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Restoring your privacy costs money, which makes it a marker of class

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Re: Restoring your privacy costs money, which makes it a marker of class

#11

Post by pelario »

danielheath wrote: post #7
resonious wrote: post #5

I feel like the idea of privacy as a luxury is not limited to high-tech society. Do poor people in a primitive society have more privacy than poor people in a developed country? We're always so concerned with machines recognizing us, but what about other people? If I live in a small village, the owner of the general store will surely remember my face just like an ML-laden camera or POS system. We get creeped out when…

The difference is reciprocity. “Everyone knows everyone” vs “I know you, but you don’t even know who I am”.

Another, related difference, is the scale.

Even though the bartender can spread rumors, when the knowledge is in hands os corporations, can be easily queried by governments, etc. The potential magnitude is way bigger than a rumor in your local village.

Re: Restoring your privacy costs money, which makes it a marker of class

#12

Post by Scoundreller »

karaterobot wrote: post #8

The only service he mentions by name is Protonmail, which has a free tier, which he doesn't mention. The pay version is about $7.50 USD a month, which is not cost prohibitive if you care about it. His theory seems to be that if you have a bunch of these, they will add up. Maybe, but I can't buy the argument without more and better examples to back it up. I mean, if you had Protonmail and a $5/mo VPN, you'd still be s…

Yeah, I wouldn’t underestimate the cost of a fiduciary I can hire to train me and set it all up for me.

Even that seems like a minefield where you might hire someone that sells you overpriced junk.

But everything you mentioned sounds like maintaining privacy. What’s the time/domain knowledge cost of scrubbing all the crap that’s already there through umpteen opt-outs?

Would make sense if a government body set up a website advising you what to do, or just make a lot of this crap completely illegal, but that would require a massive donation.

Re: Restoring your privacy costs money, which makes it a marker of class

#13

Post by baliex »

karaterobot wrote: post #8

The only service he mentions by name is Protonmail, which has a free tier, which he doesn't mention. The pay version is about $7.50 USD a month, which is not cost prohibitive if you care about it. His theory seems to be that if you have a bunch of these, they will add up. Maybe, but I can't buy the argument without more and better examples to back it up. I mean, if you had Protonmail and a $5/mo VPN, you'd still be s…

> The pay version is about $7.50 USD a month, which is not cost prohibitive if you care about it.

It’s possible for someone to care about privacy but not have the means to do anything about it.

The fact that $7.50 a month _is_ cost prohibitive for some people is the point of the article.

Re: Restoring your privacy costs money, which makes it a marker of class

#14

Post by kawzeg »

resonious wrote: post #5

I feel like the idea of privacy as a luxury is not limited to high-tech society. Do poor people in a primitive society have more privacy than poor people in a developed country? We're always so concerned with machines recognizing us, but what about other people? If I live in a small village, the owner of the general store will surely remember my face just like an ML-laden camera or POS system. We get creeped out when…

Beside the difference in scale, there are also different incentives. The bartender typically doesn't sell your data. They probably don't have a list of favourite drinks which they could share with others, they just have the information in their head.

As soon as that data can be collected and sold at scale, there's an incentive to collect and sell as much data as possible, without any repercussions.

Spreading rumours doesn't pay the bills, so there's no large scale incentive to spread them.

Re: Restoring your privacy costs money, which makes it a marker of class

#15

Post by matkoniecz »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #2

This entire article is an oxymoron. A "marker of class" is something that signals to other people which social class you belong to. The whole point of privacy is to not signal anything to anyone. Also not to mention that the biggest tracking signals companies care about are your financials: credit cards, bank accounts, etc. The largest swath of the "unbanked", people who pay with cash, etc. are poor.

>The whole point of privacy is to not signal anything to anyone.

No. The point of privacy is to signal only what I want to, and to people who I want to contact.

Looking for a privacy does not mean staying in a room, never leaving it and not communicating with external world.

I am fine with my friends and family knowing about $PRIVATE_MATTER, I am not fine with my bank/shop/government/employer knowing about it.

Re: Restoring your privacy costs money, which makes it a marker of class

#16

Post by anshorei »

kawzeg wrote: post #14
resonious wrote: post #5

I feel like the idea of privacy as a luxury is not limited to high-tech society. Do poor people in a primitive society have more privacy than poor people in a developed country? We're always so concerned with machines recognizing us, but what about other people? If I live in a small village, the owner of the general store will surely remember my face just like an ML-laden camera or POS system. We get creeped out when…

Beside the difference in scale, there are also different incentives. The bartender typically doesn't sell your data. They probably don't have a list of favourite drinks which they could share with others, they just have the information in their head. As soon as that data can be collected and sold at scale, there's an incentive to collect and sell as much data as possible, without any repercussions. Spreading rumours…

> Spreading rumours doesn't pay the bills, so there's no large scale incentive to spread them.

Spreading rumours absolutely helps pay the bills, it's almost an essential part of the experience of going to the pub in a small town that only has a couple.

You're right to say that there is no "large-scale" incentive though.

Re: Restoring your privacy costs money, which makes it a marker of class

#17

Post by yoaviram »

I'm the creator of YourDigitalRights.org, a free and open source service in the privacy space. When we started 3 years ago we decided to make the service free precisely because of the reasons outlined in this article. Almost every week I get an offer to monetize the service in some way, but I still think you shouldn't need to pay for privacy (literally as I was writing this comment I got an email offering to pay for our web extension).

One of the problems is that there is very little funding available for my sort of nonprofits. Even Mozilla with their startup studio program, which is focused on privacy, target commercial ventures. I guess that the bottom line is that as a society we do not prioritize privacy over other ambitions. This is strange to me because there's some truth to privacy being a "maker of class". Not sure how to reconcile the two.

Re: Restoring your privacy costs money, which makes it a marker of class

#18

Post by freebuju »

While true restoring privacy has implicit costs. Maybe the author shouldn't have explicitly mentioned money as one of them. I find costs such as "paying more" because you aren't participating in the ad-tracking carousel. Opportunity costs such as opting out of referral codes/links that save 5% on checkout etc. Cost of time, by taking the longer route to access a page in a cleaner non-tracked form. Etc.

Most of the tools that attempt to restore privacy are free open community-driven projects such as pi-hole. Maybe the observed distinction is a marker of class, but money isn't nearly important in the equation for most privacy-seeking folk.

Re: Restoring your privacy costs money, which makes it a marker of class

#19

Post by nicbou »

resonious wrote: post #5

I feel like the idea of privacy as a luxury is not limited to high-tech society. Do poor people in a primitive society have more privacy than poor people in a developed country? We're always so concerned with machines recognizing us, but what about other people? If I live in a small village, the owner of the general store will surely remember my face just like an ML-laden camera or POS system. We get creeped out when…

There's a big difference between things a single person remembers, and things that are stored in a database.

The database can be merged with others and queried anonymously without anyone knowing it even exists. The data can be sold, distributed and used against you at a much greater scale, and there is nothing you can do about it.

Re: Restoring your privacy costs money, which makes it a marker of class

#20

Post by PaulAJ »

resonious wrote: post #5

I feel like the idea of privacy as a luxury is not limited to high-tech society. Do poor people in a primitive society have more privacy than poor people in a developed country? We're always so concerned with machines recognizing us, but what about other people? If I live in a small village, the owner of the general store will surely remember my face just like an ML-laden camera or POS system. We get creeped out when…

Actually in low-tech societies it was the other way around. Rich people had servants who lived in their houses and knew every detail of their lives. If you were rich back then, the servants knew where you ate, what you ate, where you slept, who you met, basically every detail of your life. If you had an argument with your spouse over money the servants could hear every word.

Meanwhile poor people were known to their immediate neighbourhood, but at a much lower level of detail. Yes, local businesses might know customers, but the knowledge was atomic and disconnected: nobody was integrating the information held by the barman and the storekeeper and the newsagent and the neighbours.

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