> but pretending like any loss at all is unacceptable, such as you're doing here, is a farce.
There's a weird transformation that this conversation has gone through. As a reminder it started out with you saying "besides, doomsaying that 'anything could be illegal!' isn’t backed by anything real or lasting."
Which is just false. And I'm not sure where I or frankly anyone else in this thread has suggested that even just a single person being hurt means that privacy is an existential problem. Quite the opposite, I accepted the premise that there's a threshold, asked you what your opinion of that threshold was, and responded to you saying:
> Every time in modern history western society has started down the path of outlawing some form of existence, we self correct.
and
> Their whole argument is, “what if stuff you like is made illegal in the future?!?!” with absolutely no tether to realit[y]
by pretty objectively correctly pointing out that this doesn't change anything for anyone caught out in the current situation and that, yeah, things being made illegal in the future is a completely realistic concern with countless historical examples backing it up.
Of course we balance concerns about safety. I still use a phone and participate in society, I'm using my real name online right now. Ironically, I'm being less pseudonymous than you are right now. Very clearly I am not saying that a single person dying means we all need to go live in the woods.
But "what is an acceptable level of sacrifice for convenience" really doesn't have anything to do with the argument "I have nothing to hide." If someone dismisses concerns about car safety or medical accessibility or criminal activity by saying that those dangers aren't real, then they'd be very much in the wrong. And it's equally wrong to dismiss privacy concerns by saying that concerns about future erosion of rights "aren't tethered to reality." They are a thing that happens. They're real, just as real as car accidents. So no you don't have to stop driving, but you should wear a seatbelt, look both ways before you cross the street, and use an encrypted messenger on your phone.
The negative consequences of incomplete privacy are certainly real, they’re just not nearly as numerous as you seem to believe.
I can and I will dismiss the kinds of privacy concerns that rely on me being unable to understand how risk works, that rely on me falsely believing a solution to any problem exists with zero downside, that rejects any decision that has even one casualty.
I tried to show you how futile a game of, “your idea hurts people” is, but you seem incapable of moving past it. What a shame.
Holy crud, HN has been weird lately :) So I learned today that suggesting Facebook should encrypt its messenger app is actually just me embracing a fantasy about the nature of safety and risk.
I don't know I feel like you're probably 3 messages away from telling me that I should remove my smoke alarms from my house because house fires are uncommon and then calling me deluded because I wear a helmet when I go biking. I didn't realize that me taking 30 seconds to install Signal and then using it to chat with my friends was a futile rebellion against the natural order ;)
Okay apologies, I really don't mean to be snarky. But you've taken this conversation in a very strange direction that I don't think is representative of what anyone who rejects the "I have nothing hide" narrative actually believes. I would just point out once again, I am less pseudonymous than you are right now. I'm using my real name, I have more contact information listed on my profile. Very obviously I am willing to publish information about myself. So the context of this conversation really just does not align with this view you've gotten that the people disagreeing with you are just privacy absolutists who think any privacy risk at all is too large to take.
If you're saying that someone is rejecting all risk and refusing to accept a privacy system with any downside, and at the same time you notice that they're actively and deliberately publishing their real name and email address, then that should give you pause and it should make you step back and think, "maybe I don't understand what their argument is." Maybe when that person points out that risks exist they're saying something more than "any risk is too much risk".
You compared using Whatsapp to wearing a seatbelt; the problem with this analogy is that many, MANY more people die in car accidents than from... whatever abstract value me using Whatsapp will provide you, a complete stranger.
You're failing to understand that the conversation does not end just because someone is harmed by something. You, and society generally, do not consider "one single negative outcome" to be enough of a reason to not do anything.
We can't get past this. You must either accept this as an observation about reality, or you will not understand whatever other direction this conversation may go.
> You, and society generally, do not consider "one single negative outcome" to be enough of a reason to not do anything.
Like I said, this is a completely incorrect reading of my position, and it should be obvious to you that it's incorrect because I'm taking privacy risks right now. If I believed that "a single negative outcome" was enough privacy risk to justify not doing something, I wouldn't be talking to you right now, I'd be living in the woods and shooting drones out of the sky. But I'm not, so very clearly you are missing something about my views.
> whatever abstract value me using Whatsapp will provide you, a complete stranger.
Collective usage of E2EE makes it easier for other people to blend into the crowd and makes usage of E2EE messaging less suspicious. This is not exactly hard to understand and it's not abstract. It's the same reason why many cisgender people list pronouns when filling out profiles on new services -- it's a very low-cost way to make it so that transgender users aren't singling themselves out.
Collective normalization of E2EE also encourages people who aren't technically inclined and who are just following network effects to switch over to better messengers, which makes them safer without forcing them to become privacy experts.
And of course, when we talk about the "nothing to hide" fallacy, we mean more than "your actions as a stranger benefit me" -- we're pointing out that the risk analysis most people do about privacy risks is flawed and over-optimistic and advising you that you might want to redo that risk analysis. For comparison, you wearing a helmet when you ride your bicycle won't keep me safe, but the safety benefits to you outweigh the downsides and you should still probably wear one anyway. Because people feel invincible about accidents even though they're very much not.
Your argument relies on "one single negative outcome" to be enough of a reason not to do anything. Obviously I know you live incongruously with your argument; that's my entire point! Glad you're figuring that out, but that doesn't mean your argument suddenly has merit, just because you're aware of how bad it is.
I'm not missing anything, you're just failing to resolve your internal inconsistency.
Look, your risk analysis of privacy harms does not become accurate just because you say it is. Saying that this is "one single negative outcome" a bunch of times doesn't make it true.
Pretty much the entirety of recorded human history backs up the idea that privacy matters, including the present where state governments are currently campaigning hospitals and social platforms to identify transgender people and to prosecute abortions.
Your risk analysis is wrong. That's what people are pointing out to you. We're not privacy absolutists, obviously we are not privacy absolutists. We are not suddenly having a realization about incongruity, it's honestly just really silly to suggest that this entire disagreement boils down to me seeing one trans person die and suddenly thinking "never again, no cost is too great." Take a step back out of the weeds and think about whether it's actually likely that anyone believes that :) That is not and has never been the argument, I haven't seen anyone in this entire thread even in sibling comments make that argument.
What we've all been pointing out is that the eventual arc of justice in the universe is unhelpful to people who are suffering right now, and that your risk analysis about the likelihood of people being put into that position is wrong. But go on, tell me again that this is actually a deep philosophical disagreement and I haven't internalized that safety measures involve tradeoffs.
You can call me wrong, you can claim you’re not arguing that one casualty is too many, but your actual argument remains that any negative consequences of giving up some privacy for substantive benefit are infinitesimally small yet somehow not worth the real value provided.
Stop trying to explain how your current argument isn’t what it clearly is, and make a better one!
What you think is a minor risk is a much larger risk than you suppose. And your analysis of the downsides of privacy improvements are wrong as well:
It takes 30 seconds to install Signal. There is no substantive benefit to Facebook's messenger not being E2EE. Privacy is not the reason why it's hard for you to get a copy of your medical records or migrate accounts across services. There is no massive substantive social benefit to advertisers tracking you across the web, and your life is not going to suddenly get worse if you install an adblocker.
This is the equivalent of putting on a bicycle helmet, getting a vaccine, wearing a seatbelt. It's not hard and it doesn't hurt you and the risks of ignoring clearly established safeguards are greater than you think. Your math is wrong.
> Stop trying to explain how your current argument isn’t what it clearly is
:D That is one way to approach a discussion, but it's not one I feel particularly obligated to take seriously or treat respectfully. I'm not really interested in having an argument about whether or not I'm lying to you when I tell you what exactly I believe. That would be a pointlessly inane, obviously unproductive waste of time.
I didn't know we were allowed to just say what the other person believes and then double down when they explain otherwise. If that kind of nonsense is allowed, then I've got to say that I think it's really weird that you've been secretly objecting to privacy on purely religious grounds the whole time :)
Your argument relies on the miscalculation of risk, and now exposed you can’t even actually articulate an alternative reason why privacy is so important.
> Your argument relies on the miscalculation of risk
:shrug: Six million Jews would like a word with you.
If that's not enough, consider that there might be a reason why we literally have laws preventing the requirement of disclosure of sex/race in hiring today? Consider the countless studies about how anonymity benefits the ability of oppressed groups (particularly women) to participate in public spaces online, consider that the Supreme Court has very directly said that anonymity and privacy are an essential component of 1st Amendment rights. You also still really haven't grappled with the fact that multiple states today are pushing to get access to medical records and social media messages both to prosecute people and label minority groups. These are not issues that are affecting only one or two people.
And again, the "benefit" that we're giving up by being more private is negligible. There's very little downside to encrypting messages or blocking ad networks from tracking people. The entirety of recorded human history disagrees with your risk analysis, in addition to pretty much every single 1st Amendment expert and minority advocacy/anti-hate group today. Your math is wrong.
> So you admit your argument is predicated on the number of people who are harmed.
What, yeah, of course it is. What on earth are you talking about, which part of "your math is wrong" didn't you understand?
Lack of privacy hurts people. Not one or two people, it hurts a lot of people. It might hurt you one day. And that's worth caring about. It's worth caring about because it's a lot of people. If you didn't realize that I was talking about risk/harms then you really didn't understand a word I was saying.
Yes, I'm talking about risk. Your math about the risk is wrong. It's not a gotcha that it's apparently taken you to this point in the conversation to understand that "your math is wrong" means "your analysis of the number of people that are hurt by lack of privacy is incorrect."
> and since then, society has improved in gigantic leaps and bounds.
Society has improved slowly, via heavy investment from anonymous activists and advocates who put themselves in harms way to improve it. Every single one of those activist movements relied on privacy. Quite frankly, there really aren't many examples of social movements that have improved society that haven't heavily used privacy and anonymity to aid them. Certainly at the very least this displays a startling lack of knowledge about the history of race and gender in America.
> is no longer possible in the western world
:) Citation very, very much needed. We have a political party in America with members who are openly calling for the extermination of transgender identity, headed by a political ideologue who's currently being prosecuted for (essentially) attempting a coup. Despite that he's still favored to be the next presidential nominee of that party because the majority of that party doesn't view attempting a coup as disqualifying from office.
It is incredibly naive to believe that we are no longer capable of doing terrible things in America to oppressed identities or capable of building political and social apparatus to do those terrible things.
> Every time in modern history western society has started down the path of outlawing some form of existence, we self correct.
And as I said, that self correction is of no benefit whatsoever for the 6 million Jews that died. Self correction is not protection. Privacy is protection.
You had to go back 80 years to find an example of a lack of privacy hurting enough people to make your point, and that's my point.
We don't have things like WW2 happen anymore, and living our life like the next Holocaust is just around the corner is paranoid and overly cynical.
We really did seem to learn that lesson. Your own example of trans rights is a great one; laws protecting trans people are enshrined in many US states already, and courts are annihilating many of the attempts made to the contrary.
We stumble, but we move forward, and without the loss of millions of people this time. Progress.
The question isn't about whether the trans-identified have their basic rights. Of course they do, like every other citizen. It's about whether they should be granted extra rights, particularly those that override the existing rights of women.
For example, should a trans-identifying male criminal have the right to be incarcerated in women's prisons? Some female prisoners have already suffered rapes and sexual assaults from such males, in states that granted this right to the them.
It's another example of the balance of rights, just as privacy rights are.
Also, the feminist activists who are advocating for women's sex-based rights are largely anonymous or pseudo-anonymous due to potential repercussions from vindictive men who oppose them. Online privacy in particular is vital for their activist movement to proceed without intimidation. It works both ways.
> You had to go back 80 years to find an example of a lack of privacy hurting enough people to make your point, and that's my point.
> Society has improved slowly, via heavy investment from anonymous activists and advocates who put themselves in harms way to improve it. Every single one of those activist movements relied on privacy. Quite frankly, there really aren't many examples of social movements that have improved society that haven't heavily used privacy and anonymity to aid them. Certainly at the very least this displays a startling lack of knowledge about the history of race and gender in America.
> If that's not enough, consider that there might be a reason why we literally have laws preventing the requirement of disclosure of sex/race in hiring today? Consider the countless studies about how anonymity benefits the ability of oppressed groups (particularly women) to participate in public spaces online, consider that the Supreme Court has very directly said that anonymity and privacy are an essential component of 1st Amendment rights. You also still really haven't grappled with the fact that multiple states today are pushing to get access to medical records and social media messages both to prosecute people and label minority groups. These are not issues that are affecting only one or two people.
I'm curious, do you have any examples at all of equal-rights movements that haven't used privacy and anonymity to help protect themselves as they accomplished their goals? Because I can't think of any. Social progress isn't magic, it happens because people make it happen, and they very often rely on privacy to protect themselves during those transitions.
Do you think we could get rid of laws banning employers from asking about race/identity on job applications and it would just be fine and there would be no downsides? We got those laws for a reason -- namely because without them there would be a huge increase in discrimination. And again, ask any anti-discrimination advocacy group whether or not anonymity matters today for protecting marginalized people.
If your opinion is that anything less than the genocide of 6 million people is no longer worth worrying about, then that is a wild perspective to have that I think the vast majority of Americans (and people in general) would disagree with. Privacy did not become irrelevant after WW2 ended.
----
> and courts are annihilating many of the attempts made to the contrary.
Citation needed. Anti-trans legislation has accelerated in many states, not deaccelerated. It's by no means certain that that the situation won't get worse. A reminder that people said "the courts will shut it down" about abortion-rights challenges too.
In the meantime, doxing and violence against transgender people is at a nearly all-time high and people are stalking doctors.
Ask the transgender community sometime whether or not they think that privacy matters for them. I guarantee they will not agree with your assessment of the situation.
> "Across the country, we’re seeing a clear and unanimous rejection of these laws as unconstitutional, openly discriminatory and a danger to the very youth they claim to protect,"
10/75 is an overwhelming rejection to you? See https://translegislation.com/, bills are getting through and the pace at which they're being proposed is speeding up, not slowing down:
> 2023 marks the fourth consecutive record-breaking year for anti-trans legislation in the U.S. In just one month, the U.S. doubled the number of anti-trans bills being considered across the country from the previous year. We've seen familiar themes: attacks on gender-affirming care, education, athletics, birth certificates, religious discrimination, and other categories documented in our 2022 anti-trans legislation overview.
----
What makes this argument particularly ridiculous is -- ask every single one of these groups and advocacy fighters what they think of privacy and every single one of them will give you the same answer: it's an essential right that matters for protecting minorities. Has the ACLU stopped fighting for privacy because we've apparently defeated transphobia?
Your evidence that privacy no longer matters is an organization that spends an enormous amount of time advocating for privacy rights for exactly the reasons I mentioned above. If you're going to quote an ACLU article on the direction of transphobia, consider what they are actually saying about privacy, both in regards to transgender issues and to issues like abortion:
> As a school administrator, you have a legal obligation to maintain the privacy and safety of your students, including those who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, or questioning
> The lack of strong digital privacy protections has profound implications in the face of expanded criminalization of reproductive health care. In light of these breathtaking and authoritarian attacks on bodily autonomy, we must fight with new urgency to ensure that people maintain control over their personal information. If we fail, the repressive surveillance techniques and powers that police and prosecutors have for decades used to wage the racist wars on drugs and terrorism will be marshaled to track, catalogue, and criminalize pregnant people and those seeking basic information about reproductive health issues, putting tens of millions of people at risk of police harassment and worse.
When you say that privacy no longer matters because we've beaten transgender discrimination, first consider checking if there are any transgender advocacy groups that agree with you. The people that you're arguing are on top of this and that will prevent us from ever doing anything horrible ever again -- they all think that privacy matters. It might be a good idea to research why they think that?
I'm just trying to imagine how you think it would have gone down in Nazi Germany if a Jewish group tried to sue the Nazi party for their oppressive treatment of the Jewish people.
How you see the Holocaust as a parallel to what trans people are going through is a wild over-exaggeration of the situation, though it makes sense your argument needs such a thing as it can't stand on its own.
Trans people are not, in any way, shape or form, being oppressed to anything even remotely approaching the degree Jewish people experienced in the Holocaust, and the idea that "if only trans people could have more privacy this wouldn't be an issue" is so nonsensical it borders on delusion.
> How you see the Holocaust as a parallel to what trans people are going through is a wild over-exaggeration of the situation, though it makes sense your argument needs such a thing as it can't stand on its own.
We don't really need to imagine a hypothetical around that because we can look at the history of antisemitism after WW1 and see the parallels directly. Nazi growth was largely dismissed by political opponents of the Nazi party (https://www.bl.uk/voices-of-the-holocaust/articles/antisemit...)
> In the audio clip above, Eli Fachler remembers that many Germans he knew saw antisemitism as a sign of ignorance or lack of culture. In fact, many Germans did not take Hitler seriously and saw the Nazis as a fringe movement that would be short-lived – even when the Nazi Party won 37% of the vote in the 1932 elections, a result which made it the largest party in the German Parliament. When Hitler was appointed chancellor in January 1933, many politicians still thought that they would be able to control him and form a functioning government.
"It would be impossible for these people to seize power, we have legal challenges in front of that happening" was the overwhelming sentiment before the Nazi party seized power. There are striking similarities between early responses to the Nazi party and the attitudes of people today towards modern fascist movements in America. Consider that many Jews in early Germany during Hitler's rise to power did not think that mass discrimination against them was feasible or likely.
----
But at the same time, holy heck I'm sorry I even mentioned the holocaust if that's the only thing you're now able to think about. For the 3rd time at this point:
> Society has improved slowly, via heavy investment from anonymous activists and advocates who put themselves in harms way to improve it. Every single one of those activist movements relied on privacy. Quite frankly, there really aren't many examples of social movements that have improved society that haven't heavily used privacy and anonymity to aid them. Certainly at the very least this displays a startling lack of knowledge about the history of race and gender in America.
> If that's not enough, consider that there might be a reason why we literally have laws preventing the requirement of disclosure of sex/race in hiring today? Consider the countless studies about how anonymity benefits the ability of oppressed groups (particularly women) to participate in public spaces online, consider that the Supreme Court has very directly said that anonymity and privacy are an essential component of 1st Amendment rights. You also still really haven't grappled with the fact that multiple states today are pushing to get access to medical records and social media messages both to prosecute people and label minority groups. These are not issues that are affecting only one or two people.
Is your position somehow that none of these current events count because they haven't reached the basic threshold of 6 million deaths where privacy suddenly starts mattering? There is enough harm being done to enough people in modern America today to justify caring about this stuff.
> and the idea that "if only trans people could have more privacy this wouldn't be an issue" is so nonsensical it borders on delusion.
Nobody has said that, neither I nor the many anti-hate groups and advocacy groups whose privacy opinions you are ignoring.
> Western society learned the lesson from those awful events; they’re therefore not going to happen again.
"But it couldn't happen here" is so widely understood as a fallacy in thinking about how fascist movements operate and spread that it's become a meme at this point. There is no reason to believe that America would be incapable of mass-discrimination against a minority group.
But for the 4th time now, my more relevant response to your dismissal of the holocaust is:
> Society has improved slowly, via heavy investment from anonymous activists and advocates who put themselves in harms way to improve it. Every single one of those activist movements relied on privacy. Quite frankly, there really aren't many examples of social movements that have improved society that haven't heavily used privacy and anonymity to aid them. Certainly at the very least this displays a startling lack of knowledge about the history of race and gender in America.
> If that's not enough, consider that there might be a reason why we literally have laws preventing the requirement of disclosure of sex/race in hiring today? Consider the countless studies about how anonymity benefits the ability of oppressed groups (particularly women) to participate in public spaces online, consider that the Supreme Court has very directly said that anonymity and privacy are an essential component of 1st Amendment rights. You also still really haven't grappled with the fact that multiple states today are pushing to get access to medical records and social media messages both to prosecute people and label minority groups. These are not issues that are affecting only one or two people.
There's a weird transformation that this conversation has gone through. As a reminder it started out with you saying "besides, doomsaying that 'anything could be illegal!' isn’t backed by anything real or lasting."
Which is just false. And I'm not sure where I or frankly anyone else in this thread has suggested that even just a single person being hurt means that privacy is an existential problem. Quite the opposite, I accepted the premise that there's a threshold, asked you what your opinion of that threshold was, and responded to you saying:
> Every time in modern history western society has started down the path of outlawing some form of existence, we self correct.
and
> Their whole argument is, “what if stuff you like is made illegal in the future?!?!” with absolutely no tether to realit[y]
by pretty objectively correctly pointing out that this doesn't change anything for anyone caught out in the current situation and that, yeah, things being made illegal in the future is a completely realistic concern with countless historical examples backing it up.
Of course we balance concerns about safety. I still use a phone and participate in society, I'm using my real name online right now. Ironically, I'm being less pseudonymous than you are right now. Very clearly I am not saying that a single person dying means we all need to go live in the woods.
But "what is an acceptable level of sacrifice for convenience" really doesn't have anything to do with the argument "I have nothing to hide." If someone dismisses concerns about car safety or medical accessibility or criminal activity by saying that those dangers aren't real, then they'd be very much in the wrong. And it's equally wrong to dismiss privacy concerns by saying that concerns about future erosion of rights "aren't tethered to reality." They are a thing that happens. They're real, just as real as car accidents. So no you don't have to stop driving, but you should wear a seatbelt, look both ways before you cross the street, and use an encrypted messenger on your phone.