[slg]

Because who you are keeping something private from is often more important than what you are keeping private. For example, there are plenty of things I would be fine sharing with the anonymous internet that I wouldn't share with my coworkers. My coworkers knowing something embarrassing about me has obvious harm. There is no real harm in strangers knowing something embarrassing about me. And companies and governments are both largely strangers.

I think the fundamental problem with the pro-privacy side of the debate is an inability to communicate why privacy matters in way that makes sense to people who think like this. The argument always seems to come down to some dystopian future in which this information is abused, but hypotheticals like that are just never very motivating when people have so many more pressing issues that are causing clear and immediate harm rather than some hypothetical future harm.

[trod123]

You are mistaken. There is real harm in strangers knowing sensitive information about you. You seem to have a blindspot for how coercion works. There's harassment, struggle sessions, and blackmail as well as many other things.

If someone knows the normal hours you are at home, they can enter your home without much risk. They can plant evidence, Interfere in your life in ways that you can't easily fix, or even create situations where you get harmed or die from an accident. Information gathering is a necessary pre-requisite for a successful attack, and by itself it is an act of hostile intent.

The argument doesn't come down to dystopian future. It comes down to the fact that people in corrupt systems lie, and those lies can torture the victim without any recourse.

Information is abused regularly.

Once you see it, you can memorize it and transmit it without a paper trail. You can even have a plausible reason for needing to access that information in the first place.

It is ephemeral and its security relies on trust of an untrustable entity that trends towards corruption as a structural flaw.

All centralized hierarchies as a structure involving people either perform action based on a distribution of labor that is incentivized (away from a loss function), or they do so through corruption (in its absence).

In either case, there is incentive and there is no other means to overcome the natural friction towards inaction.

[w0m]

I think you made his point fairly clearly.

>hypothetical future harm

Does a non-techy boomer worry that Microsoft is going to use their cookie-research browsing data to harass/coerce/blackmail them?

You're describing what a hypothetical future-booggieman can do; not what to be feared now that the nontechy is reading about on the news.

[trod123]

> You're describing what a hypothetical future-booggieman can do...

Unfortunately no, being deadly serious here I'm describing what can be done today fairly trivially (to any target), and done in a way without alerting the victim that its even happening. They simply seem to have bad luck with a monkey on their back that they can't see everywhere they go in society. They are deprived of opportunities without their knowledge, be it gender relations, labor relations, citizen-government relations etc; its applies equally at all levels.

There are multiple ways than just what follows to do this:

Shall we go down the rabbit hole?

Starting off with a compromise and transparent SSL proxy termination through failures at the network edge (firmware level, between Router or Cable Modem and ISP/Internet).

Note the point the guy makes that Cable Modem standards require 56bit encryption to remain working, and there being no authentication for sensitive requests (i.e. query then update that firmware for one of something like 8 models of microcontroller architecture).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hk2DsCWGXs

From here, middle man most traffic (it says encrypted to the victim, its not encrypted), Deny service selectively (delayed update of antivirus, certificate revocation, etc), deny service selectively of inbound email and/or remove specific emails (breaking communication with a non-response you never receive), close opened resolution processes posing as the user, or the vendor CSR using generated correspondence or voice AI based in unofficial versions of GPT. The more induced frustration the better (higher cost).

Analyse traffic behavior for time spent on entertainment as potential targets. Isolate communications, prune social networks gradually.

Delay interrupt driven communications to the point of uselessness (friends ignore you, relationships wither and die, they see it as you not being interested/flaky, you see it as them not being interested; no way to validate and a lack of belief that it follows you across services; they firmly believe you are either crazy or are ghosting them and withdraw because you don't respond to communications they send you which you don't know about, and communications on their side are not impaired with other people).

ISPs may extend their cellular coverage through edge-based repeaters/mesh network allowing interception. Prevent or delay SMS/Voice Communications of all forms targeted and intermittently. (i.e. medical communications to coordinate scheduling/testing for cancer/mortal diseases early? etc...) Failures are systemic failures of the company not an adversary... or so they perceive. "It is just everyone is so incompetent, it can't be malice", someone would have ensured this is unthinkable.

If they love something (what your identity is based on), like chess, pose as the chess server and always match and win against them using an engine to demoralize. They would see perfect play 7/10 times, assume its representative of the state of thing, and despite having the expectation that they are playing against people they are constantly being the victim of deceit. This Distorts Reflected Appraisal changing their worldview subtly, the more wide in subject/situation, the worse the distortion gets; it destructively interferes with Self Concept and their Identity hollowing them out inducing hypnotic states commonly known and seen in torture from WW2/Mao but without that physical threat (its just an omnipresent threat). The mind in these states is malleable and remembers details more easily, this is where ads come in. Induce hate, disunity, derision, disgust in every one and thing they love; segment the victim into a cohort.

Make what they love shit, pose as the user for any number of harmful effects (i.e. request mail forwarding to some other address now the victim gets no mail and it goes to lost mail once the forwarded address says not here), report the property as vacant, intercept e-file make it so it appears to be submitted (when it doesn't); what happens when you don't file taxes or pay taxes?, or replace with incorrect taxes posing as the user (fraud, whose responsible?).

Google Information Services can have a fake business listing registered at an address. The victims own devices generate a busy time graph as they do for any business which is public. This is when they are home.

A Roku/Smart TV may be remotely triggered to enable the voice control mic to turn on regularly and place shows that destructively interfere with your view in their queues. They would see this as the company.

All this happens outside the users ability to perceive or largely control. It forms the basis for a struggle session (mental coercion/torture) they cannot escape from it.

With isolation and distorted view of the world you can ramp this up continually until they break psychologically, no physical presence needed. Slow, steady, and increasing the anaconda coils. If you don't minutely adjust within some arbitrary viewpoint the anaconda eats you.

If you've made fun of those insane Trump Supporters that are still with him despite everything he has done, this is a perfect example of the long-lasting permanency of mental coercion with persistence that naturally comes with demagogues, but is also being engineered using the same elsewhere for purpose.

The victims of this menticide either disassociate no longer contributing anything to anyone or reacting to anything, commit suicide, or become psychotic taking it out on other people violently until they are stopped. No physical presence needed because every single IOT/tech system has been shimmed towards benefiting a malicious adversary without a trace (since detailed network logs aren't kept longer than a certain period due to storage costs).

Need I continue?

Psychologically unstable people can be easily manipulated by timely showing solutions or ways out that temporarily resolve difficulties (pay for play to be that solution) in the middle of such torture.

Ever talk about purple dog collars with friends for awhile repeating the word and then see purple dog collars in all those ads on all your devices for up to 2-3 days later?

How do you think they know to show you those ads? The devices largely don't have the hardware specifications to do that computation at the edge so its collected, aggregated into a profile centrally, and used against you in sophisticated brainwashing/torturous ways that are simply claimed to be harmless marketing/adtech (you have to prove otherwise).

Incidentally, this is the why and how false confessions to crimes people didn't do are made, its been known since the 1950s.

Tech makes the links ephemeral with a false but generalized presumption that they are working in all cases unless you can prove otherwise which has no paper trail because it vanished immediately after it happened.

If you'd like to research these mechanisms for Thought Reform and indoctrination from sound expert material further (its dark), I'd suggest Robert Lifton "Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism", and John Meerloo "Rape of the Mind" for the foundational material. Its not absurd like most people are conditioned to believe from the irrational association of this depicted subject in media.

Communists use this as a divide a conquer strategy for regime change (most governments do too).

Monopolists use this to pressure consumers to buy things they wouldn't normally buy. This is how they capitalize on the inducements of anxiety and other emotional states they paid for via their marketing budget.

Governments use the shimmed parts to spy. Everyone benefits but the individual.

It is why the world today feels like torture to many rational people; it actually is torture and you just didn't realize it because you were not educated properly, and it was snuck in when you were not looking. It is also de-facto protected by the first amendment because of lack of standing and any interference by government to correct is a violation of the constitution.

It has been known by experts that free-will isn't guaranteed and has largely been broken for quite some time absent few exceptional individuals. These things warp people into stilted lesser versions of themselves that are incapable of further growth (by purposeful design).

Yes most of these things are very much against the law, but those laws are not self-enforcing and you have no proof, and opsec is simple when so many things are shimmed and ephemeral. Outside extreme measures coupled with extreme expertise it is impossible to detect, and equally challenging to hold those engaging in such evil to account.

Even most IT professionals lack an appropriate background knowledge to properly analyse firmware or log signal data between non-standard interfaces (i.e. coax beyond the demarcation point of responsibility, where law may punish any observer) which would be needed to overturn that irrational presumption that everything is working (uphill battle in any centralized/corrupt structure).

If you are thinking, this is crazy-making nightmare fuel...

It is, and it has valid and sound basis, and few outside the deepest niches and technical circles know (not belief).

It is an uphill battle just communicating the danger, in opposition to indoctrination caused by the many hidden systems designed for malign corruption and influence.

Edit: If you want to rip some of that indoctrination conditioning to shreds, I'd suggest Bazzel's book: Open Source Intelligence 10th Edition.

[advael]

I think we do ourselves a disservice by making "conspiracy theory" the common parlance for what is quite often just being swayed by a popular kind of diversion propaganda (the fact-thin doppelgangers of real controversies or investigations of the various complicated systems of surveillance and control that surround us) when in fact the issue is inadequate capacity for assessing the plausibility of a particular theory, the sources it comes from, identifying and resisting motivated reasoning and especially the hijacking thereof by others, or doing the cost-benefit analysis for both accepting a theory and courses of action conditioned on it

Organizations are secretive by default, countless intersecting ones have influence over our lives, communication and information are pervasive but can also be fully encrypted. It is effectively impossible that there is no conspiracy anywhere that's relevant to your life, and there is no perfect way to get accurate information about all such conspiracies

I really don't have much means to epistemically assess the threat model you've presented here except to say that it seems obviously technologically feasible, especially given that many overlapping approaches here don't need to all work for the stated aims

But perhaps more importantly, elucidating this motivates me to be more skeptical of my internal reasoning for feeling malaise, depression, and aimlessness, and as a belligerent person, even an irrational belief that this is being induced (even stochastically rather than in a targeted way) is likely going to be an enduringly effective way to resist it. Something about having an intention to defy an adversary rather than some less agentic explanation seems to benefit the underlying problem regardless of whether it's true

[trod123]

> Something about having an intention to defy an adversary ... to benefit the underlying problem regardless

For the most part I am in agreement, albeit as you might imagine I do have 1st and 2nd hand knowledge and experience interacting,remediating, and mitigating these types of situations, which are not that uncommon at the VP/executive level of global companies (insofar as it being on the IT side).

I am sure some people reading what I previously wrote would have thought, that is oddly specific for the disparate subject matter being covered. Many of the specifics are based in actual observations, first or second hand.

Unfortunately even a process you mention taken to an extreme has its own failings that need to be assessed and addressed.

I would add that it is equally important to be mindful and maintain a balance of healthy skepticism about one's own reasoning in this context, and in doing so consistently test whether discarding opportunities is appropriately supported or irrational (i.e. jumping at shadows). Having an awareness of the dangers provides forewarning which forearms and empowers us to not be mindlessly swayed.

It is a tough habit to get into for most, because frankly it is a lot of work, and when starting out fresh simple things take a lot of effort to engram, and the benefits need to outweigh the cost (which coercive methods adds to).

People generally also want to believe in goodfaith in their fellow man, and with any want comes an almost imperceptible bias. Also adversaries seek out and take advantage of presumptions, to turn it towards their advantage. Even an automatic response towards defense or discard could be used by them to deny you opportunities, which result in similar inducements in a round about way.

If one is not careful of these drawbacks you can miss out on a lot of opportunities naturally.

Like with any propaganda/influence I've found the most benefit in a few simple practices. First, withholding agreement automatically to avoid psychological consistency traps, as Cialdini notes as well in his psychology book on Influence.

Conditioning an almost automatic response to question or discard ambiguity where language has been rationally corrupted, such as where words have conflicting underlying meanings depending on misleading context (a common deceitful tactic), also where one gets a sense of confusion as these are often indicators of hypnotic influence on your mental state.

Taking the time to appropriately review what is said. When one is hurried, people often rely on their unconscious habits, or fixed action patterns of tasks/muscle memory. Speed reading for example often converts text to images/concepts, but also largely removes the filters we have for discernment.

Finally, minimizing attack surface by default, and limiting exposure/opportunity for attack while still performing the necessary 'critical' evaluation checks.

This seems to be the best balanced approach I've come across so far, albeit it does run the knife's edge; and mistakes in judgment are inevitable given incomplete information, and that few today take care that their words have no conflicting ambiguity. There were much more words in use during the 30s-50s largely because they had a hyper-rational view, and subscribed to a rational approach with one word to one non-conflicting meaning.

It is generally not a good thing to close off opportunities automatically without rational cause, and few people today actually consciously have the framework or tooling to evaluate credibility, based on observed deceits of a source. It requires a lot of discipline.

As a side note, in hypnotism, they often refer to inducing covert hypnotic states as bypassing the 'critical' factor. Conditioning oneself to maintain a critical view dulls or negates a lot of the benefit, for an adversary.

Concluding, with a small side note, ironically, these type of environments which we now find ourselves in actually provide a very sound and practical argument for internalizing strong religious beliefs with regards to the associated values, as a defense mechanism, albeit alongside an equally rational framework and principles.

From a interesting perspective, there may be very little difference between conditioning an automatic response to stimuli for this purpose, and the feelings one gets when subject matter violates their deeply held religious beliefs. When properly functioning, both would draw the required immediate attention, criticality, and wariness needed to avoid destructive outcomes (i.e. evil, as Illyin defines it when refuting Tolstoy's pacifism).

[advael]

The problem with making this case is that the threats are kind of stochastic. Usually what happens to an individual is that either a mistake occurs or some unpredictable factor changes to suddenly get them targeted. I had a relative who was blindsided by identity theft, fending off creditors for bills that were in her name because she was in some breach (I think maybe the sony one? Often not even easy to say how it happened). This is a consequence of erosion of privacy. American Muslims didn't have any more inkling that 9/11 would happen than anyone else, but suddenly received a ton of suspicion from both crazy wingnuts and actual government agencies despite often having "nothing to hide". Trans people who wanted to assimilate and blend in have by and large been blindsided by the massive increase in scrutiny they've gotten from random people and increasingly lawmakers in the last few years in much of the western world, because some machinations of internet culture made the right wing start thinking about them a lot all of a sudden in the last decade.

You can't really predict what factor is gonna get you targeted. You also can't predict the particular manner in which data that's being collected about you will be used to harm you. Sometimes it's about secrets you'd want to keep private, but often it's about correlations drawn that may even be wrong. Like if public sentiment or government scrutiny were to turn against tech in a huge way, maybe even just a post history on hackernews existing for you, regardless of what's in it, correlates you to some kind of cybercrime they're pursuing with a dragnet, and this gets your credit pinged when you try to buy a house, and someone freezes your bank account because something's going on here and we should just lock it down to be safe until we figure this out. Who knows? The erosion of privacy is a powderkeg that makes everyone more vulnerable to these sorts of things, but the effects aren't felt by everyone all at once, but chaotically based on circumstances beyond your control, sometimes even truly random ones. I can't predict the actual threat model that will become relevant to you because the attack surface is enormous already and the problem is about how it's ever-growing

It's hard to convince people that "you are more likely to be targeted and there is more that can be done if you are but it may never happen to you in particular and there's basically no way to know" is something they should care about. Intuitive risk assessment that our brains are good at can't fucking fathom the world we actually currently live in. Nonetheless, that is the form risk takes, and you should care about factors that expose you to it, even probabilistically

[slg]

You inadvertently hit on another problem with this debate. The three historical examples you chose were identity theft, Muslims post 9/11, and trans people. The root of all those people’s problems isn’t privacy, it is some other broken part of society. So why focus on the symptom instead of that root issue?

Muslim and trans people don’t want to hide their status, they want people to accept their status. Their effort would be more efficiently used advocating for acceptance than advocating for privacy.

Same goes for identity theft. That isn’t caused by bad privacy regulations, it is caused by bad financial regulations that put too much of the burden of fraud on the individual and not the company who fell for the fraud.

In any debate about privacy, it never seems like privacy should be the number one concern for the people involved. Like if you are worried about your credit report being hit for your HN comments, maybe spend some effort trying to change that credit system rather than trying to hide your HN account.

[seethedeaduu]

> trans people don’t want to hide their status, they want people to accept their status

They want both (stealth/passing and acceptance)

[slg]

Fair point, but in the context of an oppressive society the variance from the perceived norm is what presents the problem. That makes the hypothetical "hidden" status I was discussing their gender and not their non-binary status.

[advael]

I mean I think as with many broad groups of people, different individuals likely want each of those things, as well as many wanting both or neither. My comment referred specifically to a subset that wants to assimilate, as they were more likely blindsided than activists who fight for acceptance, but we're nitpicking here

Regardless, the way in which surveillance harms them, as well as other minorities, whether political, racial, ethnic, sexual, or religious, isn't that their "secret" is revealed, it's that they are monitored and can be targeted. Their status can be used to aggregate and group them, but other information can be used to harm or target them. My point in bringing up minorities that suddenly become more prominent targets isn't that they need to hide their minority status and thus are uniquely harmed by surveillance. My point is that surveillance is a weapon, and you only feel the harms of it when it is used on you, not when it's being built

Again, the issue isn't that particular information is especially dangerous. It's that information is power, and there are lots of very concentrated and unaccountable powerbases being built through mass-surveillance, which can be deployed to harm people in all manner of different ways for all manner of different reasons. People feel violated when their privacy is invaded because it is an incursion of power that violates their autonomy, and power is quite versatile in the harms it can do

[granibran]

> Trans people who wanted to assimilate and blend in have by and large been blindsided by the massive increase in scrutiny they've gotten from random people and increasingly lawmakers in the last few years in much of the western world, because some machinations of internet culture made the right wing start thinking about them a lot all of a sudden in the last decade.

The reason they're getting more scrutiny is because of the negative impact of pro-trans ideological policies on women's rights.

I can't speak for the US, but in the UK the turning point was a combination of two things: firstly, the right-wing Conservative government announcing that they were going to remove all barriers for anyone to change their "legal sex", with no medical diagnosis required at all. Secondly, press coverage, from news outlets across the political spectrum, of a male rapist incarcerated in a women's prison, who sexually assaulted several female prisoners there.

This caused an uprising of women, initially groups of left-wing feminists who most rapidly organised, to push back against this "gender self-id" policy proposal and against men in women's prisons. And then against the whole principle of males identifying themselves as female and being given special privileges because of this.

Only later on did right-wing groups take an interest in this as a division against the mainstream political left who were still very much in favour of these policies. Though we've just got a new centre-left Labour government and it seems likely now, based on what they said during the election campaign, that they're going to prioritise protecting single-sex spaces for women over the desires of males who demand to access them.

And this is because they've realised that they can't just unilaterally diminish women's rights and expect the electorate to follow along. The increased scrutiny worked.

[slg]

Civil rights are not a zero-sum game. One group of people gaining rights doesn't take away the rights from another group, but that is commonly used as an argument to manipulate people into opposing the expansion of rights without confronting what that opposition really means. We saw it with integration in the US often presented as an infringement on the rights of white people. We saw it with gay marriage when people argued that it was somehow an affront to traditional heterosexual marriage. And now we are seeing it with people claiming that trans people are infringing on women's rights.

>Secondly, press coverage, from news outlets across the political spectrum, of a male rapist incarcerated in a women's prison, who sexually assaulted several female prisoners there.

This is a good example of what that manipulation looks like in action. I agree that prisoners should have a right to safety despite their crimes. But what should the priority be for someone with this position? It certainly wouldn't be putting more attention on a single case of assault over some 999 other examples of a prisoner getting assaulted[1]. The focus on the one case involving a trans person shows that the motivation isn't actually prisoner safety.

[1] - https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/may/13/revealed-alm...

[granibran]

Sometimes they aren't zero-sum. For example, trans-identifying people being protected from employment discrimination. This takes nothing away from anyone else, but makes this group's lives easier.

But sometimes they are zero-sum. The right of women and girls to have female-only spaces, for example. If a subset of males are given the right to use such spaces, they cease to be female-only spaces. By doing so, this right is taken away from women and girls.

As another example, we can see this principle very starkly in women's and girls' sports competitions. There can only be one winner. If that winner is male, or is a team that includes males, this takes this prize away from female athletes. There are also a limited number of competition spots in most sports. Any of those taken by males denies a female athlete the opportunity to compete. This is a zero-sum game.

Regarding prisons, the expectation is that penal authorities work towards the goal of no sexual violence in prisons. Policies that demonstrably make this worse are of course going to be protested. In this case, removing the most important safeguarding measure for inmate housing: segregation by sex. The motivation is actually the safety of women prisoners. It's not an isolated case either, this was the first of many.

[slg]

>But sometimes they are zero-sum. The right of women and girls to have female-only spaces, for example.

How is this different from a white person wanting a "whites only space"? Because you are seemingly arguing for a right to segregation. I think we are better off reconsidering the root desire and how that should manifest itself in a concrete right.

For example, what right do you think the children have in youth sports?

Do they have a right to win?

Do they have a right to be on a team?

Do they have a right to compete?

Do they have the right to compete against someone with equal talent?

Should it be allowed to force a younger kid to compete against older kids?

What about a short kid against tall kids?

Should a Muslim fasting for Ramadan have to compete against Christians with no dietary restrictions?

Can a white child complain about having to compete against black children?

What if only one girl wants to play a specific sport, is it legal to force her to compete on the boys team? What if all the boys are better than her?

I just don't know how you answer these questions consistently and end up in a place in which trans athletes are your only fairness concern.

[granibran]

I see you're no longer claiming that this isn't zero-sum. Instead you now seem to be advocating that every single-sex space should be mixed-sex.

Just eradicate all female-only spaces entirely, is that the suggestion? This seems to be your logic here.

We had this arrangement with prisons, by the way. Up until the end of the 19th century prisons housed both sexes in the same estate. Female prisoners were routinely and regularly sexually assaulted, raped, impregnated. By men. That's why prisons are segregated by sex in most places today.

Now some prison authorities are trying this arrangement again. Converting female prisons to mixed-sex prisons. With the same results.

And for some reason you're making a parallel of this to racial segregation? Make it make sense, please.

[seethedeaduu]

I asked you before but you probably didn't see it. Why do you make a new throwaway for every single thread where you post about the topic?