I disagree, RMS. For the same reason you've argued that open source is better than closed source, so is transparency better than privacy.
What democracy needs isn't privacy. Privacy has always been a false value. Privacy is disappearing- period. No amount of gum-flapping, law-making, or attempts to complicate our lives or burn more CPU cycles and create more latency with more layers of security will change that.
What democracy needs is respect and tolerance. Specifically, we need: 1. Surveillance being broadcast instead of going to monolithic corporations and governments, 2. To learn to tolerate and respect each others' wishes as to what is done with that surveillance.
We're living in a closed system, no different than the International Space Station. No one on the ISS wants privacy. They want sensors covering every God damn millimeter of the space station 24/7, and they want mission control analyzing that data around the clock, so that if there's an issue with atmospheric or hull integrity, they get plenty of warning.
What they want in lieu of privacy is respect from each other to be left alone when they want alone time and to not be judged for what they do with their down time. That's respect, which is very different from privacy.
Hawking is dead wrong about us needing to get off the planet in 1000 years. What we need is to learn how to live in smaller closed systems, such as underground bunkers, undersea habitats, and sealed buildings, because no matter what planet colonists end up on, that's what they're going to have to do. After we destroy our ecosystem here, it's what we're going to have to do to survive this planet keeping the pollutants and excessive weather and heat on the outside.
This is a much more profound psychological challenge than it is a technical one, but we can't make that first step until we come to understand that privacy is not a virtue. Privacy is asymmetric ignorance. It is a cheap hack workaround for what really matters: tolerance and respect.
One of the foundations of democracy is "secret ballot". If it's possible to algorithmically deduce who you're going to vote for, a tyranny can easily take you down or try to influence* you in ways you shouldn't be.
I think you have no idea about what you're taking here. Other option being you benefitting off of surveillance in some form (Don't want to be rude, only addressing the concern.).
* We experienced this first hand in the 2016 elections -- which is why it always felt weird to most of us all the time.
It already is possible to algorithmically deduce who people are voting for.
I am not benefiting from surveillance. I am a game developer and engineer. I see things from that perspective.
We can't make compelling multiplayer games by hiding information from the server. We need as much information as possible to make sure everyone has as good a time playing the game as possible. We also need to know if some players are actively "griefing" to ruin the good time others are trying to have.
I think the mistake we make is in keeping this information to ourselves or selling it to third parties (that happens). The information should be broadcast to everyone, and if it's of some use, then it should benefit the people who the information is about directly, and by benefit, I don't mean they should be targeted for more appropriate advertising. I mean benefit, like get paid if they're having trouble paying bills, or get love if they're feeling down, or get food if they're hungry, or medical attention if they're sick.
Unfortunately, we are currently too culturally immature and litigious to be respectful of that kind of information, which is why developers don't broadcast it.
We just ceded our government to a guy who won by way of asymmetric information. We had his opponent's taxes and emails, but we didn't have his. How can candidates be judged fairly in a situation like that? One of the repercussions of this is that we now have Republican-controlled Legislative and Executive branches, and it sounds like the Judicial branch will be next. That's what asymmetric information does. It creates imbalances in power. If we can see what they're doing just as easily as they can see what we're doing, it becomes a lot harder to throw stones in our glass houses.
> It already is possible to algorithmically deduce who people are voting for.
YES, it is! Therefore, in all honesty, the foundations of democracy have already been eroded -- thanks Obama/Osama/Bush/Clinton/Trump/whoever -- it will take a few years for ordinary people to grok this.
While that happens it is our duty to make people around us understand this without getting them all hassled up or making anyone feel left out in the conversation.
> I am not benefiting from surveillance. I am a game developer and engineer. I see things from that perspective.
Good to hear that. There is nothing wrong if you were in fact. Smart entrepreneur et al. ;)
> We just ceded our government to a guy who won by way of asymmetric information. We had his opponent's taxes and emails, but we didn't have his. How can candidates be judged fairly in a situation like that?
Totally agree!
I'm glad that this discussion is even happening right now. Judgement of candidates (fair/unfair) is still due -- we're clearly in a bet right now. I believe that each comment here is a step towards making more and more people aware about where things really are today.
One reason to utterly and totally oppose mail-in and on-line balloting. That non-secret ballots also allow paid and coerced voting are other traditional reasons.
Oregon has had vote-by-mail for years and it's been nothing but a positive thing. Their turnout is consistently higher than the national average. There are simply no issues around access to voting (like long lines at polling places, people who can't get time off work, etc), because every registered voter gets a ballot and a couple of weeks to fill it in.
The claims and fears around voter fraud have been studied, and have been found to be entirely without basis in reality. Voter fraud and coercion simply hasn't been an issue in a vote-by-mail state.
It's also a lot of fun to take part in voting parties, where you get to hash out the issues with your friends and fill in your ballot as you do so.
You are aware that there are countries that manage to run elections on sundays and with sufficient polling places to not have any lines to speak of at all? That might be too advanced a technology for the US, but, unbelievable as it may sound, countries like that do indeed exist!
First of all, I didn't say that you should, I just pointed out that your argument didn't make a whole lot of sense.
But also, the reason why voting by mail is problematic is, as has been mentioned, the potential for pressuring people into voting a certain way, including buying of votes.
Now, you said that this had been studied and it had been found that it's not really been a problem. But that's completely missing the point. You cannot judge the security of a system against attacks simply by looking at how many attacks were successful in the past. A voting system being reliable is most important when shit hits the fan. That it works fine when stakes aren't (perceived to be) all that high isn't really all that surprising, the most easily corrupted voting systems would probably work fine, and it tells you absolutely nothing about how it would hold up under different circumstances.
Also, mind you, objectively giving an accurate result is not the only function that a voting system has in a democracy, equally important is that the public trusts the system and thus the result, and trust erodes really fast under the wrong circumstances, which is when you can consider yourself lucky if you have a voting system where fraud is not just not happening, but where you can demonstrate that it's not happening.
To maybe get an idea of how stuff that's not actually secured is going to be exploited once the incentives are there: In the US, the relevant laws generally don't specify how to divide the country into voting districts. Because nobody thought of that as a problem when writing the law. Nowadays, gerrymandering is a reality. It's obviously undemocratic (I suppose you would agree?), but it's not illegal, and the incentives are there, and so it happens. There is almost nothing that people don't do for power. Trusting that people will be responsible when there is an opportunity to gain power is essentially the recipe for every major disaster humanity has ever created.
There are theoretical problems with any system of voting, everything's a trade-off one way or the other. Vote-by-mail increases turnout, it's easier and more convenient, and the problems you're afraid of simply don't happen in practice.
At the end of the day, I'd much rather have the increased participation in the democratic process than cater to the unfounded/theoretical fears of a few folks.
It's not at all theoretical. Postal voting is heavily restricted in Northern Ireland due to past history of paramilitary organisations influencing voter behaviour.
One needs to provide an attested reason for not attending the polling station:
You must provide a reason why you cannot reasonably be expected to vote in person at your polling place on polling day. You must provide exact dates and locations (if applicable) or the application may be rejected on the grounds that not enough detail about the reason has been provided.
Oregon isn't Northern Ireland. They might have had problems with voter coercion. Oregon hasn't. Oregon has had problems with turnout. This improves them.
Absolutely! It is possible to deduce pretty accurately who somebody is going to vote for without even looking at the ballot or peeping into the booth box.
All actions people do online like sharing a newspiece on their Facebook walls, likes or dislikes, chats, mails, texts, add up to something that makes the person -- and that information is quite valuable.
Ohh, so the only thing that you have to do is change every single human being to do what your ideal of world is?
The closest thing I have been to the ISS is living on a small phishing boat for a week. I could warrantee you EVERY SINGLE PERSON THERE WANTS PRIVACY. And it is crazy if you do not respect it, this people can throw you out of the boat, you could not imagine how difficult it is to live in a small space with other people for a long time.
You say nobody on the ISS wants privacy, based on what? Have you asked them, I bet you do not. You have just thought about it based on your own prejudices on the comfort of your home.
I have lived in China with so many people everywhere, after that living on Norway or Alaska or Argentina feels so great. Vast Spaces just for you.
In my opinion it is just the animal inside with her territory, as simple as that, gorillas have it, lions have it, and we have it as animals.
When they remove privacy from us they are removing our personal territory: We are not free anymore, we are in someone else territory(the country masters, or the big companies).
Without Privacy we can be judged at any time for any reason. They are observing us and they could hunt us like prey when we are weaker, they can take advantage of our vices in order to profit, they could blackmail us.
Remember Bill Clinton or Kennedy having sex with young women, Hillary holding mails in her personal accounts(probably so she could sell it to someone else), prime ministers holding accounts in fiscal heavens. This is only what we know, and it is a normal thing even on people on charge, people are not perfect. The people that know all of this have power and they could and actually legally blackmail those in power and they do.
We can go for Utopia and try to change every single human for it, which is impossible.
"Tolerance and respect" how much tolerance and respect have you seen in the last elections for example, when the people in power risked loosing their power? Zero. All politicians have personal dossiers of all adversaries and friends and no doubt they will use it if you are on their way to power, money or glory.
I don't know where you get the Utopian / changing-everyone conclusion from. I don't see any Utopian solutions, but I do see the potential for dramatic improvement.
Improvement requires more information, not less. Democracy is about equality. You don't have equality when you don't have equality of information. The only way to have a level playing field is to have everyone's information publicly available.
Once you do that, you have to emulate the benefits of privacy in some other way. Tolerating more and respecting the wishes of others is I think the best way forward.
If you've got a better way to emulate the benefits of privacy, I'm all ears, but don't try to convince me we can have privacy back, not in this age of the internet of things, drones, Uber, Google, Facebook, smart cars, cell phones, big data, big corporations, big government. It's just not going to happen.
> The only way to have a level playing field is to have everyone's information publicly available.
This is extremely naive, to put it mildly. More people will be oppressed and suffer heavily if this were to happen. All that such a request would result in is a dictatorship where everybody's information is publicly available except for the few who rule.
I also don't understand how anyone could bring about "tolerance and respect" while having all information public, considering what history has shown us for thousands of years, and is continuing to show us day by day. The two put together seem like a desire to destroy capitalism, which is not easy to destroy or replace because of innate human characteristics.
It does seem like you are dreaming of a Utopia that's far more difficult to achieve than better (not necessarily perfect) privacy through technology, laws and culture.
While I do see that privacy erosion happening and increasing, that's not an excuse for saying that nobody should have privacy at all. If you really mean "all of everyone's information" to be public, I can only assume you want everyone's photos, videos, messages, safe locker key codes, banking passwords, credit card numbers, health records and everything else to be publicly available. That sounds utterly ridiculous to me, unless you revise what you mean by "information" and what you mean by "everyone". The moment you start on that revision, you're already talking about privacy controls again.
Yes, I mean everyone, including the dictator you would have abusing the system, so that he could be seen doing it and thus would not be above society's agreements himself.
Replacing capitalism is a fine idea too. Even Trump, the original fan of capitalism, is making a show of kicking out folks who might have lobbying ties.
In fact, if you think about how a healthy family or healthy company works, the first thing they do is push capitalism to the outside, because it tends to make people upset.
That's why you're not encouraged to share salaries with each other or why you're not encouraged to put up advertisements encouraging people to come to your office for consulting for a 20% off for a limited time only. That's why when Mom serves you breakfast, you don't pay her $10, and kids don't say, "I dunno, Mom. Joey's Mom down the block serves a much more competitive breakfast and is offering 50% more love."
When you reduce the value of the goods and services people provide down to a scalar, it becomes trivial to compare people on a line, and that way lies drama.
If you think about it, the idea that the clearly multidimensional value of goods and services can be formally represented by a single scalar is ludicrous on the surface of it, and now that we have cell phones that can do a billion vector operations in one second, there's really not much reason that we shouldn't be migrating to a more accurate and powerful way to represent value using long, sparse vectors. This actually goes very nicely with broadcast surveillance, because you can repurpose all that information to capture far more attributes and information on any good or service all the way down the supply chain.
> Democracy is about equality. You don't have equality when you don't have equality of information.
I'm not sure what you mean by it but in many countries collecting counter-intelligence info on intelligence agency employees would be punishable by law. If anything this sorts of laws will probably become universal with time.
Not at all. I think how everyone wants to be shown respect is quite different. This would be an enormous problem if we didn't all have cell phones in our pockets and the ability to specify how we want to be treated.
For instance, if you stuck multiple cameras in my shower that were broadcast to everyone, I would ask that you not force my friends or family to see it (but if course if they wanted to, they could), and I'd ask that you not tell me what you think of the footage unless you're a dermatologist telling me about a worrisome new mole you noticed, or you're someone who notified a first responder because you noticed I just slipped and knocked myself unconscious and was starting to bleed to death, in which case I'd like to thank you. If you want to make me a part of a study, go nuts! If you want to jerk off to me, I'm flattered, but again, prolly don't want to hear about it (unless you're my type).
That's how you can respect me. I can specify it. We all can. There's probably multiple lists of things that large groups of us want in order to feel our shower footage was respected, and I could just click on one of them. I'm sure many of mine fall under the GoNutsButDon'tWantToHearAboutIt and MedicalAndScientificValue lists. So if you decide man, gotta have me some of that shower footage of Dave, by all means, but with this approach, knowledge comes with a measure of responsibility.
This is very unlike how it works today. If footage of you in the shower leaks, boy, that's that. Here comes the internets to tell you everything you never wanted to know about your genitalia...
Privacy is pretty important for a functioning democracy... simple examples, investigative journalism and whistleblowing. It's apparent you haven't read Martin Fowler's excellent thoughts on this topic:
Citizen, it has come to our attention that you have expressed an opinion without placing your postal address, phone number and place of employment within your profile. Please remedy this immediately
Hello. I am human and I live on this planet and I want privacy, and I want my democracy to come with privacy. You do not speak for me. What happens now? Should I and others like me be rounded up for re-education?
Privacy is one of the things that helps prevent the horrible failure state of democracy; two wolves voting to eat the sheep for dinner. My comment above expresses exactly the kind of fear non-conformists have in zero privacy democracies.
Let's start with your mistaken premise. You don't actually have privacy, and you won't be getting it back.
Just by analyzing how you worded your public post, which post you responded to, and the time you posted it, entities you have no awareness of are already learning more about you than you can imagine, and they're using big data techniques to mine that and lots of other sources of data in order to get an incredibly detailed picture of you.
They're making money off that information, and they're gaining power from it.
Do you want to know more about those entities and what they're doing with that information? Would you like to be one of the beneficiaries of your information, or would you like to continue to be left out?
If you embrace privacy, you're also embracing their privacy, and you're reinforcing the increasingly asymmetric, and non-democratic advantage they have over you.
Obviously, no one should be rounded up for anything, but yes, you and I had better open our minds to a better way to live together- and quickly. If you have a solution, by all means, offer it up, but privacy is dead, and if your answer is to try to stuff that genie back in the bottle, it's a non-starter. We need to embrace another path.
" You don't actually have privacy, and you won't be getting it back."
This is a claim you have provided no evidence for that flies in the face of the fourth amendment and property rights, not to mention natural rights. If you are wondering, John Locke would be a good starting point if you are truly interested in having the discussion needed on the subject.
"If you embrace privacy, you're also embracing their privacy, and you're reinforcing the increasingly asymmetric, and non-democratic advantage they have over you."
False, the government can be and is subject to the people, and therefore it's rights to privacy say, while in the duty of office, are much degraded. (see: FOIA) They are not the same.
You haven't been reading the news if you don't understand what's happening with privacy and big data right now. I can say with conviction that we don't have privacy. What I can't point to is exactly who has this information and what they're doing with it, because... privacy.
Perhaps Y Combinator would care to share their IP access logs and tell you which servers appear to be scraping these posts? You could do it yourself, if only... oh yeah, privacy.
I look forward to FOIA-liberated records the NSA, HS, CIA, FBI, and local law enforcement agencies have on us. I also look forward to reading the FOIA-liberated transcripts of all the backroom deal-making where it seems the government is actually being governed from.
Do you think individual privacy helped bring us together as a nation to nominate the best candidates and elect the best President? Or do you think individual privacy helped us vilify each other in this election?
Privacy and transparency are not opposites. It is possible to have privacy in a perfectly transparent world.
I agree that the privacy battle as we know it is already lost. Once someone has the kind of powers the "umpteen eyes" are possessing, no amount of legislation will make them give it up.
That does not mean we should pretend that it is not a problem. There is a massive discrepancy right now in the kind of tools and information that is publicly available, and what secret government operations are possessing.
What we should be fighting for is transparency, not privacy. I want to know exactly what kind of data is collected about me, and I want to know who accesses it and when (unless I'm subject to an investigation, during which the information about my data being accessed can be embargoed until it's over).
I would blog about this, if it wasn't so damn difficult to host a website without revealing my full identity. I don't want future employers to judge me for political views, sexuality or whatever. That's why privacy is important, and still will be in a fully-transparent world (which I do think is inevitable, but no government is currently working towards that).
Could you offer up a specific example of privacy and transparency not being opposites? My imagination is failing me.
I find when "transparency" is used in conversation these days, it tends to mean, "These guys over here shouldn't be allowed privacy, but I want to keep mine."
What I really meant was "inversely proportional", rather than opposite, although I do abide by that (if only because the words have such different meanings).
Increasing one will not reduce the other, or vice versa. As an example, imagine a scenario where everything the government does is in the open, and all systems can be publicly audited and verified. This is transparency, at no cost to privacy.
Conversely, if encryption, Tor, and leaving your house without a tracking device is outlawed, that would not increase transparency. It would merely make it more difficult to reduce the opacity of the receiving end of the tracking device.
What you're describing removes the ability of government employees to use privacy. This just incentivizes them when privacy is helpful (like in sensitive negotiations) to do that private work away from the office in their private lives.
Likewise, if you expect privacy in your personal life, but you work for the government and are forced to be transparent there, then using big data techniques and the many services tracking private individuals (uber, facebook, google, twitter, HN posts, others' cell phone captures, etc), you can suss out just about everything you need to know about their supposedly private lives, whether or not you know how to use Tor, can tolerate the dogshit Tor bandwidth and latencies, and assuming your Tor exit relays haven't been compromised.
When you create zones of privacy and transparency, what you're doing is making the private zone more powerful than the transparent zone, and you're making the transparent zone a liability to the private zone.
This is exactly the opposite of what you want to motivate. You want to generally motivate people to be transparent and to protect them for being transparent. Broadly speaking, that's the only way we're going to get more transparency. Right now in the US, transparency is generally equivalent to liability. It's all punishment, little reward.
Assuming your hypothesis were correct that making the data more widely accessible would diminish the power of those who are doing the surveillance now: Please explain why you think that it is easier to get those doing the surveillance now to open up their data and thus lose their power instead of getting them to not collect the data in the first place and thus lose the power?
If I understand your question, the two options you've presented are: 1. Make a law to force governments and corporations to be more open, a la the Freedom of Information Act but turned into its live-casting modern equivalent, and 2. Not clear, but it sounds like a combination of adding more teeth to enforcement of our privacy laws and/or individually using much stronger crypto?
If that's what you meant, then neither path sounds easy. They both sound like a giant pain in the butt. However, Path #1 sounds a hell of a lot healthier in the long run to me. It's the one I advocate, because I believe more information is always better. You can certainly argue that it will be abused, but if everyone can see everything, then you can see the abuser doing the abuse as well. That's a key point that's easy to miss.
As to the diminished power, there's a similar argument to be made regarding wealth inequality. Hard to imagine the wealthy would agree to higher taxes if it hurts them, yet some of the most enlightened and even the very wealthiest do believe this, because they understand that while their individual wealth goes down if viewed in isolation, holistically, their true wealth goes up, because they improve the quality their country, its services, and the people they share their lives with.
I didn't mean any specific strategy at all, I am just wondering why you think that achieving transparency of the kind that you seem to have in mind would be easier than maintaining/gaining back privacy. I read what you wrote as "gaining back privacy is hard, therefore, we should aim for transparency". What I didn't see was a justification for why that would actually be easier. And if it's equally hard, that argument kindof falls apart, doesn't it?
Also, I don't see why your suggested options are even necessarily in conflict? At least conceptually, I don't see any problem with transparency for governments and corporations, but privacy for individuals (unless they are acting in a role within those organisations)?!
> However, Path #1 sounds a hell of a lot healthier in the long run to me.
Do you mean that a society where noone feels the need to keep secrets would be a healthier society than what we have today, or do you mean that forcing everyone to publish all their secrets against their will would lead to a healthier society? Or something else entirely?
> It's the one I advocate, because I believe more information is always better. You can certainly argue that it will be abused, but if everyone can see everything, then you can see the abuser doing the abuse as well. That's a key point that's easy to miss.
Well, the one problem is, of course, whether that is actually any more realistic than strong privacy. Just because you hope that more transparency of the powerless will also bring more transparency of the powerful, doesn't mean one actually implies the other. You can actually have total lack of privacy for common folk and total secrecy of the elite at the same time. With power come the resources to maintain secrecy, whether legal or not.
But maybe more importantly: Do you actually see the abuser doing the abuse? How would you actually find that out, in practical terms? Would you personally read all the data that's being published by the government? Millions of pages every day? After all, the more data, the better? Or wouldn't you, for the most part, have to rely on others, like journalists or activists, to filter out the interesting stuff and to put it into context for you? What do you expect powerful groups to do when they can clearly see how those journalists and activists are preparing to report on their wrongdoing? Just sit there and hope for the best, like, say, Putin or Erdogan?
> As to the diminished power, there's a similar argument to be made regarding wealth inequality. Hard to imagine the wealthy would agree to higher taxes if it hurts them, yet some of the most enlightened and even the very wealthiest do believe this, because they understand that while their individual wealth goes down if viewed in isolation, holistically, their true wealth goes up, because they improve the quality their country, its services, and the people they share their lives with.
The question is: Do you therefore want to give the wealthiest the power to write the tax code that's being enforced on everyone?
Do you think that because some people have good intentions with all the data that's being collected, anyone who manages to collect data should therefore have the right to override the wishes of the people the data is about?
If you want to find out whether something is risky, it's no use to only look at the successes. There absolutely have been monarchies where the monarch was a wise and responsible person. What does that tell us about whether monarchy or democracy should be the peferred form of government?
Yes, it's harder to make something more private than it is to make it more transparent. Absolutely. You can go nuts trying to make your life as private as humanly possible, and then all it takes is one exception to the rules, like surveillance in the name of national security, followed by an unfortunate misuse of that data or an unfortunate hack, and now your eggshell defense of privacy has failed, and you have no cultural or legal infrastructure protecting your now very transparent life.
Ask anyone famous how hard it is to maintain a private life. It's much easier to go in the direction of transparency than backwards towards more privacy.
If you want to be more private, that means that no matter the level of encryption, you can never post your brutally honest thoughts in facebook or twitter or HN ever again. You can never let people know where you're visiting. What you're eating. What you're wearing. Who you're dating. You have to clam up. Because whether or not you've encrypted everything, you still leave fingerprints, not only in the IP addresses but in piecing together all the information you're sharing in order to home in on the identity of the poster.
It takes an enormous amount of effort to obfuscate your writing style and all your proper nouns, and it's not just effort. I think it costs you a piece of your humanity.
To answer your question about watching the abuser, if all information is broadcast (like literally broadcast openly on 802.11ac, for example), then in all likelihood, the people closest to the sources of these broadcasts are going to be the folks who can make the best use of the data. Too far away, and you won't even be able to pick up the signal. If someone further away can see value for reviewing it, then it's going to make sense to incentivize someone closer to archive and host it.
Putin and Erdogan get away with what they do because of asymmetric information. If their misbehaviour is similarly broadcast, then it levels the playing field.
And it changes journalism from being about leaking information and more about better analysis of information, its veracity, its implications, etc, as information would go from being valuable to being a commodity.
Right now, the wealthiest do appear to be writing the tax code.
And no, I do not think you should override the wishes of the people the data is about (within reason). That's central to my point. It turns knowledge into responsibility instead of power.
> Yes, it's harder to make something more private than it is to make it more transparent. Absolutely. You can go nuts trying to make your life as private as humanly possible, and then all it takes is one exception to the rules, like surveillance in the name of national security, followed by an unfortunate misuse of that data or an unfortunate hack, and now your eggshell defense of privacy has failed, and you have no cultural or legal infrastructure protecting your now very transparent life.
Correct me if I am wrong, but that boils down to "it's easier to publish your own information that to keep it secret", doesn't it?
How does that answer the question why you think that forcing the elite to be more transparent is easier than gaining/protecting the privacy of the common person?
Why is the eggshell defense of privacy an eggshell defense, but the enforced transparency of the elite is robust? (or is it?)
As far as I can tell, you are still simply assuming that enforcing transparency of the elite is comparatively easy, with no justification whatsoever, yet all of your argument seems to depend on that actually being true.
> Ask anyone famous how hard it is to maintain a private life. It's much easier to go in the direction of transparency than backwards towards more privacy.
I don't think that's actually accurate. There are plenty of famous people with a pretty private private life. There are many more factors at play when people's wealth is essentially in them being known, where "being known" necessarily implies that people know something about their private lives. The relationship between paparazzi and celebrities in particular is generally much more of a symbiosis than it's often being portrayed.
> It takes an enormous amount of effort to obfuscate your writing style and all your proper nouns, and it's not just effort. I think it costs you a piece of your humanity.
I am not sure what any of this has to do with the discussion at hand?!
> Putin and Erdogan get away with what they do because of asymmetric information. If their misbehaviour is similarly broadcast, then it levels the playing field.
So, Putin and Erdogan get away with killing and imprisoning journalists and shutting down newspapers only because there are no critical newspapers and journalists broadcasting their misbehaviour? Like, first there were no critical journalists and newspapers, and then Putin and Erdogan started killing and imprisoning and shutting down critical journalists and newspapers that didn't actually exist anyway? Could you explain?
> And it changes journalism from being about leaking information and more about better analysis of information, its veracity, its implications, etc, as information would go from being valuable to being a commodity.
Apart from the fact that it's still just a baseless claim of yours that that kind of transparency is in any way realistic to actually achieve: That's actually not as big a change as you make it out to be. It's akin to saying that building operating rooms in every school in the country would change medicine from being about having access to an operating room to being about performing a surgery. Millions of pages of government documents are about as useful to the public at large as operating rooms: Almost not at all. Without someone who has hard-earned specialized knowledge about how to use it, it might just as well not be there. The value comes from understanding the information, not from having overwhelming heaps of it at your fingertips. And the centralization that comes with the required expertise to be able to distill out the important bits comes the weakness where those in power can attack to keep information under control. If you put all surgeons in prison, the availability of operating rooms is of zero value to the public.
Or to put it more succintly: Just because books about everything that you could study at a university are readily available from amazon, in practice, not everyone is an expert in every academic field. Public availability of information does not automatically translate into the general public being well-versed in it by a long shot.
> Right now, the wealthiest do appear to be writing the tax code.
May I suggest you think about what the tax code would look like if it indeed were being written by the wealthiest? Just because it is giving the wealthiest an advantage doesn't mean it's as bad as it would be, were it to be written by the wealthiest.
> And no, I do not think you should override the wishes of the people the data is about (within reason). That's central to my point. It turns knowledge into responsibility instead of power.
Would you agree then that the state should protect the citizens' privacy and give them the legal tools to force others to respect their wishes?
I'm not overly focused on the concerns of a small minority of the population. The elite have their own challenges, but they have enormous resources with which to tackle them, and while some of them would not be thrilled about high transparency, some would embrace it, just as long as there were better protections for the transparent, which there currently aren't.
I get the sense that I'm upsetting you, and I don't mean to do that. I'm sorry if I said something to offend. I want only to engage in an open discussion about this and to offer a different point of view. I believe in it very strongly, and I have given it a great deal of thought and even given talks on how to operate an economy within such a system. I by no means think it's foolproof, nor Utopian- just better.
I'm currently under deadline and a bit pressed for time, and I feel like we might have a more effective conversation over skype. Feel free to email me at advice@gmail.com if you'd like to swap contact info and chat about it further.
Well, you might be upsetting me, but not because you are saying something that offends me, but because you don't seem to address my objections, instead just repeating your claims in some form or another, which makes for a very frustrating experience.
It's not that everything you say is wrong, but your conclusion crucially depends on this one central question of whether it is actually more effective at achieving the (implied) goal if you were to try and actually implement it, which seems highly questionable to me, but which you don't even acknowledge is your burden to show. You seem to assume that universal transparency is easier than universal privacy, and based on that you put forward arguments for why a transparent society would be better if it did exist. I might even agree with that conclusion based on that assumption. The part that's missing is how that applies in the real world, how that assumption is actually true in the real world--and my strong suspicion is that that's where your whole idea falls apart in practice, because you are simply ignoring how human psychology and power structures actually work, arguing instead from a completely unrealistic model of power structures that happens to support your conclusions.
I'm sure you believe it very strongly, and even that you have given it a great deal of thought. But have you tried to tear it apart? Do you know how to falsify your idea, do you know what it would take for you to accept that it's all wrong? If not, you might just be reinforcing your own biases without any connection to reality.
As for taking this outside HN, this is unfortunately a pseudonymous account, and as such, I don't connect it to any other identities. But feel free to take some time, chances are I will notice it ;-)
You don't actually have privacy, and you won't be getting it back.
I disagree, and if this is the starting assertion then we have a permanent disagreement that no amount of discussion can solve. Perhaps you could define "privacy". We must be using different definitions, as by my definition the fact that I do have privacy is as self-evident as the fact that only I know what I had for dinner.
If you had dinner at a restaurant, the restaurant knows, and if you used a credit card to pay for it, the payment processing company can figure it out by correlating the menu prices with the total bill. If you cooked dinner at home, you used groceries, and the supermarket has a record of what you bought there. If you googled a recipe, then google knows. If anyone intercepts your sewage and analyzes it, they will know, too. Your gas company knows how much energy you used on the burner. Your electric company saw the power spikes from your blender and microwave, and it saw your fridge compressor turn on. If anyone left Siri or Google Assistant or Amazon echo on during dinner, then they know. Anyone going through your trash can see what wrappers you threw out, or any leftover food.
What you had for dinner exactly is indeed "private" as you describe, but you see where I'm going with this? Your effective privacy is being pushed into a corner, because it's now possible with all of the little bits and pieces of clues you leave everywhere and the advent of big data to correlate these pieces into such a precise picture that your effective privacy is approaching zero over time.
I appreciate your posting of this comment. I understand the sentiment, and the perception of what's possible. I do value privacy, however. But I appreciate discussion.
You're right in that the challenge is much more psychological than technical. Many of us living creatures have an urge to thrive, and more of us have an urge to survive. Taking privacy as asymmetric ignorance: often, humans, in possession of some information they see as advantageous to them, will want to exploit that information, and if it's only (or more) advantageous while in only their possession, then they will wish to keep that information private. (Not always. Often.)
Growth of tolerance and respect will go against those ingrained urges.
I would tend to agree in theory. Data is a very valuable thing that is necessary to improve beyond a certain point. Complete, unrestricted transparency of every facet of everything gives the data-wielders (humanity) unprecedented insight. It's also, however, a complete pipe dream only possible in a perfect world. Otherwise, some people will see the data in question, realize the immense power it holds, and do bad things.
Privacy is necessary because some people are dicks and constantly strive to get an advantage over others. Ideally, it's only a temporary solution until humanity can figure its shit out, whatever that would be. Until then, it's the only way to minimize oppression, which is the biggest risk to human development there is. So for now, RMS is right. There's just no way of getting rid of privacy that would not severely hurt.
We're on a progression curve, right? Privacy is melting away over time with more sensors and advances in big data analysis techniques. We'll never get to where everything is 100% transparent. Too many photons.
But I believe we're already at the point that privacy is effectively gone. It's just a question now of whether the people who have the information is only the big corporations, big governments, the best hackers, and/or whoever paid for it, or whether we want to pull this privacy band-aid off and just disarm their power in the first place by broadcasting the information and changing our behaviour and rules on the back-end of what our responsibility is to others with the information we have on them.
If you broadcast everything, then if some people are dicks, you see that, too, right? And if we still get to be judged by a jury of our peers (hope-hope), then with any luck, there are enough nice people out there to say, "Yup, dick move. Stop that."
Privacy is just an eggshell defense. When/if it's breached, that's that. The dicks win. We currently have so little recourse, because it's so badly asymmetric. The dicks now have the information and proceed to hurt you with it, but you don't necessarily have the information showing them hurting you.
I'm no less skeptical than you as to our natural inclinations, but I do think it helps people be more respectful of others when they know the world is watching.
They've seen this with police officers wearing body cameras. They receive 93% fewer complaints. That's a profound difference.
Might work for a while until enough incidents pass unnoticed (which will happen given the mass). The police is a very specific group of people that's already under massive scrutiny.
New realities engender binary responses. We haven't had time to develop checks and balances on the seismic shifts in what's possible with privacy, and intrusions into it. I think we'll land somewhere in the middle--carving out privacy in some places, adapting to less of it in others. I don't think we can just declare "privacy is disappearing," full stop. It has always waxed and waned.
We don't have to look 1,000 years ahead to see the cost of lack of transparency though. False news and obfuscation of his ties to Russia are big parts of what got Trump elected; if there had been transparency about those, it might not have happened. It's connected to privacy--obfuscation is a form of privacy (maybe not in code, but in politics). Clinton's loss of privacy through hacked emails set up a false equivalence. Almost everything in Wikileak's release of the Podesta emails was either nonsense or small potatoes, but it got way more press than Trump's ties to a hostile foreign government--successful Russian maskirovka. That's totally nuts. And Comey's flip-flopping, in the name of transparency, was the coup de grace--there was absolutely nothing there, as he himself admitted after the damage was done. "Transparency" about the wrong things is a distraction and a weapon.
I couldn't agree more about the need for respect and tolerance.
What democracy needs isn't privacy. Privacy has always been a false value. Privacy is disappearing- period. No amount of gum-flapping, law-making, or attempts to complicate our lives or burn more CPU cycles and create more latency with more layers of security will change that.
What democracy needs is respect and tolerance. Specifically, we need: 1. Surveillance being broadcast instead of going to monolithic corporations and governments, 2. To learn to tolerate and respect each others' wishes as to what is done with that surveillance.
We're living in a closed system, no different than the International Space Station. No one on the ISS wants privacy. They want sensors covering every God damn millimeter of the space station 24/7, and they want mission control analyzing that data around the clock, so that if there's an issue with atmospheric or hull integrity, they get plenty of warning.
What they want in lieu of privacy is respect from each other to be left alone when they want alone time and to not be judged for what they do with their down time. That's respect, which is very different from privacy.
Hawking is dead wrong about us needing to get off the planet in 1000 years. What we need is to learn how to live in smaller closed systems, such as underground bunkers, undersea habitats, and sealed buildings, because no matter what planet colonists end up on, that's what they're going to have to do. After we destroy our ecosystem here, it's what we're going to have to do to survive this planet keeping the pollutants and excessive weather and heat on the outside.
This is a much more profound psychological challenge than it is a technical one, but we can't make that first step until we come to understand that privacy is not a virtue. Privacy is asymmetric ignorance. It is a cheap hack workaround for what really matters: tolerance and respect.