Why do people seem so obsessed with privacy on the net?
I mean, I get that privacy is important. I would not like the walls of my house to be transparent, for instance. But that's the thing : they're not, and this law would not change that.
What I mean is that I, for better or worse, make a clear distinction between privacy in the physical word and privacy online. I basically don't consider anything I do online "really" private. The only reason I assume nobody knows what I do there is that I presume nobody cares. And if I really wanted to hide what I'm doing I'd use TOR, GnuPG or something like that.
>I basically don't consider anything I do online "really" private. The only reason I assume nobody knows what I do there is that I presume nobody cares.
Thats for /You/ though. Laws are for /everyone/. Also, everyone does private things on the net. Any credit card transaction should be a private dealing. If all your google searches were put up for the public to see, I don't think you'd be too happy about that. For others, they could have very negative social consequences.
I would argue hard privacy laws are more important on the internet, because you can mass collect data and make infinite copies, but in real life you can't mass collect the contents of homes and where things have been. The physical barrier is by itself a natural privacy maker, something that is important to try to replicate in communication with data.
If you can see the exchange happen, then it is not really private. You don't need to know how much I spent, but just that I spent something. That already is enough to not make it private anymore.
Republicans, FBI, and NSA tried to do exactly that during the Crypto Wars. Their next proposal was an escrow scheme where secret people in government agencies with history of corruption & targetting dissidents would get copies of all our secrets. They eventually relented on the ban and partially on exports.
Now, they're back at it again scaremongering about the Four Horsemen being reason to give them our secrets again:
Such false equivalence is harmful if you're a proponent of strict privacy laws.
Even if Democrats were exactly as bad as Republicans in every regard, you could actually choose to randomly thank them for their dedication to privacy. Do that often enough, you'll soon see Democratic politicians adopting pro-privacy positions.
In reality, it seems quite obvious that despite all, there is at least a marginal difference between the parties with regards to not only privacy, but many other closely-linked issues, i.e. net neutrality.
If you get frustrated because these measures don't go far enough and buy into the "they're-all-corrupt-each-worse-than-the-other"-narrative, you're removing all incentives for them to act in your interest.
They're both currently anti-privacy. It was Clinton Administration that originally compromised with escrow and then allowing crypto. Also expanded FOIA use. The conservatives in the military, esp running NSA, wanted it banned. Then conservatives passed Patriot Act and issued State of Emergency creating a lightweight, selective form oc martial law with bulk surveillance and indefinite detention without trial. Also reduced public access to government info. Obama reversed Democrat accomplishments in privacy by expanding on those conservative policies and laws. New Republican President is trying to crank them up to the next level on top of showing himself to be a threat to individuals or companies for arbitrary, unpredictable reasons motivated by ego.
So, both parties suck at privacy but one did something for it once under pressure. Republicans are consistently in favor of trading liberty for temporary, limited security if it's not their firearms, speech, or press.
> Republicans are consistently in favor of trading liberty for temporary, limited security if it's not their firearms, speech, or press
That's a pretty big "if". Trading guns, speech, and press in exchange for security seems like a much bigger deal than trading internet privacy for security.
It's the digital versions of 1st, 4th, and 5th Amendments. They want the physical but not digital versions despite the ideology behind one justifying the other.
Might even be able to add the 2nd Amendment here on the self-defense angle. It takes crypto, privacy, and endpoint protection technologies to stop hackers and online criminals effectively. The conservatives, esp military, classified high-assurance security as "munitions" since they disrupt their spy operations. They remained classified as "munitions" after the crypto wars. And, yet, we really need information security to stop all kinds of daily threats instead of them trying to ban it to hope they spot rare threats [they often fail to spot].
The internet encompasses so much of what was once in the physical world that it would be better that your walls were transparent: then they would only have access to your activities at home, instead of your every question asked of google, every communication you have with another person not face to face, everywhere you go with your phone, everything you buy, all your contacts, and all the information they have.
Even if you forgo the internet for all those activities it will still be possible to triangulate much of what you do by tracking any of your contacts who do not. And most of them will not.
And as people in the tech industry, we should be selfishly invested in privacy online, because either we will make products worth sacrificing privacy for and increase total surveillance, or people will not use our products because their privacy is not guaranteed.
And while I agree technical tools such as TOR should be used to further assure privacy, they should not be the first and only safeguard - strong legislative and civic support is required, or you end up sliding further into repression, e.g. requiring people to give up passwords, requiring backdoors in software, etc.
Before you criticize this argument as slippery slope, know that it is only a fallacy in the absence of a cause why one should slide down this slope. I hope the ample history of legislative and technical erosion of privacy can serve as proof the danger is real.
> I would not like the walls of my house to be transparent, for instance. But that's the thing : they're not
Do you have an Amazon Echo or Google Home (or even a "smart" TV)? If so (and with no privacy regulation to protect you) the walls of your house are now basically transparent to sound. As net-connected cameras become more plentiful, visual "transparency" is not far behind.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems you're making the "If you're giving Google your information, why do you care if the government gets it too?" argument.
Services that you have mentioned are voluntary. You can control which organizations have access to your data by purchasing or not purchasing certain products, though one can't be sure who within the company is actually looking at your data or who they are selling information to.
In the future, will there be any consumer technology services that do not collect and store your information? Possibly not. If enough people give up their own privacy in favor of convenience, the free market will provide. However, it will still remain a decision of the individual whether or not to utilize those services - despite there potentially not being more private alternatives.
Republicans and the current administration want to be able to be able to monitor individuals unwarranted, unchecked, and with legality. (Yes, I know the NSA exists) The difference here is that individuals don't have a decision in the matter.
There are two ways that I can think of to stop both of the above situations:
1. Implement federal policy that disallows companies from collecting and storing customer data except that which is explicitly provided by the customer.
2. Develop methods that make it financially beneficial for politicians to protect the privacy of those they are meant to represent.
I tend to be discrete when discussing any medical issues with my doctor or pharmasist as it's no business of anyone elses. Why should any online conversations I have be any different? I don't want third parties listening in and swapping my personal medical (or any other) details amongst themselves like juicy gossip, thank you.
Couple that with selective enforcement and you can put away anybody for any length of time.
So privacy matters, if only because you never know what the administration after the one you were still ok with will be up to. Case in point: the present.
Because infomation is power in the hands of government or malicious, private parties. Lots of personal information ends up online due to how so many people rely on digital communications. For government, there's concern about anything from hiding dissenting behavior (eg gag politician in Red state, organizing protests) to reducing risk of being caught violating one of the thousands of laws/regulations we can't keep track of (eg cops didnt like you or had quotas). For private parties, we already see extortion schemes, identity theft, stalking, fraudulent use of credit cards, discrimination via profiling tech, and so on.
Many, many threats are blocked when Internet tech is private by default. Even selective privacy can block a lot of them. People fighting against privacy online don't care abouf any of that. They'd sacrifice or risk it all for what benefits surveillance state allegedly brings. So far no proof of those benefits either despite billions spent. They should just invest in good-old, police work and HUMINT that got the best results consistently going back before computers were invented.
Would you also consider mailing your lawyer or your doctor not private? I mean, there are certain services that are per definition public, twitter for example. But on the other hand there are lots and lots of things you can do on the net that should be considered private.
What if all your web requests were automatically mined by your ISP, by advertising networks, and by the government?
What if through some really badly implemented semantic analysis you're flagged as a terrorist and thrown in jail without trial on "evidence" that, only if examined closely, makes no sense? This is the Brazil outcome.
What if everything you do online haunts you forever? You searched for bullets once. Your employer finds out about this because at work you're being served ads about bullets. They fire you for some bullshit reason that's legally air-tight because they don't want you going postal.
You really don't understand what a world with no privacy looks like.
Such rules don't need to be 100% perfect or 100% effective to be beneficial, and the so called downside is that they block companies from building a business selling information that users may not be aware they are collecting.
If you actually want to know, each party markets to the grassroots concerns of the people in their audience. After they get in power, what they actually implement is the agenda of their corporate sponsors.
If you want to understand the situation:
1. Try suppressing your immediate visceral reaction to issues that grassroots Republicans care about. Open your mind, tune into some decent red media, and ask yourself "what if there is some truth in this?"
2. Avoid being drawn into the groupthink that condones the actions of your own team as altruistic. Open your mind and ask yourself "what if there is some oppressive agenda behind this?"
Unfortunately, you will have to find media from back when Democrats had power. Now that the other team is the aggressor and your team is the opposition, it will be impossible to perceive (your team is now only "fighting the good fight", as they lack power to implement their sponsors' policies). But my message goes equally for the red team as well, reversing the parties.
I don't understand it either. Instead of voting 40 times to abolish Obamacare they could have introduced changes to make it better. Or if there are problems with some regulations they could improve them instead of just getting rid of them like they want to with Dodd-Frank.
Making everything shittier is the "pay back the plutocrats" phase of a reciprocating strategy that begins with "use funds from plutocrats to firehose hate-crazed medieval minds with lies so that they vote us in to work for the plutocrats".
I mean, I get that privacy is important. I would not like the walls of my house to be transparent, for instance. But that's the thing : they're not, and this law would not change that.
What I mean is that I, for better or worse, make a clear distinction between privacy in the physical word and privacy online. I basically don't consider anything I do online "really" private. The only reason I assume nobody knows what I do there is that I presume nobody cares. And if I really wanted to hide what I'm doing I'd use TOR, GnuPG or something like that.