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I am more concerned with the long term social and political implications of giving a small number of corporations elevated privileges (or the ability to obtain
by api 5y ago
I am more concerned with the long term social and political implications of giving a small number of corporations elevated privileges (or the ability to obtain them easily) on everything in the world.
If the NSA asked for escrow or root everywhere people would freak out, yet central SSO mostly accomplishes the same thing and people are running toward it because convenience. Of course the same is true for surveillance. Private adtech does things with surveillance that would give people a heart attack if the NSA did it, and unlike the NSA they don't even pretend to be accountable to anyone we can elect.
(It's the same because governments can compel corporations under their jurisdiction and there isn't a ton a company can do about it.)
While some may find this debatable, I happen to think we just had a rather incompetent but still very concerning fascist coup attempt in the USA. Historically civilizations lose their collective minds periodically. Given that computing infrastructure is becoming the basis for virtually all communication and much of life, is it wise to centralize access control like this?
I feel like younger people of virtually all political stripes are just blithely unconcerned with this and assume "it can't happen here" or "that's something that happened back in the early 20th century but not anymore, we have totally solved stable government." I think that's incredibly naive.
- anxrn 5y agoI'd suggest taking another look at how 1Password (or any other secrets management tool) deals with secret data. "the ability to obtain them easily" is not the case.
- lazide 5y agoAll of these managers that allow automatic updates or run off some cloud loaded executable (which is all of them essentially) can re-encrypt all your data to another arbitrary key on next unlock with some code changes. Those code changes could be pushed/loaded for specific customers only pretty easily. It’s not ‘all my passwords stored in their database unencrypted’ easy to compromise, but it’s also not protection against a motivated agency with jurisdiction said service has to respect, and it’s also not solid protection against any state level actor if they really care/want to spend resources targeting someone. That said, it’s all about threat assessment and trade offs. Especially for a business, what are the consequences if the NSA does x, or China does y? For 99% of businesses? Nothing except some irritation if you find out. Same as with most things. If someone is an activist going after those agencies/gov’ts? Probably quite severe consequences. If I remember correctly, some of the fallout from the Chinese gov’t hacking Gmail was folks being ‘disappeared’, extended families being held hostage in China, etc.