[midnightGhost]

I remember that story about Zachary McCoy. This whole thing continues to get worse quick and will continue to get worse. I know people say we need legislation and regulation on data privacy and tech companies which we do. But before that gets taken seriously (at least in the US) it's going to take something real scandalous done by tech companies and actually affect the common folk where they actually start to care.

Right now the average user does not care at all about security and privacy except the small niche groups of us on HN, Reddit and other tech/Geek forums. The regular average user will continue to still use Facebook, Twitter, Google, Apple etc. As long as the average user keeps using their services and vote with their data and wallets I doubt much will change anytime soon.

Until we get some real data privacy laws and regulation we just have to matters into our own hands. I don't use Google search unless I need to, and always have my VPN on (Mullvad).

Edit: Then again, once we did get data privacy laws and regulation could we actually trust the companies and politicians and LE. Probably not. That's why I also feel the laws and regulation needed for tech is more of like a "The public thinks we did something" type of situation. There will still and always will be under the table deals.

If the regular user can realize eventually how they feed these companies with their data and what happens with their data it could also hinder or start to hinder data collection at the government level (NSA, GCHQ, Project Raven and so on).

[slownews45]

HN is pretty out of touch I think.

When I talk to non HN crowd.

* Apple's efforts around blocking CASM are applauded

* Folks are GLAD that cops are using tech to catch criminals

* Folks don't have a ton of trust that the regulations will help their lives, or block govt from doing things, but do imagine they will be annoying (more permission banners / cookies popups etc).

It would be interesting to look at other countries where the govt has gotten more hands on with regulations in this area (data retention etc). I know in some spaces I've seen the regulations actually end up REQUIRING retention of records, or the liability risks require retention of video for a long time (ie, railroads have REALLY dialed up use of video given the claims they were facing in terms of running into people - once they started tracking a retaining a lot more - claims went way down - not saying folks were lying before but they are going to push back on getting rid of their data collection at this point unless laws change).

[sjwalter]

I dunno, I mostly agree with you, but I think lately, at least with my family and friends, the coronavirus political response has made many more people much more skeptical about centralized authority figures.

The narrative that is commonly recounted is that it's obvious that the people in authority are either incredibly incompetent or crazily power-hungry, and both are leading many of my family and friends to question everything. I mean total normies who are otherwise just typical taxpayers.

It's funny in a Kafka kinda way to witness the slow erosion of trust in institutions.

Don't get me wrong, I love institutions. Just seems to me and basically everyone I know that the people who should know the most about how trust is built, do everything possible to kill off that trust.

[BoxOfRain]

It's interesting how the pandemic has changed people's political views in various directions. Personally I've become more anti-authoritarian, on the political compass I've moved a few points further down and slightly to the left (based on the UK Overton window) while also adopting stronger views on constitutionalism and the seperation of powers. I've also become a lot more pessimistic about the power of institutions to act for the common good rather than for the benefit of the socio-economic elite. I'm very much now "I'm more than happy to pay taxes for better social services, but please keep the clumsy, oafish hands of the state out of my personal life before it does any more damage".

I've heard of people going in completely the opposite direction, taking on overtly authoritarian and "might-makes-right" kind of views too. I think the pandemic really gave the moral authoritarians and curtain-twitchers of this world a great big stick to hit everyone else with, which to be honest scares me more than the pandemic itself did.

[QuarterReptile]

>I'm very much now "I'm more than happy to pay taxes for better social services, but please keep the clumsy, oafish hands of the state out of my personal life before it does any more damage".

This is very much a stance of "oafish hands for thee, but none for me." The same institutional mass of "oafish hands" that interferes in your personal life does the same to everyone engaging with social services. And while , in many cases, you can opt out of those social services at some expense to yourself, the market equivalents/alternatives will, over time, be weakened or killed the same way as you would see with any other deep-pocketed firm selling a product for below-market prices, at a loss, to smoke out smaller competitors.

I can't speak for the UK, but in the US this has brought us such dire consequences as bulldozing of poor neighborhoods for de-humanizing, car-dependent housing projects; the near-dissolution of the institution of marriage for lower classes; and a healthcare system where buyer and seller have become so thoroughly de-coupled as to disarm the pricing mechanism completely and make it impossible to pay real prices for services outside of collective bargaining arrangements.

[salawat]

>the market equivalents/alternatives will, over time, be weakened or killed the same way as you would see with any other deep-pocketed firm selling a product for below-market prices, at a loss, to smoke out smaller competitors.

What market equivalents are you talking about exactly? The examples you mentioned are hardly the results of "oafish hands".

Marriage? The free market has run amok with building an entire industry and "chic" around large elaborate marriage ceremonies, replete with gratuitous mark ups on relatively everyday services. As far as the institution goes, marriage in the colloquial sense is fine. Couples form and union all the time. Legally speaking, you may have a point, but I've always held the State being involved with marriage in anything more than a record keeping capacity, and acting as a neutral arbiter of inheritance, dissolution, or adoption/parental status quo setting is a terrible idea. As an example, the practice of not getting on paper married for the benefit of welfare or food stamp eligibility is one such example.

>Bulldozing of poor neighborhoods for car dependent housing projects

Welcome to real estate as investment, and the tendency of all idle capital to seek forms that facilitate rent extraction. The lack of "public transit" has more to do with the fact that nobody wants to be burdened with actually giving up a piece of their pie for it, but expects everyone else to. The only "oafish hands" there are the councils who are continually courted by moneyed interests in the free market.

>Healthcare

Welcome to insurance in a nutshell. It completely destroys any semblance of coupling between producer and consumer of service; but is also the inevitable out one of a "captive" consumer population. The combination of service provider cartelry, consolidation of insurers, and perverse incentives created by the free market in terms of businesses becoming targets for Investment funds; it's really the market you should be blaming there.

[lavabiopsy]

I'm just curious: What exactly is seen as being new or remarkable about the failure of some leaders during this pandemic? I share the frustration about these failures, but are your friends/family too young to know about other spectacular failures like Watergate, or Iran-Contra, or the Iraq War, etc? (I could go on)

Edit: I just realized my second question is somewhat US-centric so if you aren't from the US then I apologize, please disregard that comment.

[mwint]

In my circles, this is often the first time legislation (often not even that - often executive action, sometimes by unelected folks!) has had such an immediate, clear impact on people’s lives.

Many of my friends and family have had their closest interaction with the government be taxes & vehicle registration at the DMV - inconveniences, but not much more.

What you list are indeed spectacular failures, but they happened “over there” or “to other people”.

Suddenly, the government is telling _them_ they can’t buy something, they they have to wear a mask, they have to inject something in their body, they can’t go to a concert. Many in my circle have never felt the hand of government so directly.

That’s what’s new and remarkable for a lot of people.

[lavabiopsy]

That's really interesting, I feel like I've experienced the opposite, most people I know have had some kind of interaction with the "hand of government" in some way, if not themselves then second hand. At least in the US with our incarceration rates, statistically it's still more likely that any given person knows someone who is in prison than knowing someone who has died from COVID-19. And COVID-19 has killed a lot of people.

Also maybe you might want to help by explaining to them: it's not the government that was doing those things, it's the virus that was making it so they can’t buy something, they they have to wear a mask, they have to inject something in their body, they can’t go to a concert, etc. The government can only enforce the will of the people, which in this case happens to be fear of an unprecedented attack by a deadly virus. It's totally understandable that this type of global pandemic would be new and remarkable for a lot of people.

[xfhgjxcfgh]

>it's not the government that was doing those things, it's the virus that was making it so they can’t buy something, they they have to wear a mask, they have to inject something in their body, they can’t go to a concert, etc.

The difference between my government's response to the virus and the Swedish government's response was not determined by covid's preferences. Humans made these policies.

>The government can only enforce the will of the people...

The government is enforcing the will of the medical establishment. We didn't get polled on "6' vs 8' social distancing" or "should cloth masks be required or is a bandana acceptable?".

[QuarterReptile]

>the will of the people

There is no unified 'will of the people.' I would agree that, in many cases, governments were criminalizing behavior which communities had already curtailed, so to that extent they were following wills of many people. In this case, why not let those same people who chose the actions take the blame or appreciation for their actions, rather than saying it was government?

I've moved about a decent amount in Covid times (after community spread was a fact of life in all those places). While moving throughout places within particular Covid-rule jurisdictions and looking across spans of time, the people I encounter are far stronger predictors of e.g. mask-wearing behavior than recent executive orders. Communities that want to wear masks continued to do so when civil authorities said they weren't necessary and cases were low, and communities that wanted to never wear masks stuck to their plans even when civil authorities ordered masks (with barely enough begrudging, targeted compliance to continue about their days) and cases were spiking.

[allturtles]

That doesn't make any sense. There are so many government laws and regulations that affect our day-to-day lives, it would be impossible to list them all. You have to get a driver's license to drive a car and wear a seat belt while you're driving it, you can't drive if you've been drinking alcohol, you can't buy alcohol unless you're 21 and you can't do it between the hours of 12am and 8am or on Sundays, you must vaccinate your children before they reach school age, you must put your children in a car seat until age 7, you can't download that song you found for free on the internet, you can't run your own poker table at your house, you have to get a permit before you can make alterations to your house...

This is even ignoring the massive set of additional laws and regulations you have to comply with you if you own a business.

[TeMPOraL]

Yes, but these are all regulations already established. Most people were born into the world where they were already in place, and over their lifes to date, there were only altered in a minor way - a speed limit change here, a new mandatory vaccine there. Some classes of people, like business owners, may have experienced more pronounced regulatory churn - but it still feels mostly like tweaking stuff here and there.

COVID was the first in most people's experience when their government just went and upended their lives. Starting next week schools are closed. Two weeks from now, you can't go do anything other than work and shop. Stay away from other people or else. That includes babysitters. Oh, and your workplace is ordered to close indefinitely for now.

Whether justified or not, this is an entirely different category from the usual mucking around regulations at the edges, or playing cat and mouse game with white-collar fraudsters (which causes many, if not most, of the business-related law changes).

And sure, this is an emergency. But the point is, most people alive - at least in the West - never experienced a national-level emergency before.

[tjfl]

Maybe it depends on age? For a lot of these activities it feels like it's always been that way (maybe not true if you're older?), so even if excessive you've had your whole life to get used to it. All of this covid stuff is new. I agree with mwint, don't have a home, not remodeling, no kids, and no business.

[techbio]

Public school has its influence. The asymmetrical power to focus large resources on ideological targets is a part of modern warfare that most high-school graduates are not going to grasp intuitively.

[fighterpilot]

Watergate and Iran-Contra are about malicious intent but what I see is a rise of institutional incompetence and ineffectiveness which is rather different.

Consider the mistakes of the WHO. Failure to recommend and even decrying early border closures, failure to declare a pandemic until months after evident global spread, and saying masks positively do not work and then dragging their feet for months on the question.

Contrast that to how the WHO reacted to the first SARS, and we can observe a significant deterioration in competence. I could be mistaken, but it doesn't seem that it's just that we are hearing more about incompetence or have short memories.

I can only speculate on the reasons for this. Political polarization leading to affiliation over competence in hiring decisions, more corruption due to cronyism, diversity over competence in hiring decisions, or overly risk-averse decision making due to fear of social media mobs, are candidate explanations.

[raxxorrax]

Honestly Watergate was a joke compared to stuff more recent administrations did.

[Lamad123]

Kafka's hallucinations make a lot of sense in today's world!!

[slownews45]

Right - but how does this generate support for more GOVT regulation ie, Trump and Biden appointees running things vs confidence in companies (like Apple).

My concern, the HN crowd is yelling for more govt regulation, but the average person actually thinks Apple, not the govt, makes reasonable tradeoffs (security, privacy, CASM etc) and might actually trust folks like apple or google MORE than if for example the govt set up an email service.

[foerbert]

There's a huge difference between government regulation of email services and a government email service. I doubt many people calling for the former would use the later.

[jackstraw14]

I think post-Trump it's tougher for anyone in the US to believe totally in the institutions that got us here, despite the different reasons on each side of the aisle.

[ev1]

> * Folks don't have a ton of trust that the regulations will help their lives, or block govt from doing things, but do imagine they will be annoying (more permission banners / cookies popups etc).

This is because those laws rarely have teeth at all. I don't want "ACCEPT BUTTON FOR MARKETING PERMISSION", I want all remarketing and persistent cross site tracking to be illegal. Period.

[dcow]

Cookie banners are an indication that the EU botched part of GDPR. We really just need an outright ban on tracking cookies, agreed. That’s the type of legislation people are suggesting.

[Dah00n]

They are working on a fix at least.

[slownews45]

The problem is plenty of people don't care and click accept all and are tired of folks like you who make every site put a big pop-up in their face.

[lr4444lr]

What fundamental problem do you have with cops using tech to catch criminals?

Not talking about the abuse of innocents here, or warrantless intrusions into your data, just the core of what you're saying.

[MereInterest]

I'll bite. The problem is asymmetry of information, and that the protections haven't advanced alongside the ease of collecting information.

For example, imaging you have a suspect and want to trail them. The courts have established that you have no expectation of privacy when in a public area, so an officer can trail your car and watch where you go. You only have so many officers, and so there are implicit limits on how many people you can trail in person. But if instead of sending an officer to trail a suspect, you attach a GPS tracker to the suspect's car, suddenly that restriction is removed. Instead of spending weeks trailing a single suspect, you could attach dozens of trackers to dozens of cars, or you could request location data from a third party. The lower cost of breaking somebody's privacy allows it to be done more frequently, even if the explicit legal protections haven't changed.

The problem isn't the technology itself, but that protections of privacy and protections against unreasonable searches haven't advanced alongside the technology.

[lr4444lr]

I am pretty sure thr police cannot put a GPS tracker on your car without a warrant.

[MereInterest]

Whether or not there is a warrant is tangential to my argument. There used to be hard physical limits to the amount of surveillance that could be done. Now, the only limits are legal limits. Those legal limits were never designed to be the only limit, and are insufficient in their current form.

[red_hobbit]

Cops were doing that without a warrant in the past. In 2012 it was ruled illegal by the courts. Here's a wired article. https://www.wired.com/story/man-charged-with-theft-for-remov...

[bombcar]

And now they don’t have to because you carry your own gps tracker with you and Google will sing easily.

[Gigablah]

Your telco is way more eager to sell your information.

[0des]

You'd be wrong in the USA. Anybody who parks in any public space or outdoors can have a unit placed on their vehicle by anybody.

[stjohnswarts]

It's still illegal. I could go around keying people's car for potentially a lifetime without getting caught but it's still illegal and that's what we were talking about in the thread.

[lr4444lr]

Legally?

[hellbannedguy]

Get the cops to high crime areas.

There is no need for the amount of law enforcement I have in my county of Marin.

They would then have more time to put GPS's on vechicles, and less time for Revenue Collection.

[lavabiopsy]

How is there asymmetry of information? AFAIK there have been just as many tech advances in police accountability as well, such as the prevalence of body cams, or the ability to see these warrants as they are issued in real time on a police web site, etc. Of course there are other issues at play but I think you may have missed some things that are on the other side, it's very feasible for one person to track many police officers much in the same way that you describe. What would be questionable is if the police were trying to stop the public from doing so.

[dpweb]

The use of technology is irrelevant. The question is one of unreasonable search and seizure, unsupported by probable cause.

"Law enforcement" is always used as a reason to invade privacy. Searching smartphones wasn't envisioned by the founding fathers but is exactly what they were talking about when it was written into the constitution.

[slownews45]

I personally don't.

I suspect plenty of folks agree with me.

My point is, the HN outrage at things like tech to solve crimes (because of privacy etc issues) is in many cases not shared more broadly.

[stjohnswarts]

I agree with your claim. I still think the Apple security boondoggle got the right treatment, and I hope they've backed off forever, but I have my doubts.

[midnightGhost]

I agree. You're not wrong. Us niche groups care, see how the tech works or learn how it works, see what happens with our data and see the possible use cases with some of these systems. That's why I think the whole data collection and privacy war is already over. Until the common user gets affected personally they think data collection is good, have nothing to hide and like it's being used to catch criminals.

[raxxorrax]

Highly depends on your environment actually. Most people care about privacy a lot and don't want 24h surveillance for their safety. They have no idea about CSAM of course.

Furthermore many are indeed critical of big tech and how they censor and modify information for political convenience. They are also aware about oversharing on social media.

[dcow]

On some days I believe the molten veins of liberty in the US have cooled and solidified—structurally succumb to the great machine—bound by economic needs and principles. It’s not about we the people anymore. We won’t see any real change; corruption has seeped in and taken hold. Right now, if there’s money to be made, it’s legal. (Except if it involves giving women power, so sex work remains taboo and OnlyFans is under attack.) Liberty was never about doing whatever the fuck you wanted, it was about collective ownership of structures of control. Does the average citizen participate in the economy with any shred of liberty? Who tells the reserve bank and payment processors how to wield their power over currency? Are you free to wander cyberspace and loot more than 500GB or 1TB of its treasures? Who innately owns your data? Is encryption speech? etc…

The only possible way to fix these problems is to code solutions into the fabric of society. And to do that you need a young molten society of people that fundamentally communicate using a common implementation language working toward a shared vision. This society understands the principles supporting the solutions and is willing to sacrifice in order to maintain a system which innately resists deprivation of liberty. You need birth and.. eventually.. death. We won’t see meaningful data privacy without a revolution.

On some days I feel this way.

[banannaise]

Revolution sucks for all involved. Unfortunately, at this point, the alternatives are looking even worse.

[NoImmatureAdHom]

What about raising money to buy a bunch of data from, say, the Washington, D.C. area and then de-anonymizing it. I wonder what we'd learn...

[TeMPOraL]

I wonder how a different tactic would fare:

1. Buy some legit(ish) dataset for marketing purposes. I hear DMVs in the US like to sell people's data.

2. Do a direct marketing job: send every single person in the dataset a snail mail letter with a printout of all the data you have on them, and a reference to where you got it from. I hear USPS offers good rates for bulk spam campaigns; they apparently live off it.

That sounds like something that is in range of crowdfunding money, could possibly be fully legal, and sidesteps the issue of news outlets killing the message, with (as I recently heard) their policy of not reporting data from leaked datasets.

[evilos]

This would cause so much chaos and probably result in thousands of divorces. Maybe we could get a lawyers group to front the money lol.

[VRay]

Man, that would be great. I'll bet it'd be doable for anyone whose name is tied to public records via home ownership too

Scale up what they did to Trump for this NY Times piece: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/20/opinion/locat...

See if people keep clicking "Allow" on their phone games after that goes out..

Of course, what'd actually happen is everyone would just attack the messenger. Maybe there'd be some super half-assed knee-jerk law thrown into place

If I ever get terminal cancer I'll see if I can throw something together before I kick the bucket, haha.

[NoImmatureAdHom]

I think carefully designing the campaign from the start to avoid a PR backlash would be really important. Doable, too.

[sroussey]

I actually looked into it. They are smart on this and won’t sell to you.

[NoImmatureAdHom]

Thanks for looking in to this! I wonder if we could put together a swarm of small transactions that would allow us to reconstruct a bigger data set of interest.

[gorwell]

How do they determine who to sell to?

[sroussey]

They have a sales person to talk to, and a whole process on who you are and how you will use it.

https://twitter.com/sroussey/status/1220790758749270016?s=21

[bradlys]

I really doubt legislation would come into effect. Instead, the people organizing the effort will be hunted down, prosecuted, and turned into examples of what happens when you try to fuck with people in high level government positions.

[NoImmatureAdHom]

That's a coordinated response. We don't want to invoke a coordinated response. Pick some prominent people to make examples of--people who will make many others happy by their embarassment.

[hilbert42]

The whole matter would likely come to a head very quickly if said data were sent to politicians. Seeing their own data exposed would not only be embarrassing but a wakeup call to everyone.

Not only would the laws quickly change but also we'd soon learn about some of the nefarious antics and unsavory deals made by our governors.

[NoImmatureAdHom]

That's the hope

[dillondoyle]

Has happened with grindr a few times that I know of. https://accesswdun.com/article/2021/7/1024075

And the Strava on military bases thing. https://www.wired.com/story/strava-heat-map-military-bases-f...

[1vuio0pswjnm7]

Privacy and security regulation, nor antitrust regulation, are viable means to stop tech companies from creating problems. The way to stop them is to regulate online advertising. Tech companies have no other way to make money. Ignoring this is like trying to fight a war without ever trying to interfere with the enemy's supply chains.

The constant focus on the majority of web users, i.e., "the average user", is misplaced and suffers from an incorrect assumption. Namely, that a majority of the public needs to support some law before it can be passed by a legislature.

Most legislation does not come from mass outpouring of support by the public, like the kind "HN/Reddit/other tech/Geek forum" comments call for. It comes from lobbying, usually professional, and sometimes community activism. The same "niche" groups that people in the these forums like to downplay are not necessarily much smaller and may even be larger than groups who have successfully gotten laws passed at state and federal levels. What is necessary is some number of people who do understand the issues to initiate the lobbying and campaigning; the awareness and support of the "average constituent" is never a prerequisite. Nor is it true that every law passed serves an enormous number of constituents, i.e., "the average constituent". Sometimes laws only serve small groups of people who have special needs (or wants).

The notion of the "average user" really has no bearing on whether legislation is passed or not. What matters is the small group of people who are driving the campaign to have legislation passed. That group is unlikely to comprise the "average user", its going to be people who understand the issues to which the proposed law is targeted and can articulate them to people who know how to work the system to get laws passed.

The more middlemen people accept when using the internet, the more parties that can be subpoenaed. Those are the consequences of "cloud computing" and "SaaS". But to think that no law can be passed to address the harms that "tech" companies present, because the "average user" does not understand these problems, makes no sense. Stop focusing on "the average user". Thats for the "tech" companies to do. For the non-average users, its a waste of time.

[cybersol]

When both the government and the advertising companies have an aligned incentive to spy on us all, Why would the government pass either privacy or advertising laws?

[hilbert42]

That's the problem with democracy at the moment, vested interests have taken control of the forum because (a) they're able to and (b) the majority of citizens are just not interested in or engaged with the issues.

You see this everywhere not only with security etc. but also in many other areas. A classic case is copyright law where a small number of powerful people have hijacked the debate and managed to impement grosely unfair laws in their favor. They're so organized and powerful that they've not only been successful domestically but also internationally with treaties etc. It's almost impossible to break these nexes when the populace at large is so complacent.

In short, our current democratic structures favor the powerful, money-rich and organized at the expense of the disinterested who are disinterested because they're not yet aware of the issues involved and thus don't yet know that they stand to lose or be disadvantaged. There is no effective advocacy system to support them and conterbbalance the push at the early stages of law formation and thus we end up with laws that overcompensate the initial lobby and which are extremely hard to unwind later, especially so when international treaties are involved.

Outside a revolution I cannot see change happening and revolutions are the very last thing we need, they end up disastrously for everyone.

It's all rather depressing really.

[throwaway210222]

> That's the problem with democracy at the moment

I disagree. The problem with (multi-party) based democracy is that it is way more important to be popular with the party seniority, than with the constituents.

If fact, if you want to be a member of a parliament, its essential to first be popular with the party, before you get a shot at being popular with your voters.

[hilbert42]

Not disagreeing, I should have said 'one of the problems'.

Nevertheless, same goes here, there's insufficient interest from the citizenry to break that nexus too. Breaking party loyalty etc. to obtain a fairer system has been the bane of modern democracy for hundreds of years - back to Hobbes, Locke etc. As I said it's depressing that there's no easy solution.

Edit: Same goes for any lobby who wields effective power over the elected, remember Edmund Burke got the shift from the electors of Bristol when he dared move off their agenda to put broader (national) interest first. Whilst this broader approach seems fairer/better for all it's nevertheless a double-edge sword though, as it allows politicalians an excuse to pursue another agenda - one that may not be in either the electors' or national interest but rather that of a third party or even him or herself. The problem remains, we've no effective way of fixing it/balancing all interests fairly.

[ClumsyPilot]

"Tech companies have no other way to make money"

Microsoft is pretty major, and makes money not from ads

[Lamad123]

I hope more people get thrown in jail for not caring about privacy, so they and we learn to care more.