A radical proposal to keep your personal data safe • Hacker News Board

Re: A radical proposal to keep your personal data safe

#81

Post by stinkytaco » Tue, Apr 03, 2018, 6:17 PM UTC

athenot wrote: post #73

nwah1 wrote: post #30

This seems like such a losing battle. Payments on public transit could become anonymous, but the video feeds would still be recorded, and facial recognition could be easily performed. The cat is out of the bag. Information technology makes this data accumulation inevitable. Likely even for those who walk around with a face covering all day, pay only cash, and don't use smartphones. By doing those things you actually…

Maybe the answer is to turn the dial to 11 on information sharing and require data transparency from managers/leaders/public servants who operate data accumulation outfits. Track users' location data? Then your location must be public record & realtime. Etc. At the end of the day, this is about information asymmetry. If the general public loses privacy, then so should those who benefit from that information, in order…

> At the end of the day, this is about information asymmetry. If the general public loses privacy, then so should those who benefit from that information, in order to level the playing field.

This could be said for literally any transaction, ever. The bank knows how much money you have, but you don't know how much money the teller has. You don't know which books your librarian has out or what the bartender drinks. They are also citizens with their own right to privacy.

I'm all for transparency and oversight, but information asymmetry will always exist. Some industries have regulatory structures around that asymmetry to prevent abuse, HIPAA for example, and others have not.

Re: A radical proposal to keep your personal data safe

#82

Post by anigbrowl » Tue, Apr 03, 2018, 6:20 PM UTC

confounded wrote: post #54

fortythirteen wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would a government that has a CCTV on every street enact legislation to limit its surveillance abilities? I agree that it's a good ideal, it's just incredibly naive to think that it will be achieved. Even if legislation were passed, it would very likely make things worse, in that the government wouldn't stop surveilling - they would just do it even more covertly.

There’s already quite a bit of legislation about how CCTV can be used in the UK. Our democracies have lots of problems, but they basically work, and on issues like this, the main issue is apathy. I’m a firm believer that if people are informed and they care legislation like the above could be enacted.

they basically work, and on issues like this, the main issue is apathy

People are apathetic because their democracies don't basically work. Elections and occasional referendums are very crude kinds of representation and are easily manipulated by those who have a lot of cash. Legislation is great but the reality is that you're on camera almost all the time in a large city like Londonand no politician is going to lay themselves open to easy attacks by proposing to dismantle that infrastructure.

Bentham's panopticon was a design for a prison, a mill "for grinding rogues honest." Now the whole society is constructed around that idea; you have legal rights but the implicit premise is that people are rogues. You're not free.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon

Re: A radical proposal to keep your personal data safe

#83

Post by heisenbit » Tue, Apr 03, 2018, 6:22 PM UTC

ryanbrunner wrote: post #52

cobbzilla wrote: post #26

I love RMS but I'm not holding my breath waiting for any government laws to protect me. For what it's worth, neither is RMS, if you've read about how he uses the Internet. Let's keep building the free software tools so anyone can easily get the level of privacy they want for whatever they're trying to do. We've made so much progress but there's still so far to go. Do not to look UP to authority for hope - look AROUND…

One of the problems is that the software you run on your own computer hasn't been the major source of privacy concerns in a long, long time. That isn't to say that software on your computer doesn't track you, but it's dwarfed by the amount of tracking and privacy issues that you need to compromise on to use the vast majority of the internet. It's noble and laudable to take the same stance towards freedom and privacy…

wget leaks via dns

Re: A radical proposal to keep your personal data safe

#84

Post by anigbrowl » Tue, Apr 03, 2018, 6:24 PM UTC

DataWorker wrote: post #4

Obviously this proposal will be rejected because both companies and governments are addicted to the power to control and manipulate that data gives them. We need a strong leader who will go against the grain of these massive entrenched interests and be willing to stand up to the media onslaught such a stance will bring. The mainstream media will attack anyone who threatens their advertising based business model. When…

We need a strong leader

That's how you ended up with a surveillance society in the first place, silly.

Re: A radical proposal to keep your personal data safe

#85

Post by d21d3q » Tue, Apr 03, 2018, 6:24 PM UTC

nwah1 wrote: post #30

This seems like such a losing battle. Payments on public transit could become anonymous, but the video feeds would still be recorded, and facial recognition could be easily performed. The cat is out of the bag. Information technology makes this data accumulation inevitable. Likely even for those who walk around with a face covering all day, pay only cash, and don't use smartphones. By doing those things you actually…

How about wearing huge Sombrero so that your face is invisible for cameras mounted above your head?

Re: A radical proposal to keep your personal data safe

#86

Post by ABCLAW » Tue, Apr 03, 2018, 6:25 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #63

ABCLAW wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, they're kinda wrong. You can care plenty about these issues but not see an actual way to have impact such that your concerns are addressed. If society isn't caring, then either society doesn't see why there's a concern, or society recognizes that atomically it does not have agency to address the issue, and the people who do have that agency are the ones that don't give a shit.

Saying "society needs to care more" is the last stop before the final destination of "this can't be done". Getting great many people to coordinate on something that's beneficial to them long-term, but carries an (even insignificant) short-term cost is one of the hardest (if not the hardest) things to do, out of all the things humans ever tried.

I don't think calling out 'society needs to care more' as bullshit means we collectively throw up our hands and walk away. It means we recognize that 'getting many people to coordinate on something' just plain isn't going to happen as the primary mode of addressing these issues and instead work on solutions that do work.

For a subset, sure, maybe a good PR push gets people sufficiently inflamed about a particular topic, but does that mean that key problems that aren't 'viral' enough aren't deserving of a proper solution? If "society needs to care more" is the answer, then that's the implication. But that's obviously wrong.

Re: A radical proposal to keep your personal data safe

#87

Post by tlb » Tue, Apr 03, 2018, 6:32 PM UTC

hinkley wrote: post #55

fortythirteen wrote: post #40

Expecting groups of people (tech companies or government) to purposefully do something that is disadvantageous to their bottom line, for nothing more than ideals, is a pipe dream. The real question is personal and harder to answer: "Do I really need this information technology? Is it making my quality of life any better than my ancestors?" The more I ponder this question, the more I'm convinced I could live an equall…

If you haven’t sacrificed anything for your principles, then they are just words. I think the deeper problem is that we no longer even pretend to value people of character.

I'm prepared to sacrifice many things for various principles. But I won't sacrifice access to information, which is what I find most valuable about the internet.

Information is power, and if principled people sacrifice their access to information, then unprincipled people will hold more of the world's power.

So the danger of encouraging principled people to opt out of parts of the internet is that they will become less powerful, and unprincipled people more powerful.

Re: A radical proposal to keep your personal data safe

#88

Post by yarrel » Tue, Apr 03, 2018, 6:32 PM UTC

GNU Taler seems to be such a betrayal of the GNU project's principles. Baking state surveillance into software isn't something GNU should be doing.

It's as if GPG was an implementation of the Clipper Chip algorithm because, you know, otherwise it might be used for ~~tax fraud~~ terrorism.

Re: A radical proposal to keep your personal data safe

#89

Post by MrQuincle » Tue, Apr 03, 2018, 6:36 PM UTC

Tell me how someone anonymous travels from day to day and I will tell you who he or she is.

To decouple identity data from other data does already not work in theory. Moreover, it is also in conflict with the ability to retract personal data. If data is anonymized, it is not possible anymore to get rid of your personal records.

Homeomorphic encryption is the only method that might make a dent here. Laws will be broken.

Re: A radical proposal to keep your personal data safe

#90

Post by LinuxBender » Tue, Apr 03, 2018, 6:57 PM UTC

QasimK wrote: post #77

LinuxBender wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The data could be stored encrypted on a VM and cycled off after {n} hours. With the right codecs and encryption, you could likely store a couple days of motion on a small amount of storage. If uploaded in chunks, you might miss a couple minutes prior to the unit being destroyed. I suppose protecting your internet uplink becomes important at this point.

Just store the encrypted files in AWS S3 (or equivalent)?

That works too. And maybe use ffmpeg to encode + 7-zip (p7zip 7za on linux) to encrypt and name the chunks based on date in a programmatic / deterministic manor.