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Beyond HN and tech circles, is there any detectable groundswell of demand for privacy? When you talk with friends & family about privacy, does anyone care? Whe

Beyond HN and tech circles, is there any detectable groundswell of demand for privacy? When you talk with friends & family about privacy, does anyone care? When average people care about privacy, the large players will respond. Until then, pressure from the state can be accommodated without irking customers, so Big Tech will play along.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
commandlinefan 7y ago
I seem to recall when Jennifer Lawrence (a famous actress you may have heard of) had her icloud storage hacked and leaked all over the internet, there was a bit of a murmur online and even offline about it.
dudus 7y ago
General public are generally ignorant about risks in the tech they use. That doesn't mean they don't care about their privacy. There's an assumption that laws and safeguards are in place so technology in general can be trusted and transacted on. In other words they trust in us "the tech circle" to police ourselves and assert security and privacy. It's not circle jerk about privacy. It's a duty we have by being in the frontlines.
- freehunter 7y ago
  Exactly. The general public is never going to say “I demand end to end encryption and complete privacy” because they don’t know how all the tech works. But they’re surely going to expect that their private text messages are private and their private pictures are private. People expect privacy as a default and sharing as an option, and they rely on the “experts” (tech companies, lawmakers, etc) to help them.
  - reroute1 7y ago
    Not exactly. Some people may not understand and also not care and I'm sure there are many many people who that fits. When you're talking about surveillance level vs. someone hacking your iPhone that's not really a comparison. Of course people don't want their private messages stolen, but that's not really the case with most surveillance. Not that I'm in favor of it necessarily but there are merits. Surveillance and privacy aren't the same thing but this is the FBI and people are bringing up snowden. In general I think you're right privacy is just expected for personal messages, but at some point when it's just data I don't think most people care, and may in fact support some level of surveillance.
buzzy_hacker 7y ago
There's this popular conception that the average person doesn't care about privacy, but I think that's wrong. I just think that to really get a handle on what it means to be private in the modern digital age is too complicated for the average person. People are concerned but feel overwhelmed by the technical details and don't know where to start. You need to know the fundamentals of encryption, what a key is, backdoors, the difference between E2E and non-E2E, and so on. We, as the tech community, need to do a better job communicating and explaining.
- technofiend 7y ago
  >There's this popular conception that the average person doesn't care about privacy, but I think that's wrong. I just think that to really get a handle on what it means to be private in the modern digital age is too complicated for the average person. Cypherpunks tried to sound the alarm around the time email got popular and had similar difficulty then - the barrier to adoption was too high and laypersons didn't really understand why they should care enough to overcome that barrier. See Wired coverage from 1993 as one example of this view from the techno-savvy thinking things should be one way but acknowledging that reality is much different. https://www.wired.com/1993/02/crypto-rebels/ https://www.wired.com/1993/02/crypto-rebels/ From the article Crypto Anarchy, he believes, is inevitable, despite the forces marshaled against it. "I don't see any chance that it will be done politically," says the Cypherpunk. "[But] it will be done technologically. It's already happening." Rather than some digital utopia where personal information is heavily protected and not linked, we have a generation of programmers working to persist tracking cookies across browsing sessions, whether anonymous or not and law enforcement leveraging a scraped database of three billion photos to identify people whether they choose to be identified or not. By following the electronic links we make, one can piece together a depressingly detailed profile of who we are: Our health records, phone bills, credit histories, arrest records, and electronic mail all connect our actions and expressions to our physical selves. Crypto presents the possibility of severing these links. It is possible to use cryptography to actually limit the degree to which one can track the trail of a transaction. Of course that didn't happen beyond https everywhere for point-to-point encryption and regular leaks of consumer data proves once collected data is often not protected from public scrutiny, much less encrypted at rest, anonymized, etc. So even if you do protect your data perfectly there's still a chance it'll be discovered elsewhere. Rather than trying to create backdoors, government should be trying to enforce much more stringent regulations on use and protection of consumer data. However given the political zeitgeist I don't really see that happening.
bobajeff 7y ago
Obviously there is. Otherwise it wouldn't be advertised on billboards and television. Privacy is just like your personal health everyone wants a convenient solution but no company can honestly offer it. (Doesn't stop then from pretending they do)
- redbeard0x0a 7y ago
  "Military Grade Encryption" Immediate giveaway that its just PR...
raxxorrax 7y ago
> does anyone care? Actually yes. Some even have bought into VPN services without me recommending it and without any missionary ambitions from my part. Generally these are also not people using services of the largest offenders too much though. I would even say the majority in my circle cares about it. They just have no real clue how to mimimize data exposure. There certainly is an effect that influences consumption though. From the techies within my cirlce everybody cares, most to a pretty large degree.
chopin 7y ago
Here in Germany there is a big TV ads campaign by Apple focusing on privacy. At least their marketers seem to believe that there is a large enough groundswell to justify a campaign.
aiisjustanif 7y ago
Asking the real important questions.
mhb 7y ago
Maybe they don't care about privacy because they're defining it as secrets that people have. Snowden's description of privacy is much more powerful: "And if we actually think about it, it doesn’t make sense. Because privacy isn’t about something to hide. Privacy is about something to protect. That’s who you are. That's what you believe in. Privacy is the right to a self. Privacy is what gives you the ability to share with the world who you are on your own terms. For them to understand what you’re trying to be and to protect for yourself the parts of you you’re not sure about, that you’re still experimenting with. "If we don’t have privacy, what we’re losing is the ability to make mistakes, we’re losing the ability to be ourselves. Privacy is the fountainhead of all other rights. Freedom of speech doesn’t have a lot of meaning if you can’t have a quiet space, a space within yourself, your mind, your community, your friends, your family, to decide what it is you actually want to say. "Freedom of religion doesn’t mean that much if you can’t figure out what you actually believe without being influenced by the criticisms of outside direction and peer pressure. And it goes on and on. "Privacy is baked into our language, our core concepts of government and self in every way. It’s why we call it 'private property.' Without privacy you don’t have anything for yourself."
- xvector 7y ago
  Beautiful compilation. Thanks.
Shivetya 7y ago
the youth are either ambivalent or just not the point of understanding, have you seen how much they freely share with each other on messaging, dating, and other apps? Now for the most part today's schools lean pretty heavily towards indoctrination and with so many distractions at hand at their age they don't see issues we see. As I posted before, then you get into the so called adult realm and many of them will trade away privacy if it gets them money off their coffee, coupons for grocery, or just to brag about their latest get away. it does not matter if its private or government channels, give them a reward and they want it. Privacy also tends to be highly associated with identity theft not realizing that not only is privacy important for reasons of protecting your stuff but your person and your interest also need protecting both from government and private parties. Also, some here seem to think they have more to lose than they do. It seems more about wanting to be part of a victim class as long as people and organizations they don't like are punished tl;dr no, most don't care, give them a cookie and you can get their email and more
throwGuardian 7y ago
No there isn't, despite repeated high profile hacks. I've spoken to many in security, selling E2E enablement for the enterprise, and even among CIOs, there is no urgency to implement this. You can imagine the indifference among the less tech savvy
clowd 7y ago
Next time you encounter someone who claims they don't care about privacy, ask whether or not they close the bathroom door (or the stall in a public restroom) when they're taking a shit. And if they say yes, ask them why? What's going on in there isn't any big secret. It's not like they're in there plotting a terrorist attack. What are they hiding behind that door? It turns out most people _do_ care about privacy. You just have to frame it in relatable terms. I don't want anyone else watching me take a dump because that's private, and it's not any of their business. Likewise, I don't want other people knowing what articles I read on the internet, or what music I listen to, or reading the contents of my business plan, or scoping out my dick pics, or any of a thousand other things, because those things are also private and they aren't anyone else's business unless I choose to share them. Restrooms have doors, and most people close them for privacy. Data has a privacy door, too, and it's called encryption.
- bazza451 7y ago
  Great post!
- b215826 7y ago
  > "ask whether or not they close the bathroom door (or the stall in a public restroom) when they're taking a shit" This is a pretty bad question and a hyperbole. Most people would want no one (including people who they are usually intimate with) to watch them defecate. And that is not the same thing as government snooping on its own citizens. Arguments for massive surveillance given by governments is not so much about invading the personal privacy of people than it is about protecting national "security" or preventing "terrorism". For this reason, few people are going to get convinced if you equate the privacy to use the lavatory without anyone watching to the privacy of being able to communicate without the government monitoring you. The best argument against massive surveillance is the one that Snowden gave during a Reddit AMA: > "Some might say "I don't care if they violate my privacy; I've got nothing to hide." Help them understand that they are misunderstanding the fundamental nature of human rights. Nobody needs to justify why they "need" a right: the burden of justification falls on the one seeking to infringe upon the right. But even if they did, you can't give away the rights of others because they're not useful to you. More simply, the majority cannot vote away the natural rights of the minority. > "But even if they could, help them think for a moment about what they're saying. Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say. > "A free press benefits more than just those who read the paper."

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

commandlinefan 7y ago

I seem to recall when Jennifer Lawrence (a famous actress you may have heard of) had her icloud storage hacked and leaked all over the internet, there was a bit of a murmur online and even offline about it.

dudus 7y ago

General public are generally ignorant about risks in the tech they use. That doesn't mean they don't care about their privacy. There's an assumption that laws and safeguards are in place so technology in general can be trusted and transacted on. In other words they trust in us "the tech circle" to police ourselves and assert security and privacy. It's not circle jerk about privacy. It's a duty we have by being in the frontlines.

freehunter 7y ago
Exactly. The general public is never going to say “I demand end to end encryption and complete privacy” because they don’t know how all the tech works. But they’re surely going to expect that their private text messages are private and their private pictures are private. People expect privacy as a default and sharing as an option, and they rely on the “experts” (tech companies, lawmakers, etc) to help them.
- reroute1 7y ago
  Not exactly. Some people may not understand and also not care and I'm sure there are many many people who that fits. When you're talking about surveillance level vs. someone hacking your iPhone that's not really a comparison. Of course people don't want their private messages stolen, but that's not really the case with most surveillance. Not that I'm in favor of it necessarily but there are merits. Surveillance and privacy aren't the same thing but this is the FBI and people are bringing up snowden. In general I think you're right privacy is just expected for personal messages, but at some point when it's just data I don't think most people care, and may in fact support some level of surveillance.

buzzy_hacker 7y ago

There's this popular conception that the average person doesn't care about privacy, but I think that's wrong. I just think that to really get a handle on what it means to be private in the modern digital age is too complicated for the average person. People are concerned but feel overwhelmed by the technical details and don't know where to start. You need to know the fundamentals of encryption, what a key is, backdoors, the difference between E2E and non-E2E, and so on. We, as the tech community, need to do a better job communicating and explaining.

technofiend 7y ago
>There's this popular conception that the average person doesn't care about privacy, but I think that's wrong. I just think that to really get a handle on what it means to be private in the modern digital age is too complicated for the average person. Cypherpunks tried to sound the alarm around the time email got popular and had similar difficulty then - the barrier to adoption was too high and laypersons didn't really understand why they should care enough to overcome that barrier. See Wired coverage from 1993 as one example of this view from the techno-savvy thinking things should be one way but acknowledging that reality is much different. https://www.wired.com/1993/02/crypto-rebels/ https://www.wired.com/1993/02/crypto-rebels/ From the article Crypto Anarchy, he believes, is inevitable, despite the forces marshaled against it. "I don't see any chance that it will be done politically," says the Cypherpunk. "[But] it will be done technologically. It's already happening." Rather than some digital utopia where personal information is heavily protected and not linked, we have a generation of programmers working to persist tracking cookies across browsing sessions, whether anonymous or not and law enforcement leveraging a scraped database of three billion photos to identify people whether they choose to be identified or not. By following the electronic links we make, one can piece together a depressingly detailed profile of who we are: Our health records, phone bills, credit histories, arrest records, and electronic mail all connect our actions and expressions to our physical selves. Crypto presents the possibility of severing these links. It is possible to use cryptography to actually limit the degree to which one can track the trail of a transaction. Of course that didn't happen beyond https everywhere for point-to-point encryption and regular leaks of consumer data proves once collected data is often not protected from public scrutiny, much less encrypted at rest, anonymized, etc. So even if you do protect your data perfectly there's still a chance it'll be discovered elsewhere. Rather than trying to create backdoors, government should be trying to enforce much more stringent regulations on use and protection of consumer data. However given the political zeitgeist I don't really see that happening.

bobajeff 7y ago

Obviously there is. Otherwise it wouldn't be advertised on billboards and television. Privacy is just like your personal health everyone wants a convenient solution but no company can honestly offer it. (Doesn't stop then from pretending they do)

redbeard0x0a 7y ago
"Military Grade Encryption" Immediate giveaway that its just PR...

raxxorrax 7y ago

> does anyone care? Actually yes. Some even have bought into VPN services without me recommending it and without any missionary ambitions from my part. Generally these are also not people using services of the largest offenders too much though. I would even say the majority in my circle cares about it. They just have no real clue how to mimimize data exposure. There certainly is an effect that influences consumption though. From the techies within my cirlce everybody cares, most to a pretty large degree.

chopin 7y ago

Here in Germany there is a big TV ads campaign by Apple focusing on privacy. At least their marketers seem to believe that there is a large enough groundswell to justify a campaign.

aiisjustanif 7y ago

Asking the real important questions.

mhb 7y ago

Maybe they don't care about privacy because they're defining it as secrets that people have. Snowden's description of privacy is much more powerful: "And if we actually think about it, it doesn’t make sense. Because privacy isn’t about something to hide. Privacy is about something to protect. That’s who you are. That's what you believe in. Privacy is the right to a self. Privacy is what gives you the ability to share with the world who you are on your own terms. For them to understand what you’re trying to be and to protect for yourself the parts of you you’re not sure about, that you’re still experimenting with. "If we don’t have privacy, what we’re losing is the ability to make mistakes, we’re losing the ability to be ourselves. Privacy is the fountainhead of all other rights. Freedom of speech doesn’t have a lot of meaning if you can’t have a quiet space, a space within yourself, your mind, your community, your friends, your family, to decide what it is you actually want to say. "Freedom of religion doesn’t mean that much if you can’t figure out what you actually believe without being influenced by the criticisms of outside direction and peer pressure. And it goes on and on. "Privacy is baked into our language, our core concepts of government and self in every way. It’s why we call it 'private property.' Without privacy you don’t have anything for yourself."

xvector 7y ago
Beautiful compilation. Thanks.

Shivetya 7y ago

the youth are either ambivalent or just not the point of understanding, have you seen how much they freely share with each other on messaging, dating, and other apps? Now for the most part today's schools lean pretty heavily towards indoctrination and with so many distractions at hand at their age they don't see issues we see. As I posted before, then you get into the so called adult realm and many of them will trade away privacy if it gets them money off their coffee, coupons for grocery, or just to brag about their latest get away. it does not matter if its private or government channels, give them a reward and they want it. Privacy also tends to be highly associated with identity theft not realizing that not only is privacy important for reasons of protecting your stuff but your person and your interest also need protecting both from government and private parties. Also, some here seem to think they have more to lose than they do. It seems more about wanting to be part of a victim class as long as people and organizations they don't like are punished tl;dr no, most don't care, give them a cookie and you can get their email and more

throwGuardian 7y ago

No there isn't, despite repeated high profile hacks. I've spoken to many in security, selling E2E enablement for the enterprise, and even among CIOs, there is no urgency to implement this. You can imagine the indifference among the less tech savvy

clowd 7y ago

Next time you encounter someone who claims they don't care about privacy, ask whether or not they close the bathroom door (or the stall in a public restroom) when they're taking a shit. And if they say yes, ask them why? What's going on in there isn't any big secret. It's not like they're in there plotting a terrorist attack. What are they hiding behind that door? It turns out most people _do_ care about privacy. You just have to frame it in relatable terms. I don't want anyone else watching me take a dump because that's private, and it's not any of their business. Likewise, I don't want other people knowing what articles I read on the internet, or what music I listen to, or reading the contents of my business plan, or scoping out my dick pics, or any of a thousand other things, because those things are also private and they aren't anyone else's business unless I choose to share them. Restrooms have doors, and most people close them for privacy. Data has a privacy door, too, and it's called encryption.

bazza451 7y ago
Great post!
b215826 7y ago
> "ask whether or not they close the bathroom door (or the stall in a public restroom) when they're taking a shit" This is a pretty bad question and a hyperbole. Most people would want no one (including people who they are usually intimate with) to watch them defecate. And that is not the same thing as government snooping on its own citizens. Arguments for massive surveillance given by governments is not so much about invading the personal privacy of people than it is about protecting national "security" or preventing "terrorism". For this reason, few people are going to get convinced if you equate the privacy to use the lavatory without anyone watching to the privacy of being able to communicate without the government monitoring you. The best argument against massive surveillance is the one that Snowden gave during a Reddit AMA: > "Some might say "I don't care if they violate my privacy; I've got nothing to hide." Help them understand that they are misunderstanding the fundamental nature of human rights. Nobody needs to justify why they "need" a right: the burden of justification falls on the one seeking to infringe upon the right. But even if they did, you can't give away the rights of others because they're not useful to you. More simply, the majority cannot vote away the natural rights of the minority. > "But even if they could, help them think for a moment about what they're saying. Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say. > "A free press benefits more than just those who read the paper."