I know TV and movies have imparted upon people that there is some kind of feeling of immense guilt, or maybe you are just dishing the ubiquitous passive aggressive shaming as a weak attempt at social control, but fact of the matter is that today's devs (yes, many if not all of us here) have exponentially less qualms about what we do and support and develop (let alone even fully understand the ramifications, as has become apparent to me) on a day to day basis, than any of the soldiers or henchmen or perpetrators of the favorite historical villains we are trained to hate from early on. Reality is that to the vast majority of people that are swept up in the cult mania and are essentially blindly and instinctually following their most basic herding impulses, the actions they are taking and the things they are doing are just fine as they say "it doesn't look like anything to me".
We have thoroughly entered a pathway with an ever more narrow set of possible outcomes, none of which are good, but just as all the other past events that all the "smartest" people were warned about well in advance and who self-magnanimously proclaim how the inevitable outcomes "could not have been predicted" in to protect, at all and any cost necessary, the most important thing there is ... something so important and sacrosanct that reality and fact and intellect and rationality will be suffocated and smothered and exterminated and sacrificed the very microsecond it potentially could even maybe rear its head .... their ego and incomprehensible notion of having to admit fault or infallibility.
It is utter hubris that will be bringing about the inevitable next calamity that will, due to the ever growing and expanding size of the house of cards, collapse under it's own self-deluding weight.
Remember kids, tech fraud valuations were based on sound business and house prices could only go up; and those were just the early tremors of what is to come ... unfortunately. All manias invariable are followed by crashes, regardless of how they manifest themselves. What goes up must come down and down, farther and harder, it will come crashing the higher it climbed into the sun. Lest us forget Icarus
Icarus (IK-uh-rus)
Son of Daedalus who dared to fly too near the sun on wings of feathers and wax. Daedalus had been imprisoned by King Minos of Crete within the walls of his own invention, the Labyrinth. But the great craftsman's genius would not suffer captivity. He made two pairs of wings by adhering feathers to a wooden frame with wax. Giving one pair to his son, he cautioned him that flying too near the sun would cause the wax to melt. But Icarus became ecstatic with the ability to fly and forgot his father's warning. The feathers came loose and Icarus plunged to his death in the sea.
The folly of Daedalus to not be mindful of the foolish youth of Icarus. But, do tell us of how the young of today will not cause the calamities of past generations of young who thought the too were infallible from their unearned privilege, pampered, and hedonic existence.
Should they? The vast quantity of users find it incredibly useful and have no reason to be concerned about governments or third parties being able to determine their geographic location, because governments or third parties don't generally care.
>have no reason to be concerned about governments ...
Many aren't, but everyone has reason to.
Governments change. Telling your government your religion in 1920s Germany was harmless, in 1940 many would have preferred if the government didn't have their religion on file.
Circumstances change to. In 1920 being a Japanese in the US wasn't special. After Perl Harbor came the internment camps.
And then there's the mundane stuff. You protest a government policy, someone in the government takes issue and tries to put some of these annoying people in jail.
Given that you don't know when you might become an enemy of the state it's always a good idea to keep the power of the state over its citizens in check.
You can be upset about an aspect of a product, and seek to change that aspect, without abandoning use of the product. For example, 1.3 million people are killed by cars every year, and while we recognize the risk, we also constantly improve them through safety regulations, training and improved technology. Just because people use cell phones and apps today doesn't mean we're okay with the downsides and should stop trying to improving them.
It's an interesting example you've chosen, since one of the dimensions along which car safety improvement is being researched is ubiquitous GPS signalling to share data about road and traffic conditions (and since every self-driving car is basically a panopticon and recording device rolled into one).
Mass surveillance is not really for investigating individuals.
The game being played is not '1984', it is 'Foundation'.
It is for steering entire societies, and this works far better on the boring people who think they have nothing to hide as they are the easiest to model
The general public and repeatedly-reported-upon understanding of how data collection can be leveraged to find unexpected insights not obvious from the data, coupled with the Snowden leaks, coupled with the ever-increasing user count for cellphones, Facebook, Twitter, and the Internet in general.
If people were deeply individually concerned about the risks vs. rewards of these technologies, they'd stop using them. That's the rubber-meets-the-road calculus I see.
Several recent HN stories have had this kind of comment (first noticed with the Securus submission) that's a weird mix of "You have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide" and "They will never come for you, you're too unimportant." Is this a sustained campaign or just a way for folks who have contributed to these issues to feel good about themselves?
Insinuations of astroturfing or shilling without evidence (an opposing view does not count as evidence) are an internet toxin that turns out to be worse than the things it insinuates, because it's so widespread. I've written a ton about why we don't allow that here, if anyone wants to read more: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
Wilsonnb hit the nail on the head, it’s just how some people feel. Though I don’t doubt that some people involved in the creation of this phenomenon use the argument to justify their work.
I had a hard time understanding why people wouldn’t be more conscientious of their privacy, until I had discussions about the issue with people close to me.
My folks had a very similar sentiment to the typical “if you have nothing to hide, then why do you worry about it”. My girlfriend had the same thought, but took it a step further and asked why I cared so much about people uninvolved in my life knowing personal details about it, then said I was “the most paranoid person [she’d] ever met”
Once the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke, they all understood my point. I think the majority of people who don’t work in tech don’t understand the massive implications that our lack of privacy has. They don’t know how cookies or backends or tracking pixels work, and may not even know they exist. They imagine an NSA agent sitting in a room looking for keywords, not companies that they entrust their digital lives to selling off every little piece of info about them. It’s so much more than your Facebook or Twitter posts being public, it’s data that we might not even know about ourselves being kept in the hands of unknown entities.
To sum up this rant, some people have to see it to believe it because this is outside their scope of knowledge
They collect the data because they can find themselves needing to care in the future, at which point nobody wants to be kicking themselves for failing to collect the data.
Keep in mind: most users are not part of a domestic political organization targeted by the FBI, so again, when the rubber hits the road, they'd rather not be inconvenienced for a risk that applies to other people. They don't care about COINTELPRO (disregarding, of course, the percentage of the population that actually thinks the FBI digging into "subversive" groups is part of its job).
Users get no benefit from the information resale directly, but they also aren't generally harmed by it. And the benefit they get from having a ubiquitously-connected device in their pocket outweighs the (apparently calculated to be low) per-person cost to their information being resold. The fact that you or I may do the calculus differently for ourselves (because we have different risk sensitivity) doesn't impact those who don't reach the same conclusions.
I know TV and movies have imparted upon people that there is some kind of feeling of immense guilt, or maybe you are just dishing the ubiquitous passive aggressive shaming as a weak attempt at social control, but fact of the matter is that today's devs (yes, many if not all of us here) have exponentially less qualms about what we do and support and develop (let alone even fully understand the ramifications, as has become apparent to me) on a day to day basis, than any of the soldiers or henchmen or perpetrators of the favorite historical villains we are trained to hate from early on. Reality is that to the vast majority of people that are swept up in the cult mania and are essentially blindly and instinctually following their most basic herding impulses, the actions they are taking and the things they are doing are just fine as they say "it doesn't look like anything to me".
We have thoroughly entered a pathway with an ever more narrow set of possible outcomes, none of which are good, but just as all the other past events that all the "smartest" people were warned about well in advance and who self-magnanimously proclaim how the inevitable outcomes "could not have been predicted" in to protect, at all and any cost necessary, the most important thing there is ... something so important and sacrosanct that reality and fact and intellect and rationality will be suffocated and smothered and exterminated and sacrificed the very microsecond it potentially could even maybe rear its head .... their ego and incomprehensible notion of having to admit fault or infallibility.
It is utter hubris that will be bringing about the inevitable next calamity that will, due to the ever growing and expanding size of the house of cards, collapse under it's own self-deluding weight.
Remember kids, tech fraud valuations were based on sound business and house prices could only go up; and those were just the early tremors of what is to come ... unfortunately. All manias invariable are followed by crashes, regardless of how they manifest themselves. What goes up must come down and down, farther and harder, it will come crashing the higher it climbed into the sun. Lest us forget Icarus
Icarus (IK-uh-rus) Son of Daedalus who dared to fly too near the sun on wings of feathers and wax. Daedalus had been imprisoned by King Minos of Crete within the walls of his own invention, the Labyrinth. But the great craftsman's genius would not suffer captivity. He made two pairs of wings by adhering feathers to a wooden frame with wax. Giving one pair to his son, he cautioned him that flying too near the sun would cause the wax to melt. But Icarus became ecstatic with the ability to fly and forgot his father's warning. The feathers came loose and Icarus plunged to his death in the sea.
The folly of Daedalus to not be mindful of the foolish youth of Icarus. But, do tell us of how the young of today will not cause the calamities of past generations of young who thought the too were infallible from their unearned privilege, pampered, and hedonic existence.
Should they? The vast quantity of users find it incredibly useful and have no reason to be concerned about governments or third parties being able to determine their geographic location, because governments or third parties don't generally care.
>have no reason to be concerned about governments ...
Many aren't, but everyone has reason to.
Governments change. Telling your government your religion in 1920s Germany was harmless, in 1940 many would have preferred if the government didn't have their religion on file.
Circumstances change to. In 1920 being a Japanese in the US wasn't special. After Perl Harbor came the internment camps.
And then there's the mundane stuff. You protest a government policy, someone in the government takes issue and tries to put some of these annoying people in jail.
Given that you don't know when you might become an enemy of the state it's always a good idea to keep the power of the state over its citizens in check.
You can be upset about an aspect of a product, and seek to change that aspect, without abandoning use of the product. For example, 1.3 million people are killed by cars every year, and while we recognize the risk, we also constantly improve them through safety regulations, training and improved technology. Just because people use cell phones and apps today doesn't mean we're okay with the downsides and should stop trying to improving them.
It's an interesting example you've chosen, since one of the dimensions along which car safety improvement is being researched is ubiquitous GPS signalling to share data about road and traffic conditions (and since every self-driving car is basically a panopticon and recording device rolled into one).
Mass surveillance is not really for investigating individuals.
The game being played is not '1984', it is 'Foundation'.
It is for steering entire societies, and this works far better on the boring people who think they have nothing to hide as they are the easiest to model
I agree the greater emphasis is Foundation-style analysis, but really, it's for both.
2 replies →
Cambridge Analytica did far more with far less.
Did they? They're sales pitch claimed they could but what we've heard of actual methods and impact didn't appear more effective than regular FB ads.
It's not about being able to track everybody. You're right, nobody cares about that.
It's about being able to track anybody.
Any source for this claim?
The general public and repeatedly-reported-upon understanding of how data collection can be leveraged to find unexpected insights not obvious from the data, coupled with the Snowden leaks, coupled with the ever-increasing user count for cellphones, Facebook, Twitter, and the Internet in general.
If people were deeply individually concerned about the risks vs. rewards of these technologies, they'd stop using them. That's the rubber-meets-the-road calculus I see.
12 replies →
Several recent HN stories have had this kind of comment (first noticed with the Securus submission) that's a weird mix of "You have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide" and "They will never come for you, you're too unimportant." Is this a sustained campaign or just a way for folks who have contributed to these issues to feel good about themselves?
> Is this a sustained campaign
This breaks the site guidelines. Could you please read and follow them when commenting here? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Insinuations of astroturfing or shilling without evidence (an opposing view does not count as evidence) are an internet toxin that turns out to be worse than the things it insinuates, because it's so widespread. I've written a ton about why we don't allow that here, if anyone wants to read more: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
1 reply →
It's just how a lot of people feel about the issue.
I'm not sure why you would jump to concluding that it's a sustained campaign or some kind of reaction to guilt.
Wilsonnb hit the nail on the head, it’s just how some people feel. Though I don’t doubt that some people involved in the creation of this phenomenon use the argument to justify their work.
I had a hard time understanding why people wouldn’t be more conscientious of their privacy, until I had discussions about the issue with people close to me.
My folks had a very similar sentiment to the typical “if you have nothing to hide, then why do you worry about it”. My girlfriend had the same thought, but took it a step further and asked why I cared so much about people uninvolved in my life knowing personal details about it, then said I was “the most paranoid person [she’d] ever met”
Once the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke, they all understood my point. I think the majority of people who don’t work in tech don’t understand the massive implications that our lack of privacy has. They don’t know how cookies or backends or tracking pixels work, and may not even know they exist. They imagine an NSA agent sitting in a room looking for keywords, not companies that they entrust their digital lives to selling off every little piece of info about them. It’s so much more than your Facebook or Twitter posts being public, it’s data that we might not even know about ourselves being kept in the hands of unknown entities.
To sum up this rant, some people have to see it to believe it because this is outside their scope of knowledge
1 reply →
It would be better if they did, yes.
If they "don't generally care", they wouldn't be collecting that data to begin with.
It's possible that they care about the aggregated data and not about the individual data.
They collect the data because they can find themselves needing to care in the future, at which point nobody wants to be kicking themselves for failing to collect the data.
1 reply →
1) Users get no benefit from information resale. 2) COINTELPRO
Keep in mind: most users are not part of a domestic political organization targeted by the FBI, so again, when the rubber hits the road, they'd rather not be inconvenienced for a risk that applies to other people. They don't care about COINTELPRO (disregarding, of course, the percentage of the population that actually thinks the FBI digging into "subversive" groups is part of its job).
Users get no benefit from the information resale directly, but they also aren't generally harmed by it. And the benefit they get from having a ubiquitously-connected device in their pocket outweighs the (apparently calculated to be low) per-person cost to their information being resold. The fact that you or I may do the calculus differently for ourselves (because we have different risk sensitivity) doesn't impact those who don't reach the same conclusions.
9 replies →