[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.

[slg]

I'm not conceding that rights are zero-sum. I'm trying to get to why you think people have the right to single sex spaces. What is the motivator for that belief and would that same motivator suggest that people have a right to segregation from other protected classes?

I think women have a right to safety. They have a right to privacy. They have a right to being given the same opportunities as anyone else. A girl has a right to compete in sports. She doesn't have a right to win at sports or even a guaranteed spot on the team. Those rights are not zero-sum. The rights of a cis girl are not violated when she competes against a trans girl.

[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?