
The Color of Surveillance: Monitoring of Poor and Working People – Reading List - DyslexicAtheist
https://drive.google.com/file/d/106LQoUzt-41OMt4ssyizwIMNUjn893f4/view
======
vorpalhex
Could also be labeled "Meta-Surveillance: How to make a list of everyone
interested in Surveillance" given that it's hosted as a google drive document
instead of _any other sane format in the world_.

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testuser66
It's a PDF.

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cousin_it
I know what PDFs look like, they don't have my Google account in the upper
right corner. It's a Google page wrapped around a PDF.

~~~
Hitton
>they don't have my Google account in the upper right corner

I don't understand how can someone who doesn't even bother to logout out of
his google account or use something like firefox containers care about
privacy. The document has to be hosted somewhere no matter what and google
drive isn't any worse than random web page which uses google analytics.

~~~
semiotagonal
Doesn't Google Drive show the identity of someone reading the document to
other people reading it, or at least the owner? That's worse than just
collecting analytics internally at Google.

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shadowgovt
No. If you aren't authenticated, it shows your presence in a shared document
as "anonymous [metastable animal designator]"

~~~
semiotagonal
I should have made it clear I was assuming that people were authenticated to
their Google account. I think most people who use GMail never log out, and
might not check the URL and realize they were navigating to a Google doc.

~~~
SiempreViernes
Then you entirely missed the point of the comment you replied to: that if you
willingly impose google surveillance on yourself you really don't have any
space to complain about being reminded of it.

~~~
semiotagonal
I think you're missing my point that even if you willingly impose Google
surveillance on yourself, Google Drive is still worse than Google Analytics
because your personally identifiable activity is visible to the author and/or
other readers, not just Google.

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Xorlev
> personally identifiable activity is visible to the author and/or other
> readers

View activity is not surfaced to users. View activity is tracked, and in a
_GSuite domain_ (such as your job) an admin can audit that activity. For a
standard Google account, a user cannot know whether another user has viewed
that document, let alone which user. Is there a way you're seeing this that
I'm missing? If so I'd like to know about it so I can raise it as an issue.

If you're thinking about docs/sheets/slides presence, unless you've been
shared directly on the document the owner (and other users) only see
"Anonymous <Animal>".

If the document is shared to you comment/edit access, that comment/edit
activity _will_ show up in the document's activity stream, but at that point
the owner of the document already knows you have access by virtue of sharing
it to you.

I realize you probably don't have much incentive to believe me, but as an
engineer on Drive I can say that we take privacy incredibly seriously.

~~~
semiotagonal
Thanks for the response. I'm mostly familiar with Google Docs in the
workplace, where it was apparent who was reading what document at a particular
moment from a list of users at the upper-right.

Separately, on my personal account, at some point I viewed a publicly shared
document from a well-known person, and that ended up in my "shared documents"
(or "documents shared with you"?) for ages. I wasn't sure if that sharing was
evident in both directions. I've avoided clicking on shared Google Drive
documents since then.

If it's not the case that the owner of the doc can audit activity, I stand
corrected.

EDITED TO ADD: I suppose the root of my confusion is that it's pretty hard to
distinguish the behavior of Google Drive from Google Docs; and once the lack
of privacy has been observed anywhere (e.g. using Docs the workplace), it's
hard not to assume it's also happening with PDF's shared via Google Drive,
simply because you can't know what the other person is seeing.

It's especially hard when there is an asymmetry (e.g. in a non-GSuite
environment, I can see some publicly shared document in my "shared with me"
list, but I guess the sharer can't see me).

~~~
Xorlev
> Thanks for the response. I'm mostly familiar with Google Docs in the
> workplace, where it was apparent who was reading what document at a
> particular moment from a list of users at the upper-right.

Right, which is the notion behind the Activity Dashboard in Docs too (GSuite
only). If you left a doc open and watched who popped up, you can effectively
know who views a document, so it was exposed as a panel instead. You can
disable your own activity showing up for document editors (which applies
retroactively) from that same pane.
([https://i.imgur.com/AOGmj40.png](https://i.imgur.com/AOGmj40.png))

Obviously, in GSuite especially, view activity is recorded and your GSuite
admin can audit that activity, but that's kind of an obvious need for a
business.

> Separately, on my personal account, at some point I viewed a publicly shared
> document from a well-known person, and that ended up in my "shared
> documents" (or "documents shared with you"?) for ages. I wasn't sure if that
> sharing was evident in both directions. I've avoided clicking on shared
> Google Drive documents since then.

If you open a link-shared document, it add it to your Shared With Me list (and
Recent list), but none of that is visible to the sharer. If you're worried
about even "Anonymous Fox" showing up, go to the /preview url, e.g.
[https://docs.google.com/document/d/<docid>/preview](https://docs.google.com/document/d/<docid>/preview).
This still adds it to Shared With Me/logs events on your account (it'll show
up in your Quick Access results), but none of it is visible to the sharer and
they won't even see your icon.

> it's hard not to assume it's also happening with PDF's shared via Google
> Drive, simply because you can't know what the other person is seeing.

This is a struggle, I agree. I work on it and sometimes I struggle to remember
what applies on GSuite vs. consumer. It's a complicated product and therefore
doesn't have one straightforward answer, especially in light of the myriad of
policies that GSuite admins can enable/disable. For instance, whether we even
record your search queries in Drive (for showing as recent searches in Drive)
is controlled by a policy your admin can set.

> It's especially hard when there is an asymmetry (e.g. in a non-GSuite
> environment, I can see some publicly shared document in my "shared with me"
> list, but I guess the sharer can't see me).

Right. Consumer: shows up in SWM, GSuite: shows up in SWM & you show up in
Activity Dashboard to editors (unless you turn it off as shown in
[https://i.imgur.com/AOGmj40.png](https://i.imgur.com/AOGmj40.png) \-- it may
default to off in your organization anyways).

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gpm
Heh, I missed the first ' and parsed the title as

    
    
        (The Color of Surveillance): ([Monitoring of] [Poor and Working Peoples Reading List])
    

instead of

    
    
        '([The Color of Surveillance]: [Monitoring of Poor and Working People])' [Reading List]
    

but I suppose the latter is partially about the former anyways.

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cgranier
Same here. Initially thought this was about libraries monitoring what poor
people read.

~~~
dang
Yes, that was confusing. I've repunctuated above.

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sdan
Mirror in case Drive crashes:
[https://sdan.cc/archive/CoS4%20Reading%20List.pdf](https://sdan.cc/archive/CoS4%20Reading%20List.pdf)

~~~
philshem
here's another mirror _in case drive crashes_

[https://gist.github.com/philshem/71507d4e8ecfabad252fbdf4d9f...](https://gist.github.com/philshem/71507d4e8ecfabad252fbdf4d9f8bdd2/raw/d4d45eb07cb8a1ee2cc1e9d449ba700bfcb8bbf9/CoS4%2520Reading%2520List.pdf)

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dang
Lists don't make good HN submissions, because the discussion ends up being
about the lowest common denominator of the items on the list, making it
generic instead of specific. Generic discussions are less interesting because
there are fewer unpredictable things to say. When threads turn generic, they
become repetitions of previous discussions, and usually turn nasty, almost as
if that's what the mind turns to for amusement in the absence of new things to
chew on.

It's better to pick the most interesting item on a list and submit that.
Curiosity thrives on the diffs between a new thing and other related things.

[https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20lists%20denom&sort=byDate&type=comment)

[https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20diffs&sort=byDate&type=comment)

~~~
4ntonius8lock
It's a shame, because some of those links are really interesting.

If they only included a little bit of a narrative, they could easily make
those links take on new meaning. Maybe even mixing examples of old with new
(like the surveillance and terrible abuses toward labor leaders in the 19th
century)

I think the list is a good starting point for something a little more
cohesive.

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brenden2
Kind of amusing that this PDF is hosted on Google's servers, given that Google
is running the largest surveillance operation in history.

~~~
user764743
That would be the NSA, which I guess is the same thing.

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grsrvs2vu29
Raw pastebin of the PDF contents here (Google Docs/PDF lol) so even those of
us with JS off can view it.

[https://pastebin.com/raw/baHYyHyX](https://pastebin.com/raw/baHYyHyX)

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gwenter
The title is quite confusing. Maybe a moderator could improve it... The
content is good.

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puggo
Wait, poor working people read?

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dmix
Every time I hear that term it's typically university students (and their
professors or related groups, in this case Georgetown Law) co-opting that
label and projecting their ideology on an idealized group of people whom they
don't have much in common with (besides some vague anger at society and
elites) - yet are convinced they know what's best for them... often pushing
mass centralized systems as the solution.

Systems that these same people will just happen to control and then later the
'vanguard' never actually gives up said power to the working poor. This story
has repeated itself in history a bunch of times and it continues to.

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hirundo
In the hands of the Chinese government being on such a list could get you sent
to a reeducation camp. The US isn't there yet, but "yet" does too much work
here. If you ever wonder why pro-gun folk are so adamantly against gun
registration, remember the yet. If 1A won't hold, 2A through 10A likely won't
either.

~~~
jascii
And what, may I ask, are your pea shooters going to do against the firepower
of a corrupt nation state?

I find it interesting to observe that most 2A defenders are totally willing to
support bills funding their potential adversaries and limiting your ability to
organize.

I would argue that in the modern world strong encryption and other safeguards
against surveillance much more worthy of of 2A protection than firearms..

~~~
blockmarker
People have this idea that gun owners would stand in an empty field shooting
at tanks with their handguns, and whoever won in that field battle would win
the control of the country, which is quite silly. First, if enough gunmen rose
up, the US would be ruined, and the tyranny with it. Sure, they can bomb any
rebelling city, but those rebelling cities are their cashcows. Enough of those
destroyed and the tyranny is less profitable than freedom; too many of those
destroyed and the country as a whole is ruined. Even if the factories are not
ruined, big population losses would be equally bad.

Or they can do terrorism. Assassinations, sabotage of infraestructure. Tyrants
live somewhere, and they send their children to school. Collaborators(which
probably would be civil servants, police and the army) also need to sleep
somewhere and have children and family. They could just be shot while going
home, or killed by IEDs while patrolling. Infraestructure is much easier to
destroy than to repair. Killing the power grid or destroying a bridge hurts
the rebellion as much or more than it does the dictatorship, but I don't think
they would care much.

Having guns is also a great detterent to creeping tyranny(well, at least when
the guns owners care enough to do something). If every overreach was met with
hundreds of thousands of angry people with guns on Washington, they would stop
overreaching.

I agree that it is quite foolish that these people support things which
actually work against them, but do not understimate what hundreds of thousands
of angry gunmen could do. Even if they didn't win, they would ruin the US. And
making tyranny less profitable than liberty is a good protection against it.

~~~
watwut
Basically, terrorism for freedom? I have hard time to find situation where it
actually worked that way in the past.

If it would be that easy, ISIS would do it long time ago.

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godelski
> I have hard time to find situation where it actually worked that way in the
> past.

US?

~~~
AnimalMuppet
That was armed insurrection, not terrorism.

The difference is more than just "the winners write the history books". The
methodology was different. The patriots/rebels/insurgents weren't setting off
truck bombs in city centers in the hope of making people not oppose them, and
not just because they didn't have truck bombs. They weren't trying to
assassinate the governor. It was fundamentally a war, not terrorism.

