> My son Atlas is just over nine months old [...] One thing that’s been troubling me, is that he probably wont have [privacy] in his lifetime.
> I write systems that predict the moods in real-time of nearly a million people who are communicating on the internet (HNProfile.com & RedditProfile.com).
Moral bankruptcy at its finest. No one is forcing you to write systems that do this. You can easily make top-tier salaries at companies that value the privacy of their customers.
As a prominent pessimist on this topic, lately I've seen several anecdotal evidence cases where this is actually not that true anymore.
If enough high-level tech talent starts refusing to write such systems then trust me, govts and corps are slowed down and inconvenienced for real. 5 junior programmers can't write software as well as 1 senior.
Sure those orgs might win in the end, but we can delay that "end" with years if not decades. And if they get frustrated by the delays, they'll make a mistake.
You need a phone, car, society to function and live a reasonably high quality of life.
OP has options here and this makes all the difference. No one is forcing him to write deanonymizing software, and he faces no loss in quality of life by finding a job in which he can work on something more ethical, whereas the people in the comic all face a significant loss.
Someone will write the software one way or another. All that OP would achieve by leaving is to increase the price for this specific thing a little bit. Also, insiders like OP always have specific insights into the full extent of the thing they are involved in so they also know really well how bad it is.
The "Hell," being commonly used as "Hey, even I do it!". In that context, it makes perfect sense: the author is showing their own involvement in what they so lament to demonstrate just how dire they see the situation.
I honestly don't see the incongruity. People are hypocrites. All of us, all the time. If only the morally pure could have meaningful conversations, the only people speaking would be infants.
> "True Names" by Vernor Vinge (1981): "The basic premise of that was, you had to basically hide your true name at all costs. It was an insight into the world we’re living in today … We have to figure it out. I think we have to go to pseudonymity or something. You’re gonna participate in this networked existence, you have to be connected to meatspace in some way."
Indeed. At least pseudonymity.
We need to compartmentalize. In meatspace, we must be totally unremarkable. We must make only routine communications, for entirely utilitarian purposes.
Everything even vaguely sensitive -- that is, everything that we want kept private -- must use secure channels. And if it's truly sensitive, it must be ~anonymous. With the degree of anonymity proportional to the level of sensitivity.
> Everything even vaguely sensitive -- that is, everything that we want kept private -- must use secure channels.
I see this in a different way.
The starting point should be that everything is secured. If you use the secure messaging only for non-mundane stuff, it stands out. So you want to add as much noise into the use profile of the secure channels as possible, to make it that much harder to detect when anything of value is being transmitted.
This, however, I completely agree with:
> And if it's truly sensitive, it must be ~anonymous
In the context of secure channels, that adds that the use of ~anonymous methods must not be any different from outside the channels. Preferably not even from the inside, because you have to assume that a portion of such a system is compromised at all times.
> The starting point should be that everything is secured. If you use the secure messaging only for non-mundane stuff, it stands out.
That's a good point. But consider, how do I use "secure messaging" with my meatspace bank? Or with my wife, or my meatspace friends? Sure, I use HTTPS. But trying to get any of those to use truly secure channels would be pointless. And even worse, it would attract attention.
For noise on secure channels, I torrent random stuff. That all goes through a VPN service. But among the torrent traffic, there are indirect VPN connections.
Very good questions, and something I believe we as a society AND as a profession are only starting to realise.
The truth is, people everywhere say they want security. But that's a white lie. What people really want is convenience. That is also the wedge we as a developer community can work with.
I truly believe that if you can make the secure option also the more convenient option, you won't be able to keep people away.[ß] As far as usability goes, secure and/or hardened software is still atrocious.
The point about meatspace bank is a really good one. Well, as it happens, WhatsApp based banking is a real thing. I found one startup doing that[0], but even before this I remember that somewhere (Philippines? Indonesia? Kenya?) WA was already used for bank customer support.
Now, is that somehow more secure than a well done, well maintained, properly hardened banking app from a dedicated big player? Certainly not. But it's hell of a lot better than a MVP from a company that might be barely in their second year to a basic banking license. It has the benefit of adding useful business traffic to a reasonably secure transport. Obviously it still depends on a known-malicious third party for routing, but then again, for a truly secure communications system you have to assume that you're dealing with compromised and/or actively malicious infrastructure.
Which makes it a very good first step. For any real progress, we will need at least another decade of research into usable, latency-sensitive, information-theoretically noisy communication systems. Secure and ~anonymous message routing is going to be a damn hard problem. (Without the latency part, and assuming very cheap bandwidth, something like a probabilistic K-anonymity based batched multicast might be a reasonable starting point.)
Even then, the usability has to be baked in and considered from the start.
> For noise on secure channels, I torrent random stuff. That all goes through a VPN service.
Now that's a really nice countermeasure. Well done!
ß: Global censorship and blanket bans with aggressive enforcement notwithstanding.
FYI, Absa is one of South Africa's largest banks, formed in 1991 by the merger of several large, long-established banks, and by now owns all of Barclays' African operations. It's not a startup.
Maybe a bank could support something like Briar or Ricochet, with P2P between Tor .onion instances. With secure 2FA, using hardware tokens. I'd switch in a nanosecond.
But they'd likely never satisfy KYC rules :(
And I do see many banks starting to use WhatsApp. It'd be better if they (at least) used Signal, but it's a start.
30 years ago, when anonymity was the default on the internet because of the low standard of trust that was universally presumed, this worked remarkably well. I'm thinking about IRC's golden age now. There is a small number of special-interest communication media (in software development, for example) where this still works today, like hackernews or freenode.
But for the vast majority of people and types of communication acts, anonymity is basically no longer an option: The presence of non-anonymous media like Facebook has displaced innocuous communication from media like IRC that do allow anonymity. People aren't going to go looking for kiddie porn on Facebook but IRC still enables that kind of information-seeking behaviour. People doing foodie-posts are not going to do that on IRC but go on Facebook instead. -- This means that IRC has become a really scary place to be if there's a possibility you might get deanonymized, and generally not a place where you will find like-minded individuals unless you are one screwed-up individual. On the flip-side of the coin, at Facebook etc, you are going to be the victim of surveillance capitalism.
So: Compartmentalizing doesn't work. Unless anonymity is the default for everyone and used for both sensitive and non-sensitive communication, it doesn't actually provide a solution to the problems of surveillance capitalism. And the majority of people are always going to be too dumb not to be tricked into deanonymizing themselves most of the time.
What sort of surprised me is that when you had the first generation with widespread internet access, they didn't remain deeply in love with psuedonymity. We all had our psuedonyms-- AIM screen names, email addresses that weren't firstname.lastname@domain.com, forum usernames derived from fantasy-novel characters, and the like-- but seemed perfectly eager to trade it away for non-anonymous alternatives once MySpace/Facebook/etc. became the dominant paradigm.
The concept of "I can have multiple, context-dependent identities" seems like it solves a lot of community problems naturally.
You can choose whether or not to leverage an established name between different communities. You can seek a fresh start by spawning a new identity and returning to zero. The context-dependent identity can hide or exaggerate factors that might trigger bias (can you tell from a username alone if the person you're writing to is 13 or 30, or do you have to actually judge what they're saying?)
I think the most effective use of it that still sticks around is the Reddit/HN throwaway accounts-- you want enough identity to get notified of responses without any further attachment to the rest of your life.
> So: Compartmentalizing doesn't work. Unless anonymity is the default for everyone and used for both sensitive and non-sensitive communication, it doesn't actually provide a solution to the problems of surveillance capitalism. And the majority of people are always going to be too dumb not to be tricked into deanonymizing themselves most of the time.
Well, it "provide[s] a solution to the problems of surveillance capitalism" for me. And for anyone else who cares. Everyone else will do what they want, and get what they get. Other than offering helpful suggestions from time to time, it's just not my problem. I used to think that it was, but I was a fool.
That's exactly how it is in True Names. Utilities and daemons are actually like demons in the fantasy genre. Or like knowing the true name of a genie. It's like casting spells. Hannu Rajaniemi does something very similar with invoking utility fog stuff.
The author really doesn’t have to move to undeveloped countries to stop posting online and developing tracking software... It’s not that black and white. We have a lot more freedom than he’s making it sound.
If you use a computer 24/7 you might feel oppressed by it. Like with anything.
I minored in history, maybe I didn’t pay enough attention to it, but I can’t think of a period where we’ve been more free than we are now. Not even 10 years ago. We live in a time where you can frankly do anything you want if you’re born in the western world. If you want to become a blacksmith who specialises in creating fantasy weapons, you can do that. If you want to disconnect and go live a self-sustainable life in the Swedish forest, you can do that and unlike the hippies of the 60ies you won’t even have to starve if you suck at it. And so on.
I think it’s completely possible to live a full life and never realise you had the option to be free though, and, I think it’s fair to blame the way we’ve constructed our society in the wake of new public management. We’ve essentially build a system where every human being is viewed as a Hunan resource. It starts in the daycare institution where the social workers have checklists for normal child development. It picks up in the school system where academic achievement is measured from the first classes and children have to know their path from the 6th grade to make sure they take the specific classes which allow them to advance to the next institution. The once you’re on the job market you’re evaluated on productivity and finally when you retire it’s about keeping you in good health so you cost less. All to make sure people are as efficient to the system as possible.
Social media and the massive surveillance state that we’ve build by sharing everything plays right into this. We self-censor and pretend, and everything we share on the “free” tech-platforms is kept and used against us. Which I completely agree is very worrisome.
The thing is though, 1984 was right. If anything the current level of surveillance and manufactured information is way worse than Orwell predicted, and yet, you can still go make fantasy swords in the Swedish forests if you wanted to.
I just don’t share the authors negative outlook. Maybe I’m naive, but I really don’t think that we’ll turn the west into China. I think things like the European GDPR is a show of this. We don’t want companies or governments to misuse our data, and we’ll punish them if they do. It’s happening slowly, but that’s how a democracy operates, because you have to compromise. It’s happening though, and it’s happening because people wanted it.
I also fully expect the younger generation to rebel more than we did. You see it already on climate issues, with children refusing to go to school if they won’t have a future anyway. I suspect they won’t want to keep our surveillance state or our HR centric view on society either.
>I also fully expect the younger generation to rebel more than we did. You see it already on climate issues, with children refusing to go to school if they won’t have a future anyway. I suspect they won’t want to keep our surveillance state or our HR centric view on society either.
I don't see this in my experience. I expected my stepkids' generation to all be real eco-zealots, totally concerned about everything my generation and before have done wrong. In practice, all of them that I know are a cross section - some are quite eco minded, but a lot aren't. They aren't all as PC as I expected them to be (ditto - a cross section, including some who are strongly anti). Most of them are just completely absorbed in their own lives, via whatever social platform is currently most popular.
None of them give a monkeys about their privacy, being tracked or anything else - they're totally blind to all these issues, and think that I'm a complete loon for bringing any of them up. I get the 'this is the future old man' routine fairly often, and none of them think that the consequences I'm concerned about have any relevance to them. (They range between 12 and 19 years old, FTR).
I appreciate this is anecdotal, but I don't think that the next generation will be the saviours we were expecting them to be. I expected them all to be totally tech-savvy and miles ahead of me - most of them don't even understand the basics of how the Internet works, let alone any of the details. It's the magic of the Wookie Hole Witch as far as they are concerned.
The only reason you can make fantasy weapons or live in the Swedish forest is because those things don't threaten the man. Try exposing state war crimes and see how far you get with your "freedom".
We have a lot more freedom than this guy makes it out to be.Is it shrinking ? Probably yes. All I can see though is a rather poor attempt to advertise his startup.
> I write systems that predict the moods in real-time of nearly a million people who are communicating on the internet (HNProfile.com & RedditProfile.com).
Moral bankruptcy at its finest. No one is forcing you to write systems that do this. You can easily make top-tier salaries at companies that value the privacy of their customers.