Ask HN: What assurance do you have that you are NOT being spied on?

[lifeplusplus]

way back it used to be if you called someone you could think someone is listening to you maybe. But what about now?

Would it be fair and reasonable to assume that...

- all your devices even when off are in some capacity are listening to you especially microphones and maybe cameras

- all OS(win/mac/linux/andoird/ios...) either have secret backdoors or intentionally implemented backdoors

- most hardware also come with some level of backdoors

- wifi routers certainly are also rigged and probably can track humans / “see through walls”..

so basically if you are at home you should not assume total privacy ever.

You should self censor.

And hope you don't fall onto the wrong side of the algo or someone's list. And continue to appear as an avg joe worried about money and his sports team.

[h2odragon]

Agreed up to: "You should self censor"

The possibility exists that you're being monitored that heavily; but the possibility also exists that anyone who wants to do you harm will find it far easier to do so in a direct and immediate way.

God and Big Brother may indeed see all you do. It's only relevant when they attempt to affect your life through your own sense of shame. Don't do the job for them.

[karmakaze]

I pretty much look at it pragmatically. Compared to others, what's the point of picking me? That's not to say that a random person can't be made an example of, or something innocuous at the time can later become a hot item. What I mean is that there's no point in worrying about something you can't control or predict. It's certainly possible that in the (near) future there can be automation that changes the effort/cost in bothering the masses, which is much more conceivable in other countries. But there's no reason to believe that could never happen in your own. But again, I'm not going to worry about it.

I don't "self sensor" for its own sake, but at the same time I consider "What value is there on posting random personal things on social media?" and do so selectively. If I care about the topic to speak on it, I won't block myself. Other times, I'll have a knee-jerk thought/opinion though I don't even care and refrain.

Obligatory https://xkcd.com/386/

[lifeplusplus]

i mean once you accept there is a high probability you are being recorded all times you will subconsciously filter things you say out lout

[mikewarot]

No, I will not f*cking self censor, they will not live rent free in my head.

I don't go out of my way to piss off powerful people, but I'm not going to go hide in a hole. This is my country run by folks like you and me. We tolerate the crap that the rich, and their politicians do, because it's better than all the alternatives.

[PaulHoule]

There was a lot written about the ease of wiretapping circa 1970, around the time that Nixon wiretapped himself. At that time it was notorious that people got trained by the FBI and CIA and then went into practice as ‘private investigators’, that was basically the story of G. Gordon Liddy and Nixon’s other ‘plumbers’, not to mention the people that General Motors hired to spy on Ralph Nader.

Really the invention of the transistor made it possible to make tiny bugs that you might look at and think are just a bit of nothing. In the 1970s people also invented other bugging devices such as an infrared laser that can pick up vibrations on a window from a long distance away.

Today if you have regular houseguests you might think very little of a strange phone being plugged in in some out of the way location, just one many devices that could be corrupted.

There is a tension though between gathering information an acting on that information. Back in the USSR they hired a lot of people to spy on other people, they had a house full of people spying on Andrei Sahkarov. This is both a symptom and a cause of an unproductive economy.

If you really have to physically harass or jail people then the ability to use information doesn’t scale w/the ability to gather it. If you can discriminate against or harass people entirely online (e.g. ‘social credit score’) that is something different.

A tension behind all these things is that you don’t want to reveal your methods, there are many criminal cases that get dropped because the people involved are not important enough to be worth scaring other people into better opsec. I found nothing surprising about the Snowden ‘revelations’ (if it had been revealed that the NSA was not doing that it would have been a scandal because what do we pay them all this money for?) but it did lead to https everywhere to protect us not just against the NSA but many organizations and individuals who have far worse ethics. (There was that time I turned on a packet sniffer on WiFi on an academic network and got about 20 email passwords in a minute, which I deleted right away.)

Personally I think stolen documents are much more likely to be used against you then surreptitious audio recordings, I would not use email for an HR problem or anything where there might be a lawsuit. I cannot see it how people sext because my reading of Dangerous Liasons is that those people came to a bad end not because they were promiscuous or sadistic but because they wrote it all down.

[gsatic]

Just use grandma's phone for bond villain level activities. That's what Zuck apparently does. Cause you know everyone is keeping an eye on that clowns phone.

[nullish_signal]

I will speak as I please...