Privacy is at a crossroads. Choose wisely • Hacker News Board

Re: Privacy is at a crossroads. Choose wisely

#151

Post by Double_Cast » Wed, Feb 25, 2015, 4:35 AM UTC

cheatsheet wrote: post #128

j2kun wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course definitions matter. My point is that your definition is not specific enough to be useful.

Yours is mathematically nonsensical. You either have discrete containers that denote privacy relations between information and parties or you do not have it at all. Privacy does not exist on a gradient on a computer. You can not calculate the percentage of how private something is. If it is marked 'private information' and that information is released to a party not under the user / group / role term that is supposed…

You're discussing a different problem. You're using "private" in a legal sense. As in "it's either legal or it's not". Passing privacy laws is certainly a good idea and is what the DDG post is advocating. j2kun was bringing up another solution to privacy which was cryptographic rather than legal. Cryptographers generally use "private" in a "is it physically possible for a bad actor to decrypt this" sense. In which case, there's always a possibility that bad actor can access it. It's just a question of "how likely?" (any encryption requiring a deciphering-technique which takes more than polynomial-time to crack is considered good-enough).

In order for the data to be of any use, someone (be it the user or a trusted friend) has to be able to decrypt it. But if you (or your friend) can decrypt it, a hacker can also decrypt it. Hopefully, the hacker will find it more difficult without knowing the key. But the one in a million chance that he'll crack it on the first try exists by necessity.Even titanium breaks under stress.

In the pathological case that there's zero possibility (not even epsilon), the whole business of encryption is rendered moot because the rightful user himself cannot access the data! This means one of two things: the data is corrupt; or the data has been deleted entirely.

Re: Privacy is at a crossroads. Choose wisely

#152

Post by code_duck » Wed, Feb 25, 2015, 4:51 AM UTC

happyscrappy wrote: post #65

Choose what? To live like Stallman? Even his data leaks all over the place. Absolute privacy, like all absolutes, is a sandcastle in the path of an incoming tide. I am all for encrypted comm but metadata is almost as bad and virtually unavoidable. Why was no one creeped out that Starfleet always knows where every crew member is at all times?

Starfleet personal are in some sort of military organization and are constantly exposed to some sort of danger. Not to mention, on a space ship managed by some kind of artificial intelligence. It makes sense the Federation would keep tabs on them.

Re: Privacy is at a crossroads. Choose wisely

#153

Post by burkaman » Wed, Feb 25, 2015, 5:11 AM UTC

saraid216 wrote: post #85

rom16384 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find the auto-correct to be over-zealous. If DDG decides that what I've entered is a typo, It will only show me results for the "corrected" word, so I'll have to quote uncommonly searched words. This usually happens when the search is similar to another one that is much more common.

That isn't really different from Google, though, is it?

It is, because sometimes DDG is so sure you made a typo, they don't bother to mention it and just search the correction. Try searching "president ovama". The first one or two pages of results are almost exactly the same as the results for "president obama", with no mention of the correction. I know this is sort of a contrived example, but you get the point.

As far as I can tell, Google will always tell you when it thinks you made a mistake, and provide a link to search for your exact query.

Re: Privacy is at a crossroads. Choose wisely

#154

Post by click170 » Wed, Feb 25, 2015, 5:19 AM UTC

stcredzero wrote: post #94

kardos wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is someone else's poor choice regarding privacy a justification for abandoning the fight for privacy? There's always a subset of people who don't care. There was a time when women didn't have the right to vote, and although I wasn't around during that time, I'm sure there was a subset of women who didn't care. Their apathy is not a justification for withholding that right from the rest.

There's always a subset of people who don't care. The problem is when it's the seeming majority who don't care.

If there's one thing that the outrage around the Snowden leaks showed us, it's that people do care. But they just aren't all geeks or programmers or crypto experts, they're welders and baristas and waitresses and cab drivers.

They want privacy too, but one could argue that we've failed to educate them about how to use existing tools and failed to make those tools simple enough that they're usable by the average Joe.

Re: Privacy is at a crossroads. Choose wisely

#155

Post by schoen » Wed, Feb 25, 2015, 6:03 AM UTC

shabbyrobe wrote: post #149

schoen wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google also apparently entirely eliminated the verbatim search mode (some time after making double quotes no longer perform a verbatim search). People now complain that there is no documented way to perform verbatim searches with Google.

At least from Australia, you can still perform a verbatim search by clicking "search tools", "all results", then changing the option to "verbatim". I still sometimes forget I can do this and wonder why Google is ignoring several of my qualifying terms. The deprecation of the plus symbol and double quotes for coercion is the single biggest piece of vandalism I've seen Google commit on their interface in over fifteen l…

Aha, that exists in the U.S. too; thanks for the tip. I think I heard a complaint that the current implementation doesn't truly always do a verbatim search, but I tried a couple of experiments and so far it did appear to have the behavior I expected (at least when putting the entire search term in quotes).

I agree with your chagrin at the loss of the plus symbol.

Re: Privacy is at a crossroads. Choose wisely

#156

Post by Too » Wed, Feb 25, 2015, 7:01 AM UTC

justcommenting wrote: post #2

I've also noticed the quality of DuckDuckGo search results has been steadily improving, especially over the past year. I would encourage anyone who tried it and went back to another search engine to consider giving DuckDuckGo another shot--you may be pleasantly surprised!

I've been using it for a while too now and my verdict is that i can't remove google from the second row in my search bar but i find the results of ddg to be good enough to use as my first choice.

80% searches work flawlessly on ddg, and for the remaining part you learn which kind of searches that will work and which ones doesn't. Many times i know in advance that this particular query will probably not work here but on google it will and i'll just append !g to the search to go straight to google.

What i find mostly interesting is that I have re-learned to use multiple different search engines, you know like we all did back before in the days, and that it actually helps me find more relevant information. Not only because the quality of Google has dropped significantly the past 5 years but even when google delivers a pretty solid result i check DDG after and i might find an even more relevant result, or an opposing story in a political topic etc. We all learn to check your information sources, this includes your search engine!

Re: Privacy is at a crossroads. Choose wisely

#157

Post by 0x5f3759df-i » Wed, Feb 25, 2015, 7:12 AM UTC

jwatte wrote: post #145

Privacy is not achievable. It's much better to build a world where we can all live happy /without/ privacy. This requires an attitude adjustment and significant tolerance because everything is public. Want to know if your bank treats customers good or bad? Look it up. Want to know if the issuer bets against a mortgage backed security? Audit the numbers. Want to cheat on your taxes? Tough luck! The thing is, we only h…

You are presenting a false dichotomy and your conclusion that "privacy is not achievable" is a claim without any justification.

http://mind.ucsd.edu/syllabi/98-99/logic/falsedichotomy.html

Re: Privacy is at a crossroads. Choose wisely

#158

Post by Aoyagi » Wed, Feb 25, 2015, 9:01 AM UTC

nl wrote: post #141

Aoyagi wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...not that kind of guessing. Obviously. That's not "similar to the search query", that's just different meanings of words/phrases. I didn't say anything about that, but it looks like you didn't read past the first sentence anyway. Example of what I meant: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=BMW+723i

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22BMW+723i%22 Seriously, quoting that is a reasonable solution. Given the comparative popularity of the two, it seems statistically likely that most people actually wanted a 323i. Having said that, I note that Google doesn't show 323i results for 723i, so... hm. I do think explaining the substitution that was done and linking to the exact search (ie, how Google does it) would be a good feat…

No. If the search engine thinks I meant something else, it's supposed to ask "did you mean [something else]?" and not guess that I'm incapable of writing 4 characters correctly and serve me the wrong results.

That's over-guessing.

Re: Privacy is at a crossroads. Choose wisely

#159

Post by cheatsheet » Wed, Feb 25, 2015, 10:36 AM UTC

Double_Cast wrote: post #151

cheatsheet wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yours is mathematically nonsensical. You either have discrete containers that denote privacy relations between information and parties or you do not have it at all. Privacy does not exist on a gradient on a computer. You can not calculate the percentage of how private something is. If it is marked 'private information' and that information is released to a party not under the user / group / role term that is supposed…

You're discussing a different problem. You're using "private" in a legal sense. As in "it's either legal or it's not". Passing privacy laws is certainly a good idea and is what the DDG post is advocating. j2kun was bringing up another solution to privacy which was cryptographic rather than legal. Cryptographers generally use "private" in a "is it physically possible for a bad actor to decrypt this" sense. In which ca…

Computer security has more subfields than cryptography.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_flow_%28informati...

Re: Privacy is at a crossroads. Choose wisely

#160

Post by unprepare » Wed, Feb 25, 2015, 4:08 PM UTC

chestnut-tree wrote: post #92

mgreg wrote: post #5

I'm curious if data privacy & protection will ever emerge from its little corner where a few passionate folks worry about it while the masses blithely ignore how their personal data is used and abused. Couple of other related items just from today indicate this _may_ be taking on steam but we've seen this kind of blip before just to see it fade. 1. Helping Prove Mr. Weinberg's going (CEO of DuckDuckGo) is an article…

"...health web sites share your search queries with 3rd parties..." For anyone looking for health information (in English), I recommend the NHS website. (Start your search from there rather than Google if you're worried about being tracked). It may not be the best-looking website, but the info is written by medical professionals and there are no commercial interests since the NHS is funded by the UK taxpayer. They ha…

Unfortunately This falls into the same trap as the US CDC site in the parents linked article.

The NHS site you linked makes requests to google analytics, webtrends and cloudfront. The point in the parents article applies here equally, since what i'm searching will still be analyzed by Google at the very least.

I'm not sure how identifiable this information is though, but definitely important to be aware of