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0 pointssmtddr11y ago0 comments

When I said youtube, I meant the fact that people upload their lives to it. Not the cookie or IP tracking stuff. Speaking of uploading lives, let me add Facebook. So there just can't be a Facebook?

Devolving the internet & its services isn't the answer. You'd also have to just stop using cellphones too. There is no hiding from a corrupt government. You can't expect the general population to do all this stuff you're talking about. You have to fix the government. Focus on corruption-in-USgov and NSA, they are the enemy. Anything else is a distraction because it's not reasonable to say "Don't make a useful service for millions of non-technical people". Somebody, something, will always be popular and become a major hub of communication. To prevent that, is to prevent the evolution of not only the internet... but even society in general. And you'd be doing all that to avoid a corrupt-government, which you will fail at because you cannot avoid a corrupt-government. Anyone who thinks they have is wrong; it's just that USgov/NSA isn't interested enough in them yet.

The only exception is Snowden, and we all see the sacrifice he had to make to do it. If we all did that then... well... there is no America anymore. If that's what you're advocating, then you're asking for a nationwide revolution. Which is fine, btw. I'm supportive[1] of that. I'm just saying that avoiding a couple of social sites doesn't put you out of reach of the NSA. You'd have to get a significant amount of US citizens to go completely off the grid and live like hermits... or Snowdens. If that happened, I will happily call that a revolution and celebrate.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8458114

0 comments

mindslight11y ago

(for context, I hope for both the NSA and Facebook to go out of business, and was recently thinking Snowden might make a good Schelling point for a write-in candidate)

There's always going to be collection of selective disclosure. Some of that could be changed by a culture of secrecy (youtube videos in skimasks ^_^), but in general there will be people who post everything to the friendster du jour. And I don't see how one could ever stop assuming that information will be archived indefinitely. For this, my hope can only be for a symmetric Brinworld transparency where it ultimately doesn't matter (and to the extent some does, people learn to navigate these contours).

But for stuff that doesn't need to be shared, I think you're focused too much on the NSA, when it's really just the most prominent example. Any sufficiently-funded intelligence agency is going to have plants that work at significant corporate information troves. Exfiltration isn't terribly hard when companies setup geographically diverse data centers on purpose.

And as I said, insurance companies are a far more worrying threat to me as far as dictating everyday terms of your life - "we noticed you buy an awful lot of beer. Your auto insurance rates will be doubling unless you let us install a GPS-enabled breathalyzer in your car". I suppose this could be held back with legislation if we had a working political process, but I also recognize that economics tends to win out regardless.

You say 'devolve' when talking about moving to non-centralized services, but this is a loaded term. I view web toys (also a loaded term, heh heh) as a stop off from the Internet becoming mainstream-recognized before its application technologies were really polished to withstand model precession. There's no reason privacy-preserving technology couldn't have a similar interface, yet be easily self-administered with the help of any friend who is just slightly savvy (besides that it's much harder to get such software funded when there's no point for capital to invest because it rightly takes the middlemen out of the picture).

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