Unless they change the laws and suddenly you have something to hide.
Or that hey, this power will never be abused because the system won't allow it, and those in control will always have our best interests in mind.
Don't collect more data than you have to, limit the power of any systems you implement, and always design things under the assumption your enemies will take control of it in future.
That is basically the opposite of what these companies do, and their business models rely it.
Some people realize we live in a surveillance dystopia with corrupt government, and others have not yet realized it.
This is great advice if you want to design Good systems, but under barely-regulated capitalism, those who design Good systems will be out-competed and put out of business by those who design Profitable systems :(
But back then it seemed like a distant and improbable scenario - I objected to his statement more on point of principle than out of any realistic sense that it was things were going to get that bad in the near future.
Turns out they did.
(before anyone says it - yeah. Back then there were probably already enough examples of law enforcement overreach - not to mention the decades-long injustice of the "war on drugs". I need to learn to be more cynical)
I am trying to understand this perspective. I was there and nothing seemed improbable or remote. The remoteness was merely a function of technical & economic conditions. Historic precedents, domestic and foreign, past or near present, all pointed the same direction, underlining high probabilities.
Pessimism is rarely the correct inclination, with the exception of questions concerning freedom, power, security, and control. It is appropriately rational to question and highlight worst case outcomes in such cases.
This same pattern is happening yet again ('surprise!') with generative AI. Maybe it is necessary to assure that 'yes, this technology is very cool' as red flags are raised.
It is a very simple thought, backed by unassailable historic evidence: Humans enjoy lording it over other human beings. We should never create systems that permit a tiny tiny subset to realize such base desires. A very simple idea, truly.
When you pass mass surveillance laws you are trusting the people in power now, but also the future people in power.
This framing can make you think about many laws differently.
Discussions on surveillance and misinformation often involve people advocating for granting more power to the government to prosecute who they believe violate their value system, unless the value system somehow changes and now you become the criminal. As an example, this is why breaking E2EE with backdoors to stop pedophilia, revoking immunity to social platforms for users' speech and the like are bad ideas - some day your values will become abhorrent, and the same tools that you used against others will be used against you.
My distaste for corporate stalking is, if I'm perfectly honest, at least partly selfish feelings of discomfort in losing what privacy I still have, but it is mostly concern for what some will use information about others to enforce.
We should rethink how we share our data and the costs that it has.
I don't think Meta and Google are to blame here. Other than encouraging us to give them our data unprotected (as well as trying to syphon up as much as they can get their hands on in the background).
That bracketed "as well as" is a 'king huge "other than".
Even your smaller "other than" that is stated as such, is enough to make the premise that they carry no blame seem pretty silly to me.
What concerns you about this?
That is the problem: we have nothing to hide until someone changes the law. Suddenly those things that were legal yesterday become the crimes of today.
What is legal and acceptable in one place is illegal and abhorrent elsewhere.
Until we have a homogenous global population and one world government there will be laws you disagree with and wont want enforced.
Edit: Genuinely confused by the downvotes here. Anyone care to take the time to explain?
You forgot from time to time. Abortion was legal in all of these places 1 year ago.
The article seems to imply that the big social media companies should selectively comply with a valid warrant based on what crime the accused has committed.
I think you should either have problem with the entire procedure or agree that the procedure is valid.
They already selectively comply: "According to internal statistics provided by Meta, the company complies with government requests for user data more than 70% of the time".
> As we have said in prior reports, we always scrutinize every government request we receive to make sure it is legally valid, no matter which government makes the request. We comply with government requests for user information only where we have a good-faith belief that the law requires us to do so.
(But) they seem to apply legal discretion on which to follow, which is mostly expected. When Meta receives a request/warrant they must use their judgement to determine whether it's legal or not.
A much more informative statement would be:
"We turn down about 25% of all requests"
Now, Google, to their credit, claims[1] they now purge information about users who visit abortion clinics or related places, but ... that isn't very reassuring. Even if they excise some related portion of user data, they still have enough other data to figure it out once law enforcement has access -- and there's more stuff the law would be after than just abortion! You'd be expecting Google to play whack-a-mole with every latest "activity that needs protection"!
But yes, you're correct, it's far too late to identify what Google's doing wrong after abortion is illegal, and after Google has that data about you, and after they're served with a warrant on that basis.
[1] This article https://www.opb.org/article/2022/08/18/google-workers-sign-p...
which cites this blog post: https://blog.google/technology/safety-security/protecting-pe...
Firstly, can you even prosecute a woman for abortion? Aren't they legal?
Secondly, if the abortion is illegal, it's not unusual for the state to prosecute someone when the investigation of that person reveals other crimes.
What would you propose instead? That any evidence of secondary criminal activity uncovered during an investigation of the primary activity be ignored?
Abortion legality varies by state in the US. This is a recent development.
I wouldn’t expect to be prosecuted, or even investigated, for typing “how people get away with bank robbery” into Google. Or for watching The Dark Knight.
In case you've been living under a rock for the last while: several American states have banned abortions[0][1] after the Supreme Court overturned Roe vs Wade. The federal government failed to implement any laws to safeguard access to abortions so overturning Roe vs Wade was all that conservatives needed.
Some states have exceptions for rape and incest, some don't. Texas even offers a sizeable bounty for reporting abortions. This has already resulted in medical care being refused to women carrying stillborn children and other pregnancy complications fatal to either the mother or the child out of fear of prosecution.
As for secondary criminal activity: I agree, if the police finds other illegal acts during a legal investigation, they should be allowed to act on that. This is the proof that the whole "if you've got nothing to hide" narrative surrounding state surveillance is dangerous.
[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/us/abortion-laws-ro...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_law_in_the_United_Sta...
Doesn't that fly in the face of metas own claims to not be able to?
BI seems to be implying that abortion shouldn't be treated as a crime in places where it is a crime.
Abortion was explicitly legally protected for 50 years and only became a crime in some localities last year. There aren't many "crimes" like that.
In states where it was illegal it may not even be ex-post-facto for them to prosecute for events that took place prior to last year's supreme court ruling.
Anyway, the real takeaway should be that businesses should not be collecting this kind of data in the first place. If they don't collect it, then they have nothing to turn over.
Murdering the unborn was once legal everywhere until it wasn't. It became illegal in some parts of the country and will eventually become illegal everywhere. One day we will look back and think how obvious it is that murdering the unborn is wrong.
A better option would be something like Briar which hides IPs via Tor.
Meta the company hates this and is spending money on ads trying to get people to use WhatsApp with end to end encryption for things like this.
There seems to be a disconnect between data being collected from a terminal, how rich that data can be, and what it can be used for. If you use a digital keyboard your every keystroke can, and probably is being logged - we used to call this spyware, now even the keyboard app on your phone has clipboard sync (and it's built into Windows too!).
People need to be aware for example when activating javascript (and most don't know what that is), how much the various APIs are collecting and storing, which is used to build a "fingerprint" of your device.
The web (and digital devices in general) is actively hostile, anyone who uses noscript can attest to that and anyone who goes onto any news media website and opens "network" via web dev console can see how much data is flying to god knows where to do god knows what.
If you want to defy the state you need to be a master spy, this means actually thinking how you research, and probably learning a thing or two from Snowden (are you on wifi? open hotspot? is your device logging anything, if so, what? do you need to destroy the device afterwards incase it gets forensically inspected? If you could read /var/log what would be there and would it reveal anything about your situation? If you can't read /var/log then your device is actively hostile and not worth the risk).
Privacy is effort, and, in these cases, the 'seekers' are not spending enough effort on hiding their tracks and they are like fish in shallow water, easy pickings.
The ones who are clued up are not the ones who end up making the press, because they know exactly how to cover their tracks, and make it impossible to prove or disprove a fact, which, thankfully at least at this moment, is how justice works (for the most part).
PRISM?
Serious question. I thought that was still a thing.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2023/01/27/digital-data-roe-wade-repr...
The users signed the EULA and know what their rights are.
"we also know that social media isn't likely to stand up to illegitimate law enforcement requests, because of the fact that they fear their own liability, or because of the fact that it's just too costly to stand up."
That said, I don't know if I'd feel comfortable discussing my medical history over Gmail or Facebook, even if ostensibly "private."
I thought pyrography (for example) was illegal in China
No, they'll just dutifully record all activities in a dossier, until something interesting presents itself to be leveraged against you, or until they decide at a later date that what you do is distasteful.
Facebook and Google are not to blame here; they're simply doing what the law demands of them. These companies are not above the law, they cannot refuse warrants. Blame Nebraskan and American federal law for this situation.
With a bit of luck, this situation will make these companies put more priority into E2EE. Had these conversations been done through Signal, there was likely nothing to be found or handed over.
The article disagrees:
> One legal expert said social platforms may cooperate with police even if not legally required to.
Regardless, you are right these companies are morally culpable for not implementing E2EE.
Companies just hand over data when simply asked, they don't even need a warrant.
> It shouldn't be up to Facebook/Google to decide what is a crime, nor in which cases wiretapping should be allowed.
Could mean either:
1. FB/Google should be prevented from deciding what is and is not a crime. They don't set the laws.
Or
2. FB/Google aren't setting the laws, so can't be blamed when complying with those laws.
Maybe it's my sleepiness, but I just cannot decide which of the two statements were intended by GP.
If they want to do business in a certain nation, they'll have to comply with the laws of that nation.
Are you proposing that companies be above the law? That they should be able to pick and choose which laws apply to them?
They could opt-out of being forced to comply with or defy authorities.
Don't use Facebook or Google.
Regarding your conclusion, leaving FB and G is not even the hardest part. The hardest part is that your network probably won't follow.
They should probably be using encryption within the chat itself (and not, you know, speaking in plain English) to add another layer. Perhaps changing the keys frequently via an agreed method (thinking about how to do that safely without leaving another trace) to render older messages 100% undecryptable.
But yeah, chances are all of that data is going to be accessed and they agreed to it! It's right there in the privacy policy people don't bother reading
The default setting is still unencrypted backups, though.
The story is Roe v. Wade overturned due to heinous corruption of the US political process in favour of the religious right and free market libertarians.
> The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
I agree with you in principle but AFAIK "actual laws" have never been necessary when the SCOTUS has declared a Constitutional right. Individual states don't need to codify a right to keep and bear arms, or freedom of speech or religion, nor can they choose to re-enable slavery or segregation, because those have all been decided at a higher level.
The story is Roe v. Wade was overturned due to the US political process working exactly as it as designed to, with the religious right telegraphing their play for decades, and progressives doing nothing about it except trying to fundraise on the aftermath.
More seriously, there has been substantial opposition to the anti-abortion long game but it's not easy to secure abortion rights in Nebraska from NY without federal law. But Roe made securing abortion federally a little moot and maybe not the hill a slim majority wants to die on when they have other priorities. Then they didn't get justices to retire when they could be replaced, although it's questionable that would have been allowed to happen anyway. Bad strategy but not complete inaction. They have been trying to oppose laws in states but gerrymandering means that the Right gets unfairly more representation in those states like Georgia.
>Pakistan asks Facebook and Twitter to help identify blasphemers
>Companies approached in effort to locate Pakistanis at home or abroad so they can be prosecuted or potentially extradited
I'm sure I'll be flamed into oblivion here, but it is worth considering the headline from the perspective of the anti-abortionists. If we cannot empathize or attempt to understand those who disagree, what is the point of having a discussion?
"FB and Google hand over user data, help to prosecute baby killers"
Reasonable people can disagree on the topic of abortion or at what stage of pregnancy it is acceptable. HN is not the place where I want to have that discussion. It has already been explored at depth elsewhere.
It's one thing to make providing abortions illegal. It's quite another thing to prosecute the women.
Laws of the land change, like everything else in this world.
1. The creation of domestic appliances that dramatically shorten house hold chores (washing clothing is a main one).
2. The move from the bulk of work labour being less physical.
Both meant there was less time needed to maintain a household, previously that was a full time job that seemed unpaid. And that women had suitable roles available in the work force where as manual labour would mean they likely couldn't compete with men for employment.
While society gained extra productivity from these changes, it's debatable if households gained financially as it was likely a powerful force in the mid century inflation.
I'd place centralised schooling in that list of things which freed up more labour. Contraceptives are recognised for this too, and I'm sure it lead to a sexual liberation at least.
Honestly, given where the productivity gains of women in the workforce went (not to the actual workers), we'd probably have a better quality of life if only half the household adults worked.
For men, it was always "pro-choice", child support and paternity tests are a recent invention (and don't compare with how hard it is to raise a kid)
If men got pregnant you could have your abortion together with your haircut
