3 ms·

> Curious what you'd consider an objective harm. To dodge the risk of opening a can-o-worms I don't have time for on a Monday morning I'll just say watch for t

> Curious what you'd consider an objective harm. To dodge the risk of opening a can-o-worms I don't have time for on a Monday morning I'll just say watch for the chapter "Harms" in Ethics for Hackers when it's out, or ping me a PM if you fancy being a proofreader for that chapter. > Sadly the only conclusion I can come to is that these problems are social I just replied to another similar remark. They are simultaneously psychological, social, technical, legal and political, and must be addressed on all fronts to reduce long-term harms upon the many to the temporary advantage of the few. > Punishing people who abuse others' privacy is the solution. It's a solution amongst many which is necessary but insufficient to cover all harms. An example already given in comments; of Nederlands collection of religious data prior to the Nazi rise, is apropos anachronous and displaced threats. > Frankly I'm sick of privacy nut technologists (who no doubt are genuinely concerned for everyone's safety on principle) continually pushing everyone towards "tracking evasion" I hear that. There's a real risk of alienating users and losing the psychological campaign for better opsec by harping on a "mother knows best" tune. For example, GDPR cookie popups seem to have had that negative effect. > That much, at least, I resonated with in the essay. Me too. I very much like Rohan's writing. It sparks great discussion.

dcow 4y ago
> For example, GDPR cookie popups seem to have had that negative effect. Yes, but I don't think it's limited to "visibly" negative user experiences. Not being able to sign a document in the browser using an HSM-backed hardware key because vendors won't add that functionality because some nut on the mailing list is concerned about "supercookies" also is, arguably, harmful to users because it deprives them of stronger security applications (that might also lead to a stronger tracking resistance stance nonetheless by nature of the ability to sign and encrypt messages at the application level) in pursuit of a fuzzy goal of never letting anybody have a stable identifier, ever. That seems, in the very least assuming the supercookie concern is legitimate and not a vendor play at retaining platform control, something that can only be decided individually by the user and not the browser vendor. Another example is TLS 1.3. In order to have better privacy against unfriendly networks encrypted SNI pretty much kills content filtering at the last mile network level (can still do it on device, which is Apple's solution). This might be a great win for Joe who wants to browse Ashley Madison at the coffee shop away form prying eyes. But it's not great for parents who depend on content filtering solutions to help keep their kids safe on the internet. So, who really, is a technology like that harming? > To dodge the risk of opening a can-o-worms I don't have time for on a Monday morning I'll just say watch for the chapter "Harms" in Ethics for Hackers when it's out, or ping me a PM if you fancy being a proofreader for that chapter. I emailed you via book2021@. This, though, is really the crux of it for me (sorry I rambled about a bunch of peripheral things). It seems that ethically the idea of "remembering a customer to draw inferences about how they'd behave" is rather natural to how humans operate. Historically, I can't even tell you I don't want you to do that because how I conduct myself in public is, well, public. So on the individual scale I think a lot of literature needs to be developed around building an understanding of what exactly is wrong, regarding profiling in public, to do without a person's consent. Is it wrong to write down someone's name, for instance? Is it harmful to be so good at profiling someone based on immediately available information that you might learn some things about someone even they didn't really care to discover? It certainly seems invasive from a user perspective but then again so would a good shaman, psychic, magician, or psychologist who build careers on playing the statics and profiling games. In short, I totally agree that these things are very often unwanted. But I don't think I've made the jump to them being broadly ethically harmful on an individual level, yet. At scale is where I see these problems becoming much more obviously harmful. If you can track an entire population you might also have the tools to influence an that population. If you're influencing them in a harmful way then that probably constitutes as ethically harmful. Perhaps we need to figure out how to limit or separate these powers at a global level. Maybe tracking firms should not be allow to sell information to political organizations? Maybe they should all just be shut down? Anyway if you get time to further develop that point I'm all ears as ethics, especially in computer science is fascinating.
- nonrandomstring 4y ago
  Thanks for your reply dcow, which I won't be able to do justice to, although I look forward to an email. Oddly, I am responding to someone in another thread who considers the digital rights and privacy movement as "insignificant" and a "war that's lost". At the same time I'm trying to reconcile that with your being "sick of nutters". Bruce Schniere was early in pointing out another pendulum swing in technology, which we already know from the centralisation - decentralisation cycle, as concerning authoritarian and liberal swings. Therefore I think what we are seeing is the magnitude of the genuine backlash against abusive technologies in general. People rally around the word "privacy" as a (as you say sometimes inappropriate) totem. I agree we are in the infancy of this discussion, at least in the development community. That said, I've read over 40 contemporary books on the emerging landscape of digital rights, many written by fellow devs and computer scientists, as well as piles of classical philosophy around "tech critique", and there is a wealth of wisdom to tap into. One of the aims of my writing here is to "bring the battle to Rome", and obviously risk a very harsh audience - although I am surprised how many kindred, sceptical souls are found here on HN. A lot of it has nothing to do with "privacy" as an historical semantic, so I've pushed hard to introduce "digital dignity" as a (weaker but more useful for it) conceit. But individual harms are all around us. Just to pluck one extreme one out of the air - physical violence (indeed murder). I set my students to watch the Panorama documentary about kids who kill or maim each other over online gaming. Claims that this is an issue of scale, or that online games have changed don't ring true to me. This never used to happen for the simple reason that online anonymity was good thing in this context. In a game you could suck it up or switch it off. So in this example, over-connection of virtual to real-life spaces is a dangerous thing where people cannot maintain psychological sense of perspective. respects

dcow 4y ago

> For example, GDPR cookie popups seem to have had that negative effect. Yes, but I don't think it's limited to "visibly" negative user experiences. Not being able to sign a document in the browser using an HSM-backed hardware key because vendors won't add that functionality because some nut on the mailing list is concerned about "supercookies" also is, arguably, harmful to users because it deprives them of stronger security applications (that might also lead to a stronger tracking resistance stance nonetheless by nature of the ability to sign and encrypt messages at the application level) in pursuit of a fuzzy goal of never letting anybody have a stable identifier, ever. That seems, in the very least assuming the supercookie concern is legitimate and not a vendor play at retaining platform control, something that can only be decided individually by the user and not the browser vendor. Another example is TLS 1.3. In order to have better privacy against unfriendly networks encrypted SNI pretty much kills content filtering at the last mile network level (can still do it on device, which is Apple's solution). This might be a great win for Joe who wants to browse Ashley Madison at the coffee shop away form prying eyes. But it's not great for parents who depend on content filtering solutions to help keep their kids safe on the internet. So, who really, is a technology like that harming? > To dodge the risk of opening a can-o-worms I don't have time for on a Monday morning I'll just say watch for the chapter "Harms" in Ethics for Hackers when it's out, or ping me a PM if you fancy being a proofreader for that chapter. I emailed you via book2021@. This, though, is really the crux of it for me (sorry I rambled about a bunch of peripheral things). It seems that ethically the idea of "remembering a customer to draw inferences about how they'd behave" is rather natural to how humans operate. Historically, I can't even tell you I don't want you to do that because how I conduct myself in public is, well, public. So on the individual scale I think a lot of literature needs to be developed around building an understanding of what exactly is wrong, regarding profiling in public, to do without a person's consent. Is it wrong to write down someone's name, for instance? Is it harmful to be so good at profiling someone based on immediately available information that you might learn some things about someone even they didn't really care to discover? It certainly seems invasive from a user perspective but then again so would a good shaman, psychic, magician, or psychologist who build careers on playing the statics and profiling games. In short, I totally agree that these things are very often unwanted. But I don't think I've made the jump to them being broadly ethically harmful on an individual level, yet. At scale is where I see these problems becoming much more obviously harmful. If you can track an entire population you might also have the tools to influence an that population. If you're influencing them in a harmful way then that probably constitutes as ethically harmful. Perhaps we need to figure out how to limit or separate these powers at a global level. Maybe tracking firms should not be allow to sell information to political organizations? Maybe they should all just be shut down? Anyway if you get time to further develop that point I'm all ears as ethics, especially in computer science is fascinating.

nonrandomstring 4y ago
Thanks for your reply dcow, which I won't be able to do justice to, although I look forward to an email. Oddly, I am responding to someone in another thread who considers the digital rights and privacy movement as "insignificant" and a "war that's lost". At the same time I'm trying to reconcile that with your being "sick of nutters". Bruce Schniere was early in pointing out another pendulum swing in technology, which we already know from the centralisation - decentralisation cycle, as concerning authoritarian and liberal swings. Therefore I think what we are seeing is the magnitude of the genuine backlash against abusive technologies in general. People rally around the word "privacy" as a (as you say sometimes inappropriate) totem. I agree we are in the infancy of this discussion, at least in the development community. That said, I've read over 40 contemporary books on the emerging landscape of digital rights, many written by fellow devs and computer scientists, as well as piles of classical philosophy around "tech critique", and there is a wealth of wisdom to tap into. One of the aims of my writing here is to "bring the battle to Rome", and obviously risk a very harsh audience - although I am surprised how many kindred, sceptical souls are found here on HN. A lot of it has nothing to do with "privacy" as an historical semantic, so I've pushed hard to introduce "digital dignity" as a (weaker but more useful for it) conceit. But individual harms are all around us. Just to pluck one extreme one out of the air - physical violence (indeed murder). I set my students to watch the Panorama documentary about kids who kill or maim each other over online gaming. Claims that this is an issue of scale, or that online games have changed don't ring true to me. This never used to happen for the simple reason that online anonymity was good thing in this context. In a game you could suck it up or switch it off. So in this example, over-connection of virtual to real-life spaces is a dangerous thing where people cannot maintain psychological sense of perspective. respects