That's simultaneously an admirable ethical stance... ...and total BS.
Put your money where your mouth is. Post your full banking and personally identifying details immediately, without hesitation or regret.
If you;d rather not, maybe you actually agree that not all issues of privacy come down to ethics. Some details of a person's life really do deserve privacy.
I think we thought of computers and the internet as our allies in privacy. They are not. They are our enemies.
I think we should stop trusting computers, any computers, as much as we possibly can.
Especially if you're in a minority that your government may try to punish.
---
We all deserve privacy, and we are all almost completely denied privacy, by design, by hundreds of systems we use daily.
I highly recommend the novels "Daemon" and "Freedom" by Daniel Suarez, which explore just how vulnerable our digital infrastructure is.
That's how people feel on the internet, and you're asking them to throw in the towel completely and accept they'll never be able to share anything on the internet in private. You're even going as far as to say if they want something private they shouldn't be doing it. Both of these two things are untrue, but especially the idea that technology is inherently un-private and can never be so.
I'm sorry, but I think you need to start with a list of ways you think people can use technology which has a high degree of certainty of being and remaining private.
Because I can't think of any.
Credit cards are an abomination. ISPs and wireless carriers know way too much metadata. Every social media company is a horror show. The ability to uniquely identify your browser across sites is terrifying. NSA's Carnivore. Keyloggers. Zero day exploits in the OS, in the browser, etc. Row hammer. Spectre and Meltdown. Elemental Technologies. SMS authentication and account recovery. Every online store knows way too much.
I mean, there is literally no way to even secure your IDENTITY:
https://www.wired.com/2010/05/lifelock-identity-theft/
And even if you do everything perfectly, Equifax might screw you, or Oklahoma:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2019/01/16/massi...
So, can you list maybe one or two things in technology you think are strong-guarantee secure and private?
And I'm not saying to give up. This is the fight of our lives. But right now we've LOST. We need to think about how to start over, to try to win next time.
You forgot the second part of that quote that's much more relevant to this conversation:
> "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place, but if you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines including Google do retain this information for some time, and it's important, for example that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act. It is possible that that information could be made available to the authorities."
Just need to add "we are all subject to buggy permissions APIs" :/
... Says the billionaire to the gay man in Nigeria who could be killed if this were public knowledge?
... Says the billionaire to the journalist with private sources doing legit work?
... Says the billionaire to the person who votes 'ABC' but works in company who votes 'XYZ' and hate those 'ABC voters' and who could lose their job due to blatant political discrimination?
I quite fundamentally disagree with this concept as it abnegates the very nature of privacy.
Different words, ideas, have utterly different meanings in different social contexts and in different cultures, different regimes.
It's a deeply cynical quote from him, I think, that facilitates his own 'bottom line' i.e. as someone who makes billions from the exchange of 'public' information.
"We've lost our ability to keep secrets."
It's true that privacy is harder but it's definitely not true that we can't keep secrets. We control technology and the internet, and we can definitely 'choose privacy', it's mostly a matter of will, and the pragmatic acceptance that it won't be perfect.
Privacy was taken for granted, but I believe we should recognize it as a basic right.
It'll be a little bit harder for example in the digital age, but we can absolutely have it, we just need to make the choice.
I think we thought of computers and the internet as our allies in privacy. They are not. They are our enemies.
I think we should stop trusting computers, any computers, as much as we possibly can.
Especially if you're in a minority that your government may try to punish.
---
I care deeply about all those people. I hate that computers have been weaponized against them. It's a tragedy to go from the optimism of improving the world with computers and networks, to where we are today.
I fundamentally disagree with you that we can achieve privacy.
Your ISP knows too much. Your phone carrier knows too much. Your DNS knows too much. The Credit Agencies know too much. Your CPU is too insecure. Your OS, browser, and other apps are, too. We keep turning decentralized / federated services into centralized ones. Every ad network knows too much. Your browser knows too much. It's too easy to identify you nearly uniquely from your browser, even if you try to stop it. TOR has a lot of problems, and exit nodes are the devil. Blockchain is too easy to track. Keyloggers are far too common. SMS verification and recovery are the worst things ever. Face Tracking is entirely too viable. License Plate tracking is entirely too viable. Credit Card companies know too much. Banks know too much. Employers know too much. Every online commerce site knows too much. Our phones know too much. Polling companies know too much. The political parties know too much. The NSA knows entirely too much. Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Microsoft, all know too much.
I think things like Kenton Varda's Sandstorm are a good step. I hope to see more things like them.
If you want something to be secret, don't let a computer know you're doing it. Any computer.
When you say "we just need to make the choice," I don't believe you any more. I think that's kind of like saying Communist Utopia, or Libertarian Utopia can exist. All that needs to happen is all of human nature needs to change. :(
I think tech folks like us need to work our asses off to create systems with real privacy that are just as good or better than the ones that destroy privacy. Because if they're remotely worse, in basically any way, they won't catch on.
Note that Facebook will be almost entirely impossible to replace. Because of the Network effect.
No, just some legislation, policies, some new architecture, possibly some technology changes.
If the government for example banned any org from collecting any personal information at all without specific explicit permission, and applied the same to sharing, it would quite fundamentally change the landscape.
In fact, just taking a 'closed' approach to privacy instead of 'open' in most systems, then most privacy problems would be addressed.
Obviously, a 'hacker' could steal stuff, but those are generally marginal cases, and there's no reason that we need to live with that either.
How often to hackers steal money from your regular banks? Not very often. If we treated personal information like private data then we'd be living in a new world, about the 1990's.
->click<-
People will click the button ever time.
I think human nature needs to change.
Or else we need to work our asses off to invent better technology, but we're nowhere close.
> I have nothing to hide
> Because no one is trying to hurt you
Do you have any sources on this? This kind of retroactive censorship seems to be the latest fashion in the English-speaking world [1][2][3], and it's reasonable to expect such fashion to spread in Russia, but I haven't heard of any examples.
[1] https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/zmdwk3/here-are-the-homo...
[2] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/football/2018/01/10/everton-defe...
[3] http://www.thedrive.com/accelerator/23138/conor-dalys-nascar...
I think we thought of computers and the internet as our allies in privacy. They are not. They are our enemies.
I think we should stop trusting computers, any computers, as much as we possibly can.
Especially if you're in a minority that your government may try to punish.
If you want privacy, you must first have security, and no system is secure.
I mean, just for starters, there are a constant stream of zero day exploits in OSes and Browsers that would allow me to install a keylogger on your computer, completely undetected.
So why are you so anti-cynical?
The situation is dire.
I highly recommend "Daemon" and "Freedom" by Daniel Suarez, who was a Security Consultant.
Privacy is literally life and death for people. I think trying to minimize the dangers is reckless.
Cheers.
This is what loses most people, because they don't think it's a big deal if someone reads their Facebook messages.
Privacy is what prevents gay people from getting purged in Chechnya[1]. Privacy is what keeps political dissidents and religious minorities out of concentration camps[2]. Privacy is what keeps our spies from being executed.
And for those who scoff at the idea of a state-level actor coming after them: privacy is what prevents someone's abusive partner from murdering them when they choose to leave the relationship[3].
[1] https://www.npr.org/2019/01/14/685192372/https://www.npr.org...
[2] https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/muslims-...
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/money/us-money-blog/2014/oct/20/...
Oh wait, that's happened again, and again, and again.
Which specific kinds of people were the targets has changed repeatedly over the years. Literally no one has an absolute guarantee that either they, or their family or children, are without a shadow of doubt free from this concern ever happening to them.
We thought we were anonymous. We thought we were secure. We underestimated how easy it would be to track, correlate, and analyze us.
None of us are safe. None of us have the privacy or security we should.
> If you're pretty obscure and conservative you're secure enough in practice.
You're ignoring the black swans of politics, hackers, militias, etc.
Yes, sure, we're probably all 99.99% safe. But 3 billion people are online. That math alone says 300,000 of the people online are not safe.
Do you really think we're 99.99% safe?
I think we're already tagged and manipulated like cattle. I already think that mega-corporations know entirely too much. I think we're already not safe. Equifax leaks alone prove that to me.
Heck, later down the HN front page today:
https://www.zdnet.com/article/wifi-firmware-bug-affects-lapt...
The idea that conservatives are a disenfranchised or endangered group is absolutely ludicrous.
Being conservative is the new taboo.
The former group is the ruling class in the US. The latter group is criminalized, shamed, and sometimes murdered.
Further, being gay can't harm someone else, while being conservative in a (theoretical) democracy certainly can hurt people.
> Are you suggesting that being conservative in the United States is somehow equivalent to being gay in Russia?
>> Yep. Assuming you live in SV, would you like to disprove me by putting a TRUMP 2020 sign on your lawn?[1]
In West Coast US a few people might refuse to date you.
These don't seem like the same thing.
Pretty sure I don't need to link to the California Republican Party website.
Imagine if in America in the 1910's a person has a reasonable dissenting opinion like, "I think all citizens should have equal civil rights." If I was there I would be hesitant to attach to this opinion to my public identify. Especially if my employment relied on me voicing an opinion in agreement with the majority.
This seems to have a chilling effect that prevents anyone from voicing an opinion that is not already close to being in the majority.
I think you mean “group with dominant social power”; that's often confused with majority because of the predominant pattern of race/ethnic/religious (but not economic class) oppression in Western Europe and North America, but consider apartheid South Africa.
I think we thought of computers and the internet as our allies in privacy. They are not. They are our enemies.
I think we should stop trusting computers, any computers, as much as we possibly can.
Especially if you're in a minority that your government may try to punish or control.
Maybe Eric should not have a private Instagram account which follows young models. Maybe Eric should not ask Google to delete results about his political donations.
I think we thought of computers and the internet as our allies in privacy. They are not. They are our enemies.
I think we should stop trusting computers, any computers, as much as we possibly can.
Especially if you're in a minority that your government may try to punish.
We ARE in an oppressive surveillance state. Our government is tracking us. Every business is tracking us.
I highly recommend the novel "Daemon" and sequel "Freedom" by Daniel Suarez. He's a former Security consultant, who wanted to wake people up to how fragile our digital infrastructure is.
Would he extend this idea to clandestince agencies?
I think we should stop trusting computers, any computers, as much as we possibly can.
Especially if you're in a minority that your government may try to punish. (PS, that's anyone.)
People have taken this different ways, but personally I think it's sage advice. We've lost our ability to keep secrets. Information wants to be free. We're terrible at digital security. Pretend everything you type into a computer is on the front page of the New York Times.