I've almost given up. I'm pretty much despondent at this point.

There is a booth on my way to work where they give out free Lays chips in exchange for your photo. The gimmick is that it's like a photo booth. I asked the attendant to read the privacy policy, and it's frightening, to say the least. I have no doubt that they are contracting with some AI consultant to be able to identify your face in the crowd and link it to your email address, which of course can be used to identify you freely on the Internet.

People are freely giving away their identities and their rights for a free bag of potato chips.

I always try to make sure my face is covered when I walk by it, but I can't help but despair a little when I realize that I am still surrounded by security cameras. At least one would hope that the MTA police are too busy or understaffed to do anything malicious with my face.

I think that the site is not even working anymore. Anyways, they said they were not keeping the images, and I have no reason to doubt it.

It's a pity that Microsoft is going only after the corporate market, Oracle style, and not trying to make money from consumers any more. That leaves Apple as about the only big independent player in that field. We could have benefited from the competition.

https://github.com/CellularPrivacy/Android-IMSI-Catcher-Dete...

Depends on what you mean by "sufficiently" and "encrypted"!

I'm not an expert, but my guess is these are still truly difficult, deep unsolved questions... We don't even know yet if one-way functions exist; and existing modes of analysis increasingly seem insufficient to fully account for the apparent recent successes of this last wave of 'AI' on ostensibly non-convex optimization problems! (Not to mention the debates about the possibility of fundamental physical/computational complexity limits to intelligence explosion, and so forth...)

So who knows at this point; but I think it is still an open question whether a future AI could reasonably 'break' even today's commodity encryption.

http://valerieaurora.org/hash.html

But it did drift into discussing a more offensive AI than passive monitoring done today.

Most people have no mental capacity to imagine the consequences of someone misusing their private information until either it happens to them or they see it happening in some specific scenario.

What bothers me is that everyone is being carefully conditioned to misplace the blame. Person A meticulously constructs a system designed to screw you over. They willfully neglect its security for years. Then person B comes along, pushes a button and triggers the system. These days 99% of the blame somehow goes towards person B. (Evil Hackers, or that one employee who forgot to install some update, or whatever.) Mass media is totally on-board with this kind of crap.

By the way, the same applies to AI "threat". Should we worry about AI overtaking all the world's smart toasters and simultaneously overloading the to cause mass fires? Or should we worry about the fact that those toasters somehow have processors, are Internet-enabled and run shit software?

* * *

Also, "the battle for privacy" is a bad mental model. There is no single battle you win or loose. It's a gradient. The more information you leak, the worse off you are in the long run.

Weird that those people want their poops and bedtime routines live on TV globally. Having something private is not bad and anyone who thinks so hasn't taken a second to think about it.

I think the extra dangerous thing here is propaganda along with the AI to convince everyone it is okay, and I'd say that is already happening, as your comment describes.

Aside from electing responsible people to government in order to pass regulations, what can a regular person do to change the profit incentives at scale of the companies who are building the mass surveillance systems? It seems a dire and impossible situation.

There's no need to be so fatalistic. The EU is about to enact GDPR; a huge privacy preserving peice of legislation. It seems like the large technology companies are going to give the same protections globally (verification is too much fuss). This is a huge win, and US citizens get it for 'free'.

Here are some ideas for more productive things than despairing on Hacker News:

- Vote with your neurons. Stop using services that you find objectionable, even if you enjoy them.

- Stay abreast of issues via organizations like the EFF, EPIC and the FSF in the US; ORG, Privacy International and FSFE in the UK, etc. Send them your cold hard cash.

- Speak to your representatives, and give them your angle. If they're being paid by the organizations you're worried about, tell them politely what you think of this.

- Socially, as charmingly as possible, let people know what you think about surveillance if it comes up. It's a fun one if framed correctly, as it doesn't divide down left/right lines, and no-one likes to sound authoritarian. Offer help and expertise to people who are wishing to make privacy preserving changes (e.g. move off gmail, set up a pseudonym, configure a VPN, etc.)

I agree with pretty much all of the concerns you and many others have cited, and I worry about that stuff too. On the other hand, I think about the past. How much privacy did most humans have in history?

To be clear: I'm nothing like an expert on these topics.

I'm specifically not considering the wandering nomad types. I think that the vast majority of all humans who have existed lived in fairly insular communities.

So you're a member of a small town where most adults and kids work in agriculture in order to survive. The building you live in is crowded, and not just with immediate family. You sleep in the same room as a number of other people.

What privacy do you have? Cross talk/gossip moves very quickly and is pervasive. I believe if any member of this community does anything out of the norm, every member will very quickly find out about it.

I also think that most any deviance from the norm was met with, at best, suspicion.

Are you free to leave and do your own thing? Sure, but isn't that quite risky? Maybe you could join another community...maybe. But the privacy situation remains the same.

Excluding the romantic but minority cases of hearty frontier settler, and the like, I don't think humans have enjoyed much privacy at all, ever.

I'll say it again: I'm an amateur at best in these topics.

Isn't it basic human nature to, on average, form gossipy, minimally private communities?

I'm not forgetting the enormous differences between what I just described, whether it be accurate or not, and what's happening today with technology.

I'm just thinking that, perhaps, only a small percentage of all humans in history have enjoyed anything like real privacy.

PS: I'd love to receive clarifications/corrections on this from more knowledgeable folk.

For a good person, in a sense that covers most people, having your past reputation follow you around is a benefit, the ability to wipe out reputation only benefits those with negative reputation. Furthermore, if there's a general assumption that it will follow you around, it acts as a deterrent to avoid doing immoral things, since you won't be able to easily walk away from that.

The obvious limitation to "anyone can publish any information about you, tag it to your face" is the well-established concept of libel. Publishing false harmful information is already forbidden, but they should be able to "warn the world" if the information is truthful.

The amount of data Google has and the amount of data a government will have gives an order of magnitude advantage to whoever gets to harness it.

If you have to collect info on someone "the old fashioned way" (like being siblings with them or marrying them) the power differential in the relationship is bounded by definition. To me, privacy is almost like a vector with two components—the level of privacy, plus the degree of intimacy of the relationship.

Ah, you mean like the US punishing the company that leaked one out of every two social security numbers of its citizens? Or China, a country worldly-known for the Great Firewall? Or Russia, in which you either hand out data about your customers to the government, or your business fails?

I mean, the EU's actually giving a shit about their citizens' privacy, but they are pretty lonely in that fight. My country (bordering EU) doesn't give a shit, and neither does Serbia, a country that's supposed to join the EU in the next decade (yeah, I know, wishful thinking).

Even if you live in a so-called democracy, chances are that you can make exactly 0 effect. And there are all sorts of other problems which have much higher priority. FFS, I can't run to be a president of my own country. It's in our constitution that you have to declare yourself as a member of one out of three ethnicities just to be eligible to run. The country lost three cases in the European Court of Human Rights because of this and similar fuckups in our constitution, oldest of which will be a decade old next year, and our constitution is still unchanged.

I truly do care about my own privacy and about my citizen's privacy. Yet, if I decided to advocate for certain things inside my own country to make it better, I would have at least three problems much higher in my agenda than online privacy.

The usual rebuttal I see to this mindset is "well, there's so many laws out there you're bound to accidentally incriminate yourself for something minor".

Is that the real concern here? Are people more concerned with autonomous monitoring itself, or the potential outcomes/implications that come with it? I'd love to understand this mindset. (As an aside, I've always advocated for modernizing/reforming laws so that doesn't happen, instead of blaming news tools that help law enforcement do its job.)

I think we can agree there is some amount of potential benefit of this kind of pervasive monitoring (right?). I also think we can all agree there are potential downsides as well. In an ideal world, I would think we'd take an approach that minimizes the downsides while maximizing the upsides, but if people are actually taking concern with the loss of privacy to autonomous programming (i.e. non-humans), I have no idea how to measure how "good" such a system is.

(As an additional aside, there's obviously potential for misuse by human actors, but that seems like a separate issue to tackle as well: everything has potential for misuse, and needs the proper precautions and safeguards put in place to ensure it isn't misused.)

That kind of assumes legally OK is everywhere and always the same as ethical, morally OK. Which is I guess easy to do, until life teaches you personally that there's a wide gulf between the two.

"You measure democracy by the freedom it gives its dissidents, not the freedom it gives its assimilated conformists." - Abbie Hoffman

I have yet to see much in the way of concrete harms from the supposed privacy issues plaguing online advertising. Everyone has a favorite hypothetical situation where Google dobs you in to the Chinese government, but no evidence that anything of the sort is actually happening.

This is simple and harmless, but this same information has other uses that are not so harmless. They may not be being used right now, but they may start to be used in the future

Let's say you tweet some anti-American stuff from time to time and the US government decides they want you to stop. They probably won't put a bullet in your head, but they might dig up information on you and arrest you for something totally unrelated.

This happens already. It doesn't really matter what you think of them, but people like Martin Shkreli in the US and Tommy Robinson in the UK were obviously targeted by the state because they didn't like what they were doing. They dug up information and they got them on something unrelated.

AI and tech gives governments the ability to do this to new levels. They might crash your self-driving car, or they might cause your smart-TV to catch fire while your in bed, and no one would know. We'd all carry on believing surveillance is in the interest of our safety.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Nacchio

I haven't heard of nation-state level repercussions but the persistent profiling has already bitten a few people in the ass, such as the case where Target's profiling of a teenaged girl and their subsequent marketing betrayed her pregnancy status to her parents.

In the presence of all the tracking that people rail against, there are so few actual harms that everyone invents an issue.

I think this is telling.

Institutions have a long life. All the data collected today, too, will have an extremely long life. I am sure German Jews thought the census records, tax returns, synagogue membership lists, parish records that identified them as Jewish were harmless as well - until they weren't.

Suggesting that, amongst numerous possible scenarios of abuse, if there is nothing happening now then it has absolutely no potential for harm is an overwhelmingly ignorant position. Not to mention, the public would have absolutely no idea of such abuses even if they were happening.

But to actually answer your question, here is mobile malware [1] found by the lookout team that used 3 different vulnerabilities to complete compromise an iPhone all through a link opened in Safari. This allowed for applications that encrypt messages in transit, but not at rest on the device, to be compromised. Foreign governments used this malware to target investigative journalist and activists.

[1] https://info.lookout.com/rs/051-ESQ-475/images/lookout-pegas...