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The 'papers, please' era of the internet will decimate your privacy

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Re: The 'papers, please' era of the internet will decimate your privacy

#431

Post by thephyber »

phatfish wrote: post #389
pif wrote: post #386

I am always surprised that people get shocked when online privacy is put at risk, as if it was a fundamental human right. REMOTE PRIVACY NEVER EXISTED BEFORE A FEW DECADES AGO! And what happened in these decades are enough for the societies to wonder whether this new possibility in human connections (i.e. remote privacy) is globally a good thing. Just stomping your feet because the new toy may be declared illegal is…

Yup, demoractic governments existed before the internet and repressive dictators have risen with it. The idea that being anonymous online will save a society from a dictator/repression is wishful thinking. Only good faith engagement with an existing democractic system will ensure the success of democracy, but that is too hard for most poeple. 99.9% on anonymous engagement online is bad faith.

> The idea that being anonymous online will save a society from a dictator/repression is wishful thinking.

Strawman.

> Only good faith engagement with an existing democractic system will ensure the success of democracy

This isn’t true. Voters are occasionally very willing to vote in demagogues, authoritarians, and fascists.

The founding fathers knew that democracy came with it the chance of mob rule.

The solution isn’t to guarantee that nobody has any anonymity online. It’s to make society more resilient by increasing media literacy. Countries which border Russia (notably Finland and Ukraine) are doing an amazing job at resisting the industrial volume of manufactured propaganda. Countries with gullible people just become victims to it.

Re: The 'papers, please' era of the internet will decimate your privacy

#432

Post by [deleted] »

bigbuppo wrote: post #166
madrox wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the lie is to look at the problems we have that the internet has enabled and say "things are ok as they are don't try to do anything to solve it."

If the problem is "social media bad for kids" then any parent that allows their children to access social media is as guilty of abuse or neglect as a parent that lets them play in traffic. Throw the parents in prison and put the kids in foster care. Problem solved.

[deleted]

Re: The 'papers, please' era of the internet will decimate your privacy

#433

Post by meindnoch »

totetsu wrote: post #340
kaashif wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not the problem governments are solving. They're solving the problem of convincing the public it's a good idea to end the anonymity of internet use.

which begs the question, In preparation for what?

Alien disclosure.

In 1953, Eisenhower signed a pact with the Zeta Reticulans (grey aliens) at Holloman Air Force Base. This pact set in motion a century-long program of preparing humanity for the alien disclosure. Communication must be controlled at a global scale, to avoid mass panic and the collapse of society when the disclosure is announced.

Re: The 'papers, please' era of the internet will decimate your privacy

#434

Post by tavavex »

watwut wrote: post #427
tavavex wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You see, when the governments are outraged that they can't monitor all facets of communication or are disallowed from using their shiny new ways to automatically observe and categorize billions of datapoints to automatically surveil-by-default millions of people, that is called having serious doubts and grave concerns, very important stuff. When the people are outraged that a freedom they've enjoyed for several decad…

The surveillance economy was brought in by people who were pontificating about freedom. Freedom for companies created it and bad faith arguments about freedom sustained it. The evil governments were Johny come lately here, basically. I have read absolutists libertarian rants about "the governments" trying to remove the freedom. In overwhelming majority of the cases, these people were actually supporting fascists and…

To me, again, this doesn't look like a real attempt by the people to counteract the corporations, although it's certainly sold and advertised that way. I think it's the world's biggest collaboration project between tech megacorporations and governments. Many companies stand to gain a lot from the removal of privacy, because it discourages competition and funnels users away from doing anything on their own and towards compliant services owned by these companies. More importantly, these companies will be the enforcement arm of many anti-privacy technologies. They're the ones who will be sifting through internet traffic, processing pictures of your IDs, organizing datapoints about everything you've ever done on their services. All mandated by governments as part of the world's largest conflict of interest. All the governments will do is just bundle these streams of data into narratives and timelines, a full automatic dossier on everyone without ever having to do actual old-school spying on them.

Re: The 'papers, please' era of the internet will decimate your privacy

#435

Post by u8080 »

Hendrikto wrote: post #397
u8080 wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could download few terabytes from torrent site which will contain almost all books published prior to current date and use it offline btw.

No, you won’t be able to do that, because going online, or even logging into your PC will require ID verification.

But why wait? Do it right now and just store somewhere

Re: The 'papers, please' era of the internet will decimate your privacy

#437

Post by akie »

defmacr0 wrote: post #399
akie wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a very libertarian and ultimately low-trust forum where most people seem to think the government is out to get you, but I have to say: what's so great about having complete online anonymity anyway? I mean, seriously. Real life is not anonymous and consequence free either, why should online life be? It's not as if there are no downsides. There are, and some of them are so severe that they are impacting the who…

> Real life is not anonymous and consequence free either, why should online life be? In real life you are largely anonymous if you go to any place that is not in your social circle. If I go to any physical store under the sun and pay in cash I remain completely anonymous. The only exception is staff checking your ID for alcohol etc. if you look underage, but that datum is only stored in one persons brain for as long…

> Unless you have absolute faith that your government will never do something you have a moral objection to, you can never be sure that anything you are, believe or do will not be censored or land you in jail in the future.

Any solution that can convince the Germans, the most privacy obsessed sticklers on the whole planet, has my support by proxy. If they think it's safe enough, it most likely is. Almost no other country has seen the dark side of what you're saying here as much as Germany, first with the Nazis and then in East Germany.

> To the extent that political discourse is shaped by astroturfing

Both Brexit and the Trump election have been significantly impacted by this, and it's not even controversial to observe that.

> Outside interference in the form of legal bribes (lobbying) and sometimes less legal forms of corruption has orders of magnitude more sway over politics than whatever the public may effect in elections.

Perhaps, but that doesn't mean that we should not address the elephant in the room - the seriously degrading impact that social media has on our society.

> It's ridiculous to imply that there was any serious public debate on this.

There was no debate because almost no one in (for example) tech circles is even acknowledging the problem, let alone coming up with a solution. Give me a better solution and I would argue for that instead. The status quo is unacceptable.

https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/eu-age-ver...

Re: The 'papers, please' era of the internet will decimate your privacy

#438

Post by fbrusch »

rockskon wrote: post #84
teravor wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

worthless is too strong. the truth is that the two extremes you listed can be titrated. if you use nullifiers you can trade some privacy for some security. basically you convert your true identity into a private token which you can use to authenticate aspects of yourself, the price being that the token can be tracked with some effort across services. better than just using your identity at least. if a token/nullifier…

Okay - so you verify age and what else? What combination of details can you validate on that is meaningfully privacy-preserving and couldn't result in wide-spread re-use of tokens? Additionally - what would prevent some kids from getting a homeless man in the city to hand them his ID, get a facial scan, and everything else you can think of to generate a token and then pass that token around? ZKP are a cryptography-ne…

In Italy every citizen has an electronic ID card that contains a private key and can sign challenges. It also has state-signed credentials/certificates that bind the public key to info about the citizen (date of birth etc).

You can do this: when you want to log into a service, the service provider gives you a fresh challenge C, bound to that service/session. You sign the challenge, and then generate a zkp of the fact that:

1. you have the signed challenge C with a certain public key P 2. you have a state-signed credential/certificate that binds P with a person with birth date BD 3. current date - BD > 18 years 4. optionally, you derived a per-service nullifier, e.g. from the card/credential secret, the service origin and a time bucket, so the service can rate-limit abuse without getting a global cross-site identifier

You send the proof to the service provider, that verifies it, and learns nothing about you (except for the fact that you're of age).

An adult can of course give away the card/PIN, but you need to have it physically to sign fresh challenges, so it cannot be passed around as easily as a bearer token. Moreover he loses access to his actual ID, which is required for other services.

Re: The 'papers, please' era of the internet will decimate your privacy

#439

Post by throwaway72587 »

pif wrote: post #386

I am always surprised that people get shocked when online privacy is put at risk, as if it was a fundamental human right. REMOTE PRIVACY NEVER EXISTED BEFORE A FEW DECADES AGO! And what happened in these decades are enough for the societies to wonder whether this new possibility in human connections (i.e. remote privacy) is globally a good thing. Just stomping your feet because the new toy may be declared illegal is…

This is 100% wrong. Privacy has been the norm every time someone wandered a week by feet from home, or sent a letter. Famous authors published for a whole lifetime under pseudonyms.

We are living in a panopticon that never existed before.

Re: The 'papers, please' era of the internet will decimate your privacy

#440

Post by basilikum »

pif wrote: post #410
tavavex wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You see, when the governments are outraged that they can't monitor all facets of communication or are disallowed from using their shiny new ways to automatically observe and categorize billions of datapoints to automatically surveil-by-default millions of people, that is called having serious doubts and grave concerns, very important stuff. When the people are outraged that a freedom they've enjoyed for several decad…

You see, when someone talks about "the governments" without realising that they do represent the people in a democracy, their ignorance show so much that it is difficult for them to attract any sympathy in those places where the laws are discussed.

It is ignorant to believe that democracy is a stable, self regulating equilibrium that maintains itself purely through elections.

The people in power in a democracy do not not persecute their dissidents because they are better people or because they got to power by being elected by the people, but because good democratic systems hold the people in power accountable to the general population. A surveillance state does the opposite. It holds the people accountable to the government.

Democracies stay democratic because the people hold power over the state and have means to get informed about the state. That requires for example journalism and protection for journalists and their sources. When the state can trivially find the sources of journalists and surveil the investigations of journalists before they can even publish anything that protection is no longer given.

When the state can know exactly all the people that participated in a protest that gives the state power over the people and takes power away from the people.

When the state can know exactly where in important organizations of all kinds there are dissidents so it can replace them before they can organize...

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