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Why is privacy so hard? (2019)

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Re: Why is privacy so hard? (2019)

#31

Post by cogman10 »

socalgal2 wrote: post #28
cogman10 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ad revenue is the new shrink-flation without it prices will rise. Some prices rise, some prices go down. Ads aren't free money, the advertisers are paying for them (I know, seems obvious) but where do the advertisers get the money to advertise? Well, it's baked into the cost of the goods they advertise. That makes everything that advertises more expensive.

And yet advertising raises demand, which in intern causes people to offer to meet that demand which means competition, which lowers prices. Lots of examples of this cycle you can search for.

That only works for smaller and unestablished brands. There are diminishing returns to the economy of scale.

Coca-cola, for example, isn't going to lower their prices in response to increased demand from their $4 billion marketing budget.

Re: Why is privacy so hard? (2019)

#32

Post by fn-mote »

chii wrote: post #27
nfujd7 wrote: post #25

One thing interesting about the Church is that Kings, Inquisitors, Revolutionaries, Govts etc have all tried to break the seal of confession for thousands od years now. The Church has some how managed to defend it by saying we believe path to repair/forgiveness involves creating and maintaining space where people can confess their sins. If a priest shares those sins with the state, everyone looses trust in the system…

The reason it works for churches is because the data told to churches are somewhat embarrassing for the confessor, and if leaked, will destroy the confessor's reputation (if not get into legal troubles). The data that google collects are somewhat useless on their own, and is only valuable in aggregate with the millions of others they also collect. And for an individual, the leakage of this data (e.g., your advertisin…

> are somewhat useless on their own

There is no way Google does not have a good idea about the (sexual) kinks and (medical) issues that the majority of its users have. They know when you're shopping for an engagement ring. If they don't know when you're cheating, it's just because they don't want to know. Just wait for the ad: "is your relationship on the rocks, come to us for tele-counseling" and "caring for yourself post-breakup" (hopefully arriving after the actual breakup, but the whole thing is inferred so... you never know!).

My argument is: the data told in the confessional is as serious as what the ad networks know about you.

Re: Why is privacy so hard? (2019)

#33

Post by roenxi »

The article is exploring a broad topic but one area that seems to be overlooked is governments making privacy illegal or actively working to undermine it. The major privacy risk right now is things like social media age verification laws which, in principle, probably make pseudonymous sites like HN illegal or on the path to being illegal in many jurisdictions.

It is hard to maintain privacy when a law enforcement body insists that it isn't allowed. There are also indications that companies quickly become too enmeshed with intelligence services to be able to create properly private options even if tactically they might have an interest. Companies like Telegram stand out as looking difficult to run in practice because of the pressure from various snoops.

If it is legal to create private options then they will always exist because the people who care about specific aspects of privacy can self-serve.

Re: Why is privacy so hard? (2019)

#34

Post by drdaeman »

beloch wrote: post #26

We should tax data. Hear me out. Google, Meta, etc. offer "free" services to a significant portion of the world's population. This isn't charitable work. They do this for data that makes them money. Lots of money. Data has real monetary value, but governments don't treat it as such. Few, if any, jurisdictions view data exports as taxable. It's simply not tracked. If data collection isn't tracked, how can one realisti…

I like the overall direction, but how to tax it without screwing over hobbyist archivists aka data hoarders? That is, how to assess the value of some datastore, somehow distinguishing between personal preference profiles, random LLM software slop and, say, vintage anime collections?

Re: Why is privacy so hard? (2019)

#35

Post by matheusmoreira »

drdaeman wrote: post #34
beloch wrote: post #26

We should tax data. Hear me out. Google, Meta, etc. offer "free" services to a significant portion of the world's population. This isn't charitable work. They do this for data that makes them money. Lots of money. Data has real monetary value, but governments don't treat it as such. Few, if any, jurisdictions view data exports as taxable. It's simply not tracked. If data collection isn't tracked, how can one realisti…

I like the overall direction, but how to tax it without screwing over hobbyist archivists aka data hoarders? That is, how to assess the value of some datastore, somehow distinguishing between personal preference profiles, random LLM software slop and, say, vintage anime collections?

> how to tax it without screwing over hobbyist archivists

If you're a corporation, you're taxed. If you're a human, you're not.

Re: Why is privacy so hard? (2019)

#36

Post by MrDrMcCoy »

beloch wrote: post #26

We should tax data. Hear me out. Google, Meta, etc. offer "free" services to a significant portion of the world's population. This isn't charitable work. They do this for data that makes them money. Lots of money. Data has real monetary value, but governments don't treat it as such. Few, if any, jurisdictions view data exports as taxable. It's simply not tracked. If data collection isn't tracked, how can one realisti…

I can imagine this having negative consequences for open platforms, such as Wikipedia, Bluesky, Mastodon, Common Crawl, etc. It could have implications for Stack Exchange keeping their datasets downloadable, and general API availability of most platforms. How would this make provisions for keeping the things that are currently free to access still free? People are already buckling under the weight of subscription fatigue, and I can only see this making that worse. I'm willing to give up a lot for the sake of privacy, but the people who would be most affected by such a change could stand to lose a lot more.

Re: Why is privacy so hard? (2019)

#37

Post by daft_pink »

Because there are numerous choke points where people need to use devices to do a thing and those devices can record you and the financial incentives for the companies that own these choke points is so great that they end up selling your data.

Even if Apple truly had perfect privacy you still need to use credit cards, bank accounts, insurance, cell towers, drive a car, etc.

I think that’s the underlying reason why privacy is so hard.

Re: Why is privacy so hard? (2019)

#38

Post by rileymat2 »

beloch wrote: post #26

We should tax data. Hear me out. Google, Meta, etc. offer "free" services to a significant portion of the world's population. This isn't charitable work. They do this for data that makes them money. Lots of money. Data has real monetary value, but governments don't treat it as such. Few, if any, jurisdictions view data exports as taxable. It's simply not tracked. If data collection isn't tracked, how can one realisti…

I am not sure what the point of this is.

If they are exporting data for sale, we can tax the value they are selling it at. If they are using data to generate ad revenue, we can tax that.

If we want to enforce privacy standards, we can make liability laws around sharing that data with third parties; we can make it harder for users to consent to the sharing of data by making users decide and approve on a case by case basis.

There is so much to do before exotic schemes, for instance way less intrusive things like making it so privacy policies legally survive bankruptcy.

Re: Why is privacy so hard? (2019)

#39

Post by rileymat2 »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #35
drdaeman wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like the overall direction, but how to tax it without screwing over hobbyist archivists aka data hoarders? That is, how to assess the value of some datastore, somehow distinguishing between personal preference profiles, random LLM software slop and, say, vintage anime collections?

> how to tax it without screwing over hobbyist archivists If you're a corporation, you're taxed. If you're a human, you're not.

Perhaps you are human that wants to isolate the expenses, activity and liability into a corporate organization, like Wikimedia?

Re: Why is privacy so hard? (2019)

#40

Post by johnnyanmac »

It's fairly simple

1) there's a lot of money to be made with data, so there are a lot of incentives to jump over any gates setup to protect privacy. If not actively tear down the gates and lobby to make it illegal to build more gates

2) The policy makers have a lot of power to be gained with data, so there are a lot of incentives to at worst, legalize backdoors so they get access to data, and at worst make it illegal to build more gates

Two powerful incentives in lockstep for once means an uphill battle for the force that is society. There's a lot of points brought up, but it mostly comes down to (the articles's points) 4) and 8). In my eyes, everything else is secondary and only serves to justify the ends of 4) (which includes 8, the only real barrier in the way).

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