The Future of Privacy (opens in new tab)

As a security consultant who does a lot of privacy work, I found this article quite interesting (not enough depth for my liking, but interesting nonetheless).

That it has been flagged due to the one-week political hiatus is exactly the sort of thing I feared would happen when the hiatus was announced. I don't wish to debate the reasons for the hiatus itself, there are arguments on all sides to which I am sympathetic, both intellectually and viscerally.

What should be open to debate, however, is a matter of definition: What is (what are) politics? What constitutes a political topic?

The hiatus was announced without a sufficiently clear operational definition, IMHO. (It's a bit like the old arguments against pornography/obscenity: I cannot define it but I know it when I see it.)

I come to HN for interesting articles of appeal both intellectual and professional. Even with its echo chamber and nuclear downvoting, HN is still has the best signal-to-noise and highest value of any news aggregator I've checked. Since my work involves the intersection of security, policy, privacy, and governance, articles such as these are welcome in my feed.

Without a clearer definition politics, all we need is for someone who works outside a particular field deemed largely non-technical to assert that a post is political, and BAM! it's gone.

Like this one might end up being, despite the fact that fundamentally privacy is major unsolved issue of our technical era, an issue that has exacerbated by the very technology embraced by the bulk of us here on HN: This technology makes it possible to expose and share private information, whether as a direct and desirable effect (photo sharing) or as an indirect and undesirable effect (vulnerabilities and the like).

There are business opportunities here (privacy-protective services and systems) and there are stones to throw and derision to cast, for companies that services that fail to take privacy and security seriously.

That such a topic can run afoul of a loosely-defined hiatus is to me very unfortunate, a sad if not terrible side-effect of a well-intentioned but ultimately poorly defined decision.

This political story does not belong on HN.

This reminds me of a piece he wrote titled "A dead man sings", also about memory and how it is recorded.

I'm literally shaking. We can't let this keep happening on HN.