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I don't think the problem is with the "lie" that the innocent need not fear surveillance. Most people will agree that mass-surveillance will negatively affect s

• Santosh83 5y ago
  Because the 'time and effort required to maintain my privacy' part requires immediate and sustained and rigorous action and sacrifice of various comforts, all for a nebulously perceived, personally theoretical risk. The ultimate trajectory of liberal democracy is towards anarchism. But humans are anything but evolutionarily suited for that. We are biologically built to function in a hierarchy, even if the top of that hierarchy is tyrannical. This will take a long while to change. And enough efforts to educate are not being made. Not even close. PS. Also wanted to add that the "maintain my privacy" part is still far too technical for anyone except diehard nerds, and even they confess it takes great effort and thought. The entire system has been taken over at all levels of the stack by commercial and political powers. The average Joe doesn't stand a chance unless he wants to go entirely off-grid.
  • labster 5y ago
    Nah, we are biologically built to function in bands of no more than 300 people. Hierarchies are just the basic level of abstraction allowing bands to collectively form tribes, nations, and empires.
    • Jorengarenar 5y ago
      You are saying it as if "in bands of no more than 300 people" there was no hierarchy. It starts appearing at few dozens, let alone few hundreds. Proof of it being biological? Look at other primates. They form groups of way less than few hundreds and still maintain (strict) hierarchy.
      • js8 5y ago
        It's nowhere as clear-cut as you try to portray it. First of all, there are differences among primates, how are these hierarchies structured and some of it is also, surprisingly, cultural. (Look for example at work of Robert Sapolsky.) I for example believe that hierarchies are a cultural artifact of civilization, not a biologically inherent human value. The inherent human value is deference to authority, which is useful to maintain existing order and generational memory (and is the basis for what we typically call "conservative"). In tribes of 300 people or so, the hierarchies are easily challenged. In a civilization of 1000s of people, with incomplete information, this is much more difficult. (That being said, I think there are individuals who do not share typical human values, and try to subvert those for their personal benefit. So these individuals might subvert the value of deference to authority to create a hierarchy from which then they personally benefit. Just like existence of somebody, who might always take and never give back, doesn't invalidate reciprocity as a typical human value.) And in fact we increasingly live in a world where everybody is a member of multiple independent social hierarchies, and these apply situationally (and it's not even clear they are always needed). This really strains the claim that humans inherently favor hierarchies (which there should be only one), rather than just simply defer to authorities (which might be multiple or even chosen by each individual independently).
        • Zachsa999 5y ago
          Following this claim, a society does not need social order to fulfill the need to defer, it is just more comfortable.
        • dnautics 5y ago
          I don't think deference to authority is inherently human, there are plenty of humans who resist authority to various degrees independent of socialization. It might be a "median" human quality though
  • throwaway81523 5y ago
    > The ultimate trajectory of liberal democracy is towards anarchism. It's more like towards feudalism, and that's what the surveillance helps achieve. That's why surveillance is dangerous.
    • deregulateMed 5y ago
      >towards anarchy Yet every democracy seems to tend toward dictatorships according to history. But I agree the idea behind liberalism is individuals, which anarchy makes sense. Given I have 3 to 5 government layers, Federal, State, city, HOA, and international law, I'd certainly prefer to get rid of a few of these layers due to corruption.
      • roenxi 5y ago
        > Yet every democracy seems to tend toward dictatorships according to history. How could a democracy end if not dictatorship? I suppose sinking beneath the waves is an alternative, but that is pretty rare. If you want to have some fun reading up on Wikipedia's list of Empires [0], take some time to appreciate that the Republic of Venice being the longest-lived Western European empire. And I'm no expert in Venetian history (especially being as they have so much of it), but it seems to have had some solid democratic elements for around 700 years. Democracies have a messy, difficult to categorise staying power. I hear stories about Kings and Emperors, but nobody talks about the enduring-like-weeds powers that don't have neatly defined figureheads but are hotbeds of prosperity. Look at Switzerland working through the World Wars for example. Really a minor miracle at that time in that place. And world's largest empire (the British) spawned numerous highly successful democracies. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_empires https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_empires
        • andrepd 5y ago
          Venice wasn't a democracy in any meaningful way, either in the style of Greek democracy that preceded it or western liberal democracies that succeeded them. It was an oligarchy with limited democratic elements.
  • hoseja 5y ago
    It's the culture since the agricultural revolution that's evolved to be inherently tyrannical.
  • andrepd 5y ago
    >The ultimate trajectory of liberal democracy is towards anarchism Interesting you would say that, by all accounts the current trajectory of bourgeois liberal democracy is towards towards concentration of power and neo-feudalism.
  • jnsie 5y ago
    ^ This I am going to make a weird, but IMHO apt, comparison to Type 1 Diabetes. T1D is an attritional disease caused by the pancreas's inability to produce enough/any insulin and the list of complications is long and deadly. As someone who has lived with the disease for decades what makes the disease particularly insidious is immediate effort versus delayed impact. The disease affects everything...every single part of every single day. Eating, sleeping, exercising, traveling, finances...everything. And to be on top of everything is extremely effortful. However the impact of not taking enough insulin, of not checking blood sugars frequently enough, or living with high blood sugars, is delayed. Today's transgressions may not be punished for decades. It is no shock to read about poor therapy adherence when the effort is immediate (and constant) and the effect is delayed (and therefore hypothetical). I see the same issue - immediate and constant effort coupled with long term hypothetical effect - with protecting one's privacy. Obviously one should do the right thing. But many won't.
    • radarsat1 5y ago
      This is an incredibly insightful point of view for understanding people around me on this topic. And maybe a useful analogy for talking about it. Thank you.
      • lisper 5y ago
        Climate change is another area where this analogy is apt.
    • THATthereguy 5y ago
      Wow, this is a really good analogy. Sad, but true.
    • scottLobster 5y ago
      The key issue in your analogy being that we know T1D will actually have long-term consequences if left untreated. We don't yet know the cost of "lack of privacy". Part of me wonders if privacy advocates will be on the same level as doomsday preppers in a few decades, at least in the Democratic world. It's not that they were wrong to prepare for nuclear war given the information available during the Cold War, it's just that it never happened so their efforts were largely wasted. To use myself as an example: I've had a gmail account since it was invite-only. Was on facebook as soon as it was available to high schoolers. So over 15 years now for both (although I'm basically off facebook at this point because it sucks now, I maintain a skeleton account to use the Marketplace). I've had an android phone for 6 years, used a "free" discount brokerage for years, etc, file my taxes with Turbotax, and use any number of services (including credit cards themselves) that likely sell my data in some form. Any hard privacy-based damages have yet to materialize beyond a couple of stolen credit card numbers that were easily dealt with. Now what's the "therapy" for all this? 1. Thoroughly examine the terms and conditions of any service/software I sign up for and actively avoid those who state they'll sell my data, and re-review said terms and conditions every time they're updated, canceling services when/if the terms turn malicious. That point alone could be a career unto itself. 2. Run an adblocker which will inevitably break some sites and have to be periodically turned off 3. Run a Pi-Hole on a local router 4. Run anti-browser-fingerprinting extensions 5. Use a VPN to obfuscate location data 6. Switch from Android to Apple (and even Apple isn't perfect) 7. Avoid all social media 8. ... There's an endless list of technical partial solutions that may or may not add up to any real difference, but will definitely consume hundreds or thousands of hours of time in set-up and maintenance and reserach, thousands of dollars in fees over the long haul if using paid services. Plus the daily grind of dealing with non-homogeneous and often 2nd-rate alternative tools because there isn't much money in privacy. All to prepare for a threat that may never materialize and hasn't materialized at all in the over 15 years people have been warning me about the issue. I drink beer, wine and cider on the weekends. Yes I'm well aware that marginally increases my odds of getting cancer/other nastiness over decades. I don't care, I judge the increased risk negligible compared to the worth of enjoyment/socializing. Privacy falls into that same category for now. I tried using GnuCash to track my finances over privacy concerns. It won't connect to my bank for some reason, spent hours troubleshooting the issue, researching obscure bank communication protocols to no end. Maybe I could have figured it out, but Mint.com works with everything down to my power and gas utilities, was completely set up in less than 30 minutes. I'd like Privacy, but I think people sneer at the word "convenience" more than they should. Convenience means I get time back, the one resource we all definitely have a finite amount of. And maybe there will be some great privacy crisis some day, in the same sense that there may be nuclear war. I'm not building a fallout shelter any time soon, I've got better things to do.
  • ccn0p 5y ago
    > sacrifice of various comforts Yes and I would take this even further -- Google, Facebook, and our phones, have become such an integral part of our daily (hourly) lives that to ask the average person to give up even a portion of these things or to change their habits is akin to social ostracization or educational handicapping.
  • dspillett 5y ago
    >* Because the 'time and effort required to maintain my privacy' part requires immediate and sustained and rigorous action and sacrifice of various comforts, all for a nebulously perceived, personally theoretical risk.* “Maintain” and “sustained” are the key words there. The effort is constant and must be. You only have to get it wrong once, those wanting to slurp up all the data they can about you and pass it on can keep trying and trying and tying, and the effort is much less expensive to them (portioned out over the number of subjects they are tracking or attempting to track) than the counter-effort is to the individual.
• ipster_io 5y ago
  I have similar experience. Many people choose not to care (or they are not aware of the consequences). If someone is aware and choose something, it's absolutely fine. The problem is the hidden agendas in all shapes and forms. Didn't know about 'Tverskyan study', thanks for referring
• vnorilo 5y ago
  I think there are a couple of levels to this. I try to avoid adtech-driven stuff because I prefer other kinds of products which come out of different business incentives. On a practical level, that's what drives my online privacy habits. On a more sinister level, even though a malicious state seems very distant (Nordics here), given how many such there are in the world, it is definitely not impossible. We must avoid being frog-boiled to accept surveillance. Even if I don't have anything to hide, we must present "herd anonymity" to shield those who really need it when shit hits the fan. This is the much more abstract part of my privacy philosophy.
  • Santosh83 5y ago
    The crux of the Tor project was all about herd anonymity. Your traffic blends in with millions of other Tor users. Unfortunately global passive surveillance, flooding the network with malicious nodes and targetted exploits of the browser and OS mean that very strong anonymity is still not possible, even with a relatively 'extreme' solution like Tor.
    • h0p3 5y ago
      Forgive me for being late in replying to you (sometimes I sit on things for a while). Are you suggesting that we must find a way to democratically federate the problem of trusting particular mixnet servers? What solutions would you suggest? This seems a silly exercise, so feel free to ignore it: if you were to redesign the internet from the ground up, what would it look like, particularly with respect to this problem?
• Hokusai 5y ago
  > about expected value and perceived risk. Overall for most people the equation is always: (probability of data being mishandled) * damage < time and effort required to maintain my privacy. That is the main reason. To keep privacy is too costly on purpose. In Europe, thanks to the GDPR you can get quite good privacy. But companies give you a 1-click option to be tracked, And then company that build products usually 1-click or 2-click to not be tracked. But ad-based companies will ask you 3,4 or sometimes even dozens of clicks to not be tracked. That extra effort is on purpose and should be regulated. When you get a pop-up "Do you want to be tracked (Yes/no)" most people chooses no.
  • Nextgrid 5y ago
    > companies give you a 1-click option to be tracked, And then company that build products usually 1-click or 2-click to not be tracked. But ad-based companies will ask you 3,4 or sometimes even dozens of clicks to not be tracked The GDPR explicitly forbids that. If you're going to do that you may as well not ask to begin with because you'll be in breach either way. The problem is that GDPR enforcement is delegated to incompetent idiots and very little of it is being enforced, so these breaches go unpunished. At this point it raises the question of whether the regulators actually benefit from it not being enforced.
• RandomLensman 5y ago
  For me the issue is again the conflation of risks from state actors vs from private companies. In the case here it is state actors doing the surveillance. The biggest con was that people are concerned about privacy vs private companies when the focus should be on state actors. The ability to get people worked up about privacy and data sharing in a messenger app when at the same time governments are trying to remove anonymity in the web is nothing but astonishing.
• sneak 5y ago
  "I don't care" is frequently a stand-in for "I feel powerless in the face of precisely zero meaningful steps available for me to take to fight the surveillance state/big tech that don't sort of ruin my life".
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• 1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
  "Having unsuccessfully tried to make family and acquaintances more aware of privacy issue, I can confidently sat that "nothing to hide" argument is nothing next to the "I don't care" attitude." You can express as much "confidence" as you like in saying that but as it stands, this is nothing more than another personal anecdote. If you were sure about your anecdotally-based conclusion, then what would be the purpose of a Tverskyan study. People are not being given a meaningful choice. No one is "choosing" to sacrafice privacy in exchange for using the internet. Rather, others are choosing to violate previously established notions of privacy in order to make money. Why. 1. Because whatever these others have in the way of computer skills they lack in moral character 2. Because they can; it's technically easier with the internet and generally there are no legal protections against it. What happened when Apple asked iPhone users if they want to be tracked by Facebook. What did users choose.
  • 1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
    s/sacrafice/sacrifice/
• gingerlime 5y ago
  yes, exactly. My mum, sister, brother and sister-in-law were all listed on the latest facebook leak (with ~500mil others). Yet none of them could be bothered to switch their phone number or get off facebook or whatsapp (even though they got signal and communicate with me on it once I moved away from whatsapp)… I feel pretty helpless to help them understand the risks. Or they just don’t calculate the risk vs hussle the same way I would??
  • PeterisP 5y ago
    In your opinion, what are the practical risks to them? What actual interference in their daily lives has the FB leak caused or is likely to cause, which would justify e.g. the effort and inconvenience of switching their phone number? Has anyone abused the data leak against them in some way? If not, how likely is that someone would actually do so?
    • gingerlime 5y ago
      I guess identity theft is the most likely risk? but who knows? and humans are pretty bad at calculating such risks. Changing your phone number is a pretty concrete hassle though, and I guess none of them estimated it worth the hassle… It’s just some anecdata to support the parent’s point.
      • PeterisP 5y ago
        If your threat model is mostly about identity theft, then switching your phone number and going off whatsapp won't help at all; going off facebook might limit it a bit but not really, as data in FB leaks isn't that relevant to identity theft, that's usually done based on leaks of your data from e.g. Experian which you can't prevent. There are a bunch of somewhat reasonable precautions against identity theft (credit freezes, filing taxes early to prevent tax refund fraud, etc), but those don't include switching your phone number and abandoning FB/Whatsapp. So from looking at that risk it seems quite clear that no, it's not worth the hassle, because the hassle is real but the benefits are not. It may be different for other risks, of course - e.g. if OP was worried about a specific abusive ex stalking one of their family, that would be a very different story.
• flareback 5y ago
  I think part of it is an "I don't care" attitude but another part is that people think that the government won't bother them. Another part of it is that there is nothing they can do even if they did care.
• pessimizer 5y ago
  > The problem is that even if most people don't subscribe to the "nothing to hide" argument in general, they do not care about themselves being the target of surveillance. They do care, but they don't have a choice. Investing the time and effort it takes to avoid constant surveillance is far more costly than being under constant surveillance. If asked, they would all prefer a functional government, rather than the ones we have now that not only refuse to regulate, but take advantage of lax laws for private date collection to get around slightly tighter laws for government data collection.
• soheil 5y ago
  The "nothing to hide" argument is flawed because it only looks at the past and not the future. It's basically saying the opportunity cost for not giving up my privacy is zero. It's to hedge against being wrongly accused of something or a myriad of other unforeseen events happening to you, none of which your fault (e.g., identity theft) that if you had privacy would be easier to avoid even if you're a perfectly law abiding citizen. It's like believing put options in stock market should be worth $0 because you will never need to exercise them.
• tootie 5y ago
  This case isn't even about mass surveillance. It's still very targeted. The question is who is being targeted and by whom? The implication of what we know so far is that the surveillance is allowing bad actors to target political enemies. And not that this isn't terrible but just throw it on the pile. Did they sell the Saudis access to Khashoggi's wife's phone? Maybe but we definitely sold them a fleet of fighter jets too. Trump campaigned on it and got huge applause from crowds. So I wouldn't expect a lot of outrage over this.