Comment by TheRealDunkirk
2 years ago
It's crazy to me that so much effort is being expended pretending that companies and the government are doing anything in the name of privacy, when we have all the proof by Assange and Snowden that they're doing realtime surveillance of ALL communications, 24x7 -- no matter what any laws say -- and we don't even talk about it any more. What's the point of any of this? All we can do is assume that our every position, purchase, and electronic communication is being tracked and saved, and act accordingly. The Constitution no longer matters, and there's no one coming to save us.
I think where we go wrong is to allow the conversation to revolve around what evil corporations are doing with our information, rather than what the evil government is doing with it. I believe the risk to our freedom is much greater from the latter. Of course governments can extract the information from corporations that have it, but let's keep the spotlight on the government itself, and use THAT as a reason to give corps less information about us.
Corporations showing me better-targeted ads is the least of my troubles.
> Of course governments can extract the information from corporations that have it, but let's keep the spotlight on the government itself, and use THAT as a reason to give corps less information about us.
Yep. Treating the two as distinct makes no sense. Corporate dragnet surveillance collecting forever-datasets isn't meaningfully different from the government doing the same thing, directly. People who fear government power ought to support outlawing corporate collection of the same types of things they don't want government collecting.
Granted that's relying on the government to prevent corporations from doing things in order to limit... the government (and, incidentally and IMO beneficially, also the corporations themselves). However, that's the only effective mechanism we've got—and the basis of all the other mechanisms we have available, ultimately, short of violence and strikes and such—and I think it's implausible that, even assuming a great deal of bad-faith behavior, such a move wouldn't significantly curb this activity.
> I believe the risk to our freedom is much greater from the latter.
I’ll take power being consolidated in a democratically elected government over a privately controlled corporation any day of the week.
Let’s put the spotlight on the stuff that isn’t democratically controlled, and subject to much more limited oversight.
The US government isn't really democratically controlled, which is obvious to anyone paying attention, and this Princeton paper proves it:
https://www.princeton.edu/~mgilens/idr.pdf
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> I think where we go wrong is to allow the conversation to revolve around what evil corporations are doing with our information, rather than what the evil government is doing with it.
I think it would be wrong to ignore either. Especially since most of the data the government gets is from corporations.
> Corporations showing me better-targeted ads is the least of my troubles.
You're right about that. That data sure isn't only used for ads. Companies use it to decide what services you're allowed to get and under what terms. The policies a company tells you they have are different from the polices they tell others they have. Companies use it to set prices so that what you pay can be different from what your neighbor does for the same goods/services. Companies even use that data to determine how long to keep you on hold when you call them.
Employers use it to make hiring decisions. Landlords use it to decide who to rent to. It's sold to universities who use it to decide which students to accept or reject. It's sold to scammers who use it to select their victims. Extremists use it to target and harass their enemies. Lawyers use it in courtrooms as evidence in criminal cases and custody battles. Insurance companies use it to raise rates and deny claims.
The data companies are collecting about will cost you again and again in more and more aspects of your life. Ads are absolutely the least of your troubles.
“Better-targeted advertisements” is not the most nefarious way this information is used. That’s just one of the selling points to entice advertisers. It’s also been used extensively to determine content that you will find the most engaging, regardless of whether it’s to your benefit or not, so that ad-driven marketplaces may harvest and sell your attention.
If you have any contemporary examples of the way the government has used the same information, in a way that’s been more widely destructive, I would be curious to know more.
Wouldn't the exact opposite focus have a better effect? Going after the "evil corporations" would mean nobody was collecting the data in the first place, which would also take away the "evil government" as they have nobody to buy that data from.
Right now they just write fat checks to Google, Apple, Amazon and the telcos and badda bing, badda boom it's done.
A government can (in some cases) force a company to collect information they otherwise wouldn't have. The reverse is not true. So I do think the bigger danger here is the legal framework that not only permits this but keeps it secret, rather than the mere fact of information collection.
I suppose if government orgs weren't allowed to buy that data, the value might drop. Significantly? Unclear.
Corporations use the government to get around regulation. Goverment uses corporations to get around the constitution. It takes two to tango.
Now do,
"declining to hire, insure, or loan to you" and "declining to admit your kids into school|sports program|internship"
This is such a strange position for me.
Do we not agree that corporate America and other special interest groups essentially control Washington via lobbying and corruption?
Do we not agree that a US citizen has (nominally) more leverage over their government than over an unaccountable private collective?
I mean, we are half a century deep into this Reaganite "your government is your enemy" experiment.
https://www.princeton.edu/~mgilens/idr.pdf
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Assembly 2023 had a fantastic presentation[1] from @BackTheBunny (from X) about precisely this. When the US really wants to do something, the constitution is a parchment guarantee and the media runs cover for them. Many US gov agencies are basically supranational and extrajudicial.
I don't agree with everything he said but the information was well presented and enjoyable.
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUTcIXuw2f0
What Crypto and DeFi has to do with State Surveillance? Or anything about the comment above? I don’t understand
I don't think many people actually care much about privacy. There are a few, and they're loud. But look at what matters in politics -- both major political tribes in the US are only interested in privacy and protection from the government as it relates to their own interest, but they are perfectly happy to use that power against their perceived opponents.
Thirty years ago, one perceived element of moral superiority in the West was revelations of the extensive internal surveillance in places like East Germany and own-spying. There used to be news items and documentaries mocking this behavior and intimating how backward and uncouth those governments were to stoop to furiously wiretapping irrelevant private conversations.
So, whether the world has changed enough to justify it, people still do care and when adequately informed about some magistrate furiously eavesdropping on private matters, people universally recognize this is antisocial bizarre conduct.
It is my opinion that people do not about privacy as much as they did in your mention Cold War-era times (or the tail end of it, anyway). They've been shown how easy it is to trade their privacy for considerable convenience and now they're in so deep that the idea of our governments tracking us seems remarkably mundane. Normalization is a helluva drug.
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Meh, collecting information is different from acting on it. My underdtaning, which could be wrong, was that people legitimately lived in fear of getting found out by the stazi. There isn’t a good reason to fear the NSA based on current actions, that I’m aware of anyway.
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> I don't think many people actually care much about privacy.
People absolutely care about their privacy. If you don't believe me try going outside and following someone in public with a video camera. They'll scream at you about how horrible and illegal what you're doing is. They'll probably call the police on you. Upset as they are, they ignore the fact that they've been being filmed from the moment they stepped outside and have in fact been being extensively tracked and recorded even while they were still inside their homes.
People don't understand the extent that their privacy is being violated. It's mostly out of sight/out of mind. They also don't understand the impact the data they give up has on their daily lives. They aren't allowed to know when or how much that data costs them. The moment they are confronted with the reality of the situation, they suddenly care very much about their privacy. Mostly they feel powerless against the invasion of their privacy.
While I believe that you can't solve (at least permanently) political problems with technology, and we need political action, you can prevent a good bit of surveillance with technology if you invest in setting it up.
E2EE for chats (Matrix, Signal, or XMPP) is pretty solid I think. More shaky, Tor/reputable VPNs or some combo for browsing. FOSS ROMs for phones (Graphene), or Librum/PinePhone if you can deal with not always having a working phone.
It's not a great situation, but it's not hopeless!
Unfortunately, the constitution isnt very clear on privacy. It should be. There should be a new amendment which makes it crystal clear that the Patriot Act, for example, is completely unconstitutional.
But what the 14th amendment says is that people and their property are protected against searches by the government wherever there is a “reasonable expectation of privacy.” That and some combination of other details imply a right to privacy, but its mot very explicit and clearly limited. In light of this, the Supreme Court has actually ruled quite favorably In practice, the Supreme Court has actually ruled pretty favorably towards a right to privacy, considering whats actually in the constitution.
> IX. The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
> X. The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
Operating a surveillance apparatus isn't an enumerated power of the federal government. The courts screwed up by reading its enumerated powers so unreasonably broadly that this even came up.
The only real way to fix this in the US is via election reform.
The GOP is trying to create an apartheid state where minority rural areas dictate the laws for the majorities that live in urban areas while they extract resources from those areas.
They know this is incredibly unpopular, so they don't even pretend they're trying to get the majority of the vote in most places. Instead, they've been trying to set vote thresholds to > 60% for ballot measures and stripping authority from all elected offices that aren't subject to gerrymandering.
It's also crazy to me that people are frequently arguing over what is the best security app to use for communication arguing over privacy maximalist viewpoints but not considering the old and have forgotten the major flaw we learned about from PGP: can't decrypt, please resend unencrypted. It doesn't matter how good your encryption is if no one will use it. Pareto is a bitch. (This is a crack at the Signal vs Threema or whatever app is hot this month and we discuss next month. But when usernames?)