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Tell HN: We'd better step up to protect privacy

47 points by couchand ↗ HN
The hacker community holds the right to privacy sacrosanct, and we understand more than most the hard fight that we all face trying to protect it.

That's why it's critical that we lend our support to fight for the right to privacy whenever it is threatened. Today, that threat comes from the Supreme Court. We have a duty to step up join the call for privacy today, or we shouldn't expect to see the support of others when it's our turn.

29 comments

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transcriptase
We’ll need to overlook for a moment that a non-trivial fraction of users here work for companies that do everything they legally can to collect, extract, track, scan, ping, and infer every last byte of information they’re able to about people who aren’t even vaguely aware of it.
gabrielsroka
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

-- Upton Sinclair

[dead] evocatus
solenoidalslide
I'm confused as to why you cannot gain the accolades of your peers. Implying only white people care about privacy? That is nonsensical.
[dead] evocatus
emptysongglass
You could be not-white, loudly proclaim your causes and reap accolades too. This isn't an issue of color.
CryptoPunk
There is no need to make racist generalizations. You could just limit your criticism to social justice activists.
evocatus
As a minority, it's impossible to be racist to whites [0]. Perhaps you should become educated.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prejudice_plus_power

CryptoPunk
1. That is not a standard definition of racism. It's one a small elite attempts to impose on society and is still mostly unrecognized outside of that.

2. There is no evidence that white people have institutional power over people of other races. This is a baseless assertion that forms the basis of a left-wing racial victimhood dogma.

3. It's also irrelevant. It's not the word "racism" that makes what you're doing bad. It's the fact that you're negatively generalizing people based on a single superficial dimension of their personage. It's bigotry, that disparages people based on something they have no control over, no matter if you want to engage in mental gymnastics to claim it's not "racism".

rg111
This is profound. Thanks for sharing your experience.

Nowadays, actual social status is somewhat dependent on one's status on Facebook, i.e. whether they frequently post pictures, what they do in those pictures, whether they go to premium vacation, etc.

I heavily dislike this. I also have seen my social status take a visible hit because I abstained from Facebook.

This effect is more announced in economically backwards geographies.

I don't care because I have a small circle of friends and well-wishers with whom I am content, and I am comfortably employed, and a man with good culture.

jen20
This does not seem true among my group of mid-late 30s friends who were there “at the start” - none of them use Facebook, and many haven’t since they started allowing non-academic email addresses to sign up.

Perhaps it’s true among older people, but it seems that younger people have abandoned Facebook at an even more prodigious rate. WhatsApp and Instagram are much more problematic at this point.

ls15
The platform names are interchangeable, but the constant issue seems to be that social status is tied to storing personal data in some company's database
rg111
> This does not seem true among my group

Well not true for my "group" either.

Before people in my (erstwhile) small town knew me, like they knew me and I did not knoe them.

Due to my achievements and I frequently posted on FB. I enjoyed recognition.

I abandoned fb, and that "recognition" has went away.

MonaroVXR
And... I literally got a lot of shit going on due this social media, because my family member wanted a perfect picture from the tower. For Instagram.
wmeredith
> Nowadays, actual social status is somewhat dependent on one's status on Facebook

This heavily depends on one's social circle. None of my friends are on Facebook or care about it.

rg111
I actually care about a broader circle.

My inner, medium, or even outer circle are not on Facebook.

HeyLaughingBoy
> there's no getting away from it

I remember someone on one of the comp.arch.* newsgroups pointing out in 1997 that privacy was over because everyone reading his post was probably already in a for-sale corporate database.

In 1997

The ship sailed a long time ago.

yucky
If you really want a sobering realization, how about Ted Kaczynski calling all of this out earlier than that in his infamous manifesto. Not to say the Unabomber was noble, but he turned out to be prescient if nothing else.
giantg2
Minus the bombs and potential mental disorder, living in a cabin away from most people sounds pretty right about now.
assemblylang
>I deleted Facebook some time around 08... I've abstained from almost all social media, and suffered the consequent damage to my social life.

You're not alone, I deleted my Facebook roughly around that same time (in 09 IIRC), and haven't joined any other major social media since (only social media I have left is hacker news and a tiny mastodon instance, and only started using these recently).

I had the same outcome, its a pretty massive blow to one's social life, and looking back it probably was not worth it to leave, but I stand by my decision. My miscalculation was the assumption that social media was a bit of a fad that people would "grow out of". Turned out to be completely the opposite, people I thought would never ever have been on social media are now some of the same people that are on it constantly.

rocketpastsix
I've been off Facebook for about 2 years now and I've not seen any damage to my social life. Maybe its because I had a robust handful of hobbies that helped me make friends in the wild or something else I don't know but it sounds more like a problem you need to solve, not rely on social media.
PatentlyDC123
Is this about the draft opinion leak? Or a 4th Amendment related opinion that was issued recently? I don't quite understand how the Supreme Court is involved right now. The Court doesn't really have a good track record of understanding the threats to privacy that technology brings, but that's been the situation for some time.
olliej
In this particular case the opinion explicitly stated that the constitution does not provide a right to privacy.
FooBarBizBazz
The problem is that Roe v. Wade frames the right to have an abortion as stemming from the right to privacy, and in fact is the decision that created the concept of a Right to Privacy. So, in Theoretical Jurisprudence Land, the Right to Privacy is at risk, because it's tied to something much more controversial.
starwind
This is demonstrably untrue. Louis Brandeis (late Supreme Court justice) and his business partner Samuel Warren published an article called the "Right to Privacy" in 1890.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Right_to_Privacy_(article)

See also Katz vs United States

"For the Fourth Amendment protects people, not places. What a person knowingly exposes to the public, even in his own home or office, is not a subject of Fourth Amendment protection. But what he seeks to preserve as private, even in an area accessible to the public, may be constitutionally protected."

FooBarBizBazz
I stand usefully corrected. Thank you.

Now how did I get this impression, and what grain of truth, if any, does it stem from? Hm.