
The Fantasy of Opting Out - pshaw
https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-fantasy-of-opting-out/
======
stereolambda
This is one of the better articles on the subject, not written in inside-tech-
bubble terms. I think they also describe something we may call "obfuscation of
power": formally you can opt out, in practice you cannot, and people who have
power over you are lost in a soup of legal entities. So first, you are
alienated to face surveillance alone as an individual, taking all blame for
losing your freedom because you "chose" it. Second, it's hard to even name the
surveillers (one of the 500 "trusted partners"?). There's now a parallel
discussion on AI black boxes which can further serve similar purposes. ("It
was not our decision, some AI did it".)

The sooner it will be commonly framed as a question of freedom (i.e. absence
of arbitrary power of other people above you [1]), and as a question in the
interest of society as a whole, the better.

[1] I'd take the opportunity to plug Quentin Skinner's "How should we think
about freedom", "A genealogy of liberty" or a similar talk, where he
challenges the tradition of understanding freedom as absence of direct
interference. I think this stuff would be beneficial for politics nowadays.

~~~
hos234
But framing things differently has been done, yet we have smoking, drinking,
gambling, mcd and coke.

To me it fells like certain people (a percentage of any population) are just
wired to exploit human weakness.

Sometimes they are unconsciously doing it and when made conscious don't know
how to exit that path. And society needs to make it simpler for exits to
happen.

Those that are consciously doing it...well we are just stuck with them like we
will always have bugs in code.

~~~
candu
...which is the value of robust systems designed to limit the impact these
people can have.

This is precisely why mechanisms like separation of powers and whistleblower
protections matter. This is also why social conventions around honesty,
reciprocity, fairness, etc. matter.

When these mechanisms and conventions operate smoothly, you get a sort of
"security in depth" against abuse and exploitation. People acting in bad faith
find their worst impulses thwarted, both by societal / legal systems and by
average citizens who are empowered to help hold them to account.

When they don't, you get dangerous patterns of corruption and indifference;
these weaken trust in the system, making it harder to fix over time.

------
YeGoblynQueenne
I'm very pessimistic about all this. It seems to me that the horse has already
bolted: we are all under constant surveilance and there is not much we can do
about it at all. Many of us don't even think it's a problem and even many who
do think it is don't want to lose the benefits that are attached to the
constant automated surveilance.

As citizens of democratic countries we have uttely failed to protect our
rights against private and public intrusions. We have failed to vote against
politicians who introduce legislation to legalise pervasive automated
surveilance. In the UK, Theresa May, who brought the Snooper Charter into law
became Prime Minister instead of being kicked out of her political career in
disgrace. __* A majority of citizens of Western democracies continue to use
social media and online services like Amazon and Netflix etc.

The EU has introduced some legislation of course, but even in the EU state
institutions are free to spy on citizens and non-citizens alike. Everytime I
take the Eurostar for the continent I'm offered a "fast track" through a set
of automated gates that use facial recognition. I keep declining, but my
partner who also normally declines was coerced to go through by a border
guard. Pseudo-scientific deep-learning lie-detectors are deployed at the
borders of my own country, Greece, as well as Hungary and Latvia.

But all this started long ago. When surveilance cameras were first put up on
every shop and every street corner in every major EU city, only hippies and
weirdoes opposed them. And now we're all watched by them and there's no
changing that.

Who is going to stand up against the new threat to our rights? A few dispersed
academics that nobody listens to? Anonymous?

___________

 __* She was, but only later, because of Brexit.

~~~
whatshisface
History has consistently shown that the rights tend to arise after the
violations, not the other way around. The Magna Carta was written in response
to an awful king, the FDA was established as a response to widespread problems
with people getting poisoned, slavery wasn't abolished until millenia after it
was invented, and labor organization (leading to such modern niceties as the
40 hour week) did not arise until well after the industrial revolution. Give
it time.

~~~
mikelyons
There will have to be time, but also immense harm and death before something
will be done. It wont just take decades of the discomfort of wondering what
they're doing with the data. It will take some sort of massive act against the
people done with the data before the outcry will happen, as with any
technology. People didn't invent and require seatbelts becasue "you could die"
people _did_ die.

The question is what will happen, or how bad will it get? The worst fear is
some sort of automated genocide.

~~~
dashwav
I think that one of the pervasive problems of these kinds of technology is
that each individual violation can be individually tailored to the person in
question.

In my opinion, it's not going to be some blanket thing that is immediately
obvious, but rather a collection of individual actions taken against
individual people in exactly the way that is the least suspicious for that
person specifically.

Plus with the level of surveillance, those in control of the centralization
will also know the dissidents well before they become a serious threat and can
take preventative measures should they need to.

~~~
rapind
What's the ultimate end game though if you're one of these future (not so
distant?) powerful elites in control? You turn everyone else into slaves? Will
they remain happy and productive? Will they still invent shiny new things for
you if they know they're slaves? Is your only job now to prevent the slaves
from figuring it out? Is that even a fun job or is it sort of like a prison?
Can you still find meaning? How long can you conspire with your peers until
some of them get bored and rock the boat?

Sounds like a moronic shit show to me. We either find enlightenment before the
earth swallows us up or we don't. I think it'd be cool if we figured it out.

------
pdkl95
> Obfuscation may be our best digital weapon.

From Dan Geer's talk "Cybersecurity as Realpolitik" (which everyone should
hear[1]/read[2]):

>> There are so many technologies now that power observation and
identification of the individual at a distance. They may not yet be in your
pocket or on your dashboard or embedded in all your smoke detectors, but that
is only a matter of time. Your digital exhaust is unique hence it identifies.
Pooling everyone's digital exhaust also characterizes how you differ from
normal. Privacy used to be proportional to that which it is impossible to
observe or that which can be observed but not identified. No more -- what is
today observable and identifiable kills both privacy as impossible-to-observe
and privacy as impossible-to-identify, so what might be an alternative? If you
are an optimist or an apparatchik, then your answer will tend toward rules of
data procedure administered by a government you trust or control. If you are a
pessimist or a hacker/maker, then your answer will tend towards the
operational, and your definition of a state of privacy will be my definition:
_the effective capacity to misrepresent yourself_.

>> Misrepresentation is using disinformation to frustrate data fusion on the
part of whomever it is that is watching you. Some of it can be low-tech, such
as misrepresentation by paying your therapist in cash under an assumed name.
Misrepresentation means arming yourself not at Walmart but in living rooms.
Misrepresentation means swapping affinity cards at random with like-minded
folks. Misrepresentation means keeping an inventory of misconfigured
webservers to proxy through. Misrepresentation means putting a motor-generator
between you and the Smart Grid. Misrepresentation means using Tor for no
reason at all. Misrepresentation means hiding in plain sight when there is
nowhere else to hide. Misrepresentation means having not one digital identity
that you cherish, burnish, and protect, but having as many as you can. Your
fused identity is not a question unless you work to make it be.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nT-
TGvYOBpI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nT-TGvYOBpI)

[2]
[http://geer.tinho.net/geer.blackhat.6viii14.txt](http://geer.tinho.net/geer.blackhat.6viii14.txt)

~~~
excalibur
> If you are an optimist or an apparatchik, then your answer will tend toward
> rules of data procedure administered by a government you trust or control.

Make the data public. All of it. Don't allow them any secrets. Knowledge is
power, power to the people.

~~~
bilbo0s
That would also spawn outrage mobs.

"This boy said right here in his Call of Duty chat that he was going to go to
school with his dad's rifle and shoot people!!!"

The only thing you would do is put entirely unprofessional future mobs in
place of the slightly unprofessional police we use currently. I would hope
people could see the very real chance that your idea would make things worse.

~~~
excalibur
> The only thing you would do is put entirely unprofessional future mobs in
> place of the slightly unprofessional police we use currently. I would hope
> people could see the very real chance that your idea would make things
> worse.

Worse than the status quo, yes. But you seem to be under the assumption that
we will be able to maintain a police force at "slightly unprofessional" moving
forward, when governments have the tools and incentive to become far more
controlling.

~~~
bilbo0s
Governments can be ultra-controlling with slightly unprofessional police. It
happens all the time across the globe. But without exception, wherever those
police have been removed, poor though those police may have been, it has
resulted in untold misery on the populace.

Giving everyone the power to know exactly what everyone else is saying and
doing is tantamount to taking data and removing all its police, and removing
all its locks.

It will not end well.

~~~
excalibur
I'm not sure how much stock I put in this analogy, but you could be right.

It could also create an incentive to avoid collecting data in the first place,
which would obviously be a good thing. But perhaps this could be better
achieved through other methods.

------
shadowgovt
Cost of ubiquitous surveillance is going down, and at the end of the day,
that's the dominant effect. Given the intersection of low cost and
demonstrated utility, we're seeing a sea-change in society of significant
scale, such that "opting out of surveillance" really does being to equate to
"opting out of society." Imagine if you had a moral objection to, say, walking
on roads. What percentage of society would you have to avoid to maintain your
personal constraint?

Rather than asking how we opt out, it's probably best to ask how we live in.
How do we all get along and feel safe and secure given the new existence of
multiple cheap-to-maintain panopticons? David Brin's "The Transparent Society"
is a bit dated, but I think it provides a decent starting framework to
consider the question. Because the genie's out of the bottle, and "being in
the community" is going to be synonymous by "being seen by the community." We
have some liberty to determine as societies what that means.

(Consider, as a bad example but perhaps a useful framing of thought: nobody in
Star Trek worries about the fact that the computer on a ship knows what
they're doing, continuously, at all times, and can report that to anyone who
asks. Why? And how does that fictional reality differ from what people
actually want?)

~~~
philwelch
Everybody in Star Trek is serving in the military and has no expectation of
privacy while on duty. Plus it only tracks their commbadges.

Another consideration might be: what privacy would someone have had living in
a premodern or early modern village or even a small town at the turn of the
century? Aside from being surveilled in our own homes by Alexa and her kind,
are we worse off today?

~~~
shadowgovt
Not to rabbit-hole too far on this, but in the Next Generation, civilian
families are also aboard-ship. However, that's almost certainly modeled as
"military families and contractors," and the analogue to modern life is some
autonomy is understood by those groups to be given up for the privileges of
direct military support (i.e. you have to abide by some policies set by the
military when you're granted on-base housing).

But we're talking a fictional universe, so best not to unpack this bad analogy
too far. ;)

~~~
philwelch
Also the civilians don't tend to wear commbadges.

------
mojuba
What an irony that I open the page source of this article and see this
literally on the second line:

    
    
      var mi_track_user = true
    

Then there are all the usual suspects: Google Analytics, Facebook, Twitter and
a few others at the bottom. Is this the price I should pay for reading this
article for free?

~~~
buboard
i like the poetry of the third line too:

    
    
        var mi_no_track_reason = '';
    

We have no reason not-to track people, so let's track everyone

~~~
YeGoblynQueenne
Could be worse:

    
    
      var mi_track_reason = '';

------
SysINT
The use of the word Privacy is misleading the conversation. We should be
setting the goal to make it illegal to collect. It should be illegal for
commercial entities to collect information that can be considered personally
identifiable information without explicit consent. Additionally, that should
not be allowed within a commercial terms of service agreement, and if
automated must also provide means to remove with the same timeliness of the
automated subscription.

~~~
yeahforsureman
Consent is a poor tool for such a wide category of data. If you're looking for
actual informed consent, we are talking about something either practically
impossible or at least a massive strain on people's time and decision-making
capabilities over things they often couldn't care less about.

See e.g. F.J. Zuiderveen Borgesius, Security & Privacy, ‘Informed Consent. We
Can Do Better to Defend Privacy’, IEEE (Volume 13, Issue 2, p. 103-107).

~~~
SysINT
In context of the cited article, the assumption is the data was already
collected. My posit is that should not be allowed. I do not expect companies
should be able to collect and then ask for consent. They should be subject to
criminal behavior if they do so before and without explicit request.

------
llarsson
I cannot help but wonder if the use of such tools as the ones listed in the
article are not just "privacy theater", in the same sense that we have come to
realize that much of what happens in the name of security is just "security
theater". Ironically, of course, is that much of what happens in the name of
security is exactly what takes away our privacy in the first place.

What is needed is for people to tangibly suffer from lack of privacy. It is
obvious to people how they suffer from lack of security.

Germans remember what a lack of privacy can do (Stasi in East Germany), and as
a consequence, they are much more privacy-minded than in many other places.

What will be the wake up call for other nations?

~~~
stiray
Ther is a wakeup call already but it needs to come from us (tech workers). We
do understand what is going on, we do use use adblockers, application
firewalls, obfuscate our online fingerprints, use multiple accounts etc.

On the other side we also produce tools for mass survailance, ads networks,
tracking, implement telemetry, adding ads providers frameworks to our
applications.

In same breath we are protesting against selling technology to military, ICE,
disallow their children playing online games where gambling is the revenue
(opening boxes and similar), gitlab enforced telemetry,...

I see a huge discrepancy between what we want for ourself (privacy), what we
preach and on the other side, what we do and we fuel the survailance society.

The solution is to stop on our side and dont do to the others what we dont
want to be done to us. (... and even if there is always going to be someone
"selling drugs to kids", most of people dont do it).

~~~
ghaff
>We do understand what is going on, we do use use adblockers, application
firewalls, obfuscate our online fingerprints, use multiple accounts etc.

That seems like a broad statement. I tend to use adblockers (but not
religiously). But I generally don't obfuscate my online behavior or firewall
different identities for most purposes. I certainly would for certain types of
online behavior--and certainly for things like political dissent in some
countries--but by and large I try to avoid doing things online I wouldn't want
someone to find out about.

(Obviously I'm talking about actions that _don 't_ carry an expectation of
person to person communications as opposed to broadcast. Though, even then,
I'm pretty careful about what I commit to digital text or image that could
potentially leak.

------
qubex
_AdNauseam_ and similar obfuscation mechanisms strongly remind me of Neal
Stephenson’s ‘bogons’ he introduced in his cinderblock-sized (and eminently
enjoyable) novel _Anathem_. In that regard, he appears to have been highly
prescient: hiding signal in reams of random noise (and random meta-noise about
both signal and noise). [http://www.virtustate.com/fake-news-advertising-and-
bogons-s...](http://www.virtustate.com/fake-news-advertising-and-bogons-
science-fiction-manifesting)

------
Altheasy
The author: Privacy does not mean stopping the flow of data; it means
channeling it wisely and justly to serve societal ends and values and the
individuals who are its subjects, particularly the vulnerable and the
disadvantaged.

You are wrong, privacy mean stopping the flow of the data completely. No one
should spy on your life.

~~~
onion2k
_No one should spy on your life._

Absolute statements are always wrong. ;)

The problem with this way of thinking is that it's very hard to define what
'spying' is, and what 'your life' is. This is best illustrated with an example
- when you read this comment you'll have loaded a page on HN. That means HN's
server probably has a log of your IP address, browser agent string, etc.
There's a complete history of every article you've ever read, upvoted,
commented on there for you (and the public at large for some things) to see;

Your profile:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=Altheasy](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=Altheasy)

Your comments:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=Altheasy](https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=Altheasy)

Your favourited articles:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/favorites?id=Altheasy](https://news.ycombinator.com/favorites?id=Altheasy)

Taking the first page of your comments and that favourite I can reasonably
assume that you're a developer, you don't like testing much, you have a cat,
you have a judgemental attitude about how other people spend money, you have a
smart phone, etc. Not great insights but you're pretty new here. If I trawled
through the comments of someone who has 20,000 comments I could learn _a lot_.

So... is HN spying on you? Am I spying on you when I read those pages? I don't
think so. You put that data out there in the open. The same is technically
true for _most_ data that people say is spying - eg Google Analytics isn't
spying on you when it tracks everything you do on 50% of the websites you
visit. You're giving that data away. That's fine. It's useful. It makes the
internet better.

The flow of data _in itself_ is OK. It only really becomes _spying_ when the
data is misused. That's what people want to control.

~~~
cousin_it
Grandparent's statement is pretty absolute, but I find myself in agreement
with it. Data collection is the right place to intervene, because once
collected, data can be copied and misused at any time in the future.

> _when you read this comment you 'll have loaded a page on HN. That means
> HN's server probably has a log of your IP address, browser agent string,
> etc._

Such logging isn't technically necessary to serve web pages, and ideally
shouldn't be done without consent.

> _Am I spying on you when I read those pages?_

That's not spying, because the user consented to making their comments public.
(Not sure about favorites though, there's a small note on the profile page but
maybe the favoriting action should make it more explicit.)

> _Google Analytics isn 't spying on you when it tracks everything you do on
> 50% of the websites you visit._

It's spying if you didn't consent to it.

~~~
onion2k
_It 's spying if you didn't consent to it._

There's no explicit consent but the fact you've told your computer to download
some code and run it looks _a lot_ like implied consent.

~~~
cousin_it
I think that argument proves too much. To a user browsing the web, clicking a
link that says "check out this nice article" signifies intention/consent to
read that article, not to suffer the effects of all possible JS tripwires
including pwning their computer and such.

~~~
onion2k
This is the point I was making about misuse of data. Thinking usage analytics
on a website is a tripwire is quite extreme. Thinking that building a complete
profile of someone based on their activity on lots of websites is a tripwire
is quite reasonable. Hence the difficulty in defining what 'spying' really is.

~~~
cousin_it
If by analytics you mean something like a hit counter from the 90s, which
doesn't require recording user sessions, then I agree with you. But if it's
recording user sessions, I think it's a good idea to require consent for that.

------
bananatron
In Germany recording folks without their consent is illegal (or at least not
admissible in courts) in many contexts. It is possible to build incentives
that don't lead towards mass surveillance.

~~~
SamuelAdams
I think this is the correct solution. The author's recommendation - a cocktail
of browser extensions and other technologies - is only a temporary fix. This
needs to be fixed at an institutional level, but there are entire industries
(facebook, other ad-service companies) that depend on bulk data collection so
a bill like what Germany has will be fought against tooth and nail.

------
eindiran
Definitely check out the browser extension TrackMeNot, mentioned in the
article: it runs searches in the background to obfuscate what internet
behavior is actually yours.

[https://trackmenot.io/](https://trackmenot.io/)

------
d3nj4l
This article talks about the cost of opting out, but doesn't go into some of
the more insidious ways in which companies have made it harder and harder to
do so. I recently opened the Downloads app on my new Mi phone only to find a
notice asking me to grant authorization to Xiami to "... collect, process and
use [my] personal data" in order to use the app[1]. Why does a basic
_downloads_ app need to gather and analyze my personal data? Why can't I use a
version of the app that doesn't collect that data, and why is the agreement
framed almost as a carte blanche for Xiaomi to collect personal data? I can
see that the downloads app is running in the background, because it sends me
notifications every now and then about recent downloads, which was what
prompted me to open the app in the first place as I wanted to disable those on
the app level. Now there's an app on my phone that's constantly running in the
background whose behaviour I _cannot_ control except by blocking all
permissions and internet access unless I decide to give Xiaomi the keys to my
data. I won't even go into the "Security" app that comes pre-installed that
cannot be removed and has permissions to record audio granted by default!

Similarly, Gitlab recently prevented people from logging in and even deleting
their own repos unless they agreed to data collection[2]. They had the feature
to "opt-out" by setting DNT on your browser - but only if you granted them
permission to collect data first. They did turn that feature back, but only
after widespread criticism from all quarters. I might just be cynical, but I
think we might see more and more companies use basic features as Trojan horses
for data collection that is _unnecessary_ to the functioning of those basic
features themselves, with options to "opt-out" as cover and PR.

[1] [https://i.imgur.com/yxokdzY.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/yxokdzY.jpg) [2]
[https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/dm72oa/gitlab_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/dm72oa/gitlab_mandating_thirdparty_telemetry_locks_out/)

~~~
sokoloff
> Why can't I use a version of the app that doesn't collect that data

Because that particular developer hasn’t chosen to offer you that deal. If you
don’t like the deal vendor X is offering, don’t use vendor X. Particularly in
the case of a phone app, you tend to have a lot of choice. If vendor Y
provides you a deal you like better, why not use them?

You might find that vendors who offer those terms might bundle them with other
terms you don’t prefer (like charging money directly for the app or service).

~~~
squiggleblaz
That's absolutely daft. You can pick your lord, but they'll all demand
unnecessary permissions. The road to serfdom looks like capitalism working
according to spec - right up until you can't meaningfully vote.

~~~
sokoloff
The difference is in a great many cases, you _can_ pick "no lord". Don't like
being tracked with electronic tolling transponder? Don't use a toll
transponder. Don't like giving Xiami permissions to use your personal data?
Don't install a Xiami app. Don't like the supermarket tracking your purchases?
Pay cash and don't use the loyalty card.

The key is that you have to be willing to give up what those things give you
as well. The article even lists several: "long waits at road toll cash lines,
higher prices at grocery stores, inferior seating on airline flights."

There were very few things in the article that I read that a principled person
literally could not reasonably live without. Electricity was perhaps the
closest, but even most automated meter reading or smart metering programs have
a way to pay a monthly fee for a dumb meter to be installed and read manually.

If that's the case, then the question is one of convenience vs privacy
tradeoff. I choose to get a driver's license, to have a car and to register it
and put license plates on it. I could bike or walk. I choose to use credit
cards, frequent flier and other loyalty programs, to use electronic tolling
and automated meter reading, to use Kindles and highlight passages, to use a
TiVo, Netflix, and Amazon to consume television, to use a smartphone and many
apps, to connect with friends and family on Facebook and colleagues on
LinkedIn. I do so _because_ I perceive the benefit of doing so to be
extraordinarily higher than the loss of privacy.

That's quite a bit different from being a feudal serf living on a lord's land
in my book.

~~~
somatic
You have erected a hilarious false choice.

The supermarket is recording your image as you browse through the store, and
within five years will assuredly be plugging you into facial recognition
software.

It is not necessary for you to have a toll transponder in order for your car
to be tracked. You have a license plate which can be trivially collected and
indexed with off-the-shelf hardware and software. If you have a car made
within the last few years, it probably has a permanent tether to the Internet.

Your cell phone is triangulated and your location is approximated to a handful
of feet by your carrier.

In some not-too-distant future, it’s easy to imagine the death of cash, the
outmoded way to pay: cryptocurrency is just so much _sexier_.

Newsflash: every man is not his own island.

In excusing those responsible for polluting my life, _you_ are culpable also.

------
wruza
Obfuscating your personal profile is like obfuscating an entrance to your
house so that thieves to have hard time to find it. If that is a concern, a
society should consider a strict law and legal trouble for them, not hiding
tactics.

Opting out is a thing created by fraudsters, and why is it tolerated is
mysterious. The way EU implemented it, allowing sites to drag a user through a
burden of un-checking a dozen of checkboxes, is also ineffective en masse. It
is still easier to just use complete ad-blocking (passive measures) and
clicking “okay” to get rid of a popup.

------
jefftk
Their proposals for obfuscation are a mix of real solutions and things that
are easy to work around in an automated way:

* Tor: real workaround, though it does have some vulnerabilities (ex: correlation of ingress and egress)

* Browser plugins that block trackers: real

* Browser plugins that click on ads: super easy to filter out, since you're a massive outlier

* Browser plugins that choose random FB reacts: even easier to filter out since FB has a strong system of identity

* Clothes that fool facial recognition: they can update the software faster and cheaper than everyone can update their clothes

------
BerlinMarkets
One of the issues with Nissenbaum and Brunton's Obfuscation book is that there
has been an extensive argument made that it actually supports pro-state
forces, not opposes them [0]

[0] [http://computationalculture.net/poisoned-fruit-booby-
trapped...](http://computationalculture.net/poisoned-fruit-booby-trapped-
privacy-guides-as-state-sponsored-propaganda-a-case-study-of-obfuscation/)

------
shadowgovt
I think it's reasonable to turn the philosophical question around and look at
it from the other direction.

Why should a person interacting within society have the option to opt out of
surveillance?

We don't imagine that in pre-industrial-age communities, people believed in a
right to not be seen by, say, the butcher or blacksmith when they went in to
buy meat or metalwork, or a right to not have their commerce recorded in books
of accounting. And people weren't immune to town gossip---the low-speed, high-
latency, low-accuracy equivalent of having your disparate data points
aggregated. Has society changed or has what it means to be seen changed? Is
gossip qualitatively different now because it's fast, low-latency, and high-
accuracy?

Framed from this angle, I think the question is less about opting out and more
about "How much gossip is it polite to engage in before people should see one
as an asshole for being that nosy?"

~~~
danShumway
> Why should a person interacting within society have the option to opt out of
> surveillance?

A non-exhaustive list of a few specific reasons:

\- Private, unregulatable actions are historically large components of social
change, particularly for minority groups.

\- Historically, powerful groups (both governments and societies as a whole)
have used surveillance to harass critics and undesirable parts of the
population.

\- People have a natural tendency to self-select and avoid honestly engaging
with controversial ideas when they know they're being watched.

I tend to sum most of that up into a more general point:

People have the Right to Hide because society can be cruel, vindictive, and
arbitrary, and because people have the right to protect themselves from others
in the same way that a deer has the right to camouflage itself from wolves.

Opting out of society is not a real choice that anyone here can realistically
take, so a just society must balance collective and individual rights. That
means respecting individual rights of privacy and self-autonomy.

~~~
shadowgovt
> Private, unregulatable actions are historically large components of social
> change, particularly for minority groups

I agree but I'd note there's reasons not to maximize that effect universally.
Some balance is important; the Klu Klux Klan in the US is a minority group.
Apart from that, I generally agree with your assessment of the benefits of the
ability to have a private life.

------
carapace
I've been saying for ages now that the ubiquitous surveillance panopticon is
inevitable: technology makes it possible and politics and economics drive it.

(BTW, FWIW, I don't _like_ it. I just don't see any way around it.)

So, given that, the _obvious_ problem becomes making sure it is self-
referential: the powerful must be subject to it as well as the "little guys".
Otherwise you get Morlocks and Eloi, a split-level society with most people
living as _de facto_ slaves. Ask the people of Hong Kong about it, eh? (If
they can still speak freely by the time you read this?)

If we and our children and grandchildren and their progeny are going to be
irretrievably strapped into this global machine we'd better make sure it's
humane, eh?

------
EGreg
I have a different take

The information is out there, we cannot rely forever on the inefficiency of an
attacker.

Computers and their internet are making it easier to index and correlate this
information.

Our location, gait and so on is constantly tracked by phone companies.

But everything else can be found in public by CCTV cameras, drones etc. They
are able to literally know where you are at all times. They can analyze your
gait, face, tag your car, and so on. Law enforcement can use wifi to see if
you’re inside a building and find a good correlation between that and any
video.

AI can predict when and where a network of dissidents will organize, and flag
police to intercept (palantir is just one company that does this). It would be
trivial for an AI-powered government to predict and defuse any uprising or
organizing.

People have been outed by timing attacks (being in real-time chatrooms and
having their internet cut to confirm it’s them). JK Rowling has been outed by
analyzing her style.

Robots will be able to track down a human, outrun and and incapacitate them
easily. Forget speeding tickets by cop. They’ll have drones spot the car from
the sky, cameras by the road snap the car’s info. If it’s a criminal suspect,
they can release little bots to roll up next to a car and puncture its tires
to slow it down. Come and collect. No more high speed chases.

We need to let the public have access to this. We need encrypted CCTV video
from cameras in college dorm tooms stored and decrypted when there is a need
to solve eg a rape court case.

In some way this may also be helpful in the future for preserving alibis
because video and audio can now be totally faked with deepfakes, and
adversarial iteration will make it go past the uncanny valley into
indistinguishability from real video. So the future will have immutable
records with timestamps of everything. Where you were and when. Deal with it.

The genie is out of the bottle. More here:

[http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=169](http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=169)

------
motohagiography
It raises the interesting question: how do other employees of platform
companies protect their own privacy to prevent being put on a list after a
political conflict of some sort? When you work in security, this kind of thing
is always a distant blip on the radar, but it's there.

I know when I did work for a platform company, I didn't trust the internal
controls or quality of people enough to keep their app on my devices. I was
also sure there were people with access to user data who could not be depended
upon to be noble.

These aren't faceless government agencies monitoring you, when it's someone
doing a favour or using it to support some cause, it's people you know.

------
citruscomputing
I wrote an essay for school on this, and the central thrust was that we can
apply feminist theories of informed consent and adaptive preferences to
digital consent, and the waters are very, very murky, especially when that
consent is manipulated.

If I consent to something, fully believing it is in my best interest, it can
still be said my consent is not legitimate in certain circumstances. For
example, if an abuse victim is gaslit into beliving their abuser is the only
person who could ever love them. The applications to the digital world, I
hope, are apparent.

For more information, I highly reccomend Serene J. Khader's "Adaptive
Preferences and Women’s Empowerment."

------
arminiusreturns
Start taking you privacy seriously, and opting out of bad services where you
can. This sometimes means not getting to be on $latestplatform, and missing a
few conversations, etc. Sticking to your principles is never easy or costless.
Even then, verify that what you are using isn't spying on you. That means read
the EULAs and TOSs. That means packet sniff your network regularly to find
potential issues. etc etc It requires work.

I think there will be a huge market for entities to help individuals without
these skills do these things.

~~~
dredmorbius
The article's point is that individual actions really don't scale.

This is a general problem of race-to-the-bottom dynamics -- a form of
Gresham's Law. At best, personal resistance simply opens more space for the
bad actors / RTTB dynamic.

Instituting systemic blocks, through regulation, legislation, taboo, or other
mechanisms, is required.

Individual action _can_ help spread awareness. But it's a first step, not a
last.

~~~
arminiusreturns
I guess in that case I'd be interested in hearing more about the "other
mechanisms".

~~~
dredmorbius
Anything that's systemic and collective rather than individual.

A few come to mind, but the primary intent was to indicate my list was not
comprehensive.

~~~
arminiusreturns
I understand that, I just feel like the others in your list have tended to
fail to produce change (regulation, legislation, taboo), via regulatory
capture, K-street and money influence on congress, and media manipulation,
respectively. So I am more interested in anything you might consider to go in
the other category. Not looking for a comprehensive list, just something to
get started with.

------
axilmar
Most of the actions referred to in the article are mundane: you left your
home, you got cash from the ATM, you used the subway, etc. I can't see how
that can be used for anything against us.

The real problem is the internet: when we express our political interests
online, when we visit certain sites, a profile is built for us about not what
we do but what we believe in.

------
fouc
>Those who know about us have power over us. Obfuscation may be our best
digital weapon.

Interesting, we could use tools like deepfake to fake images & videos of
ourselves in order to increase the level of obfuscation.

Perhaps we can even analyze our writing styles and then use GPT-2 to produce
writing that matches our styles, and flood the web with that.

Anonymity through noise.

~~~
pixl97
Not really, you're still giving them the real signal.

------
mirimir
Meatspace is a lost cause. So you must blend in. Just do whatever you must to
get along.

But online, there's still a chance. As in Vinge's _True Names_. You hide your
uplink using nested VPN chains and Tor. And then do whatever you want. Using
as many unlinked personas as you like.

------
RobPfeifer
I actually sort of thought this was the common POV for anyone within tech.
Controlling google searches for your name, putting fake content on social
media, etc. are obviously only way to create enough noise to direct algorithms
to outcomes you’d prefer no?

~~~
buboard
Yet i can see your full name, your linked in profile, twitter etc etc. Use
pseudonyms, people

------
imgabe
> But if we are nearly as observed and documented as any person in history,
> our situation is a prison that, although it has no walls, bars, or wardens,
> is difficult to escape.

The defining characteristic of a prison is a loss of freedom. What is it that
you want to do that these technologies are preventing you from doing?

It's unlikely that we're going to put the technology genie back in the bottle.
Instead we need to preserve freedom by sharply curtailing government and
corporate power, and demanding radical transparency from any organization that
is collecting data.

~~~
missosoup
Always-on surveillance is the ultimate prison. Foucault articulated this very
clearly back in the 70s in Discipline and Punish. You don't need walls, you
don't even need guards. You just need an ever-present observer and a fear of
being observed doing something 'undesirable'.

Perhaps the genie isn't going back in the bottle, but rolling over and
reiterating the 'if you have nothing to hide...' fallacy is not a productive
course of action either.

~~~
imgabe
Nowhere did I say anything about "...nothing to hide". I am saying we need to,
via legislation, weaken governmental and corporate authority, and increase
personal authority so that the data collected cannot be used to harm us.
Because the real fantasy here is that there is some way the data is not going
to be collected.

~~~
hrktb
If we agree that data will be collected whatever laws we put in place, under
the same premises can’t we agree that it will be misused as well ?

Problem with laws to me is that they are only binding to some portion of the
actors. Some government actors have a mandate to work around the law, and
other organisations have divisions dedicated to avoid triggering these laws.
Regulation is only part of the solution.

------
Merrill
Security by obscurity is no security at all.

What is needed is stronger individual rights to access, correct, delete, and
control the use of any information collected about us, as well as strong
prohibitions on the use of data against our individual and collective
interests.

~~~
hrktb
The point is not security though, but privacy. At its base privacy is
obscurity.

Also you seem to advocate for every single individual to run a race against
the rest of the world to not misuse their data. We both wish there was decent
safeguards, I am way more pessimistic about any effective rights regulation
though (I think it’s just way too hard for any legislation body).

Not saying nothing should be done on the elgal anr regulation side, but that
it’s only a tiny drop in what is needed for us to preserve privacy.

~~~
Merrill
The problem with privacy by obscurity is that once broken it cannot be fixed.
Once information is released and becomes public, there is no way to retrieve
or expunge it from the public record. The only remedy is law, regulation, and
a social compact that the continued dissemination and use against your
interests is forbidden.

~~~
Nasrudith
The real issue historically hasn't been privacy itself in many cases so much
as people unduly giving a fuck about things they shouldn't because it doesn't
actually affect them at all or their "requirements" are objectively barking
mad. While surveillance is full of evils the true root of most damage from
releases. Society's stupid reactions are and it would prefer to change
anything execpt their dumb presumptions in the face of reality and morality.

It brings to mind the stacked absurdity of pagent winners losing their crown
over nude picture releases. Clearly they should inspect the models to
beforehand to be sure they have Barbie Doll crotches beforehand if having a
naked body is a disqualifier. It would save them all embarassment once they
realize there are no qualified human models which meet their standards and
they will have to make due with giving trophies to department store
mannequins.

Or the many who suffered from being outed as gay including dumbass tautologies
where making a secret firing worthy because of a risk of blackmail - that they
created.

------
ddiq
It's the year 2027. You get a notification from the H8Watch™ by the ADL app,
default installed on every phone, and can't be deleted without jailbreaking.
You open the notification, and it shows a video of you from 2 weeks ago, from
a camera embedded in the table of the fast food restaurant from where you were
eating lunch with your friend. Your voice has been reconstructed through
lipreading software and played back to you. "You're such a feandra, I paid
last time!" you said to your friend playfully, using the new insult people
just started using to refer to someone thrifty.

After the video and reconstructed voice plays back to you twice, it changes to
a message. "Minor class-based insult detected." The nonsense word "feandra"
had been added to the H8Watch™ database 2 hours ago, and your offense had come
up as part of their program to catch racists and classists retroactively. This
prevents the use of new words or euphamisms that may otherwise be used to
bypass H8Watch™ detection.

Moments later, you get more notifications. Twitter: account suspended for 1
day, your bank: $25 has been deducted from your account for terms of service
violation, Facebook: 2 offenses so far this month, 1 more and all three videos
will be posted to your Facebook feed.

You quickly swipe away the rest of the notifications, you'll deal with them
later, and text the friend you were going to meet for dinner. "Hey John, I
can't make it tonight. Cash is a little tight after another violation, and I
can't risk a public conversation this week."

~~~
varjag
It's remarkable how someone living in 2019 still finds grounds to complain
about stiffing political correctness.

~~~
goatinaboat
In 2019 the hand symbol for OK has been retconned as hate speech. There is no
sign yet of this trend reversing.

~~~
varjag
There are people still sore about swastikas and roman salute "retconned" too.
But well maybe don't use them for supremacist signaling in the first place,
that sure could help.

------
paulmd
With a clamor of bells that set the swallows soaring, the Festival of Summer
came to the city Omelas, bright-towered by the sea. The rigging of the boats
in harbor sparkled with flags. In the streets between houses with red roofs
and painted walls, between old moss-grown gardens and under avenues of trees,
past great parks and public buildings, processions moved. Some were decorous:
old people in long stiff robes of mauve and grey, grave master workmen, quiet,
merry women carrying their babies and chatting as they walked. In other
streets the music beat faster, a shimmering of gong and tambourine, and the
people went dancing, the procession was a dance. Children dodged in and out,
their high calls rising like the swallows' crossing flights, over the music
and the singing. All the processions wound towards the north side of the city,
where on the great water-meadow called the Green' Fields boys and girls, naked
in the bright air, with mud-stained feet and ankles and long, lithe arms,
exercised their restive horses before the race. The horses wore no gear at all
but a halter without bit. Their manes were braided with streamers of silver,
gold, and green. They flared their nostrils and pranced and boasted to one
another; they were vastly excited, the horse being the only animal who has
adopted our ceremonies as his own. Far off to the north and west the mountains
stood up half encircling Omelas on her bay. The air of morning was so clear
that the snow still crowning the Eighteen Peaks burned with white-gold fire
across the miles of sunlit air, under the dark blue of the sky. There was just
enough wind to make the banners that marked the racecourse snap and flutter
now and then. In the silence of the broad green meadows one could hear the
music winding through the city streets, farther and nearer and ever
approaching, a cheerful faint sweetness of the air that from time to time
trembled and gathered together and broke out into the great joyous clanging of
the bells.

Joyous! How is one to tell about joy? How describe the citizens of Omelas?

They were not simple folk, you see, though they were happy. But we do not say
the words of cheer much any more. All smiles have become archaic. Given a
description such as this one tends to make certain assumptions. Given a
description such as this one tends to look next for the King, mounted on a
splendid stallion and surrounded by his noble knights, or perhaps in a golden
litter borne by great-muscled slaves. But there was no king. They did not use
swords, or keep slaves. They were not barbarians. I do not know the rules and
laws of their society, but I suspect that they were singularly few. As they
did without monarchy and slavery, so they also got on without the stock
exchange, the advertisement, the secret police, and the bomb. Yet I repeat
that these were not simple folk, not dulcet shepherds, noble savages, bland
utopians. They were not less complex than us. The trouble is that we have a
bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness
as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting.
This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and
the terrible boredom of pain. If you can't lick 'em, join 'em. If it hurts,
repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is
to lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold; we can no longer
describe a happy man, nor make any celebration of joy. How can I tell you
about the people of Omelas? They were not naive and happy children – though
their children were, in fact, happy. They were mature, intelligent, passionate
adults whose lives were not wretched. O miracle! but I wish I could describe
it better. I wish I could convince you.

Omelas sounds in my words like a city in a fairy tale, long ago and far away,
once upon a time. Perhaps it would be best if you imagined it as your own
fancy bids, assuming it will rise to the occasion, for certainly I cannot suit
you all. ..

..........

[https://canvas.wayne.edu/files/3466337/download?download_frd...](https://canvas.wayne.edu/files/3466337/download?download_frd=1)

[https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:IZDmzk...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:IZDmzkZ0u5sJ:https://canvas.wayne.edu/files/3466337/download%3Fdownload_frd%3D1+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-b-1-d)

~~~
dredmorbius
I'm gathering some people here aren't familiar with Ursula K. LeGuin's short-
story epic.

It's a bit of a stretch for this particular post, but I think there's a
connection which can be made.

~~~
paulmd
It is indeed a story about "opting out". I was hoping it would spur a little
discussion. It's not exactly a long read, but I guess too long for the
attention span of the current crowd.

Everyone in modern society has chosen not to walk away from Omelas. Every day
we live on the backs of untold suffering - actual peasants and literal slave
labor who mine our minerals and manufacture our goods.

The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas personifies that as a single child, whose
suffering we all know. And yet our banners could not be as bright or our
people as happy if we didn't.

We of course all identify with the ones who walk away, yet none of us choose
to do so. It's a thought-provoking piece.

~~~
dredmorbius
I think it got interpreted as copypasta, of which there's been some uptick.

I got the point. Then again, I've also walked away, at least from much of the
tech Omelas.

------
macspoofing
Yes, there is some friction in opting out just like there is friction in any
action you want to take (from going to the grocery store to voting). So what?

The reality is that some people really care about this stuff but the wider
population doesn't. The people that care tend to get really frustrated at the
wider population and attribute the population's uncaring attitude to the small
amount of friction that it takes to opt out and/or to ignorance and/or low-
intelligence. This is followed by a push for a government policy to adjust the
behaviour. If people won't care by themselves or are too stupid to do it,
we'll make them care through laws ... and that usually results in idiotic
policies like a cookie warning on every webpage on the internet.

