I have seen stuff like "defendant had TOR installed - a popular program for criminals" in court filings. ...and judges and juries accept that as fact because they just don't understand the technology. For example, having a bookmark for "Hacker News" would absolutely show up in court. Crazy stuff meant to bias judges and juries that don't know tech.

The point is that the situation is 100x worse in tech where prosecutors, judges, and juries simply do not understand the evidence. ANYTHING can be painted as incriminating evidence.

I have seen saved credentials on automation jobs being used to incorrectly establish people's network activity. I have seen routine maintenance being used to establish obstruction charges just to intimidate possible witnesses... Like stuff you would not believe happens, happens.

It's even worse in civil suits, where opposing counsel will subpoena as much as possible (mountains of data) just to give you more work and fish for trade secrets or anything they can twist in court.

When I was junior, I proudly told my legal team "good news, I added space to keep our transaction records for 20 years!" and was aghast when they said they wanted files deleted THE DAY the legal requirement to hold it expired because it increased legal liability.

Now I totally get it. Today we only store the bare minimum - everything else is deleted immediately. ... and I have to re-explain this to junior employees each year to their disgust.

Both of those are really good examples of how a statement of fact that is literally true can still be a lie. Politicians do this kind of stuff all the time especially in their attack ads that make TV unwatchable around this time of year in every even numbered year. Amazingly what gets a politician called out by the other party's press as a "liar" is the opposite of this kind of statement: something that is fundamentally true but where the politician got one minor irrelevant detail wrong. That's also a major reason why it isn't a good idea to represent yourself in court or to explain yourself to the police when you get arrested because people are prone to accidentally getting minor details wrong or misspeaking even when they're telling the truth to the best of their ability.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE

"Don't Talk to the Police Part 2" - https://youtu.be/tIt-l2YmH8M

Cannot emphasise this enough.

Unless you live a criminal lifestyle (if so, you can learn nothing from me) you may encounter cops once. They do it every day.

Often police job advancement is helped by making your life hell. Say nothing you are not legally obliged to.

I know a prosecutor who had to investigate the statements made by the husband of a person who (presumably) had drowned themself in their pool (she used workout weights to keep herself at the bottom). The statement to be investigated: "Those were her weights. I never touched those weights!"

Now all of a sudden maybe his fingerprints are on the weights and that statement is untrue...

I also got to learn that they scoop the weights into a bucket because I guess they need to keep them submerged in water, otherwise the prints will wash off.

I was punished in school for having NetHack source code in my home dir. And it was not because it was a game but because it allegedly was a hacking tool.

https://web.archive.org/web/20031114161830/http://www.adequa...

You're talking about Hillary Clinton, right? That's literally one of the arguments they used against her.

I would hope so, since presumably the storage devices on that server would either be resold or sent to a dump.

The info on those storage devices (assuming backups/existence of that data elsewhere for government data retention purposes) should not be let out into the wild.

In fact, I (and I don't work/exist in areas with confidential data) have a dozen or so hard drives that sit in a closet as I don't have the interface cards (any more) to hook them up and securely delete the data.

Eventually I'll probably purchase a bulk eraser[0], but until then, those disks will sit in my closet as my business is my business and no one else's.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Degausser-Electricity-Required-Mainte...

On sale, now only $3,990.00 (previously $6,999.99).

An interesting idea and one I hadn't considered. Thanks!

I made a cool spiral chandelier out of fishing wire and hard drive parts. The platters don't chime as harmoniously as I had hoped, but it still worked out great - and I have enough super fridge magnets to last the rest of my life.

https://www.denverpost.com/2016/09/03/fbi-report-platte-rive...

In other words, crimes were probably committed but the FBI dropped the investigation because they figured that no prosecutor would file charges in the case.

And would the defense be allowed to show the legal and harmless conversations we have here? Or ask the prosecutors which HN posts they believe influenced the accused to commit a crime?

Same in software-land. Nobody wants to have years of who-knows-what subpoenaed.

We do that with speed cameras, why not just automate health data mining too? Why did you stop updating your cycle data, is it because you knew you were pregnant and wanted an abortion? Sounds like suspicious activity to me, exactly identical to turning around at a DUI checkpoint.

Has anyone actually got in trouble for that? I turned around those checkpoints all the time because it's just faster to go around.

Change, but not retroactively.

It's a poignant example of what others have pointed out. "I have nothing to hide" until political landscape changes to make it something to hide.

It's like people pushing for liberal drug laws and legalizing homeless tents and then one day its in their backyard.

While I feel for women part of groups that are impacted by Roe vs Wade being overturned, their apathy against privacy concerns have boomeranged, the same of which proportion of men who aren't having to deal with abortion are looking at this issue as "I don't need an abortion so it doesn't concern me".

Those women caught up in this struggle also looked on, along with men and everybody else as Uyghur women were sterilized and forced to abort using the very surveillance mechanism that were developed and custom tailored to fit the needs of the abusers.

It's almost like the land of CCP is a testing ground for what's in store for Western civilization. Remember what caused Latin America's shift towards tyranny and dictatorship, it was inflation. Nothing about our land that makes it any less susceptible or resilient. Inflation has deep remifications to privacy and this Roe vs Wade situation is only the beginning.

... maybe we shouldn't have spent years telling them they weren't allowed to have an opinion because it didn't concern them.

that never stopped women from doing what they want. you are completely brushing past the main issue which is apathy towards privacy which is not remotely related to women's rights portrayed by mainstream media and your language generalizes 100+ years of women, who regardless societal expectations, went on their own because they believed they had same rights as any other human. It's sad that the same spirit is now being used as shields to derail completely unrelated issues that by mere association of gender, calls for a complete review of a certain political lens that we are all familiar with. Save us the grace here honey.

It turns out assholes come in all genders.

And French Jewry was spared to a large extent not because of the compassion of Vichy administration, who even sent French children to the death camps over German objections, but due to a complicated bureaucracy and disorganized recordkeeping that made it a real challenge for French collaborators to round Jewish people up. They'd have no such roadblock these days.

The privacy issue has been raised most insistently with respect to the creation and maintenance of longitudinal data files that assemble information about persons from a multitude of sources. Files of this kind would be highly valuable for many kinds of economic and social research, but they are bought at too high a price if they endanger human freedom or seriously enhance the opportunities of blackmailers. While such dangers should not be ignored, it should be noted that the lack of comprehensive data files has never been the limiting barrier to the suppression of human freedom. The Watergate criminals made extensive, if unskillful, use of electronics, but no computer played a role in their conspiracy. The Nazis operated with horrifying effectiveness and thoroughness without the benefits of any kind of mechanized data processing.

<https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/a9e7/33e25ee8f67d5e670b3b7d...> (PDF)

There is, of course, one slight problem with Simon's argument: The Nazis did make heavy use of mechanised data processing, provided and supported by an American company, IBM.

Another Edwin Black IBM and the Holocaust link:

<https://ibmandtheholocaust.com>

There is this rose tinted glass view that Americans rose up to defeat Nazism taught in textbooks and mainstream media but was far from the truth. Not only did Nazism was cool then, American corporations like IBM directly aided Nazi party with surveillance efforts, very much like they have funded the persecution of uyghurs by purchasing American software and hardware.

What is constant is that the US looks out for its interest first and foremost, even if it means doing business with authoritarian or tyrannical regimes. Is it moral from a humane perspective? No. But is the state subject to humane? are corporations? The accepted view is that they have no consciousness and is not bound by the same moral/ethical afflictions unless they are shamed out of it that it impacts their bottom line.

https://anightatthegarden.com/

In theory it’s unconstitutional here to prosecute someone for an act they committed before there was a law against it. But there are other ways to convict someone, for better or worse.

Corporations leverage this all the time, so they go unpunished unless it’s in the court of public opinion. The toolset is necessary but the power dynamics are important.

Today is the 59th anniversary of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing, in which four girls aged 11--14 were killed, and another 14--22 injured.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/16th_Street_Baptist_Church_bom...>

thank you

PS I'm sorry for digressing; there was no reply button on that post.

See: <https://vim.fandom.com/wiki/Using_marks> <https://www.marksanborn.net/software/using-markers-in-vim/>

(Six year old comment comes back to haunt me ... Could've been worse ;-)

I'm looking at the European Union and at Apple and Google. Good intentions? That doesn't mean that you're the good guys! History has shown that the bad guys always believe strongly that they were the good guys. Privacy and security is not only about protection from criminals and companies but especially about protection from our governments. It doesn't matter wether you voted for your government or not or you like them or not or they like you or not.

Today people with similar mindsets control politics and surveillance is increased at every step. A frightful older demographic is part of this. Someone said it would be insanity to repeat the same mistakes over and over again and expect different results...

It's not especially governments for which you need to keep the integrity of your privacy - it's everyone. And I would imagine if we're trying to estimate the entities that pry the most, it's corporations. Sure, they may feed it to governments, but there's an energy barrier there (in at least some circumstances) - but the trust of corporations is one of the bigger issues here.

People are many, and weird, and different; the attention of lawmakers & govs are limited, and this can (and have repeatedly made) roadkill of you, with no recourse other than privacy.

In security, to make an assessment of overall risk of a potential vulnerability, we take into account both the probability, and the impact of exploiting such vulnerability. Facebook, and corporations in general, ultimately want to move merch, and, at worst, make you vote for candidates of their choice: probability of being successful is medium, but impact for the individual is relatively low. Goverment laws can roadkill you: probability of this ranges from low to medium, but impact is super high. This advises for being especially vigilant for gov interventions, especially where freedom, and liberties are concerned.

Good luck on getting Facebook to stop using you though [1].

In a similar vain, how does Equifax fit into this mythical world where government is the problem but corporations are not?

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_profile

But, yes, corporations will quite readily sell all that information to the government, anyway, so it doesn't really matter in the end.

By implication, what your provider knows, governments also know - they have a direct line.

Sell your soul.

A: "I have nothing to hide."

B: "Give me your bank details."

A: "Not like that! That's not something to hide because I'm hiding them to protect my savings."

B: "The reason other people hide things is also to protect themselves, their property, and their loved ones."

As Mitchell and Webb pointed out, "identity theft" is actually bank theft that's blamed on the account holder. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CS9ptA3Ya9E

Notwithstanding any legal or ethical judgement, being burglarized would cause me significant inconvenience and at the very least some sentimental losses, even if I were ultimately compensated years later with interest. Therefore, I keep my keys private to protect myself.

I told my father something about myself years ago and he tried to make the case that I hadn’t brought it up because I was ashamed.

I wasn’t ashamed. But if you share certain things about yourself, being gay being one of the most obvious examples, some people want to define you by it, or talk about it to the exclusion of all other things. I’d much rather talk about trees, for that matter tax law.

One of my mentees had a bit of a persecution complex about several things, orientation one of them. When late in our relationship I finally mentioned that my kid had come out, she was shocked I hadn’t brought it up before (which in retrospect I think she may have been recalculating her opinions of me on the fly, like the Key & Peele skit, “Oh I see, I’m just an asshole.”)

Without a pause I answered that it’s because it’s not the most interesting thing about them, which just made the eyebrows go up even higher. But I think it finally sunk in.

If I were focused on that meaning, I'd call talking about whether they're doing right or wrong things completely unresponsive. We're talking about privacy and protection, not their personal assessments of the merit of their private lives.

Instead, I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt and remind them that the people who are dangerous to them may not share their standards or ethics.

Better would be to not use that phrase as most people have something they wish to remain private or secret, without it being anything sinister. Like their password for example !

Seeing the arrests in Edinburgh this past week has been heart wrenching. It's just... I thought we were better than that?

Edit: Also, this is OT anyway from the matter of privacy and "nothing to hide".

The state shouldn't get to declare mandatory solemnity.

Of course they can - for example, remembering those who died in a terrorist attack, victims of genocide, victims of the diseases such as the AIDS epidemic, etc. Lots of groups can declare solemn events for a lot of different reasons, and they shouldn't have to deal with obnoxious and thoughtless individuals purposely trying to disrupt those events.

lol, my country's concept of free speech is in part based on the idea everyone should be able to tell your country's nobility things they don't want to hear.

And to put a fine point on it, the age of consent in New York is 17 and is 16 in New Jersey.

So I think the focus on "child" is not only misplaced, but untrue. Rape is the real issue, so that's the real thing to focus on.

The argument is flawed because we generally tolerate power differences in relationships: men and women (institutional power), certain cases of coworkers of different ranks, an able-bodied person with a disabled person, a depressed person with a mentally healthy person, a suicidal person with a happy person, etc.

There are also a lot of adults who vary, due to personal characteristics or experiences with relationships (or lack thereof) who are far more easily snared into a relationship; the average 17 year old has had many more relationships than I have as a 25 year old, and sexual ones too, usually with peers. If anything, I'm the naive one who would fall into a very convincing snare with an older man.

But I do agree somewhat, if what you’re saying is true. People should be able to hold a funeral in peace.

This very obviously isn't "just a funeral".

Anyone else dies and they don't cancel the EPL for the weekend.

I assumed based on what OP said, it was akin to a funeral being disrupted. That’s a big “if” though.

One person, probably not invited, makes a scene, shouts a bunch of stuff. Perhaps they have a mental illness, perhaps they had a grudge against your mom - she might have been a judge or a teacher.

Are you just going to ignore it? Would you expect some security to remove that person so that you and others can have a peaceful funeral?

But it's far more offensive and far more vile to suggest that the State has any right to regulate public speech based on its content.

If you want to control what is said at the funeral, don't have the funeral in public. End of.

Why? Offensive to whom? There seems to be general agreement that some speech crosses lines that are not okay and should be regulated. This is why all countries that have freedom of speech protections also have a list of exceptions. In the US, certain things like ads, pornography, slander, sedition, and lies are generally not considered protected speech. It depends on the specifics in any given case, but I’m not offended at all by the suggestion that the State should be allowed to regulate these kinds of speech when they cause harm.

She was the head of state who presided over genocides, resisted the independence many dozens of British colonies, got carveouts in laws to shield her personal possessions from scrutiny for stolen antiquities...

I could go on.

Public figures in general, and heads of state in particular, lose the right to be treated as "just somebody's mom". They get treated by the public based, at least in part, on their treatment of the public.

And even apart from all that, this funeral, at a time when many, many UK residents are facing skyrocketing costs for everything from food to electricity to heat—as in, increases of 5-10x, not just a few percent—is projected to cost upwards of half a billion pounds, from what I've heard.

So no, let's not "say it is your mom's funeral".

Then it is pretty damning that not almost everyone is shouting! I'll go even further, then it is outrageous that people around the world mostly, including in the US, are saying what a great person she was.

So I wonder why is that?

Also, my understanding is that the person who got arrested for heckling was doing so because Andrew had sex with a 17 year old. So he was more upset about that than the queen overseeing genocides.

And if people really think she was evil, why wait until death? Why not speak up very loudly while the person is alive in order to affect change.

Weird priorities, or misdirection.

Having someone removed for being loud and obnoxious is a much different thing than being arrested and potentially incarcerated for same.

False equivalence.

This is the accession to the throne of a monarch wrapped around a funeral.

That doesn't happen when anyone else's mom dies.

And the people being arrested were in public places.

Funerals are reasonably often held at public cemeteries. FWIW I disagree the arrests were justifiable unless the protestors refused to be non-violently lead away from the scene, assuming they presented a genuine risk of provoking a violent response from the mourners etc.

Of course it would be wrong for the police to arrest people for being disrespectful in a cemetery. What would be alright is if the owners of that cemetery wanted them to leave the property, they refused, and the police were called. That's why all of the photos of Westboro protesting at funerals were them on the sidewalk facing a cemetery.

Just because City Hall is public doesn't mean that there aren't rules that you have to follow when you're there, or that you can't be kicked out when you break those rules. What it means is that you can't make up rules, because those are just the whims of the ruler.

If there are no rules at a publicly-owned cemetery against verbally abusing your recently dead mother in front of her grandchildren, you have to face that the abuser, as part of the public, has as much a right to be there as you do. But in real life there will be posted rules, just like there are rules at the public pool.

If Britain wants to pass a blanket law criminalizing all criticism of the royal family, they should. Plenty of dictatorships and monarchies already have lèse majesté laws, they can just copy them. They won't have to make up rules or improvise.

This is extremely compatible with Juche thought. Let's say that the Kim family is the mother of North Korea.

I would say this for _anyone_, today it just happens to be a famous person.

If the family wanted to control the show, they should organize a private event with only invited guests who signed a code of conduct.

Unlike in the 80-es, singing that today would make you arrested. Maybe the song is now more true than then, maybe the regime really became more fascist?

Maybe the common British people should take notes from their French neighbors and teach these royal shits what true persecution feels like.

Their moment for grief was severely impacted by the protestor.

It's nowhere near as simple as you or other people in this thread are pretending it is. Even though I think Andrew should be stripped of his titles, it's right that guy was arrested.

>Their moment for grief was severely impacted by the protestor.

>It's nowhere near as simple as you or other people in this thread are pretending it is. Even though I think Andrew should be stripped of his titles, it's right that guy was arrested.

Clearly that guy was being an asshole, but being a loud jerk shouldn't be a crime, IMHO.

If that's the prevailing attitude there, I'm glad I don't live in the UK.

Not because I think it's right to intrude on the mourning/grief/funerary rights of others (cf., Westboro Baptist Church[0]), much to the contrary, but because it shouldn't be illegal (as much as I despise such folks) to be an asshole.

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

It's not just the protestors that have rights, the mourners do too.

Just like you've got no human right to stab people as much as you like, you can't cause other people distress at a funeral.

You're the one being incredibly unreasonable here.

Also, you can't freely protest a soldier's funerals in America, so you're also ridiculously hypocritical, sort your own country out first if you feel so strongly about this!

If you're not actively protesti g The Respect for America's Fallen Heroes Act then you need to get off your high horse.

Right. Because words that are unpleasant are exactly the same as violence, right?

Shall we jail anyone who says something that annoys, disturbs or is unpleasant to anyone else? Based on the unpleasantness in your comment, let's start with you.

Yes, it's rude and obnoxious to intrude on others, especially at gatherings like funerals. And most of us (myself included) try not to do so.

However, some folks are jerks, and will do so anyway. But making such a thing a crime rather than just removing the disruptive individual from the area is a recipe for abuse.

Who decides what's a crime or not in a given circumstance? You?

I'd note that I'm neither angry nor insulted by you. Rather, I'm trying (I hope successfully this time) to get you to see that making someone a criminal for being a jerk is a really bad idea.

Remove such a person from your sight. Shun them. Verbally abuse them right back. But the idea that someone should be criminalised for being insensitive and/or obnoxious is risible at best.

I expect you will continue to disagree with me and think I'm being nasty, disruptive and a jerk. Shall we arrest me too? How long should I spend in prison for pissing you off?

Edit: Fixed typo.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrest

To arrest someone, the behaviour they're engaging in has to be criminal (i.e. chargeable).

Then the police can ask the prosecution service to charge them (the US equivalent of the DA I guess), which is the discretionary bit. This seems to be the thing you're taking issue with.

So although you don't realize it, you're basically saying you want to give the police brand new powers to grab anyone they want. That's an incredibly dangerous and seriously poorly thought out suggestion.

Nope. Not intentionally or otherwise. Police have always had the "move along citizen" (with no arrest/detention at all) power. In fact, I'd say they use it far too often, at least in the US.

I'm not in the UK, and when I've visited I haven't interacted with the police, so that may not be true there. Is it?

What's more, being asked/encouraged to leave if someone is being disruptive is pretty normal and certainly doesn't require detention and/or arrest. Or even police for that matter.

Even more, (again, I'm not in the UK so not sure if this applies there) arrest records are public records and can negatively affect one's ability to get a job or housing due to the stigma around "criminals" even if they aren't actually charged/convicted in relation to such an arrest.

So no. I'm not advocating (wittingly or otherwise) for any new powers for the police. Rather, I'm agreeing with your premise that folks shouldn't disrupt solemn occasions like funerals, but I'm disagreeing with your premise[0] that such activity should be criminalised.

And I also take issue with your assertion (perhaps I misunderstood, but that's the impression I got. Please enlighten me if I've misunderstood) that the only options for police are either arrest or do nothing at all. That's absurd on its face.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32848029

Possibly me, too. Maybe we could be cell mates. What do you say, handsome?

And as for time & place, finding the right moment and location to be maximally irritating is part of the art of protest.

Which school of thought is this from? Protesting can take many forms and they need not be offensive and/or irritating to be effective. I personally respect calm, dignified, and persistent protestors far more than the loud, disruptive, and in-your-face ones.

The sad part is that they, and all of their supporters, will probably go back to agitating against free speech after this whole thing blows over.

Every officially designated 'pro free speech warrior' I've seen in recent times has been strongly for authoritarianism if it suits their agenda. Just ask many of them for their opinion on say Palestine or Yemen and you'll lots of ugly things come out, none of which are consistent with the image of 'freedom' these types like to portray themselves as.

In fact, many of them seem to support anti-BDS laws and such.

I do not endorse censorship attempts, but also let's not kid ourselves about the nature of many of the people who market themselves free speech advocates, please.

Huge sweeping claim, with exactly nothing to back it up.

This is a fairly easily to verify claim. Now of course it's not going to be all of them, but a large chunk from what I've seen.

It's certainly more concrete than OP saying:

> The people getting arrested in the streets of Edinburgh were the same people who have been arguing to take away free speech and privacy rights from others.

Then providing nothing to back up the claim.

The UK is one of the most "live and let live" countries in the world.

However I think there is a marked difference between 2010 and 2022, especially in Scotland, who I used to think of as usually the sensible ones; the land of David Hume.

Free speech is being curtailed by legislation that is auspiciously about preventing "hate crime", but in actuality is being used as a tool to shut down dissenting opinions, such as the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Bill.

And this is just the history I'm personally connected with. There's plenty of other examples of how the UK has treated other minorities poorly, notably the Windrush Generation. Being a 'live and let live' society isn't, and shouldn't, just mean being the least worst country, if we can even claim that title... it's about being a permissive society, of letting people get on with their own lives unmolested and in return you can expect the same. But as I've already shown, that was in no way the case for us... if you ever wonder why there's so few gay men around the age of 60+, it's because so so many of them were left to die of the gay disease.

We were never ever a live and let live country.

For instance, if you go hiking, you my get attacked by a bear, is it a risk worth taking? Usually yes, bear attacks are rare, unless you do stupid things like going where you know there is a bear. Same thing for privacy, you can take some risks, for example by letting Facebook follow you doing mundane things for targeted advertising, but not be so stupid as to post picture of yourself doing stupid things for everyone to see. The concrete example in the article is in the second category: some guy gets fired because he posts a picture of doing stupid things at his job.

Personally, I consider the political risks you cited low for the US or EU. Not zero, it is never zero, but low enough to be negligible compared to what Google, Amazon or Facebook offer me. Maybe it is not your case.

There are some privacy high risks, and that's, I think, mostly about things you publish online. Police doesn't need a warrant to look at your public profile, neither does your boss or the spouse you are cheating. Others include doing stupid things on your employer's corporate network, or doing things that are seriously illegal right now in your country without necessary precautions.

- (access) trust every individual employee who has immediate access. Forever? And every individual employee of the government agencies that could compel access? Forever?

- (policy from above) trust every executive who could change policy on where your data goes and how it is held. Forever? Trust the relevant national government regarding laws about your data. Forever?

- (security) trust the Security set up is at least great. Forever?

Forever, because data can last that long. And auditing data handling is hard.

Edit: tried to make it clearer.

You have nothing to hide... yet.

Mountains of personal data is too juicy and is inevitably misused.

Actually it started much earlier than that.

Christian started going after Jews since at least the fourth century, inspired by the hatred written in the Gospel of John. In particular, it was a Christian ritual to physically attack Jews around Easter in the Middle Ages.

More detail: https://theconversation.com/why-good-friday-was-dangerous-fo...

There's concerns about: hackers, surveillance capitalism, foreign state actors, and domestic state actors. People that say they have nothing to hide are usually unconcerned about one or two of these (surveillance capitalism and domestic state actors) but often are actually concerned with at least one.

The truth of the matter is, though, that if you're concerned about one, you need to be concerned about all of them. There is no door that only good guys can use and bad guys can't. Breaking it down has often led to more successful conversations for me. Even in a group of highly tech literate people (CS graduate students) I often see the "I don't care" or "what can I do" sentiments. So I suggest when talking about all this, break it down into these categories. Maybe if more of us did this then we'd have more success as a community.

If you want to “worst case” scenario something, that’s your choice, but it’s not very predictive.

Anyways, something like 40% of the EU citizens lived through communism, so it's not exactly unusual.

Kind of makes it seem like privacy itself can't stand on its own as meritous, and needs to be propped up by overgeneralizations and FUD.

To me, it seems like there are much longer periods of problems than periods of peaceful life. Only 30 years out of the last 100 were in lived in relative freedom here, and still excesses are happening today. Protect yourselves people. Nobody will return your health and life back once an excess happens to you.

I'm sorry those things happened to your family, but they're not relevant to a modern privacy conversation.

You're doing a common Internet Thing by twisting a conversation into the topic you actually want to talk about, even though it's wholly unrelated.

Just because something bad happened to your family doesn't mean the entire planet should adjust fundamental aspects of how humans interact. That's just your trauma speaking, and not a rational thought.

But, again, completely irrelevant to the broader topic of conversation, privacy.

[0] https://www.fincen.gov/news/news-releases/fact-sheet-benefic...

The US Government directly used census data to target families and neighborhoods to send to internment camps within living memory.

Something ongoing: prosecutions are currently underway to parties who have abortions or assist in abortions based off of private correspondences such as texting, calling, or facebook messages.

Name one person who is being prosecuted for obtaining an abortion, and that prosecution is moving forward due to evidence collected from any kind of extrajudicial breach of privacy.

I refuse to continue a discussion with someone who doesn't believe in the concept of a warrant.

I'm not value judging this, I'm just trying to determine if it's worth reacting to, and based on the number of folks effected, the severity of the impact, and the frequency, privacy violations seem pretty minor overall as a threat, not worth considering within my personal attack surface.

Sorry... but some nice contradiction you have there. I think your "algorithm" might be a bit off ;)

Some people (especially here on HN) are so into privacy for the sake of privacy, more like a hobby than a practical exercise in improving their quality of life. And that's completely fine. But I'm more interested in convenience. I'm at the point where I would legitimately prefer my Social Security Number to be leaked on the dark web than have to deal with the proposed three-factor authentication for my banking and brokerage accounts.

In the case of a targeted investigation, yeah, you're probably right. Thing is, that's not the only (or even most likely) threat unless you're some kind of wannabe DPR. Dragnet/geofence-style investigations are getting more common and while not using Google likely won't save you from the CIA, it may very well avoid your technically-incompetent local LEOs accidentally framing you for a bank robbery or something when you win the location-data lottery.

But that's an individual-level argument, which imo isn't the main point - privacy is a societal-level good.

> But I'm more interested in convenience.

This is basically the "I have nothing to say, so I have no need for freedom of expression" argument transplanted into the privacy sphere. The effectiveness of privacy methods scale both technically and socially: an example on the technical front is how tor is more useful the more "normal" traffic ends up on it, and an example on the social front is how encrypted messaging capabilities aren't suspicious if they're integrated by default into widely used apps. So, I see privacy as less about me and more about participating in creating an environment where those who truly require it can have it, and that's something that's way harder if privacy is only conceived as being "for" dissidents or fetishists or whatever.

Is it inconvenient sometimes? Sure, but it's also a civic duty. I'd honestly call it analogous to jury selection: quite possibly nothing but a burden to you personally, but an important part of maintaining a healthy society.

> This is basically the "I have nothing to say, so I have no need for freedom of expression" argument transplanted into the privacy sphere.

Not at all. It's "I do not have infinite time and energy to spend in trying to protect myself against every remote possible negative outcome."