alt Hacker NewsIt's not anti-privacy to point out the obvious that privacy-advocacy is sometimes at odds with governments and the will of voters at large.
Privacy is being abused by criminals to victimize people at scale. Just because privacy is a moral good doesn't mean you are morally off the hook for enabling criminals.
Governments are so aware of this they're passing sweeping laws against it. This is your new reality -- you can't just bury your head in the sand. The whole point was saying that there could have been a middle ground that protected more of your rights than where you're at now if it weren't for the absolutism.
Turns out that being an absolutist isn't helpful.
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The laws they pass do nothing to stop the criminals. Do you think an “age verification” law can stop any criminals?
> Privacy is being abused by criminals to victimize people at scale.
Almost all victimization is being done without end to end encryption. This is not a problem caused by privacy.
Gotta disagree. The encryption part needed to happen: without it, there's just too much opportunity for governments to intercept unencrypted traffic and abscond with it. We saw that occur with Snowden, and with programs like MUSCULAR in particular.
I don't think it's that encryption was harmful, it's that it wasn't enough, and in a sense I agree with TFA & the Sun Tzu bit: it needed to be complemented by legislation that added decent privacy protections, and it largely wasn't. That was a mistake, I suppose, but the current political situation, esp. in the USA, disfavors privacy regulation getting done, ever. The Democrats are … maybe spiritually for it? … but not terrible effectual at getting it done; Obama's response to Snowden was "meh" at best, and Congresspeople, in particular Feinstein especially, let the DNI walk all over her. The GOP has no interest at all in regulating corporations, at all, ever, so with the House/Senate/POTUS all (R) at the moment, it's going to be until at least Nov before it is possible to even think that these might get addressed, and even that's … generous, and I won't be holding my breath for it to occur.
Stuff like what we saw in another thread today — with LG wantonly installing spyware — and things like Flock would have happened in addition to network intercepts; they are not happening instead of. Corporations and the government will do whatever the People permit them to get away with.
The guy’s logic is “if only we had allowed a small backdoor from the start they wouldn’t be forced to install a large backdoor now”. Other technologies that were open to the law were endlessly abused for surveillance.
His theory is bunk, there is absolutely no middle ground to be had with the people who want a backdoor. There are no small backdoors.
He's very clearly arguing against absolute privacy on the Internet and is saying that the people who advocated for it, which he besmirches as "tech bros", are responsible for the governments going too far now, instead of a happy compromise having been set out at the beginning, which by the way totally mischaracterizes the history of the Internet, where the governments were trying to impose total surveillance from the very beginning.
Age verification is not the will of the voters. It is the will of large political donors (specifically tech companies and religious censorship groups). It is certainly not the will of adult citizens who use adult websites, who have overwhelming shown in their usage patterns they will abandon any website that tries to do age verification.
Parental controls remains the right way to do age gating. It works today and has no privacy impacts.