
Once it was easy to be obscure, but technology has ended that - tysone
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/17/opinion/data-privacy.html
======
sbov
I'm not sure if many people have experienced losing the "practical obscurity"
this article talks about firsthand. Property records are public. So are WHOIS
records. But it's unrealistic to manually search all the property records,
phone books, WHOIS records to find someone you're looking for. However, some
websites index these, and some search engines index those sites. I've had
people contact me that I would prefer couldn't find me because my information
was searchable due to a WHOIS record.

There are people out there slurping up all the information they can find in
the public and attempting to connect it together. If you want to see what I
mean, go check out your mylife.com profile. Mine has a big red warning because
I have neighbors with court records. It says I "may" have sex offenses. What
the actual fuck? This company needs to eat shit.

This isn't about people tracking you to give you better ads. Its about people
tracking you to sell information to whoever wants to pay them. Its way fucking
worse.

~~~
AnIdiotOnTheNet
I didn't know about this site, but checking myself out with it, its
information is remarkably incorrect. Maybe that means I'm doing a good job of
being a hermit? It claims I'm Christian (I was born into a Lutheran family, so
that's an understandable mistake), am married (ha!) and maintain relationships
with many people (ha), proceeding to list 5 people I've never heard of[0].
Salary is wrong, home value is wrong, and the only email address it lists is
about 20 years out of date. Really no better than the other various people
search pages I've seen, which also failed to impress. Hell it even does the
fake "we're looking up all this full report information for you... please pay
at the next window" thing that they do. If this were the best the corps could
track me I would say we have nothing to worry about, but I doubt it is.

[0] Turns out they're my neighbors.

~~~
brookside
Sounds similar to Zillow lowering homes' estimated values (zestimates) to
encourage subscriptions with which you can contest their number.

------
1e-9
I continue to be amazed by the level of nearly complete indifference that the
general populace still has towards privacy. I don't think the politicians are
going to do much of consequence until their constituents think it is
important. Those who understand the danger of what is happening should take
every opportunity to help others become aware. Possibly the biggest challenge
of this is how to avoid coming across as a total paranoid wacko.

~~~
privacyELI5
That's because to the average person, the privacy fears of the average HNer
make no sense. Even if something extremely bad _might_ happen as a result of
violations of my privacy, the chances seem fairly low. In that sense, it's no
different than millions of other fears high-impact-low-chance fears that we
happily go through life ignoring.

What's your most convincing argument for why an average person should care
more? Explain it to me like I'm 5.

~~~
mbesto
> What's your most convincing argument for why an average person should care
> more?

Laymen Argument 1:

Mark Zuckerburg who has majority control of the largest source of private data
in the world bought the two plots of land next to him for privacy reasons.

Laymen Argument 2:

Forward me all of your emails if privacy isn't an issue. _crickets_

The average person doesn't care about these because it doesn't affect them
_right now_ , but it's a "boil the frog" situation...you won't know you're
getting boiled to death until it's too late.

~~~
vegasdew
> Mark Zuckerburg who has majority control of the largest source of private
> data in the world bought the two plots of land next to him for privacy
> reasons.

President of USA, travels with a ~100 men security cover all the time, does
not mean USA is unsafe to move around and you should stay in home with a gun
in hand.

~~~
Scoundreller
> President of USA, travels with a ~100 men security cover all the time, does
> not mean USA is unsafe to move around

It doesn’t??? Most other OECD presidents/PMs/HoS don’t bother.

~~~
xlii
To be fair US president is said to be single most powerful person in the
world.

I don’t have any data to back it up but I could see them being no. 1
assassination target globally.

OTOH few years back I was walking and passing near former president of my
small European country. Since he is rather charismatic I asked if I can shake
his hand and get a photo. He agreed and we did so, however I learned few
minutes later from a friend lagging behind, that couple random bystanders
twitched and totally focused on our interaction. Obviously personal security.
So it’s not like security isn’t there, we might just not see it.

~~~
ben_w
I’m not sure about that counter-argument. POTUS is _currently_ the most
powerful position in the world, but between 1850 and 1915 (approximate dates),
I think the British and possibly French empires were more powerful.

In this time period, three American presidents were assassinated. The UK lost
one MP, who was not the PM, and apparently the killers only targeted him
because he happened to be walking with their main target at the time. None of
the UK royals were assassinated in that period.

~~~
NeedMoreTea
That may be pure luck - there were 8 attempts on Queen Victoria!

------
o10449366
"And until lawmakers, corporate leaders and citizens embrace obscurity and
move to protect it, your freedom and opportunities to flourish will be in
jeopardy."

True! Look no further than NYT's initiatives to collect and sell their
readerbase's emotional engagement to their content.[0] From their very own
publisher:

"People have little transparency into what is being gathered, where it’s being
shared and how it’s being used — to follow their movements, to charge them
more for health insurance or to manipulate them with political messages — and
even less agency to do anything about it." Mr. Sulzberger, publisher of The
New York Times [1]

I don't mean to detract from the essay, but I'm pretty skeptical of NYT's
"Privacy Project". NYT is the only publication that I read frequently that
aggressively tries to prevent me from browsing in private mode with Firefox
Focus and I wouldn't be surprised if they collect and sell the most reader
information out of all major US publishers. I can only posit that though
because they don't disclose any of that information. NYT's attempts at "data
transparency"[1] are just excuses justifying the sale of reader information
instead of answers regarding what information they collect, what information
they sell, and who they sell this information to.

How long until NYT writers start facing pressure to produce stories that will
maximize "emotional engagement", even if they're divisive and inflammatory?
How long until emotional engagement is inadvertently used to discriminate
against certain groups based on their reactions to controversial topics? These
outcomes are an inevitability when profit motives are involved because humans
are incapable of exercising restraint and saying "That's enough information,
we don't need to collect any more or expand our current profit levels." NYT is
repeating the same mistakes they're currently criticizing tech companies for
and, as usual, the individual will suffer.

[0] [https://investors.nytco.com/press/press-releases/press-
relea...](https://investors.nytco.com/press/press-releases/press-release-
details/2018/The-New-York-Times-Advertising--Marketing-Solutions-Group-
Introduces-nytDEMO-A-Cross-Functional-Team-Focused-on-Bringing-Insights-and-
Data-Solutions-to-Brands/default.aspx)

[1] [https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/10/opinion/sulzberger-new-
yo...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/10/opinion/sulzberger-new-york-times-
privacy.html)

~~~
joe_the_user
Well,

About the only way to get actual privacy is: individuals valuing privacy,
individuals having the tools to protect their privacy, and states not actively
removing those tools (which can mostly be prevented by protest and refusal).

This isn't I think this will happen. Every indication is that you won't see
individuals caring about privacy. Every day the attitude that there's
something insincere about not being online with your real name seems to get
more traction, along with the belief that "sharing your life with your
friends" can somehow now be compatible with privacy.

It's just that individual is about the only way this could happen. Because no
institution wants to do more than protect your privacy _from everyone else_.

~~~
o10449366
I understand your point and I agree that individuals need to value privacy,
but I also think it's important to recognize that the average individual on HN
is much more technologically literate than most. I would posit that most
people _do_ care about their privacy, but that most people aren't aware how
exposed they really are. You could make the argument that being aware about
what information you're exposing is the threshold for caring about your
privacy, but the reality is that it's impossible to cover all of your bases
and tech companies, and now NYT, are fully exploiting that to their advantage.
The average individual isn't aware of how much specific information is
collected when they use a credit card, when they connect to a cellular
network, when they open a webpage with trackers, etc. Hell, Mr. Sulzberger in
[1] admitted himself that NYT isn't even fully aware of what happens to the
reader information they sell and whether it ends up in responsible hands.

It's exhausting and impossible to care about privacy today. You can care about
privacy today and still end up with all of the same information exposed as
someone who couldn't care less. The responsibility doesn't fall on the
individual, it falls on the companies that continuously scrape every piece of
metadata possible. That's why I can't take NYT's Privacy Project seriously,
because in [1] they justify their data collection methods by essentially
saying "Well, everyone else is doing it, too! Look at these other publications
and companies that also collect data!" instead of taking the opportunity to be
transparent and setting a standard. It's disappointing and makes me question
the motives behind the project.

~~~
joe_the_user
_I would posit that most people do care about their privacy, but that most
people aren 't aware how exposed they really are._

Indeed, well. The average person cares about privacy but they don't
_understand_ privacy. I mean, it various ways I probably don't fully
understand privacy.

Which is to say, on reflection, that privacy and security are fundamentally
intertwined just all the various points-of-entry for the bad guys are
intertwined.

And the thing with security is that it isn't a feature and an add-on. In an
organization, everyone has to care or no can. And with individuals, the same.
A given individual can't expect just AV to protect their security and they
can't expect a website by itself to protect their privacy.

Where, as I said above, I'm not optimistic on all these concerns.

------
CapitalistCartr
Its actually practical to keep track of 328 million Americans now. All it
takes is money. And it gets easier every year.

~~~
specialist
Seisent, ChoicePoint, others were tracking everyone in North America by at
least 2005, with partial coverage for Central America, South America,
Caribbean. Just from public records, which at the time was ~1600 data feeds.
Seisent's sales person told us the NSA bought one of their clusters and
included their own data feeds (communications, transactions).

I assume by now multiple parties, both private and governmental, know
everything about everyone, living and dead, in near real time.

------
devoply
Data protection laws need to basically create this sort of ephemerality in
collected data in that data is destroyed by law after a certain period of
time. Outside of that we're a step away from a total surveillance state where
everything that you do in any major city outside of your house is on record
for eternity.

Here Louis Rossman talks about how all recordings that he has made using his
Android phone's voice-to-text feature and Google recording all that audio for
years and all of that is on record under his account.

So in terms of storage, if Google is storing that level of data. Then yeah we
have the ability to store everything, forever. If that's what we as a society
want to do.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_vWAF13KigI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_vWAF13KigI)

~~~
blakesterz
>> If that's what we as a society want to do.

I guess I'd argue that we as a society don't really want to do that, and if we
as a society paid attention to privacy/security more then we'd force the
companies doing this to stop. Or we'd force our government to pass laws that
would stop it. But we as a society only have a limited number of hours in our
day, and most of society just doesn't care enough to apply pressure where it
would make changes. I think most people just don't see why it matters.

~~~
baroffoos
Those things are happening though. The GDPR has only recently come in and the
average person is starting to realize how data collection affects them in ways
like manipulating elections and data leaks. Until recently these privacy
intrusions have only been a theoretical risk and most people don't care about
theoretical risks until they become real risks.

------
sn41
Ralph Nader has an analysis on how online advertising is often at the root of
corporate surveillance.

[https://nader.org/2018/10/04/the-root-of-the-internets-
disre...](https://nader.org/2018/10/04/the-root-of-the-internets-disrepute-
online-advertising/)

Of course, other forms of surveillance, like rulers spying on their own
citizens, are time-honoured cornerstones of civilisation. (/s)

------
tyscorp
Although I value privacy and obscurity, this makes me kind of sad for future
historians.

~~~
lapinot
Future historians don't care about who was in line in the bakery this morning
etc. Data that should legitimately be obscure is about personal/small scale
everyday actions that could be identifying given a small sample. I'm the first
one to fall into data hoarding, but we need to repeatedly acknowledge that
most of the things we do are not worth being recorded, and actively not
recording them (or making them easily accessible, standardized) does have a
lot of value, in terms of social structure.

~~~
cortesoft
I don't know, some of the most interesting and enlightening things we learn
about past civilizations is through the mundane.

------
lilsoso
Now that privacy is gone, I'm surprised that we haven't seen this technology
used to unfortunately tarnish people's reputations. I don't want to quite
spell it out.

I fear that scandals could retroactively breakout: you're no longer safe from
your past. Old public recordings could be used to frame nearly anyone in
unfavorable light.

~~~
circlefavshape
Last year one of my wife's uncles had a DNA test done, and he turned out to
have a sibling match with someone he had never met (living in a different
country). Turns out that her grandfather had a child from a relationship with
someone he met before her grandmother, and none of the family had ever known

------
jsnider3
I really think at this point that it would be more effective for "privacy
advocates" to switch gears. Trying to end the war on drugs, legalize
prostitution, make the culture more permissive, etc. actually has a chance of
succeeding while privacy has only been losing ground for decades at this
point.

~~~
asark
Miniaturized, cheap, low-power electronics and ubiquitous wireless Internet,
plus modern image and audio process/recognition, are the end of it, really.
It's over. War's lost as long as those exist, and good luck getting rid of
them. Cell phones and giving all our data to 3rd parties who can track us
without restriction are making it much worse, but the other tools are there,
now. We built the ultimate totalitarian toolkit, and a massive disinformation
machine that leaves us even less certain what's "grassroots" and what's enemy
action than we ever have been.

We split the privacy atom and no non-proliferation treaty equivalent is
anywhere near the Overton window, nor likely to be any time soon.

Whoops.

------
HNLurker2
Bypass article:
[https://lm.facebook.com/l.php?u=https://www.nytimes.com/2019...](https://lm.facebook.com/l.php?u=https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/17/opinion/data-
privacy.html)

------
mirimir
Well, you can if you work at it hard enough.

Online, at least. In meatspace, not so much. So you just gotta stay present to
that fact that you're under observation at all times. Potentially, at least.

------
KineticLensman
The only certainties in life: death, taxes and surveillance

------
GrryDucape
The author may know of a great deal of harm caused, but so far I remain about
ten pole lengths away from panic over my privacy. My Life did not seem to have
much, and I have found more on myself in the past by simply googling. Yeah, I
don’t like how easy it is for people to see my mostly measly political
donations, but only a stalker would give a darn about the facade of my home.
Seems like it is more likely we need to fear identity theft than a lack of
obscurity. Here’s an idea, if you want more privacy/obscurity, refrain from
social media or using your real name in comments sections.

~~~
lilsoso
Your political records alone could land you in trouble in the near future.

Roger Scruton lays this out elegantly in a lecture at Oxford:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUbfMQ91Mps#t=37m](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUbfMQ91Mps#t=37m)

Initially Barack Obama was in favor of homosexual rights, but not in favor of
altering the institution of marriage. Scruton continues on, "within a year he
was saying I am in favor of gay marriage and within another year he was
joining forces with those who say that those who are against gay marriage are
homophobes."

"So something which had been judged perfectly legitimate to oppose suddenly
becomes the criterion of moral merit. And I think we've seen this in all sorts
of issues that we've gone through in recent years. All of us are within one
tiny step of being demonized."

------
qrbLPHiKpiux
What all of us are witnessing and living through right now is data in its
infancy. There is no one to nurture it and help it develop and grow. Only us -
to learn as it grows. To change direction on its growth. I wish I would be
alive when it truly becomes what it becomes. My grandkids will likely not even
be alive. And I don’t have grandkids yet.

