The solution here shouldn't be technical; it should be legal.
If we rely on the technical path, Comcast can achieve the same by how many active IPv6 addresses are in use. Even if you aren't using your phone, the device is going to be constantly pinging services like email, and your ISP can use that to piece together how many people are at home.
If we rely on legal protection, then not only Comcast, but all ISPs will be prohibited from spying on their customers. Ideally the legislation would be more broad and stop other forms of commercial/government surveillance, but I can't imagine a world where Congress could actually achieve something that widely helpful for regular citizens.
We suffer from a problem that engineers want nothing to do with politics. I 1000% agree we need a digital bill of rights. It pains me every time a “well behaved” website pops up a cookie consent banner for the billionth time after I already consented because the browser wiped all the persistent user identifiers available to it. For my protection -_-
I want privacy codified in human law. I didn't vote for standards bodies to pave the road to hell by removing every goddamned persistent handle we can find from existence. I didn't vote for the EU to reinvent an internet worse than popup ads by attacking the symptoms not the cause. I would rather have the internet of the 2000s back in a heartbeat than keep putting up with shitty “technical solutions” to corporations having too much power at scale. I don’t care if people break the law: prosecute them when they do and make the punishments enough to deter future law breakers.
There is absolutely something civilized beyond a lawless advertising wild west where the technical solution is to all be masked Zorros.
Why is it that if someone said “we need a legal solution to gun violence” the people that say “no we need a technical solution all people should wear kevlar and carry 9mm pistols” are considered the lunatics but when we ask for a legal solution to rampant non-consensual tracking for the purpose of indoctrinating the consumer class with propaganda we all laugh and say bah the solution must be technical? I don’t get it.
No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks
- Paris, 1948, Universal
Declaration of Human Rights
Which says nothing about a business profiling customers that walk through the door and selling its profiles to aggregators. It says nothing about requiring consent before soliciting individuals or subjecting them to psychologically manipulative advertisements. Etc. We need more.
The problem is interpretation. The key phrase is "interference with privacy" which is ambiguous yet all encompassing. You say it says nothing toward solicitation or manipulation where I interpret both of those acts as "interference with my privacy." Not saying your version is wrong, by the way, just different from mine as a example of where the protection falls apart.
My gut feeling as that no matter how much additional and specific language we add to any bill of privacy rights, there will always be holes or work-arounds due to interpretation and semantics. This is how lawyers in most robust legal systems make their living, after all. The data that results from robbing us of consent, privacy and agency when engaged with websites, web/mobile apps and software is so insanely valuable that the people interested in collecting and selling it will be happy to keep one step ahead of whatever language we come up with that attempts to mitigate their actions.
We need a different solution, one that returns us to the levels of implied trust I remember from the late 1990's/early 2000's Internet, one that prevents corporate entities from being the dominant drivers behind its growth and development. However, I am not technical enough or imaginative enough to even guess at what that solution might be, so from my perspective, the battle is already lost and we are at their mercy unless we avoid having an online presence as much as possible...a bit like that old classic movie War Games, the only way to win is not to play.
> My gut feeling as that no matter how much additional and specific language we add to any bill of privacy rights, there will always be holes or work-arounds due to interpretation and semantics.
Nobody will ever write a perfect law and you’ll always see cases like dark patterns when people try to unsubscribe from things or try to maintain their privacy, until there is proper enforcement and businesses start getting punished for violating the intent of the law. That is also unlikely.
That's a declaration, which is not binding. The ECHR art. 8 has similar contents and is binding. However, it has a 'unless we really want to'-portion:
"except such as is in accordance with the law and is necessary in a democratic society in the interests of national security, public safety or the economic well-being of the country, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others."
Currently 'the West' happens to be doing its best to quash international law, so I'd expect even that thin veneer to crumble rather soon.
> It pains me every time a “well behaved” website pops up a cookie consent banner for the billionth time after I already consented because the browser wiped all the persistent user identifiers available to it.
Do yourself a favor and enable the Cookie lists in uBlock Origin.
I'm personally grateful that a law requires my consent before tracking me. That means I should not be tracked without me saying OK without monetary risks.
> Do yourself a favor and enable the Cookie lists in uBlock Origin.
Could you elaborate on this please? I'm sifting through the options and not sure what I'm looking for (disclaimer: I have never once opened the uBlock Origin settings menu in all the years I've used it).
EasyList cookiefilter. Works in uBlock lite as well. It hides all permission notices and consent forms for things you are (presumably) blocking anyway.
I've found you need to remember that you've done this as occasionally I'll get a website that behaves strangely until I link the behavior to uBlock, temporarily disable it and fulfill the cookie notice, then I can enable it and proceed.
Setting a language preference cookie is not tracking and I will die on that hill. The law requires consent before using a cookie to store even a mundane option that was just directly modified by a user. Collecting a crash report is not tracking a user. Even first party product analytics is not tracking a user.
Tracking a user across domains using a 3rd party aggregator to serve add and do attribution is the evil. And the EPD far overshoots the mark of specifically addressing that evil.
A language preference cookie is not tracking under the GDPR and doesn't need to be promoted for. Of course, if you take that language preference and feed it into your advertising to identify and target people, then it becomes tracking.
You're correct under the GDPR but incorrect under the older ePrivacy Directive. EU sites need to be compliant with both, and so the cookie banners persist.
> The Directive provision applicable to cookies is Article 5(3). Recital 25 of the Preamble recognises the importance and usefulness of cookies for the functioning of modern Internet and directly relates Article 5(3) to them but Recital 24 also warns of the danger that such instruments may present to privacy. The change in the law does not affect all types of cookies; those that are deemed to be "strictly necessary for the delivery of a service requested by the user", such as for example, cookies that track the contents of a user's shopping cart on an online shopping service, are exempted.
Language preferences are (in all of the deployments I've seen) legally categorized as functional cookies and not strictly necessary cookies. Same with e.g. dark mode/light mode or other preference toggles
The wording is annoying, but no. I’ve received legal advice on this topic. Functional cookies are not strictly necessary. It seems very backwards but it’s how the industry currently treats things.
Read: https://gdpr.eu/cookies/ …after you dismiss the cookie banner, of course. I add this not only as a quip but to highlight that even a gdpr explainer website which you’d expect isn’t doing the evil thing of tracking users, has interpreted the relevant laws such that it finds it necessary to promt the user in order to simply explain the gdpr and epd/epr…
> This is not an official EU Commission or Government resource. [...] Nothing found in this portal constitutes legal advice.
It's easier and safer to just claim that you must prompt for everything, and it serves the goal of obfuscating bad behaviour.
Cookies that are functionally necessary to do what the user is there for, not to track them, are OK, that's the spirit and intent of the law. Even if you think the wording means that, realistically, the EU isn't coming after anyone for a legitimate good-faith use of language cookies without a banner, and they'd clarify if that was how they intended to enforce it.
I did, I quoted stuff from it, but you are not helping. You should quote the things relevant to the point your are making. Especially when you notice people are not picking up. You also keep saying that gdpr is not EPD, but your link is short on details about this and with this point, you lead me to seek information in sections that are irrelevant.
But I see what you are saying now. That page lists the different purposes, including preference cookies (which include language preferences) and strictly necessary cookies, and I know asking consent is not necessary only for strictly necessary cookies (this page says it, I quoted that part earlier).
If that page is right, you are right and I was wrong. Thanks for persisting.
Well, that would be a shame, and that probably would explain why cd.cz makes me pick English each time I visit. I was assuming they could just save this preference in a cookie, but they obviously wouldn't be able to since I didn't provide consent, since I hide the cookie banners and they don't ask for consent later when needed.
I guess it it safe to ask consent in doubt, but I'm not yet convinced the language cookie cannot be considered strictly necessary. How can you correctly provide a requested service to a user if you don't use a language they understand, and how storing the language is not for fulfilling an explicit request from them?
>The law requires consent before using a cookie to store even a mundane option that was just directly modified by a user.
If your are referring to GDPR this is wrong. GDPR does not require consent for strictly necessary cookies.
>Strictly necessary cookies — These cookies are essential for you to browse the website and use its features, such as accessing secure areas of the site. Cookies that allow web shops to hold your items in your cart while you are shopping online are an example of strictly necessary cookies. These cookies will generally be first-party session cookies. While it is not required to obtain consent for these cookies, what they do and why they are necessary should be explained to the user.
Though language preference does not seem like something that requires a cookie. Just respect the Accept-Language header. There is no need to reinvent the wheel here.
No I am referring to the EPD as I state in my comment, an acronym you should know since it’s defined in the explainer you link. As someone who has experience in this area, it’s not as simple as “just use the Accept-Language header it will be fine”.
In any event, that’s besides then point. There are non-tracking cookies that get swept up in the EPD’s consent requirements. This causes way more popups than needed to address the real problem of users being tracked and profiled across domains. The result is users being inundated with consent banners on freaking homepages.
If you changed the requirements to “consent is required for marketing cookies” then I’d wager it would vastly reduce the need for these banners. You could show the banner interstitially as soon as a customer entered your funnel and wanted to try to perform spooky attribution.
In my experience the banners are useless because they don’t actually tell me whether the site is tracking me or not (the behavior I presumably want to prevent). They just tell me whether the site uses cookies, which I’m okay with 99% of the time, so I just click yes.
We got it from understanding the legal difference between strictly-necessary and functional cookies. I’ve received legal advice on this topic. The law is crap. It is bad and harmful and botches a nuanced topic. That’s my original point.
> The law requires consent before using a cookie to store even a mundane option that was just directly modified by a user
Nope.
That's exactly why the evil cookie modals are not on the GDPR but only on the sites that want to track you and now need to ask you for your consent before doing so. That's usually exactly where good faith GDPR detractors are wrong, and that's what needs to be repeated again and again in those discussions.
You're correct that the GDPR specifically doesn't require this, but you're incorrect that "the law" doesn't—the 2004 EU ePrivacy Directive requires affirmative consent for all cookies, and it's being enforced much more strictly now in a post-GDPR world
No you didn’t. You’re misunderstanding the classification of strictly necessary vs functional vs marketing/tracking cookies. Go talk to a lawyer. I’m sure they will clear things up for you.
It should be noted that Mein Kampf's first three chapters are pretty much a call for the common citizen to start becoming more interested - if not involved - in his local politics. I am of the opinion that this is the reason that the book was banned. The antisemitism in the book is far more restrained than I was expecting. But the call to hold politicians accountable to the people - that was a surprise.
This is an insane take on a book that literally advocates for genocide, and pushes race theory as a cause for Germany's downfall after ww1, and justification for the subsequent murder of millions.
The reason is our government and regulators are captured by business concerns which profit from our data. The government in turn views mass surveillance as a powerful tool for social control. Although there are many more people whose privacy is violated by these policies than benefit from them, the rich and powerful minority is more organized in its efforts and thus comes out ahead in the balance of power.
> the rich and powerful minority is more organized
They show up. I've worked on privacy legislation at the state and local level. Barely anybody calls or writes in support. That means barely anybody would turn up to a contested primary election over it, or donate to a challenger, or organise the foregoing en masse. Contrast that with bread-and-butter or activist issues, where it's immediately clear there is political capital at the very least on the board.
Or the people elected by other humans could... IDK do their job of representing the people rather than a handful of corporations.
The problem is what I said in other comnents here. This is the fabel of sodom and gomorrah in action. We have no people with any moral compass in charge.
> do their job of representing the people rather than a handful of corporations
There is no incentive to represent the civically disengaged. Particularly on niche issues like privacy.
> We have no people with any moral compass in charge
No system works if reliant on wishing up on a star that people were better. We have a lot of problems with our republic's design. None of them can address problems people don't care to involve themselves in respect of.
>no incentive to represent the civically disengaged
THATS LITERALLY THE JOB.
You are literally arguing that if I got a job at a bank and started stealing the deposits it would be ok because I had no incentive not to.
Actually now that I think about it you are also reinforcing my point. Sodom and Gomorrah. You yourself have such poor moral compass that when another person acts maliciously you give them a pass because of course that's what they would do. Because its also what you would do because you also have no moral compass.
The city could not be saved. Not because "god" destroyed it but because the people themselves destroyed it. No good people existed there.
No, it’s not and it never has been. (Civic engagement and persistent watchfulness on liberties is a universal drumbeat across democracies.)
The courts et al are tasked with protecting the minority from the tyranny of the majority, or in this case, the engaged. Making the judiciary coëqual was our founders’ attempt at taming this tendency. But nothing knowledgeable ever written has suggested our republic should run on autopilot.
> when another person acts maliciously you give them a pass
I’m not giving them a pass, I’m saying the system is acting as designed. If people don’t give a shit about privacy but give a LOT of shits about abortion and cost of living, the elected should focus on the latter. This isn’t moral corruption, it’s responding to expressed preference. (Also, Comcast using Wi-fi to aid law enforcement is far from a black-and-white moral issue. It’s a political and legal question with multiple equilibria when it comes to right answers.)
There is being righteous and there is being right. The bulk of advocates for digital privacy enjoy the former and almost take their failure at the latter as further evidence of their righteousness. (It’s a lot easier to wax lyrical about Sodom and Gomorrah than pick up the phone once a month and attend meetings.)
The whole point of representative democracy was supposed to be that you elect someone to represent your interests, so you don't need to participate in the day to day mundanity of managing the bureaucracy.
The bar rises. The vote was supposed to be enough. If people call in, well, that's not enough, after all, if you really cared, you'd have written an email, or filled out the correct form in the FTC call for feedback thing, which you knew was happening because you monitor the day to day activities of the FTC, the FDA, and the sixty other agencies that might ask for your opinion on something, without which oh well they'll just do what the lobbyists tell them. Oh, you did fill the form? Well, too bad, our lobbyists tell us that you're a bot. Oh, you're not a bot? Well, if you truly cared, you'd have come to the office of such and such at so and so time. You did? Well, if you truly cared, you'd attend more city council meetings, board of education meetings, representative town halls, senate town halls. You'd have written the senator, the congressperson, the state senator, the state congressperson, the mayor, the governor, the president, the president's dog.
What's becoming clear is that the idea of representative democracy is a good one, but the various implementations throughout history have missed the mark - weirdly, inevitably, all giving way with barely a whimper to highly concentrated forms of power, since the Romans.
We should seek to develop, and teach, solutions that empower each individual to take action. This liberal (as in, liberal democracy) idea that things can only get done if you convince 1000, 10,000, 1,000,000 people to do the exact same specific action, is disempowering, disenfranchising, and leads to concentration of power in the hands of the few who can wield the capital equivalent of 1,000,000 people in the form of lobbying, disinformation campaigns, or whatever other wack shit billionaires and corporations get up to.
Direct action seems to be the way to empower people to actually get things done, and syndicalist trade unionism seems to be a good way to balance between individual engagement in the serious work of organizing society, while leveraging the good ideas of representative democracy to allow representatives to manage some of the more tedious aspects of day to day communication and organization between various groups.
I freely admit this is utopian thinking, but I sure wish our world would try more experimentation in governance and organization rather than all of us just repeatedly smacking ourselves in the faces with the baseball bat of capitalist liberal democracy and hoping maybe one time we'll come away without a bloody nose or worse.
> whole point of representative democracy was supposed to be that you elect someone to represent your interests, so you don't need to participate in the day to day mundanity of managing the bureaucracy
According to whom? Nothing in the Federalist Papers or our country’s founding envisions fire-and-forget politics.
> sure wish our world would try more experimentation in governance
The correct place for this experimentation is small governments. And to my knowledge, this experimentation does happen. It just doesn’t necessarily have the effects its framers imagined. RCV didn’t break the two-party system, for example. And public-sector unions have turned into pests.
> There is no incentive to represent the civically disengaged
You're repeatedly misrepresenting or misunderstanding the issue. The tl'dr is that Bezos' civic engagement weighs more than my civic engagement, more than a million of me even. This is one easy way to take the casual and overly general "you're civically disengaged" victim blaming off the table.
Your elected representatives already know your interests, they were a precondition of winning the election. They don't need tens/hundreds of thousands of citizens writing them a letter every time so they are reminded of those interests. This shouldn't turn into a part time job for all citizens.
You casually handwave away the abusers' role with a simple "ah people aren't better" while in the same sentence blaming the abused for not doing enough?
Large corporations have full time lobbyists. They only have to send one "letter". You don't expect every shareholder and employee to be "engaged" just because a company's interest is in fact their interest. Your opinions will be shaped by whether you're more a shareholder or employee, or a "civically disengaged" single parent with 3 jobs.
> We have a lot of problems with our republic's design
The big one being that money is a superpower so the more one has, the more one can take. Or hang behind the predator pack and feed on the leftovers. After all a billionaire's rising tide will lift a millionaire's boat too. Jumping through mental hoops to justify the current situation by victim blaming isn't a prerequisite of this, it's a choice.
> Bezos' civic engagement weighs more than my civic engagement
Again, I worked on these issues. Bezos and friends never showed up. Nobody showed up. This wasn’t a battle between David and Goliath, it was an empty field to which some generals showed up, looked around and then left.
> money is a superpower so the more one has, the more one can take
To a limit. The last few years have been a barn full of monied candidates being trounced by insurgents.
And again, in any case, not germane to this issue. Most people who would call in on digital privacy don’t bother because they’re lazy or think it’s useless. When they do, e.g. when the EFF mobilises, it’s a quick battle. (The problem being such mobilisation has tended to be reactionary. In part due to the other overlap between digital privacy advocates who will civically engage and libertarians. So we don’t get positive pressure to pass protections, just occasional negative pressure against legal encroachment.)
Working on something means you put in effort, not that it's focused properly or that you even understand the real issues. At best you'll solve your problems without caring or understanding if it solves anyone else's.
> Bezos and friends never showed up.
Case in point. Bezos and friends don't need to "show up" anywhere you'd know. Their interests are implicitly considered and they're transmitted on channels you and I don't have access to. I'm talking about the general issue of asymmetric representation. This is where money matters.
> The last few years have been a barn full of monied candidates being trounced by insurgents.
You are conflating winning a popular election with leading for the people. Such statements in 2025 US are ridiculously disconnected. Almost without exception in recent history the wealthy always increased their wealth faster than the poor, and at their expense. Just over a decade ago the poorest 50% had 0.4% of the US wealth. No wealth means no power, not even personal agency, let alone in national policy. Are you telling me that finally the "insurgents" are fixing this and with their help the bottom half will start gaining the wealth and power from the super rich? Because if you aren't saying this, you aren't saying anything. The powerful will keep pushing and getting what they need, and you'll keep blaming "the lazy" that things don't change.
> Most people who would call in on digital privacy don’t bother because they’re lazy or think it’s useless.
Most people are assaulted with many, many more attacks on their rights and wellbeing. Those are more immediate concerns. Over 50% of US population just barely eeks out more that $10k in wealth. When they're drowning in debt, living from (social security) paycheck to paycheck, worried what else they'll lose next, showing up to fight for digital privacy, or almost anything that's not life and death, is the least of their concerns.
You decided to label them "lazy". Ever wondered if your work "on these issues" is tainted by this opinion, and that's why ultimately all you can achieve is only for the people who can afford it? Because you can afford it, and the lazy don't deserve it. The correlation is there.
> Their interests are implicitly considered and they're transmitted on channels you and I don't have access to. I'm talking about the general issue of asymmetric representation
I’ve worked on other issues that got passed into legislation. In the privacy cases, I was speaking directly to the electeds.
Nobody showed up. They were dead ends unless they could be linked to an issue people care about, e.g. abortion in blue states and Chinese espionage in red ones.
> Most people are assaulted with many, many more attacks on their rights and wellbeing. Those are more immediate concerns
People with strong views on digital privacy tend to be wealthier and better-educated than the average American. Also, the single mother of three working two jobs will show up to town halls and electeds’ field offices when it comes to issues they care about. And it’s impactful.
People do show up and civically engage. Just not on digital privacy.
> Working on something means you put in effort, not that it's focused properly or that you even understand the real issues
They definitely understand them far more than you, who has zero experience with them and regularly makes fallacious arguments and outright incorrect claims about them.
> Their interests are implicitly considered and they're transmitted on channels you and I don't have access to.
Where, exactly?
> You are conflating winning a popular election with leading for the people.
No, you failed to actually read their comment correctly. Their comment was a refutation of your claim that "money is a superpower so the more one has, the more one can take". They were not claiming that winning an election meant leading for the people, only pointing out the evidence against your claim.
> Because if you aren't saying this, you aren't saying anything.
What does this even mean?
> you'll keep blaming "the lazy" that things don't change
Fact: active participation from voters is a necessary precondition for a democracy to survive.
> showing up to fight for digital privacy, or almost anything that's not life and death, is the least of their concerns
Yes, that's correct, but those same people don't participate on politics at all, with any of the time that they have. The middle class doesn't participate. I've literally never heard a friend or acquaintance of mine say that they've ever contacted a representative (in federal or state government) about a political issue. This factually is an issue of people being lazy and disengaged, because of the fact that people with lots of disposable time and income don't put in the effort.
> You decided to label them "lazy". Ever wondered if your work "on these issues" is tainted by this opinion
No, it's a trivial implication of the nature of democracies. If you don't get that active participation is necessary for democracies to survive, you fundamentally don't understand how democracies work.
This is also an extremely lazy cop-out (which is thematically consistent) where you're dismissing someone's opinion because they have more experience than you in that field...which is insane.
> that's why ultimately all you can achieve is only for the people who can afford it
And, again, this is factually incorrect as to the root of the problem, because the people who can afford to participate in politics (which at the very least includes the middle-class) do not.
> No wealth means no power, not even personal agency, let alone in national policy.
This is also factually incorrect. The eligibility to vote has zero requirements as to income or wealth. Bezos gets the exact same number of votes as I do, despite having orders of magnitude more wealth. And guess how our representatives get elected?
You should really consider listening to someone who has actual experience in the relevant field rather than spewing fallacies and factual inaccuracies.
Any recommendations on possible regulatory responses to the collection, processing and sale of human motion/activity data collected via WiFi and other RF Sensing?
> Any recommendations on possible regulatory responses to the collection, processing and sale of human motion/activity data collected via WiFi and other RF Sensing?
Research your state's privacy laws and submit a cool and concise complaint to your regulators, e.g. attorney general, consumer protection bureaus, public utility commissions, et cetera. These offices are understaffed and overworked--there is a good chance they haven't noticed this.
If you want to throw cash at the problem, check if Xfinity is pulling this crap in Illinois. (Or another state with a a BIPA [1].) One could argue that one's radar cross section is biometric [1]. That opens up avenues for financing litigation.
Finally, always, call your electeds. U.S. Congressmen and Senators, yes, but also your state legislators. Put it on their radars. (Most offices will put a staffer on a novel issue if more than a couple people call in about it.) If you want to supercharge this effect, find a local party organisation (e.g. such and such town or county D/R committee or club), go to their meeting and try to get it on the agenda.
> They show up. I've worked on privacy legislation at the state and local level. Barely anybody calls or writes in support.
This is by design. A lot of people talk about RTO in regards to business real estate but there's also the aspect of keeping people so busy and exhausted that they don't show up when it matters.
> there's also the aspect of keeping people so busy and exhausted that they don't show up when it matters
This would make sense if people didn’t show up for anything. They do. Including very overworked folks.
The unfortunate truth is the people most interested in privacy overlap significantly with the politically nihilistic and lazy. They’ve never called their elected or shown up to a town hall and, moreover, never will, because of course it’s useless.
> It pains me every time a “well behaved” website pops up a cookie consent banner for the billionth time after I already consented because the browser wiped all the persistent user identifiers available to it. For my protection -_-
Yep, you're right on the money. The correct course of action is for those of use who recognize this to cease arguing on the Internet with those who don't and connect with one another offline. We're in dire need of something akin to a 21st century Continental Congress.
"engineers want nothing to do with politics". Do you mean Comcast engineers see this as a purely technical challenge without caring about implications? In general we are seeing more engineers taking positions on a variety of political issues.
While I agree that we should have legal codes protecting our online and digital rights, I’m convinced that there are enough Bad People on the Internet that we do indeed still need strong technical protections as well.
And sometimes, you don't even know what the feature will even be used for.
Today it's an automatic subtitle generator for people with hearing difficulties. Tomorrow it'll be an AI training data generator. In a year, the NSA will re-purpose it into a mass surveillance tool.
> And sometimes, you don't even know what the feature will even be used for.
I did some work in the early 2010s that we expected to be used for computational photography, gaming, and little else. Years later, after I had already left the company, its primary use case became image stabilization for quadcopter drones, something that had not crossed our minds at all when we were building that stuff.
Cue in all the drone footage from the Russian invasion of Ukraine. FUCK. FUCK FUCK.
This is all true, and I suppose I participated in a signed update mechanism that I knew the (corporate) end user probably wasn't going to be given the keys to. But, I think there's a difference between this and deliberately going to work on a system that's clearly just top-down designed for something low.
For example, I don't think there's anyone in the (large!) fixed-odds betting terminal industry that can honestly say their work is a good thing for the end users.
I genuinely wonder if people would wind up spending less money if they had to pay for services than if they get exposed to ads that lead them to buy more things. But either way, once ads and "free with ads" are gone, there's much more room for other competitors.
Okay, you think that, but as we've seen even banning TikTok alone is incredibly controversial and ultimately seems to have failed. Banning Instagram and TikTok doesn't seem politically feasible. So what do you do?
Would ads still be worth enough if they were targeted based on things like what you watch/read/follow/subscribe to on that platform and your general location?
Or can instagram only be free if ads are targeted to detailed profiles of individuals built over decades as they are tracked across the whole internet?
> Would ads still be worth enough if they were targeted based on things like what you watch/read/follow/subscribe to on that platform and your general location?
The heavily profiled ads cost a lot more money for the advertiser to run compared to traditional ads, if those platforms turn to contextual ads they do not have their special expensive profiled ads product to sell anymore.
So it's not about the perceived effectiveness of advertisements that you feel as a user, it's about the rather more unique product that they sell to advertisers that really raises their revenue.
And another reason you don’t want laws governing the internet is that politicians are dumb. As soon as I heard about the laws I knew this was going to happen.
> ”Google searches for online tools like VPNs have surged in Florida after Pornhub, one of the world's largest adult websites, blocked access to users in the state," CBS News reported earlier this month. "Since the end of November, Google searches for VPNs have surged in the Florida, according to Google Trends. From the week of Dec. 22 - 28 to Dec. 29 - Jan. 4, searches nearly doubled. Since then, the numbers have gone even higher."
Why would you need a user identifier to block a consent banner? You don't technically. The website requires it because it is a shitty website.
It would be enough to have your browser store a cookie without personal information with { cookieconsent: "STFU" } or some variable in local storage. If the website respected that, we would be fine.
Personal identifiers are not needed and foul compromises aren't acceptable.
I think I’m kind of on your side in general, but I have more of the opposite feeling about legal versus technical solutions. If we had no idiotic EU cookie laws, no “consent” bs required, a technical solution would be easy: default segmentation of cookies by what site you are actually visiting, plus all non-first-party ones silently expired after 60 minutes or whatever. It seems like this would be very easy, except for the fact that the number one ad network is also the only browser vendor that matters.
But the attempted legal solutions suffer from being inside the sandbox, meaning all the “cookie management” software is a pile of hacks that barely work, and rely on browsers, as you’ve noticed, to allow their cookies in the service of…limiting cookies. And of course they also suffer from the politicians who wrote them having no clue how any of this works. I suspect if they did, they’d see how dumb it is to regulate that 10,000,000 websites each implement a ton of logic to self-limit their cookies they set (hard to police, buggy) instead of telling 2-3 companies they have to make their browsers have more conservative defaults with how they keep and send cookies back. (easy to prove it’s working with testing).
The obnoxious cookie banners are not required by "idiotic EU cookie laws".
> a technical solution would be easy: default segmentation of cookies by what site you are actually visiting, plus all non-first-party ones silently expired after 60 minutes or whatever.
1. This was already implemented
2. Tracking isn't limited to cookies only
> except for the fact that the number one ad network is also the only browser vendor that matters.
Oh, so an "easy" solution isn't easy after all. Who would've thought.
> And of course they also suffer from the politicians who wrote them having no clue how any of this works.
But you do? Like how you only speak about cookies when tracking and user data isn't limited to cookies? Or how "stupid EU cookie law" doesn't even talk about cookies (if we're talking about GDPR)?
Usually the people who really have no clue are exactly the people who say that "there's an easy technical solution".
> The obnoxious cookie banners are not required by "idiotic EU cookie laws".
Of course, the alternative is to not use cookies, to not use any web analytics products, or to resolve to argue the semantics of what is necessary before a judge when sued by one of the many lawyers who now advertise (ironically) all over social media with come-ons like "Did you browse FUZZYSWEATERS .COM? Your data may have been improperly used!"
> 1. This was already implemented
Please let me know what browser does what I describe. Close as I can come is configuring a Chromium based browser to just only keep cookies for certain domains, but it's a pain in the butt so I stopped worrying about it a long time ago.
> Oh, so an "easy" solution isn't easy after all. Who would've thought.
But I went on to detail the much "easier" solution where the EU aims its big swinging...list of mandates... at the 2-3 browser vendors rather than involving 10,000,000 small businesses worldwide in the business of trying to guess if they're "GDPR compliant," or could be in breach because they added some snippet of code from a useful web analytics platform that could be said to "track" users.
Do you really think that it is easier and better to regulate millions of people/companies to make them all do a complex thing in good faith AND do it well, than to make those couple of companies sandbox cookie storage in a way that severely kneecaps cross-site tracking?
> 2. Tracking isn't limited to cookies only
Sure, but also I question to what extent anyone is being harmed by "tracking" in the most broad sense of that word. As far as I can tell, the public believes "tracking is a problem" primarily because they resent retargeting ads. That's all. People see a shirt or a chainsaw or an air fryer "following them around" after they browsed for one, and think "that's weird! THEY know!" Despite the fact that most of those things function very simply, do not give a shit who you are, just some ID that your browser saved and is sending back, and which is tied to a list of SKUs you showed interest in.
The more reasonable concern is more around data brokers and the data about a person being sold and aggregated, which mostly gets concerning when it could be used for stalking, targeting political dissidents, etc. The fact that I spent 34 seconds on A product page, then 32 seconds on B, then added B to my cart and then bounced, that is the nature of all of the data being tracked on 90% of websites, they don't traffic in my location data or even want to collect sensitive information. But every website is affected by the GDPR's vague definitions of "tracking." And ironically, I assume partly because all these in-sandbox "CMPs" barely even work, I haven't even observed a decrease in retargeting ads, the #1 thing that people actually observe and are bothered by.
> Of course, the alternative is to not use cookies, to not use any web analytics products, or to resolve to
Honestly, I could not parse this rant that is a chain of non-sequiturs
> Please let me know what browser does what I describe.
Segmenting cookies has been a thing in all browsers for half a decade at least. Everyone but Chrome block third-party cookies. Safari clears out a bunch of cookies periodically (and PWA developers hate it for that)
> But I went on to detail the much "easier" solution where the EU aims its big swinging...list of mandates... at the 2-3 browser vendors
Ah yes, because tracking is only limited to cookies and to browsers.
> Sure, but also I question to what extent anyone is being harmed by "tracking" in the most broad sense of that word. As far as I can tell, the public believes "tracking is a problem" primarily because they resent retargeting ads. That's all.
Well, people from countries with quite recent cases of pervasive and invasive surveillance have other problems with invasive and pervasive tracking.
> The more reasonable concern is more around data brokers and the data about a person being sold and aggregated, which mostly gets concerning when it could be used for stalking, targeting political dissidents, etc. The fact that I spent 34 seconds on A product page, then 32 seconds on B, then added B to my cart and then bounced, that is the nature of all of the data being tracked on 90% of websites, they don't traffic in my location data or even want to collect sensitive information.
You have to chose one stance, not multiple at the same time:
- is this not a problem because who cares about a single ID?
- is this a problem because data broker amass and trade vast amounts of sensitive personal data?
> But every website is affected by the GDPR's vague definitions of "tracking."
And GDPR isn't required at all, because all we need to do is make the 2-3 major browser to just not set cookies, because that's all we're concerned about. There are no other ways of tracking people, and that tracking data isn't used by anyone anywhere.
Except, you know, "data brokers and the data about a person being sold and aggregated", but who cares about that.
It would be nice if you could argue, “well, just be a good site and don’t use marketing cookies”, but the ePrivacy Directive requires consent for performance and preference cookies too. Perhaps a liberal reading arguably allows classification of certain statistics and preferences functions to be strictly necessary, like “I wouldn’t provide this service without crash reporting because I’d go insane so it’s strictly necessary”, but most lawyers would be ill before advising as much.
There’s still the question of what law mandates that they are annoying pop-ups? They could be preferences in a menu, for example.
What happened is website operators started to feel entitled to doing whatever they want with cookies on users’ machines and eventually decided to act like petulant children when the rules changed.
If cookies are only used for preferences functions, then I should expect that it should only require to mention the cookies in the preferences menu (I hope)? If they have a document to explain each cookie by name, then it would also be helpful, that you can enable/disable them individiaully (or make them read-only) by the browser settings. However, for some things such as languages there are other ways to do without using cookies, such as Accept-Language header for languages, although cookies could be used to override the Accept-Language header in case both are present in the request.
Yes that's the point. You don't need those things. The idea that a news article or blog post or e-commerce page could "crash" is ridiculous, and the law shouldn't humor that excuse. There's been standard ways to declaratively define such pages since before scripting frameworks gained popularity. Use those standard ways. If you're really building an app and need to performance test, buy some hardware in your target range. Privacy aware users block things like Sentry.
You don’t need a shopping cart either. Just make the user write down the skus from your online catalog and send you a purchase order. Products exist on spectrum and the ones that win are typically easier and more convenient to use. If your business is developing the best product it can, it absolutely needs the ability to be convenient and useful.
Adding a language select option on a multinational site seems pretty table stakes in my experience. Plenty often the user does not wish to use the same language as their system/browser. Switching your system’s default language just for one site is a huge hassle.
Re crash reporting: I’m talking about tools like Sentry. I have never once worked on a product of any scale that didn’t need to collect diagnostic reports from the field in order to address code level errors that happen as users are using the product. In house or 3rd party it doesn't matter, and client state has always been involved. A product that doesn’t function is broken. It needs to be fixed.
There is no privacy concession in any of these cases. The EPD simply over-regulates cookies.
I mean maybe we should just reimplement all this crap using indexdb. That’s not a cookie, legally.
The EPD fights symptoms not causes and the internet is worse for it.
Language selection seems easy enough: when the user clicks your flag button, show a toggle switch for "Allow a cookie for language preference". When the user toggles it on, present the language options. If they toggle it off, delete the cookie (in a better world, the server could just send a standard language options header and let the browser show a dropdown for per-site language selection, but oh well).
For crash reporting: pop up a dialog asking if they'd like to submit a report (as software used to do). Don't just submit info from their computer without asking.
If literally any physical product breaks, I don't expect the manufacturer to receive telemetry so they can fix it. If I want them to fix it, I'll bring it back to them. I expect that if I don't go out of my way to tell them something, after I buy the thing, we go our separate ways, and they have no idea about anything I do. If their thing breaks, I also have the option of just not telling them and instead telling everyone else that they're crap. They don't need to spy on me for any reason.
I'm really not seeing the issue with asking consent to do things as they're actually needed. You don't need an "I CONSENT TO EVERYTHING" banner, and most of the stuff you want isn't necessary anyway.
Like I said, privacy conscious users block tools like Sentry. It's a perfect example of "no, you don't actually need to spy on me."
Pretty sure this exact example is explicitly carved out as a-okay.
I think what we're dealing with here is not websites trying to do basic things. Rather, it's every website and their mom thinking they need elaborate analytics to sell plastic garbage.
Yes, that elaborate analytics you spread to 20 third parties IS a privacy concern. We should be looking at that.
> You don’t need a shopping cart either. Just make the user write down the skus from your online catalog and send you a purchase order.
I think this is a way to do it, I had thought also of such a thing before. You can send a "computer payment file" which includes the product ID numbers (and parameters if applicable), the total price that the customer expects to pay, a signature, and encrypted data for use with the bank or credit card company (or some specification of store credit, if you are using that instead).
The existing use of "shopping cart" cookie can still be available as an alternative as well though, in case you do not want to use (or cannot use) the "computer payment file"; then it can provide its UI but you can also use your own if you have your own implementation.
> Adding a language select option on a multinational site seems pretty table stakes in my experience. Plenty often the user does not wish to use the same language as their system/browser. Switching your system’s default language just for one site is a huge hassle.
This is true. However, it would also be helpful to be able to change the settings (including languages, and HTTP request headers) per URL prefix, which would also be another way. This does not mean that the setting cannot also be available as a cookie, which will override the Accept-Language header if both are present in the request.
There is also user authentication; cookies are not really the best way to do that either. I think X.509 client certificates are a better way. However, other methods can still be provided for compatibility for users who do want to use it.
And then, there is more other stuff too, they can also be done in other ways.
Note that all of the above stuff means that many things can work with JavaScripts and cookies disabled (or unavailable), but enabling them will provide a way of working that does not require these other things too.
It does matter from the perspective of privacy, because in one case your vistors deal with one party (you) and in the other case another party (Sentry) is also involved.
The GDPR standard of "consent" (as I suspect you know, but as context for my opinion) is applied to the ePrivacy Directive and relates to any cookies that are not strictly necessary.
I do not like using the legal basis of "consent" for processing personal data, and I would much prefer not to need to use consent for placing cookies. As it is, in my personal capacity I can get away without placing cookies at all .
If we had access to other lawful bases for placing cookies, I'd like to think we could work out way towards phasing out any blanket consent. I'm sure "legitimate interests" would be abused and over-relied-on. But it already is, and if we're not arguing with people about whether the "consent" they rely on is legitimate then maybe we'll have more time to worry about whether companies are using other bases appropriately.
> Why is it that if someone said “we need a legal solution to gun violence” the people that say “no we need a technical solution all people should wear kevlar and carry 9mm pistols” are considered the lunatics but when we ask for a legal solution to rampant non-consensual tracking for the purpose of indoctrinating the consumer class with propaganda we all laugh and say bah the solution must be technical? I don’t get it
I don’t know that a reasonable person would compare privacy threats to the threat of death from gun violence.
They exist in totally different altitudes of concern.
> The solution here shouldn't be technical; it should be legal.
I disagree. Solutions should be technical whenever possible, because in practice, laws tend to be abused and/or not enforced. Laws also need resources and cooperation to be enforced, and some laws are hard to enforce without creating backdoors or compromising other rights.
"ISPs will be prohibited from spying on their customers" doesn't mean ISPs won't spy on their customers.
> this paper addressed passive attacks, where the attacker controls only a receiver, but exploits the normal Wi-Fi traffic. In this case, the only useful traffic for the attacker comes from transmitters that are perfectly fixed and whose position is well known and stable, so that the NN can be trained in advance, thus the obfuscator needs to be installed only in APs or similar ‘infrastructure’ devices. Active attacks, where the attacker controls both the transmitter and the receiver are another very interesting research area, where, however, privacy protection cannot be based on randomization at the transmitter.
> The experimental results obtained in our laboratory show that the considered localization method (first proposed in an MSc thesis) works smoothly regardless of the environment, and that adding random information to the CSI mess up the localization, thus providing the community with a system that preserve location privacy and communication performance at the same time.
There is no technical solution for this unless you want to invest billions/trillions in building new computing and networking platforms created with privacy in mind.
ISPs will always have the ability to at least deduce whether a connection was used, the MAC address, and it there is WiFi, unfortunately whether people are physically present.
If we look at the roadmap for WiFi/phones/etc, they will soon gain the ability to map out your home, including objects, using consumer radios.
This isn't really true. The easiest technical solution to the problem of ISPs using your wifi data is to simply use your own WiFi router which does not send the data to them.
I don't think there's any reliable way around that. They can do that with real-time power meter monitoring even if you don't have an internet connection.
With a VPN, your ISP may not know where packets are going, but they can still see packets moving. So, unless your VPN is injecting dummy data to mask all patterns (possible, but not common), your ISP is going to have a good idea if someone is home or not.
Sometimes mathematics and physics provide superior solutions than man-made laws. Encryption for example. It's better to make something impossible, than to have laws that are routinely ignored by law enforcement.
>You can’t solve social problems with technical solutions.
Sure, this has a fair amount of truth to it. However, security is not a social problem, it's an economic one. No one, not even the most well funded and skilled organizations like the NSA, has access to infinite resources. Whether a given attack/data harvesting effort costs $1 million, $10 thousand, $100, $1, or $0.01 makes an enormous difference in impact. Can a given three letter agency afford to spend $1m on anyone? Sure. Can they afford it against everyone? No. Same with private orgs, if harvesting data costs $10000/person, it has to generate well over that much money in profit to make it worth it. Is that likely on average? Probably not. If it costs fractions of a cent, then they will be incentivized to scale it as hard as possible, since payoff from even one person will cover thousands of duds.
So sure, by all means we should pursue laws too, as that also shifts costs a bit. But there is zero reason not to simultaneously pursue technical means to make costs as high as possible. Both tracks matter a lot.
I am really struggling to see the technical solution here. This isn’t a security question - security has already been lost. We’re talking about a device in a home that the owner doesn’t control, being able to monitor the presence of a person using either WiFi signals or device identifiers.
The obvious solution is to not use that device. But that’s not necessarily possible for a variety of reasons, not all of them controllable.
So, what is the technical solution to this? Anything that’s going to mask a persons RF signal is probably going to make WiFi difficult to use. Anything at the network level is already lost because we have a potentially hostile device in a critical point in the network path.
>I am really struggling to see the technical solution here.
Are you? Comments are full of obvious solutions like using your own hardware, which you clearly understand.
>We’re talking about a device in a home that the owner doesn’t control
No, we definitely are not. As you yourself immediately acknowledge:
>The obvious solution is to not use that device. But that’s not necessarily possible for a variety of reasons, not all of them controllable.
...but then immediately try to do a fuzzy hand wave it away for reasons I don't really understand. Technical solutions don't have to be completely perfect, which is surely not a standard you're holding any social/legal solution to right? Since that would be ridiculous.
As I said, simultaneously pursuing multiple tracks in parallel is the correct approach, as hybrids can be more then the sum of their parts. A purely legal solution ("law against ISPs collecting this data"), if it's even possible to get passed at all, ends up depending heavily on the honor system with all sorts of perverse incentives, and is very challenging to verify. A purely technical solution ("use your own hardware", "route through another end point") could potentially be interfered with (though let's be clear: this isn't actually a thing basically ever). But we can easily imagine hybrid approaches, just as was done in the past with efforts like CableCARD. The law doesn't need to necessarily try to mandate and police hard to verify behavior like how non-property owner controlled hardware acts, but instead can mandate that ISPs must always allow direct dumb interfaces to their network via customer controlled hardware. That's something easy to verify, which enhances compliance, and easy to understand which enhances the politics.
But make no mistake: the technical aspect is an inseparable part of this approach. We need both.
It makes it much more difficult to be profitable if its illegal. This deters the majority of opportunists leaving only the dedicated criminals. And just like thief's people might understand why they steal no one sheds a tear when they go to prison.
And how do you force all consumers to buy their own privacy hardware?
Edit: sorry my question is not strictly how one person would mangle their hardware so it breaks presence detection, it’s how the tech industry would develop an at scale everyday consumer solution to this problem.
Require certain disclosures to be made in not so fine print.
Require that each privacy waiver is individually initialed, per clause, in wet ink.
This shit would end tomorrow if they had to start delivering modems with 1 inch high letters that said "THIS DEVICE WILL TRACK YOUR LOCATION WITHIN YOUR HOME AND SHARE THAT DATA WITH LAW ENFORCEMENT WITHOUT YOUR KNOWLEDGE", and the modem didn't work until you went down to the Comcast store to sign your rights away.
You don't have to force anything except taking this knowledge out of the fine print and prove that your customers are actually aware of the contractual clauses they are subject to.
The tech industry could come together and come up with a privacy standard guarantee that device manufacturers could use (Something as simple as, we will never share data with law enforcement unless legally compelled).
There's a lot of solutions, ranging from technical (firmware update) to social (pass some laws with teeth).
> This shit would end tomorrow if they had to start delivering modems with 1 inch high letters that said "THIS DEVICE WILL TRACK YOUR LOCATION WITHIN YOUR HOME AND SHARE THAT DATA WITH LAW ENFORCEMENT WITHOUT YOUR KNOWLEDGE",
I have the urge to laugh at this, but maybe I'm just too cynical. Pretty sure we still live in an age where most people would let go of principles like privacy for a bit of convenience.
Some ISPs allow you to bring your own modem, so there wouldn't be any hardware other than your own and whatever they install to bring it into your home.
You attach large sacks of potatoes to the ceiling fans and lighting fixtures that are connected to strings and random timers to move them. The potato bags perfectly simulate human motion.
I thought we were talking about a solution that the tech industry could implement and deploy en masse to users, because it’s just, like TLS and browser standards. That’s usually what is being discussed when these give everyone privacy topics come up. The people that care enough to ground their antenna are already using their own hardware. And the ISP will deter hardware modification by charging you for damaged leased hardware. Or you’ll be in an arms race where the ISP’s firmware will flag the unit as defective because the radio doesn't work and cut off access till you fix it.
I guess you could put it in a cage. Maybe I should go door to door selling privacy cages. Do people pay for tinfoil hats these days?
I don't know, how many people that didn't care much about privacy said things like "There is no way the US government would deport US citizens" 7 months ago.
When we find them spying on customers they will take it all the way to the supreme court where the definition of spying will be put the wringer and flushed of all actual meaning. Then the law will be struck because it violates the corporation's 1st amendment protections concerning 'free speech'. See also Citizen's United.
I don’t expect the law to prevent the crime. Much like my comment you replied to, I recognize different tools are for different situations.
The law is there to enforce the “rule of law”
It’s a little ambiguous because the phrase is in English and doesn’t match up 1:1 with the common vernacular, but I want the “rule of law” to enforce that the rules are real, not to prevent someone from testing their existence
> The solution here shouldn't be technical; it should be legal.
The parent commenter was highlighting that law enforcement can compel them to provide the data.
The customer has to opt-in to WiFi motion sensing to have the data tracked. If you see something appear in an app, you should assume law enforcement can compel the company to provide that data. It's not really a surprise.
> If we rely on legal protection, then not only Comcast, but all ISPs will be prohibited from spying on their customers.
To be clear, the headline on HN is editorialized. The linked article is instructions for opting in to WiFi motion sensing and going through the setup and calibration. It's a feature they provide for customers to enable and use for themselves.
> The customer has to opt-in to WiFi motion sensing to have the data tracked.
- Is this true if Law Enforcement gets a subpoena?
- Is this true if Law Enforcement asks "nicely"?
- Can Xfinity activate it without the user knowing?
- Does it explicitly notify the user when the setting has been changed? (e.g. done by LE, hacker, or an abusive partner)
- Is this a promise and a promise that by default it will stay off?
- Is the code to perform this feature pre-installed and able to be trivially (or even non-trivially) activated by hackers?
Idk, there's a lot of questionable things here and Xfinity doesn't have the best track record that gives me a lot of confidence that we should trust them. This seems like an easily abused system that can do a lot of harm while provides very little utility to the vast majority of people.
Yea, at least in the US you have almost zero consumer rights around this.
Once they find some marketing firm to sell the data to suddenly it will be come opt-out in a new update and most people will blindly hit agree without having a clue what it's about.
From my understanding it tracks signal strength between two points (gateway and printer for example).
Putting your phone in airplane mode doesn't make it think you have left the house.
> If you’d like to prevent your pet’s movement from causing motion notifications, you can exclude pet motion in your WiFi Motion settings by turning on the Exclude Small Pets feature.
> Motion is detected based on the amount of signal disruption taking place between the Xfinity Gateway and your selected WiFi-connected devices, so motion from small pets (around 40 pounds or less) can be filtered out while keeping you notified of large movements more likely to be caused by humans.
Comcast sells a router gateway combination device that's probably required for this motion sensing anyway. If you have that they could already check device counts and in fact their Xfinity app lists connected devices in detail.
The point of the comment about ipv6 is that if you don't use a Comcast modem/router or they're prohibited by law from snooping on that, Comcast can still sorta understand the number of users from the outside by looking at your ipv6 addresses.
I understand they can do traffic analytics but with privacy extensions and the proliferation of IoT devices I don't think that level of analysis is going to be very fine. Probably just enough to bin houses into different size groups.
There are a multitude of pre-existing ways of achieving the same result. One would be simply looking at the ft^2 listed on the public tax documents for the given address.
So I was really assuming any useful analysis would require them to be the actual man in the middle by owning and controlling your router. In which case address family does not matter.
> The solution here shouldn't be technical; it should be legal.
I expect more than a few commenters here will disagree with you. Some rather vehemently.
To those that do so, I'd encourage you to read the novel Attack Surface by Cory Doctorow. While it's fiction, in the book, Doctorow makes a pretty compelling argument for the notion that when it comes to privacy, we can't win by "out tech'ing" the governments and corporations. We're simply too heavily out-resourced. If I'm interpreting his message correctly, he is saying basically what Josho is saying here: that we have to use the political/legal system to get the privacy protections that we care about enshrined into law and properly enforced.
Now, is that going to be easy? Hell no. But after reading the book I was largely sold on the idea, FWIW. That said, the two approaches aren't necessarily mutually exclusive. But I do believe that those of us who care about privacy should focus more on using our (knowledge|skills|resources) to try to foster change through politics, than on trying to beat "them" with better tech.
YMMV, of course. But if you haven't read the book, at least consider giving it a shot. Probably Doctorow makes the argument better than I can.
> The solution here shouldn't be technical; it should be legal
Technical solutions tend to last longer. Legal solutions have a habit of being ignored when they become inconvenient.
The legal default should be that collecting this sort of data should always be illegal without informed consent and never used beyond the remit of that consent. As inconvenient as it sometimes is, the world needs GDPR.
Until the day when to use the service you have to use their device. Or it's being used at work, a hotel, in stores, in your kids school, or anywhere you have no say on the devices used.
Also make sure your phone and other every day carry items never connect to the Internet via your ISP’s network or emit radio signals while nearby your home.
The solution can be technical, but only if it is also sneaky. Blocking or disallowing certain information is one thing but making that information worthless is better. A simple AI agent could pretend to ping all sorts of services. It could even do some light websurfing. This fake traffic would nullify any value from the real traffic, destroying the market that feeds this surveillance industry.
I see a UI that allows homeowners to fake certain people being in the house when they are not, either replaying traffic or a selection of generic bots that mimic the traffic of various cohorts.
you cant tell most of those things because same ip doesnt coorespond to a unique service and plenty of programs and websites phone to servers where addresses have changed. there is no static database.
you also cant associate it to a person automatically. the burden of proof is high - how many jurors have tech at home they know nothing about and maybe got hacked?
It would work even better. From the linked support page:
"Motion is detected based on the amount of signal disruption taking place between the Xfinity Gateway and your selected WiFi-connected devices, so motion from small pets (around 40 pounds or less) can be filtered out while keeping you notified of large movements more likely to be caused by humans."
With enough signals, gait recognition for example is possible, and those same signals could be corroborated with presence or absence of concomitant device signals to determine if your device is moving with your person, and if not, to then flag this for enhanced monitoring if evasion is suspected.
The point is every single thing I own should be "on my side". My car should not store my location history. My wifi router should not track presence and movement. My printer should not add any watermarks or telltale dots. My stuff should actively make it difficult or impossible for hackers, advertisers, or law enforcement to recover any useful information.
This means, respectively: ensure personal info is stored securely so hackers can recover little. Don't transmit info to remote servers to limit what advertisers get. And just store as little as possible in the first place because this is the legal means to have little to subpoena or discover.
Useful info, when absolutely necessary, should be locked behind a password, as constitutional rights preclude law enforcement from making someone disclose it.
I agree, but that is only one reason. The other reason is to save power (and also RAM, disk space, network bandwidth, time, etc) by omitting unwanted functions. (Some things to actively make it difficult (e.g. encryption, passwords) would use up more power, but since they are not constantly active and are not as many functions, they might still use up less power in total.)
This is magical thinking, because it’s using the legal system to solve a technical and social problem. It’s probably possible to create standards that don’t leak PII and other forms of metadata that are unique. That is probably the only solution going forward to reduce possible interdiction by extralegal third parties. However, Comcast can only be enjoined from doing this legally, and will likely not do anything that isn’t implemented by standards bodies, such as WiFi standards. The fact that these capabilities are available to Comcast corporate is because OEMs that make set top cable receivers and combination cable modem WiFi routers provide these capabilities. I’m not sure if these features are standard or require a special order. Once Comcast has the data, it is available to law enforcement via the Third Party Doctrine, which isn’t going away anytime soon.
You seem to think that it would be impossible to instruct Comcast to implement on/off for the feature? That's the sort of thing that the legal system is for.
I don’t think that this would be likely to pass Congress. Even if it were, if Comcast failed to uphold its obligations due to receiving a National Security Letter (NSL) then they would be hamstrung, unable to comply and unable to protest publically.
It’s almost a legal impossibility and would be a bad move geopolitically to give up this full take capability and it is not happening. It’s wishful thinking to believe otherwise.
These companies are so big now, and more importantly their lobbyists are, that it is unlikely any regulations would ever come that would limit their abilities to make money off of your PII.
All these already existing dragnets make oldies like the Clipper Chip seem like a weekend hackathon project.
The irony is that all of these metadata leaks and correlation attacks etc were theoretical at the time these technologies were created and developed, unless you’re NSA level compute power, both human and silicon. Now, any script kid has enough info to try to build an array of SDRs to do the same thing, and no one will care when they do besides the feds who cry foul about their turf being stepped on by plebeians. The public will never care because their eyes will already have glazed over once you mention MAC addresses and SSIDs.
> any script kid has enough info to try to build an array of SDRs to do the same thing
It doesn't particularly matter what hobbyists get up to. It matters what's available at scale on the mass market, what's widely deployed, what data is legally permissible to collect on a large scale, and what data is legal to sell.
Law enforcement can't subpoena that which does not exist. The best defense to these sorts of things is often to place legal limits on collection, retention, and sale.
Legal limits on national security agencies are not enforceable due to Five Eyes etc. Allied foreign spies do what American spies don’t. I’m just admitting the political reality of the situation. What you do with that information may be limited, but it’s not a failing on my part that this is the status quo.
You're not talking about what they're talking about. They're talking about limiting corporate data collection. If companies don't build this into routers, then 99% of routers won't be collecting this data, and foreign spies won't have any data to steal.
They will classify the data as necessary for business purposes and collect it under a different name. They will be obligated to pass full take information if necessary, and it will be tapped at any point by employees who are given NSLs and asked/told to do things under penalty of law where applicable, and on threat of arrest or dismissal if not, or by federal agents themselves or their deputies or other approved third parties. Your modem may be intercepted in the mail and reflashed if necessary or over the wire, and that functionality is part of the operating standards of the modems. You could find a way to secure this on your own maybe, which is perhaps just another signal which flips a bit somewhere and may be logged. You can’t close Pandora’s box. It doesn’t matter if Comcast has the WiFi data to sell because they will have access to the information due to how the WiFi signals propagate. It’s diagnostic data. It’s the signals themselves. So all this is perhaps a misdirect, as any third party in range of the WiFi network can likely do the same thing passively, so it is a moot point. The data being gathered and sold should be legislated, but I don’t think that it will affect any of the actual concerns raised, because feds will still legally do whatever they are authorized to do, the justification and doctrine may not be public information. You probably won’t know, so you won’t object. Third parties who lack principles will gather the data regardless of legality. I don’t know how you could even legislate against passive monitoring unless you could demonstrate intent to harm or violate FCC regulations and applicable laws about harming people or computer systems like CFAA, which is a whole other issue.
When they are compelled to do it, they will not even know it is happening. Only the people doing it would know. That’s the reality of why it is done now. That there is a market for it should never have been allowed but the capability is necessary to troubleshoot the network. I guess it seems silly to say this is even a legal issue. They shouldn’t do a lot of things, but they are going to be legally compelled to do them, so the network structure’s form follows that function. If there is no market for that data, they will get the data by proxy by leasing access to the network or the customer or the metadata for security or other legal purposes via intermediaries or separate internal units. This is just how ISPs have to handle this kind of data request or other legal request. They have formal means to ask for what they need, and they will usually get enough data to find out anything they will need to find out that the CPE is emitting or doing.
I guess if you’re truly concerned you shouldn’t have WiFi at home or a mobile phone. Too bad 5G signals have similar capabilities, but at least the signals don’t propagate as well.
> When they are compelled to do it, they will not even know it is happening.
That ... might or might not be an issue, but it's not _this_ issue, ie the one we were originally talking about here.
A targeted order to wiretap (or otherwise spy on) a specific person or entity is entirely different from widespread data collection, retention, and sale for whatever corporate purpose. With widespread collection the data is then sitting there in a data lake waiting to be subpoenaed by law enforcement at their leisure for any arbitrary reason they happen to think up potentially years in the future.
> they are going to be legally compelled to do them, so the network structure’s form follows that function
You can't be compelled to hand over that which you do not have. Neither can you be compelled to modify your product in a particular manner absent market wide legislation; see FBI v Apple if you doubt that.
> A targeted order to wiretap (or otherwise spy on) a specific person or entity is entirely different from widespread data collection, retention, and sale for whatever corporate purpose. With widespread collection the data is then sitting there in a data lake waiting to be subpoenaed by law enforcement at their leisure for any arbitrary reason they happen to think up potentially years in the future.
I do see what you mean, but they are differences of degree, not kind. It could be considered a best practice to minimize PII etc, but even other groups don’t do any better. Signal still uses phone numbers.
> > they are going to be legally compelled to do them, so the network structure’s form follows that function
> You can't be compelled to hand over that which you do not have. Neither can you be compelled to modify your product in a particular manner absent market wide legislation; see FBI v Apple if you doubt that.
I agree. However, Apple is also confident enough in their legal team, reasoning, funding, and likely legal outcomes that they will flout NSLs in America, and yet they will cave to UK in that they disabled Apple’s Advanced Data Protection (in UK) which means that iCloud files aren’t really E2EE if the government can just say that you can’t do that anymore. Not your keys, not your files and the security and privacy of said effects thereof.
> This is magical thinking, because it’s using the legal system to solve a technical and social problem.
Is that not literally the entire purpose of the legal system?
> will likely not do anything that isn’t implemented by standards bodies, such as WiFi standards
I imagine beamforming techniques are only going to become more commonplace over time.
> Once Comcast has the data, it is available to law enforcement via the Third Party Doctrine
Unless they were legally obligated to purge it from their servers after a few weeks. Or if they employed E2EE so as not to have access to the data in the first place.
> > This is magical thinking, because it’s using the legal system to solve a technical and social problem.
> Is that not literally the entire purpose of the legal system?
The legal system is subverted by the national security apparatus by necessity and by design. The information gathered by ISPs is necessary to prevent interference with ground-based radars around airports, and is necessary for fraud detection and internal security of the network. It would be feasible to make it so that this information would be gathered and retained only for a short period of time to establish and maintain network integrity, such as handshakes and other bits and bytes exchanged and retained inherent to the protocols used. The legal doctrines that establish the legality of full take surveillance have been argued before FISA courts, so an act of Congress or a test case would likely be necessary to prompt any legal reexamination of the relevant issues. However, national security issues are not really able to be resolved legislatively, because executive orders will always enable that which cannot be done on the books, which presupposes that which is done is done by the book to begin with.
What is done in the shadows must stay obscured due to means and methods, and this ideology isn’t amenable to change, political or otherwise. There is not much else to say on that point as it is observational and experiential based on my lived experience and history of interactions with law enforcement, national security professionals, and private security as a service provider and former licensed security guard, as well as being a victim of police overreach and charge stacking. I’ve worked with law enforcement and been work for law enforcement. I’ve fought the law to a draw, and I’ve fought the law and lost due to bad calls by refs. I’m working on becoming a better citizen and community member so that I can be a helper. More than that, I can’t say. The future is hopeful and yet the challenges are real, and changing. Old guards are giving way to young Turks. It’s an interesting time to be alive.
> > will likely not do anything that isn’t implemented by standards bodies, such as WiFi standards
> I imagine beamforming techniques are only going to become more commonplace over time.
The beamforming and other technologies used with modern WiFi are what enable the motion detection “for free” because the WiFi signals act as radar signals, the contours of the perturbations of which are already baked into the WiFi protocol. It’s insecure by design against this side channel attack.
> > Once Comcast has the data, it is available to law enforcement via the Third Party Doctrine
> Unless they were legally obligated to purge it from their servers after a few weeks. Or if they employed E2EE so as not to have access to the data in the first place.
You would have to reimplement the standards to make everything that squawks rotate their identifiers regularly, ideally after every transmission. It’s possible I suppose. I don’t think the political will is there to mandate this, and there are not that many people who work on these kinds of problems. Look at who created TOR. You’d have to run that kind of system everywhere, and only use it for everything, and that system would have to be part of the protocol or otherwise unable to be disabled by end users. Otherwise, you’re at the status quo we have now, where the weak links are the first to break.
If this sounds like a stretch, the weak links are always people, not protocols or pipes. That’s why this is magical thinking. As principled as you and I are, bad guys don’t have principles. Those who fight bad guys have principles, and they also have more coffee and mathematicians and hashrate.
Congress will never rule against the national security apparatus because there is no political will to do so. I can count on one hand the folks in Congress who are on relevant committees to even consider legislation on these matters who is in any way critical at all, and they largely agree with you that something needs to be done. But they don’t have the votes to do anything because the issues aren’t relevant to voters. No one cares the way you or I do, or they would probably become lawyers or politicians, as well as soldiers and broadcasters.
If you think something constructive and positive needs to be done, I would likely agree that the impetus for change exists. I’m all ears.
when I'm at home, my device is just sitting on the desk. rarely is it in my actual hand being carried with me. also i'm old, so i don't have it in my hand while sitting on the couch or in bed either. that's why my laptop is for. something with a real keyboard and screen and not something that's going to give me scoliosis for hunching over to read all the damn time
We are now treating foreign students with suspicion when they don't have a satisfactory internet footprint. Only a matter of time until that gets turned against the citizenry. Submit to surveillance capitalism or go to jail you deviant.
If we rely on the technical path, Comcast can achieve the same by how many active IPv6 addresses are in use. Even if you aren't using your phone, the device is going to be constantly pinging services like email, and your ISP can use that to piece together how many people are at home.
If we rely on legal protection, then not only Comcast, but all ISPs will be prohibited from spying on their customers. Ideally the legislation would be more broad and stop other forms of commercial/government surveillance, but I can't imagine a world where Congress could actually achieve something that widely helpful for regular citizens.