4 ms·

Why is privacy so hard? (2019)

61 points by andsoitis 28d ago

spottedmarley 28d ago
Personal privacy is, and has always been, the job and responsibility of the individual. You can be as private or as public as you allow yourself to be through your own practices. Nobody can give you privacy, you must take it, which requires work and sacrifices that most people are simply unwilling to make, that's why nothing has changed. If it's privacy you want, stop being so public. Avoid surveillance. It's not easy but it's also not impossible, you have to actually value your privacy enough to do the work of establishing it. Good luck.
- mdspan 28d ago
  Yeah, and I think it's gotten much worse with LLMs. If someone wants to use an LLM privately, their two options are either redacting/morphing their data before sending it through or hosting locally, both of which are intractable for most users. And if someone chooses not to use an LLM they face a dramatic loss in productivity. I don't think the tradeoff between privacy and convenience has ever been this severe in history, with the exception of the smartphone.
- k310 28d ago
  > If it's privacy you want, stop being so public. Avoid surveillance. It's not easy but it's also not impossible, you have to actually value your privacy enough to do the work of establishing it I can't avoid traffic cams by any sane means (like taking side roads?) I MIGHT be able to do without the electric company and water company (which I do during outages) but I am not seeing how to avoid the DMV and USPS, which sell my data. Does a privacy seeker have to be a prepper? I certainly hope not. Surveillance capitalism and policing is so pervasive. And the connection is money. Especially with Citizens United, laws are bought to trash any right to, or even possibility of privacy. Not bashing your post, just pointing out the extreme difficulty.
- infinite_spin 28d ago
  Can you explain what you mean by "job" and "you must take it".. what does that mean in concrete terms? And what do you mean by "sacrifices"? For example, if students don't agree to TurnItIn's policy, it becomes significantly harder to take classes. Do you mean to say students should have to suffer the consequences of these sacrifices just because we can't seem to support their right to privacy?
- bigbaguette 28d ago
  Unrestricted invasion of privacy and considering it completely normal is just a libertarian fantasy
  - chadgpt5 28d ago
    More like a libertarian reality
- basilikum 28d ago
  That is overly simplistic to the point where it is hard to interpret it as good faith. We live in a world where both the government is increasingly spying on everything, often in secret, as well as companies in every aspect of modern life who constantly lie about this. It is not a fair choice with natural disadvantages. Blaming all this on the individual reeks of bad faith.
- socalgal2 28d ago
  yes, if have zero friends and family, contact and talk to no one, move out in the boonies away from everyone else, then you can have privacy. Good to know
- Pragmata 28d ago
  >It's not easy but it's also not impossible, you have to actually value your privacy enough to do the work of establishing it. It is literally illegal. Are you suggesting that we must commit crimes?
alphabeta3r56 28d ago
Privacy is only hard because comoanies are not telling/asking tgeir customers before sharing their data. A way to solve this problem would be to create a portal where customer data is stored in control of the customer. Companies are only allowed to tell each other about customers, not even which data they hold. And then each data request goes directly through the customers. Then customers can decide who to share data with. And then those customers will be happy with their choices.
- andsoitis 28d ago
  > Privacy is only hard Privacy is one of those words that you think you understand until you try to define it.
  - infinite_spin 28d ago
    the dictionary definition seems fine: > a state in which one is not observed or disturbed by other people. > the state of being free from public attention. From this, it seems obvious that a person should not be observed in our digital spaces without clear consent, where consent is not tied to preclusion of goods or services (i.e. without coercion).
  - johnnyanmac 28d ago
    Sure. 20 years ago I would agree, and even 10 years ago I'd say there are some nuances to explore. Today, though: governments are actively pushing policy to restrict the internet, legalize backdoors, and normalize mass surveillance. We're in the levels of obvious privacy violations that would make for an overly alarmist dystopian novel if published. There's not much nuance to worry about as of now.
- kulahan 28d ago
  If there isn’t a very strong incentive to share, nobody will. If there is, people will just share it as much as possible to get money, consequences be damned.
- autoexec 27d ago
  > Privacy is only hard because comoanies are not telling/asking tgeir customers before sharing their data. If customers had to log into some website (collecting their data) and then explicitly allow data one company collected on them to be sent to some other company so that the second company can use that data to take advantage of them, no company would ever get access to another company's data again. No customer would do that. It's cool if that's what you want, but it seems like at that point you might as well just make surveillance capitalism illegal.
deleted 28d ago
[deleted]
hacker_homie 28d ago
My thought was to write legislation that gives 20% of my generated ad revenue to me the customer as legal tender (no store credit, coupons) then have the government tax that income. 1. government gets new income source. 2. government is invested in making sure they are not getting short changed. 3. failure to pay me is fraud. 4. When you pay me now I know your crap is spying. 5. Government taxes almost never go down, with this system it going down will immediately be visible to consumers who will balk. Problems: ad revenue is the new shrink-flation without it prices will rise. companies will fight this tooth and nail, but voters get "free" money.
- cogman10 28d ago
  > ad revenue is the new shrink-flation without it prices will rise. Some prices rise, some prices go down. Ads aren't free money, the advertisers are paying for them (I know, seems obvious) but where do the advertisers get the money to advertise? Well, it's baked into the cost of the goods they advertise. That makes everything that advertises more expensive.
  - socalgal2 28d ago
    And yet advertising raises demand, which in intern causes people to offer to meet that demand which means competition, which lowers prices. Lots of examples of this cycle you can search for.
    - cogman10 28d ago
      That only works for smaller and unestablished brands. There are diminishing returns to the economy of scale. Coca-cola, for example, isn't going to lower their prices in response to increased demand from their $4 billion marketing budget.
    - chadgpt5 28d ago
      Higher demand causes higher prices, not lower. Competition is irrelevant because startup competitors have to advertise a lot more, making their prices even higher.
Arubis 28d ago
Privacy is hard because it’s not merely a technical problem. It’s applied to individuals by systems that most individuals have very limited influence into—and those that _do_ have influence often stand to benefit from eroding the privacy of others.
- txrx0000 28d ago
  Precisely. And it's not only privacy, but individual sovereignty in general. I just wrote a mini essay about this half an hour ago on a different but related post and don't want to immediately repeat that, so here's the link to that comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49690354 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49690354
slopblast 28d ago
Very nice summary and we are definitely at an inflection point on privacy. The incentives are misaligned, and the temptation of free digital services cause users to overlook the very real cost of their privacy.
Kuyawa 28d ago
If you want privacy, shut down your windows And spend money on products you can install locally that do not connect to the web. Free products will always abuse your privacy
- mitxela 28d ago
  Which products?
- autoexec 27d ago
  > Free products will always abuse your privacy This ignores that fact that products that cost several thousands of dollars, even tens of thousands, also abuse your privacy. Pretty much always too. It also ignores the fact that local/non-internet connected isn't always an option at any price and that will only continue. Stop blaming the consumers when they're being abused by corporations. If it's you vs a multinational corporation with trillions of dollars you are always going to lose.
prologic 28d ago
Because good privacy is not profitable.
LoganDark 28d ago
Privacy isn't the problem. The problem has been the sea of bad actors trying to undermine it. That's the problem. Stop them, don't put the responsibility on the consumer to claw that privacy back.
- ares623 28d ago
  It takes two to tango
  - LoganDark 28d ago
    It only takes one to be a problem. This isn't a two-way street the same way that communication or collaboration is a two-way street. This is entirely one-way in that the corporate levels are putting down apps, services and hardware designed to undermine privacy. Customers don't have any choice in the matter except to look for alternative packages, but this will stop working eventually (and already has in some markets). The set of possible safe hobbies and experiences continues to shrink as more and more of it becomes impossible to find without weapons against privacy. The only way to stop this is regulation.
cadamsdotcom 28d ago
A lot of value is left on the table because informed people don't give up data. If simple regulation existed - say, "no one can use data for any purpose the user did not explicitly consent to, including product improvements AND including on-selling", that suddenly turns giving up data into a legally-binding, two-party transaction. There'd be an explosion of really cool uses of data as a result of the trust that'd engender. But today's status quo is lucrative - so here we stay.
- Rygian 28d ago
  Any "legally-binding, two-party transaction" between an individual and a large corporate conglomerate is a lost battle (or more precisely, a not-even-fought battle) for the vast majority of individuals. 80% of buyers of anything simply smash "Accept" (and watch through ads/spam) until their device shows the content they wanted to access. (Statistic is made up, but I think it's hard to refute.) Do you call that "explicit consent"?
  - cadamsdotcom 28d ago
    I'm talking of a world in which laws are strong and well written enough that people don't need to worry; they can mash that Accept button and not be getting screwed over. We agree that most peopke aren't equipped to provide informed consent and "buyer beware" won't work. For these the government steps in - car & plane safety for example.
    - mitxela 28d ago
      Has anyone tried arguing they didn't actually consent even though they clicked accept?
cogman10 28d ago
The lack of privacy is due to a lack of regulation and funding of regulatory agencies. It happens precisely because the US is very adverse to adding new privacy laws or enforcing the ones on the books (you need to fund federal regulators if you want them to regulate). Frankly, I think a large reason it goes unaddressed is because governments love to invade privacy just as much as advertisers do. Adding new laws to curtail consumer products from spying also means the likes of the NSA, FBI, or local law enforcement can't also tap into that spying machine. They want google to log everything you do because they are all to happy to use those logs.
nfujd7 28d ago
One thing interesting about the Church is that Kings, Inquisitors, Revolutionaries, Govts etc have all tried to break the seal of confession for thousands od years now. The Church has some how managed to defend it by saying we believe path to repair/forgiveness involves creating and maintaining space where people can confess their sins. If a priest shares those sins with the state, everyone looses trust in the system and therefore breaking the seal over any sin is equal to dismantling the institution itself. This argument is literally the same structure used to defend attorney client confidentiality, psychiatrist patient confidentiality, corporations(telcos, email providers, platforms) from handing all data to the state. But for all those cases the state has manahed to add huge amount of expceptions which it has not been aable to do with the Church. So the Churchs defense of the seal almost since 1215 has stood on a Belief. A story literally. That privacy is requires for repair. Everyone else just hasnt come up with a good enough story. Secondly what is stored in the head of a priest is usually forgotten cuz human memory is flaky and no one is writing anything down in a central db. So every now and then a state attack on the seal work but the everything then reliea on how reliable the memory of a single priest is. Its like a terrible distributed atorage system that is constantly forgetting things. Notice this is literally what large platforms have now built to defend privacy. Its called data minimization and costs a huge amount that they constantly cry about. So its really funny how the church just stumbled into a solution that is cheap and hard to attack.
- chii 28d ago
  The reason it works for churches is because the data told to churches are somewhat embarrassing for the confessor, and if leaked, will destroy the confessor's reputation (if not get into legal troubles). The data that google collects are somewhat useless on their own, and is only valuable in aggregate with the millions of others they also collect. And for an individual, the leakage of this data (e.g., your advertising profile) is not detrimental unless the data is highly identifying (like your name, address, phone etc). Therefore, people tend to simply ignore such leaks, and place zero value on the data. This difference in valuation is how google generates their money. The church, on the other hand, generates value from the gratitude of the confessors, and is therefore, aligned with the interest of the confessors.
beloch 28d ago
We should tax data. Hear me out. Google, Meta, etc. offer "free" services to a significant portion of the world's population. This isn't charitable work. They do this for data that makes them money. Lots of money. Data has real monetary value, but governments don't treat it as such. Few, if any, jurisdictions view data exports as taxable. It's simply not tracked. If data collection isn't tracked, how can one realistically enforce privacy standards? If we tax data, then we'll have an incentive to track how data is being used and corporations will suddenly have a direct financial interest in not just casually collecting data if they don't need to. Such taxes should be gauged to be tolerable for Google and Meta, but high enough to make companies who make their money via other avenues (e.g. Smart TV sellers) to take a pass on data collection.
- drdaeman 28d ago
  I like the overall direction, but how to tax it without screwing over hobbyist archivists aka data hoarders? That is, how to assess the value of some datastore, somehow distinguishing between personal preference profiles, random LLM software slop and, say, vintage anime collections?
  - matheusmoreira 28d ago
    > how to tax it without screwing over hobbyist archivists If you're a corporation, you're taxed. If you're a human, you're not.
    - rileymat2 28d ago
      Perhaps you are human that wants to isolate the expenses, activity and liability into a corporate organization, like Wikimedia?
    - mitxela 28d ago
      Oh cool so Google just has to become a sole trader
- MrDrMcCoy 28d ago
  I can imagine this having negative consequences for open platforms, such as Wikipedia, Bluesky, Mastodon, Common Crawl, etc. It could have implications for Stack Exchange keeping their datasets downloadable, and general API availability of most platforms. How would this make provisions for keeping the things that are currently free to access still free? People are already buckling under the weight of subscription fatigue, and I can only see this making that worse. I'm willing to give up a lot for the sake of privacy, but the people who would be most affected by such a change could stand to lose a lot more.
Glyptodon 28d ago
IMO it's not that it's hard but that nobody makes money from it the way they do from the panopticon so listed factors 4 and 8 have outsize influence.
roenxi 28d ago
The article is exploring a broad topic but one area that seems to be overlooked is governments making privacy illegal or actively working to undermine it. The major privacy risk right now is things like social media age verification laws which, in principle, probably make pseudonymous sites like HN illegal or on the path to being illegal in many jurisdictions. It is hard to maintain privacy when a law enforcement body insists that it isn't allowed. There are also indications that companies quickly become too enmeshed with intelligence services to be able to create properly private options even if tactically they might have an interest. Companies like Telegram stand out as looking difficult to run in practice because of the pressure from various snoops. If it is legal to create private options then they will always exist because the people who care about specific aspects of privacy can self-serve.
daft_pink 28d ago
Because there are numerous choke points where people need to use devices to do a thing and those devices can record you and the financial incentives for the companies that own these choke points is so great that they end up selling your data. Even if Apple truly had perfect privacy you still need to use credit cards, bank accounts, insurance, cell towers, drive a car, etc. I think that’s the underlying reason why privacy is so hard.
- chadgpt5 28d ago
  Why's there no competition?
johnnyanmac 28d ago
It's fairly simple 1) there's a lot of money to be made with data, so there are a lot of incentives to jump over any gates setup to protect privacy. If not actively tear down the gates and lobby to make it illegal to build more gates 2) The policy makers have a lot of power to be gained with data, so there are a lot of incentives to at worst, legalize backdoors so they get access to data, and at worst make it illegal to build more gates Two powerful incentives in lockstep for once means an uphill battle for the force that is society. There's a lot of points brought up, but it mostly comes down to (the articles's points) 4) and 8). In my eyes, everything else is secondary and only serves to justify the ends of 4) (which includes 8, the only real barrier in the way).
unsungNovelty 28d ago
Privacy is hard because the definition of privacy differs depending on who you ask to. And people think companies have your data, so "what's the point?". Data economy which survives on privacy encroaching practices depend on ur "stream of data". Reducing the flow can exclude you from data breaches, spam calls, personalised pricing which rips from you etc. Sure, there are PII which can't be hidden. But you surely can reduce the footprint. And browsing the internet is always a better UX with adblockers. https://www.unsungnovelty.org/posts/07/2026/fire-alarms-privacy/ https://www.unsungnovelty.org/posts/07/2026/fire-alarms-priv...
HansMeist 28d ago
[dead]
deleted 27d ago
[deleted]
egberts1 27d ago
One only need to brush up on John Stuart Mill and his "On Liberty (1859). He wrote about individual liberty (before SCOTUS Chief Warren and Brandeis branded the word "privacy" in their 1890 "Rights to Privacy". He should have been one of the Founding Fathers.

61 points by andsoitis 28d ago

Personal privacy is, and has always been, the job and responsibility of the individual. You can be as private or as public as you allow yourself to be through your own practices. Nobody can give you privacy, you must take it, which requires work and sacrifices that most people are simply unwilling to make, that's why nothing has changed. If it's privacy you want, stop being so public. Avoid surveillance. It's not easy but it's also not impossible, you have to actually value your privacy enough to do the work of establishing it. Good luck.

mdspan 28d ago
Yeah, and I think it's gotten much worse with LLMs. If someone wants to use an LLM privately, their two options are either redacting/morphing their data before sending it through or hosting locally, both of which are intractable for most users. And if someone chooses not to use an LLM they face a dramatic loss in productivity. I don't think the tradeoff between privacy and convenience has ever been this severe in history, with the exception of the smartphone.
k310 28d ago
> If it's privacy you want, stop being so public. Avoid surveillance. It's not easy but it's also not impossible, you have to actually value your privacy enough to do the work of establishing it I can't avoid traffic cams by any sane means (like taking side roads?) I MIGHT be able to do without the electric company and water company (which I do during outages) but I am not seeing how to avoid the DMV and USPS, which sell my data. Does a privacy seeker have to be a prepper? I certainly hope not. Surveillance capitalism and policing is so pervasive. And the connection is money. Especially with Citizens United, laws are bought to trash any right to, or even possibility of privacy. Not bashing your post, just pointing out the extreme difficulty.
infinite_spin 28d ago
Can you explain what you mean by "job" and "you must take it".. what does that mean in concrete terms? And what do you mean by "sacrifices"? For example, if students don't agree to TurnItIn's policy, it becomes significantly harder to take classes. Do you mean to say students should have to suffer the consequences of these sacrifices just because we can't seem to support their right to privacy?
bigbaguette 28d ago
Unrestricted invasion of privacy and considering it completely normal is just a libertarian fantasy
- chadgpt5 28d ago
  More like a libertarian reality
basilikum 28d ago
That is overly simplistic to the point where it is hard to interpret it as good faith. We live in a world where both the government is increasingly spying on everything, often in secret, as well as companies in every aspect of modern life who constantly lie about this. It is not a fair choice with natural disadvantages. Blaming all this on the individual reeks of bad faith.
socalgal2 28d ago
yes, if have zero friends and family, contact and talk to no one, move out in the boonies away from everyone else, then you can have privacy. Good to know
Pragmata 28d ago
>It's not easy but it's also not impossible, you have to actually value your privacy enough to do the work of establishing it. It is literally illegal. Are you suggesting that we must commit crimes?

alphabeta3r56 28d ago

Privacy is only hard because comoanies are not telling/asking tgeir customers before sharing their data. A way to solve this problem would be to create a portal where customer data is stored in control of the customer. Companies are only allowed to tell each other about customers, not even which data they hold. And then each data request goes directly through the customers. Then customers can decide who to share data with. And then those customers will be happy with their choices.

andsoitis 28d ago
> Privacy is only hard Privacy is one of those words that you think you understand until you try to define it.
- infinite_spin 28d ago
  the dictionary definition seems fine: > a state in which one is not observed or disturbed by other people. > the state of being free from public attention. From this, it seems obvious that a person should not be observed in our digital spaces without clear consent, where consent is not tied to preclusion of goods or services (i.e. without coercion).
- johnnyanmac 28d ago
  Sure. 20 years ago I would agree, and even 10 years ago I'd say there are some nuances to explore. Today, though: governments are actively pushing policy to restrict the internet, legalize backdoors, and normalize mass surveillance. We're in the levels of obvious privacy violations that would make for an overly alarmist dystopian novel if published. There's not much nuance to worry about as of now.
kulahan 28d ago
If there isn’t a very strong incentive to share, nobody will. If there is, people will just share it as much as possible to get money, consequences be damned.
autoexec 27d ago
> Privacy is only hard because comoanies are not telling/asking tgeir customers before sharing their data. If customers had to log into some website (collecting their data) and then explicitly allow data one company collected on them to be sent to some other company so that the second company can use that data to take advantage of them, no company would ever get access to another company's data again. No customer would do that. It's cool if that's what you want, but it seems like at that point you might as well just make surveillance capitalism illegal.

deleted 28d ago

[deleted]

hacker_homie 28d ago

My thought was to write legislation that gives 20% of my generated ad revenue to me the customer as legal tender (no store credit, coupons) then have the government tax that income. 1. government gets new income source. 2. government is invested in making sure they are not getting short changed. 3. failure to pay me is fraud. 4. When you pay me now I know your crap is spying. 5. Government taxes almost never go down, with this system it going down will immediately be visible to consumers who will balk. Problems: ad revenue is the new shrink-flation without it prices will rise. companies will fight this tooth and nail, but voters get "free" money.

cogman10 28d ago
> ad revenue is the new shrink-flation without it prices will rise. Some prices rise, some prices go down. Ads aren't free money, the advertisers are paying for them (I know, seems obvious) but where do the advertisers get the money to advertise? Well, it's baked into the cost of the goods they advertise. That makes everything that advertises more expensive.
- socalgal2 28d ago
  And yet advertising raises demand, which in intern causes people to offer to meet that demand which means competition, which lowers prices. Lots of examples of this cycle you can search for.
  - cogman10 28d ago
    That only works for smaller and unestablished brands. There are diminishing returns to the economy of scale. Coca-cola, for example, isn't going to lower their prices in response to increased demand from their $4 billion marketing budget.
  - chadgpt5 28d ago
    Higher demand causes higher prices, not lower. Competition is irrelevant because startup competitors have to advertise a lot more, making their prices even higher.

Arubis 28d ago

Privacy is hard because it’s not merely a technical problem. It’s applied to individuals by systems that most individuals have very limited influence into—and those that _do_ have influence often stand to benefit from eroding the privacy of others.

txrx0000 28d ago
Precisely. And it's not only privacy, but individual sovereignty in general. I just wrote a mini essay about this half an hour ago on a different but related post and don't want to immediately repeat that, so here's the link to that comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49690354 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49690354

slopblast 28d ago

Very nice summary and we are definitely at an inflection point on privacy. The incentives are misaligned, and the temptation of free digital services cause users to overlook the very real cost of their privacy.

Kuyawa 28d ago

If you want privacy, shut down your windows And spend money on products you can install locally that do not connect to the web. Free products will always abuse your privacy

mitxela 28d ago
Which products?
autoexec 27d ago
> Free products will always abuse your privacy This ignores that fact that products that cost several thousands of dollars, even tens of thousands, also abuse your privacy. Pretty much always too. It also ignores the fact that local/non-internet connected isn't always an option at any price and that will only continue. Stop blaming the consumers when they're being abused by corporations. If it's you vs a multinational corporation with trillions of dollars you are always going to lose.

prologic 28d ago

Because good privacy is not profitable.

LoganDark 28d ago

Privacy isn't the problem. The problem has been the sea of bad actors trying to undermine it. That's the problem. Stop them, don't put the responsibility on the consumer to claw that privacy back.

ares623 28d ago
It takes two to tango
- LoganDark 28d ago
  It only takes one to be a problem. This isn't a two-way street the same way that communication or collaboration is a two-way street. This is entirely one-way in that the corporate levels are putting down apps, services and hardware designed to undermine privacy. Customers don't have any choice in the matter except to look for alternative packages, but this will stop working eventually (and already has in some markets). The set of possible safe hobbies and experiences continues to shrink as more and more of it becomes impossible to find without weapons against privacy. The only way to stop this is regulation.

cadamsdotcom 28d ago

A lot of value is left on the table because informed people don't give up data. If simple regulation existed - say, "no one can use data for any purpose the user did not explicitly consent to, including product improvements AND including on-selling", that suddenly turns giving up data into a legally-binding, two-party transaction. There'd be an explosion of really cool uses of data as a result of the trust that'd engender. But today's status quo is lucrative - so here we stay.

Rygian 28d ago
Any "legally-binding, two-party transaction" between an individual and a large corporate conglomerate is a lost battle (or more precisely, a not-even-fought battle) for the vast majority of individuals. 80% of buyers of anything simply smash "Accept" (and watch through ads/spam) until their device shows the content they wanted to access. (Statistic is made up, but I think it's hard to refute.) Do you call that "explicit consent"?
- cadamsdotcom 28d ago
  I'm talking of a world in which laws are strong and well written enough that people don't need to worry; they can mash that Accept button and not be getting screwed over. We agree that most peopke aren't equipped to provide informed consent and "buyer beware" won't work. For these the government steps in - car & plane safety for example.
  - mitxela 28d ago
    Has anyone tried arguing they didn't actually consent even though they clicked accept?

cogman10 28d ago

The lack of privacy is due to a lack of regulation and funding of regulatory agencies. It happens precisely because the US is very adverse to adding new privacy laws or enforcing the ones on the books (you need to fund federal regulators if you want them to regulate). Frankly, I think a large reason it goes unaddressed is because governments love to invade privacy just as much as advertisers do. Adding new laws to curtail consumer products from spying also means the likes of the NSA, FBI, or local law enforcement can't also tap into that spying machine. They want google to log everything you do because they are all to happy to use those logs.

nfujd7 28d ago

One thing interesting about the Church is that Kings, Inquisitors, Revolutionaries, Govts etc have all tried to break the seal of confession for thousands od years now. The Church has some how managed to defend it by saying we believe path to repair/forgiveness involves creating and maintaining space where people can confess their sins. If a priest shares those sins with the state, everyone looses trust in the system and therefore breaking the seal over any sin is equal to dismantling the institution itself. This argument is literally the same structure used to defend attorney client confidentiality, psychiatrist patient confidentiality, corporations(telcos, email providers, platforms) from handing all data to the state. But for all those cases the state has manahed to add huge amount of expceptions which it has not been aable to do with the Church. So the Churchs defense of the seal almost since 1215 has stood on a Belief. A story literally. That privacy is requires for repair. Everyone else just hasnt come up with a good enough story. Secondly what is stored in the head of a priest is usually forgotten cuz human memory is flaky and no one is writing anything down in a central db. So every now and then a state attack on the seal work but the everything then reliea on how reliable the memory of a single priest is. Its like a terrible distributed atorage system that is constantly forgetting things. Notice this is literally what large platforms have now built to defend privacy. Its called data minimization and costs a huge amount that they constantly cry about. So its really funny how the church just stumbled into a solution that is cheap and hard to attack.

chii 28d ago
The reason it works for churches is because the data told to churches are somewhat embarrassing for the confessor, and if leaked, will destroy the confessor's reputation (if not get into legal troubles). The data that google collects are somewhat useless on their own, and is only valuable in aggregate with the millions of others they also collect. And for an individual, the leakage of this data (e.g., your advertising profile) is not detrimental unless the data is highly identifying (like your name, address, phone etc). Therefore, people tend to simply ignore such leaks, and place zero value on the data. This difference in valuation is how google generates their money. The church, on the other hand, generates value from the gratitude of the confessors, and is therefore, aligned with the interest of the confessors.

beloch 28d ago

We should tax data. Hear me out. Google, Meta, etc. offer "free" services to a significant portion of the world's population. This isn't charitable work. They do this for data that makes them money. Lots of money. Data has real monetary value, but governments don't treat it as such. Few, if any, jurisdictions view data exports as taxable. It's simply not tracked. If data collection isn't tracked, how can one realistically enforce privacy standards? If we tax data, then we'll have an incentive to track how data is being used and corporations will suddenly have a direct financial interest in not just casually collecting data if they don't need to. Such taxes should be gauged to be tolerable for Google and Meta, but high enough to make companies who make their money via other avenues (e.g. Smart TV sellers) to take a pass on data collection.

drdaeman 28d ago
I like the overall direction, but how to tax it without screwing over hobbyist archivists aka data hoarders? That is, how to assess the value of some datastore, somehow distinguishing between personal preference profiles, random LLM software slop and, say, vintage anime collections?
- matheusmoreira 28d ago
  > how to tax it without screwing over hobbyist archivists If you're a corporation, you're taxed. If you're a human, you're not.
  - rileymat2 28d ago
    Perhaps you are human that wants to isolate the expenses, activity and liability into a corporate organization, like Wikimedia?
  - mitxela 28d ago
    Oh cool so Google just has to become a sole trader
MrDrMcCoy 28d ago
I can imagine this having negative consequences for open platforms, such as Wikipedia, Bluesky, Mastodon, Common Crawl, etc. It could have implications for Stack Exchange keeping their datasets downloadable, and general API availability of most platforms. How would this make provisions for keeping the things that are currently free to access still free? People are already buckling under the weight of subscription fatigue, and I can only see this making that worse. I'm willing to give up a lot for the sake of privacy, but the people who would be most affected by such a change could stand to lose a lot more.

Glyptodon 28d ago

IMO it's not that it's hard but that nobody makes money from it the way they do from the panopticon so listed factors 4 and 8 have outsize influence.

roenxi 28d ago

The article is exploring a broad topic but one area that seems to be overlooked is governments making privacy illegal or actively working to undermine it. The major privacy risk right now is things like social media age verification laws which, in principle, probably make pseudonymous sites like HN illegal or on the path to being illegal in many jurisdictions. It is hard to maintain privacy when a law enforcement body insists that it isn't allowed. There are also indications that companies quickly become too enmeshed with intelligence services to be able to create properly private options even if tactically they might have an interest. Companies like Telegram stand out as looking difficult to run in practice because of the pressure from various snoops. If it is legal to create private options then they will always exist because the people who care about specific aspects of privacy can self-serve.

daft_pink 28d ago

Because there are numerous choke points where people need to use devices to do a thing and those devices can record you and the financial incentives for the companies that own these choke points is so great that they end up selling your data. Even if Apple truly had perfect privacy you still need to use credit cards, bank accounts, insurance, cell towers, drive a car, etc. I think that’s the underlying reason why privacy is so hard.

chadgpt5 28d ago
Why's there no competition?

johnnyanmac 28d ago

It's fairly simple 1) there's a lot of money to be made with data, so there are a lot of incentives to jump over any gates setup to protect privacy. If not actively tear down the gates and lobby to make it illegal to build more gates 2) The policy makers have a lot of power to be gained with data, so there are a lot of incentives to at worst, legalize backdoors so they get access to data, and at worst make it illegal to build more gates Two powerful incentives in lockstep for once means an uphill battle for the force that is society. There's a lot of points brought up, but it mostly comes down to (the articles's points) 4) and 8). In my eyes, everything else is secondary and only serves to justify the ends of 4) (which includes 8, the only real barrier in the way).

unsungNovelty 28d ago

Privacy is hard because the definition of privacy differs depending on who you ask to. And people think companies have your data, so "what's the point?". Data economy which survives on privacy encroaching practices depend on ur "stream of data". Reducing the flow can exclude you from data breaches, spam calls, personalised pricing which rips from you etc. Sure, there are PII which can't be hidden. But you surely can reduce the footprint. And browsing the internet is always a better UX with adblockers. https://www.unsungnovelty.org/posts/07/2026/fire-alarms-privacy/ https://www.unsungnovelty.org/posts/07/2026/fire-alarms-priv...

HansMeist 28d ago

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deleted 27d ago

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egberts1 27d ago

One only need to brush up on John Stuart Mill and his "On Liberty (1859). He wrote about individual liberty (before SCOTUS Chief Warren and Brandeis branded the word "privacy" in their 1890 "Rights to Privacy". He should have been one of the Founding Fathers.