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I am only speaking from experience. In my social bubble convenience is king. Privacy is not something desirable, because people "have nothing to hide". It's som

by arpa 6y ago

I am only speaking from experience. In my social bubble convenience is king. Privacy is not something desirable, because people "have nothing to hide". It's something they don't consider at all. They are not stupid or uneducated, they know stories about stasi. They don't care. And they care even less if privacy brings inconvenience. And this is where we, techies, should step in: provide privacy-friendly platforms which have the same level of convenience. Is that going to happen, tho? No. The problem is too hard, the status quo too deeply entrenched, no better (!) money is to be made here.

xoa 6y ago
>I am only speaking from experience. In my social bubble If all you're speaking from is personal anecdote from a tiny biased subsample of people, then don't speak about "the majority of the people". Because objectively, millions care given the chance. Measures like the GDPR were popular. Or in the US the CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act), which in fact just this past election got an attempted[1] enhancing provision passed by popular referendum (2020 Proposition 24) with 56% of the vote, or about ~9.1 million people. Of course people care about convenience and security as well. So again it's very important to make it clear that those don't have to be zero-sum games with privacy, and for technical people to not merely blindly oppose flawed efforts to improve that but put up better solutions. I think we've repeatedly made big mistakes there over the past 20 years, failing to get out in front of efforts like Apple's iOS and then ending up with no way to create standards with the good but not the bad. But that doesn't mean, all else being equal, that people don't care, or in major cases won't make some sacrifices for it. One of the real nasty strategies of anti-privacy forces in fact has been trying to twist it into zero-sum, claiming that privacy can't be convenient or secure. ---- 1: Proposition 24 is itself also illustrative of how popular support doesn't always translate into perfectly written legislation, I know the EFF had reservations about it saying it was a mix of steps forward and backward. But again, the desire is clearly there.
- deleted 6y ago
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clarkevans 6y ago
Our business/regulatory environment reflects the values we wish to have, they are not a given and require work. We need concrete use cases to convince the public that privacy matters and to make it clear that technology can deliver it. For example, in our local swim team, I pushed back on using Facebook live-stream for broadcasting a time trial (parent audience was not permitted due to COVID) and instead we distributed heat videos with a password protected server. It seems other teams went with the convenient approach, and now they are banned from recording (since a few parents, correctly, complained). Since then we have gotten permission to continue what we were doing, because we put privacy first. But even so, this begs the deeper question... why is privacy not the default? It's about monetization (cost) and convenience.
aidenn0 6y ago
I've noticed that some people seem to have an intrinsic desire for privacy. Desire is possibly even to weak of a word, but I can't come up with a better one. I have it, one of my daughters has it. My wife does not. I would say that I do not feel like me if I don't have time that is unobserved by others (and I'm not using this as a euphemism for masturbation). Even though the things I do then are typically inane. My browser history is fairly inane, and yet I would not publish it. I had kind of noticed this before, but didn't really have to put it into words until trying to explain my daughter's need for privacy to my wife. She is a very empathetic person, but it took several conversations for her to start to get the idea that "I want to do something without someone looking over my shoulder" is different from "I want to hide what I'm doing from someone" (though absolutely the latter can be used as a smokescreen for the former, particularly by teenagers).

by arpa 6y ago

xoa 6y ago

>I am only speaking from experience. In my social bubble If all you're speaking from is personal anecdote from a tiny biased subsample of people, then don't speak about "the majority of the people". Because objectively, millions care given the chance. Measures like the GDPR were popular. Or in the US the CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act), which in fact just this past election got an attempted[1] enhancing provision passed by popular referendum (2020 Proposition 24) with 56% of the vote, or about ~9.1 million people. Of course people care about convenience and security as well. So again it's very important to make it clear that those don't have to be zero-sum games with privacy, and for technical people to not merely blindly oppose flawed efforts to improve that but put up better solutions. I think we've repeatedly made big mistakes there over the past 20 years, failing to get out in front of efforts like Apple's iOS and then ending up with no way to create standards with the good but not the bad. But that doesn't mean, all else being equal, that people don't care, or in major cases won't make some sacrifices for it. One of the real nasty strategies of anti-privacy forces in fact has been trying to twist it into zero-sum, claiming that privacy can't be convenient or secure. ---- 1: Proposition 24 is itself also illustrative of how popular support doesn't always translate into perfectly written legislation, I know the EFF had reservations about it saying it was a mix of steps forward and backward. But again, the desire is clearly there.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

clarkevans 6y ago

Our business/regulatory environment reflects the values we wish to have, they are not a given and require work. We need concrete use cases to convince the public that privacy matters and to make it clear that technology can deliver it. For example, in our local swim team, I pushed back on using Facebook live-stream for broadcasting a time trial (parent audience was not permitted due to COVID) and instead we distributed heat videos with a password protected server. It seems other teams went with the convenient approach, and now they are banned from recording (since a few parents, correctly, complained). Since then we have gotten permission to continue what we were doing, because we put privacy first. But even so, this begs the deeper question... why is privacy not the default? It's about monetization (cost) and convenience.

aidenn0 6y ago

I've noticed that some people seem to have an intrinsic desire for privacy. Desire is possibly even to weak of a word, but I can't come up with a better one. I have it, one of my daughters has it. My wife does not. I would say that I do not feel like me if I don't have time that is unobserved by others (and I'm not using this as a euphemism for masturbation). Even though the things I do then are typically inane. My browser history is fairly inane, and yet I would not publish it. I had kind of noticed this before, but didn't really have to put it into words until trying to explain my daughter's need for privacy to my wife. She is a very empathetic person, but it took several conversations for her to start to get the idea that "I want to do something without someone looking over my shoulder" is different from "I want to hide what I'm doing from someone" (though absolutely the latter can be used as a smokescreen for the former, particularly by teenagers).