Posted by ibotty 10/28/2024
We still have this blind spot today: Google and Apple talk about security and privacy, but what they mean by those terms is making it so only they get your data.
The article debunks this, demonstrating that privacy was a primary concern (e.g. Cypherpunk's Manifesto) decades ago. Also that mass surveillance was already happening even further back.
I think it's fair to say that security has made significantly more progress over the decades than privacy has, but I don't think there is evidence of a causal link. Rather, privacy rights are held back because of other separate factors.
Over time, because security and cryptography were beneficial to business and government, cryptography got steadily increasing technical investment and attention.
On the other hand, since privacy as a social value does not serve business or government needs, it has been steadily de-emphasized and undermined.
Technical people have coped with the progressive erosion of privacy by pointing to cryptography as a way for individuals to uphold their privacy even in the absence of state-protected rights or a civil society which cares. This is the tradeoff being described.
How does that debunk it? If they were so concerned, why didn't they do anything about it?
One plausible answer: they were mollified by cryptography. Remember when it was revealed that the NSA was sniffing cleartext traffic between Google data centers[0]? In response, rather than campaigning for changes to legislation (requiring warrants for data collection, etc.), the big tech firms just started encrypting their internal traffic. If you're Google and your adversaries are nation state actors and other giant tech firms, that makes a lot of sense.
But as far as user privacy goes, it's pointless: Google is the adversary.
[0] https://theweek.com/articles/457590/why-google-isnt-happy-ab...
As one prominent example, the EFF has been actively campaigning all this time: "The Electronic Frontier Foundation was founded in July of 1990 in response to a basic threat to speech and privacy.". A couple of decades later, the Pirate Party movement probably reached its peak. These organizations are political activism, for digital rights and privacy, precisely by the kind of people who are here accused of "doing nothing".
In a few decades, people will probably look back on this era and ask why we didn't do anything about it either.
We didn't go wrong in limiting export encryption strength to the evil 7, and we didn't go wrong in loosening encryption export restrictions. We entirely missed the boat on what matters by failing to define and protect the privacy rights of individuals until nearly all that mattered was publicly available to bad actors through negligence. This is part of the human propensity to prioritize today over tomorrow.
That's a very hot take. Citation needed.
I remember when the US forced COP(P?)A into being. I helped run a site aimed at kids back in those days. Suddenly we had to tell half of those kids to fuck off because of a weird and arbitrary age limit. Those kids were part of a great community, had a sense of belonging which they often didn't have in their meatspace lives, they had a safe space to explore ideas and engage with people from all over the world.
But I'm sure that was all to the detriment of our society :eyeroll:.
Ad peddling, stealing and selling personal information, that has been detrimental. Having kids engage with other kids on the interwebs? I doubt it.
COPA [0] is a different law which never took effect. COPPA [1] is what you're referring to.
Ad peddling, stealing and selling personal information, that has been detrimental.
I agree and what's good for the gander is good for the goose. Why did we only recognize the need for privacy for people under an arbitrary age? We all deserve it!
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_Online_Protection_Act
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children%27s_Online_Privacy_Pr...
So we agree on this part.
> What did happen is that regulation was passed to allow 13 year olds to participate online much to the detriment of our society.
My claim is that if "we" hadn't allowed 13 year olds to sign away liabilities when they registered on a website there would be fewer minors using social media in environments that are mixed with adults; more specifically guardians of minors would be required to decide if their kids should have access and in doing so would provide the correct market feedback to ensure that sites of great value to minors (education resources being top of mind for me) would receive more market demand and at the same time social platforms would have less impact on children as there would be fewer kids participating in anti-nurturing environments.
Unless those kids aren't interacting with kids at all, but instead pedo's masquerading as kids for nefarious reasons. Which yes, has been VERY detrimental to our society.
Knee-jerk responses like yours, and "what about the children"-isms in general are likely more detrimental than actual online child abuse. Something about babies and bathwater.