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I'm currently working as a cybersecurity engineer and I'm a former Google SRE. So, I request you do not kneejerk dismiss me as some kind of technical ignoramus if you think that's what my argument hinges on.
Whenever privacy warriors complain about privacy I find myself rolling my eyes and thinking okay boomer. Even though more people than boomers say this and I do believe privacy is important. To be clear I mean privacy in the abstract. "I don't use Facebook because [privacy]". "I am looking to adopt a GrapheneOS based phone with no Google apps because [privacy]".
Privacy is obviously important. I don't want some rando, or worse, some personal enemy to rifle through my all of my digital data looking for ways to harm me. But the abstract privacy concern takes the form of a Motte and Bailey between the two. Google, Facebook and friends mostly act on your private data in the aggregate, but the privacy advocates generate worry that your intimate conversations or pictures are being personally viewed.
I also find privacy warrior claims rather, lets say, Joker-level anarchistic about rule of law. Everyone should have end-to-end encrypted messaging and the government should be locked out of private spaces no matter what. In no other domain do we accept a claim like "this dungeon in my house is off limits even to detectives with a court order because it is my private property" but apparently yes this digital cache of self-produced child pornography or evidence of a ticking time bomb terrorist plot[1] is something we can take to our graves regardless of any legitimate pursuit of justice. The level of hostility towards government here surpasses any of government's responsibility to protect its citizenry.
I'm not arguing against having digital security. It's very important for both organizations and individuals to have basic opsec lined up, especially because of how many automated and directed attacks there are trying to steal money and secrets. But in this battle companies like Google, who privacy advocates possibly fear only less than Facebook, are far closer to friend than foe because they provide a level of sophisticated and free security and direct privacy guarantee that almost nobody can achieve on their own.
The level of fear and worry privacy warriors generate rises to the level of conspiracy-adjacence. The word "qanon" pops into my head. Someone, Out There, is collecting all of your private information and you need to disconnect from the grid right now. Abandon all petty conveniences like being able to share photos with grandma, your life depends on it.
Ironically, the self-hosted Trust No One approach appears to make people even more vulnerable to attack. Even very technically sophisticated friends of mine who have hosted their own email have been hacked and their identities stolen (and used against them for extortion) in ways that would not have happened if they had stuck to GMail and used their FIDO2 two factor key for second factor.
I have another friend who decided to take his family's photos and files out of iCloud and Google Drive. He set up a home RAID array and was cruising along fine but neglected to monitor the drives. One failed and he didn't know, so when the second failed all of his data was gone. He didn't have backups, because why would you if you have RAID and snapshotting. He's not some noob either. He is also a sophisticated technology professional.
My argument against individual actions you can take on privacy are something like: you can do a few basic things to radically improve your personal opsec, and anything else is rapidly diminishing returns at increasingly greater inconvenience and, worse, may be a net increase in your vulnerability to attack or data loss.
My argument against regulatory action on this is, well: Europe leads the way on this. Does anyone think, say, GDPR has made Europeans much safer than Americans? At what regulatory and compliance cost? Mostly GDPR seems like a joke.
The fact that privacy fretting appears to primarily afflict men (with notable exceptions like Naomi Brockwell) suggests that there must be something autistic about it.
(Mostly, I can't shake the strange feeling that inside of all of this is a The Last Psychiatrist style phenomena (made with impeccable erudition that I could never live up to) that privacy worries are a proxy for dealing with some... thing(?) that people would never allow themselves to acknowledge consciously)
In the end, excessively fretting about privacy mostly is costly (in time), increases inconvenience and annoyance, increases the nanny/regulatory state, puts you at greater risk, and just makes the ads being served to you dumber.
I think part of the issue, for me anyway, is just how much of my data is out there and how useful it is. And it turns out to be not only nearly impossible to protect your data from leaking with or without a warrant, but absolutely impossible to remove information once it’s in the wild.
If I go into your house, warrent or not, I’m bound to only the things in that location to get Information on your life. I might rifle through the papers on your desk, and maybe find out some things. But it’s limited in scope and it’s not going farther than those bits of data that are available in that house. Give me access to your data and I can know pretty much literally everything about you. I have your location, the websites you visit, the apps you use, your contact list — and that’s just from your internet service provider. Get your credit card information, and I know every purchase you’ve made. The scope is worlds apart.
The other thing is the permanent nature of the databases that the governments can build off the data. Once they have it, storage capacity is the only limit to the size and detail of the profile built. And this presents a problem that really needs addressing— if the cops get a warrent on me today, how far back can they dig and how far forward? How long can they keep this data? What can they do with these dossiers once they have them?
For most people, I think the danger is probably overblown. Most of us aren’t that interesting. But there are people who would absolutely be harmed by public databases being available. Back doors for cops can easily be weaponized by bad actors to track down escaping domestic abuse victims, for example. Governments can use these databases to track dissenters or in extreme cases to enable genocide. If the government decided in 2357 that it wanted to kill Hispanics, your phone and the data it collected and continues to collect would turn you in rather quickly. You had your phone in your pocket when you went to the Hispanic church up the road. You have a Spanish keyboard on your phone. You follow Hispanic topics on social media. It doesn’t take a lot of work to query a database with markers for membership in the wrong demographic group.
These databases already exist and have more than enough information to carry out any kind of genocide you'd like. Society couldn't possibly work without them. This was true 100 years ago and it's true today.
If the government wants to find and kill a group (or even an individual), it's not lack of information that's going to stop them, it hasn't been for a very long time.
I feel like much of the pracrical issues is with how these databases are accessed. People shouldn't have as wide access as the do and analysis should be done more by machines whose algorithms are centrally controlled (rather than having potentially millions of bad actors accessing the information and being security risks), that can then hand risks related to specific individuals to human analysist/administrators who only get access to that relevant information.
There were limits. Real time tracking wouldn’t have been possible in 1924. And given that most of the data available at the time we’re on paper that had to be physically stored, copied and sent to various places, it would have been much harder to pull off a targeted mass killing without missing people who wanted to hide. In fact there was at least one country (I believe it was Holland) that managed to save a substantial number of Jews from the Nazis by burning the census records. In that era, burning the single copy of the records in question makes them no longer exist. In the era of cloud computing, nothing short of destroying all the internet connected computers on earth would guarantee the data being gone.
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