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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.
We have only to look at the Chinese surveillance system, especially as implemented in Xinjiang to track Uyghurs, to see that it is entirely feasible to have technology tracking every individual citizen all the time: where they go, who they are in contact with, and what they say.
We can also see from the COVID lockdowns how quickly “of course we could do that, but we never would” turns into “we will use every tool at our disposal to keep you safe” when a real or perceived crisis arises.
I am enough of a heretic to know that I will be discriminated against if the UK ever implements Chinese-style social credit. I was already subject to a considerable amount of abuse for voicing moderate right-wing opinions at the university I was in. I therefore want to maximise the number of controversial steps that have to be made, and red lines that have to be publicly overrun, before such a social credit system becomes popular.
It is vital that using e2e, local storage, blockers and privacy settings is done by ordinary citizens as well as witches. Otherwise it is very easy to make attempting to avoid surveillance effective proof of wrongthink.
I did not say lets also become an authoritarian dictatorship at the same time. I am specifically criticizing privacy warriors in the US.
See also the bottom of this other comment: https://www.themotte.org/post/851/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/183628?context=8#context
You will not agree, I think, but from where I’m standing both America and the UK became authoritarian dictatorships in
20192020 when they locked the entire population in involuntary house arrest. I get why, but I was raised to believe that there were certain things we would never do, and seeing how quickly we stomped all over them has soured me on “let’s go 50% of the way there but obviously not 100%, who would do that?”. The fact that we managed to pull most of the way back again doesn’t really reassure me.The privacy weirdos provide an immense service to society by keeping privacy somewhat non-partisan and acting as meat shields for witches.
Can discuss more later but got to go.
It's not substantive and I agree with your point but it is really astonishing to me that anyone could get the year in which the world reacted to COVID wrong. I feel like "2020" will never look the same as any other number to me again.
Ha. I think it’s because they first discovered it in 2019, so I got used to thinking of it as Covid 2019-2022. Thanks for the correction.
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