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Didn't know ACM was anti-privacy. Glad I haven't paid dues in who knows how long if they're spending them to platform these noxious opinions.

by Scaled 3mo ago

busterarm 3mo ago
It's not anti-privacy to point out the obvious that privacy-advocacy is sometimes at odds with governments and the will of voters at large. Privacy is being abused by criminals to victimize people at scale. Just because privacy is a moral good doesn't mean you are morally off the hook for enabling criminals. Governments are so aware of this they're passing sweeping laws against it. This is your new reality -- you can't just bury your head in the sand. The whole point was saying that there could have been a middle ground that protected more of your rights than where you're at now if it weren't for the absolutism. Turns out that being an absolutist isn't helpful.
- failuser 3mo ago
  The laws they pass do nothing to stop the criminals. Do you think an “age verification” law can stop any criminals?
  - busterarm 3mo ago
    The laws not stopping the criminals isn't the point. People are calling on their governments to do something and thus governments are going to do what they are going to do. It's a mix of what they can do and what they're likely to do. They just have to be able to go back to voters and say they're doing something. If you think that the fact that they did the wrong thing is an argument for not doing anything, you clearly are blind to politics & history. And age verification being the wrong solution to the "privacy problem" doesn't remove privacy from lawmakers' crosshairs.
    - WarmWash 3mo ago
      People are calling on governments or Meta is calling on governments to preemptively deflect punishment onto everyone else for their own misdeeds?
      - failuser 3mo ago
        Exactly. Voice of the people if very faint, sound of lobby banknotes makes lawmakers listen.
    - failuser 3mo ago
      Governments can make effective laws, you know. There are tools that can solve this. Parental controls, separation of peer-to-peer communications from algorithmic feeds. The lawmakers are old, tech-illiterate people. You can tell them that a private Minecraft server is illegal and they will believe it.
      - inigyou 3mo ago
        It's a shame that non-evil tech-literate people refused to talk to lawmakers about any of this.
    - casey2 3mo ago
      People are also calling on parents, governments and tech companies to respect children's privacy. [1] None of these groups will because they profit too much from disrespecting their privacy. The average child would be far safer if they used the Dark Web. I'm not sure why the "richest country on earth" is engaging in zero-sum behavior, but those are the kinds of contradictions such behavior creates. [1] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/10/18/key-findings-about-americans-and-data-privacy/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/10/18/key-findi...
- Scaled 3mo ago
  Age verification is not the will of the voters. It is the will of large political donors (specifically tech companies and religious censorship groups). It is certainly not the will of adult citizens who use adult websites, who have overwhelming shown in their usage patterns they will abandon any website that tries to do age verification. Parental controls remains the right way to do age gating. It works today and has no privacy impacts.
  - SoftTalker 3mo ago
    Parental control does not work today, it's too fragmented and too difficult.
    - simoncion 3mo ago
      > Parental control does not work today, it's too fragmented and too difficult. Then legally require it to be effective and easy-to-use-if-you-take-a-few-minutes-to-read-the-instructions. See also [0]. [0] <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48911863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48911863>
      - inigyou 3mo ago
        This is literally what California did with the Digital Age Assurance Act, AB1043.
        simoncion 3mo ago
        > This is literally what California did with the Digital Age Assurance Act, AB1043. There's apparently information that you didn't read contained in the footnote of the comment you replied to. Based on this layman's reading of the law, [0] California did literally the opposite. They require major OS vendors to require users to enter their birthdate or indicate in some other way their current age, and then require programs and websites to act on that age information. This is entirely different from requiring major OS vendors to allow a "guardian account" to set fairly-fine-grained restrictions on one or more -er- "ward accounts", and then requiring programs and websites to refuse let the "ward account" do the things that those restrictions say that it isn't permitted to do. "Restrict by age" neither accounts for precocious under-eighteens, nor does it account for vulnerable elderly or otherwise brain/developmentally-damaged adults who need protected. And because "restrict by age" cares very much about your age, and because it's not going to work nearly as well as promised by those pushing it, it will inevitably require scans of both a photo ID and one's face and/or other biometrics. A "you don't need to know anything about this account other than that these are the things it's not supposed to be able to do" system gives zero shits about the identity of a person, so there's no plausible path for it to gate access behind submission of any identifying documents to any third party. [0] <https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=202520260AB1043 https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...>
- close04 3mo ago
  The guy’s logic is “if only we had allowed a small backdoor from the start they wouldn’t be forced to install a large backdoor now”. Other technologies that were open to the law were endlessly abused for surveillance. His theory is bunk, there is absolutely no middle ground to be had with the people who want a backdoor. There are no small backdoors.
  - inigyou 3mo ago
    What do you consider a backdoor though? Saying that devices must have parental controls isn't a backdoor. Saying that devices must scan your ID is a backdoor to break anonymity, but is he saying that? If we had parental controls that actually worked it would forestall any talk about ID scanning because parents could just enable parental controls.
    - close04 3mo ago
      Even the article talks about this. The backdoor is when there’s no E2EE - he speaks of the “absolute right to privacy” which the proposed age verification solution wouldn’t breach in any way, so it’s actually the loss of encryption. It’s when a legal and technical framework are put in place to do age verification which can be switched to identity verification in a blink of an eye. It’s when cryptographically attested software is the only way to use the internet which even the author, as a suporter of the upsides, knows what it implies on the downside.
- deathanatos 3mo ago
  Gotta disagree. The encryption part needed to happen: without it, there's just too much opportunity for governments to intercept unencrypted traffic and abscond with it. We saw that occur with Snowden, and with programs like MUSCULAR in particular. I don't think it's that encryption was harmful, it's that it wasn't enough, and in a sense I agree with TFA & the Sun Tzu bit: it needed to be complemented by legislation that added decent privacy protections, and it largely wasn't. That was a mistake, I suppose, but the current political situation, esp. in the USA, disfavors privacy regulation getting done, ever. The Democrats are … maybe spiritually for it? … but not terrible effectual at getting it done; Obama's response to Snowden was "meh" at best, and Congresspeople, in particular Feinstein especially, let the DNI walk all over her. The GOP has no interest at all in regulating corporations, at all, ever, so with the House/Senate/POTUS all (R) at the moment, it's going to be until at least Nov before it is possible to even think that these might get addressed, and even that's … generous, and I won't be holding my breath for it to occur. Stuff like what we saw in another thread today — with LG wantonly installing spyware — and things like Flock would have happened in addition to network intercepts; they are not happening instead of. Corporations and the government will do whatever the People permit them to get away with.
- Dylan16807 3mo ago
  > Privacy is being abused by criminals to victimize people at scale. Almost all victimization is being done without end to end encryption. This is not a problem caused by privacy.
  - inigyou 3mo ago
    Yep. For example on Instagram DMs, which is why Instagram abolished E2EE, and we all went into an uproar. Also on Discord and Roblox, they are apparently the biggest platforms for this, but they're not E2EE anyway, they're just hiding it because their executives like what's happening.
  - ShinyLeftPad 3mo ago
    And I guess you have statistics about how much victimization happens over e2e?:)
- ETH_start 3mo ago
  He's very clearly arguing against absolute privacy on the Internet and is saying that the people who advocated for it, which he besmirches as "tech bros", are responsible for the governments going too far now, instead of a happy compromise having been set out at the beginning, which by the way totally mischaracterizes the history of the Internet, where the governments were trying to impose total surveillance from the very beginning.
  - busterarm 3mo ago
    He’s not exactly wrong either. The founders/executives of a tech startup I worked for spun off a completely unrelated E2EE chat app as a separate startup and didn’t market it to anyone. It’s only used by them and their buddies and basically only for OTR conversations related to their publicly traded company that would have put them in prison. Totally the “let’s defraud these investors and do industrial espionage” type shit. I also know about a good half dozen other VC-funded E2EE chat apps that are also exactly this. They do it just to get something they control in app stores that’s also a separate entity. Then they don’t have to answer uncomfortable questions about why such and such is on their phone. This is some of what regulators are seeing and finding a problem with.
    - ETH_start 3mo ago
      We can agree to disagree on this. Even on this example you gave, I'm not entirely sure it's harmful to society. Having worked in the corporate world, there are just so many regulations that — from what I've seen — there is pervasive non-compliance and the covering up of the non-compliance. I suspect that if every single corporate regulation was effectively enforced, a significant fraction of economic activity would grind to a halt.
      - busterarm 3mo ago
        People often say the same thing about environmental regulation too... I hope you realize what a poor argument (to lawmakers) that is, especially if your goal is to advocate for privacy.
orf 3mo ago
Wow, you missed the entire point of the article.
- chaps 3mo ago
  Honestly? It's weirdly written and incredibly hard to understand what their point is. I can't tell if they hate or love privacy.
  - orf 3mo ago
    > Please make my predictions come out wrong.
    - chaps 3mo ago
      [flagged]
      - layer8 3mo ago
        The author is predicting a decrease in privacy, but would prefer these predictions to be wrong.
        chaps 3mo ago
        Gotcha, thank you. (just to be clear, my post was just to point out that the article is very difficult to make heads or tails of. it's easy to misinterpret a lot of the points many different ways! kind of like they're being overly implicit with the expectation that everyone'll know what they mean. it's something I do too and my way of cutting through it is to cut my writing in half and focus on clarity over mystique)
        dgellow 3mo ago
        That reads like any old school blog post where the author is sharing their thoughts on a few topics. I don’t see what is confusing about it
some-are-better 3mo ago
Wow, re-read the fine article. He was NOT stating that he wants the outcome you think. He is afraid it is going to happen because the younger generation has no clue or ability to maintain FOSS.

Didn't know ACM was anti-privacy. Glad I haven't paid dues in who knows how long if they're spending them to platform these noxious opinions.

by Scaled 3mo ago

Didn't know ACM was anti-privacy. Glad I haven't paid dues in who knows how long if they're spending them to platform these noxious opinions.

busterarm 3mo ago

It's not anti-privacy to point out the obvious that privacy-advocacy is sometimes at odds with governments and the will of voters at large. Privacy is being abused by criminals to victimize people at scale. Just because privacy is a moral good doesn't mean you are morally off the hook for enabling criminals. Governments are so aware of this they're passing sweeping laws against it. This is your new reality -- you can't just bury your head in the sand. The whole point was saying that there could have been a middle ground that protected more of your rights than where you're at now if it weren't for the absolutism. Turns out that being an absolutist isn't helpful.

failuser 3mo ago
The laws they pass do nothing to stop the criminals. Do you think an “age verification” law can stop any criminals?
- busterarm 3mo ago
  The laws not stopping the criminals isn't the point. People are calling on their governments to do something and thus governments are going to do what they are going to do. It's a mix of what they can do and what they're likely to do. They just have to be able to go back to voters and say they're doing something. If you think that the fact that they did the wrong thing is an argument for not doing anything, you clearly are blind to politics & history. And age verification being the wrong solution to the "privacy problem" doesn't remove privacy from lawmakers' crosshairs.
  - WarmWash 3mo ago
    People are calling on governments or Meta is calling on governments to preemptively deflect punishment onto everyone else for their own misdeeds?
    - failuser 3mo ago
      Exactly. Voice of the people if very faint, sound of lobby banknotes makes lawmakers listen.
  - failuser 3mo ago
    Governments can make effective laws, you know. There are tools that can solve this. Parental controls, separation of peer-to-peer communications from algorithmic feeds. The lawmakers are old, tech-illiterate people. You can tell them that a private Minecraft server is illegal and they will believe it.
    - inigyou 3mo ago
      It's a shame that non-evil tech-literate people refused to talk to lawmakers about any of this.
  - casey2 3mo ago
    People are also calling on parents, governments and tech companies to respect children's privacy. [1] None of these groups will because they profit too much from disrespecting their privacy. The average child would be far safer if they used the Dark Web. I'm not sure why the "richest country on earth" is engaging in zero-sum behavior, but those are the kinds of contradictions such behavior creates. [1] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/10/18/key-findings-about-americans-and-data-privacy/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/10/18/key-findi...
Scaled 3mo ago
Age verification is not the will of the voters. It is the will of large political donors (specifically tech companies and religious censorship groups). It is certainly not the will of adult citizens who use adult websites, who have overwhelming shown in their usage patterns they will abandon any website that tries to do age verification. Parental controls remains the right way to do age gating. It works today and has no privacy impacts.
- SoftTalker 3mo ago
  Parental control does not work today, it's too fragmented and too difficult.
  - simoncion 3mo ago
    > Parental control does not work today, it's too fragmented and too difficult. Then legally require it to be effective and easy-to-use-if-you-take-a-few-minutes-to-read-the-instructions. See also [0]. [0] <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48911863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48911863>
    - inigyou 3mo ago
      This is literally what California did with the Digital Age Assurance Act, AB1043.
      - simoncion 3mo ago
        > This is literally what California did with the Digital Age Assurance Act, AB1043. There's apparently information that you didn't read contained in the footnote of the comment you replied to. Based on this layman's reading of the law, [0] California did literally the opposite. They require major OS vendors to require users to enter their birthdate or indicate in some other way their current age, and then require programs and websites to act on that age information. This is entirely different from requiring major OS vendors to allow a "guardian account" to set fairly-fine-grained restrictions on one or more -er- "ward accounts", and then requiring programs and websites to refuse let the "ward account" do the things that those restrictions say that it isn't permitted to do. "Restrict by age" neither accounts for precocious under-eighteens, nor does it account for vulnerable elderly or otherwise brain/developmentally-damaged adults who need protected. And because "restrict by age" cares very much about your age, and because it's not going to work nearly as well as promised by those pushing it, it will inevitably require scans of both a photo ID and one's face and/or other biometrics. A "you don't need to know anything about this account other than that these are the things it's not supposed to be able to do" system gives zero shits about the identity of a person, so there's no plausible path for it to gate access behind submission of any identifying documents to any third party. [0] <https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=202520260AB1043 https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...>
close04 3mo ago
The guy’s logic is “if only we had allowed a small backdoor from the start they wouldn’t be forced to install a large backdoor now”. Other technologies that were open to the law were endlessly abused for surveillance. His theory is bunk, there is absolutely no middle ground to be had with the people who want a backdoor. There are no small backdoors.
- inigyou 3mo ago
  What do you consider a backdoor though? Saying that devices must have parental controls isn't a backdoor. Saying that devices must scan your ID is a backdoor to break anonymity, but is he saying that? If we had parental controls that actually worked it would forestall any talk about ID scanning because parents could just enable parental controls.
  - close04 3mo ago
    Even the article talks about this. The backdoor is when there’s no E2EE - he speaks of the “absolute right to privacy” which the proposed age verification solution wouldn’t breach in any way, so it’s actually the loss of encryption. It’s when a legal and technical framework are put in place to do age verification which can be switched to identity verification in a blink of an eye. It’s when cryptographically attested software is the only way to use the internet which even the author, as a suporter of the upsides, knows what it implies on the downside.
deathanatos 3mo ago
Gotta disagree. The encryption part needed to happen: without it, there's just too much opportunity for governments to intercept unencrypted traffic and abscond with it. We saw that occur with Snowden, and with programs like MUSCULAR in particular. I don't think it's that encryption was harmful, it's that it wasn't enough, and in a sense I agree with TFA & the Sun Tzu bit: it needed to be complemented by legislation that added decent privacy protections, and it largely wasn't. That was a mistake, I suppose, but the current political situation, esp. in the USA, disfavors privacy regulation getting done, ever. The Democrats are … maybe spiritually for it? … but not terrible effectual at getting it done; Obama's response to Snowden was "meh" at best, and Congresspeople, in particular Feinstein especially, let the DNI walk all over her. The GOP has no interest at all in regulating corporations, at all, ever, so with the House/Senate/POTUS all (R) at the moment, it's going to be until at least Nov before it is possible to even think that these might get addressed, and even that's … generous, and I won't be holding my breath for it to occur. Stuff like what we saw in another thread today — with LG wantonly installing spyware — and things like Flock would have happened in addition to network intercepts; they are not happening instead of. Corporations and the government will do whatever the People permit them to get away with.
Dylan16807 3mo ago
> Privacy is being abused by criminals to victimize people at scale. Almost all victimization is being done without end to end encryption. This is not a problem caused by privacy.
- inigyou 3mo ago
  Yep. For example on Instagram DMs, which is why Instagram abolished E2EE, and we all went into an uproar. Also on Discord and Roblox, they are apparently the biggest platforms for this, but they're not E2EE anyway, they're just hiding it because their executives like what's happening.
- ShinyLeftPad 3mo ago
  And I guess you have statistics about how much victimization happens over e2e?:)
ETH_start 3mo ago
He's very clearly arguing against absolute privacy on the Internet and is saying that the people who advocated for it, which he besmirches as "tech bros", are responsible for the governments going too far now, instead of a happy compromise having been set out at the beginning, which by the way totally mischaracterizes the history of the Internet, where the governments were trying to impose total surveillance from the very beginning.
- busterarm 3mo ago
  He’s not exactly wrong either. The founders/executives of a tech startup I worked for spun off a completely unrelated E2EE chat app as a separate startup and didn’t market it to anyone. It’s only used by them and their buddies and basically only for OTR conversations related to their publicly traded company that would have put them in prison. Totally the “let’s defraud these investors and do industrial espionage” type shit. I also know about a good half dozen other VC-funded E2EE chat apps that are also exactly this. They do it just to get something they control in app stores that’s also a separate entity. Then they don’t have to answer uncomfortable questions about why such and such is on their phone. This is some of what regulators are seeing and finding a problem with.
  - ETH_start 3mo ago
    We can agree to disagree on this. Even on this example you gave, I'm not entirely sure it's harmful to society. Having worked in the corporate world, there are just so many regulations that — from what I've seen — there is pervasive non-compliance and the covering up of the non-compliance. I suspect that if every single corporate regulation was effectively enforced, a significant fraction of economic activity would grind to a halt.
    - busterarm 3mo ago
      People often say the same thing about environmental regulation too... I hope you realize what a poor argument (to lawmakers) that is, especially if your goal is to advocate for privacy.

orf 3mo ago

Wow, you missed the entire point of the article.

chaps 3mo ago
Honestly? It's weirdly written and incredibly hard to understand what their point is. I can't tell if they hate or love privacy.
- orf 3mo ago
  > Please make my predictions come out wrong.
  - chaps 3mo ago
    [flagged]
    - layer8 3mo ago
      The author is predicting a decrease in privacy, but would prefer these predictions to be wrong.
      - chaps 3mo ago
        Gotcha, thank you. (just to be clear, my post was just to point out that the article is very difficult to make heads or tails of. it's easy to misinterpret a lot of the points many different ways! kind of like they're being overly implicit with the expectation that everyone'll know what they mean. it's something I do too and my way of cutting through it is to cut my writing in half and focus on clarity over mystique)
        dgellow 3mo ago
        That reads like any old school blog post where the author is sharing their thoughts on a few topics. I don’t see what is confusing about it

some-are-better 3mo ago

Wow, re-read the fine article. He was NOT stating that he wants the outcome you think. He is afraid it is going to happen because the younger generation has no clue or ability to maintain FOSS.