[tslug]

You haven't been reading the news if you don't understand what's happening with privacy and big data right now. I can say with conviction that we don't have privacy. What I can't point to is exactly who has this information and what they're doing with it, because... privacy.

Perhaps Y Combinator would care to share their IP access logs and tell you which servers appear to be scraping these posts? You could do it yourself, if only... oh yeah, privacy.

I look forward to FOIA-liberated records the NSA, HS, CIA, FBI, and local law enforcement agencies have on us. I also look forward to reading the FOIA-liberated transcripts of all the backroom deal-making where it seems the government is actually being governed from.

Do you think individual privacy helped bring us together as a nation to nominate the best candidates and elect the best President? Or do you think individual privacy helped us vilify each other in this election?

[terrestrial]

Privacy and transparency are not opposites. It is possible to have privacy in a perfectly transparent world.

I agree that the privacy battle as we know it is already lost. Once someone has the kind of powers the "umpteen eyes" are possessing, no amount of legislation will make them give it up.

That does not mean we should pretend that it is not a problem. There is a massive discrepancy right now in the kind of tools and information that is publicly available, and what secret government operations are possessing.

What we should be fighting for is transparency, not privacy. I want to know exactly what kind of data is collected about me, and I want to know who accesses it and when (unless I'm subject to an investigation, during which the information about my data being accessed can be embargoed until it's over).

I would blog about this, if it wasn't so damn difficult to host a website without revealing my full identity. I don't want future employers to judge me for political views, sexuality or whatever. That's why privacy is important, and still will be in a fully-transparent world (which I do think is inevitable, but no government is currently working towards that).

[tslug]

Could you offer up a specific example of privacy and transparency not being opposites? My imagination is failing me.

I find when "transparency" is used in conversation these days, it tends to mean, "These guys over here shouldn't be allowed privacy, but I want to keep mine."

[terrestrial]

What I really meant was "inversely proportional", rather than opposite, although I do abide by that (if only because the words have such different meanings).

Increasing one will not reduce the other, or vice versa. As an example, imagine a scenario where everything the government does is in the open, and all systems can be publicly audited and verified. This is transparency, at no cost to privacy.

Conversely, if encryption, Tor, and leaving your house without a tracking device is outlawed, that would not increase transparency. It would merely make it more difficult to reduce the opacity of the receiving end of the tracking device.

[tslug]

What you're describing removes the ability of government employees to use privacy. This just incentivizes them when privacy is helpful (like in sensitive negotiations) to do that private work away from the office in their private lives.

Likewise, if you expect privacy in your personal life, but you work for the government and are forced to be transparent there, then using big data techniques and the many services tracking private individuals (uber, facebook, google, twitter, HN posts, others' cell phone captures, etc), you can suss out just about everything you need to know about their supposedly private lives, whether or not you know how to use Tor, can tolerate the dogshit Tor bandwidth and latencies, and assuming your Tor exit relays haven't been compromised.

When you create zones of privacy and transparency, what you're doing is making the private zone more powerful than the transparent zone, and you're making the transparent zone a liability to the private zone.

This is exactly the opposite of what you want to motivate. You want to generally motivate people to be transparent and to protect them for being transparent. Broadly speaking, that's the only way we're going to get more transparency. Right now in the US, transparency is generally equivalent to liability. It's all punishment, little reward.