There is also a herd immunity effect, if it's easy to compile a large database with everyone's personal data and political beliefs, then it's also easy to launch micro-targeting campaigns where you give political ads with messages that are tailored to the narrow segment of the population that the person viewing the ad is in.
Ask HN: So what if my personal information gets stolen?
51–60 of 77 posts
Re: Ask HN: So what if my personal information gets stolen?
#52I suspect blackmail is going to see a rise as more information like this gets leaked. It goes like this:
"Hi, . I know all about you. For instance, . Wire me or I'll publish your browser history (or credit card statements, or anything else that sounds sufficiently compromising among some segment of the population)."
Against any particular target, this may not be effective if they don't care about the leverage you claim to have or call your bluff. However, since you have a data dump you can send this to every single affected individual and you'll get at least some bites.
Re: Ask HN: So what if my personal information gets stolen?
#53If you're that curious, go ahead and post all of your PII in this thread and find out what happens. Something tells me you won't. The reason you won't, is the answer to your question.
Not a very useful answer; presumably OP doesn't know the reason.
Well, there is only one way to know if he/she will guess the reason :)
Re: Ask HN: So what if my personal information gets stolen?
#54In many countries name, address, social security number etc are all public information so really depends on where you live.
"Would you be happy to have your tax return displayed for everyone to see? In Norway, no one can disguise their earnings, as every citizen's is made available for everyone else in the country to inspect. Workers can see what their colleagues earn and neighbours can snoop on how much the people next door make — all legally and online.
On a date every year in October, just after midnight, Norwegian citizens' annual tax returns are posted online — and the country's Norwegian newspapers leap to produce top ten lists of the country's highest earners, the incomes and taxes paid by the political and cultural elites, celebrities and sportspeople. https://www.theguardian.com/money/blog/2016/apr/11/when-it-c...
Re: Ask HN: So what if my personal information gets stolen?
#55As long as people will think that privacy is a normal thing to seek, we'll keep using personal information and secrets as authentication methods, and those whose data leaks will suffer the consequences. What we should do is think about the post-privacy world, where all data is available to everyone. We won't be able to keep secrets and passwords anymore, but we won't have to secure them either, as we will have better…
> What we should do is think about the post-privacy world, where all data is available to everyone. Either I don't fully understand what you're suggesting, or you don't fully understand what you're suggesting. ;) Right to privacy is part of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights for good reasons. Violations and abuses of privacy have done a lot of damage to a lot of people throughout history. So what does authenti…
"Privacy, as we understand it, is only about 150 years old."https://medium.com/the-ferenstein-wire/the-birth-and-death-o...
Re: Ask HN: So what if my personal information gets stolen?
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's the likelihood of either of these happening? Neither of the links provide any data on incidence of ID theft leading to house stealing or being thrown in jail, which leads me to believe it's probably extremely low. Happy to be shown otherwise though.
It's non-zero. Does it matter by how much? Why increase your surface area of attack if it can be prevented?
> Does it matter by how much?
That's the only thing that matters.
Re: Ask HN: So what if my personal information gets stolen?
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's non-zero. Does it matter by how much? Literally everything you do carries a non-zero risk of death, being 100% safe is impossible. Given that every day is a gamble, knowing your risk and reward ratios is important for deciding which activities to do and which to stay away from. In this specific case, if dedicating your whole life to privacy reduces your odds of identity theft from 2% to 1%, I think a lot of pe…
Which is kinda besides the point? The question isn't whether you as an individual should dedicate your life to having privacy for yourself, but whether we as a society should make privacy a norm. If everyone shits in the streets, the question isn't whether you should dedicate your life to avoiding all the shit to reduce your risk of infection, the question is whether society should stop shitting in the streets, becau…
I made my statement about an individual because OP seemed to be asking as an individual, but it still applies perfectly to society; you can pretty much search and replace on the text:
"In this specific case, if society making privacy a top priority at the expense of everything else reduces everybody's odds of identity theft from 2% to 1%, I think a lot of people would say "I'd rather society priorotised having fun and accept the higher risk to society"; if a tiny lifestyle change across society could reduce the odds from 20% to 1%, the outcome would probably be different."
The point remains the same: you can't make sensible decisions without knowing the odds; avoiding all activities with non-zero risk means avoiding all activities, and that's why it matters how much.
Re: Ask HN: So what if my personal information gets stolen?
#58I suspect blackmail is going to see a rise as more information like this gets leaked. It goes like this: "Hi, . I know all about you. For instance, . Wire me or I'll publish your browser history (or credit card statements, or anything else that sounds sufficiently compromising among some segment of the population)." Against any particular target, this may not be effective if they don't care about the leverage you cla…
>"Hi, . I know all about you.
Did you receive that in an email recently? I've already deleted it, but I got almost that exact email in my spam on my junk mail account the other day. They were clearly working off of the Adobe password leak.
They quoted my old password in the email and gave the same ol', 'I will email a list of your perverted pornographic interests to your family and employer'
Like you said, they cast a wide net in hopes of catching a few fish. That being said, asking for BTC seems to really narrow the pool to folks who, I assume, would be less likely to fall for this scam.
Re: Ask HN: So what if my personal information gets stolen?
#59There is a very good podcast episode on IRS Tax Refund fraud using identity theft: https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/26/
BTW, Darknet Diaries is very informative and entertaining podcast. Highly recommended!
Re: Ask HN: So what if my personal information gets stolen?
#60I'm astonished to see things like blackmail and fear of a break-in near the top of the list.. really? the most likely and damaging outcome is identity theft -- the consequence of which is damaged credit which is difficult to fix