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The Candid Naivety of Geeks

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Re: The Candid Naivety of Geeks

#61

Post by robwwilliams »

itsanaccount wrote: post #30
robwwilliams wrote: post #4

Guy on a good soapbox, but heavy on assertions and high emotion. Those damn trade-offs!

Except the trade offs only go one way. Its a rachet. You never get more free, open systems. Over time your life and the life of your children only gets more bound. It's frog boiling. You're displaying the exact naivety he's trying to point out.

Maybe, but these types of complaints have a very long history. Photographs are an invasion of privacy. And many forms of technology. We are embedded in complex societies. The idea of being a sacrosanct private silo is a Western mode of thinking, and not an old one either.

Re: The Candid Naivety of Geeks

#62

Post by Ferret7446 »

Pedantic, but the naivete of spelling it as "naivety" (diacritics dropped when anglicized, for those even more pedantic)? I'm pretty sure that (mis)spelling did not exist (or was certainly not commonly used) 10 years ago.

Re: The Candid Naivety of Geeks

#63

Post by thayne »

lukev wrote: post #26

Ok this is a little frustrating for me. Not because there aren't bad actors (there are, and LOTS of them, basically anything ad-supported.) But we're in a capitalist system, right? We want companies to compete on features that have value to users. And privacy is definitely a thing of value. And god help me, I never wanted to be an Apple apologist, they're a giant capitalist organization. But they're also the ONLY one…

> We want companies to compete on features that have value to users.

What we want and what actually happens are two different things. In many cases there isn't a whole lot of competition. For example, Apple's only competitor for mobile OS is google.

Re: The Candid Naivety of Geeks

#64

Post by danaris »

disambiguation wrote: post #53

Naivety has layers. You either die a normie who doesn't care about privacy, or you live long enough to become a schizo who knows how bad things really are. Try bringing up at the dinner table the NSA dragnet or always-on backdoors embedded in consumer routers and CPUs. Everything is tracked, everything is logged, its been this way for a long time and there's nothing you can do about it. You have zero privacy in the i…

> Everything is tracked, everything is logged, its been this way for a long time and there's nothing you can do about it. You have zero privacy in the internet and you're an idiot if you think otherwise.

But this nihilistic, all-or-nothing attitude is another kind of naïvety.

There are absolutely still ways for people to keep large chunks of their online presence and activity private. Using E2EE services like Matrix and iMessage, for instance. De-Googling sharply reduces the amount of information Google has about you. Etc, etc.

It may not be accessible—or even understandable—for everyone, but the idea that absolutely everything we say, do, want, and think will be collected and tracked and there's nothing we can do about it is just not true.

Re: The Candid Naivety of Geeks

#65

Post by poincaredisk »

boppo1 wrote: post #58
disambiguation wrote: post #53

Naivety has layers. You either die a normie who doesn't care about privacy, or you live long enough to become a schizo who knows how bad things really are. Try bringing up at the dinner table the NSA dragnet or always-on backdoors embedded in consumer routers and CPUs. Everything is tracked, everything is logged, its been this way for a long time and there's nothing you can do about it. You have zero privacy in the i…

>NSA dragnet Can you tell me more? What specifically, are they collecting? The porn I've looked at on /s/? >always-on backdoors embedded in consumer routers and CPUs Are we talking about IME? That's more of a 'theoretically it could execute code, but they'd need a crazy amount of software engineering to really use it to monitor you'. Besides, you can MITM your network traffic and see if it's phoning home. And I'm sur…

GP basically called himself a schizo so they know, at least subconsciously, they went too far down that rabbit hole. Even though they just called us idiots.

My particular hot take, speaking partially from experience, is that indeed, there are insurmountable amounts of data collected - but it's collected by hundreds of disconnected, inhomogeneous and incompetent organizations with conflicting goals. There's no global all-knowing conspiracy, even governmental organizations in a single country have poor data sharing capabilities. And this should be trivial - it gets much harder when you take into account commercial organizations that store user data but it's not their main focus, commercial organizations that want to sell user data, but not for free, commercial organizations that really want to pretend they care about user privacy, foreign organizations, foreign organizations from hostile countries, and everreaching bureaucracy related to getting data from basically any of those.

Re: The Candid Naivety of Geeks

#66

Post by like_any_other »

danaris wrote: post #64
disambiguation wrote: post #53

Naivety has layers. You either die a normie who doesn't care about privacy, or you live long enough to become a schizo who knows how bad things really are. Try bringing up at the dinner table the NSA dragnet or always-on backdoors embedded in consumer routers and CPUs. Everything is tracked, everything is logged, its been this way for a long time and there's nothing you can do about it. You have zero privacy in the i…

> Everything is tracked, everything is logged, its been this way for a long time and there's nothing you can do about it. You have zero privacy in the internet and you're an idiot if you think otherwise. But this nihilistic, all-or-nothing attitude is another kind of naïvety. There are absolutely still ways for people to keep large chunks of their online presence and activity private. Using E2EE services like Matrix…

Plus, privacy leaks are plugged one at a time - we'll never get to private computing if we immediately give up because there's more than one thing spying on us, so fixing any one thing won't solve everything.

And it's a lot harder to spy en masse if for each act of spying you risk exposing your chip-level backdoor, instead of just asking Facebook for the data.

Re: The Candid Naivety of Geeks

#67

Post by int_19h »

9dev wrote: post #41
int_19h wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OpenAI integration in current Apple products needs to be enabled to begin with, and then it still prompts you before sending anything to OpenAI servers, so I'd say it's in line with their practices so far. The reason why I trust Apple a little bit more than, say, Google on something like this is that Apple is pitching their products as luxury goods - a way to be different from the hoi polloi - so they need features t…

That is kind of proving OPs point, though: the differentiating factor isn’t actual privacy, it’s an impression of privacy that you’re sold; the warm, fuzzy feeling that you’re using a superior product because you’re special and this phone is for special people that have important data that needs to be protected, and as a manufacturer of special people devices, Apple obviously takes care of this—because you’re importa…

That is true, but the catch is that reputation is very easy to lose and very hard to gain.

Re: The Candid Naivety of Geeks

#68

Post by poincaredisk »

I agree so far, but:

>But was is happening in your inbox, really? >Most spam is not "black hat spam". It is what I call "white-collar spam": perfectly legitimate company, sending you emails from legitimate address. You slept in a hotel during a business trip?

This is pure survivor paradox. This is true for your Gmail account, because all "black hat spam" was already filtered! I own two unfiltered email accounts that were sadly scraped from the internet, and the spam is - by far - almost completely malspam, romance scam, cryptocurrency spam, scam attempts, spoofs, phishings.

Re: The Candid Naivety of Geeks

#69

Post by egometry »

philo_sophia wrote: post #22

As a tech employee who has worked on software privacy controls for consumer devices at amazon I have a couple thoughts. First, let me clarify that I am still highly skeptical about any tech companies privacy promises. That being said, the privacy control I worked on for one of Amazon's devices was a pita. It was a hardware switch which completely powered down all sensors, and modifying code related to it required ext…

The ethics of individual employees only lasts until the next firing, unfortunately.

Re: The Candid Naivety of Geeks

#70

Post by thakoppno »

afc wrote: post #47
thakoppno wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In the case of one 15-year-old boy Barksdale met through a technology group in Seattle, Washington, he allegedly tapped into the boy's Google Voice call logs after the boy refused to tell him the name of his new girlfriend. Barksdale then reportedly taunted the boy with threats to call the girl. This doesn’t quite refute your assertion of no leaks of searches but it is just as egregious. You are right about incenti…

The gcreep was a huge wake up call for Google, back in ~2010 when this happened. I can tell you that Google took very drastic action internally as a direct result of this (my estimate is that it spent about 100 engineer years, including some very senior SWEs, in this, though that's just a guess) to make it very unlikely for this (an SRE abusing production access) to ever happen again. I'd still say that one incident…

> Google revealed to TechCrunch that a second Google employee had also been caught violating user privacy and was also dismissed. Google didn't reveal any details about what or when this occurred, other than to say the other case didn't involve minors.

I agree largely that the efforts have been successful but there’s more than one incident. I’ll even speculate wildly without any evidence that there have been more than two.

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