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When did “privacy issues” start to mean “too much privacy”?
- underseacables 6y agoThe ability to speak your mind freely without repercussions is almost nonexistent today.
- kache_ 6y agoidk man, 4chan.org still exists
- munk-a 6y agoThat just highlights the repercussions though - to speak freely you need to resort of mostly anonymous discussion (and maybe consider using Tor to make sure you're extra anonymous).
- Dylan16807 6y agoTalking to other people has always had repercussions.
- jaredandrews 6y agoWhen could you speak freely without repercussions at any point in history?
- salawat 6y agoOut in the field, the crops don't seem to mind a thing. The dog doesn't either. Cats, an empty room, same story. Add anotger human to the equation, and my, how circumstances change.
- CorpOverreach 6y agoPretty sure the cats are judging you regardless of what you say.
- cousin_it 6y agoRussia 1990-2010 or so. We were coming off many decades of speech repression, and everyone understood that it's a treasure when people speak their mind. The Russian segment of LiveJournal had people of all imaginable political views yelling at each other all day, but when a US-based "abuse team" tried banning a few people for an offensive image, everyone saw that as a restriction of speech and rose up in protest. That's how I want the world to work.
- andy_boot 6y agoDidn't Russia make a habbit of killing journalists who criticized either the old or new regimes from 1990 to present day? Pretty sure that was prevalent. Maybe they weren't tracking online much in the early days though.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- AnimalMuppet 6y agoWhen you were alone with someone trustworthy.
- jaredandrews 6y agoThank you!
- munk-a 6y agoI think true freedom of speech is an impossibility of the same vein as freedom of action. Your speech is generally half of an interaction with one or more listeners and forcing their precipitation is impinging on their freedoms. It is also generally recognized that there is such a thing as dangerous speech but I don't think we even need to start including that category of speech to hit a contradiction - that said we can and should strive to allow as much freedom in expression as possible.
- meowfly 6y agoIs this snark or is the difference between what free-speech looks like today and 30 years ago not apparent? What people are nostalgic for is the ability to have semi-anonymous semi-ephemeral speech. For example: The ability to have a private conversation in public without fear someone is recording you and can easily use that recording to identify you.
- jaredandrews 6y agoI assure you it was not snark. Your example is not something I would have thought of and is interesting. Probably because I am 29 and for my entire adult life I have assumed all digital communications I participate in can and will be used against me at a future point (which is why I just use my real name here on HN). And while that is all horrible, I have played Dungeons and Dragons my entire life without persecution and none of the bands I listen to who are the same age as me have been harassed by the government. Not something I can say about the lates 80s and 90s from my understanding of it. (I am referring to the DnD panic and the legal harassment that destroyed the Dead Kennedys among other bands who the Govt pursued)
- minikites 6y agoWhen did it exist?
- gweinberg 6y agoWell, obviously there are always possible repercussions is you say the wrong thing to the wrong person. But if adults in a relatively free society are having a provate discussion and one says something that offends another, it just does not happen that the offended party "tattles" on the offender.
- yarcob 6y agoIf you say something offensive to someone, even in private, it's pretty much expected in any setting that the other person will tell all their friends what an idiot you are. People love gossipping, and they always have. It's just that offline the news won't spread as quickly and the rumors wont reach your boss quite as easily.
- rootusrootus 6y agoConversely, the ability to put your thoughts in front of millions of people is trivial today. In the past you could speak more freely without repercussions because very few people could hear you.
- lamontcg 6y agoThat should not exist. The freedom of speech doesn't mean anyone else has to respect your opinion.
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 6y agoThat ability still exists if you are anonymous.
- lima 6y agoPoliticians should absolutely be held accountable for what they say in a semi-public ("pseudo-private") forum. In this context, the journalist is right. Making Clubhouse record the calls is, of course, the wrong solution.
- Enginerrrd 6y ago>Politicians should absolutely be held accountable for what they say in a semi-public ("pseudo-private") forum. In this context, the journalist is right. ...Only if what they are doing involves a part of their public duties. (Like that covered in the Brown Act in CA) Otherwise, the journalist is not entitled to hear and repeat arbitrary conversations held in confidence between the politician and others. For instance, they aren't entitled to hear conversations between the politican and their spouse about what they like in the bedroom, or their anonymous post on a bathroom furnishings enthusiast forum about which type of toilet can handle massive poops the best. That's simply none of your business.
- lima 6y ago> Only if what they are doing involves a part of their public duties This is about politicians using Clubhouse to talk to their constituents. It qualifies.
- WarOnPrivacy 6y agoIt is unfortunate that journalists of 2021 see an accountability issue with individuals who can speak privately - but devote zero characters to Gov officials who use private email to dodge accountability via FOIA.
- minikites 6y agoWhich officials are those?
- nickff 6y agoMany government officials just avoid using e-mail at all for sensitive subjects, thus side-stepping the issue entirely. I remember Janet Napoletano (Secretary of Homeland Security) saying that she did most of her business over the phone or in-person to avoid having it on record.
- sroussey 6y agoClubhouse record rooms, it’s right there in their privacy policy (I think with a 15 day lifespan barring a order to keep data longer).
- WesolyKubeczek 6y agoI don’t know, is plugging the good ole line out to some good ole line in not a thing anymore? Is it so that if it’s not a big red in-app button, it’s too complicated? I dunno, the journalists carry their handy recorders with them all the time, have they forgotten how they work all of a sudden?
- edrxty 6y agoMy thoughts as well. This should be pretty easy to monitor in a newsroom setting. Just have a few phones hooked up to recorders saving everything of interest. Worse, it's probably relatively easy to spoof the app and automate the process. People should never rely on technology to ensure their content remains ephemeral. Snapchat tried and that obviously never worked. There used to be automated tools that could save content out of the cache automatically.
- WesolyKubeczek 6y agoI think there's another implication at work. If the platform enables recordings, and stores those recording in its cloud 'puters, one could demand it be accountable for things that are being said on it. It's as if the police learns a group of terrorists used a local coffee shop to meet and go through some details of their operation, and then proceeds to arrest the coffee shop owner not on the grounds that he knows the suspects (for the sake of the story, he doesn't), but on the grounds that an incriminating conversation happened within his walls and he had the chutzpah to not have the place bugged, in case someone is going to need those conversations and so that the owner can be held responsible for the conversations people have in his shop. In fact I won't be surprised if at least one of replies to this comment expresses a genuine lack of understanding what's wrong with this story. Just sad.
- kolinko 6y agoJust because a medium is semi-public doesn’t mean it doesn’t need to deal with privacy. One case, personal: my friend’s ex-gf is on Clubhouse. He has her unfollowed on Facebook, and he would prefer to see her as little as possible. And yet clubhouse keeps recommending him the rooms she is in, even though he didn’t follow her. The opposite is true as well - there is no way to subtly hide yourself from someone on Clubhouse (as in: don’t show the other person I’m in the room unless they enter). As for GDPR - as soon as an app has your private data (like phone number, a list of followers and so on), certain laws apply - having a right to be forgotten for example, or a right to receive what the service has on you. I’m not sure if Clubhouse adheres to GDPR, but there definitely are things that apply.
- TedShiller 6y agoWait but it’s trivial to record a Clubhouse session.
- Sodman 6y agoThis would likely be in violation of several wiretapping laws though (Also, Clubhouse's own ToS).
- x86ARMsRace 6y agoWiretap laws are complex. It would only violate two party consent wiretap laws, many places only have one party consent. If it is a two party consent wiretap law, and the conversation is happening in public, then there's a chance that the 'expectation of privacy' is not there since it's a public conversation, which would put this outside the scope of wiretap laws. Think of it this way: it's not a wiretap to record a public speaker.
- lotsofpulp 6y agoThere are many states where you can record audio as long as you were invited to be in the conversation. Even in all party consent states, a clubhouse session might qualify as public speaking and not be subject to any recording restrictions.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- fl0wenol 6y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_call_recording_laws#One-party_consent_states https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_call_recording_laws#... Although a wrinkle is a single user in a two-party jurisdiction overrides and all parties would need to be notified, and if you don't know for sure where each end user is, then you're taking a gamble on the legality.
- TedShiller 6y agoMaybe but people restream/broadcast Clubhouse chats to YouTube all the time currently
- jancsika 6y agoAnswer to the headline: When the app in question is a proprietary app that ostensibly wants to boost engagement using whatever industry standard and novel methods it can find, just like every other proprietary social network. If it takes off it will go through the same problems that every other unregulated online-casino-posing-as-a-neutral-social-network has gone through. Oops, kids are using it. Sorry. Oops, turns out we're boosting engagement with white supremacist clubs. Sorry. And so forth. If a factory for get-rich-quick schemes makes it difficult to leave a trail of the damage it's inflicting on its user base, I'm not sure in which moral universe that could be considered a desirable feature.
- creddit 6y agoYou must really hate E2EE messaging services like WhatsApp and Telegram. They provide dramatically strong privacy guarantees while being proprietary and driving engagement. What is the reason that users shouldn't be allowed to have the strongest guarantees of privacy possible if it happens to be the case that they are users of "proprietary apps" that want to "boost engagement" (here, of course, engagement being people talking to/with other people)? This is the most horrifying thing I've read on HN and not seen downvoted to oblivion.
- jancsika 6y agoYou wrote > driving engagement I wrote > boost engagement using whatever industry standard and novel methods it can find AFAICT the challenge of something like Signal is to have a UX that feels like everything else, while being able to essentially prove by design that they cannot leverage the user's data. E.g., they can't plug the user's data into the kinds of nasty rabbit-hole algos as featured on Youtube. That's not "whatever novel methods" they can find. It's highly constrained given the privacy guarantees they are after.
- creddit 6y agoI didn’t mention signal. Do you claim Telegram’s channels are not novel? Do you think the FB owned WhatsApp doesn’t do whatever it can to drive engagement? Everything is constrained in some dimension. To assert that E2EE as a constraint immediately removes “whatever novel methods” from consideration is non-sensical. Is CH not constrained by being audio only? By being invite only? By being iOS only? By being mobile only? I’ll ask again, why is it that users should be denied privacy guarantees because an app is proprietary and wants to drive engagement growth? Do you demand the same for telephone lines?
- strken 6y agoIn the specific case of Clubhouse, it was and possibly still is leaking channel and user IDs in cleartext over UDP.[0] I have no idea whether the NYT is referring to this. https://cyber.fsi.stanford.edu/io/news/clubhouse-china#appendix https://cyber.fsi.stanford.edu/io/news/clubhouse-china#appen...
- ajhurliman 6y agoBased off of the content of the NYT article and the sources it linked, I don't think that was their issue with Clubhouse.
- tehjoker 6y agoGreenwald was talking about this recently: https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-journalistic-tattletale-and-censorship https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-journalistic-tattletale...
- sesutton 6y agoI'm kind of impressed at the mental gymnastics needed to make journalists wanting to hear what powerful people are talking about in a semi-public place into the stasi.
- tehjoker 6y agoI haven't paid close attention, but I think he wouldn't have a complaint if these journalists had uncovered a conspiracy worthy of public attention and instead were basically tattling on people for using bad words when the bad words were just quoting e.g. reddit.
- Dirlewanger 6y agoA year ago, Greenwald was a hero here. Now, everyone downvotes any mention of him because he reported a story across party lines. Truly pathetic. I fucking hate HN sometimes.
- motohagiography 6y agoThere is an argument to be made that privacy is just a polite euphemism for (mostly white-) privilege that is really an anti-democratic shield from accountability for propagating hate and intolerance. In democratic societies that put equality and diversity first, the only people who could have something to hide are sexists, racists, homophobes and white supremacists, because we live in an open society where we have fought so that historically oppressed people no longer have to hide who they are. If that statement is uncomfortable, this is the level of criticism that anyone building a new, divergent, or privacy focused technology or platform can expect from mainstream institutions in the current political climate. We can rail and write screeds against how insane it is, or we can write the code that gives people the tools to preserve the human dignity and freedom that individual privacy makes possible. (mods, please delete if this crosses the provocation line, it seemed important and topical enough to take the risk.)
- Bancakes 6y agoWhat's wrong with being anonymous by default? The EU has been fighting for 'functional deanonymisation' and they raise some good points. There's nothing to lose and only to gain when you have privacy by default and only release information as the situation requires it - like online purchases. Likening anonymity to being silenced is a little far-fetched idea when compared to simple acts like avoiding data leaks.
- raspyberr 6y agoI personally think that all the new diversity are the ones that would want privacy. So they can communicate and form ideas in confidence that they can then use to tell the rest of society. When gay people congregated in secret to talk about their position in society, they were happy they could do it in secret. That statement doesn't make me uncomfortable, it just makes me think that the view behind that statement is far too optimistic about how tolerant people are in society. Racism will be around in 100 years. Privacy helps any human being.
- luckygladiator 6y agoWell if a mainstream institution makes a similar argument then they are missing the whole point of privacy, there is the usual point about how everybody has something to hide. If you do not think so then please forward me all your private account information and <i>i promise</i> to not look into everything you have done on them. Even just taking that arguments and dissecting it to reveal the hidden agenda behind it is way too much effort. But the main point is that there is no need to explain why you need basic privacy, it is already revealed why you need it when the NSA goes on a manhunt when somebody reveals that they can search every information on you with a single click. Or when the big five get their shady practices revealed they get defensive and start making bull crap points, or that there are laws on privacy for a reason. Their arguments always have a ton of flaws because they are only after an agenda, public shaming is the answer to their bull crap. "If you aren't doing some shady stuff with that binary then why aren't you releasing the source code?"