the other category. Not looking for a comprehensive list, just something to get started with.
mirimir 7y ago
Meatspace is a lost cause. So you must blend in. Just do whatever you must to get along. But online, there's still a chance. As in Vinge's True Names. You hide your uplink using nested VPN chains and Tor. And then do whatever you want. Using as many unlinked personas as you like.
citruscomputing 7y ago
I wrote an essay for school on this, and the central thrust was that we can apply feminist theories of informed consent and adaptive preferences to digital consent, and the waters are very, very murky, especially when that consent is manipulated. If I consent to something, fully believing it is in my best interest, it can still be said my consent is not legitimate in certain circumstances. For example, if an abuse victim is gaslit into beliving their abuser is the only person who could ever love them. The applications to the digital world, I hope, are apparent. For more information, I highly reccomend Serene J. Khader's "Adaptive Preferences and Women’s Empowerment."
EGreg 7y ago
I have a different take The information is out there, we cannot rely forever on the inefficiency of an attacker. Computers and their internet are making it easier to index and correlate this information. Our location, gait and so on is constantly tracked by phone companies. But everything else can be found in public by CCTV cameras, drones etc. They are able to literally know where you are at all times. They can analyze your gait, face, tag your car, and so on. Law enforcement can use wifi to see if you’re inside a building and find a good correlation between that and any video. AI can predict when and where a network of dissidents will organize, and flag police to intercept (palantir is just one company that does this). It would be trivial for an AI-powered government to predict and defuse any uprising or organizing. People have been outed by timing attacks (being in real-time chatrooms and having their internet cut to confirm it’s them). JK Rowling has been outed by analyzing her style. Robots will be able to track down a human, outrun and and incapacitate them easily. Forget speeding tickets by cop. They’ll have drones spot the car from the sky, cameras by the road snap the car’s info. If it’s a criminal suspect, they can release little bots to roll up next to a car and puncture its tires to slow it down. Come and collect. No more high speed chases. We need to let the public have access to this. We need encrypted CCTV video from cameras in college dorm tooms stored and decrypted when there is a need to solve eg a rape court case. In some way this may also be helpful in the future for preserving alibis because video and audio can now be totally faked with deepfakes, and adversarial iteration will make it go past the uncanny valley into indistinguishability from real video. So the future will have immutable records with timestamps of everything. Where you were and when. Deal with it. The genie is out of the bottle. More here: http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=169 http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=169

611 points by pshaw 7y ago

fouc 7y ago

>Those who know about us have power over us. Obfuscation may be our best digital weapon. Interesting, we could use tools like deepfake to fake images & videos of ourselves in order to increase the level of obfuscation. Perhaps we can even analyze our writing styles and then use GPT-2 to produce writing that matches our styles, and flood the web with that. Anonymity through noise.

pixl97 7y ago
Not really, you're still giving them the real signal.

RobPfeifer 7y ago

I actually sort of thought this was the common POV for anyone within tech. Controlling google searches for your name, putting fake content on social media, etc. are obviously only way to create enough noise to direct algorithms to outcomes you’d prefer no?

buboard 7y ago
Yet i can see your full name, your linked in profile, twitter etc etc. Use pseudonyms, people
Nasrudith 7y ago
It is a viewpoint of the SEOers. Others prefer not to bother with that arms race of bullshit and never "opted in" to the dancing monkey trap in the first place.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

llarsson 7y ago

I cannot help but wonder if the use of such tools as the ones listed in the article are not just "privacy theater", in the same sense that we have come to realize that much of what happens in the name of security is just "security theater". Ironically, of course, is that much of what happens in the name of security is exactly what takes away our privacy in the first place. What is needed is for people to tangibly suffer from lack of privacy. It is obvious to people how they suffer from lack of security. Germans remember what a lack of privacy can do (Stasi in East Germany), and as a consequence, they are much more privacy-minded than in many other places. What will be the wake up call for other nations?

stiray 7y ago
Ther is a wakeup call already but it needs to come from us (tech workers). We do understand what is going on, we do use use adblockers, application firewalls, obfuscate our online fingerprints, use multiple accounts etc. On the other side we also produce tools for mass survailance, ads networks, tracking, implement telemetry, adding ads providers frameworks to our applications. In same breath we are protesting against selling technology to military, ICE, disallow their children playing online games where gambling is the revenue (opening boxes and similar), gitlab enforced telemetry,... I see a huge discrepancy between what we want for ourself (privacy), what we preach and on the other side, what we do and we fuel the survailance society. The solution is to stop on our side and dont do to the others what we dont want to be done to us. (... and even if there is always going to be someone "selling drugs to kids", most of people dont do it).
- hirako2000 7y ago
  Do to others anything they accept to take. But tell them about what you do. One way or another, don't hide what you do, explain what you do. On your drug analogy: sell drugs, and tell exactly what drug you are making. Or others, less scrupulous will make all sort of drugs, hiding what's exactly in them. Do what you are good at, and make sure to inform, if whoever you are doing it for isn't playing transparency then whisleblow what they do. Then quit or stay, that part will depend on what impact you want to make to this world.
- 7y ago

eindiran 7y ago

Definitely check out the browser extension TrackMeNot, mentioned in the article: it runs searches in the background to obfuscate what internet behavior is actually yours. https://trackmenot.io/ https://trackmenot.io/

ddiq 7y ago

It's the year 2027. You get a notification from the H8Watch™ by the ADL app, default installed on every phone, and can't be deleted without jailbreaking. You open the notification, and it shows a video of you from 2 weeks ago, from a camera embedded in the table of the fast food restaurant from where you were eating lunch with your friend. Your voice has been reconstructed through lipreading software and played back to you. "You're such a feandra, I paid last time!" you said to your friend playfully, using the new insult people just started using to refer to someone thrifty. After the video and reconstructed voice plays back to you twice, it changes to a message. "Minor class-based insult detected." The nonsense word "feandra" had been added to the H8Watch™ database 2 hours ago, and your offense had come up as part of their program to catch racists and classists retroactively. This prevents the use of new words or euphamisms that may otherwise be used to bypass H8Watch™ detection. Moments later, you get more notifications. Twitter: account suspended for 1 day, your bank: $25 has been deducted from your account for terms of service violation, Facebook: 2 offenses so far this month, 1 more and all three videos will be posted to your Facebook feed. You quickly swipe away the rest of the notifications, you'll deal with them later, and text the friend you were going to meet for dinner. "Hey John, I can't make it tonight. Cash is a little tight after another violation, and I can't risk a public conversation this week."

varjag 7y ago
It's remarkable how someone living in 2019 still finds grounds to complain about stiffing political correctness.
- ddiq 7y ago
  If you think this story is limited to, or even about, political correctness, you are mistaken. It could be your insurance rates going up for jaywalking, even with no cars around. It could be your credit score dropping if you have too many drinks at a bar. It's about your personal activities all being tracked, measured, and in the end, controlled by corporations.
  - chillwaves 7y ago

Altheasy 7y ago

The author: Privacy does not mean stopping the flow of data; it means channeling it wisely and justly to serve societal ends and values and the individuals who are its subjects, particularly the vulnerable and the disadvantaged. You are wrong, privacy mean stopping the flow of the data completely. No one should spy on your life.

theaeolist 7y ago
"Should". But they do nevertheless. It's a fact.
onion2k 7y ago
No one should spy on your life. Absolute statements are always wrong. ;) The problem with this way of thinking is that it's very hard to define what 'spying' is, and what 'your life' is. This is best illustrated with an example - when you read this comment you'll have loaded a page on HN. That means HN's server probably has a log of your IP address, browser agent string, etc. There's a complete history of every article you've ever read, upvoted, commented on there for you (and the public at large for some things) to see; Your profile: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=Altheasy https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=Altheasy Your comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=Altheasy https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=Altheasy Your favourited articles: https://news.ycombinator.com/favorites?id=Altheasy https://news.ycombinator.com/favorites?id=Altheasy Taking the first page of your comments and that favourite I can reasonably assume that you're a developer, you don't like testing much, you have a cat, you have a judgemental attitude about how other people spend money, you have a smart phone, etc. Not great insights but you're pretty new here. If I trawled through the comments of someone who has 20,000 comments I could learn a lot. So... is HN spying on you? Am I spying on you when I read those pages? I don't think so. You put that data out there in the open. The same is technically true for most data that people say is spying - eg Google Analytics isn't spying on you when it tracks everything you do on 50% of the websites you visit. You're giving that data away. That's fine. It's useful. It makes the internet better. The flow of data in itself is OK. It only really becomes spying when the data is misused. That's what people want to control.
- 7y ago

pdkl95 7y ago

> Obfuscation may be our best digital weapon. From Dan Geer's talk "Cybersecurity as Realpolitik" (which everyone should hear[1]/read[2]): >> There are so many technologies now that power observation and identification of the individual at a distance. They may not yet be in your pocket or on your dashboard or embedded in all your smoke detectors, but that is only a matter of time. Your digital exhaust is unique hence it identifies. Pooling everyone's digital exhaust also characterizes how you differ from normal. Privacy used to be proportional to that which it is impossible to observe or that which can be observed but not identified. No more -- what is today observable and identifiable kills both privacy as impossible-to-observe and privacy as impossible-to-identify, so what might be an alternative? If you are an optimist or an apparatchik, then your answer will tend toward rules of data procedure administered by a government you trust or control. If you are a pessimist or a hacker/maker, then your answer will tend towards the operational, and your definition of a state of privacy will be my definition: the effective capacity to misrepresent yourself. >> Misrepresentation is using disinformation to frustrate data fusion on the part of whomever it is that is watching you. Some of it can be low-tech, such as misrepresentation by paying your therapist in cash under an assumed name. Misrepresentation means arming yourself not at Walmart but in living rooms. Misrepresentation means swapping affinity cards at random with like-minded folks. Misrepresentation means keeping an inventory of misconfigured webservers to proxy through. Misrepresentation means putting a motor-generator between you and the Smart Grid. Misrepresentation means using Tor for no reason at all. Misrepresentation means hiding in plain sight when there is nowhere else to hide. Misrepresentation means having not one digital identity that you cherish, burnish, and protect, but having as many as you can. Your fused identity is not a question unless you work to make it be. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nT-TGvYOBpI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nT-TGvYOBpI [2] http://geer.tinho.net/geer.blackhat.6viii14.txt http://geer.tinho.net/geer.blackhat.6viii14.txt

jelliclesfarm 7y ago
Thanks for sharing this. I subscribe to this notion but this is very elegantly put.
worldsayshi 7y ago
Misrepresentation is a good way to improve the training data sets for intelligence agencies.

mojuba 7y ago

What an irony that I open the page source of this article and see this literally on the second line: var mi_track_user = true Then there are all the usual suspects: Google Analytics, Facebook, Twitter and a few others at the bottom. Is this the price I should pay for reading this article for free?

buboard 7y ago
i like the poetry of the third line too: var mi_no_track_reason = ''; We have no reason not-to track people, so let's track everyone
- YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago
  Could be worse: var mi_track_reason = '';
playpause 7y ago
It’s good that authors are free to write about things that might reflect negatively on the underlying technology or business practices of the platform they are being published on.
ErikAugust 7y ago
No tracking on this: https://beta.trimread.com/articles/356 https://beta.trimread.com/articles/356

paulmd 7y ago

With a clamor of bells that set the swallows soaring, the Festival of Summer came to the city Omelas, bright-towered by the sea. The rigging of the boats in harbor sparkled with flags. In the streets between houses with red roofs and painted walls, between old moss-grown gardens and under avenues of trees, past great parks and public buildings, processions moved. Some were decorous: old people in long stiff robes of mauve and grey, grave master workmen, quiet, merry women carrying their babies and chatting as they walked. In other streets the music beat faster, a shimmering of gong and tambourine, and the people went dancing, the procession was a dance. Children dodged in and out, their high calls rising like the swallows' crossing flights, over the music and the singing. All the processions wound towards the north side of the city, where on the great water-meadow called the Green' Fields boys and girls, naked in the bright air, with mud-stained feet and ankles and long, lithe arms, exercised their restive horses before the race. The horses wore no gear at all but a halter without bit. Their manes were braided with streamers of silver, gold, and green. They flared their nostrils and pranced and boasted to one another; they were vastly excited, the horse being the only animal who has adopted our ceremonies as his own. Far off to the north and west the mountains stood up half encircling Omelas on her bay. The air of morning was so clear that the snow still crowning the Eighteen Peaks burned with white-gold fire across the miles of sunlit air, under the dark blue of the sky. There was just enough wind to make the banners that marked the racecourse snap and flutter now and then. In the silence of the broad green meadows one could hear the music winding through the city streets, farther and nearer and ever approaching, a cheerful faint sweetness of the air that from time to time trembled and gathered together and broke out into the great joyous clanging of the bells. Joyous! How is one to tell about joy? How describe the citizens of Omelas? They were not simple folk, you see, though they were happy. But we do not say the words of cheer much any more. All smiles have become archaic. Given a description such as this one tends to make certain assumptions. Given a description such as this one tends to look next for the King, mounted on a splendid stallion and surrounded by his noble knights, or perhaps in a golden litter borne by great-muscled slaves. But there was no king. They did not use swords, or keep slaves. They were not barbarians. I do not know the rules and laws of their society, but I suspect that they were singularly few. As they did without monarchy and slavery, so they also got on without the stock exchange, the advertisement, the secret police, and the bomb. Yet I repeat that these were not simple folk, not dulcet shepherds, noble savages, bland utopians. They were not less complex than us. The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can't lick 'em, join 'em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold; we can no longer describe a happy man, nor make any celebration of joy. How can I tell you about the people of Omelas? They were not naive and happy children – though their children were, in fact, happy. They were mature, intelligent, passionate adults whose lives were not wretched. O miracle! but I wish I could describe it better. I wish I could convince you. Omelas sounds in my words like a city in a fairy tale, long ago and far away, once upon a time. Perhaps it would be best if you imagined it as your own fancy bids, assuming it will rise to the occasion, for certainly I cannot suit you all. .. .......... https://canvas.wayne.edu/files/3466337/download?download_frd=1 https://canvas.wayne.edu/files/3466337/download?download_frd... https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:IZDmzkZ0u5sJ:https://canvas.wayne.edu/files/3466337/download%3Fdownload_frd%3D1+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-b-1-d https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:IZDmzk...

bananatron 7y ago

In Germany recording folks without their consent is illegal (or at least not admissible in courts) in many contexts. It is possible to build incentives that don't lead towards mass surveillance.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
SamuelAdams 7y ago
I think this is the correct solution. The author's recommendation - a cocktail of browser extensions and other technologies - is only a temporary fix. This needs to be fixed at an institutional level, but there are entire industries (facebook, other ad-service companies) that depend on bulk data collection so a bill like what Germany has will be fought against tooth and nail.
ensignavenger 7y ago
Do stores there not use security cameras? Or is a sign at the door considered consent?
a3n 7y ago
That's great, but not much protection if the surveillor has no intention of bringing the information to court.

axilmar 7y ago

Most of the actions referred to in the article are mundane: you left your home, you got cash from the ATM, you used the subway, etc. I can't see how that can be used for anything against us. The real problem is the internet: when we express our political interests online, when we visit certain sites, a profile is built for us about not what we do but what we believe in.

imgabe 7y ago

> But if we are nearly as observed and documented as any person in history, our situation is a prison that, although it has no walls, bars, or wardens, is difficult to escape. The defining characteristic of a prison is a loss of freedom. What is it that you want to do that these technologies are preventing you from doing? It's unlikely that we're going to put the technology genie back in the bottle. Instead we need to preserve freedom by sharply curtailing government and corporate power, and demanding radical transparency from any organization that is collecting data.

antocv 7y ago
> What is it that you want to do that these technologies are preventing you from doing Organizing tea parties without being surveilled and oppressed? Inviting friends to a meeting, without tech giants knowing about it, and taking actions against said meeting.
- imgabe 7y ago
  Which actions are tech giants taking against people organizing meetings? Does Google have a goon squad that is busting people's doors down and breaking up meetings? It seems like something like that would be in the news somewhere.
  - vincnetas 7y ago
    it's a bit like global warming probably. untill it has no obvious effect. but it's too late to do something when goon squad is already knocking.
  - antocv 7y ago
    > Which actions are tech giants taking against people organizing meetings? Feeding the data straight to NSA, which then feeds FBI, which then crashes the party with pepper spray and dogs. Sometimes the Feds can send under-cover agents to join the party, then stirr dissent and division. See Occupy Wallstreet. Another example is, tech giants forbid/censor messages (try sending a torrent link with wikileaks data in it to your friends), making your party so small you think no-body is actually interested. But the message is just silently dropped. Spooky eh.

macspoofing 7y ago

Yes, there is some friction in opting out just like there is friction in any action you want to take (from going to the grocery store to voting). So what? The reality is that some people really care about this stuff but the wider population doesn't. The people that care tend to get really frustrated at the wider population and attribute the population's uncaring attitude to the small amount of friction that it takes to opt out and/or to ignorance and/or low-intelligence. This is followed by a push for a government policy to adjust the behaviour. If people won't care by themselves or are too stupid to do it, we'll make them care through laws ... and that usually results in idiotic policies like a cookie warning on every webpage on the internet.

d3nj4l 7y ago

This article talks about the cost of opting out, but doesn't go into some of the more insidious ways in which companies have made it harder and harder to do so. I recently opened the Downloads app on my new Mi phone only to find a notice asking me to grant authorization to Xiami to "... collect, process and use [my] personal data" in order to use the app[1]. Why does a basic downloads app need to gather and analyze my personal data? Why can't I use a version of the app that doesn't collect that data, and why is the agreement framed almost as a carte blanche for Xiaomi to collect personal data? I can see that the downloads app is running in the background, because it sends me notifications every now and then about recent downloads, which was what prompted me to open the app in the first place as I wanted to disable those on the app level. Now there's an app on my phone that's constantly running in the background whose behaviour I cannot control except by blocking all permissions and internet access unless I decide to give Xiaomi the keys to my data. I won't even go into the "Security" app that comes pre-installed that cannot be removed and has permissions to record audio granted by default! Similarly, Gitlab recently prevented people from logging in and even deleting their own repos unless they agreed to data collection[2]. They had the feature to "opt-out" by setting DNT on your browser - but only if you granted them permission to collect data first. They did turn that feature back, but only after widespread criticism from all quarters. I might just be cynical, but I think we might see more and more companies use basic features as Trojan horses for data collection that is unnecessary to the functioning of those basic features themselves, with options to "opt-out" as cover and PR. [1] https://i.imgur.com/yxokdzY.jpg https://i.imgur.com/yxokdzY.jpg [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/dm72oa/gitlab_mandating_thirdparty_telemetry_locks_out/ https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/dm72oa/gitlab_...

sokoloff 7y ago
> Why can't I use a version of the app that doesn't collect that data Because that particular developer hasn’t chosen to offer you that deal. If you don’t like the deal vendor X is offering, don’t use vendor X. Particularly in the case of a phone app, you tend to have a lot of choice. If vendor Y provides you a deal you like better, why not use them? You might find that vendors who offer those terms might bundle them with other terms you don’t prefer (like charging money directly for the app or service).

Merrill 7y ago

Security by obscurity is no security at all. What is needed is stronger individual rights to access, correct, delete, and control the use of any information collected about us, as well as strong prohibitions on the use of data against our individual and collective interests.

hrktb 7y ago
The point is not security though, but privacy. At its base privacy is obscurity. Also you seem to advocate for every single individual to run a race against the rest of the world to not misuse their data. We both wish there was decent safeguards, I am way more pessimistic about any effective rights regulation though (I think it’s just way too hard for any legislation body). Not saying nothing should be done on the elgal anr regulation side, but that it’s only a tiny drop in what is needed for us to preserve privacy.
- Merrill 7y ago
  The problem with privacy by obscurity is that once broken it cannot be fixed. Once information is released and becomes public, there is no way to retrieve or expunge it from the public record. The only remedy is law, regulation, and a social compact that the continued dissemination and use against your interests is forbidden.
  - Nasrudith 7y ago
    The real issue historically hasn't been privacy itself in many cases so much as people unduly giving a fuck about things they shouldn't because it doesn't actually affect them at all or their "requirements" are objectively barking mad. While surveillance is full of evils the true root of most damage from releases. Society's stupid reactions are and it would prefer to change anything execpt their dumb presumptions in the face of reality and morality. It brings to mind the stacked absurdity of pagent winners losing their crown over nude picture releases. Clearly they should inspect the models to beforehand to be sure they have Barbie Doll crotches beforehand if having a naked body is a disqualifier. It would save them all embarassment once they realize there are no qualified human models which meet their standards and they will have to make due with giving trophies to department store mannequins. Or the many who suffered from being outed as gay including dumbass tautologies where making a secret firing worthy because of a risk of blackmail - that they created.

qubex 7y ago

AdNauseam and similar obfuscation mechanisms strongly remind me of Neal Stephenson’s ‘bogons’ he introduced in his cinderblock-sized (and eminently enjoyable) novel Anathem. In that regard, he appears to have been highly prescient: hiding signal in reams of random noise (and random meta-noise about both signal and noise). http://www.virtustate.com/fake-news-advertising-and-bogons-science-fiction-manifesting http://www.virtustate.com/fake-news-advertising-and-bogons-s...

stereolambda 7y ago

This is one of the better articles on the subject, not written in inside-tech-bubble terms. I think they also describe something we may call "obfuscation of power": formally you can opt out, in practice you cannot, and people who have power over you are lost in a soup of legal entities. So first, you are alienated to face surveillance alone as an individual, taking all blame for losing your freedom because you "chose" it. Second, it's hard to even name the surveillers (one of the 500 "trusted partners"?). There's now a parallel discussion on AI black boxes which can further serve similar purposes. ("It was not our decision, some AI did it".) The sooner it will be commonly framed as a question of freedom (i.e. absence of arbitrary power of other people above you [1]), and as a question in the interest of society as a whole, the better. [1] I'd take the opportunity to plug Quentin Skinner's "How should we think about freedom", "A genealogy of liberty" or a similar talk, where he challenges the tradition of understanding freedom as absence of direct interference. I think this stuff would be beneficial for politics nowadays.

dsfyu404ed 7y ago
>The sooner it will be commonly framed as a question of freedom (i.e. absence of arbitrary power of other people above you [1]), and as a question in the interest of society as a whole, the better I agree but I don't think I'd use the word "soon" There's a reason this is an opinion piece by a person who specifically cares about these issues and not an article. Things are going to have to get worse before they get better. Right now the slices of society closest to these issues (tech and academics) don't seem to care at all as long as it's not overtly being used to oppress the poors or some specific minority. Said slices of society are also mostly wealthy enough that they can comply with most laws most of the time, they're not gonna get robo-tickets for not having their car inspected. Nobody's gonna care until it hits them personally or has the potential to do so imminently.
- Loughla 7y ago
  >Nobody's gonna care until it hits them personally or has the potential to do so imminently. It's for this reason that I really, really want the US to implement some kind of formal, stated facial recognition across the board. I honestly don't think we'll see any mass movement on privacy issues from regular folks until something that big happens.

SysINT 7y ago

The use of the word Privacy is misleading the conversation. We should be setting the goal to make it illegal to collect. It should be illegal for commercial entities to collect information that can be considered personally identifiable information without explicit consent. Additionally, that should not be allowed within a commercial terms of service agreement, and if automated must also provide means to remove with the same timeliness of the automated subscription.

foxhop 7y ago
Additionally if we agree to have our data collected, we should still own that data, meaning the 3d x-ray that the othodontist generates is your data, and you should have access to it (from anywhere if digital, or a copy of it if physical), and the choice of it's removal, when said data no longer serves you.
yeahforsureman 7y ago
Consent is a poor tool for such a wide category of data. If you're looking for actual informed consent, we are talking about something either practically impossible or at least a massive strain on people's time and decision-making capabilities over things they often couldn't care less about. See e.g. F.J. Zuiderveen Borgesius, Security & Privacy, ‘Informed Consent. We Can Do Better to Defend Privacy’, IEEE (Volume 13, Issue 2, p. 103-107).
- SysINT 7y ago
  In context of the cited article, the assumption is the data was already collected. My posit is that should not be allowed. I do not expect companies should be able to collect and then ask for consent. They should be subject to criminal behavior if they do so before and without explicit request.
infinitezest 7y ago
This would be a huge step in the right direction but I think it's important to limit surveillance by government entities as well. After all, you have _no_ opt-out options where they are concerned.

jefftk 7y ago

Their proposals for obfuscation are a mix of real solutions and things that are easy to work around in an automated way: * Tor: real workaround, though it does have some vulnerabilities (ex: correlation of ingress and egress) * Browser plugins that block trackers: real * Browser plugins that click on ads: super easy to filter out, since you're a massive outlier * Browser plugins that choose random FB reacts: even easier to filter out since FB has a strong system of identity * Clothes that fool facial recognition: they can update the software faster and cheaper than everyone can update their clothes

motohagiography 7y ago

It raises the interesting question: how do other employees of platform companies protect their own privacy to prevent being put on a list after a political conflict of some sort? When you work in security, this kind of thing is always a distant blip on the radar, but it's there. I know when I did work for a platform company, I didn't trust the internal controls or quality of people enough to keep their app on my devices. I was also sure there were people with access to user data who could not be depended upon to be noble. These aren't faceless government agencies monitoring you, when it's someone doing a favour or using it to support some cause, it's people you know.

wruza 7y ago

Obfuscating your personal profile is like obfuscating an entrance to your house so that thieves to have hard time to find it. If that is a concern, a society should consider a strict law and legal trouble for them, not hiding tactics. Opting out is a thing created by fraudsters, and why is it tolerated is mysterious. The way EU implemented it, allowing sites to drag a user through a burden of un-checking a dozen of checkboxes, is also ineffective en masse. It is still easier to just use complete ad-blocking (passive measures) and clicking “okay” to get rid of a popup.

YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago

I'm very pessimistic about all this. It seems to me that the horse has already bolted: we are all under constant surveilance and there is not much we can do about it at all. Many of us don't even think it's a problem and even many who do think it is don't want to lose the benefits that are attached to the constant automated surveilance. As citizens of democratic countries we have uttely failed to protect our rights against private and public intrusions. We have failed to vote against politicians who introduce legislation to legalise pervasive automated surveilance. In the UK, Theresa May, who brought the Snooper Charter into law became Prime Minister instead of being kicked out of her political career in disgrace.* A majority of citizens of Western democracies continue to use social media and online services like Amazon and Netflix etc. The EU has introduced some legislation of course, but even in the EU state institutions are free to spy on citizens and non-citizens alike. Everytime I take the Eurostar for the continent I'm offered a "fast track" through a set of automated gates that use facial recognition. I keep declining, but my partner who also normally declines was coerced to go through by a border guard. Pseudo-scientific deep-learning lie-detectors are deployed at the borders of my own country, Greece, as well as Hungary and Latvia. But all this started long ago. When surveilance cameras were first put up on every shop and every street corner in every major EU city, only hippies and weirdoes opposed them. And now we're all watched by them and there's no changing that. Who is going to stand up against the new threat to our rights? A few dispersed academics that nobody listens to? Anonymous? ___________ * She was, but only later, because of Brexit.

whatshisface 7y ago
History has consistently shown that the rights tend to arise after the violations, not the other way around. The Magna Carta was written in response to an awful king, the FDA was established as a response to widespread problems with people getting poisoned, slavery wasn't abolished until millenia after it was invented, and labor organization (leading to such modern niceties as the 40 hour week) did not arise until well after the industrial revolution. Give it time.
- mikelyons 7y ago
  There will have to be time, but also immense harm and death before something will be done. It wont just take decades of the discomfort of wondering what they're doing with the data. It will take some sort of massive act against the people done with the data before the outcry will happen, as with any technology. People didn't invent and require seatbelts becasue "you could die" people did die. The question is what will happen, or how bad will it get? The worst fear is some sort of automated genocide.

shadowgovt 7y ago

Cost of ubiquitous surveillance is going down, and at the end of the day, that's the dominant effect. Given the intersection of low cost and demonstrated utility, we're seeing a sea-change in society of significant scale, such that "opting out of surveillance" really does being to equate to "opting out of society." Imagine if you had a moral objection to, say, walking on roads. What percentage of society would you have to avoid to maintain your personal constraint? Rather than asking how we opt out, it's probably best to ask how we live in. How do we all get along and feel safe and secure given the new existence of multiple cheap-to-maintain panopticons? David Brin's "The Transparent Society" is a bit dated, but I think it provides a decent starting framework to consider the question. Because the genie's out of the bottle, and "being in the community" is going to be synonymous by "being seen by the community." We have some liberty to determine as societies what that means. (Consider, as a bad example but perhaps a useful framing of thought: nobody in Star Trek worries about the fact that the computer on a ship knows what they're doing, continuously, at all times, and can report that to anyone who asks. Why? And how does that fictional reality differ from what people actually want?)

philwelch 7y ago
Everybody in Star Trek is serving in the military and has no expectation of privacy while on duty. Plus it only tracks their commbadges. Another consideration might be: what privacy would someone have had living in a premodern or early modern village or even a small town at the turn of the century? Aside from being surveilled in our own homes by Alexa and her kind, are we worse off today?
- shadowgovt 7y ago
  Not to rabbit-hole too far on this, but in the Next Generation, civilian families are also aboard-ship. However, that's almost certainly modeled as "military families and contractors," and the analogue to modern life is some autonomy is understood by those groups to be given up for the privileges of direct military support (i.e. you have to abide by some policies set by the military when you're granted on-base housing). But we're talking a fictional universe, so best not to unpack this bad analogy too far. ;)

shadowgovt 7y ago

I think it's reasonable to turn the philosophical question around and look at it from the other direction. Why should a person interacting within society have the option to opt out of surveillance? We don't imagine that in pre-industrial-age communities, people believed in a right to not be seen by, say, the butcher or blacksmith when they went in to buy meat or metalwork, or a right to not have their commerce recorded in books of accounting. And people weren't immune to town gossip---the low-speed, high-latency, low-accuracy equivalent of having your disparate data points aggregated. Has society changed or has what it means to be seen changed? Is gossip qualitatively different now because it's fast, low-latency, and high-accuracy? Framed from this angle, I think the question is less about opting out and more about "How much gossip is it polite to engage in before people should see one as an asshole for being that nosy?"

kgwxd 7y ago
To me, it's the lack of personal responsibility. Once it's automated, there's basically no single person to call an asshole.
danShumway 7y ago
> Why should a person interacting within society have the option to opt out of surveillance? A non-exhaustive list of a few specific reasons: - Private, unregulatable actions are historically large components of social change, particularly for minority groups. - Historically, powerful groups (both governments and societies as a whole) have used surveillance to harass critics and undesirable parts of the population. - People have a natural tendency to self-select and avoid honestly engaging with controversial ideas when they know they're being watched. I tend to sum most of that up into a more general point: People have the Right to Hide because society can be cruel, vindictive, and arbitrary, and because people have the right to protect themselves from others in the same way that a deer has the right to camouflage itself from wolves. Opting out of society is not a real choice that anyone here can realistically take, so a just society must balance collective and individual rights. That means respecting individual rights of privacy and self-autonomy.
- swader999 7y ago

carapace 7y ago

I've been saying for ages now that the ubiquitous surveillance panopticon is inevitable: technology makes it possible and politics and economics drive it. (BTW, FWIW, I don't like it. I just don't see any way around it.) So, given that, the obvious problem becomes making sure it is self-referential: the powerful must be subject to it as well as the "little guys". Otherwise you get Morlocks and Eloi, a split-level society with most people living as de facto slaves. Ask the people of Hong Kong about it, eh? (If they can still speak freely by the time you read this?) If we and our children and grandchildren and their progeny are going to be irretrievably strapped into this global machine we'd better make sure it's humane, eh?

BerlinMarkets 7y ago

One of the issues with Nissenbaum and Brunton's Obfuscation book is that there has been an extensive argument made that it actually supports pro-state forces, not opposes them [0] [0] http://computationalculture.net/poisoned-fruit-booby-trapped-privacy-guides-as-state-sponsored-propaganda-a-case-study-of-obfuscation/ http://computationalculture.net/poisoned-fruit-booby-trapped...

arminiusreturns 7y ago

Start taking you privacy seriously, and opting out of bad services where you can. This sometimes means not getting to be on $latestplatform, and missing a few conversations, etc. Sticking to your principles is never easy or costless. Even then, verify that what you are using isn't spying on you. That means read the EULAs and TOSs. That means packet sniff your network regularly to find potential issues. etc etc It requires work. I think there will be a huge market for entities to help individuals without these skills do these things.

dredmorbius 7y ago
The article's point is that individual actions really don't scale. This is a general problem of race-to-the-bottom dynamics -- a form of Gresham's Law. At best, personal resistance simply opens more space for the bad actors / RTTB dynamic. Instituting systemic blocks, through regulation, legislation, taboo, or other mechanisms, is required. Individual action can help spread awareness. But it's a first step, not a last.
- arminiusreturns 7y ago
  I guess in that case I'd be interested in hearing more about the "other mechanisms".
  - dredmorbius 7y ago
    Anything that's systemic and collective rather than individual. A few come to mind, but the primary intent was to indicate my list was not comprehensive.
    - arminiusreturns 7y ago
      I understand that, I just feel like the others in your list have tended to fail to produce change (regulation, legislation, taboo), via regulatory capture, K-street and money influence on congress, and media manipulation, respectively. So I am more interested in anything you might consider to go in the other category. Not looking for a comprehensive list, just something to get started with.

mirimir 7y ago

Meatspace is a lost cause. So you must blend in. Just do whatever you must to get along. But online, there's still a chance. As in Vinge's True Names. You hide your uplink using nested VPN chains and Tor. And then do whatever you want. Using as many unlinked personas as you like.

citruscomputing 7y ago

I wrote an essay for school on this, and the central thrust was that we can apply feminist theories of informed consent and adaptive preferences to digital consent, and the waters are very, very murky, especially when that consent is manipulated. If I consent to something, fully believing it is in my best interest, it can still be said my consent is not legitimate in certain circumstances. For example, if an abuse victim is gaslit into beliving their abuser is the only person who could ever love them. The applications to the digital world, I hope, are apparent. For more information, I highly reccomend Serene J. Khader's "Adaptive Preferences and Women’s Empowerment."

EGreg 7y ago

I have a different take The information is out there, we cannot rely forever on the inefficiency of an attacker. Computers and their internet are making it easier to index and correlate this information. Our location, gait and so on is constantly tracked by phone companies. But everything else can be found in public by CCTV cameras, drones etc. They are able to literally know where you are at all times. They can analyze your gait, face, tag your car, and so on. Law enforcement can use wifi to see if you’re inside a building and find a good correlation between that and any video. AI can predict when and where a network of dissidents will organize, and flag police to intercept (palantir is just one company that does this). It would be trivial for an AI-powered government to predict and defuse any uprising or organizing. People have been outed by timing attacks (being in real-time chatrooms and having their internet cut to confirm it’s them). JK Rowling has been outed by analyzing her style. Robots will be able to track down a human, outrun and and incapacitate them easily. Forget speeding tickets by cop. They’ll have drones spot the car from the sky, cameras by the road snap the car’s info. If it’s a criminal suspect, they can release little bots to roll up next to a car and puncture its tires to slow it down. Come and collect. No more high speed chases. We need to let the public have access to this. We need encrypted CCTV video from cameras in college dorm tooms stored and decrypted when there is a need to solve eg a rape court case. In some way this may also be helpful in the future for preserving alibis because video and audio can now be totally faked with deepfakes, and adversarial iteration will make it go past the uncanny valley into indistinguishability from real video. So the future will have immutable records with timestamps of everything. Where you were and when. Deal with it. The genie is out of the bottle. More here: http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=169 http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=169