Yet another Hacker News

19 points andsoitis 3 hours ago 13 comments

spottedmarley 3 hours ago | parent

Personal privacy is, and has always been, the job and responsibility of the individual. You can be as private or as public as you allow yourself to be through your own practices. Nobody can give you privacy, you must take it, which requires work and sacrifices that most people are simply unwilling to make, that's why nothing has changed. If it's privacy you want, stop being so public. Avoid surveillance. It's not easy but it's also not impossible, you have to actually value your privacy enough to do the work of establishing it. Good luck.

mdspan 2 hours ago | parent

Yeah, and I think it's gotten much worse with LLMs. If someone wants to use an LLM privately, their two options are either redacting/morphing their data before sending it through or hosting locally, both of which are intractable for most users. And if someone chooses not to use an LLM they face a dramatic loss in productivity. I don't think the tradeoff between privacy and convenience has ever been this severe in history, with the exception of the smartphone.

k310 1 hour ago | parent

> If it's privacy you want, stop being so public. Avoid surveillance. It's not easy but it's also not impossible, you have to actually value your privacy enough to do the work of establishing it

I can't avoid traffic cams by any sane means (like taking side roads?) I MIGHT be able to do without the electric company and water company (which I do during outages) but I am not seeing how to avoid the DMV and USPS, which sell my data.

Does a privacy seeker have to be a prepper? I certainly hope not.

Surveillance capitalism and policing is so pervasive. And the connection is money. Especially with Citizens United, laws are bought to trash any right to, or even possibility of privacy.

Not bashing your post, just pointing out the extreme difficulty.

infinite_spin 49 minutes ago | parent

Can you explain what you mean by "job" and "you must take it".. what does that mean in concrete terms?

And what do you mean by "sacrifices"? For example, if students don't agree to TurnItIn's policy, it becomes significantly harder to take classes. Do you mean to say students should have to suffer the consequences of these sacrifices just because we can't seem to support their right to privacy?

bigbaguette 47 minutes ago | parent

Unrestricted invasion of privacy and considering it completely normal is just a libertarian fantasy

basilikum 41 minutes ago | parent

That is overly simplistic to the point where it is hard to interpret it as good faith.

We live in a world where both the government is increasingly spying on everything, often in secret, as well as companies in every aspect of modern life who constantly lie about this. It is not a fair choice with natural disadvantages.

Blaming all this on the individual reeks of bad faith.

alphabeta3r56 3 hours ago | parent

Privacy is only hard because comoanies are not telling/asking tgeir customers before sharing their data.

A way to solve this problem would be to create a portal where customer data is stored in control of the customer. Companies are only allowed to tell each other about customers, not even which data they hold.

And then each data request goes directly through the customers.

Then customers can decide who to share data with. And then those customers will be happy with their choices.

andsoitis 3 hours ago | parent

> Privacy is only hard

Privacy is one of those words that you think you understand until you try to define it.

infinite_spin 53 minutes ago | parent

the dictionary definition seems fine:

> a state in which one is not observed or disturbed by other people. > the state of being free from public attention.

From this, it seems obvious that a person should not be observed in our digital spaces without clear consent, where consent is not tied to preclusion of goods or services (i.e. without coercion).

kulahan 1 hour ago | parent

If there isn’t a very strong incentive to share, nobody will. If there is, people will just share it as much as possible to get money, consequences be damned.

hacker_homie 1 hour ago | parent

My thought was to write legislation that gives 20% of my generated ad revenue to me the customer as legal tender (no store credit, coupons) then have the government tax that income.

1. government gets new income source.

2. government is invested in making sure they are not getting short changed.

3. failure to pay me is fraud.

4. When you pay me now I know your crap is spying.

5. Government taxes almost never go down, with this system it going down will immediately be visible to consumers who will balk.

Problems: ad revenue is the new shrink-flation without it prices will rise. companies will fight this tooth and nail, but voters get "free" money.

Arubis 31 minutes ago | parent

Privacy is hard because it’s not merely a technical problem. It’s applied to individuals by systems that most individuals have very limited influence into—and those that _do_ have influence often stand to benefit from eroding the privacy of others.

slopblast 4 minutes ago | parent

Very nice summary and we are definitely at an inflection point on privacy. The incentives are misaligned, and the temptation of free digital services cause users to overlook the very real cost of their privacy.