Comment by EGreg
20 hours ago
Don't you see it closing all around you?
It's not just Google. It's governments, corporations, all around the world, simultaneously. The noose is being tightened gradually, then all at once. And it's coming for all of us:
https://community.qbix.com/t/increasing-state-of-surveillanc...
The threats above interlock by design or convergence: Identity layer (1-5) creates the prerequisite for the others. Once identity is established at SIM/account/device level, the carve-outs that make surveillance politically viable become possible (powerful users get exemptions; ordinary users get watched).
Device layer (10-12, 16-19) creates the surveillance endpoint. Once content is scanned on the device before encryption, the cryptographic protections at the communications layer become irrelevant.
Communications layer (6-9) is the most-defended. Mass scanning has been defeated repeatedly. This is the layer where the resistance has the best track record.
Reporting layer (13-15) is nascent. Direct OS-to-government reporting hooks haven't been built yet at scale. The UK's December 2025 proposal is the leading edge.
Platform control (20-24) determines whether alternatives can exist. Browser diversity, app distribution diversity, and engine diversity are the structural protections. All three are narrowing.
A society with all five layers complete has the technical infrastructure for total surveillance with elite carve-outs. We are roughly 40% of the way there. Whether that infrastructure becomes a dystopia depends on political choices, not technical ones.
HN as a whole is surprisingly oblivious to the noose tightening, because many here are super against decentralized distributed things, if they involve any sort of token. You can complain all you want, but downvoting and burying the decentralized alternatives just for groupthink makes you somewhat complicit in the erosion of our privacy and liberties. Even if you might disagree with a project, all the work that goes into it might be a good reason to upvote it instead, considering that without this work, we're basically doomed.
Hell, even using cash feels like a minor form of dissent. And of course even if you leave your phone at home, your car will be scanned with ANPR wherever it goes. And if that fails, there's still your face to be tracked.
The cars themselves phone home all the time. You have to physically remove the transceiver to prevent it or run a jammer nonstop at the risk of a felony.
Yeah. I’ve never owned a car newer than 2006 though. These days I just ride a bike. Though the fancier e-bikes have gps tracking…
1 reply →
I said 16 years ago that when IPV6 was coming into use was the only reason for a 128 bit address space was so they could tie every packet on the internet back to you as a person. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1464940
No, the main reason is because NAT is terrible and restoring the end to end principle is important if we want the internet to stay not separated into server networks and eyeball networks. If we want to decentralize the internet it's necessary that eyeball machines can talk with each other, not only with servers. This ability reduces the possibility of surveillance.
When IPv6 was designed it was normal for each IPv4 address to be traceable to someone's desk. Fortunately, as that changed with IPv4 so did it with IPv6, so we got IPv6 privacy extensions.
It doesn't help that your first sentence makes you sound like a conspiracy theorist riding his hobby horse. I read on despite that, but others may not.
[flagged]
I refer you to all my own comments about decentralized solutions, which you can see in my history. And the posts that have been flagged after amassing too many upvotes. I think that's sufficient.
My apologies then