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Privacy: One of the Most Fundamental Human Rights, yet Constantly Under Threat

jruohonen 3y ago
A decent but a little bit too alarmist essay in my opinion. A few reservations also, starting with: "Our actions, our words, even our thoughts, are being monitored, recorded, and analyzed. The sanctity of our homes, once our refuge from the world, is under threat." "It’s not just mere data; rather, it’s a master key to the sealed vaults of our thoughts and experiences." The mind-reading stuff is still a fantasy and will be so also in the future. Then: "An individual’s freedom of speech hinges significantly on their ability to communicate privately without fear of reprisal." True enough in principle, but I'd reckon that in the current infodemic it is more about who is given a voice (or a megaphone). Furthermore: "Enterprises are no longer solely engaged in the commerce of goods or services; they are also playing a part in a grand, global data accumulation endeavour, where consumer data assumes colossal worth." Once again true enough, but then again, most of data is garbage, useless beyond the immediate moment of pushing an ad or two. Finally: "This isn’t a criticism aimed at those agencies responsible for our national security." I am not sure whether their job either is made easier or worse by the vast amounts of garbage.
- gjsman-1000 3y ago
  > “ This isn’t a criticism aimed at those agencies responsible for our national security.” Why the heck not? Snowden? NSA? GCHQ? FBI having 280,000 abuses? I don’t get this logic.
- escape-big-tech 3y ago
  > The mind-reading stuff is still a fantasy and will be so also in the future. Haha, of course they don't literally read our minds, but with enough data, it's possible to gather a lot about the way a person thinks
- ben_w 3y ago
  > The mind-reading stuff is still a fantasy and will be so also in the future. Fantasy today, sure — judging by advertising categories I was getting placed in at least a few years back, the AI don't generally have the ability to infer much from revealed preferences, despite the odd headline every so often. But in the future? Even ignoring the possibility that the aforementioned advertising-AI get better, there's Neuralink and whatever competition it ends up getting.
  - jruohonen 3y ago
    > Even ignoring the possibility that the aforementioned advertising-AI get better, there's Neuralink and whatever competition it ends up getting. I am skeptical. AI, Neuralink, or whatever might infer better on many things, sure, but these certainly will not be able to infer what non-dogmatic people think about, say, philosophy or politics already because humans have always a capability to change their minds, while AI is terribly bad at reorienting itself.
    - ben_w 3y ago
      Wires on synapses, however, are very good at sensing exactly what's up. They're too expensive right now, and I really hope Neuralink turns out to be as much of a business disaster as buying Twitter, because if it's as much of a world-changer as Tesla or SpaceX… …well, if cheap-and-good BCI comes, there's too many dystopian ways for it to be abused for comfort.
      - jruohonen 3y ago
        > ... well, if cheap-and-good BCI comes, there's too many dystopian ways for it to be abused for comfort. I am all for dystopia; already with VR/XR/etc. you can probably infer a lot, especially once they start (or have done already?) scanning retina movements and such. But still: stimuli is a one thing and mind-reading (thought control?) is another.
        ben_w 3y ago
        BCI is literal mind-reading: when the thought goes ping, it shows up on the wire. The current limitation is that the number of sense-wires we can put on a BCI implant is a factor of ~2^30 smaller than the number of synapses in a human brain.
- Clubber 3y ago
  >A decent but a little bit too alarmist essay in my opinion. A trend that has been going on since at least 9/11. Alarmism is the norm. When alarmism is the norm, only escalating alarmism will be heard. We can't have a normal conversation anymore. Before: Here's a problem, here's where I think it would go if we ignore it. Now: Here's a problem, everyone is going to die!!!!!!!!!!!
gjsman-1000 3y ago
I’m personally reminded of the Pied Piper of Hamelin (which has some historical evidence for being a true story)…
- itronitron 3y ago
  I don't follow
  - gjsman-1000 3y ago
    Telly (and similar) is the Pied Piper and the children the people who follow along for his free music and entertainment. Though I get it’s a stretch - I re-read the story so it’s fresh on my mind.
    - itronitron 3y ago
      I was thinking that 'big tech' is heralded as a saviour but then it ends up just stealing everyone's information and attention. Although big tech also gets the gold, so it's not a perfect match to the story.
jmclnx 3y ago
Well I dare say, before civilization, when people lived in small tribes, there was no privacy in your tribe. But now, comparing to back then, all other "tribes" can see what you are doing.
- drewcoo 3y ago
  > when people lived in small tribes, there was no privacy in your tribe Anything to back that claim?
  - bombcar 3y ago
    I think there's some evidence, take the old saying "three can keep a secret if two are dead" or it's variations. Even the Bible warns about how easily things get spread around. But the Internet and communications moving to online text, etc, greatly increases the provability of the gossip, if you will. Which is a major change that we as a society haven't really adapted to. We treat "private" or "direct" chats as like talking in a cornfield; but before you just had a he said/she said situation, now someone can "drop receipts" or you can have whatever platform you're on hacked and everything spilled.
    - ghaff 3y ago
      >the old saying "three can keep a secret if two are dead" or it's variations I was reminded of this just a few weeks ago. Told a few people some news I told them was non-public given I was seeing them in person. Wouldn't you know it, it immediately got up to someone I'd just as soon not have known. Wasn't really a big deal but still annoying.
  - ghaff 3y ago
    Common sense? Lived experience? No privacy is probably an overstatement (as absolute statements tend to be). But my experience having gone to university and living with a group of people was that you tended to learn a lot about other people's lives. And that's almost certainly more privacy than in a tribe.
- Supermancho 3y ago
TekMol 3y ago
As an individual, I want privacy of course. But is privacy really important to mankind? If we look at mankind as an organism, the organism can function better if each part knows what the other part is doing. If the left hand knows what the right hand does. Isn't it the same with mankind? Maybe a society is more efficient without privacy. And more efficiency of the society would benefit its members.
- throwbadubadu 3y ago
  Our laws are imperfect, democracy is likely the best system but imperfect.. unless we'd have a way for Utopia where everything is perfect, fair and agreed upon, and there are never a bad actors (but then you also need to get rid of different opinions, and what that means..), then maybe full transparency (including no company secrets, no government secrets) could be a thing - but tbh this is impossible, at least for me, as infinite as the Universe is. Taken to the extreme, wouldn't that also mean no privacy for your thoughts, brain, mind, but everything should be transparent? Welcome to the Borg, hell of an efficient society.. but not what makes life worthy... so imo no, privacy, free thought, freedom, and likely more just go together, as philosophers long established. It is one of most foundational human rights!
- Xerox9213 3y ago
  [dead]
- chmod600 3y ago
  That assumes that information is always good and that all actors are working towards a common goal. Neither of those is true.
- akomtu 3y ago
  Privacy matters when it's privacy from predators, and their number is only growing. You don't want a group of opportunistic burglars to know when you aren't home and what you keep inside. Similarly you want to keep bigger predators blind: adtech, three letter agencies and so on. The utopia you're describing will come true when there are no more predators, and mankind is far from that stage.
- 3y ago
coremoff 3y ago
I disagree that it's a fundamental right. Over most of history privacy has been rare for most people, with the provisio that if you really wanted a private conversation you could have one in the middle of an open field in daylight with a reasonable expectation that your conversation would not be compromised. These days there can be no such expectation, and we need to separate out discussion of day-to-day privacy from "if bad actors intercept my communication bad things happen". We should aggressively maintain the security of privilaged communication, and not stress so much about day to day privacy in our lives; stop gossiping and judging others for actions that do not harm others, whilst allowing them necessary privacy for transactions that should remain privilaged.
- diegoholiveira 3y ago
  Many fundamental rights that everyone can agree on today used to be rare in the past, so I'm not sure that use this perspective is the right thing to do.
  - shrimp_emoji 3y ago
    Water! Freedom from slavery! Internet! Progressing ethically as a civilization is nice.
  - edgyquant 3y ago
    It is. You can’t just argue for something you want as it being a human right when it’s something most people aren’t that concerns with. It makes people not take you or what you’re arguing seriously
    - BaseballPhysics 3y ago
      Except people absolutely are concerned with privacy, if you ask the questions the right way. The problem is that surveillance capitalism shares a lot of properties with pollution: the effects are typically hidden or ephemeral; the cost to individuals is low while the cost to society is high; and people have largely become complacent if not resigned to the status quo. And so a) most people don't understand the sheer extent of surveillance capitalism, and b) they don't understand how they're affected by it. I can't count the number of times I've seen shocked faces when I explained how companies like Acxiom and Experian work. And they've been around for decades! But they operate in the shadows, out of view, and so people simply do not understand how much of their private lives are bought and sold to the highest bidder. If they understood that--and I mean truly understood it--I suspect the conversation around these topics would be very different indeed. Meanwhile, large portions of the tech community have a financial motive to want to downplay these issues. "Oh pfft, privacy, so antiquated," they say as they draw down a 300k FAANG salary funded by the harvesting and selling of private information. And so what's the predominant narrative? Well, the people who are in the best position to understand these issues have a financial incentive to protect the status quo, while everyone else doesn't understand them well enough to form an opinion, and thus the former dominates the discourse.
diegoholiveira 3y ago
> Our mission is clear - we aim to unravel the magic of FOSS, Linux, and self-hosting to individuals seeking a break from the shackles of Big Tech. IMO, it's not only Big Tech that poses a threat on privacy and freedom. Big Governments are other threat that, IMO, it's much harder to fight against it.
- spacebanana7 3y ago
  Any data collected by big tech can be accessed by governments and governments will manage that data using big tech products so there's not that much distinction between the two.
- anfogoat 3y ago
  They're not even close to comparable. Worrying about privacy and then focusing on Big Tech is like trying to swat away a mosquito while you're being devoured alive by three bears.
  - AlexandrB 3y ago
    A huge amount of government surveillance either depends on Big Tech contractors or explicitly leverages Big Tech's disregard for privacy. For example "geofence warrants" wouldn't be possible if Big Tech wasn't collecting and storing all that location data in the first place.
    - anfogoat 3y ago
      Let's rein in Big Tech. Now what? Law enforcement and intelligence agencies are going to leave it at that and not seek alternative paths? I do not understand how anyone is more eager to address something that merely facilitates the problem than the actual problem itself.
- BLKNSLVR 3y ago
  Ironically, it's government that should be protecting the privacy of its citizens against the pervasive surveillance big tech has essentially normalised and monetised. And so monetised has it become that any attempt by government to reign in the pervasive surveillance, it could potentially have a noticeable effect on the employment rate as all those "smartest people on the planet working very hard on getting better click rates" in the big tech surveillance industry are legislatively made redundant. Bad politics. This would also dry up a fair portion of the ... lobbyist funding ... governments receive. Plus governments handily use these private enterprises profiting from pervasive surveillance to take the pulse of the citizenry for the purposes of staying in power - the very reason they're in government in the first place. So, yeah, Government, as they are, are a significant part of the problem from a number of angles.
photochemsyn 3y ago
This article seems to be a response to this 'free Orwellian TV monitor' offer: https://www.wired.com/story/telly-tv-free-privacy/ https://www.wired.com/story/telly-tv-free-privacy/ I think the real wet dream of the security state is to have a software agent for every human on the planet. Something rather like this was at the core of DARPA's "Total Information Awareness" program of about two decades ago (later absorbed by the NSA and private contractors IIRC). Today's LLMs help make the concept clear - if you could collect enough data about a person you could create a software construct that could predict how that person would respond to different stimuli - an advertisement, a news story, etc. It would be the greatest tool for mass control every invented in the history of humanity - and those in control would use it to create the most dystopian authoritarian state imaginable - and yet those who lived under that state would probably think they were 'free people'. The idea was nicely laid out in the 1995 movie, "Twelve Monkeys": > "Jeffrey Goines : When I was institutionalized, my brain was studied exhaustively in the guise of mental health. I was interrogated, I was x-rayed, I was examined thoroughly. Then, they took everything about me and put it into a computer where they created this model of my mind. Yes! Using that model they managed to generate every thought I could possibly have in the next, say, 10 years. Which they then filtered through a probability matrix of some kind to determine everything I was gonna do in that period. So you see, she knew I was gonna lead the Army of the Twelve Monkeys into the pages of history before it ever even occurred to me. She knows everything I'm ever gonna do before I know it myself. How's that?" It's the FBI keeping files on citizens, but on steroids. Those claiming 'this is fine' generally don't like to talk about who would get access to the database of agents, and who wouldn't.
endisneigh 3y ago
privacy is important but the article is strange because all of the things described can be opted-out of. in the case of Telly you are explicitly trading off privacy in order to receive a free product. don't consume if you don't agree. there are certain situations in which you might be OK with the privacy implication. I, for example, would be OK with receiving a free car ride if I had to watch an advertisement while traveling in the vehicle. a better example would be something like being fingerprinted at the airport. Where it is not strictly necessary in order to accomplish the goal of security. In general I would say Big Government is more concerning than Big Tech. Is it unfortunate that Meta and Google track you across the internet? Sure, but it's ultimately not necessary for your participation in society, unlike say being tracked in order to get a state identification card, and thus do basic things like get a bank account.
- BaseballPhysics 3y ago
  > Is it unfortunate that Meta and Google track you across the internet? Sure, but it's ultimately not necessary for your participation in society I'm honestly astonished by this claim. For many the products provided by Meta and Google--Facebook, Whatsapp, Gmail, WeChat, etc--are deeply important to their lives. These tools are the way people connect and communicate with friends and families, conduct business, and in general navigate the world. It is becoming damn near impossible to avoid their prying eyes. And I know. I've tried. So, I'm sorry, no, I completely disagree with your claim. Is "Big Government" surveillance a concern? Yes. Absolutely. But private company surveillance is every bit as concerning, every bit as difficult to avoid, and far harder to control (after all, I don't get to elect who runs Facebook).
  - endisneigh 3y ago
    Those examples you gave inherently must track you in order to function. I'm talking about accessory cases, e.g. "Facebook pixel." That case is problematic, but also easy to avoid - don't go to sites that for example use Facebook comments. Fundamentally though, even if you are tracked by Facebook you being banned on Facebook isn't going to stop you from living your life. If that is the case then that is indeed problematic. We will have to agree to disagree. I care about surveillance only to the extent that if the person doing has the ability to stop my participation in society. To that extent Meta cannot do much damage (to me at least).
alphanullmeric 3y ago
Especially financial privacy, which many supposed supporters of privacy are always very quiet about. It’s unfortunate to hear the patriot act style talking points people use to justify KYC laws and transaction tracking.
- CatWChainsaw 3y ago
  Taking financial privacy to the extreme is how you get failed states.
  - alphanullmeric 3y ago
    Is Switzerland a failed state? Concern yourself less with the money of others. Spying on my wallet is not a basic human right.
    - CatWChainsaw 3y ago
      I mean it is interesting that you picked the most "respectable" option as a counter, so how about a more regular example. What about Ukraine? Yanukovich looted his country and lived in a palace with an exotic zoo and bathrooms that had TVs at sitting-on-the-toilet height so that he wouldn't miss his shows while he dealt with his constipation problems. Or in Angola, where a minister's daughter came to NYC and starred on Say Yes to the Dress, and in fact said yes to about a dozen dresses, just for herself, for just her wedding, each in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, even though 66% of Angolans are impoverished? The minister salaries don't cover such costs. Do you consider kleptocracy to be the natural and right state of the world? (never mind, I skimmed previous comments of yours - "libertarian", reagan-worshipping, hyper-conservative. You won't answer 'yes', but you will ask 'if that's how the world works then what's wrong with it?')
      - alphanullmeric 3y ago
        I don’t care if you spy on public figures, someone funded by tax dollars does not have the right to privacy. That’s not what my comment was about and you know that. Feel free to move to one of the “regular” examples of financial surveillance states such as Cuba or Venezuela, I will never object to collectivists looting from each other. I just ask that you leave others out of it.
swayvil 3y ago
If we could trust the wolves to not eat us zero privacy would be excellent. Imagine how useful that would be for running a society. Bespoke everything. Crazy efficient. But ya. May as well ask pigs to fly. Which brings up another point. Isn't it crazy how our society bends over backwards and twists, chokes and contorts itself? To accommodate the existence of wolves.
deleted 3y ago
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Cruq 3y ago
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booboofixer 3y ago
In the discussion of losing privacy we focus on the social freedoms lost as a result of loss of privacy. I agree with all of those arguments but missing from these discussions are the economic freedoms we might lose. People like to portray their least favorite countries as being engaged in corporate espionage in other developed countries, but what stops your favorite big corp from stealing what you create? Going forward, the value of eyeballs on ads might not be much compared to the value of business ideas, strategies etc. a corporation can access by violating your privacy. Think of it this way: If you are a business owner, how successful would your business be if every second of the day, your fierce competitors had access to all your phone calls, texts, google docs, spreadsheets etc.? What if your competitor is already established with much more resources to create and get to market before you can?
- kornhole 3y ago
  Many people have been conditioned to think they are unimportant and these companies would not waste time looking at their stuff. They may not understand the power of AI which can constantly scan, remember, and process the information of many people to provide distilled information and opportunities to its master. We are also easily manipulated into spending, speaking, and voting which this knowledge and processing power greatly improves. If you do not think you are easily manipulated, you are probably the most easily manipulated.
- WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
  Neither voters nor the press has a meaningful objection to lawmakers trading campaign cash & jobs for law & power. As long as that condition persists, I see no path away from what you describe.
- georgeplusplus 3y ago
  I suggest you read some books on espionage. China is a fantastic example of what corporate espionage can do. If interested I recommend Silent Invasion. There is tremendous knowledge to be gained also, to call the opposite of privacy social freedom, is disturbing to me. If you are more private in some aspects of your life does not mean you cannot be more social in others.
austin-cheney 3y ago
The best means of preserving privacy online is encryption and to not send to or store data in a server. Of course the challenge there is a dramatic economic shift in revenue generation for many software companies that imposes a competing interest.
deutschepost 3y ago
Everytime I read threads like this I get very concerned. It's like, even here, people don't understand the core problem. Or are intentionally trying to shift the blame away from big tech. Of course the state spies on you. After Edward Snowden everyone should know that. And thats a big problem because the state is the one actor that should fight to protect you from surveillance. But let's not claim that big tech is not the motor of the machine that is state sanctioned surveillance. Google allowed the US to read your e-mails. A yahoo software was responsible to access your webcam from the outside. NSO sold Pegasus to state actors. That sounds bad enough. But if these companies would care about their users they would stop this from happening. Right? Of course these companies will tell you that they need your information to provide you with the best service. In reality they want to collect the biggest value as possible from you. In the past you would just pay for a service and the service would provide a service. If the company wanted to extract more value from their users they would raise the prices. But today is different. It is no longer just a transaction between you and a company. It is also a transaction between the company and a third actor who is interested on spying on you. The motivation changes. It is no longer about protecting you country or whatever. It is about money. And companies want to make money. And if companies see a legal opportunity to make more money they will take it. They will sell as much of your data as possible. Now you will tell me that I should just stop using these services. But that's not so easy. Network effects are real. If they aren't real for you? Great. But other people have friends outside of tech circles. Now if you want to have a social life you need WhatsApp or other services. This is an even bigger problem in developing countries that are literally dependent on these "free" services. Normal people wont buy a homeserver, self host a matrix instance and convert literally everyone in their friend group to element. They will go for the cheaper solution and just download WhatsApp. But they don't know that they are paying for this service with their data. E2EE? Yeah right, your Messages can only be read by me, you and Facebook. This is why we are in dire need of anchoring privacy into law. People will go for the cheaper option. But if you are in need of using a service it should not come with strings attached. And if your service is only sustainable by selling the private correspondence of people it deserves to die. There is plenty of great OSS that just doesn't have the network effects of proprietary ones.
- CatWChainsaw 3y ago
dogman144 3y ago
I used to engage with this topic a lot and still orient my life around minimizing the scope of digital access to my life. The outcomes are great - I read books more often, and I’m less on my phone bc my phone is largely bricked outside of Signal. That said, our laws represent our values. We have a complete lack of tangible privacy laws and any ability to enforce them, and that doesn’t seem to be changing despite decades of these calls. GDPR delete requests are a joke because of the 17 marketing excel sheets with user exports floating around and forgotten in downloads folder that every tech company with user data has in some form. Western culture, in its current form, doesn’t value privacy. It’s nuking privacy bc of tech-enabled capitalism and a decentralized mess of efforts to hit OKRs, love of social media by users, making that next VC raise, do that compliance check on user origin. Everything about tech can’t function without that stream of user data. Every company is about tech now. Every company can’t function in its current profit mode without user data. I’ve benefited greatly from capitalism, so I don’t get too bent out of shape. But you have to spend just one quarter with access to user-facing logs to know privacy is a lost cause, unless there is a significant reevaluation of tech regulations, and then you’d need the actual hammer-drop EPA in new 1970z style regulations. I don’t think we’ll get it. So my conclusion is to protect yourself as able and otherwise ride the wave into what’s next.
rayiner 3y ago
I can’t get any normies interested in privacy. Even my wife, who is the most tin-foil-hat woman I know, is perfectly fine with NSA spying, the TSA, etc. Given that, how can anyone say that privacy is “one of the most fundamental human rights?” The masses obviously don’t agree. And who else even has standing to decide what’s a human right and what isn’t?
- aio2 3y ago
  Sorry for the confusion, but what is TSA and what did they do?
  - tenacious_tuna 3y ago
    in the United States, the Transportation Security Administration is most commonly responsible for airport security screenings. This typically involves scanning passengers' belongings with xray equipment and passengers themselves with at least metal detectors. As such there is a markedly reduced expectation to privacy when passing through an airport security checkpoint.
nologic01 3y ago
Once the invasion of privacy proved monetarily and politically profitable and legally a gray area its fate was sealed. In a sense the age of moving fast and breaking things helped us see what the system is made of: What sort of moral reflexes exist, how quickly they get mobilized, where this happens institutionally, geographically and socially etc. Needless to say that it has been the bleakest of revelations. What is deeply ironic though, is that the system is in self-destruct mode. The privacy destruction happens in parallel with the annihilation of ownership / copyright that is discussed in other threads. A new "world order" is instituted, uglier and poorer. The prosperity and social stability of the West has been based on instituting, respecting property rights, privacy, individual agency as the bedrock of liberal market democracy. It turned out the pillars on which the edifice was standing have rotted over time and nobody knew.
- arthurcolle 3y ago
  I would like to subscribe to your newsletter
pwndByDeath 3y ago
Or you have the right to remain silent... Just give up on the exhibition platforms, nobody you care about cares about what you post, it can only be held against you.
motohagiography 3y ago
For privacy to exist, you need a shared understanding of something effectively "sacred," where the ethics that stem from it are self enforcing. I have trespasser and loiterer problems where I live because newer people in my area don't recognize private property unless it has high fences or walls around it. Their understanding of privacy does not incorporate the norms of the society they have joined, and it creates tension with the locals. Imagine some strangers decided your house was a tourist attraction and developed a subculture and social scene around it. This might seem insane to you, where if your sentiments toward them as the resident did not matter to them, but the symbol of being somehow associated with your home and property did, this would be an encroachment on your privacy. To them, legally they're just in public looking at things they desire (your property), and using the peace and effect of your property as their own relative privacy so that they can have sex in their cars away from people who might recognize them. The lack of privacy in this case is a lack of shared norms, and an inability to enforce or resolve them without conflict. When it comes to electronic privacy, the same dynamic applies, where you're "just a user," and not a person, but rather an object that is subject to some process by an other. Privacy also definitely breaks down at scale, and it might actually be defined as relating only in a context on a certain scale - or that privacy itself is an artifact of context in a given scale. It needs re-thinking because it's not a value that is universally shared, it requires an enforcement mechanism, and it also seems to require a certain belief in basic dignity that is separate from material concerns. It presumes some natural rights that are not natural to everyone, and I don't think it's something an individual has unless they can actually defend it.
FreshStart 3y ago
ChatGpt emulate a conversation while moving through the city. Topic: local sportsteams and the shops windows. Add:GPS markers and background noise + occasional synthetic screenshot. Generate parallel plausibel phone activity. Hand as argument's to "NonOfYourBuisness.app" on my phone.

A decent but a little bit too alarmist essay in my opinion. A few reservations also, starting with: "Our actions, our words, even our thoughts, are being monitored, recorded, and analyzed. The sanctity of our homes, once our refuge from the world, is under threat." "It’s not just mere data; rather, it’s a master key to the sealed vaults of our thoughts and experiences." The mind-reading stuff is still a fantasy and will be so also in the future. Then: "An individual’s freedom of speech hinges significantly on their ability to communicate privately without fear of reprisal." True enough in principle, but I'd reckon that in the current infodemic it is more about who is given a voice (or a megaphone). Furthermore: "Enterprises are no longer solely engaged in the commerce of goods or services; they are also playing a part in a grand, global data accumulation endeavour, where consumer data assumes colossal worth." Once again true enough, but then again, most of data is garbage, useless beyond the immediate moment of pushing an ad or two. Finally: "This isn’t a criticism aimed at those agencies responsible for our national security." I am not sure whether their job either is made easier or worse by the vast amounts of garbage.

gjsman-1000 3y ago
> “ This isn’t a criticism aimed at those agencies responsible for our national security.” Why the heck not? Snowden? NSA? GCHQ? FBI having 280,000 abuses? I don’t get this logic.
escape-big-tech 3y ago
> The mind-reading stuff is still a fantasy and will be so also in the future. Haha, of course they don't literally read our minds, but with enough data, it's possible to gather a lot about the way a person thinks
ben_w 3y ago
> The mind-reading stuff is still a fantasy and will be so also in the future. Fantasy today, sure — judging by advertising categories I was getting placed in at least a few years back, the AI don't generally have the ability to infer much from revealed preferences, despite the odd headline every so often. But in the future? Even ignoring the possibility that the aforementioned advertising-AI get better, there's Neuralink and whatever competition it ends up getting.
- jruohonen 3y ago
  > Even ignoring the possibility that the aforementioned advertising-AI get better, there's Neuralink and whatever competition it ends up getting. I am skeptical. AI, Neuralink, or whatever might infer better on many things, sure, but these certainly will not be able to infer what non-dogmatic people think about, say, philosophy or politics already because humans have always a capability to change their minds, while AI is terribly bad at reorienting itself.
  - ben_w 3y ago
    Wires on synapses, however, are very good at sensing exactly what's up. They're too expensive right now, and I really hope Neuralink turns out to be as much of a business disaster as buying Twitter, because if it's as much of a world-changer as Tesla or SpaceX… …well, if cheap-and-good BCI comes, there's too many dystopian ways for it to be abused for comfort.
    - jruohonen 3y ago
      > ... well, if cheap-and-good BCI comes, there's too many dystopian ways for it to be abused for comfort. I am all for dystopia; already with VR/XR/etc. you can probably infer a lot, especially once they start (or have done already?) scanning retina movements and such. But still: stimuli is a one thing and mind-reading (thought control?) is another.
      - ben_w 3y ago
        BCI is literal mind-reading: when the thought goes ping, it shows up on the wire. The current limitation is that the number of sense-wires we can put on a BCI implant is a factor of ~2^30 smaller than the number of synapses in a human brain.
Clubber 3y ago
>A decent but a little bit too alarmist essay in my opinion. A trend that has been going on since at least 9/11. Alarmism is the norm. When alarmism is the norm, only escalating alarmism will be heard. We can't have a normal conversation anymore. Before: Here's a problem, here's where I think it would go if we ignore it. Now: Here's a problem, everyone is going to die!!!!!!!!!!!

gjsman-1000 3y ago

I’m personally reminded of the Pied Piper of Hamelin (which has some historical evidence for being a true story)…

itronitron 3y ago
I don't follow
- gjsman-1000 3y ago
  Telly (and similar) is the Pied Piper and the children the people who follow along for his free music and entertainment. Though I get it’s a stretch - I re-read the story so it’s fresh on my mind.
  - itronitron 3y ago
    I was thinking that 'big tech' is heralded as a saviour but then it ends up just stealing everyone's information and attention. Although big tech also gets the gold, so it's not a perfect match to the story.

jmclnx 3y ago

Well I dare say, before civilization, when people lived in small tribes, there was no privacy in your tribe. But now, comparing to back then, all other "tribes" can see what you are doing.

drewcoo 3y ago
> when people lived in small tribes, there was no privacy in your tribe Anything to back that claim?
- bombcar 3y ago
  I think there's some evidence, take the old saying "three can keep a secret if two are dead" or it's variations. Even the Bible warns about how easily things get spread around. But the Internet and communications moving to online text, etc, greatly increases the provability of the gossip, if you will. Which is a major change that we as a society haven't really adapted to. We treat "private" or "direct" chats as like talking in a cornfield; but before you just had a he said/she said situation, now someone can "drop receipts" or you can have whatever platform you're on hacked and everything spilled.
  - ghaff 3y ago
    >the old saying "three can keep a secret if two are dead" or it's variations I was reminded of this just a few weeks ago. Told a few people some news I told them was non-public given I was seeing them in person. Wouldn't you know it, it immediately got up to someone I'd just as soon not have known. Wasn't really a big deal but still annoying.
- ghaff 3y ago
  Common sense? Lived experience? No privacy is probably an overstatement (as absolute statements tend to be). But my experience having gone to university and living with a group of people was that you tended to learn a lot about other people's lives. And that's almost certainly more privacy than in a tribe.
Supermancho 3y ago

TekMol 3y ago

As an individual, I want privacy of course. But is privacy really important to mankind? If we look at mankind as an organism, the organism can function better if each part knows what the other part is doing. If the left hand knows what the right hand does. Isn't it the same with mankind? Maybe a society is more efficient without privacy. And more efficiency of the society would benefit its members.

throwbadubadu 3y ago
Our laws are imperfect, democracy is likely the best system but imperfect.. unless we'd have a way for Utopia where everything is perfect, fair and agreed upon, and there are never a bad actors (but then you also need to get rid of different opinions, and what that means..), then maybe full transparency (including no company secrets, no government secrets) could be a thing - but tbh this is impossible, at least for me, as infinite as the Universe is. Taken to the extreme, wouldn't that also mean no privacy for your thoughts, brain, mind, but everything should be transparent? Welcome to the Borg, hell of an efficient society.. but not what makes life worthy... so imo no, privacy, free thought, freedom, and likely more just go together, as philosophers long established. It is one of most foundational human rights!
Xerox9213 3y ago
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chmod600 3y ago
That assumes that information is always good and that all actors are working towards a common goal. Neither of those is true.
akomtu 3y ago
Privacy matters when it's privacy from predators, and their number is only growing. You don't want a group of opportunistic burglars to know when you aren't home and what you keep inside. Similarly you want to keep bigger predators blind: adtech, three letter agencies and so on. The utopia you're describing will come true when there are no more predators, and mankind is far from that stage.
3y ago

coremoff 3y ago

I disagree that it's a fundamental right. Over most of history privacy has been rare for most people, with the provisio that if you really wanted a private conversation you could have one in the middle of an open field in daylight with a reasonable expectation that your conversation would not be compromised. These days there can be no such expectation, and we need to separate out discussion of day-to-day privacy from "if bad actors intercept my communication bad things happen". We should aggressively maintain the security of privilaged communication, and not stress so much about day to day privacy in our lives; stop gossiping and judging others for actions that do not harm others, whilst allowing them necessary privacy for transactions that should remain privilaged.

diegoholiveira 3y ago
Many fundamental rights that everyone can agree on today used to be rare in the past, so I'm not sure that use this perspective is the right thing to do.
- shrimp_emoji 3y ago
  Water! Freedom from slavery! Internet! Progressing ethically as a civilization is nice.
- edgyquant 3y ago
  It is. You can’t just argue for something you want as it being a human right when it’s something most people aren’t that concerns with. It makes people not take you or what you’re arguing seriously
  - BaseballPhysics 3y ago
    Except people absolutely are concerned with privacy, if you ask the questions the right way. The problem is that surveillance capitalism shares a lot of properties with pollution: the effects are typically hidden or ephemeral; the cost to individuals is low while the cost to society is high; and people have largely become complacent if not resigned to the status quo. And so a) most people don't understand the sheer extent of surveillance capitalism, and b) they don't understand how they're affected by it. I can't count the number of times I've seen shocked faces when I explained how companies like Acxiom and Experian work. And they've been around for decades! But they operate in the shadows, out of view, and so people simply do not understand how much of their private lives are bought and sold to the highest bidder. If they understood that--and I mean truly understood it--I suspect the conversation around these topics would be very different indeed. Meanwhile, large portions of the tech community have a financial motive to want to downplay these issues. "Oh pfft, privacy, so antiquated," they say as they draw down a 300k FAANG salary funded by the harvesting and selling of private information. And so what's the predominant narrative? Well, the people who are in the best position to understand these issues have a financial incentive to protect the status quo, while everyone else doesn't understand them well enough to form an opinion, and thus the former dominates the discourse.

diegoholiveira 3y ago

> Our mission is clear - we aim to unravel the magic of FOSS, Linux, and self-hosting to individuals seeking a break from the shackles of Big Tech. IMO, it's not only Big Tech that poses a threat on privacy and freedom. Big Governments are other threat that, IMO, it's much harder to fight against it.

spacebanana7 3y ago
Any data collected by big tech can be accessed by governments and governments will manage that data using big tech products so there's not that much distinction between the two.
anfogoat 3y ago
They're not even close to comparable. Worrying about privacy and then focusing on Big Tech is like trying to swat away a mosquito while you're being devoured alive by three bears.
- AlexandrB 3y ago
  A huge amount of government surveillance either depends on Big Tech contractors or explicitly leverages Big Tech's disregard for privacy. For example "geofence warrants" wouldn't be possible if Big Tech wasn't collecting and storing all that location data in the first place.
  - anfogoat 3y ago
    Let's rein in Big Tech. Now what? Law enforcement and intelligence agencies are going to leave it at that and not seek alternative paths? I do not understand how anyone is more eager to address something that merely facilitates the problem than the actual problem itself.
BLKNSLVR 3y ago
Ironically, it's government that should be protecting the privacy of its citizens against the pervasive surveillance big tech has essentially normalised and monetised. And so monetised has it become that any attempt by government to reign in the pervasive surveillance, it could potentially have a noticeable effect on the employment rate as all those "smartest people on the planet working very hard on getting better click rates" in the big tech surveillance industry are legislatively made redundant. Bad politics. This would also dry up a fair portion of the ... lobbyist funding ... governments receive. Plus governments handily use these private enterprises profiting from pervasive surveillance to take the pulse of the citizenry for the purposes of staying in power - the very reason they're in government in the first place. So, yeah, Government, as they are, are a significant part of the problem from a number of angles.

photochemsyn 3y ago

This article seems to be a response to this 'free Orwellian TV monitor' offer: https://www.wired.com/story/telly-tv-free-privacy/ https://www.wired.com/story/telly-tv-free-privacy/ I think the real wet dream of the security state is to have a software agent for every human on the planet. Something rather like this was at the core of DARPA's "Total Information Awareness" program of about two decades ago (later absorbed by the NSA and private contractors IIRC). Today's LLMs help make the concept clear - if you could collect enough data about a person you could create a software construct that could predict how that person would respond to different stimuli - an advertisement, a news story, etc. It would be the greatest tool for mass control every invented in the history of humanity - and those in control would use it to create the most dystopian authoritarian state imaginable - and yet those who lived under that state would probably think they were 'free people'. The idea was nicely laid out in the 1995 movie, "Twelve Monkeys": > "Jeffrey Goines : When I was institutionalized, my brain was studied exhaustively in the guise of mental health. I was interrogated, I was x-rayed, I was examined thoroughly. Then, they took everything about me and put it into a computer where they created this model of my mind. Yes! Using that model they managed to generate every thought I could possibly have in the next, say, 10 years. Which they then filtered through a probability matrix of some kind to determine everything I was gonna do in that period. So you see, she knew I was gonna lead the Army of the Twelve Monkeys into the pages of history before it ever even occurred to me. She knows everything I'm ever gonna do before I know it myself. How's that?" It's the FBI keeping files on citizens, but on steroids. Those claiming 'this is fine' generally don't like to talk about who would get access to the database of agents, and who wouldn't.

endisneigh 3y ago

privacy is important but the article is strange because all of the things described can be opted-out of. in the case of Telly you are explicitly trading off privacy in order to receive a free product. don't consume if you don't agree. there are certain situations in which you might be OK with the privacy implication. I, for example, would be OK with receiving a free car ride if I had to watch an advertisement while traveling in the vehicle. a better example would be something like being fingerprinted at the airport. Where it is not strictly necessary in order to accomplish the goal of security. In general I would say Big Government is more concerning than Big Tech. Is it unfortunate that Meta and Google track you across the internet? Sure, but it's ultimately not necessary for your participation in society, unlike say being tracked in order to get a state identification card, and thus do basic things like get a bank account.

BaseballPhysics 3y ago
> Is it unfortunate that Meta and Google track you across the internet? Sure, but it's ultimately not necessary for your participation in society I'm honestly astonished by this claim. For many the products provided by Meta and Google--Facebook, Whatsapp, Gmail, WeChat, etc--are deeply important to their lives. These tools are the way people connect and communicate with friends and families, conduct business, and in general navigate the world. It is becoming damn near impossible to avoid their prying eyes. And I know. I've tried. So, I'm sorry, no, I completely disagree with your claim. Is "Big Government" surveillance a concern? Yes. Absolutely. But private company surveillance is every bit as concerning, every bit as difficult to avoid, and far harder to control (after all, I don't get to elect who runs Facebook).
- endisneigh 3y ago
  Those examples you gave inherently must track you in order to function. I'm talking about accessory cases, e.g. "Facebook pixel." That case is problematic, but also easy to avoid - don't go to sites that for example use Facebook comments. Fundamentally though, even if you are tracked by Facebook you being banned on Facebook isn't going to stop you from living your life. If that is the case then that is indeed problematic. We will have to agree to disagree. I care about surveillance only to the extent that if the person doing has the ability to stop my participation in society. To that extent Meta cannot do much damage (to me at least).

alphanullmeric 3y ago

Especially financial privacy, which many supposed supporters of privacy are always very quiet about. It’s unfortunate to hear the patriot act style talking points people use to justify KYC laws and transaction tracking.

CatWChainsaw 3y ago
Taking financial privacy to the extreme is how you get failed states.
- alphanullmeric 3y ago
  Is Switzerland a failed state? Concern yourself less with the money of others. Spying on my wallet is not a basic human right.
  - CatWChainsaw 3y ago
    I mean it is interesting that you picked the most "respectable" option as a counter, so how about a more regular example. What about Ukraine? Yanukovich looted his country and lived in a palace with an exotic zoo and bathrooms that had TVs at sitting-on-the-toilet height so that he wouldn't miss his shows while he dealt with his constipation problems. Or in Angola, where a minister's daughter came to NYC and starred on Say Yes to the Dress, and in fact said yes to about a dozen dresses, just for herself, for just her wedding, each in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, even though 66% of Angolans are impoverished? The minister salaries don't cover such costs. Do you consider kleptocracy to be the natural and right state of the world? (never mind, I skimmed previous comments of yours - "libertarian", reagan-worshipping, hyper-conservative. You won't answer 'yes', but you will ask 'if that's how the world works then what's wrong with it?')
    - alphanullmeric 3y ago
      I don’t care if you spy on public figures, someone funded by tax dollars does not have the right to privacy. That’s not what my comment was about and you know that. Feel free to move to one of the “regular” examples of financial surveillance states such as Cuba or Venezuela, I will never object to collectivists looting from each other. I just ask that you leave others out of it.

swayvil 3y ago

If we could trust the wolves to not eat us zero privacy would be excellent. Imagine how useful that would be for running a society. Bespoke everything. Crazy efficient. But ya. May as well ask pigs to fly. Which brings up another point. Isn't it crazy how our society bends over backwards and twists, chokes and contorts itself? To accommodate the existence of wolves.

deleted 3y ago

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Cruq 3y ago

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booboofixer 3y ago

In the discussion of losing privacy we focus on the social freedoms lost as a result of loss of privacy. I agree with all of those arguments but missing from these discussions are the economic freedoms we might lose. People like to portray their least favorite countries as being engaged in corporate espionage in other developed countries, but what stops your favorite big corp from stealing what you create? Going forward, the value of eyeballs on ads might not be much compared to the value of business ideas, strategies etc. a corporation can access by violating your privacy. Think of it this way: If you are a business owner, how successful would your business be if every second of the day, your fierce competitors had access to all your phone calls, texts, google docs, spreadsheets etc.? What if your competitor is already established with much more resources to create and get to market before you can?

kornhole 3y ago
Many people have been conditioned to think they are unimportant and these companies would not waste time looking at their stuff. They may not understand the power of AI which can constantly scan, remember, and process the information of many people to provide distilled information and opportunities to its master. We are also easily manipulated into spending, speaking, and voting which this knowledge and processing power greatly improves. If you do not think you are easily manipulated, you are probably the most easily manipulated.
WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
Neither voters nor the press has a meaningful objection to lawmakers trading campaign cash & jobs for law & power. As long as that condition persists, I see no path away from what you describe.
georgeplusplus 3y ago
I suggest you read some books on espionage. China is a fantastic example of what corporate espionage can do. If interested I recommend Silent Invasion. There is tremendous knowledge to be gained also, to call the opposite of privacy social freedom, is disturbing to me. If you are more private in some aspects of your life does not mean you cannot be more social in others.

austin-cheney 3y ago

The best means of preserving privacy online is encryption and to not send to or store data in a server. Of course the challenge there is a dramatic economic shift in revenue generation for many software companies that imposes a competing interest.

deutschepost 3y ago

Everytime I read threads like this I get very concerned. It's like, even here, people don't understand the core problem. Or are intentionally trying to shift the blame away from big tech. Of course the state spies on you. After Edward Snowden everyone should know that. And thats a big problem because the state is the one actor that should fight to protect you from surveillance. But let's not claim that big tech is not the motor of the machine that is state sanctioned surveillance. Google allowed the US to read your e-mails. A yahoo software was responsible to access your webcam from the outside. NSO sold Pegasus to state actors. That sounds bad enough. But if these companies would care about their users they would stop this from happening. Right? Of course these companies will tell you that they need your information to provide you with the best service. In reality they want to collect the biggest value as possible from you. In the past you would just pay for a service and the service would provide a service. If the company wanted to extract more value from their users they would raise the prices. But today is different. It is no longer just a transaction between you and a company. It is also a transaction between the company and a third actor who is interested on spying on you. The motivation changes. It is no longer about protecting you country or whatever. It is about money. And companies want to make money. And if companies see a legal opportunity to make more money they will take it. They will sell as much of your data as possible. Now you will tell me that I should just stop using these services. But that's not so easy. Network effects are real. If they aren't real for you? Great. But other people have friends outside of tech circles. Now if you want to have a social life you need WhatsApp or other services. This is an even bigger problem in developing countries that are literally dependent on these "free" services. Normal people wont buy a homeserver, self host a matrix instance and convert literally everyone in their friend group to element. They will go for the cheaper solution and just download WhatsApp. But they don't know that they are paying for this service with their data. E2EE? Yeah right, your Messages can only be read by me, you and Facebook. This is why we are in dire need of anchoring privacy into law. People will go for the cheaper option. But if you are in need of using a service it should not come with strings attached. And if your service is only sustainable by selling the private correspondence of people it deserves to die. There is plenty of great OSS that just doesn't have the network effects of proprietary ones.

CatWChainsaw 3y ago

dogman144 3y ago

I used to engage with this topic a lot and still orient my life around minimizing the scope of digital access to my life. The outcomes are great - I read books more often, and I’m less on my phone bc my phone is largely bricked outside of Signal. That said, our laws represent our values. We have a complete lack of tangible privacy laws and any ability to enforce them, and that doesn’t seem to be changing despite decades of these calls. GDPR delete requests are a joke because of the 17 marketing excel sheets with user exports floating around and forgotten in downloads folder that every tech company with user data has in some form. Western culture, in its current form, doesn’t value privacy. It’s nuking privacy bc of tech-enabled capitalism and a decentralized mess of efforts to hit OKRs, love of social media by users, making that next VC raise, do that compliance check on user origin. Everything about tech can’t function without that stream of user data. Every company is about tech now. Every company can’t function in its current profit mode without user data. I’ve benefited greatly from capitalism, so I don’t get too bent out of shape. But you have to spend just one quarter with access to user-facing logs to know privacy is a lost cause, unless there is a significant reevaluation of tech regulations, and then you’d need the actual hammer-drop EPA in new 1970z style regulations. I don’t think we’ll get it. So my conclusion is to protect yourself as able and otherwise ride the wave into what’s next.

rayiner 3y ago

I can’t get any normies interested in privacy. Even my wife, who is the most tin-foil-hat woman I know, is perfectly fine with NSA spying, the TSA, etc. Given that, how can anyone say that privacy is “one of the most fundamental human rights?” The masses obviously don’t agree. And who else even has standing to decide what’s a human right and what isn’t?

aio2 3y ago
Sorry for the confusion, but what is TSA and what did they do?
- tenacious_tuna 3y ago
  in the United States, the Transportation Security Administration is most commonly responsible for airport security screenings. This typically involves scanning passengers' belongings with xray equipment and passengers themselves with at least metal detectors. As such there is a markedly reduced expectation to privacy when passing through an airport security checkpoint.

nologic01 3y ago

Once the invasion of privacy proved monetarily and politically profitable and legally a gray area its fate was sealed. In a sense the age of moving fast and breaking things helped us see what the system is made of: What sort of moral reflexes exist, how quickly they get mobilized, where this happens institutionally, geographically and socially etc. Needless to say that it has been the bleakest of revelations. What is deeply ironic though, is that the system is in self-destruct mode. The privacy destruction happens in parallel with the annihilation of ownership / copyright that is discussed in other threads. A new "world order" is instituted, uglier and poorer. The prosperity and social stability of the West has been based on instituting, respecting property rights, privacy, individual agency as the bedrock of liberal market democracy. It turned out the pillars on which the edifice was standing have rotted over time and nobody knew.

arthurcolle 3y ago
I would like to subscribe to your newsletter

pwndByDeath 3y ago

Or you have the right to remain silent... Just give up on the exhibition platforms, nobody you care about cares about what you post, it can only be held against you.

motohagiography 3y ago

For privacy to exist, you need a shared understanding of something effectively "sacred," where the ethics that stem from it are self enforcing. I have trespasser and loiterer problems where I live because newer people in my area don't recognize private property unless it has high fences or walls around it. Their understanding of privacy does not incorporate the norms of the society they have joined, and it creates tension with the locals. Imagine some strangers decided your house was a tourist attraction and developed a subculture and social scene around it. This might seem insane to you, where if your sentiments toward them as the resident did not matter to them, but the symbol of being somehow associated with your home and property did, this would be an encroachment on your privacy. To them, legally they're just in public looking at things they desire (your property), and using the peace and effect of your property as their own relative privacy so that they can have sex in their cars away from people who might recognize them. The lack of privacy in this case is a lack of shared norms, and an inability to enforce or resolve them without conflict. When it comes to electronic privacy, the same dynamic applies, where you're "just a user," and not a person, but rather an object that is subject to some process by an other. Privacy also definitely breaks down at scale, and it might actually be defined as relating only in a context on a certain scale - or that privacy itself is an artifact of context in a given scale. It needs re-thinking because it's not a value that is universally shared, it requires an enforcement mechanism, and it also seems to require a certain belief in basic dignity that is separate from material concerns. It presumes some natural rights that are not natural to everyone, and I don't think it's something an individual has unless they can actually defend it.

FreshStart 3y ago

ChatGpt emulate a conversation while moving through the city. Topic: local sportsteams and the shops windows. Add:GPS markers and background noise + occasional synthetic screenshot. Generate parallel plausibel phone activity. Hand as argument's to "NonOfYourBuisness.app" on my phone.