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

#221

Post by TeMPOraL » Wed, Jan 06, 2016, 4:27 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…

> 99% of software engineers decide to take enormously strong stands against surveillance even at great personnel cost, and surveillance continues on as if nothing happened, except maybe those who work on it get paid a bit more to make up for decreased supply.

Yup. And the magic of digital content, software being a kind of it - it's infinitely copyable. It takes one guy to write a surveillance package and open-source it or have their company sell it, and everyone can now use it.

It's not engineers who make the decision to use surveillance technology. Hell, for most of the work a software engineer does, most of the data coming from surveillance tech doesn't even matter.

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

#222

Post by TheDong » Wed, Jan 06, 2016, 4:32 PM UTC

kordless wrote: post #216

jerf wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

Every time one of millions of developers commits code to a centralized service, they have a hand in exposing individual's data to the surveillance society we live in today. Data exposure can come from being publicly available on the site itself, being obfuscated through aggregation in the service's APIs, leaked through security holes in implementation of said services, risk of theft by hackers looking for high value…

That is not what's typically meant by surveillance.

Sure, it turns out using centralized web services has helped the government with things such as PRISM, but that doesn't mean we should blame people for those development practices rather than the government.

Prior to PRISM, pretty much any reasonable person would assume that the blobs you store in S3 aren't going to be looked at anyone or, worst case, metadata will be seen by AWS employees for debugging stuff.

What we have done is make things a ton better for developers; we can make things quicker and more easily which empowers society/humanity. The fact that it's incidentally contributed to a surveillance society through no intent of the developers in a way you wouldn't reasonably expect does not make the developers culpable.

It is true that customer data is trusted with a lot of services-of-services nowadays, but do you want to go back to the stone age where the only people who can store anything must run their own hardware with their own databases and so on?

The right thing to do here is to call for better use of encryption where possible and, for surveillance issues, to reign in the unreasonable government programs that make this practice result in such problems.

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

#223

Post by zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC » Wed, Jan 06, 2016, 4:37 PM UTC

elrodeo wrote: post #210

robmcm wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We don't assume anything by default, we just make an empirical observation of how people behave, and then act accordingly. The empirical observation is that there are people who are unethical, corrupt, what have you. And also, the empirical observation is that there exist certain group dynamics that make certain societal developments very hard to reverse. That is why it seems like a very good idea to avoid putting too much power into a single person's hands (in case it turns out to be one of the bad apples, or in case the power is delegated to a role rather than a specific person, in case one of the bad apples ever gets into that role), and to try and avoid the kinds of developments that tend to end badly.

Nobody says that _all_ people are unethical, or _all_ governments are corrupt, or that _all_ people in power are criminal. But rather, that being part of a government or having power does not prevent people from being unethical or corrupt. Bad people are generally a minority, but they do exist. That is one reason why we have government and police and military in the first place. But there is nothing that necessarily prevents bad people from becoming part of government, police, and military. That is why it is important to limit the power of those institutions. To limit the damage that bad people inside them can do. And also to limit the appeal to bad people wanting to become part of them. That's essentially the whole point of democracy and the separation of powers, BTW. It's a security mechanism that protects you from bad people in power - not because all people in power are bad, but because occasionally bad people manage to get into powerful positions, and that tends to end badly.

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

#224

Post by karmacondon » Wed, Jan 06, 2016, 4:37 PM UTC

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC wrote: post #215

karmacondon wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with drawing historical parallels is that they never apply exactly. Saying "A thing happened in the past" can be instructive, especially to people who didn't even realize that the thing was possible. But what's much more practically useful is to say "I think what happened before will happen again in the current context and for these reasons ". An example from the past is only useful if it can be tangibly…

Let me ask you one question: What would be circumstances that would change your mind? As in: What would need to happen to make you think that surveillance is going to far? So far, it seems pretty much like your belief that surveillance is not a problem for you is unfalsifiable, that you will believe that it is a problem for you only when the secret police is actually coming for you or maybe your family.

Something bad would have to happen to random citizens as the result of government surveillance. Something like "Private Citizen X criticized the government and embarrassing information about his life was revealed as a consequence."

There are lots of bad things that the government could do. But it just hasn't happened. They've had mass surveillance technology in place for over a decade now. The world hasn't fallen apart, Hitler hasn't risen from the dead and everything is pretty much the same as it was before.

I guess we can check back in another ten years to see if your apocalyptic visions have come to pass yet.

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

#225

Post by zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC » Wed, Jan 06, 2016, 4:43 PM UTC

SFjulie1 wrote: post #32

Wishing privacy on the internet is like wishing no turmoil while shagging during a massive religious events of paranoid gunned puritans. If privacy is such a problem for some it is not a technological problem, it is a political problem. If so, people concerned should make their revolution in an appropriate place: the real world, and let internet stay a public media. PS noticed another fun topic there are blacklisted…

> Wishing privacy on the internet is like wishing no turmoil while shagging during a massive religious events of paranoid gunned puritans.

Why do you think that?

> If privacy is such a problem for some it is not a technological problem, it is a political problem.

Why do you think that?

> If so, people concerned should make their revolution in an appropriate place: the real world, and let internet stay a public media.

The internet is the real world.

Also, who wants to make the internet a non-public media?

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

#226

Post by uptown » Wed, Jan 06, 2016, 4:45 PM UTC

ap22213 wrote: post #207

jerf wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 s…

"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."

I'd like to think that'd be the case, but consider one of the more-recent privacy intrusions with "The Fappening" ... very little became of that, despite the wealthy, high-profile individuals involved. I realize they weren't the politically connected, but they were certainly what society considers "VIPs".

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

#227

Post by CurtMonash » Wed, Jan 06, 2016, 4:48 PM UTC

Bravo!

I've been making the chilling effects argument for several years:

http://www.dbms2.com/2013/07/08/privacy-data-use-chilling-ef...

http://www.dbms2.com/2013/07/29/very-chilling-effects/

http://www.dbms2.com/2015/06/14/chilling-effects-revisited/

This article makes it with reasonable, appropriate breadth.

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

#228

Post by CurtMonash » Wed, Jan 06, 2016, 4:53 PM UTC

rhino369 wrote: post #73

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…

One thing people seem particularly blind about is that private companies holding data from their own purposes is the huge point of failure for privacy. The government can get your gmail, facebook, verizon, amazon data because those companies keep that data about you. The NSA doesn't need to spy on you, google already does. I don't think the NSA is reading my email, but I know Google is. Not to mention that when all t…

That's a big part of why restrictions on governmental collection and retention of data will never suffice. (The other big part is terrorism fears. Whether or not you or I agree with the plan -- as a practical political matter, a lot of surveillance will be done to try to identify in-country baddies.)

http://www.dbms2.com/2010/07/04/fair-data-use/

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

#229

Post by TeMPOraL » Wed, Jan 06, 2016, 4:55 PM UTC

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #186

iheartmemcache wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doctors (as a profession) have a professional regulatory board and are educated on the ethical proceedings, but doctors (as an individual) can be just as corrupt as anyone else. The difference is accountability within the profession . If a doctor starts doling out tons of prescription opiates, an auditing system is in place (Many levels in fact - either within the state, nationally via the DEA, by someone arrested wh…

> We need to regulate any institution that collects data in the same way. I feel like this is too wide. Everyone collects data. I don't mean all tech companies collect data, I mean, for example, your friends have copies of the emails you've sent them. They have photos with you in them of places you've been with timestamps and GPS coordinates. Your coworkers have access to your calendar. Your mechanic has the service…

An interesting point, and I generally agree. But RE "avoidable monopolies":

> Why is there a copy of your photos on Facebook's servers? If one of your friends wants to see one of your photos, why are they not getting it directly from you? Then you don't have to trust Facebook with a copy of it. So the solution for this half of the problem is, disintermediate the avoidable monopolies.

It's because decentralization like that is stupidly, stupidly inefficient. Not to mention that the assumption that your phone is actually on-line 24/7 is unrealistic, and that's before we notice we're not on IPv6 yet, or that people also use cameras, or that they change their phones, go out of service range or simply want to free up space on SD card for something else.

So the fundamental reasons are a) efficiency, and b) availability. That's not to say things couldn't be improved wrt. privacy. I don't know that much about crypto yet (that's about to change, for work-related reasons), but I vaguely recall that there are encryption schemes that would let only you and your friends access the data stored on third party servers, and that would make the data unreadable for said third party.

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

#230

Post by CurtMonash » Wed, Jan 06, 2016, 4:56 PM UTC

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…

The most concise description of what you're missing is "chilling effects".

In a hardcore surveillance society, almost any innocent act can be harmful to one. If government, for anti-terrorism reasons, has a rather complete picture of our lives, then we need strong safeguards against how they can act based on that picture.

And the same goes for the private sector, which might form that picture for business reasons.