Comment by close04
15 hours ago
> And before you ask: Yes, I’m laying this one squarely down before (and partly on the toes of) the tech bros: We could have designed our protocols to be minimally compatible with “a nation of laws,” but the tech bros insisted that compromise was treason, and, as a result, we will lose more privacy than necessary.
Ah, the famous “maybe if I take a step back they’ll appreciate it and not push harder”. Or maybe it’s “if I give the leopard my face maybe it spares my body”.
I’ll let reality speak for itself: look no further than Stingrays and every bit of legal abuse they enabled, where innocent people are spied on in bulk with flimsy excuses. How well did it work out when the protocol was already maximally compatible with laws?
There’s no “minimally compatible”, you either have the privacy technically guaranteed or you don’t. If it’s technically allowed to breach it, it will soon be done as a matter of routine under the guise of “protecting”, “preventing”, and so on.
So in the end we didn’t lose anything, what we did was we gained a short period in which we could all taste that freedom. If we used your proposal nobody would have had even that to begin with.
This logic would have been easier to forgive if it came from youth and inexperience, from someone who never got to know about the endless abuse of surveillance that was inflicted indiscriminately on everyone.
> I promised myself I would never join their ranks.
A wasted opportunity, missed by at least 1 article :).
A working solution can forestall a worse one. Because of the age verification law in California, which is very explicit that you only need a device-wide checkbox, nobody can use the argument that they need a passport scan to comply with the law.
We’ve had the “compromise” solutions forever before the harder stance tech took on privacy in the last few years, and governments abused them into oblivion. Every time the tech allowed it, it was legally abused and applied much wider than initially promised. This isn’t just about age verification but also encryption.
Every time you step back, the opposing force advances one step and soon you’ll have the same discussion again except from an even weaker position. Do you really think that once the framework is in place everyone will forever be content and not push for the next step?
Like the author, you are advocating for the “small backdoor”. Or like another commenter put it, the prophylactic that only gets you a little pregnant. There’s no such thing.
Non sequitur. I didn't say anything about backdoors or privacy.
I also found the compromise bit of the article strange
The minimally compatible is what existed before. The Snowden leaks showed that the Government, and not just the US government, would abuse the shit out of that for mass surveillance.
So now privacy advocates no longer trust that such a compromise can exist
It’s strange that the author both recognizes that the Government broke the social contract and then says privacy advocates should just keep trusting them in the same article
This. Author does talk about a lot of facts but seems very defeatist wrt whether an anonymous, encrypted internet can be preserved.
I do recognize their point that it's been made very hard to catch and prosecute cyber criminals. I think there are ways to improve that that don't destroy the privacy of everyone. But if that's the real goal, why isn't it the big pitch line of the Parent's Decide Act?