Privacy: One of the Most Fundamental Human Rights, yet Constantly Under Threat
escapebigtech.infoOnce the invasion of privacy proved monetarily and politically profitable and legally a gray area its fate was sealed.
In a sense the age of moving fast and breaking things helped us see what the system is made of: What sort of moral reflexes exist, how quickly they get mobilized, where this happens institutionally, geographically and socially etc.
Needless to say that it has been the bleakest of revelations.
What is deeply ironic though, is that the system is in self-destruct mode.
The privacy destruction happens in parallel with the annihilation of ownership / copyright that is discussed in other threads. A new "world order" is instituted, uglier and poorer.
The prosperity and social stability of the West has been based on instituting, respecting property rights, privacy, individual agency as the bedrock of liberal market democracy.
It turned out the pillars on which the edifice was standing have rotted over time and nobody knew.
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In the discussion of losing privacy we focus on the social freedoms lost as a result of loss of privacy. I agree with all of those arguments but missing from these discussions are the economic freedoms we might lose.
People like to portray their least favorite countries as being engaged in corporate espionage in other developed countries, but what stops your favorite big corp from stealing what you create? Going forward, the value of eyeballs on ads might not be much compared to the value of business ideas, strategies etc. a corporation can access by violating your privacy.
Think of it this way: If you are a business owner, how successful would your business be if every second of the day, your fierce competitors had access to all your phone calls, texts, google docs, spreadsheets etc.? What if your competitor is already established with much more resources to create and get to market before you can?
Many people have been conditioned to think they are unimportant and these companies would not waste time looking at their stuff. They may not understand the power of AI which can constantly scan, remember, and process the information of many people to provide distilled information and opportunities to its master. We are also easily manipulated into spending, speaking, and voting which this knowledge and processing power greatly improves. If you do not think you are easily manipulated, you are probably the most easily manipulated.
Neither voters nor the press has a meaningful objection to lawmakers trading campaign cash & jobs for law & power. As long as that condition persists, I see no path away from what you describe.
> your fierce competitors had access to all your phone calls, texts, google docs, spreadsheets etc.?
I'll take this a step further into the Sci-Fi realm: what if your competitors could use all that data to model a simulation of your thoughts and generate your own ideas faster than you can?
There's a philosophical argument here as ownership of those produced thoughts are contestable. The data is from you, so do you have the rights? The machine that produced the thoughts was built by a different person and they fronted all the costs and other such things, just not the data. You can make strong arguments either way.
And to keep with the sci-fi dystopian theme, would that society stop communicating openly and watch their words carefully?
I'm dialing it up to 11, but in some respect this is possible today or in the near future. But for our scenario, let's keep it dialed to 11 and assume this is/can be perfected. (I'm not convinced this would be effective today fwiw, far too much noise)
> would that society stop communicating openly and watch their words carefully?
I think we already live in that society, to be honest.
I think this is starting, but I'm not sure it has been internalized. People still frequently quote Goebbels and saying "my data isn't useful." I think one key change that is happening now is that our data and decisions have really changed. For example, with the advent of LLMs I've thought of not just deleting accounts (despite being semi-anonymous) but purging them, so that my data cannot be used for future training. This is something that wasn't reasonably predictable 5-10 years ago, despite understanding the information was public and utilized for other means. Maybe we need to update how accounts are handled. On HN you can only delete your account. You can't purge and the reason was to ensure that there's a record of conversations for future readers. But the environment has changed and thus we need to weigh the threat model of privacy now vs the consistency argument.
Dang, if you're poking around, I really would be curious about your thoughts here. Are you thinking about allowing account purging due to this new environment change?
> I think this is starting, but I'm not sure it has been internalized.
Good point. But I see people doing a whole lot more self-censoring these days without even realizing they're doing it, too.
> with the advent of LLMs I've thought of not just deleting accounts (despite being semi-anonymous) but purging them, so that my data cannot be used for future training
I have removed my websites from the public web for exactly this reason, and I've heard from several others who have done the same. So, to some degree anyway, this is already happening at least at that level.
This sort of thing (self-censoring) worries me greatly, and I don't think there's anything I can do about it. The sense of powerlessness is very high sometimes.
I'm interested in the "removing your websites from the public web". Are you taking them down, putting them behind auth, or something else?
Ah yeah, in that context I'm agreement. Self-censoring is tricky because it can happen without people realizing it or viewing it as self-censorship. That's a good point.
I suggest you read some books on espionage. China is a fantastic example of what corporate espionage can do. If interested I recommend Silent Invasion.
There is tremendous knowledge to be gained also, to call the opposite of privacy social freedom, is disturbing to me. If you are more private in some aspects of your life does not mean you cannot be more social in others.
The only book I could find called Silent Invasion is about Trump and Covid, is that what you are recomending?
I believe they are referring to this book:
Information already leaks like this between huge tech companies.
Chrome, Edge both by default send your URL's back home. This is just the official telemetry features you can turn off.
I try to avoid both Edge and Chrome. Brave seems better (of course we are taking them at their word).
> Our mission is clear - we aim to unravel the magic of FOSS, Linux, and self-hosting to individuals seeking a break from the shackles of Big Tech.
IMO, it's not only Big Tech that poses a threat on privacy and freedom. Big Governments are other threat that, IMO, it's much harder to fight against it.
Ironically, it's government that should be protecting the privacy of its citizens against the pervasive surveillance big tech has essentially normalised and monetised.
And so monetised has it become that any attempt by government to reign in the pervasive surveillance, it could potentially have a noticeable effect on the employment rate as all those "smartest people on the planet working very hard on getting better click rates" in the big tech surveillance industry are legislatively made redundant. Bad politics.
This would also dry up a fair portion of the ... lobbyist funding ... governments receive.
Plus governments handily use these private enterprises profiting from pervasive surveillance to take the pulse of the citizenry for the purposes of staying in power - the very reason they're in government in the first place.
So, yeah, Government, as they are, are a significant part of the problem from a number of angles.
Any data collected by big tech can be accessed by governments and governments will manage that data using big tech products so there's not that much distinction between the two.
And big government, which demands information in many cases by law, is terrible at keeping that info "safe" in its hands once it's been collected.
Taking the U.S. federal government as an example, by my count we've already seen over 60 notable breaches in just this young decade: https://github.com/MattHJensen/US-gov-info-losses. Certainly many others have gone unreported or unnoticed.
>Big Governments are other threat that, IMO, it's much harder to fight against it.
Whenever people complain about Big Government I like to remind them that any attempt at regulating industries like Big Tech is decried by the owner class as "Big Government", which is often parroted by conservatives, libertarians, and other pro-business groups.
So is it Big Government when it protects the interests of Big Industry to the detriment of its country's people, or Big Government when it regulates it to protect the interests of the people? They can't both be the same thing, and I would argue what most people call "Big Government" is what they've been told to call it, namely the regulation of corporate interests. Nobody ever calls the consistent erosion of people's individual rights "Big Government".
As near as I can tell, when people complain about "big government", what they're really complaining about is just the government doing things that they dislike.
I've never heard anyone decry "big government" in response to governmental actions that they like, so I don't think it's usually a principled position.
>or Big Government when it regulates it to protect the interests of the people?
We (the "owner class," parrots, what have you) would argue for the government regulating itself, not the companies. Facebook showing you fursuit ads as a result of your history isn't as big of a problem as the government showing up at your door now that you've shared the wrong idea online. Governments should not be allowed to indiscriminately collect data from (that is, to spy on) it's citizens. Giving the governmemt more power doesn't seem like the right solution here, being that that is exactly what we are trying to limit. Companies should not be unregulated, but more important is that the government itself should be regulated: specifically, minimized in it's powers.
> Whenever people complain about Big Government I like to remind them that any attempt at regulating industries like Big Tech is decried by the owner class as "Big Government", which is often parroted by conservatives, libertarians, and other pro-business groups.
I disagree. Big Government means the government getting into every subject possible. The opposite of this is that you have a government that only enters into essential matters for the well-being of society.
> enters into essential matters for the well-being of society.
Which has poorly defined boundaries because people disagree on essential.
In practice "Big Government" is used only for PR value. It sometimes seems the more a politician or policy wonk uses it, the more they are actually likely to increase government spending when they are in power.
Most people seem to use "Big Government" to mean they don't like something the government is supporting or regulating, and "Essential Government Function" to mean something they want the government to pay for or regulate.
I don't know what's the difference supposed to be.
A void of power never creates a favorable outcome for the common person. If there's room for commercial activity in the area, you can expect all sorts of unethical tactics to eventually surface, like we see in cryptocurrency. In a free-for-all capitalism people will lie and scam and cheat for profit.
So I don't really know what could the government get out of that would make things better.
They're not even close to comparable. Worrying about privacy and then focusing on Big Tech is like trying to swat away a mosquito while you're being devoured alive by three bears.
A huge amount of government surveillance either depends on Big Tech contractors or explicitly leverages Big Tech's disregard for privacy. For example "geofence warrants" wouldn't be possible if Big Tech wasn't collecting and storing all that location data in the first place.
Let's rein in Big Tech. Now what? Law enforcement and intelligence agencies are going to leave it at that and not seek alternative paths? I do not understand how anyone is more eager to address something that merely facilitates the problem than the actual problem itself.
I can’t get any normies interested in privacy. Even my wife, who is the most tin-foil-hat woman I know, is perfectly fine with NSA spying, the TSA, etc. Given that, how can anyone say that privacy is “one of the most fundamental human rights?” The masses obviously don’t agree. And who else even has standing to decide what’s a human right and what isn’t?
Sorry for the confusion, but what is TSA and what did they do?
in the United States, the Transportation Security Administration is most commonly responsible for airport security screenings. This typically involves scanning passengers' belongings with xray equipment and passengers themselves with at least metal detectors. As such there is a markedly reduced expectation to privacy when passing through an airport security checkpoint.
privacy is important but the article is strange because all of the things described can be opted-out of. in the case of Telly you are explicitly trading off privacy in order to receive a free product. don't consume if you don't agree.
there are certain situations in which you might be OK with the privacy implication. I, for example, would be OK with receiving a free car ride if I had to watch an advertisement while traveling in the vehicle.
a better example would be something like being fingerprinted at the airport. Where it is not strictly necessary in order to accomplish the goal of security. In general I would say Big Government is more concerning than Big Tech. Is it unfortunate that Meta and Google track you across the internet? Sure, but it's ultimately not necessary for your participation in society, unlike say being tracked in order to get a state identification card, and thus do basic things like get a bank account.
> Is it unfortunate that Meta and Google track you across the internet? Sure, but it's ultimately not necessary for your participation in society
I'm honestly astonished by this claim.
For many the products provided by Meta and Google--Facebook, Whatsapp, Gmail, WeChat, etc--are deeply important to their lives. These tools are the way people connect and communicate with friends and families, conduct business, and in general navigate the world.
It is becoming damn near impossible to avoid their prying eyes. And I know. I've tried.
So, I'm sorry, no, I completely disagree with your claim.
Is "Big Government" surveillance a concern? Yes. Absolutely.
But private company surveillance is every bit as concerning, every bit as difficult to avoid, and far harder to control (after all, I don't get to elect who runs Facebook).
Those examples you gave inherently must track you in order to function. I'm talking about accessory cases, e.g. "Facebook pixel." That case is problematic, but also easy to avoid - don't go to sites that for example use Facebook comments.
Fundamentally though, even if you are tracked by Facebook you being banned on Facebook isn't going to stop you from living your life. If that is the case then that is indeed problematic.
We will have to agree to disagree. I care about surveillance only to the extent that if the person doing has the ability to stop my participation in society. To that extent Meta cannot do much damage (to me at least).
> Those examples you gave inherently must track you in order to function.
No. They don't. What gave you that idea?
> That case is problematic, but also easy to avoid - don't go to sites that for example use Facebook comments.
Honestly, that you think it's that easy suggests to me you don't understand the topic well enough to have an informed opinion.
That's not a slight! That's actually a huge problem with the debate, as few people truly understand the issues well enough to have a fully informed opinion on the topic.
> No. They don't. What gave you that idea?
Yes they do. How could Google serve you email without knowing what your email address is, for instance?
> Honestly, that you think it's that easy suggests to me you don't understand the topic well enough to have an informed opinion.
No, it's probably that I'm not as injected in the internet as you, probably. You can easily live a very full life and barely use the internet, let alone Facebook. This conversation reminds me of someone who told me that they need Discord to live. Just silly.
> Yes they do. How could Google serve you email without knowing what your email address is, for instance?
There is no one who would describe that as "surveillance" and I'd expect you to know that.
Voluntarily divulging information in order to make use of a service is obviously completely fine.
Turning around and selling that information is not.
Augmenting that information with additional data from across multiple sources--whether that data is voluntarily or involuntarily divulged--is also not fine.
Buying and selling those augmented datasets, also not fine.
And that is what Meta, Google, and so many of these other companies do. That's what surveillance capitalism is.
> No, it's probably that I'm not as injected in the internet as you, probably. You can easily live a very full life and barely use the internet, let alone Facebook.
Frankly, that suggests to me you're the outlier, not me.
Facebook has nearly two billion worldwide daily active users.
WeChat is used every single day in parts of the world not just to communicate with people but to engage in basic daily commerce.
WhatsApp is the way countless individuals stay in touch with friends and family.
You might be oddly disassociated from big tech and the internet, and thus it may be very easy for you to have a cavalier attitude about surveillance capitalism.
Most folks absolutely are not.
> Turning around and selling that information is not.
Both Meta and Google do not sell your data. No point of continuing if the basics are wrong. Both companies also make it very explicitly clear how your data is used.
With respect to Meta and Google, fair enough. They collect vast troves of data themselves and then use it to monetize content on their platforms. That's still enormously problematic as a) it makes them juicy targets for data breeches (hence Cambridge Analytica), b) it makes them key players in state surveillance activities, and c) they could always change their policies in the future if the financial incentives are right.
But critically, they are far from the only players in the space, and it's the entire ecosystem that's problematic.
"Sure, but it's ultimately not necessary for your participation in society"
I'm going to push back on this. I've opted out of Facebook before when I was part of some active social groups, and known others who've done so. Opting out of these providers absolutely hampers participation in society, depending.
So many groups and activities require a Facebook account. If you're not there you miss out on discussions and maybe miss being invited to things altogether because "out of sight, out of mind."
At the minimum, not using these things introduces friction in participating in society. Whether they're necessary really depends on what you want your participation to look like and what you consider "society." For some people, it's very easy to cast off the Facebook chains because their social circles don't use Facebook.
But say you have kids and want to participate in a school parenting group or external activity and they've decided to organize things via FB. It's in or out. You aren't just making a choice for you now, it drags your spouse and kids into it too. Maybe your extended family.
And this is by design. Facebook absolutely designs its products to ensure that the maximum number of people must have accounts and that not having an account makes it difficult or impossible to participate or even observe content related to things.
Now, government tracking is harder to avoid and even more concerning, but let's not handwave away the impact people face if they refuse to use FB or Google. It is limiting for a large swath of people.
I would argue that access and utilization of the internet is needed to participate in society. That is to say if we define "participate in society" beyond being alive and merely existing in close proximity to your neighbours, the internet is inescapable if you want to pay bills, stay up to date what is happening in your neighbourhood or have any chance of a decent living (e.g. a paying job).
This is ignoring the very very VERY possible reality of everyone and their dog signing up to get a free 55" TV.
They don't see a loss of privacy and a very easy conduit for constant surveillance; they see free TVs with a decent enough sound bar
Well I dare say, before civilization, when people lived in small tribes, there was no privacy in your tribe.
But now, comparing to back then, all other "tribes" can see what you are doing.
On the contrary, you could go always off on your own and use any tools you could get your hands on to do private acts, think private thoughts (including writing/drawing them out physically), and make private art. That is increasingly difficult in a world where every tool you can get your hands on is designed to spy on you as a primary function.
Recently I've favored Privacy as a Right. Seeing what someone is doing is only part of it, imo. What about the thoughts in your head? Is it a privacy issue to try to extract your thoughts? Yes. There is a moral right to privacy. It's part of what makes us humans and promotes humankind, as we know it.
> when people lived in small tribes, there was no privacy in your tribe
Anything to back that claim?
I think there's some evidence, take the old saying "three can keep a secret if two are dead" or it's variations. Even the Bible warns about how easily things get spread around.
But the Internet and communications moving to online text, etc, greatly increases the provability of the gossip, if you will. Which is a major change that we as a society haven't really adapted to. We treat "private" or "direct" chats as like talking in a cornfield; but before you just had a he said/she said situation, now someone can "drop receipts" or you can have whatever platform you're on hacked and everything spilled.
>the old saying "three can keep a secret if two are dead" or it's variations
I was reminded of this just a few weeks ago. Told a few people some news I told them was non-public given I was seeing them in person. Wouldn't you know it, it immediately got up to someone I'd just as soon not have known. Wasn't really a big deal but still annoying.
Common sense? Lived experience? No privacy is probably an overstatement (as absolute statements tend to be). But my experience having gone to university and living with a group of people was that you tended to learn a lot about other people's lives. And that's almost certainly more privacy than in a tribe.
Everytime I read threads like this I get very concerned. It's like, even here, people don't understand the core problem. Or are intentionally trying to shift the blame away from big tech.
Of course the state spies on you. After Edward Snowden everyone should know that. And thats a big problem because the state is the one actor that should fight to protect you from surveillance. But let's not claim that big tech is not the motor of the machine that is state sanctioned surveillance. Google allowed the US to read your e-mails. A yahoo software was responsible to access your webcam from the outside. NSO sold Pegasus to state actors.
That sounds bad enough. But if these companies would care about their users they would stop this from happening. Right? Of course these companies will tell you that they need your information to provide you with the best service. In reality they want to collect the biggest value as possible from you.
In the past you would just pay for a service and the service would provide a service. If the company wanted to extract more value from their users they would raise the prices. But today is different. It is no longer just a transaction between you and a company. It is also a transaction between the company and a third actor who is interested on spying on you.
The motivation changes. It is no longer about protecting you country or whatever. It is about money. And companies want to make money. And if companies see a legal opportunity to make more money they will take it. They will sell as much of your data as possible.
Now you will tell me that I should just stop using these services. But that's not so easy. Network effects are real. If they aren't real for you? Great. But other people have friends outside of tech circles. Now if you want to have a social life you need WhatsApp or other services. This is an even bigger problem in developing countries that are literally dependent on these "free" services.
Normal people wont buy a homeserver, self host a matrix instance and convert literally everyone in their friend group to element. They will go for the cheaper solution and just download WhatsApp. But they don't know that they are paying for this service with their data. E2EE? Yeah right, your Messages can only be read by me, you and Facebook.
This is why we are in dire need of anchoring privacy into law. People will go for the cheaper option. But if you are in need of using a service it should not come with strings attached. And if your service is only sustainable by selling the private correspondence of people it deserves to die. There is plenty of great OSS that just doesn't have the network effects of proprietary ones.
I imagine that this site is more heavily skewed towards a population of people who work/ed at FAANGs and/or who write software that dips into the personal data cookie jar much more heavily than need be, for various reasons.
Something something, salaries depend on not understanding the objections to invasive surveillance capitalism (or not caring), and egos depend on always being the hero of their own stories.
For privacy to exist, you need a shared understanding of something effectively "sacred," where the ethics that stem from it are self enforcing. I have trespasser and loiterer problems where I live because newer people in my area don't recognize private property unless it has high fences or walls around it. Their understanding of privacy does not incorporate the norms of the society they have joined, and it creates tension with the locals.
Imagine some strangers decided your house was a tourist attraction and developed a subculture and social scene around it. This might seem insane to you, where if your sentiments toward them as the resident did not matter to them, but the symbol of being somehow associated with your home and property did, this would be an encroachment on your privacy. To them, legally they're just in public looking at things they desire (your property), and using the peace and effect of your property as their own relative privacy so that they can have sex in their cars away from people who might recognize them.
The lack of privacy in this case is a lack of shared norms, and an inability to enforce or resolve them without conflict. When it comes to electronic privacy, the same dynamic applies, where you're "just a user," and not a person, but rather an object that is subject to some process by an other.
Privacy also definitely breaks down at scale, and it might actually be defined as relating only in a context on a certain scale - or that privacy itself is an artifact of context in a given scale. It needs re-thinking because it's not a value that is universally shared, it requires an enforcement mechanism, and it also seems to require a certain belief in basic dignity that is separate from material concerns. It presumes some natural rights that are not natural to everyone, and I don't think it's something an individual has unless they can actually defend it.
If we could trust the wolves to not eat us zero privacy would be excellent. Imagine how useful that would be for running a society. Bespoke everything. Crazy efficient.
But ya. May as well ask pigs to fly.
Which brings up another point. Isn't it crazy how our society bends over backwards and twists, chokes and contorts itself? To accommodate the existence of wolves.
This article seems to be a response to this 'free Orwellian TV monitor' offer:
https://www.wired.com/story/telly-tv-free-privacy/
I think the real wet dream of the security state is to have a software agent for every human on the planet. Something rather like this was at the core of DARPA's "Total Information Awareness" program of about two decades ago (later absorbed by the NSA and private contractors IIRC). Today's LLMs help make the concept clear - if you could collect enough data about a person you could create a software construct that could predict how that person would respond to different stimuli - an advertisement, a news story, etc. It would be the greatest tool for mass control every invented in the history of humanity - and those in control would use it to create the most dystopian authoritarian state imaginable - and yet those who lived under that state would probably think they were 'free people'.
The idea was nicely laid out in the 1995 movie, "Twelve Monkeys":
> "Jeffrey Goines : When I was institutionalized, my brain was studied exhaustively in the guise of mental health. I was interrogated, I was x-rayed, I was examined thoroughly. Then, they took everything about me and put it into a computer where they created this model of my mind. Yes! Using that model they managed to generate every thought I could possibly have in the next, say, 10 years. Which they then filtered through a probability matrix of some kind to determine everything I was gonna do in that period. So you see, she knew I was gonna lead the Army of the Twelve Monkeys into the pages of history before it ever even occurred to me. She knows everything I'm ever gonna do before I know it myself. How's that?"
It's the FBI keeping files on citizens, but on steroids. Those claiming 'this is fine' generally don't like to talk about who would get access to the database of agents, and who wouldn't.
The best means of preserving privacy online is encryption and to not send to or store data in a server. Of course the challenge there is a dramatic economic shift in revenue generation for many software companies that imposes a competing interest.
As an individual, I want privacy of course.
But is privacy really important to mankind?
If we look at mankind as an organism, the organism can function better if each part knows what the other part is doing. If the left hand knows what the right hand does.
Isn't it the same with mankind? Maybe a society is more efficient without privacy. And more efficiency of the society would benefit its members.
Privacy matters when it's privacy from predators, and their number is only growing. You don't want a group of opportunistic burglars to know when you aren't home and what you keep inside. Similarly you want to keep bigger predators blind: adtech, three letter agencies and so on. The utopia you're describing will come true when there are no more predators, and mankind is far from that stage.
Privacy is important because of the power dynamic in society. If information were truly free and open, and we all had the same access to all private information and aggregation/analysis, maybe that kind of world would be best. But we don't, so privacy is a form of self-defense. Data gatherers are data hoarders and data abusers.
Our laws are imperfect, democracy is likely the best system but imperfect.. unless we'd have a way for Utopia where everything is perfect, fair and agreed upon, and there are never a bad actors (but then you also need to get rid of different opinions, and what that means..), then maybe full transparency (including no company secrets, no government secrets) could be a thing - but tbh this is impossible, at least for me, as infinite as the Universe is.
Taken to the extreme, wouldn't that also mean no privacy for your thoughts, brain, mind, but everything should be transparent? Welcome to the Borg, hell of an efficient society.. but not what makes life worthy... so imo no, privacy, free thought, freedom, and likely more just go together, as philosophers long established.
It is one of most foundational human rights!
That assumes that information is always good and that all actors are working towards a common goal. Neither of those is true.
ChatGpt emulate a conversation while moving through the city. Topic: local sportsteams and the shops windows. Add:GPS markers and background noise + occasional synthetic screenshot. Generate parallel plausibel phone activity.
Hand as argument's to "NonOfYourBuisness.app" on my phone.
Or you have the right to remain silent... Just give up on the exhibition platforms, nobody you care about cares about what you post, it can only be held against you.
I’m personally reminded of the Pied Piper of Hamelin (which has some historical evidence for being a true story)…
I don't follow
Telly (and similar) is the Pied Piper and the children the people who follow along for his free music and entertainment.
Though I get it’s a stretch - I re-read the story so it’s fresh on my mind.
I was thinking that 'big tech' is heralded as a saviour but then it ends up just stealing everyone's information and attention. Although big tech also gets the gold, so it's not a perfect match to the story.
I used to engage with this topic a lot and still orient my life around minimizing the scope of digital access to my life. The outcomes are great - I read books more often, and I’m less on my phone bc my phone is largely bricked outside of Signal.
That said, our laws represent our values. We have a complete lack of tangible privacy laws and any ability to enforce them, and that doesn’t seem to be changing despite decades of these calls. GDPR delete requests are a joke because of the 17 marketing excel sheets with user exports floating around and forgotten in downloads folder that every tech company with user data has in some form.
Western culture, in its current form, doesn’t value privacy. It’s nuking privacy bc of tech-enabled capitalism and a decentralized mess of efforts to hit OKRs, love of social media by users, making that next VC raise, do that compliance check on user origin.
Everything about tech can’t function without that stream of user data. Every company is about tech now. Every company can’t function in its current profit mode without user data.
I’ve benefited greatly from capitalism, so I don’t get too bent out of shape. But you have to spend just one quarter with access to user-facing logs to know privacy is a lost cause, unless there is a significant reevaluation of tech regulations, and then you’d need the actual hammer-drop EPA in new 1970z style regulations. I don’t think we’ll get it.
So my conclusion is to protect yourself as able and otherwise ride the wave into what’s next.
Especially financial privacy, which many supposed supporters of privacy are always very quiet about. It’s unfortunate to hear the patriot act style talking points people use to justify KYC laws and transaction tracking.
Taking financial privacy to the extreme is how you get failed states.
Is Switzerland a failed state?
Concern yourself less with the money of others. Spying on my wallet is not a basic human right.
I mean it is interesting that you picked the most "respectable" option as a counter, so how about a more regular example.
What about Ukraine? Yanukovich looted his country and lived in a palace with an exotic zoo and bathrooms that had TVs at sitting-on-the-toilet height so that he wouldn't miss his shows while he dealt with his constipation problems.
Or in Angola, where a minister's daughter came to NYC and starred on Say Yes to the Dress, and in fact said yes to about a dozen dresses, just for herself, for just her wedding, each in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, even though 66% of Angolans are impoverished? The minister salaries don't cover such costs.
Do you consider kleptocracy to be the natural and right state of the world? (never mind, I skimmed previous comments of yours - "libertarian", reagan-worshipping, hyper-conservative. You won't answer 'yes', but you will ask 'if that's how the world works then what's wrong with it?')
I don’t care if you spy on public figures, someone funded by tax dollars does not have the right to privacy. That’s not what my comment was about and you know that.
Feel free to move to one of the “regular” examples of financial surveillance states such as Cuba or Venezuela, I will never object to collectivists looting from each other. I just ask that you leave others out of it.
I disagree that it's a fundamental right. Over most of history privacy has been rare for most people, with the provisio that if you really wanted a private conversation you could have one in the middle of an open field in daylight with a reasonable expectation that your conversation would not be compromised.
These days there can be no such expectation, and we need to separate out discussion of day-to-day privacy from "if bad actors intercept my communication bad things happen".
We should aggressively maintain the security of privilaged communication, and not stress so much about day to day privacy in our lives; stop gossiping and judging others for actions that do not harm others, whilst allowing them necessary privacy for transactions that should remain privilaged.
Many fundamental rights that everyone can agree on today used to be rare in the past, so I'm not sure that use this perspective is the right thing to do.
Water!
Freedom from slavery!
Internet!
Progressing ethically as a civilization is nice.
It is. You can’t just argue for something you want as it being a human right when it’s something most people aren’t that concerns with. It makes people not take you or what you’re arguing seriously
Except people absolutely are concerned with privacy, if you ask the questions the right way.
The problem is that surveillance capitalism shares a lot of properties with pollution: the effects are typically hidden or ephemeral; the cost to individuals is low while the cost to society is high; and people have largely become complacent if not resigned to the status quo.
And so a) most people don't understand the sheer extent of surveillance capitalism, and b) they don't understand how they're affected by it.
I can't count the number of times I've seen shocked faces when I explained how companies like Acxiom and Experian work. And they've been around for decades! But they operate in the shadows, out of view, and so people simply do not understand how much of their private lives are bought and sold to the highest bidder.
If they understood that--and I mean truly understood it--I suspect the conversation around these topics would be very different indeed.
Meanwhile, large portions of the tech community have a financial motive to want to downplay these issues. "Oh pfft, privacy, so antiquated," they say as they draw down a 300k FAANG salary funded by the harvesting and selling of private information.
And so what's the predominant narrative? Well, the people who are in the best position to understand these issues have a financial incentive to protect the status quo, while everyone else doesn't understand them well enough to form an opinion, and thus the former dominates the discourse.
The same is true of state surveillance, except the state has the right to do way more directly bad things to you.
Sure. Both are bad. But it's not the state that's created massive, unaccountable, opaque, private marketplaces that incentivize these behaviours.
It's true that it does massive unaccountable opaque surveillance without the need of a buyer (other than the taxes of the people it surveils ). But the state definitely allows this information to be bought and sold, as the state is ultimately responsible for safeguarding its citizens from itself, other states, and from private entities.
You keep saying "people" but you seem only to mean "me"
While historical precedent is informative, it should not constrain our conceptualization of fundamental rights. The context and needs of society evolve over time, and so should our understanding of what constitutes a fundamental right.
Privacy, has grown in importance with the surge of digital communication and mass surveillance.
Regarding privileged communication, it is impossible to define the boundary between what should be private and what should not. Just because some information might seem mundane doesn't mean it lacks potential misuse by bad actors.
By fostering a culture of respect for privacy in our day-to-day lives, we strengthen protections against more significant intrusions.
It's talking about freedom from massive surveillance networks and unaccountable data collectors who use our data against us. Those didn't exist for most of human history. It's not just about neighborhood gossip.
I agree, however the article conflates mass surveillance and personal privacy, and I felt it worth highlighting the distinction.
They are both the same, because your neighbor contributes to mass surveillance. I don't feel that was worth highlighting at all because it's wrong.
Over most of history privacy has been rare for most people
Yeah right. You could walk any street, and people would not have known which street you walked before that. You could have your picture taken, and no one who saw your photo could know your name nor your birth date. You could enter a shop, and none of the shopkeepers would know which shop you went to before -- most shopkeepers wouldn't even remember what you bought a week before, unless maybe you were a regular. How can you say that privacy was rare, when it was the natural state of being before mass-scale administration and surveillance was possible?
couldn't have said it better myself!
Privacy and private property rights are deeply intertwined (it is, for example, what makes it unlawful for me to walk into your house uninvited and install a hidden camera, or to walk up to your house and stare through your bedroom window while you make love to your partner). Would you argue that, because historically a right to own and control access to private property has "been rare for most people", we shouldn't view it as fundamental, either?
I think here you're conflating phsyical security (am I safe in my home) with privacy (am I unobserved).
Yes, I would argue that controlling information access to property should not be considered a fundamental right - in that it's practically un-enforceable for privacy purposes already; I do think there should be an expectation that you can walk around your property without fear of bumping into some stranger though.
Clearly it's not as cut and dried as that, as physical security is required to ensure that you can have information privacy too, but I think it's important to maintain the distinction.
> Yes, I would argue that controlling information access to property should not be considered a fundamental right - in that it's practically un-enforceable for privacy purposes already;
So you don't think it should be a fundamental right because we lost the right before we realized how important it was?
That's a strange argument.
> I do think there should be an expectation that you can walk around your property without fear of bumping into some stranger though.
Why?
If I walk onto your property and stare in your windows, if "physical security" is important but "privacy" isn't, why should you be allowed to stop me? I'm not threatening you. I'm just watching you. Sounds fine to me.
Or perhaps you'd be fine if I just did it from the public sidewalk with a telephoto lens aimed at your bedroom?
What if I then took a bunch of naked photos of you and your partner and then posted them online? Would you be okay with that? If not, why not, if privacy is not a fundamental right?
> So you don't think it should be a fundamental right because we lost the right before we realized how important it was?
How do you propose putting that cat back in the bag?
I also think that if we had legislated for privacy, supposing that we had realised its important early enough, what would that battle look like? I expect it would go as well as the war against drugs; if nothing else miniaturisation makes it practically unenforceable anyway, and legislation might protect you against individual harm but would do nothing against state level, or large corporation, action.
> If I walk onto your property and stare in your windows, if "physical security" is important but "privacy" isn't, why should you be allowed to stop me? I'm not threatening you
Given that we are unable to discern intent prior to action (when that intent is only manifest in thought), strangers lurking are always going to be a different problem to strangers peeking; it's analagous to copyright law vs. property law.
> Or perhaps you'd be fine if I just did it from the public sidewalk with a telephoto lens aimed at your bedroom?
I'm not saying that I'm immune to our societies' privacy hangups; but ideally I should be - I do think we should try and stop judging others for harmless actions.
> How do you propose putting that cat back in the bag?
GDPR was a good start.
Creating transparency in data marketplaces, and giving people an affirmative right to have their data removed would be significant progress.
Frankly, I'd like to see the buying and selling of individualized data be made completely illegal, with massive fines for companies that misuse or otherwise fail to protect PII.
> I'm not saying that I'm immune to our societies' privacy hangups; but ideally I should be - I do think we should try and stop judging others for harmless actions.
Jesus, I don't even know how to respond to this. In essence you're saying: If there were no consequences for peoples words or actions we wouldn't need privacy.
Well, yeah.
Except there are, and so we do.
> GDPR was a good start.
Honestly, I agree with you, but GDPR is barely a start, it does little to actually protect people's privacy. It needs to expand a lot to be an actual weapon against surveillance
There's 2 parts of this: government, and corporations. We have 1 potential solution already for government:
4th Amendment
> The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Papers (things containing information), and effects clearly need to be interpreted to INCLUDE digital information storage and devices.
Privacy against corporations can be solved a few ways, but are also piecemeal.
A GDPR like law could definitely help.
Having the FTC ban "free" services would also be a good start, as under terms of bundling free to entrap people.
EULAs can just outright negated, as those onerous documents are effectively an after-sale blackmail. And many of 5hem contain questionable, onerous, or plain illegal terms.
The company aspect will always look for ways to gain money any way they can, so it's always an uphill battle. But we can do some reasonable roadblocks slowing down terrible privacy-destroying behavior piecemeal, and by enforcing laws on the books.
privacy (am I unobserved)
That's not the common definition of privacy. Rather, privacy is having the agency to control which parts of your life to share with which other people. It's a freedom of expression: you are free to decide which part of your personality to express at which time.
Having control over who is observing you is a requisite but not sufficient.
There is no such thing as a fundamental human right. There is no such thing as human rights at all except insofar as it descibes the belief that it exists. For many people, the existance of human rights would be beneficial. They beleive in these rigths and create (or attempt to create) a society in which the rights have been secured. Saying a right is fundamental is saying that it is important to those people and is generaly a right that they believe further rights are built on.
There is a similiar meaning of "rights" as a word used to descibe what people are able to do. The fact that I have legs gives me the right to walk, for example. Within this idea, there is a further idea of natural rights, which descibes what the rights (that is, abilities,) of people in nature — or more aptly, people not in civilized society — have, which I think is what you are refering to. There are people who believe in human rights that use natural rights to discover human rights but it is not necessary to do so. A more popular definition of human rights is what the people decide or what people who study human rights decide.
Realizing that rights are not real, that is, something that you "have" or are born with, is important if you want to truly understand them.
> I disagree that it's a fundamental right
That was my first thought - like, it would great if everybody agreed that it was a fundamental right, but other than as an empty political talking point, I'm not familiar with any government official in all of recorded history who's ever behaved as if they thought so. It's definitely not codified in any law I've ever seen.
All fundamental human rights are actually progressive political positions if you really want to examine them. For anything we accept as a "right", there was a time and place where people would emphatically argue it was not a right.
Human rights are not intrinsic to human beings: they're fundamental to our civilization. I for one look forward to the expansion of fundamental human rights.
> I disagree that it's a fundamental right.
https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-huma...
This declaration uses the word "privacy" once, and doesn't define it - and that's what we're seeing here and elsewhere.
Also, what does it mean to free from arbitrary interferrence with privacy? Interferrence implies more than observation, in my view.
> This declaration uses the word "privacy" once, and doesn't define it - and that's what we're seeing here and elsewhere.
So is the word "life" mentioned also once. Do we need to argue also about that? Declarations and constitutions are not supposed to include rigorous definitions. See also:
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:12...
This discussion isn't about the word life, it's about privacy; I'm sure the question of "life" will become harder if we end up creating sentient AGI...
Privacy in this discussion can mean different things, where there are definite overlaps, but also distinction:
* privacy of action (being sure that no one is watching what I'm doing) * privacy in communication (being sure that my priviliged information isn't compromised)
We should be concerned with the second; the first is already lost
We should be concerned with those who pretend that historical precedent is a thing when it comes to questions of ethics, indeed anyone who conflates ethics with legalistic frameworks.
IMO the largest barrier to progress today is that too many people think the point of laws is to dictate ethics. This leads them to believe that legal things are good and illegal things are bad, and then you get horribly circular arguments like those above.
So privacy is now an ethical question but not a human right?
Historical precedents no longer matter, so we as a humanity can again commit all the atrocities of the past? Lunacy.
Sorry to disappoint you: we ("people") should be especially worried about technologists eager to define what is ethical and trying to overcome laws with their own interpretations. No wonder many companies are constantly in courts because of their "ethics".
Besides, the interplay between ethics and law runs through the whole Western philosophy.
> So privacy is now an ethical question but not a human right?
Privacy is a human right precisely because of its weight in the question of ethics. I would hazard against playing false-dichotomy games, for they can only be lost, never won. I would say that your error appears to be in giving undue primacy to legal definitions over other kinds as holding some kind of authority. It is true that governments use laws to justify their violent actions but I don't think that gives them any more metaphysical weight over other forms of judgment. (To anticipate a quibble: judgment is inherently metaphysical, to claim metaphysics is irrelevant is to claim opinions are irrelevant and we get nowhere on questions of ethics and rights.)
> Historical precedents no longer matter, so we as a humanity can again commit all the atrocities of the past?
This is such a perversion and misinterpretation of what I said that I'm struggling to see your response as anything but a troll's. Regardless, I will continue.
> we ("people") should be especially worried about technologists eager to define what is ethical and trying to overcome laws with their own interpretations
I agree -- the direction we both seem to be advocating for, then, despite your insistence that we argue about it, is that neither laws nor random technologists can define ethics for the entire society. It must be a bottom-up process of popular, consensual decision-making, as has been demonstrated in the past through mass political (dare I say populist) movements. There is no ethical way for a small group to impose such things on the populace without their input and control in that process.
> the interplay between ethics and law
This is just another variation of the "historical precedent defines ethics" argument, which has already been addressed.
> I would say that your error appears to be in giving undue primacy to legal definitions over other kinds as holding some kind of authority.
While I have nothing against ethics as such, it is a reality that digital rights have been advanced only through jurisprudence. I am quite disappointed with technology ethics in particular: despite immense amount of research and advocacy within companies and across society, technology ethics have not achieved anything of practical value.
> It must be a bottom-up process of popular, consensual decision-making, as has been demonstrated in the past through mass political (dare I say populist) movements. There is no ethical way for a small group to impose such things on the populace without their input and control in that process.
That is a long characterization for a single word: democracy.
If you want a philosophical debate, we can start from this classic (see particularly Section B):
https://scholarship.law.gwu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=...
One of our most fundamental rights that wasn't written into any country's constitution that I know of. And in the US, privacy was basically built around the concerns of celebrities and businessmen.
Privacy for the general public has always been considered a danger, and wasn't even a concern for the courts until technological advances removed any limits on how much even uninteresting people can be surveilled, and how easily massive amounts of that data can be kept and algorithmically searched through. But even in the old days, the government would find time to go through your mail to see if you were getting any information about birth control, then arrest you for it.
I wonder how people can watch old spy movies now, where spies had to smuggle money to other spies, they communicated with tiny strips of microfilm surreptitiously dropped into trashcans, etc., if they think that in the past, people could communicate freely with each other and transfer money willy-nilly? The battle that snoops are involved in now is the same as always, except with extremely overpowered tools and access. This access will not be limited, and these tools will not be dropped, because these tools can be turned on any politician who seriously wants to do that.
The way they see it is the same way they saw the made-up "missile gap." They look at China, and its government powers over civil liberties, and see it as an arms race that they're losing. If you're anti-surveillance, they see you as holding back the West in comparison, and wonder why you would want the bad guys to have access to tools that the good guys don't have. So they not only want more surveillance, they want to use it to track the people who are against more surveillance.
This is another self-serving narrative that motivates western elites to exaggerate the capabilities and immorality of US enemies, just like the missile gap was.
Define "fundamental right".
Rights are an American way of saying that something is desirable and that one is morally justified in using violence to achieve it. They use this terminology for reasons of history. There is no such concrete object of course, just translate into your own world view.
BTW, 'Define "X"' sounds rather childish, whoever says it.
The abject nihilists came out to play! If only they realized the irony of imposing their singular viewpoints on anything or anyone else while maintaining such a philosophy.
... abject nihilist ...
I'll take it! Wait a second while I get my leather jacket & shades
... imposing their singular viewpoints ...
I missed the bit where I imposed anything on anyone, but as you prefer. By the way, how do you have a non-singular viewpoint?
A decent but a little bit too alarmist essay in my opinion. A few reservations also, starting with:
"Our actions, our words, even our thoughts, are being monitored, recorded, and analyzed. The sanctity of our homes, once our refuge from the world, is under threat."
"It’s not just mere data; rather, it’s a master key to the sealed vaults of our thoughts and experiences."
The mind-reading stuff is still a fantasy and will be so also in the future. Then:
"An individual’s freedom of speech hinges significantly on their ability to communicate privately without fear of reprisal."
True enough in principle, but I'd reckon that in the current infodemic it is more about who is given a voice (or a megaphone). Furthermore:
"Enterprises are no longer solely engaged in the commerce of goods or services; they are also playing a part in a grand, global data accumulation endeavour, where consumer data assumes colossal worth."
Once again true enough, but then again, most of data is garbage, useless beyond the immediate moment of pushing an ad or two. Finally:
"This isn’t a criticism aimed at those agencies responsible for our national security."
I am not sure whether their job either is made easier or worse by the vast amounts of garbage.
> The mind-reading stuff is still a fantasy and will be so also in the future.
Haha, of course they don't literally read our minds, but with enough data, it's possible to gather a lot about the way a person thinks
> The mind-reading stuff is still a fantasy and will be so also in the future.
Fantasy today, sure — judging by advertising categories I was getting placed in at least a few years back, the AI don't generally have the ability to infer much from revealed preferences, despite the odd headline every so often.
But in the future?
Even ignoring the possibility that the aforementioned advertising-AI get better, there's Neuralink and whatever competition it ends up getting.
> Even ignoring the possibility that the aforementioned advertising-AI get better, there's Neuralink and whatever competition it ends up getting.
I am skeptical. AI, Neuralink, or whatever might infer better on many things, sure, but these certainly will not be able to infer what non-dogmatic people think about, say, philosophy or politics already because humans have always a capability to change their minds, while AI is terribly bad at reorienting itself.
Wires on synapses, however, are very good at sensing exactly what's up.
They're too expensive right now, and I really hope Neuralink turns out to be as much of a business disaster as buying Twitter, because if it's as much of a world-changer as Tesla or SpaceX…
…well, if cheap-and-good BCI comes, there's too many dystopian ways for it to be abused for comfort.
> ... well, if cheap-and-good BCI comes, there's too many dystopian ways for it to be abused for comfort.
I am all for dystopia; already with VR/XR/etc. you can probably infer a lot, especially once they start (or have done already?) scanning retina movements and such. But still: stimuli is a one thing and mind-reading (thought control?) is another.
BCI is literal mind-reading: when the thought goes ping, it shows up on the wire.
The current limitation is that the number of sense-wires we can put on a BCI implant is a factor of ~2^30 smaller than the number of synapses in a human brain.
>A decent but a little bit too alarmist essay in my opinion.
A trend that has been going on since at least 9/11. Alarmism is the norm. When alarmism is the norm, only escalating alarmism will be heard. We can't have a normal conversation anymore.
Before: Here's a problem, here's where I think it would go if we ignore it.
Now: Here's a problem, everyone is going to die!!!!!!!!!!!
> “ This isn’t a criticism aimed at those agencies responsible for our national security.”
Why the heck not? Snowden? NSA? GCHQ? FBI having 280,000 abuses? I don’t get this logic.