Comment by ajsnigrutin
15 days ago
I never understood this kinds of arguments... both sides want to read your private data, but it's bad if 'the other side' does it? It's your current MI5/government that wants access to apples data.
15 days ago
I never understood this kinds of arguments... both sides want to read your private data, but it's bad if 'the other side' does it? It's your current MI5/government that wants access to apples data.
My interpretation is that it is an argument against trust in authority in privacy discussions.
A: Privacy matters! B: Why should you care if you have nothing to hide? A: If you have nothing to hide, then give me the password to your Facebook. B: I don't trust you with that, but I trust my governments and relevant authorities.
The point is that B's faith in authority is flawed as the "powers that be" are an eternally shifting target. By agreeing to government surveillance, you place trust in every subsequent government, even the ones you would rather not.
I always look at this from the other side...
Side A abuses (legal, governmental) power, and instead of "lynching" them for that, we turn the issue into "this will become bad only because of side B will do the same". To me it looks like someone supports side A, and wants to limit the "badness" of whatever they did, but still can't support the thing, so they find the way out by claiming that the other side will do something bad with that data, as if the collecting the data (chats,...) isn't bad enough by itself.
I understand your analogy with friends and facebook, and explaining that stuff to your grandma in this way would probably work... maybe even better if you used "your neighbor Sally works for the government, she could read your chats too, do you really want that?"... but on a technical "forum", it (to me) gives off very politically biased vibes.
For what it's worth I don't support this Labour government one iota. I fully admit to being extremely biased against the Reform party, much in the same way that I'm biased against standing in front of a fully loaded 16 wheeler moving at 60mph.
Exactly this. What I'm talking about is just a specific instance of the generalised rule you've stated.
That shifting target can also shift immediately it doesnt need an election.
One is bad in principle and the other is also bad in practice. Both are very bad but the latter is more likely to move people to action.
Generally speaking it is worse if a party who is ideologically inclined to do something bad to you reads it, yes.
One side wants to purge large parts of the population and the other one doesn't. Yes, all parties can abuse data, but their policies do actually matter.
I think if you value privacy this isn't the right place to be making distinctions between parties. This only serves to alienate people and isn't the core argument.
I think it's more likely to get broad support when framed as us vs. them where "us" is normal working people regardless of political affiliation and "them" is our government elites trying to spy on us.
No, sorry, I've read too much history to buy into this line of reasoning. Authoritarians are a concrete threat to people's safety and they have a long history of abusing sensitive information about people to do so.
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The other one isn't even voted in yet, hasn't done anything yet, and the current one already wants the data, that they shouldn't get.
The current ones are already abusing their power, and the other one might hypothetically do something, if and when and if at all.
This is like Alice making it legal and then punching you in the face and instead of you "punching back", you say "this is fine, but Bob is bad, because if he gets voted in, he'll punch harder".