Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by cactus2093 1943 days ago
This is really, really bad reasoning. Basically you're saying that there's no point in countering wildly untrue conspiracies with facts or evidence, the mere fact that people believe the conspiracies means they might as well be true?

(I'm not making a claim either way on whether or not in this case it's true that devices are spying on us, just that this line or thinking is absurd that it doesn't really matter if a given thing is true)
2 comments
titzer 1943 days ago
I remember back in 2002 when I took a college course on Computer Security and the prof told story after harrowing story of the lengths to which spy agencies went to get the information they were after. I remember thinking, "Well if the NSA really wanted to track everyone and record everything that was ever transmitted over the internet, I suppose they could. But nah, that's crazy."

Fast forward to 2013 and Snowden.

Our defaults for "they wouldn't do that" when it comes to your privacy are all wrong.

If that's a "conspiracy theory" that you need to dismiss so that you can go about your life, fine. But the truth is, these people are constantly up to no good and you can't trust closed software nor hardware. The technical capability for draconian mass surveillance exists.

link
judge2020 1943 days ago
The poster you're replying to did not say that AMZN/GOOG/AAPL wouldn't spy on you, they simply stated that evidence should be considered to justify claims, especially if you're trying to spread those claims to other people. Your argument "we should sound alarms without evidence because tomorrow we'll have evidence" is classic conspiracy theory reasoning, which is why people will classify you as one. In essence, we shouldn't throw people in jail for crimes they haven't committed yet.
link
whynaut 1943 days ago
The leap you make to punish someone is much further than the one you take to protect yourself, i.e. locking your own device away for a moment.
link
fartcannon 1943 days ago
I believe the post in question believes they have enough evidence to justify the actions and is speaking from a position of surprise/resignation at the state of things.

Kind if like, 'I cant believe it's come to this, but given all the evidence, it's justified."

link
titzer 1943 days ago
That's a pretty big leap. The OP was talking about putting their phone in a drawer, not throwing people in jail without a trial. I, for one, don't blame them one bit.
link
johannes1234321 1943 days ago
The issue is: We can't prove it either way. We can make law which increases the risk if they are uncovered and hope they abide to it (see GDPR and California Law for attempts in that direction) but a prove is hard.

At the same time we see the incentives, and the incentives are to collect and analyze things.

link
czbond 1943 days ago
Is it absurd? My leap seems smaller and more logical than the alternative. The technical fact is that each of these features exist, and are used daily.

A device which does not have a hardware cutoff switch, which you've allowed to listen for it's own prompts ("Hey Siri, etc") can listen to you. So far we're all speaking "current knowns". Nothing about that is conspiracy.

The trust part is "storage of data received" and "use of that data". Sure it probably does not today - but will the terms of service change tomorrow?

An example parallel are Alexa devices listening, and accidentally storing whole convos.

link