I agree that privacy is important, but whenever I hear people talk about how hard it is to abandon Facebook or similar services, it seems to me that there's a missing middle ground. Posting to Facebook, even messaging, is publishing. People just need to remember that. There's nothing wrong with publishing. It's something that people used to work hard to achieve and only a few could afford. Now anyone can publish. Thi…
There's a distinct (I'd say moral or intentional) difference between publishing/performing in public and sharing with friends/family. Even Friendster or Diaspora* conflate the two. What I would like to see is the P2P equivalent of something like Snapchat, completely decentralized and fully under control of the person sharing a datum (text, picture, video, like, etc.) Unfortunately, that's not something easily enginee…
This is the expectation I think people need to get over. If you are sending your data to a third party unencrypted, even if that third party is Facebook, you have just published your data, no matter what expectation they might have set. Even encrypted data will likely become public at some point if it is stored indefinitely as computing power increases and quantum computing and further advances become common. As long as we use the Internet with the expectation that everything we send is only temporarily private at best, we will be fine. The idea that we can share privately with a select group on a public network is really something like a delusion, even if you are the NSA!
We still can and should develop private and secure communication protocols like DIME, but nobody should ever expect a hosted communication service out of their control to be private.
We just don't have all the answers yet. We are at a strange era in human history. We have had privacy for eons, and now we may not. We can't even answer the question "do we need privacy?" If you were raised with no privacy, you wouldn't know the difference. Imagine living your whole life with cameras on you. You know if something bad happens, you have video evidence. Now imagine all those cameras are taken away. You…
Privacy, as it exists today, is entirely a modern invention. For most of human history people lived in small groups where everyone knew everyone else very well. It was not until industrialisation that we had mega cities where no one knows anyone.
I don't think everyone knew everyone else very well in ancient cities like Rome, Athens and many others. Certainly more people historically lived in villages, but cities have been around for millenia and even in villages people were more intimate with their family than everyone else.
I have always been fascinated by computers and passionate about programming. I never taught I would ever feel ashamed of my passion ... that maybe I have been part of the decline of freedom and privacy, the same things I've always believed in and fought for . I've finished reading again 1984 a short time ago, and I felt sick reading this article and realizing we're making a monster. I stopped using Facebook a few mon…
I agree that privacy is important, but whenever I hear people talk about how hard it is to abandon Facebook or similar services, it seems to me that there's a missing middle ground. Posting to Facebook, even messaging, is publishing. People just need to remember that. There's nothing wrong with publishing. It's something that people used to work hard to achieve and only a few could afford. Now anyone can publish. Thi…
You just effected a fundamental change in my perspective without even telling me anything I didn't know already. Thank you!
Eh... in my experience, most people simply aren't worth watching very closely.
Favorite part of the article...
"he used Craigslist to hire somebody to help him improve his productivity. The idea was that the person would come sit next to him and give him a slap whenever he would not be working..."
Love the idea. I recently had a talk w/ my boss about I was thinking about leaving because I was making many times more on the side than I was with the company. But the one caveat... I needed him to keep being my boss and check on what I was doing. Make sure I was at my desk at 7:30 coding away and didn't go home until 5. He laughed quite a bit and said to think about it. I am.
I'm not in favor of massive surveillance, but sometimes knowing we are watched a little helps us at certain times....
Sorry to digress here. Just want to comment on Ai. He is like many other iconic/famous people in the country, who got awards aboard, do things that seem against the ruling party in the country and basically walk away with way less consequences almost every time. Some of them get into short-term jail like hero and after that their experiences worth much more. This is very interesting since average people would probabl…
The real potential trouble makers probably don't last too long. We aren't talking house arrest either. And I'm guessing this might be true for many more countries than China.
I have always been fascinated by computers and passionate about programming. I never taught I would ever feel ashamed of my passion ... that maybe I have been part of the decline of freedom and privacy, the same things I've always believed in and fought for . I've finished reading again 1984 a short time ago, and I felt sick reading this article and realizing we're making a monster. I stopped using Facebook a few mon…
This is a fairly naive and negative statement no offensive, the context of history is important, the planet is in a much better place to communicate ideas and consensus, and it gets better every year.
The fact you're even reading about Ai Weiwei is a case in point. Sure it's not perfect , there are growing pains with anything new, but I'm tired of the one sided stories about privacy when the definition if what that means is hazy at best and often misses the point.
I don't really buy the privacy paranoia anymore these days. It was the internet that first grew the distance between people so that we could pretend-anonymous say things about anything without repercussion an it will be the internet that shrinks that distance down to where you better be talking about what matters to you and putting your money where your mouth is. In ten years I'll be sharing and leaking at least 10x…
One thing which requires privacy is being an actual thinking human being and not a fearful automaton.
Do you really think said hackers are "gleefully building these tools" specifically in order to enable a surveillance state? Of course not. It's been said a million times before: every technology can be used for good or for ill. After all, the technology that enables you to drink the water coming out of your tap, one of the most important developments in the history of mankind, is the very same technology that makes m…
> It's been said a million times before: every technology can be used for good or for ill But what is the "good" about what we're building? The most cringe-worthy justification I have ever read for giving up privacy was this post by an Ex-Googler[1]: > Digital identity unlocks universal personalization (i.e. better ads), payments and commerce (i.e. Snapcash), environmental adaptation (i.e. an Uber that plays your Spo…
The general idea from that is: computer systems that know a lot about you can provide personalized services for you or about you. Those services can be to your benefit or detriment, depending on who controls the data, their intentions and their priorities (e.g. quick cash grab vs sustainable customer relations). If you want better examples: Google maps knowing your location allows you to navigate in places where you don't know the surrounding area or where you are exactly; Gmail reading all your mails allows you to filter crud out of your inbox and pretty much solved the spam problem that plagued the 90s; Facebook makes a lot of your life transparent to corporations, but it also does allow you to keep up with the lives of friends in distant places that you don't meet often. Now, I am all for solutions that make your private data more opaque to the services that consume it, and the way they consume it more transparent to you. But services based on your personal information will not disappear, and the reason is not some dark evil conspiracy to monitor your every step (or, at least, not just some dark evil conspiracy to monitor your every step) but the fact that people find this services useful. Like the industrial revolution, the issue is not that we are going forward with this new uses of energy/information, but that we are doing so largely without consideration of their harmful externalities (pollution in the case of the industrial revolution, misuse of private data in the case of the information one).
Ai Weiwei isn't living in our future, he's living in an actual totalitarian-ish nationstate.
The degree to which there's this encouraged ignorance to what the Chinese government is all about is the story which is of greater concern here: they're never not been a brutal regime, they're just a trade partner now so the narrative has shifted.
What they do, and what they can do isn't enabled by technology. It's enabled by the simple political and military will to actually kick in doors and arrest and execute people.
You want to not live in that world? Then you inform people why the no-fly list is stupid, for a start. How such a list is distributed, generated or updated is irrelevant.
You feel awful now, but what you've written is very encouraging. You're doing the right thing. Coding can be put to good use too. Perhaps there's an open-source project you can contribute to that has a positive benefit to offer society? What social injustices are you most passionate about? I also intend to leave Facebook (again) very soon. The only reason I haven't in the past is that I didn't want to lose contact wi…
I thought about moving away from gmail too but to be honest, gmail has all my emails. 99% of my friends use gmail.
Even symbolic gestures by enough people can facilitate change.