The book from a year or two ago, "Means of Control," by Tau, goes into some pretty good detail on the data collection and sales from just the adtech firms - where the entire ecosystem seems to be, "You can't use our data for anything but advertising... wink wink", and everyone knows exactly who is bidding on ads, and never winning any, just to slurp up location data and sell it. Or the "companies that don't sell the government." Also, they don't vet any clients beyond "The credit card is good."
> And because giants like Meta, Google, and Apple must collect as much of your personal data as possible, there’s little they can do to protect your privacy.
I quite disagree with the "must" there. They choose to collect as much data as possible, because that's their business model.
And the good news is, it's fairly easy to opt out of quite a lot of that.
Turn location services off, turn your phone off when moving about, and pay cash without "personal tracking cards" associated with you. Just about everywhere has [local area code] 867-5309 registered, if you care.
For a couple of years now I've been using [my area code] - 555 - [a unique 4-digit pin] for dealing with otherwise "walk-in" business that look at you like you have three heads if you decline to say a phone number out loud. In the US at least, the 555 block is defacto "fictional" and typically isn't assigned out, so it lets me create a valid looking number that won't accidentally ring some random real person if they try to call it.
Minor quibble, 555 isn't fictional, it's typically reserved for teleco internal use, or at least that was the case 25 years ago, who knows what the deal is now. Used to be you could wardial 555-xxxx and end up with all kinds of weird AT&T field installations, back office numbers, switch remote command and control modem numbers, etc.
The basic rule of thumb is, if a company knows something about you, then the government does too.
Which means they know everything you have posted, everywhere you've gone, everywhere you've worked, what you think politically, and almost certainly have AI profilers trying to "precog" you.
To say nothing of camera surveillance, gait analysis, facial recognition, license plate tracking, cell phone signal interceptors.
All it takes is for one authoritarian to walk in and turn the key and POOF we have perfect.
Are we in danger of that? Oh right, no politics on HN. Don't worry, be happy folks.
A one-off or series of authoritarians should be the least of your concern. They tend to be controversial and have great difficulty amassing the political will to get their things truly done and set in stone. A constantly popular government should be what keeps you awake at night. Because people who are otherwise capable of "hold a job, support myself" levels of intelligent thought will tie themselves into knots to support otherwise unjustified screwing at the hands of a government they support.
Just don't bring your phone with you. With low power states and opaque software and hardware, you really can't risk it. You can never be sure it's truly off, unless it's in a Faraday bag. But is it worth it?
The magnetic field passes through a Faraday cage, so even then there are no guarantees if the phone uses unconventional modes of communication. Ultrasonic audio is another one.
Its like expecting farm animals to keep track of how the farm works, as the farm gets more and more sophisticated in animal domestication and exploitation. The individual action argument was weak 10 years ago and its worthless today.
The is a Systemic problem. Doesn't matter what the individuals do.
The trouble is people thinking it can be fixed with the system. I've been to a few dictatorships, none of them had the slightest clue what I was doing because the government was too poor and distracted with stuff like militias at their door to take much interest in what I was doing.
Safety comes from dysfunctional governance. Surveillance is a property of functional governance. Embrace disfunction.
Plenty of ineffective dictatorships will happily line you up against the wall with bogus surveillance. And shitty surveillance states will happily fake surveillance or data to look more effective.
The danger with these types of
State organs is they are constantly trying to justify their existence and cover up their mistakes, and if you can be thrown in the gears, some places are happy to do that.
Im sure when I fought for the YPG Assad might have liked that, unfortunately all the bogus surveillance in the world is no use when your army cannot enforce their borders or sovereignty. In any case I saw guys with AKs posting to Facebook, no bogus stuff needed, they were already publicly providing all the evidence needed for the death penalty without any worry of being prosecuted.
I don’t think we’re disagreeing. My point is that while those folks shooting AKs in the air are doing their thing, some other random putz that never did anything like that is probably getting nailed to the wall by the same system.
And unlike an effective/accurate surveillance system, you can’t be safe by just not being the AK weilding guys. In fact, sometimes you’re safer because you’re more dangerous, and they’d rather find someone easier to pick on.
Third world places aren’t what they are because of a lack of rules or systems (usually), but rather because the rules and systems aren’t fit for purpose and produce the wrong outcomes.
Ah yes absolutely. Under no system is anyone safe if they're unable to bear arms to protect themselves/family, they will be systematically vulnerable or vulnerable to the next bandit. This just becomes more visible under disfunction.
>Plenty of ineffective dictatorships will happily line you up against the wall with bogus surveillance. And shitty surveillance states will happily fake surveillance or data to look more effective.
Sure, but that's the exception. Governments have a pyramid of needs too. Governments don't throw a bunch of resources on things with poor returns, like shooting people who haven't done much wrong, when there's easier fruit to pick. Sure, you can go full jackboot on specific issues here and there but that's not sustainable on a "will I retire in peace of will I hang from the overpass" timeline. And even if you're the dictator's henchman and want to go down some rabbit hole of killing people you don't like the the fact that the dictator may have you shot for waste or as a sacrifice when that provokes unrest or dissatisfaction among the people generally keeps the government in line. And the government really doesn't want to be killing people because it needs people to do things and pay taxes.
Look at all the historically violent dictatorships that lasted a long time and for many leaders. They all provide for their people generally. They might not be competitive absolutely but they keep things generally moving in a positive direction decade over decade and keep the country doing at least as well as its peers. The ones that don't tend to fall apart after a couple bad leaders.
I really shouldn't need to be explaining this. This is how every European monarchy worked just with god and birthright as justification instead of backroom dealing and politics and false elections.
It is impossible to avoid, and if you try to avoid it, you stick out. The correct maneuver is to appear normal, but selectively shutdown the system. Turn your phone on airplane and pay with cash with the moment is right. We live in a panopticon afterall.
In a country with the rule of law like the USA, the government can know you committed a crime, you know you committed a crime, society may suspect you of committing a crime, but criminal law requires a jury to convict beyond reasonable doubt. With a good lawyer this is a very tough bar, it's how organized crime gets away with so much (and despite the mafia being out of the news, they operate extremely well to this day).
So selectively you choose when to be anonymous. You pick your battles.
As a practical matter that may help the average HN normie, if you have a family you likely have life insurance. Never, ever, buy alcohol, marijuana, or cigarette / vapes / nicotine products with a credit card. Always pay cash. If you die the insurance company will go through everything to try and deny.
In the reverse case, the modern day can help you. If you drive, get a dashcam. You don't have to reveal video if you are at fault. But if not at fault, the video is gold. Put cameras around your house.
If you have rental property attached to your primary domicile, never have the internet under your own primary internet, lest you give reason for a wayward tenant to cause a search of your own home.
You aren't protecting yourself for the 99.99% time, you are prepared for the 0.01% case
ok but -- combined with innate hostility or rampant selfishness, this degenerates into the famous "low trust society" fairly quickly. Certainly there is room for work on fair courts and laws somehow? in the daylight?
I was watching this old British show called connections where they try to connect random things in the world together and they talk about your online persona and how the world will change because of the internet and World Wide Web. What I found interesting is that they present it all as if there will be an online version of you that you should treat, essentially, as a separate entity. It is not you, it is your representative to the digital space. That you should think of it as some agent that does things for you in that space even though in reality it’s simply a collection of data about you. But I liked that idea because it helps create a delineation between you the person and your online presence. I think what people don’t realize these days is that it is rather difficult to be anonymous online in the same way it is rather difficult to be anonymous in a room full of people you know. This is because your online profile is essentially known to any online actor who wants to know as you and the article point out. But tbh I think most people, including myself, spend too much time engaging in doing things connected to online. You don’t need slack and zoom to talk to colleagues it is possible to have in person interactions. You don’t need strava to go for a run. You don’t need your phone to go to the coffee shop and read a book.
I’m a big fan of the show. People who only use Facebook, I don’t expect them to dress their speech based on anonymity. People who actually fear a surveillance state, same deal. So how shall we depict the minority (on HN and IRC, etc) who expect anonymity as a feature?
> And the good news is, it's fairly easy to opt out of quite a lot of that.
The problem is that we really need something like herd immunity. If you opt out, but the rest of the people in your life do not, then it's possible to discover most of your data most of the time. You might have location services off, but your friends and family don't, so much of the time there's a good guess where you are at. Or you might not share your phone #, but it can be collected by those that you text or call and shared that way. Creating "shadow accounts" is very advanced these days.
Not to mention, "opt out" has to be actually true and not just a facade.
Wait until that author learns about Edward Snowden or advertisement agencies.
I used to play with Twitters firehose back in the day and there's quite a lot of personal data you derive from private accounts. We could tell the city someone likely lived if they followed a certain amount of people from a specific city, etc. Could also guess their gender with 95% accuracy with just using n-grams from their tweets. We'd test our algorithms with public accounts.
I think there's too much power and money in personal information for it to stop.
Can you provide any additional context for this? I haven't heard it, and a cursory search doesn't turn up anything obvious regarding their ties to fascism.
Ironically, we told you all for years that if you abused terms like fascist, Nazi, racist, etc then they would lose their power and their impact and people would ignore them in future. You were warned what would happen if you cried wolf.
I know they're deporting people who aren't here legally (that's a whole other debate), but I'm not aware of them actively targeting anyone based on race of ethnicity regardless of their legal status.
I don't know, is it? The US has had Trump as POTUS for four weeks and he's already doing a lot of what was "promised" in [Project 2025](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_2025)...
I know trump was already saying shitty things about Haitians before he was even sworn in. Have they had ICE rounding up and deporting people who are actually here legally?
They are working on cancelling their legal status. We have allowed Haitian migration because of the incompetence and corruption down there (and our role in a lot of that in the past)
If they go through the legal process and revoke or cancel status in a way that courts agree is within their legal authority, I'm not sure what they would have done wrong there. Morally I'd take huge issue with it, but we have allowed such a complex web of laws and authorities that we can't really complain when an elected official does what they want by the book.
Now if they go off script and act outside the law, that's a whole other story.
There has also been posts from schools in Texas recommending kids on field trips keep legal documentation on them because ICE is stopping school buses for investigations.
The boy who cried wolf is only a meaningful story because he is eventually eaten by a wolf.
However, your third point is a bit breathless. They aren't expelling anyone based on ethnicity. They want to deport illegal aliens. It isn't their fault so many of those aliens are from one country. The Nazis were expelling and killing Jews that had been in Europe for centuries lawfully. And, yknow, the whole killing them thing! The human experiments. The slave labour camps.
You are forgetting that fascist regimes go to war with their neighbours for territory, ignore the law, suspend democracy and have secret police to enforce political orthodoxy. Trump is an isolationist and he hasn't done any of the rest, yet at least.
Also don't forget that for all the stick Trump gets about immigration, all the Democratic presidents I can remember claim that they want to control the border too, and claim they can do so better. Hardly illustrative of fascism...
Yes, ask any Canadian how they feel about their sovereignty right now. Let me know how the Riviera in Gaza is going to work out and enjoy that vacation in the Gulf of America. Do you remember when Solemeni got assassinated. I also hope your not what he calls "vermin" and end up in Guantanamo Bay. Just because they're so dumb and incompetent and incapable of accomplishing their goals(at this moment) doesn't make a spade a spade. Honestly I am not even surprised by this anymore your post describes exactly why fascism takes root, just endless justification of authoritarianism.
There is no threat towards Canadian sovereignty obviously. The Riviera in Gaza would be a lot better than the current situation in which its biggest industry is exporting rockets into Israel. Also not territorial expansion as Gaza isn't a neighbour. Imperialism? Yes. But look at the world. It functioned much better in most places when imperial powers controlled more of it. That isn't an excuse for them to invade each other, which never ended well. Also he is just using it as a negotiating tactic with Jordan and Egypt obviously.
Changing the name of some water isn't territorial expansion or authoritarianism.
Solemeni was a terrorist. A dead terrorist is a good terrorist. If you attack a sovereign country then you should expect to be targeted. Fuck around? Find out.
Obama closed Gitmo. He promised to, remember, so he must have. And he withdrew from Afghanistan, remember? He said so in between claiming that marriage was only between a man and a woman. What a hero of the left.
Feel free to tell me I am wrong when I actually am instead of just when your imagination runs wild and you see "authoritarianism" in your cereal. Killing terrorists is authoritarianism lol. And drone striking children isn't?
> There is no threat towards Canadian sovereignty obviously. The Riviera in Gaza would be a lot better than the current situation in which its biggest industry is exporting rockets into Israel.
Like there is no threat to Medicaid? Here’s the authoritarianism: Trump is clearly setting us up for a major constitutional crisis by way of his lying bullshit. Go see the way he talked to the governor of maine and tell me you dont hear the threats? You might not be a Nazi, but you’re sure damn close.
In what way do they support fascism? I am using Protonmail, does it mean I indirectly support fascism? I do not care about the CEOs political views, nor his views on polygamy, or his favorite sexual position. If you want to argue against the use of Protonmail, you will have to try harder.
What these analyses always miss is that providers on foreign soil have even less protection against the US IC: breaking into foreign providers is literally NSA's chartered mission. That's not to say you should deliberately use US providers! Unless, that is, abuse of legal process in the US motivates your decisionmaking, in which case: an abused legal process beats no process requirements at all.
It's the NSA's job to do that domestically, it's just supposed to be firewalled by some hidden kangaroo court that absolutely doesn't do its job: FBI agents have been busted stalking women/exs several times.
Has been since 9/11. Remember, there's the omnipresent neverending war on terror.
Europe has plenty of “Kangaroo courts” of their own and partnerships like five eyes encourages authorities to share information. The UK’s NSA equivalent doesn’t need to worry about infringing on an American’s 4th amendment right and technically (if you don’t think about it) the NSA has plausible deniability if the UK shares this information. And vise versa with UK citizens or any western government.
“Surveillance state” is debatable. I would disagree, but I’ve had that debate too many times on HN recently, and don’t propose to start it again here.
However, to call the UK “totalitarian” is just an abuse of language. The country is not run by a single all-powerful party or dictator. It’s especially odd to use this word and then make a comparison to the US, which (though it is not totalitarian either by any stretch of the imagination) is currently in the midst of an executive power grab, with demands for a level of partisan loyalty from civil servants that remains unthinkable in the UK.
I don’t know what your goal is here, but if you want to persuade the average person in the UK to change their minds about the extent to which the government should be able to access surveillance data, it helps not to bundle your arguments together with wild misstatements.
You're right I shouldn't have used the adjective "totalitarian." It was the kind of mindless parroting of phrases that I dread myself, so thank you for pointing that out! The UK has extremely strict surveillance laws, which are incompatible with EU legislation by now, so it's not a typical example of European countries in that respect. That's all I meant to say.
If so, that was a judgment about legislation that is no longer current (and wasn’t when the judgment was issued). It may be that current legislation is also incompatible with EU law (IANAL, I’m not arguing that point), but AFAIK there is no court judgment to that effect.
No, I didn't talk about court judgments. Yes, I had various aspects of the Regulation of the Investigatory Powers Act and recent additions to the Investigatory Powers Act in mind.
> It may be that current legislation is also incompatible with EU law (IANAL, I’m not arguing that point), but AFAIK there is no court judgment to that effect.
Quite possibly but that wasn't my point. The point is that the UK is by far more of a surveillance state than any EU country, at least to my knowledge. UK legislation is not typical for a European country in that respect. People can go to prison in the UK for not handing over an encryption password and the UK has just effectively banned end-to-end encryption (if you put a backdoor in it, it's no longer end-to-end encryption).
I’m just responding to the specific claim regarding the incompatibility of current UK legislation with EU law. AFAIK this is not an established fact. It’s an increasingly hypothetical question, though not entirely so.
Of course, it's not an established fact. Who would establish that fact? The UK is not a member of the EU. I was talking about the current UK legislation and I stand by what I stated. You disagree but have not presented any reasons why I should change my mind. You even said you're not a lawyer and have not displayed any knowledge of EU or UK legislation and practice. So you disagree. I understand that. There is no need to further continue this discussion.
What I do know is that I won't be able to sell my software in the UK or to any UK citizens or to any citizens who want to use to to communicate with UK citizens because it uses secure end-to-end encryption. That's the important bit for me personally.
When a famous media personality was assassinated the police managed to catch the killers within hours. Turns out they really DO track every car on the highway- it wasn't just bragging.
I don't mean that Europe has worse processes. I mean that the US IC doesn't care about those processes. They can just take whatever they want from European providers.
It’s not even that they have to “break in.” The government allows big tech companies to basically do whatever they want as long as big tech provides the government with an easy way to move forward with the parallel construction needed to bring case against literally anyone should officials be motivated to see that person imprisoned. Everything you’ve ever done can and will be used against you to maximum effect.
Whatever legal requirements might be at play, the fundamental difference is that a US company will comply, whereas a non-cooperative external party would still need to be broken, which is very much non-trivial in the age of strong cryptography, even if you're NSA.
Apple does collect some of your data, but their business doesn't depend on it, and I have some degree of control over how much I participate.
I think it's a category error to include all three in the same sentence, but I don't think the author is lying. I do agree somewhat with the sentiment that such a lack of distinction calls the content into question, or at least the author's framing of it.
Disagree. All three companies exist in the set of massively international megacorps who as a matter of routine daily business collect and distribute personal information of the individuals who use their service. Being precious about what percentage of their yearly revenue is generated by this activity seems weird.
> Being precious about what percentage of their yearly revenue is generated by this activity seems weird
No one is being precious about it. They're debating whether or not the article is written in good faith. Jumping to a bad faith-based defence isn't going to change the mind of people who are concerned about things being done in bad faith.
To clarify, you're concerned that one or more arguments advanced in the article don't meet your personal definition of bad faith, bad faith is important to you, and as such the entire article is suspect? Entirely ignoring the central claims of bad faith handling of users sensitive information, we're skipping past that entirely to deconstruct a single sentence as a "gotcha"? One of us does not understand the other, clearly.
Good/bad faith isn't just about one's preference about a form of argument, but can also completely change the validity of the underlying argument.
The point here is that bad faith is doing exactly that: making the legitimacy of the argument presented by the author fundamentally questionable. Comparing the core business model of a company that has invested in capabilities like Advanced Data Protection with Meta in an article highlighting the ways authorities can get your data...seems disingenuous at best, and just plain wrong/misleading.
> we're skipping past that entirely to deconstruct a single sentence as a "gotcha"
When someone sets up a false premise, then yes, everything that comes after it is suspect.
The book from a year or two ago, "Means of Control," by Tau, goes into some pretty good detail on the data collection and sales from just the adtech firms - where the entire ecosystem seems to be, "You can't use our data for anything but advertising... wink wink", and everyone knows exactly who is bidding on ads, and never winning any, just to slurp up location data and sell it. Or the "companies that don't sell the government." Also, they don't vet any clients beyond "The credit card is good."
> And because giants like Meta, Google, and Apple must collect as much of your personal data as possible, there’s little they can do to protect your privacy.
I quite disagree with the "must" there. They choose to collect as much data as possible, because that's their business model.
And the good news is, it's fairly easy to opt out of quite a lot of that.
Turn location services off, turn your phone off when moving about, and pay cash without "personal tracking cards" associated with you. Just about everywhere has [local area code] 867-5309 registered, if you care.
For a couple of years now I've been using [my area code] - 555 - [a unique 4-digit pin] for dealing with otherwise "walk-in" business that look at you like you have three heads if you decline to say a phone number out loud. In the US at least, the 555 block is defacto "fictional" and typically isn't assigned out, so it lets me create a valid looking number that won't accidentally ring some random real person if they try to call it.
Minor quibble, 555 isn't fictional, it's typically reserved for teleco internal use, or at least that was the case 25 years ago, who knows what the deal is now. Used to be you could wardial 555-xxxx and end up with all kinds of weird AT&T field installations, back office numbers, switch remote command and control modem numbers, etc.
The fictional block exists, but it's not the entire 555 prefix. It's 555-01xx.
It was the entire "Klondike-5" block, but got narrowed.
The basic rule of thumb is, if a company knows something about you, then the government does too.
Which means they know everything you have posted, everywhere you've gone, everywhere you've worked, what you think politically, and almost certainly have AI profilers trying to "precog" you.
To say nothing of camera surveillance, gait analysis, facial recognition, license plate tracking, cell phone signal interceptors.
All it takes is for one authoritarian to walk in and turn the key and POOF we have perfect.
Are we in danger of that? Oh right, no politics on HN. Don't worry, be happy folks.
A one-off or series of authoritarians should be the least of your concern. They tend to be controversial and have great difficulty amassing the political will to get their things truly done and set in stone. A constantly popular government should be what keeps you awake at night. Because people who are otherwise capable of "hold a job, support myself" levels of intelligent thought will tie themselves into knots to support otherwise unjustified screwing at the hands of a government they support.
Or an authoritarian propped up by popular and powerful monopolistic corporations to which otherwise capable people depend on for their jobs.
Isn't that basically what every modern government is regardless of dictatorship vs democracy?
Priority #1 seems to be defending state moneymaking interests and state adjacent/intertwined BigCos
Priority #2 seems to be expanding their own power
Priority #3 seems to be micromanaging in social issues at the behest of various special interests to distract from #1 and #2
Keeping us all from keeling over from heavy metal poisoning or whatever is way, way, way down the list unless it bleeds up to #3 for whatever reason.
Just don't bring your phone with you. With low power states and opaque software and hardware, you really can't risk it. You can never be sure it's truly off, unless it's in a Faraday bag. But is it worth it?
The magnetic field passes through a Faraday cage, so even then there are no guarantees if the phone uses unconventional modes of communication. Ultrasonic audio is another one.
My phone has hardware kill switches for modem, WiFi/BT and camera/mic. So I can be sure. The schematics is available, too.
what phone?
Librem 5.
Its like expecting farm animals to keep track of how the farm works, as the farm gets more and more sophisticated in animal domestication and exploitation. The individual action argument was weak 10 years ago and its worthless today.
The is a Systemic problem. Doesn't matter what the individuals do.
The trouble is people thinking it can be fixed with the system. I've been to a few dictatorships, none of them had the slightest clue what I was doing because the government was too poor and distracted with stuff like militias at their door to take much interest in what I was doing.
Safety comes from dysfunctional governance. Surveillance is a property of functional governance. Embrace disfunction.
Eh, that’s overly rosy.
Plenty of ineffective dictatorships will happily line you up against the wall with bogus surveillance. And shitty surveillance states will happily fake surveillance or data to look more effective.
The danger with these types of State organs is they are constantly trying to justify their existence and cover up their mistakes, and if you can be thrown in the gears, some places are happy to do that.
Im sure when I fought for the YPG Assad might have liked that, unfortunately all the bogus surveillance in the world is no use when your army cannot enforce their borders or sovereignty. In any case I saw guys with AKs posting to Facebook, no bogus stuff needed, they were already publicly providing all the evidence needed for the death penalty without any worry of being prosecuted.
I don’t think we’re disagreeing. My point is that while those folks shooting AKs in the air are doing their thing, some other random putz that never did anything like that is probably getting nailed to the wall by the same system.
And unlike an effective/accurate surveillance system, you can’t be safe by just not being the AK weilding guys. In fact, sometimes you’re safer because you’re more dangerous, and they’d rather find someone easier to pick on.
Third world places aren’t what they are because of a lack of rules or systems (usually), but rather because the rules and systems aren’t fit for purpose and produce the wrong outcomes.
Ah yes absolutely. Under no system is anyone safe if they're unable to bear arms to protect themselves/family, they will be systematically vulnerable or vulnerable to the next bandit. This just becomes more visible under disfunction.
>Plenty of ineffective dictatorships will happily line you up against the wall with bogus surveillance. And shitty surveillance states will happily fake surveillance or data to look more effective.
Sure, but that's the exception. Governments have a pyramid of needs too. Governments don't throw a bunch of resources on things with poor returns, like shooting people who haven't done much wrong, when there's easier fruit to pick. Sure, you can go full jackboot on specific issues here and there but that's not sustainable on a "will I retire in peace of will I hang from the overpass" timeline. And even if you're the dictator's henchman and want to go down some rabbit hole of killing people you don't like the the fact that the dictator may have you shot for waste or as a sacrifice when that provokes unrest or dissatisfaction among the people generally keeps the government in line. And the government really doesn't want to be killing people because it needs people to do things and pay taxes.
Look at all the historically violent dictatorships that lasted a long time and for many leaders. They all provide for their people generally. They might not be competitive absolutely but they keep things generally moving in a positive direction decade over decade and keep the country doing at least as well as its peers. The ones that don't tend to fall apart after a couple bad leaders.
I really shouldn't need to be explaining this. This is how every European monarchy worked just with god and birthright as justification instead of backroom dealing and politics and false elections.
I question your priorities.
It is impossible to avoid, and if you try to avoid it, you stick out. The correct maneuver is to appear normal, but selectively shutdown the system. Turn your phone on airplane and pay with cash with the moment is right. We live in a panopticon afterall.
In a country with the rule of law like the USA, the government can know you committed a crime, you know you committed a crime, society may suspect you of committing a crime, but criminal law requires a jury to convict beyond reasonable doubt. With a good lawyer this is a very tough bar, it's how organized crime gets away with so much (and despite the mafia being out of the news, they operate extremely well to this day).
So selectively you choose when to be anonymous. You pick your battles.
As a practical matter that may help the average HN normie, if you have a family you likely have life insurance. Never, ever, buy alcohol, marijuana, or cigarette / vapes / nicotine products with a credit card. Always pay cash. If you die the insurance company will go through everything to try and deny.
In the reverse case, the modern day can help you. If you drive, get a dashcam. You don't have to reveal video if you are at fault. But if not at fault, the video is gold. Put cameras around your house.
If you have rental property attached to your primary domicile, never have the internet under your own primary internet, lest you give reason for a wayward tenant to cause a search of your own home.
You aren't protecting yourself for the 99.99% time, you are prepared for the 0.01% case
ok but -- combined with innate hostility or rampant selfishness, this degenerates into the famous "low trust society" fairly quickly. Certainly there is room for work on fair courts and laws somehow? in the daylight?
I was watching this old British show called connections where they try to connect random things in the world together and they talk about your online persona and how the world will change because of the internet and World Wide Web. What I found interesting is that they present it all as if there will be an online version of you that you should treat, essentially, as a separate entity. It is not you, it is your representative to the digital space. That you should think of it as some agent that does things for you in that space even though in reality it’s simply a collection of data about you. But I liked that idea because it helps create a delineation between you the person and your online presence. I think what people don’t realize these days is that it is rather difficult to be anonymous online in the same way it is rather difficult to be anonymous in a room full of people you know. This is because your online profile is essentially known to any online actor who wants to know as you and the article point out. But tbh I think most people, including myself, spend too much time engaging in doing things connected to online. You don’t need slack and zoom to talk to colleagues it is possible to have in person interactions. You don’t need strava to go for a run. You don’t need your phone to go to the coffee shop and read a book.
I’m a big fan of the show. People who only use Facebook, I don’t expect them to dress their speech based on anonymity. People who actually fear a surveillance state, same deal. So how shall we depict the minority (on HN and IRC, etc) who expect anonymity as a feature?
My personal favorite is 281-330-8004.
Who?
> And the good news is, it's fairly easy to opt out of quite a lot of that.
The problem is that we really need something like herd immunity. If you opt out, but the rest of the people in your life do not, then it's possible to discover most of your data most of the time. You might have location services off, but your friends and family don't, so much of the time there's a good guess where you are at. Or you might not share your phone #, but it can be collected by those that you text or call and shared that way. Creating "shadow accounts" is very advanced these days.
Not to mention, "opt out" has to be actually true and not just a facade.
Wait until that author learns about Edward Snowden or advertisement agencies.
I used to play with Twitters firehose back in the day and there's quite a lot of personal data you derive from private accounts. We could tell the city someone likely lived if they followed a certain amount of people from a specific city, etc. Could also guess their gender with 95% accuracy with just using n-grams from their tweets. We'd test our algorithms with public accounts.
I think there's too much power and money in personal information for it to stop.
He wrote about Snowden as late as last year: https://proton.me/blog/us-warrantless-surveillance and corporate role in surveillance state before that https://proton.me/blog/privacy-user-data-requests
Have been using proto mail for a few years now and highly recommend it. You will ever have a cute @pm.me address!
Many people I know are switching away from them because of their alleged support of fascism.
I think they are mixing up who is supporting fascism…
Yeah fascists love to say everyone else is fascist so
Can you provide any additional context for this? I haven't heard it, and a cursory search doesn't turn up anything obvious regarding their ties to fascism.
Their CEO made some comments in support of Trump. https://theintercept.com/2025/01/28/proton-mail-andy-yen-tru...
Ah yes. Everything I don't like is fascism.
Ironically, we told you all for years that if you abused terms like fascist, Nazi, racist, etc then they would lose their power and their impact and people would ignore them in future. You were warned what would happen if you cried wolf.
Sometimes there actually is a wolf, though.
MAGA is a right-wing political movement that:
-seeks to return the nation to a mythical superior past, by
-empowering an extraordinary leader who represents the will of the people, in order to
-expel inferior/unworthy ethnicities, and
-expunge left/“Marxist” influences from art and culture.
These are all characteristics of Fascism specifically, not the authoritarian actions that people casually call fascist.
> expel inferior/unworthy ethnicities
Is this happening? Or a stated goal?
I know they're deporting people who aren't here legally (that's a whole other debate), but I'm not aware of them actively targeting anyone based on race of ethnicity regardless of their legal status.
I don't know, is it? The US has had Trump as POTUS for four weeks and he's already doing a lot of what was "promised" in [Project 2025](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_2025)...
Yes, they are currently targeting Venezuelans and Haitians who have legal status
I know trump was already saying shitty things about Haitians before he was even sworn in. Have they had ICE rounding up and deporting people who are actually here legally?
They are working on cancelling their legal status. We have allowed Haitian migration because of the incompetence and corruption down there (and our role in a lot of that in the past)
That already happened. The Biden/Harris admin quietly did not renew their TPS status while the "eating the pets" nonsense was in the news.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/05/politics/biden-administration...
If they go through the legal process and revoke or cancel status in a way that courts agree is within their legal authority, I'm not sure what they would have done wrong there. Morally I'd take huge issue with it, but we have allowed such a complex web of laws and authorities that we can't really complain when an elected official does what they want by the book.
Now if they go off script and act outside the law, that's a whole other story.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/native-americans-say-tribal...
There has also been posts from schools in Texas recommending kids on field trips keep legal documentation on them because ICE is stopping school buses for investigations.
https://www.newsweek.com/texas-school-district-bus-immigrati...
At what point do you pull your head out of the sand and stare into reality.
The boy who cried wolf is only a meaningful story because he is eventually eaten by a wolf.
However, your third point is a bit breathless. They aren't expelling anyone based on ethnicity. They want to deport illegal aliens. It isn't their fault so many of those aliens are from one country. The Nazis were expelling and killing Jews that had been in Europe for centuries lawfully. And, yknow, the whole killing them thing! The human experiments. The slave labour camps.
You are forgetting that fascist regimes go to war with their neighbours for territory, ignore the law, suspend democracy and have secret police to enforce political orthodoxy. Trump is an isolationist and he hasn't done any of the rest, yet at least.
Also don't forget that for all the stick Trump gets about immigration, all the Democratic presidents I can remember claim that they want to control the border too, and claim they can do so better. Hardly illustrative of fascism...
What about threatening to annex Canada and Greenland, eliminating birthright citizenship or expanding the Guantanamo Bay concentration camp?
Yes, ask any Canadian how they feel about their sovereignty right now. Let me know how the Riviera in Gaza is going to work out and enjoy that vacation in the Gulf of America. Do you remember when Solemeni got assassinated. I also hope your not what he calls "vermin" and end up in Guantanamo Bay. Just because they're so dumb and incompetent and incapable of accomplishing their goals(at this moment) doesn't make a spade a spade. Honestly I am not even surprised by this anymore your post describes exactly why fascism takes root, just endless justification of authoritarianism.
There is no threat towards Canadian sovereignty obviously. The Riviera in Gaza would be a lot better than the current situation in which its biggest industry is exporting rockets into Israel. Also not territorial expansion as Gaza isn't a neighbour. Imperialism? Yes. But look at the world. It functioned much better in most places when imperial powers controlled more of it. That isn't an excuse for them to invade each other, which never ended well. Also he is just using it as a negotiating tactic with Jordan and Egypt obviously.
Changing the name of some water isn't territorial expansion or authoritarianism.
Solemeni was a terrorist. A dead terrorist is a good terrorist. If you attack a sovereign country then you should expect to be targeted. Fuck around? Find out.
Obama closed Gitmo. He promised to, remember, so he must have. And he withdrew from Afghanistan, remember? He said so in between claiming that marriage was only between a man and a woman. What a hero of the left.
Feel free to tell me I am wrong when I actually am instead of just when your imagination runs wild and you see "authoritarianism" in your cereal. Killing terrorists is authoritarianism lol. And drone striking children isn't?
> There is no threat towards Canadian sovereignty obviously. The Riviera in Gaza would be a lot better than the current situation in which its biggest industry is exporting rockets into Israel.
Like there is no threat to Medicaid? Here’s the authoritarianism: Trump is clearly setting us up for a major constitutional crisis by way of his lying bullshit. Go see the way he talked to the governor of maine and tell me you dont hear the threats? You might not be a Nazi, but you’re sure damn close.
Still want to claim there's no threat to Canadian sovereignty going on? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egGm4Od5rp0
One of the problems with this community is there are no mechanisms for intellectual accountability beyond the span of a news cycle.
Actually I think the message that people should get is that folks LIKE fascism.
Germans loved Hitler until Stalingrad.
What I’ve heard is that hosting in Switzerland concerns right-leaning people.
In what way do they support fascism? I am using Protonmail, does it mean I indirectly support fascism? I do not care about the CEOs political views, nor his views on polygamy, or his favorite sexual position. If you want to argue against the use of Protonmail, you will have to try harder.
Selling peoples personal data has been around for longer than people realise
The Hank Show https://www.amazon.com/dp/1250209277/
What these analyses always miss is that providers on foreign soil have even less protection against the US IC: breaking into foreign providers is literally NSA's chartered mission. That's not to say you should deliberately use US providers! Unless, that is, abuse of legal process in the US motivates your decisionmaking, in which case: an abused legal process beats no process requirements at all.
It's the NSA's job to do that domestically, it's just supposed to be firewalled by some hidden kangaroo court that absolutely doesn't do its job: FBI agents have been busted stalking women/exs several times.
Has been since 9/11. Remember, there's the omnipresent neverending war on terror.
I mean, sure, stipulate that. But there isn't even a kangaroo court for a service hosted in Europe.
Europe has plenty of “Kangaroo courts” of their own and partnerships like five eyes encourages authorities to share information. The UK’s NSA equivalent doesn’t need to worry about infringing on an American’s 4th amendment right and technically (if you don’t think about it) the NSA has plausible deniability if the UK shares this information. And vise versa with UK citizens or any western government.
I think OP meant the EU. The UK is known to be a totalitarian surveillance state and has been less free than the US in that respect for a long time.
“Surveillance state” is debatable. I would disagree, but I’ve had that debate too many times on HN recently, and don’t propose to start it again here.
However, to call the UK “totalitarian” is just an abuse of language. The country is not run by a single all-powerful party or dictator. It’s especially odd to use this word and then make a comparison to the US, which (though it is not totalitarian either by any stretch of the imagination) is currently in the midst of an executive power grab, with demands for a level of partisan loyalty from civil servants that remains unthinkable in the UK.
I don’t know what your goal is here, but if you want to persuade the average person in the UK to change their minds about the extent to which the government should be able to access surveillance data, it helps not to bundle your arguments together with wild misstatements.
You're right I shouldn't have used the adjective "totalitarian." It was the kind of mindless parroting of phrases that I dread myself, so thank you for pointing that out! The UK has extremely strict surveillance laws, which are incompatible with EU legislation by now, so it's not a typical example of European countries in that respect. That's all I meant to say.
Are you referring to this? https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/sep/13/gchq-data-co...
If so, that was a judgment about legislation that is no longer current (and wasn’t when the judgment was issued). It may be that current legislation is also incompatible with EU law (IANAL, I’m not arguing that point), but AFAIK there is no court judgment to that effect.
No, I didn't talk about court judgments. Yes, I had various aspects of the Regulation of the Investigatory Powers Act and recent additions to the Investigatory Powers Act in mind.
> It may be that current legislation is also incompatible with EU law (IANAL, I’m not arguing that point), but AFAIK there is no court judgment to that effect.
Quite possibly but that wasn't my point. The point is that the UK is by far more of a surveillance state than any EU country, at least to my knowledge. UK legislation is not typical for a European country in that respect. People can go to prison in the UK for not handing over an encryption password and the UK has just effectively banned end-to-end encryption (if you put a backdoor in it, it's no longer end-to-end encryption).
I’m just responding to the specific claim regarding the incompatibility of current UK legislation with EU law. AFAIK this is not an established fact. It’s an increasingly hypothetical question, though not entirely so.
There are EU countries with key disclosure laws. See e.g. France and Ireland on this list: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_disclosure_law
Of course, it's not an established fact. Who would establish that fact? The UK is not a member of the EU. I was talking about the current UK legislation and I stand by what I stated. You disagree but have not presented any reasons why I should change my mind. You even said you're not a lawyer and have not displayed any knowledge of EU or UK legislation and practice. So you disagree. I understand that. There is no need to further continue this discussion.
What I do know is that I won't be able to sell my software in the UK or to any UK citizens or to any citizens who want to use to to communicate with UK citizens because it uses secure end-to-end encryption. That's the important bit for me personally.
When a famous media personality was assassinated the police managed to catch the killers within hours. Turns out they really DO track every car on the highway- it wasn't just bragging.
Every rich country is a surveillance state.
I don't mean that Europe has worse processes. I mean that the US IC doesn't care about those processes. They can just take whatever they want from European providers.
It’s not even that they have to “break in.” The government allows big tech companies to basically do whatever they want as long as big tech provides the government with an easy way to move forward with the parallel construction needed to bring case against literally anyone should officials be motivated to see that person imprisoned. Everything you’ve ever done can and will be used against you to maximum effect.
Whatever legal requirements might be at play, the fundamental difference is that a US company will comply, whereas a non-cooperative external party would still need to be broken, which is very much non-trivial in the age of strong cryptography, even if you're NSA.
I would love a privacy-friendly (e.g. Proton or similar-supplied) log in option on lots of websites. Log in with Google is what keeps me using Gmail.
Proton has Proton Pass, even supports passkeys if you're into that.
Yeah, that looks quite good! Not quite a log in with Google, but an interesting alternative.
BuT ChiNa Is TeH SuRvEiLlaNcE sTaTe
Where was that nightmare GDPR letter template again?
>giants like Meta, Google, and Apple must collect as much of your personal data as possible
Stopped reading there. If someone tries to sell a lie like that in their first five sentences, I can't trust anything they say.
but it's the truth. where is the lie?
Hmmm... Perhaps an Apple fan, upset that the company's Not Quite As Bad policies aren't being celebrated?
Must they really collect as much data as possible?
Is it a lie?
Meta and Google must collect your data.
Apple does collect some of your data, but their business doesn't depend on it, and I have some degree of control over how much I participate.
I think it's a category error to include all three in the same sentence, but I don't think the author is lying. I do agree somewhat with the sentiment that such a lack of distinction calls the content into question, or at least the author's framing of it.
Disagree. All three companies exist in the set of massively international megacorps who as a matter of routine daily business collect and distribute personal information of the individuals who use their service. Being precious about what percentage of their yearly revenue is generated by this activity seems weird.
> Being precious about what percentage of their yearly revenue is generated by this activity seems weird
No one is being precious about it. They're debating whether or not the article is written in good faith. Jumping to a bad faith-based defence isn't going to change the mind of people who are concerned about things being done in bad faith.
To clarify, you're concerned that one or more arguments advanced in the article don't meet your personal definition of bad faith, bad faith is important to you, and as such the entire article is suspect? Entirely ignoring the central claims of bad faith handling of users sensitive information, we're skipping past that entirely to deconstruct a single sentence as a "gotcha"? One of us does not understand the other, clearly.
Good/bad faith isn't just about one's preference about a form of argument, but can also completely change the validity of the underlying argument.
The point here is that bad faith is doing exactly that: making the legitimacy of the argument presented by the author fundamentally questionable. Comparing the core business model of a company that has invested in capabilities like Advanced Data Protection with Meta in an article highlighting the ways authorities can get your data...seems disingenuous at best, and just plain wrong/misleading.
> we're skipping past that entirely to deconstruct a single sentence as a "gotcha"
When someone sets up a false premise, then yes, everything that comes after it is suspect.
Google have stopped recording location history (opt-in) server side at all.