Who do you think builds these things? Email, cameras in phones, handwriting recognition, network analysis, facial recognition, big data... We should be highly aware of both edges of the swords we forge in our volcano.
Perhaps I've always found it obvious that creating these things, working for companies with close ties to military and surveillance (Lockheed, etc.) is quite near evil and that professionals with integrity would not do that.
I think that is a minority view in our profession, so you are probably right.
If you think working for Lockheed is evil, what do you think of working for a company like Facebook, that profits from selling the personal data of teenagers to companies who take advantage of their adolescence to peddle overpriced products to them that they don't need and that their parents can't really afford?
I'm not saying Facebook is evil, but let's face it the world is a lot more morally complex than the self-righteous want to make it out to be.
This idea that Silicon Valley is full of engineers toiling in a Parthenon of virtue while evil people in Washington misuse the fruits of their creations is utter bunk. Like every technology in history, software and internet technology can be used for different things, and there is widespread disagreement on the virtues of those ends.
E.g. Einstein might have regretted his involvement in the nuclear program, but there are a huge number of people who to this day think the development of nuclear weapons was a positive thing in how it ensured American ascendency for the succeeding half-century. At the same time, you'll find lots of people who think Lockeed, etc, are doing very noble things by developing technologies that allow American foreign policy to be implemented while getting fewer American soldiers killed (and reducing collateral damage too--a cruise missile is a lot more damaging than a drone strike). There is probably no country in history that has maintained its supremacy for as long as America has with so relatively few casualties among its armed forces. You can thank Lockheed for that.
Why not? I say it is. Just as you said the other day -- advertising is preying on people's cognitive biases. Sure, the world is very morally complex, but that has no bearing on the morality of advertising and whether how Facebook in particular does it is evil or not.
It is evil for a panoply of reasons. Just say it, don't just hint at it. Facebook does more lasting harm to society than good.
I won't say it's evil because that's like saying fattening foods or sugary sweets are evil. People love getting the latest Kate Spade handbag even if its an exercise in irrational behavior. I'm no philosopher-king, I'm not going to sit here and call it evil to give people what they want.
That's just a defeatist attitude then isn't it. I think it's better to proactively attack something even slightly evil, because if you don't it'll keep becoming more accepted until it becomes normal and starts rotting the very foundations of a civilized society.
It is very important to look at the "other side" of things, because there are people just like you and I on the "other side" in even greater numbers -- just not born in privileged homes with access to the same opportunities. On the other side of the Silicon Valley society that is full of white kids from high-income households with connections in high places you have poor black kids who're too poorly educated, who are more susceptible to getting had by mischievous advertising schemes of today. How this is different from pyramid schemes and other immoral -- but legal things -- is it's just more sophisticated... and I guess therefore, more effective, and therefore ultimately much more damaging.
(I have to add a meta-note, because this keeps happening over and over again: I think the last 4 or 5 times I responded to you I was upvoted and all of the follow-up comments you made to me were downvoted. I swear it's not me, I think it's a pity that this happens. As much and as often as I disagree with you I do like engaging with you because you're generally pretty thorough and pretty smart. I mean, at least you recognize that advertising is something not so "good" -- a lot of people here don't. Here's hoping my upvote to you helps).
My views are painted by pacifism, so nothing is as bad to me as producing military technology, or providing talent for the military industrial complex. Your Facebook example harps on some of the evils of capitalism (manipulative advertisements and such), but given the way the world works right now, even if you live in North Korea, you are born into that (black markets, etc. which of course beat having no economic freedom any day).
Enabling surveillance is a distant second, but still certainly wrong because it is direct support for the robbing of privacy, a basic human dignity. There is no room for ambiguity or argument as in the case of economic theory and such, like in the Facebook example.
Look at it from a purely numerical standpoint. How much is lost when a teenager buys a $100 pair of Ralph Lauren jeans when a pair that is identical in all but brand-name could be produced for $20 or so? That is the opportunity cost of that money to that kid?
Military technology kills a few people (large harms to a few people), but advertising diverts vast amounts of money towards industries where it is easy to take advantage of cognitive biases to create artificial distinctions between products (small harms to lots of people). And both have their legitimate justifications too. People need to know about new products and services and advertising helps them find those products and services. And while you may be a pacifist, Americans are decidedly not. They want a country that sits at the top of the world and they want to be protected from hostility and Lockeed gives Americans what they want in that regard.
And even for a pacifist: we live in the most peaceful time in human history. American military supremacy, plays a big part in maintaining that state of affairs. Countries that might be incentivized to wage war (as countries have done since there were countries), avoid doing so because they know the American military response will be swift and overwhelming.
Using war or the threat of war to apprehend peace is antithetical to pacifism.
I'm not sure what the American populace's purported will has to do with my view that war and its antecedents are revolting. Certainly you aren't suggesting that building these things is patriotic duty for a US citizen?
The fact that Obama declared on national TV that they only spy on non-US citizens (6.5+bn humans) without a warrant is the biggest news in the internet industry since the mass deployment of broadband a decade ago.
Knock it off. These specific government abuses may well destroy the bulk of the revenue streams for the largest companies in silicon valley. If that isn't on topic for HN, I don't know what is.
No it isn't, that was going on all through the Cold War. It's just more efficient now.
This isn't just a government problem either; people in europe are at least as unhappy about firms like Google and Facebook warehousing their data, but at least over in Europe they have robust privacy laws that service providers have to comply with.
See for example these stories, in which (some) American users express puzzlement over Euros' insistence that they are the owners of their personal data:
There's a Facebook bias to these because those were the easiest threads for me to remember & get search hits on, but the principles apply to any firm that retains customer data. EU users have a legal right to demand companies divulge all dta stored about them, and insist on its permanent deletion - something that's not available to US users.
Now, you can hardly insist that governments be less powerful than the companies they are supposed to regulate. If you want real privacy, then you need it explicitly stated in law, and structured so that it can't be signed away in exchange for some commercial benefit, much the same as you can't legally sign yourself into slavery; such contractual arrangements are inherently invalid. This is going to require a constitutional amendment, because otherwise companies are going to defend their data hoarding and unilateral exploitation of said data on First Amendment grounds.
One thing all of this brings to mind is that we appear to be nearing a crossroads (perhaps we've already passed it).
That is, we'll have to very soon decide en masse whether we are OK with the demise of privacy or not. This is irrespective of whether our privacy is lost to companies, government, or both.
Because it seems that by default, people are simply becoming accustomed to a world without personal privacy. In fact, stories such as that referenced on this thread are coming out with such frequency and ferocity now that one wonders whether it has the effect of simply jading people with sheer volume (whether designed for this intent or not).
In any event, we've been moving in this direction for some time. And, after some point those who still care about privacy won't be able to summon the support needed to effect a return to its protection.
I don't think we're seeing the demise of personal privacy. For most of American history, "privacy" meant that what happened in the walls of your home or in the confines of some other private place remained private. You could expect privacy in your house and your coat pocket and in conversations you had with people in a private setting. And by and large, that's still the case. If you live on a farm like most people did in 1789 and go into town once a week to get supplies you pay for with cash, the government doesn't really have any data on you today that it didn't have back then.
Rather, what we're seeing is these conceptions of "private spaces" not being abstracted and extended to the new media people use to communicate (cell phones, e-mail, Facebook, etc). You might analogize between your GDrive account and the contents of your desk drawer, but that doesn't seem to be the model we're heading towards.
And I think the fundamental reason for that is the nature of the technology, not the law. A teenager might post a snarky comment on Facebook which back in the day he would have said out loud in the locker room, but that analogy doesn't change the fact that back then, the only people who heard that kid were other kids in the locker room, while today there are thousands of people with access to that data as it travels over some cell phone network to Facebook's data center to be permanently recorded forever. The internet is really not designed to keep communications over it secret or private in any way, and platforms like Google and Facebook are built on exposing as much private information about users as possible.
As a Euro myself I hew to the more expansive version of privacy, in which you have a right to know what data others (private) actors store about you (not unlike an FOIA request to a public body in the US), and to have that data expunged. In general, EU citizens enjoy much more robust privacy protections, even when arrested (no perp walks or publication of mugshots, for example).
I agree that technology rather than competing philosophies of law or governance is the main driver here - witness the threads I linked to above where some people consider the work of EU-nation data commissioners to be an unwarranted intrusion on the private business relationships of internet entrepreneurs.
It's too bad we live on opposite coasts, as I feel we could enjoy a long conversation on this issue.
"For most of American history, "privacy" meant that what happened in the walls of your home or in the confines of some other private place remained private"
The problem is that today there are very few private places, and it is very hard to get to a private place unnoticed. Private, secluded places are becoming rare as security cameras are installed. Even if you can find such a place, your trip to it might be recorded by security cameras and license plate scanners. Even if records of postal mail had been kept in the past, it would have been very difficult to make use of that data -- but data mining techniques are changing that.
"The internet is really not designed to keep communications over it secret or private in any way, and platforms like Google and Facebook are built on exposing as much private information about users as possible."
I once had this view, but I have come to see that it is flawed. Most people are not making an informed decision about this, and there is almost no effort to teach the background needed to make such an informed choice. What we are seeing are governments and corporations taking advantage of the general population's ignorance. It is not that people do not value privacy, it is that they do not even realize the extent to which they are giving it up.
I don't disagree that many people aren't making an informed decision about this, especially all the kids and young teenagers who use Facebook and Google, etc. But my point is about the technology, not the people. The technology isn't designed to keep information private. SMTP sends plain-text e-mails through intermediate servers. Anybody can inspect the packets flying by on their network, which mostly have plain-text contents. Apparently at Google (from what we've learned from the David Barksdale stalking story: http://gawker.com/5637234/gcreep-google-engineer-stalked-tee...) lots of people have extensive access to customer data. I don't imagine the situation is much better at Facebook.
The technology didn't have to be designed that way. Google could, e.g. encrypt your gdrive contents client-side, and I bet there would be a way to store e-mail accounts encrypted so only the inbox/outbox would be stored in plain text on Google's servers. Facebook might be harder but it would be an interesting technical challenge to see what extent to which Facebook accounts could be stored encrypted on Facebook's servers. But by and large the internet is not designed that way. It is designed to leak your data all over the place, to every sysadmin at every intermediary, which makes privacy very hard to achieve, whether from the government or from companies.
Yes, the historical conception of privacy meant certain things, while other things weren't a part of this conception, simply because the technology of the day made them inconceivable.
For example, it would be akin today to someone believing that the people should be free from being spontaneously teleported by the government against one's will. It's just not something we worry about.
But, putting that silly (but salient) analogy aside, there is an underlying ethos with regard to our conception of privacy that I think is true historically, as well as today. It survives changes in technology and generally weathers the test of time. I think that ethos feels something like the Constitution with regard to federal government rights not specifically expressed. That is, they fall to the states and the people.
So, likewise, I think people believe (at some level of consciousness) that the government simply should not be where it doesn't belong (i.e. in areas of their private lives) and that the government should have access to the minimal information about us required to do its job. And for privacy advocates, this extends to erring on the side of rights vs. security when in doubt.
In short, I think most people would agree that just because technology provides the possibility of more government access to our information, it doesn't mean they should have such access.
Mind you, I am not saying that any of this is codified, but rather is a part of people's conception of privacy. So, I disagree with your assessment of what people consider private.
With regard to your Facebook snarky comment example, I think we're talking about different things. Publicly posting such is, I think, a conscious decision that what is being posted is not deemed private. However, the notion that everything uploaded, e-mailed, or otherwise stored or communicated (even if not marked for public consumption, or clearly is not intended for same) should be accessible to the federal government is an entirely different matter. And, I believe, most people would view such carte blanche access as an invasion of their privacy.
I fully agree. In the short term, I'd urge particular attention to the US-EU Free Trade Agreement talks that are underway at present. I'm strongly in favor of an FTA, but I think there's a lot to be learned from how the disparity between the US and EU laws on privacy are handled therein.
Over the long term, I really do think a constitutional amendment is necessary, which is a 10-year project at minimum.
If I were in the government of other countries, I'd be setting up more programs to woo technical talent from the US. In Brazil, Rio de Janeiro's Botofogo district is a prime location for tech talent to go to. It's an international city with a great quality of life that Americans tend to love. Berlin is another city that could be actively wooing dozens to hundreds of American developers.
Make it a no strings attached program. All you need to do is move to the country and work with software/hardware. You would be given assistance to either join an existing company or set a new one up. Your choice.
I think it's OK for now. This is big news; very very big. I am a fan of trying to keep HN on topic but for now I am very interested in what everyone here has to say.
I have to say, I thought I was very up to date on US spying - I know people who have worked with Echelon and would not say certain words on the phone - but I have still been blown away with the revelations. They're game-changing. They're relevant to HN. Business exists in a context; that context is changing around us, or at least being revealed for its true form. It's very relevant.
And FWIW I am astounded at the lengths "they" are going to get him and the massive political capital they seem happy to burn in the attempt. Genuinely amazing stuff. I have no idea what's next; no-one has. We're in a genuinely unprecedented era here. Anything is possible.
Well maybe not for you, but for me it's another piece of a jigsaw which is beginning to show a very ugly picture indeed.
You're a US citizen I see. Well, maybe you don't understand or give a shit, but from the outside, the opinion of your country is being revised dramatically downwards. Very dramatically. All of this human rights, freedom of speech, fourth amendment stuff is being exposed for the bullshit that it is.
The damage to the reputation of the USA from these events is incalculable. Do you have any conception of what it means when normal people are suggesting that a whistleblower on the run from the USA seek refuge in Russia or China?
> Maybe you view the scanning of the outside of people's letters differently now... but it's not a new story and the article says as much.
I guess it's the context of an all-pervasive spying culture that lends it a new relevance.
And who cares if it's "new". We might only realise the relevance of an old story years later. We might only realise a whistleblower was telling the truth after years of dismissing their tall tales.
edit: eli deleted the post I quote. Oh, don't like things you say online being used against you later? That's not new either.
No need to attack my character. I deleted the comment immediately after writing it because I decided it contributes to the thing I'm complaining about, which is many front page stories full of repetitive comment threads that are only tangentially related to the linked story and contain little new information or insight.
Fair enough. Usually I would probably agree with you. But in this case, I feel the "reaction comments" are important. The reaction is going to be the main story, after all.
Einstein spent his entire life changing the world for great good. Of course another one of this contributions lead to the development of the Atomic Bomb. It is said that in his later life he slumped into a bout of depression knowing how his work was being used.
On a different scale, i think a lot of us are realizing that all the things we've been working towards (machine vision, machine learning, twitter, facebook etc) are also being used against us. Its a bit disappointing really.
Of course, ever since nuclear proliferation, worldwide violence has been dramatically reduced... so take that for what its worth ;)
Agreed, although the top comment here was actually quite interesting.
HN has made an exception for all things US gov't spying related. I even lost my flagging rights for flagging all the snowden stuff (which I thought was exactly what you were supposed to do when you thought something was off topic... not my fault it was the entire front page!)
It's an important topic, but like you I preferred when HN was an oasis of tech away from this nonsense.
It's an important topic, but like you I preferred when HN was an oasis of tech away from this nonsense.
Unfortunately, politics have invaded our tech oasis, and I don't mean HN. The politicization and militarization of technology is undeniable; at this point, retreating to some new oasis and denying it won't make it go away. While I do want a site where I can see more articles about Erlang and lambda calculus, for now at least, I can accept the pressing need to maintain focus on political issues that undermine our ability to build the technology we want and have it used for good instead of evil.
>The politicization and militarization of technology is undeniable
You make this statement as if it was some sort of new happening. This is as old as technology itself. Finding new ways to kill each other has been the number one driver of technology progress, and always has been.
Ah, the web was invented to keep military sites in communication (presumably so that they could keep killing people) while the rest of the world was dying a horrible, nuclear death. So it kinda was.
I strongly agree that there is too much "shallowly interesting" stuff, rather than "deeply interesting" stuff on HN.
It's a shame that people who flag "too much" fluff lose their flagging ability. I flag 4 submissions per day; I still have my flag button. I upvote good articles on new. I've been restricting my comments on the fluff articles. I've been upvoting the comments in good submission threads.
Perhaps someone could create an "HN-Shallowly-interesting"?
I think it's important so people can build a picture that includes the full scope, and with the more areas and dots to connect, the more prominent it will become in ones' mind.
Between here and Reddit, it's overkill...until you realize here the people might actually have the ability to execute to do something about it more quickly and over at Reddit well...just throw up the best meme you can and sit back and reap the karma.
On the other hand when Reddit does something, the talking heads notice that something happens (however badly it all comes out), while when HNN carps about things nobody cares.
Between your comment and loceng's, there seems to be an agenda, and the latent idea of co-opting programmers and decision makers to make "something" happen. I understand people are furious, but people are furious about all sorts of things that maybe folks here could intervene on if prodded. I think long-time HN users mostly care about where technology notably intersects with these scandals (or anything for that matter).
It's a bit on the heavy side, but on the other hand, the surveillance under discussion relies on technology, in many cases recent technology and products that 5-10 years ago many of us were really excited about and may not have seen the downsides of. It's pretty relevant.