8 ms·

I think most people who say "I have nothing to hide" are just mimicking a slogan they no doubt heard someone they respect or at least think talks well say Anot

• w0m 2y ago
  > spying is abstract to them. Not just spying, but for many/most - the harm is also. Most people struggle on the day-to-day; getting worked up that a random boogieman is compiling a profile on them to serve ads leads to a big pile of 'so?'. When Windows Recall was announced as an example; I started asking (non tech, mostly boomer) people their take on it. I almost universally got a 'neat!' response. The security implications simply didn't register or matter, even when I explained them. I felt like I should be wearing a tin foil hat.
  • advael 2y ago
    Most animals are bad at learning stochastic or even unreliable patterns, even when doing important things like threat assessment
  • mdp2021 2y ago
    > for many/most - the harm is also [abstract] Tell them that persecutions have historically been more effective in places where institutionalized profiling was in place.
  • slg 2y ago
    Because who you are keeping something private from is often more important than what you are keeping private. For example, there are plenty of things I would be fine sharing with the anonymous internet that I wouldn't share with my coworkers. My coworkers knowing something embarrassing about me has obvious harm. There is no real harm in strangers knowing something embarrassing about me. And companies and governments are both largely strangers. I think the fundamental problem with the pro-privacy side of the debate is an inability to communicate why privacy matters in way that makes sense to people who think like this. The argument always seems to come down to some dystopian future in which this information is abused, but hypotheticals like that are just never very motivating when people have so many more pressing issues that are causing clear and immediate harm rather than some hypothetical future harm.
    • advael 2y ago
      The problem with making this case is that the threats are kind of stochastic. Usually what happens to an individual is that either a mistake occurs or some unpredictable factor changes to suddenly get them targeted. I had a relative who was blindsided by identity theft, fending off creditors for bills that were in her name because she was in some breach (I think maybe the sony one? Often not even easy to say how it happened). This is a consequence of erosion of privacy. American Muslims didn't have any more inkling that 9/11 would happen than anyone else, but suddenly received a ton of suspicion from both crazy wingnuts and actual government agencies despite often having "nothing to hide". Trans people who wanted to assimilate and blend in have by and large been blindsided by the massive increase in scrutiny they've gotten from random people and increasingly lawmakers in the last few years in much of the western world, because some machinations of internet culture made the right wing start thinking about them a lot all of a sudden in the last decade. You can't really predict what factor is gonna get you targeted. You also can't predict the particular manner in which data that's being collected about you will be used to harm you. Sometimes it's about secrets you'd want to keep private, but often it's about correlations drawn that may even be wrong. Like if public sentiment or government scrutiny were to turn against tech in a huge way, maybe even just a post history on hackernews existing for you, regardless of what's in it, correlates you to some kind of cybercrime they're pursuing with a dragnet, and this gets your credit pinged when you try to buy a house, and someone freezes your bank account because something's going on here and we should just lock it down to be safe until we figure this out. Who knows? The erosion of privacy is a powderkeg that makes everyone more vulnerable to these sorts of things, but the effects aren't felt by everyone all at once, but chaotically based on circumstances beyond your control, sometimes even truly random ones. I can't predict the actual threat model that will become relevant to you because the attack surface is enormous already and the problem is about how it's ever-growing It's hard to convince people that "you are more likely to be targeted and there is more that can be done if you are but it may never happen to you in particular and there's basically no way to know" is something they should care about. Intuitive risk assessment that our brains are good at can't fucking fathom the world we actually currently live in. Nonetheless, that is the form risk takes, and you should care about factors that expose you to it, even probabilistically
  • trod123 2y ago
    That is because the boomer generation was raised in a time where technology publicly wasn't turned on them in undisclosed ways. They were in control, and the laws had more teeth than they do now. Their cohort was incentivized to help themselves as well. Look at social security. In my experience, their idea of the way the world works seems to have crystallized for them about the times of the 1970s. They have significant blind spots which they likely won't ever recover from, they were blined and in many respects behave like children in a indoctrinated way. They certainly didn't have to deal with arbitrary high costs because someone spied on them secretly and used that information as a false justification for increasing their auto rates since non-regenerative breaking is hard breaking and is therefore reckless driving (Lexis Nexus reports). Heaven forbid that traffic conditions go from 65 to 15 in less than 200 feet. No, the fact tha you avoided getting into an accident is the same as reckless driving. All parents want their kids to be better than them, some parents through circumstances largely in their control set the bar so low that it is a horrible feeling when their grown children exceed them at most levels. Being more educated, rational, and mature at almost every level, then they were at a similar age, where there growth remained perpetually stalled in their 20s is a very damning situation. Especially since they blew their inheritance like a playboy at a party and will be leaving you almost nothing but debts except in rare circumstances. Indoctrination and Menticide is real. Its subtle, and it blinds perception of issues. John Meerloo, and Robert Lifton cover it well.
• dylan604 2y ago
  >so it doesn't emotionally feel like a big deal to them I wonder how people would feel if there was a single site that aggregated all of the data that has been harvested about them. Potentially showing where/how the data was collected and setting aside protecting that data from prying eyes would be problematic. In the world of today where evidence is just fake news, how [in]effective would something like this be in changing minds?
  • HeatrayEnjoyer 2y ago
    Viewing the off-site data Facebook has collected was enlightening. There were events from when I paid for food and other goods at brick-and-mortar stores.
• trod123 2y ago
  I disagree that people are complacent. What we are seeing today is the same thing East-germany saw under The Stasi. The primary issue is that there is no means to correct the situation non-violently. When you have people as a group lie for profit, and they corrupt your representatives and there is no one to hold them to account. They don't give you the choice, and you can't hold them accountable first because you find out about it later, but you still have no choice and you reach out to the people whose job it is to solely represent you in government and they do nothing, and the courts are inaccessible so you have no means. At that point, despite declarations, there really isn't a rule of law then, it along with most of what people think of as their rights were taken by collusion gradually and quietly. When that type of problem occurs, every citizen has a choice based upon the individual risk. Totalitarian governments kill people, or lock them up from kafka kangaroo courts (before they kill them) to give a semblance of legitimacy when that legitimacy has already passed. You show me the person, I'll show you the crime; is a famous saying. When feedback systems fail, and can no longer respond, things will get worse until people will do something, and that will be destructive. The only choice they are given is when. Totalitarian governments make no distinction between peaceful protests, they may not go after you initially, but collecting all the information upfront of everyone that does to black bag you later; or keep you under their thumb through enhanced coercion (given the systems) and harassment from every direction is not unheard of. The moment you start surveilling peaceful protests is a known indicator that you are in fact in a totalitarian government. Its not the people who are the problem. Its the fact that feedback mechanisms have been corrupted and are now broken. Privacy is a necessary and requisite element for any insurgency in its beginnings, so by eliminating it no corrective action can take place and abuses will continually get worse. You've had agency stripped from you without your consent and told all your life you live in a world that doesn't exist while misleading you at every step. These situations historically always cascade, which is why we almost certainly will have a violent civil war in the near future. Its destructive, but that is the inevitable outcome when feedback systems are interfered with to the point where they can no longer function to keep people within reasonable bounds.
  • advael 2y ago
    There's a lot to fear from revolutionary uprising, and I think people are very risk-averse, so this becomes a coordination problem even when there's perhaps widespread discontent I agree with your conclusion that most rich countries are totalitarian in character, and it feels so fundamentally absurd that a lot of how we got here was merely developing the capability and not doing enough to prevent it However, I don't think any kind of uprising is actually inevitable. One of the most powerful uses of these panopticons is the pre-emption and disruption of coordinated resistance efforts. Is an effective uprising even feasible if not supported by some faction of the extant powerbrokers? Hard to say to be honest. A lot of these capabilities are unprecedented, if not in nature then certainly in responsiveness and scope