I think we (everyone who participants here on Hacker News) have to learn how to be smart freedom fighters who can use nonviolent methods to overthrow dictatorships if we are to have any hope of reversing these trends
I'd settle for the HN crowd stopping scooping up gobs of data under a "it's different when I do it" copout. But even that much won't happen. (por exemplo the inevitable rationalizations in reply to this comment)
I don't think it's necessarily the scooping up of data that's scary. If you use a service, the service has a right to collect certain data about you. It only becomes an issue when the company behind that service has its hand in many pies and correlates all of the related data, or worse, if they share or sell that data to other entities.
> If you use a service, the service has a right to collect certain data about you.
I think this is the crux of the problem. The reality is that no, a service does not have a right to collect data about you. The service provider may ask that you provide certain data to use the service, but that collection is not a right.
> It only becomes an issue when the company behind that service has its hand in many pies and correlates all of the related data, or worse, if they share or sell that data to other entities.
The notion that one has a right to collect data from users of a service is the same notion that says the service provider has ownership of that data. But this is faulty, the data is not owned by the service provider, it was merely collected and stored. This distinction is important: if you feel you own the data, you feel that you should be able to sell it. If you feel you are a custodian of data, then you are defaulting to protecting that data from others that a user never agreed to give it to in the first place.
"The notion that one has a right to collect data from users of a service is the same notion that says the service provider has ownership of that data."
Last year my family went to have a family portrait taken by a professional (service provider or portraits) photographer. The photos (data) that were produced from the photo shoot belonged to the photographer. That photographer was more than happen to sell me family portrait, but the law is fairly clear that he in fact owns the data (all photos that were taken), i.e. he has copyright over the data.
The law isn't actually clear at all. Commissioned works (such as a private portrait session) can very often be considered "works for hire," depending on the exact wording of the contract.
I could simply snap at you with "so said the dictator"... but I don't feel like burning away karma with a cheap shot.
Instead, I will point out that most dictators in the world rationalize their actions as necessary to ensure a greater good that will ultimately outshine whatever it is they know they should not be doing. I don't have the time or interest to provide a peer reviewed article about how this pattern repeats over the last 5,000 years of World history, but I will provide an example form my home country. You may google for other examples if you feel it's due.
Porfirio Diaz came to power in Mexico in 1876, under the platform of "no reelection" due to the recurrent problem of 19th century Mexican politicians running for office multiple terms (last example was Benito Juarez, who died during his 4th term, but there are others). After this he:
1. Appointed close friend, Manuel Gonzalez, as successor in 1880 election.
2. Amended the constitution to allow a non consecutive 2nd term reelection.
3. Came back to rule in 1884.
4. Extended the presidential term from 4 years to 6 years (which remains the norm in the country to this date).
5. Removed all restrictions to reelection and remained in office through electoral fraud and assassination of political rivals for the next 27 years.
6. In 1908, he claimed that Mexico was "ready for democracy" and organized an election that allowed other candidates for the first time in two decades.
7. However in 1910, he had the other candidate, Francisco I. Madero, put in jail. Then the election was carried on, and he claimed to have won by "overwhelming advantage".
8. This fact triggered the civil war know as the Mexican Revolution, which forced him to flee to France in 1911, leaving behind a country drawn in open warfare for 6 more years (and in the ballpark of 25 years of instability and low intensity conflict).
If you collect data (and create a walled garden around it through various superficial methods increasingly easier to bypass at scale, so that "only" you can access/leverage it to the fullest without having to go through such artificially erected barriers), your government can quietly collect it from you (and access/leverage it to the same extent).
If you collect data, and it was made accessible to everyone to access and leverage to the fullest if they choose, … ?:
"This paper has engaged in a wide ranging discussion around the issues of information asymmetry in contemporary life. We have examined the relationship between such asymmetries and how power is ineluctably interrelated to such imbalances. Within this, we demonstrated how key technologies and techniques have been, and continue to be, employed to deepen and widen the information gap.
Unsurprisingly, we note that there are marked differences between those who inhabit the opposite banks – we are witnessing an entrenchment of power and information within a small, exclusive group on one side while the general population bears the weight of evermore intrusive surveillance.
One potential,and possibly democratic, move would be to ensure that knowledge is spread more equally and transparently.[…]"
If you collect data, and it was made accessible to everyone to access and leverage to the fullest if they choose, … ?:
Then the government can still use the data.
The point is not that any database has on you it's what you get when you combine the public and private history of everyone. So, suddenly a joke taken out of context or an angry x and your on the next 'no fly list'. The more information someone has the easier it is to find something they dislike even if it's simply being to normal.
It's the lost of anonymity that's important not your drunken photo's.
That is the case now, however under the scenario that I'm putting forth (and what general societal trends are moving towards), what we call "private" today is increasingly becoming "public".
So now that joke everyone can make can still be taken out of context by everyone, but how one ends up on a no fly list or any list anyone is free to see/compile/disregard will no longer be the black box event it is now, especially if the information about people who decide (human biases involved in such decision making will be increasingly open to see for all) how one get's placed on such list becomes increasingly public or theoretically everyone would be on a no fly list because of some aspect social behavioral norms people will violate at least once in their life or because anyone is capable of making such jokes, it will become meaningless to compile such lists in the first place especially if how one becomes on such lists and those who enforce such lists are available to such potential scrutiny by everyone else.
It's the lost of anonymity
I suggest that people/organizations/governments are coming to terms that it's the lost illusion of anonymity/control over what information propagates, that was never an inherit property of the universe, but merely local maxima we have constructed from prior limitations/experience that we were (and increasingly less) constrained to for our relative existence, that now has become (and become increasingly more) something we're able to see beyond and challenge now on multiple levels now that our capabilities have shown us that our constructed ideas of reality and how things are not nearly as absolute as we have conditioned ourselves to be.
That's not to say that anonymity can not exist to any degree, even now, I think people will gain anonymity in other forms like from apathy to sifting through all the information that is increasingly more available about everyone and everything else.
How so? When I say "private" information is increasingly becoming "public", you assume I'm treating privacy as a binary thing?
Whether one declares information as classified or public isn't an inherit property of the information itself, and as everyone has increasingly similar access (relative asymmetry approaches 0 on a scale from 0 to 100) to information (which seems to be the direction of our collective behaviors, especially if we compare to prior times in human history), trying to classify any information in either state or on a spectrum, seems increasingly like an exercise in futility/irrelevance (to me) in the face of what we are seeing take place and the capabilities on the horizon.
The "private" vs. "public" divide is less binary than your suggesting.
Individuals, corporations, low level government workers, and the government as a collective all have differing access to different types of information. Also, it's not just pieces of information but also the ability to deal with that that's restricted. For example you might look at a few tweets, but twitter rate limits you without paying them a lot of money.
Edit: (removed redundant crap).
Sure, Russia got copy's of the design for both the first Atomic and Hydrogen bombs. So, every country with nuclear weapons can trace their designs back to those same researchers. Yet, even after 10's of thousands of people have seen them (or a derivative design) and 70 years good luck finding detailed documentation on Google.
Sure, but you would think the way you hear the media going on and on about people getting access into "types" of information they shouldn't have access to (banks pretty much consider electronic hacks apart of the cost of doing business these days), using the same tools as the people who construct such systems, its not hard to think otherwise compared to say hundreds of years ago. I mean, anyone could easily look up as list of free proxies and crawl twitter to get around the ip rate limits (or any site for that matter, people do this all the time), increasingly more than ever, people have the ability to access such information (and vasts amounts of it) more than before. Whether they feel compelled to is a different story. Same goes for the fission and fusion weapons: the physics behind it is pretty much available in every university in the world (and their online lecture notes), I just think not many people just want to build such things. And all this is pretty much within a century. Took much longer if one looks back throughout human history for knowledge of information to even propagate throughout different cultures.
Beyond that, I don't really know what to say beyond that things change. A lot of the social constructs that we are born into may be totally irrelevant in our lifetime regardless of our opinions about them, some people can adapt to such, and some people will go to their grave with cognitive dissonance of such change clinging to their memories of a world that was but will never be again.
I'd settle for the HN crowd stopping scooping up gobs of data under a "it's different when I do it" copout. But even that much won't happen. (por exemplo the inevitable rationalizations in reply to this comment)