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Google's Chief Internet Evangelist: 'privacy may be an anomaly' (2013)
- nashashmi 7y agoMaybe there should be three terms acknowledged in the study of privacy: Public Obscure Private For the longest time we have interpreted obscurity as privacy. Such as what your house looks like. Or how many people know of your legal immigration status. There are very few pieces of information that are truly private, like social security number, health records (known only by Healthcare providers), and the actions you did in secret where no one was present, and maybe even the thoughts you have and the writings of your journal.
- darepublic 7y agoI sometimes wonder about the day when even thoughts won't be safe from outside scrutiny.
- Avamander 7y ago> There are very few pieces of information that are truly private, like social security number Most countries don't have such a number with such high value.
- lonelappde 7y agoHow do those countries handle taxes, public services, and credit?
- Avamander 7y agoThose countries do have a number, but it's not SSN it's a National Identification Number and its usually not considered valuable or secret information.
- eximius 7y agoThey have similar IDs, but they are IDs not authentication methods in and of themselves. SSNs are Bearer IDs that the knowing of is proof of identity, which is dumb.
- saagarjha 7y ago> There are very few pieces of information that are truly private, like social security number, health records (known only by Healthcare providers) Knowing the security of the organizations that handle these, I don’t really think so.
- sarah180 7y ago> the writings of your journal …unless that journal is electronic
- alexwasserman 7y agoI think this starts to get at it, but missed the lopsided situation we're in today. In the small town he mentions, yes, there's little privacy, but it's constrained to the small town, and largely equal. Everyone knows about everyone. If someone from outside showed up to ask questions the town would likely protect your privacy, but also let you know someone was asking questions. Instead today there are corporations (some public, some very secretive) gathering vast amounts of information and it's impossible to know who knows what about you. That information is also much more easily tradable, so it spreads. For example, in the small town, pre-IT, it was hard to produce consolidated, and deep reporting of who's buying what, beyond the memory of the staff. Now Target, Amazon, etc can know not just what you're buying, but what you're looking at, and correlate it with information from other sources, and it can be easily correlated with public records, and other information on a scale that's just wasn't ever possible historically.
- Pedrit0 7y agoWell, Google may be an anomaly too...
- Pedrit0 7y agoOh let me be more explicit: Google's destiny is deeply intricated with geopolitics, and as several US-based giants it will have its future indexed on the US destiny. And the US are declining at the speed of light. China has built its own tech powerhouse and it is dwarfing the american digital universe. Moreover Trump's tech blocade on China is just prompting them to develop alternatives on every possible hardware and software product and therefore China is becoming the biggest threat to US Big tech companies. Europe can (and will) go on make easy money taxing Google and other 'privacy predating' companies because they cannot afford the luxury to quit the biggest trade bloc in the world... ANd it is a good strategy to weaken the US. If you think that Google will remain what is is now, get your head off the SV tech blogs and read a bit about geopolitics. So yeah, I think that Google is anomaly. And most anomalies tend to disappear...
- NegativeLatency 7y ago“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
- close04 7y agoNot having to eat your own dog food helps a lot too... You lose your privacy for his benefit, not the other way around.
- wayoutthere 7y agoYeah, in the modern world privacy is a luxury. It's actually pretty damn hard to find information about many technology executives outside of their LinkedIn profile; but many lower-income jobs practically require an active social media presence.
- na85 7y agoExactly correct. Corporations like Google and Facebook successfully turned privacy into a luxury good available only to the oligarch class. See for example Zuckerberg buying all the mansions around his, to protect his privacy, with the money he made proselytizing "privacy is dead" and selling us out to advertisers.
- sixstringtheory 7y agoI’m interested in which jobs you speak of. Surely nobody cares whether or not you have aFB profile when deciding to hire you as a grocery stocker or cashier...
- close04 7y ago> according to a study by CareerBuilder, nearly 70% of employers screen their candidates using social media and what’s more surprising is 57% of employers are less likely to even contact applicants who lack an online presence [0] [0] https://www.lawdepot.com/blog/should-employers-look-at-social-media-when-hiring/ https://www.lawdepot.com/blog/should-employers-look-at-socia...
- wayoutthere 7y agoI think this assumes people don't have a choice about being "extremely online". As someone who quite literally grew up on the Internet in the early 90s (before that was common), I have pulled back my engagement significantly in the last 5 years. I'm not on social media at all. And you know what? Other than a few Facebook Groups, I realized I'm not missing much. I rather enjoy living life offline; I'm not obsessed with checking the news 30 times a day or being performative with my posts. The last few weeks have actually been pretty hard for me because it's like being forced to take heroin when you've been clean for a while. But I also have privacy. There are things in my life that I don't feel are even appropriate to broadcast widely, so I don't. You can't really Google me and find anything meaningful. The advertisements I see are not in any way aligned to things I would do / buy, which makes it way more obvious how much advertising we are subjected to. I feel it's a bit like peeking behind the curtain.
- 0xff00ffee 7y ago> I'm not on social media at all. What's HN then?
- Nicksil 7y agoHN is an Internet forum: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_forum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_forum
- sixstringtheory 7y agoWhich is one kind of medium for socially interacting.
- astrobe_ 7y agoWell, if you insist, sure, but social networks are focused on people while forums are focused on topics (news article etc.). The difference is significant enough that some people may post on various forums all day long but never on Twitter or FB.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- cleanroom 7y agoOpen source is a work in progress. There are plenty of software and hardware projects that care about security and big tech can't stop them although they would probably like to.
- jonny_eh 7y agoThis is Vint Cerf, co-creator of TCP/IP (aka the internet protocol). He's better known by his actual name, isn't he?
- coldtea 7y agoBy technical audiences maybe. By the general public, Verge readers, etc, not so much. Half of the population doesn't know who the vice president is, much less Vint Cerf.
- lallysingh 7y agoWe're on Hacker News. I think we can assume audience here is fairly technical.
- PopeDotNinja 7y agoI'm smart enough and I didn't know he was the cocreater of tcp/ip. I also get him confused with Tim Berners Lee, as they are both referred to as the father of <2 different things that are use somewhat interchangeably>.
- simmanian 7y agoIs there any way to make personal data usage within companies more transparent and verifiable? Are there known studies/works in this line of thought? In an ideal world, what can we do to make data usage more transparent?
- lonelappde 7y agoHow would you guarantee privacy by requiring transparency? They are opposites.
- simmanian 7y agoI had been a staunch advocate of not sharing any personal information wherever possible, but recently I've been thinking whether I've approached the whole privacy issue from a wrong angle. I now believe privacy is the lesser evil we pursue because of lack of trust. The world is full of "evil" corporates that funnel our personal info into black boxes for their private gains. We have no idea what happens to our data once they're collected and fear that they could be used to exploit or even harm us down the road. In this zero-sum environment, our best option to protect ourselves is by not sharing data at all. Trust is the game changer. We almost take it for granted that increased transparency is inherently good, and we've seen how people's data could be used for good in how countries like S. Korea handled the COVID crisis. Verifiability and transparency are how we achieve trust.
- sarah180 7y agoIt's a reasonable hypothesis, but I think it overlooks the scope of information that is now shared electronically and the ability to collate it. Noticing the people from whom somebody get mail is very different from having access to a huge amount of private communication in a queryable database. As people have said before, a modern smartphone is like a diary times a thousand.
- ashton314 7y ago> Elaborating, he explained that privacy wasn't even guaranteed a few decades ago: he used to live in a small town without home phones where the postmaster saw who everyone was getting mail from. "In a town of 3,000 people there is no privacy. Everybody knows what everybody is doing." Terrible, stupid analogy. If I wanted to have a private conversation with someone, I could just close my door or make sure no one was eavesdropping in the bushes. Perfect secrecy. In the digital realm, there's always a danger that my message will be recorded, decrypted, or analyzed and I have no idea how long that message will live. Internet communications are insecure, but that is not the default in real life person-to-person interactions. It does work in some sense: everyone in town will know you bought that fancy new thing, etc.—there's less privacy there—but as far as communication has been concerned, the default was private: no one other than the participants hears the message.
- a_c 7y agoAnd I think scale matters. We are living in an eavesdropping-on-steroid era
- specialist 7y agoAgreed. Clay Shirky in Here Comes Everyone compared kids online convos to real life, from memory: Kids hanging out in a food court, gossiping about this and that, are talking to each other. Not to outsiders. And adults eavesdropping are creepy. They treat their online chatting the same way. What I take away from Shirky's (many) observations is that social conventions haven't adapted to the new reality and that our new communication technology was implemented irrespective of social norms. I haven't used Snap, so this is speculation: I think it's tech of short-lived messages tried to implement social norms. Which would be exceptional in the tech world.
- gundmc 7y agoIt's odd to describe Vint Cerf as Google's Chief Internet Evangelist, a largely honorary and emeritus position, as opposed to co-creator of TCP/IP for which is is famous. It makes the headline and framing feel very click-baity. The referenced FTC announcement was titled "Internet Innovator Vinton G. Cerf to Keynote FTC's Internet of Things Workshop".
- tantalor 7y agoMore people know what Google is than TCP/IP.
- gundmc 7y agoAnd more people know what the internet is than Google.
- reidjs 7y agoI think, in a weird way, this is actually debatable.
- ggeorgovassilis 7y agoI read the comment as "more people know what the internet is than google knows what the internet is".
- contingencies 7y agoIn some developing countries many people believe that Facebook is the internet.
- lonelappde 7y agoHow is TCP/IP relevant to his opinions on Privacy?
- tomaslb 7y agoIt's relevant to the reader to understand the impact this man has had on developing the internet as we know it, and realising that he probably knows what he is talking about.
- paulus_magnus2 7y agoindirect Proof: To all Googlers, does your contract include clauses about Confidential Information, Trade Secrets, NDA-type clauses etc? Great penalties for breaking these? -- Q.E.D
- bgee 7y agoVint Cerf has been infected with COVID-19 [0], btw. [0]: https://twitter.com/vgcerf/status/1244636584508604417?lang=en https://twitter.com/vgcerf/status/1244636584508604417?lang=e...
- matz1 7y agoAgree with him, we need to evolve and adapt. Relying on privacy is not feasible going forward. Instead of privacy we need to strive to minimize the damage due the information being online.
- throwawaymanbot 7y agoSTILL WRONG..its not in any way an anomaly. If theres a will, it can happen. Greed is privacys enemy.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]