Why privacy is important, and having “nothing to hide” is irrelevant • Hacker News Board

Re: Why privacy is important, and having “nothing to hide” is irrelevant

#201

Post by laotzu » Wed, Jan 06, 2016, 3:19 PM UTC

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #44

Laaw wrote: post #4

I have two unrelated thoughts. "Chilling effect" has always been a profound term for me, because I imagine the "cold" (numbness really) sensation a human body often senses when something truly awful (disembowlment/dismemberment) occurs. The body's way of protecting itself is to go "cold", and in many ways that's exactly the effect taking place here, as well. There's also an undeniable part of this conversation that r…

Try this: Secrecy does not exist any more Privacy is the politeness of your neighbours. Now everyone is your neighbour As such we choose to not be polite to paedophiles However only a limited number of us choose to be polite to people still in closet. Others will impolitely sell pink insurance, others scrawl hate messages I am not sure where I am going other than politeness is hard to enforce.

>politeness is hard to enforce.

Because it is a logical fallacy. To enforce something implies using violence which is considered mean and not polite.

The same logical fallacy applies to gun control. Oh you want to ban or restrict access to guns? How are you going to do that? With guns of course.

Re: Why privacy is important, and having “nothing to hide” is irrelevant

#202

Post by marcosdumay » Wed, Jan 06, 2016, 3:22 PM UTC

Laaw wrote: post #4

I have two unrelated thoughts. "Chilling effect" has always been a profound term for me, because I imagine the "cold" (numbness really) sensation a human body often senses when something truly awful (disembowlment/dismemberment) occurs. The body's way of protecting itself is to go "cold", and in many ways that's exactly the effect taking place here, as well. There's also an undeniable part of this conversation that r…

Are you talking about physical - real world Evil, about digital real Evil, or about digital - inside of one's head Evil?

About the first one, physical, what king of stupid incompetent secret service lets an entire terrorist organization train their people on physical training centers, physically dispatch them to their targets, get their hands on weapons and explosives, and successfully commits their crime, while doing nothing because they are really focused on breaking Tor?

Universal surveillance is not just useless for fighting terrorism, it's actually harmful, in several ways. And most of those apply to almost any use you can came up for it.

About the last one, digital - inside of your mind (that is, inside of the criminal mind), those people need help, not punishment. Stop punishing them and they'll seek you.

Now, the real problem is the second set, digital - real Evil. I have no good answer for those, but the surveillance people also lacks this answer, and are almost completely useless against that too. I'm not willing to accept an argument claiming that mass surveillance needs to exist so those people may start doing that work in the future, when they discover some way to do it.

Re: Why privacy is important, and having “nothing to hide” is irrelevant

#203

Post by CaptSpify » Wed, Jan 06, 2016, 3:25 PM UTC

m1sta_ wrote: post #174

karmacondon wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not everyone agrees with you that the tech sector is contributing to the building of a surveillance society or police state. There are a lot of people who have carefully considered the issue and come to the conclusion that facebook knowing what posts you liked or ad networks knowing which pages your IP address has visited is not a Bad Thing. It's clear that you don't agree and all debate is welcome, but I caution you…

I'm more worried about a lack of government transparency than I am about personal privacy.

Por que no los dos?

I'm worried about both, and I can't say which I'm worried about more. What are the reasons you are concerned about one more than the other?

Re: Why privacy is important, and having “nothing to hide” is irrelevant

#204

Post by maxerickson » Wed, Jan 06, 2016, 3:25 PM UTC

miguelrochefort wrote: post #198

m1sta_ wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do we get to a completely transparent society without massive collateral damage? I understand the rationale for the goal but the transition is so very difficult. I wish more thought was being put into it.

My only concern at the moment is to get people to realize that privacy is not good. Only when people understand that our goal is transparency can we come up with a strategy to make the switch. Considering that we need to get to a transparent society, contributions to the privacy movement only ensures that the transition will be even more difficult and violent.

Have you written anywhere about how you arrived at such a radical position?

(I mean radical in the traditional sense, not as a slur)

Re: Why privacy is important, and having “nothing to hide” is irrelevant

#205

Post by zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC » Wed, Jan 06, 2016, 3:27 PM UTC

golergka wrote: post #195

blub wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people are not persons of interest and nothing particularly bad will happen to them if various entities have access to their private info. Still, they might have their identity stolen, get scammed (e.g. Dell) or pranked (e.g. swatting, disconnecting utilities) or have their house broken into if they have bad luck. They might pay a premium on insurance for having the wrong friends on FB or get fired for holding c…

OK, so in your comment you reviewed only the bad possible outcomes of some thing X, and came to a conclusion that thing X is bad. Don't you see any logical problems with this line of reasoning?

The good outcomes should be achievable without the bad side effects of the implementation (centralization and surveillance) that's being criticized here, at least as far as technology is concerned.

There is only one positive outcome of concentrations of power, and that is efficiency in execution. Which is extremely scary when combined with huge power.

This is really just the democracy discussion with different terms. It is well known that dictatorships are much more efficient at executing their plans. The inefficiency we voluntarily introduce when establishing and maintaining a democracy (and if you have ever been involved in democratic decisionmaking, the inefficiency can be really frustrating) is the price we pay to insure us against the efficient abuse of power as we have witnessed it countless times in human history.

Re: Why privacy is important, and having “nothing to hide” is irrelevant

#206

Post by marcosdumay » Wed, Jan 06, 2016, 3:38 PM UTC

HSO wrote: post #113

kmonad wrote: post #83

Whenever I read one of these articles I am wondering why the examples of WHY mass surveillance affects ME as average Joe negatively have to be so weak / contrived: For example, imagine someone convinced by the argument "nothing to hide nothing to fear". Would this example convince them that in fact they do have to fear something? "You might think twice about contacting or meeting people (exercising your freedom of as…

Because nobody, as far as I know, has brought together the issues of knowledge and control yet. In short, my argument goes something like this: 1) It is possible to manipulate or influence people. This extends to their memories, perceptions, emotions, actions, even complex beliefs. And it can be more or less direct. Humans think of themselves as special snowflakes, but we are actually quite simple. 2) The degree to w…

> I should finally write that essay that I've been meaning to for the longest time.

No need. Orwell already wrote it.

I just don't get why you think you are alone.

Re: Why privacy is important, and having “nothing to hide” is irrelevant

#207

Post by ap22213 » Wed, Jan 06, 2016, 3:41 PM UTC

jerf wrote: post #171

tobbyb wrote: post #64

I think the tech crowd is in denial about their role in surveillance. We expect professionals to behave ethically. Doctors and companies working on genetics and cloning for instance are expected to behave ethically and have constraints placed on their work. And with consequences for those behaving unethically. Yet we have millions of software engineers working on building a surveillance society with no sense of ethic…

"Yet we have millions of software engineers working on building a surveillance society with no sense of ethics, constraints or consequences." No, we don't. We have probably a few hundred doing hard-core surveillance. We have another few thousand functioning as enablers by making social media and ad networks really attractive. We have a whole lot of non- engineers insisting on placing ads and tracking on their website…

You're really low-balling.

Work in the greater D.C. area. Within a 150-200 mile radius, there are literally tens of thousands of developers working directly on surveillance. Probably even more. How do I know this? From random sampling. Go to any tech event, talk to any program manager at any government contractor. The work and money is in surveillance.

And, that's just government surveillance. All that tech is then spilling over into corporate surveillance. Location and behavioral tracking is big money. How do I know this? Because, sadly, that's how I have to make my money. The problem is that there's always another grunt like me willing to create the systems that enable this.

The solution: Use all of this surveillance tech and data to expose all of the VIPs. Publicly post where they are and where they've been, who they've been with, what they read, and what they buy. You do this and laws will be created pretty quickly.

Re: Why privacy is important, and having “nothing to hide” is irrelevant

#208

Post by marcosdumay » Wed, Jan 06, 2016, 3:41 PM UTC

x5n1 wrote: post #5

Privacy is less important than the ability to trust your government won't do blatantly illegal things like put innocent people behind bars, steal their money or property, when they actually know that they are innocent. The biggest problem with America is that the government can not be trusted to follow the rules, their own rules. I don't live in the US, but the stuff the government whether local, state, or federal ge…

You can never completely trust your government won't abuse its power.

Privacy is a necessary tool for opposing those abuses of power and organizing a change.

Re: Why privacy is important, and having “nothing to hide” is irrelevant

#209

Post by bcg1 » Wed, Jan 06, 2016, 3:42 PM UTC

A tragicomedic irony of course is that most "nothing to hide" advocates demand secrecy and legal cover for their own actions. This sort of doublethink leads to things like a "Freedom of Information Act" in the US that provides a legal framework for concealing information that should otherwise be out in the open.

If you apply the "nothing to hide" principle to states' own actions, I can think of two possible conclusions:

1) It is not true that if you have done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide (i.e., there is a legitimate right to privacy)

2) State actors have something to hide, so they must be doing something wrong.

Re: Why privacy is important, and having “nothing to hide” is irrelevant

#210

Post by elrodeo » Wed, Jan 06, 2016, 3:47 PM UTC

robmcm wrote: post #169

elrodeo wrote: post #108

There are very few topics where I just cannot get the point of the discussion among smart people, but this is one of them. Look at the real world NOW, 15 years after all the surveillance. You still can explode bombs and kill people middle in a european capital without any encryption at all. Is this the kind of surveillance you are afraid of? If you want to hide something, there are infinitely many ways to do this. No…

Yes because you assume the people who are collecting your data are ethical, secure and will always share your opinions and beliefs. Say your bank account information was stolen and someone used it to blackmail you because as you said it would have, "implications in some social aspects". Say the country you live in converted to a religion you are not part of or want to be any part of. Imagine if they had a record of y…

If we assume, that — by default — people are unethical, governments are corrupt and most people in power are criminal, then you're f*cked anyway. With or without mass surveillance.