[lifeisstillgood]

The thing that F-droid are getting right here is "if we don't track you, you have privacy from us".

But privacy is not secrecy. If f-droid tracked my every waking move, and then just never bother to look at that data, I would still have privacy from them.

What they are doing here is a form of guaranteeing their future good behaviour. Which is nice, but there are other methods. For example I am happy to announce my plans to not rob a bank. But there are means in place to ensure I do not - At least not twice.

So while it is nice to find ways to avoid having user accounts at all, most hospitals will have to have other means to keep their users privacy.

Most of the time we are going to need to rely on regulation, where PII data (which lets face it is 98% of all data) will both legally and culturally have to be protected at levels hardly dreamed of today.

[hinkley]

> I would still have privacy from them.

No, they have an unexploited asset and you think you're safe because nobody has exploited it yet. This is false security. If money gets tight they'll exploit it. If they get bought out the new owners will exploit it. If they get hacked, the entire Internet will exploit it.

I would highly recommend that you spend a little bit of time thinking about or working with groups of dissidents, other oppressed groups, even people who have been sexually harassed. I have seen so much wrong-thinking about what Security actually is and it's always people living in a privilege bubble, not thinking of actual, real life existential threat that exposure can represent until they have some user in hiding because they got death threats after being doxxed. Or just plain disappearing because their government black-bagged them over something they posted online.

[lifeisstillgood]

Yes, I do live a privileged life. I think I get it. And I do not want to spark some kind of fight here. I am interested in your views and would be interested in specific cases / archetypes of concern.

But I do not want to be on the side of "we need a better way to hide". Staying hidden should not be the solution to death threats. Jail is the solution.

I hate that we (western ? US/UK?) society has abandoned hope of properly funding a justice system, let alone a mental health system.

In our society I do not want the response to death threats to be "hide better". It must be "police better". And that is expensive and difficult and long.

In other societies, well, We are not going to bring the worlds dictators down with clever messaging protocols. That is going to be old fashioned politics (and by recent events war too).

I have been very unsure about posting this - it's a very big wide topic that raises a lot of emotions. And that's because it is important - we have much to fix about our world.

[hinkley]

My friend dragged me to an Amnesty International meeting in college and for like the first half hour I thought they were joking. Surely... no, they're serious. There are movie villains out there in the world.

But since then I've had friends who volunteered for domestic abuse situations, and I've had a few friends who talked about former stalkers. In one case, the stalker was a LEO. My best friend's parents found asylum in the US, having snuck out of Poland sometime in the mid 80's, with the Communists hot on their trail. The Law would have had them swinging from a yard arm.

Jail isn't the solution in at least half of these cases. It's the stick being used against the victim, not a way out of the problem. In the police procedural dramas the cops have to assure people about how they're not INS, they're just here to ask about a murder. Those fictional scenarios, and the real situations that inform those writers, are essentially a case of Principle of Least Power playing out on the streets. Protests are often about changing the laws to match current or emerging public opinion. Changing a law means you're working against the law.

Consolidating all power into one place is how power trips end, but it can also be how they start. As someone else put it so plainly elsewhere in the thread, "You don't need to know" is an important concept and one we've lost. If I were President, I'd dismantle the TSA, and go back to something halfway between what we had before and where we are now. Because it looks exactly like the setup for a dystopian novel. We're still partly in the 'acclimate people to unreasonable request' but that's how totalitarians start out.

[lifeisstillgood]

I see. I guess it's something about trust or hope. I hope that we can build a society that respects the individual rights of all, while using the powerful insights of digital surveillance to improve our lives (obvious answer is how much medical epidemiology will benefit from minute by minute data).

I can certainly see I am putting hope over experience. But that is the excuse to do nothing as well.

The world has changed. We must chnage our laws and our culture.

Yes there is a danger of totalitarianism, but we have had that without iPhones. We will have it with iPhones. The problem lies not in our stars.