This is my summary of Attack Surface by Cory Doctorow. It's funny, you can replace censorship with anything really and still argue the statement is true.
Censorship is Alice wants to send a message to Bob through Eve and Eve throws it away. Solution: Don't send the message through Eve, send it through Carol, who doesn't throw it away. Interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.
Privacy is Alice doesn't want Eve to read her messages to Bob, so she encrypts them. Then Eve can't read them. How is Eve supposed to route around this? Read Carol's messages instead? Not the same thing. Alice and Bob still have privacy.
Alice doesn't want Eve to read her messages to Bob. Bob, however, is careless after he reads it, and lets Eve read it as well. Now Alice wants Bob (and Eve) to stop showing her message to everyone. Alice is screwed.
The privacy violation is Bob being careless and losing the message to Eve. That isn't caused by the internet, it's caused by Bob.
When Eve has the message, privacy is already lost. Preventing Eve from spreading it around is technologically equivalent to censorship at that point so then you're just proving the original formulation.
It doesn't mean you can insert just anything. "The net interprets beef as damage and routes around it." If you're an animal activist you might like for that to be true, but that's not really how it works.
Bob isn't careless. Bob is trying to offer a service free of charge, and Daryl is paying for metadata. So Bob makes a deal in order to provide the service. Daryl's offer is open to anybody, so even if Alice doesn't trust Bob, everybody from Edith through Zach is also selling metadata to Daryl too.
The definition of "the internet" that you are using, is sort of like defining "the U.S. government" by the constitution. Yet, it is more useful in most cases, when referring to "the U.S. government", to include the way in which it actually, typically works. If your point is that it is possible to make an internet which did not violate privacy, sure, it is possible. But, that's not the internet we have, and this is not just a coincidence or a bit of bad luck, but rather an intrinsic feature of the very ease of networking and communicating on a vast scale which is also what's good about it. Making an internet which respected privacy might be possible, but it's much, much harder than before the internet.
Sorry, mixed up the actors in all the silly metaphors. Comcast would probably tell you that they get you cheaper prices or nebulously better service via their data sharing agreements, but you know as well as me that it's as bullshit as it is ubiquitous. I'd say vote with your dollars, but that doesn't seem to work anymore either. Gotta vote in stronger legislation protecting privacy, but that seems insurmountable too.
The internet is what enables Eve to spread the formerly private message to literally anyone on Earth in a matter of seconds. That’s a qualitative difference from pre-Internet times.
Relevant point, although Eve could be tricky and Bob careless, both. But I suppose the bad part is that either Eve being tricky or Bob being careless is enough, in most cases, unless Bob is a security professional (and even then only maybe).
Privacy is Alice wants to be able to read things from Bob, who has posted them on Eve's site, without Eve keeping a record of them forever and sending it to a very long list of possibly malevolent actors.
Bob wants to post on Eve's site because the list of possibly malevolent actors are paying him.
The market routes around it, not the Internet. There is no money in privacy. Very few will pay for it (or even understand it enough to make a conscious choice), and there's a lot of money to be made in amassing data on users.
There is money in privacy. But there is even more money in pretending you give privacy while giving everything or at least what is juicy enough to malevolent (usually state) actors.
Yeah, about the original quote, "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it", the sentiment refers to packet switching. That's ISO/OSI layer 3-4. And it's true - the packets will find their way around the Internet, even if pieces of the network drop.
Importantly, this does not apply to the application layer. The actual Internet services regular people use. The top of the stack of the Internet is very strongly centralized. There's no routing around anything there, because you're not broadcasting packets - you're asking a service provider to kindly do an action on your behalf. And the service provider can just refuse it.
>People who uses these new entry points into the Net may be in for a shock. Unlike the family-oriented commercial services, which censor messages they find offensive, the Internet imposes no restrictions. Anybody can start a discussion on any topic and say anything. There have been sporadic attempts by local network managers to crack down on the raunchier discussion groups, but as Internet pioneer John Gilmore puts it, "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it."
>"The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it."
>This was quoted in Time Magazine's December 6, 1993 article "First Nation in Cyberspace", by Philip Elmer-DeWitt. It's been reprinted hundreds or thousands of times since then, including the NY Times on January 15, 1996, Scientific American of October 2000, and CACM 39(7):13.
>In its original form, it meant that the Usenet software (which moves messages around in discussion newsgroups) was resistant to censorship because, if a node drops certain messages because it doesn't like their subject, the messages find their way past that node anyway by some other route. This is also a reference to the packet-routing protocols that the Internet uses to direct packets around any broken wires or fiber connections or routers. (They don't redirect around selective censorship, but they do recover if an entire node is shut down to censor it.)
>The meaning of the phrase has grown through the years. Internet users have proven it time after time, by personally and publicly replicating information that is threatened with destruction or censorship. If you now consider the Net to be not only the wires and machines, but the people and their social structures who use the machines, it is more true than ever.
>"We make free software affordable."
>This is the slogan on the back of the first Cygnus Support T-shirt.
It’s ideological principles like this that got me into computers. I hate the new internet bf cancel culture. We had an amazing thing and now it’s in the toilet.
Real name and required accounts ruined this. Now, everyone is too afraid to talk. Things were better, on average, when no one knew who anyone else was.
Have you been on social media or any political thread on HN lately? No one is afraid to speak their mind about anything.
I liked the old web, but not because it was uncensored, rather because the psychos stayed in their cages. Now they're flinging their excrement everywhere.
I hate to break it to you but your employer could always fire you if they didn't like you or your politics, real name accounts on the internet and "cancel culture" didn't change anything in that regard.
Saying “The Net interprets privacy as damage and routes around it” is more meaningful to me than the original statement because I am forced to make choices on privacy on a regular basis. I see the Net as a screwdriver prying the lid off my mostly sealed life and forcing me to interact with it. Sometimes it’s a lot of fun to assimilate with borg, but I worry about the hidden price tag!
One could view the "Net" mostly as an organism that wants to grow. In this case saying privacy does make a lot of sense.
One could view the "Net" mostly as people: as it's hardware/software commanded by people who are sometimes commanded by companies. So depending on your point of view the Net can mean a lot of things, hence you could replace “censorship” with what has meaning for different types of people. I find going down this route to be insightful or just silly fun because you can start thinking in so many different ways. Correctly or not...
the net certainly does route around many things. I feel thatostlu privacy loss comes from the bad companies we transact with. the net is fairly nuetral, privacy or not wise. but the anti privacy forces certainly can put this routing machine to many vulgar uses, yes.
owning the means of production seems like a rising moral imperative, as polticial/governmental forces increasingly bend more and entities to make more unprivate systems.
Privacy isn't damage. Privacy is a threat to profits, it is a form of competition. The less competition, the more freedom to suck up more data and repackage it as product.
It's a long,layered, and sometimes difficult read, but The Age of Surveillance Capitalism thoroughly lines up the stones and turns them over. After hearing this, I was obligated to buy it , and read it.
If we assume that there exists information about you, what is privacy if not censorship of your private information? Given this assumption, the saying must then be true, and privacy is untenable.
However, that assumption is not necessarily true. As one measure, we can make it illegal to store information about everybody in the first place (GDPR, etc.). As a second measure, we can design new (or resurrect old) networking protocols and systems which by design, and provably, can’t know too much about everyone; decentralization is the usual term for these.
It's also a great heuristic for controling your own privacy. Digital information on the internet spreads. So put it out there knowing it'll be out forever.
I've seen privacy fatalism grow as an outlook recently. PII of yours in somebody else's contacts list is sufficient to have it "out forever" (see e.g. Facebook), and that is, if not completely out of my control, it's close to it.
The thought is: Given that they will get my information from someone else, why should I not get the benefits offered for giving up my PII.
Privacy is Alice doesn't want Eve to read her messages to Bob, so she encrypts them. Then Eve can't read them. How is Eve supposed to route around this? Read Carol's messages instead? Not the same thing. Alice and Bob still have privacy.