[Cacti]

Yes, I think people really underestimate how much data they leak all day long, and how strong the pattern is. Simply emitting bluetooth and wifi, nevermind cellular, all day long can expose an incredible amount of stuff, provided someone can piece it all together (which is exactly what Facebook and other ad companies do).

We like to pretend we're unique and powered by free-will but the reality is most things you do are fairly easy to track and predict.

We're not in 1984, but certainly the capability is _already_ there. The difference between us and 1984 is only really one of intent, and you can guess how long that'll last.

[gnulinux]

> The difference between us and 1984 is only really one of intent

I'm not convinced intent isn't there; I'm also confused why'd you assume that. As a free software activist, I wonder have you every checked EFF or FSF websites. I'm not saying EFF and FSF are saving the world (no, they are not) but if you browse what they're dealing with, you can easily see the intent is there. It is simply hard to do all these without people thinking intent is not there, which is why nothing is done as explicitly as 1984. For example, Windows 10 has built-in ads, INSIDE operating system, your OS, which you already paid quite a price, forces you see ads; and tracks your behavior "to optimize user experience". People are not worried about this since ads are such an integral part of our lives. But Microsoft perfectly intents to track which websites I visit, what do I eat, what do I like, where would I go. Maybe you can say intention is "different" as in in 1984 they use my personal information to prosecute me, whereas this is not what Microsoft is after. Well, then this brings us to some Foucoult reading. In a world where all my information collected what is the difference between using all my information for a specific cause, when this cause can change just tomorrow. What if NSA asks Microsoft to give bunch of people's data? (we all know this already happened, but it is better practice to ask questions)

I am a programmer, I use my computer all the time, pretty much every single awake moment of mine. I don't want to be watched. But as you said it is depressingly hard to achieve this, since it feels like only 0.1% of the population shares this same desire. Most people are okay being watched, and this is part of the problem.

[isostatic]

> ads are such an integral part of our lives

I'll skip the futurama reference for now, but for me ads are far rarer than in the 90s. Adblock handles most things online, iPlayer, Netflix and amazon don't really have adverts on TV (they have a graphical menu but I would call that an advert), Spotify doesn't have adverts. Sure there are a few adverts if I go to somewhere like london, and Sainsbury's advertise their own deals in store, and of course products on the shelf are adverts in of themselves, but the only advert I have seen in the last 24 hours was one raising awareness of cistic fibrosis in a billboard outside of Sainsbury's. Oh and the train announcement saying "the on board shop is open for teas coffees and light refreshments". There wouldn't have been any product placement in the episode of once upon a time I watched last night either.

The TV jingles I remember from childhood are still etched in my brain, the adverts I see in this decade are ones I hunt out depberatly (the John Lewis Xmas advert for example, or film trailers, or something about amazon delivery people stealing your sofa that was recommended at work)

I did see adverts on Saturday night when we went to see Thor. I don't recall what was advertised other than odeon limitless, the trailers are adverts too of course, alas they don't really work - we'd rather see more films at the cinema than we do now, but getting babysitting is a pain. We missed Spider-Man and kingsmen for example.

If anything there are more opportunities to avoid adverts than ever before.

[46922010]

It definitely depends where you are living, and how you travel.

If you haven't been to London recently I understand you might say there are a few ads, but lately I have really begun to notice just how prevalent they are. The tube is absolutely plastered with them - in the train carriages, the escalators, the tunnels between platforms. Construction work fences are covered in ads. And this is for thousands of people who travel 30-45mins two times every day, completely filled with ads. You don't necessarily pay them much attention every day, but they definitely have an effect on which companies, brands and even theatre performances pop into my head first.

On top of this, I took a flight to Heathrow last night and there were ads on the plane, ads all over the arrivals area as you walk to the taxi rank. In the Uber home I noticed the motorway connecting Heathrow and London has bright electronic billboards one after the other - it never seems to end.

I just wanted to give some perspective on what the commuter experience is like in London (and I'm sure in other large cities, too). It may feel like you experience less ads personally, but that may not be representative of the general public.

The apps you mentioned are a select few (admittedly good examples of how TV ads have gone down) , but most free apps now rely on some kind of advertising model to be profitable. Almost every social media platform forces ads into your timeline. Perhaps we just don't tend to notice how pervasive they are.

[isostatic]

I guess one side effect of being glued to your phone all the time is that you don't notice adverts. But the tube had adverts in the 90s, and before - http://howlsandwhispers.co.uk/articles/bob-mazzer-london-und...

I did notice adverts on a flight from delhi last month on the front of a film, but it's very rare I'll watch anything on a plane's entertainment system, partly because of things like adverts.

[EADGBE]

Even tiny cities in comparison will give you a similar experience. You just have to look. There's probably a lot of people looking right through them.

[maccard]

Not sure I agree r; Netflix and Spotify. Both have curated home pages with questionable amounts of accuracy. Netflix in particular, places all of their own content on the top row of the selection. My fire tv stick home page is jammed with ads for content on the landing screen. Amazons website is a gigantic ad. My online shopping now has suggested items based on what I’m ordering( ordering strawberries - now you get suggestions for branded cream in the same search)

Product placement also appears to be rampant (despite you mentioning it explicitly in your post) - many shows highlight specific vehicles and brands, or specific phones, brands of food...

Another one I’ve found is lots of blogs (particularly food ones) have sponsored entries. So you have someone writing about food ad having recipes that use a particular brand of harissa, or a particular food processor.

All these things are advertising, and are mostly heavily targeted too.

[Feniks]

Absolutely. Ublock origin scrubs every page clean of ads and trackers.

It's really not THAT hard to stay off the grid.

[luxpir]

Quick note to say that despite umatrix/ublock origin, it's hard to not be tracked via canvas fingerprint tracking, where the use of a blocker can make you more trackable. I mean it's not necessarily the ad companies at that point, but you're still a data point for marketing/surveillance.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canvas_fingerprinting

[EADGBE]

I was the audience to at least a hundred advertisements on my way to work today.

Do I mind? Not really. Probably because I can't point out a single one.

[cm2187]

> Most people are okay being watched, and this is part of the problem.

I am not sure I agree with that. I think the vast majority of people react to the same way to surveillance, they at most don't like it, or outright hate it.

But most people are not conscious of this surveillance. If there was a guy following them absolutely everywhere, all day long, and logging on a notepad everything they do and everything they say, they would go absolutely mad. It's just that current surveillance, through cookies, CCTVs, server side logging, is too stealth for people to notice.

[unicornporn]

> We're not in 1984

https://m.imgur.com/vRBtL

[yazaddaruvala]

"that Huxley not Orwell was right"

Implies only one can be right. There doesn't have to be only one answer.

    Some say the world will end in fire, 
    Some say in ice. 
    From what I’ve tasted of desire 
    I hold with those who favor fire. 
    But if it had to perish twice, 
    I think I know enough of hate 
    To say that for destruction ice 
    Is also great 
    And would suffice.

Everytime we avoid one possible dystopia, the possibility for another will surface. We just have to hold them at Bay faster than they can arrive

[unicornporn]

> "that Huxley not Orwell was right" Implies only one can be right.

You're very right about this observation. That being said, I'm kind of tired of the 1984 meme because the state of things and the way we seem to be heading looks nothing like the future presented in 1984. In fact, if we are expecting dystopia to present itself like the one portrayed in 1984 it might obscure the fundamental issues and complexities that our society faces. Brave New World, on the other hand, has a better chance of helping us reveal them.

[jwilk]

Direct link to the image:

https://i.imgur.com/vRBtL.jpg

[thisacctforreal]

I get redirected regardless.

[rowyourfuture]

When a person submits their email for free Wifi at a place with Zenreach, they pull from databases and build a profile on the person.

I don't know which services provide this or how they gather data, but the thought of anyone being able to download a detailed file on you with only an email or phone number is scary.

[squarefoot]

A few months ago I did a Google search for my name as i do once or twice a year just to see what comes out. This time I had mixed reactions because among first results there was full text taken from a scanned old magazine dated 1978 or so with my name complete with street address. That was long before the Internet was publicly available and having such data into a magazine would not hurt anyone because people expected it could be useful to get in touch with others with similar interests (electronics in this case), and it surely worked for me because I got a free subscription and some job offers which I would have gladly accepted if I wasn't only 12 years old:) But nearly 40 years have passed, the ubiquitous magazine called the Internet is read by anyone for free, and having your address and/or personal data there isn't that safe anymore. Luckily I relocated a few times since, but what if I didn't? Technically speaking it's great to see an old magazine brought back to life, but what about unfiltered personal information one would expect to remain buried that will instead remain available forever in other contexts? I'm not bashing Google's bots crawling around to turn anything into searchable data, and I surely would never ever want laws to limit what can be searched, but pay attention if you shared personal data on printed material because if until yesterday we said "everything you put on the internet stays there forever", today there is more.

[leonroy]

As a company director since the age of 15 I’ve had my personal address publicly listed for quite a while now.

Prior to that there were phone books and whilst you could choose to be delisted clearly a lot of people didn’t since the books were so thick!

I thoroughly agree that privacy is important but I don’t think people ever really minded very much or if they did not enough to do something about it like lobby for laws to ensure personal addresses are not disclosed publicly.

[widforss]

What's the reason for keeping your address a secret? Genuinely curious, as where I live (se) almost all peoples addresses are public information, and it's really practical.

[dredmorbius]

33 bits. Information is a force multiplier, not power itself (Francis Bacon was wrong.)

https://33bits.wordpress.com/about/

It takes only 33 bits of distinctive information to identify a given person. Specific information about a person, including background, can help provide further information on them -- it tells you where to look (and more importantly, a very good idea as to where not to), who to talk to, and what they might have done.

"If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged."

- Cardinal Richelieu (a/k/a Armand Jean du Plessis, Cardinal-Duc de Richelieu et de Fronsac)

"the forced revelation of information makes individual privilege and power more important. When everyone has to play with their cards on the table, so to speak, then people who feel like they can be themselves without consequence do so freely -- these generally being people with support groups of like-minded people, and who are neither economically nor physically vulnerable. People who are more vulnerable to consequences use concealment as a method of protection: it makes it possible to speak freely about controversial subjects, or even about any subjects, without fear of harassment."

https://plus.google.com/+YonatanZunger/posts/WegYVNkZQqq

(Yonatan Zunger is the former chief architect of Google+.)

[corvallis]

I work with prisoners. I have a unique name. My family members and I are the only people with our names in the country, and possibly the world.

If you google my name, you will find my family (parents, sibling), their home address, phone numbers, ages, occupations. It is local.

Upon release or through veiled communication, I or my family members could easily be targeted for harm by inmates or former inmates.

This is a very real concern for me. I have found no way to permanently remove this information from search results.

I encourage people to think more creatively when they cannot think of potential disadvantages of easily searchable personal information.

[wolco]

Create a batch of new yous' with different addresses and make them public across the internet. Your problem is too little misinformation.

[geofft]

> What's the reason for keeping your address a secret?

I, and the people I love, have public political opinions on the internet, and SWATting is a thing.

I can either keep my address a secret (and I do; I use my PO Box whenever possible), or I can decline to participate in public civic discourse and encourage the people I love to do the same.

[daemin]

I think it's not so much keeping this sort of information a secret, it has never really been a secret as anyone with some motivation could find out these things. The big thing these days with computerisation and the Internet is it is making these things trivial to acquire, accumulate, and search. It's not a matter of going to offices and looking through paper records, because it's all at someone's fingertips.

[huhtenberg]

> it's really practical

To what end?

I can't think of a situation when someone might need my address and not being able to get it from me directly.

[bertil]

Addresses can be used for authentication—it routinely is in the UK where I live now.

There are also possible physical safety issues, especially in a country like the US were people seem to have guns and are willing to use them.

I miss Sweden’s transparency and widespread’s trust.

[EADGBE]

Lookup address-by-name seems much more damning than lookup-name-by-address.

Much less is to be assumed about you, like just your name.

Versus the country you live in, state/province/territory, city/village/township, neighborhood, etc.

[paloaltokid]

We _are_ in 1984, but unlike the book, it's not imposed on us. We signed up for it. And those of frequenting HN most likely are the ones helping to build it.

Think about it: tomorrow is Monday. How many folks on this board will be working on analytics and tracking once they get in to the office? A lot of us, guaranteed. And how many of us will take a principled stand, swearing not to work on products until surveillance features are removed? A few of us, guaranteed.

[Cacti]

You say people will take a stand, but the vast and overwhelming number of us wont, we will just continue to help build the greatest surveillance system in history. And then tell each other how we’re unicorns that are saving the world, that we cherish freedom and liberty and the hacker ethis, when really we just want to get paid.

[jeffdavis]

Nobody knows what stand to take. We stood and fought for open source everywhere, thinking that would be our salvation. But apperently there is more to it than that, and we aren't exactly sure what.

[Cacti]

Sure we are sure, we just don't like it. RMS gets a lot of flack, but he's mostly right---this is not a technical problem with a technical solution, it's a political problem with a necessarily political solution. Most of us live in democracies, so if you want to fix the problem, it's actually quite straight-forward, it's just that people don't want to give up their nice job and nice hobbies.

[jeffdavis]

If you know what the law should be, please tell us.

[maxscam]

Oh my god stop being so dramatic, both of you. The vast majority of people are not actively contritubing to the sorry state of data privacy nor are they heroically working to fix it. Put the blame where its due.

[Cacti]

Are you kidding me? HN is _built_ on startups that specialize in selling ads.

[katastic]

>We _are_ in 1984, but unlike the book, it's not imposed on us.

We're living in both 1984 and Brave New World.

See this illustration between 1984 and Brave New World.

https://i.imgur.com/vRBtL.jpg

[rambojohnson]

the other difference between us and 1984 is that we are volunteering that data for free.