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> You have no such guarantee when you upload government IDs to a server. The problem is that so many people here look at this purely from a USA perspective. A

by audunw 2mo ago

> You have no such guarantee when you upload government IDs to a server. The problem is that so many people here look at this purely from a USA perspective. An age check in many European requires no uploading of any ID. It’s an API call toward an ID service, it will tell you which data the service gets access to, and there’s strict regulations and liability around data retention. I’m not concerned about the government. If they become authoritarian enough to worry, they will impose far tighter surveillance anyway. What we have now is the naive idea that just by not doing ID check, government surveillance is a solved problem in the free democratic world. It’s not. Avoiding ID checks just makes the problem worse because it makes the regular person complacent. The surveillance is implicit and hidden. If we understand that it’s nearly impossible for a non-tech person to avoid being tracked by corporations and governments, then we start working on the things that really help: super tight regulations about what can and can’t be tracked. Requiring audits of large corporations. Solutions that give corporations access to only the data they absolutely need and nothing else (the lack of such things is how we end up by uploading whole ID documents)

jolmg 2mo ago
> The surveillance is implicit and hidden. If we understand that it’s nearly impossible for a non-tech person to avoid being tracked by corporations and governments, then we start working on the things that really help: super tight regulations about what can and can’t be tracked. We can't get perfect privacy so we should normalize not having any? Leave it to the government we're distrusting to handle our privacy? > If they become authoritarian enough to worry, they will impose far tighter surveillance anyway. What is this logic? Let's not worry about creeping there because if they want it they'll force it? That's not how it works. Getting to a surveillance state needs acceptance. To get that, rather than dropping people in boiling water, you slowly heat the pot, which is what this is.
- dgroshev 2mo ago
  Just a few decades years ago, everyone's names and phones in the US were freely available to anyone with a phone book. Communications were done in the clear, either via letters (hardly tamper-proof), or via phone (that anyone with access could tap). Did every American live in a "surveillance state" back then?
  - jolmg 2mo ago
    What could be tracked from phones back then compared to now is completely different. Phones are basically only called "phones" for historical reasons.
    - dgroshev 2mo ago
      So what? Some things are exceptionally hard to track now (like e2ee messages) that were trivial to track back then. Every remote communication could only be had in the clear. Everyone was fine with that. Was the US in the 80s a surveillance state?
      - jolmg 2mo ago
        Back then there was only the possibility of listening-in on particulars, and even then people did worry. They weren't fine with that. That's why there's wiretapping laws enacted in the 80s. Today, and as things continue to progress with speech-recognition, LLMs, video recognition, etc. surveillance can be automated. It's looking conceivable to be able to process all communication population-wide in real-time. That would have been unimaginable back then. Now, texts and calls today are only a small role of phones. For many people, it's their primary general computing device. It's how they interact with the world. It contains their entire digital life. Couldn't look at your photo reels and videos, and diary, and every purchase you've ever made, every opinion you've ever said on a public space, every community you've ever interacted with, every location you've ever been in down to the room, from wiretapping a phone in the 80s. > Some things are exceptionally hard to track now (like e2ee messages) that were trivial to track back then. Can be easier than back then if stuff like chat-control comes to pass, because now the message can be obtained, processed and stored indefinitely in an automated fashion for everybody at once. E2EE becomes security theater for the most part.
        dgroshev 2mo ago
        You just said it yourself: the perceived danger of overreach was averted through new laws and control over what the government is doing. If citizens still have a capacity to restrict the government via (enforced) laws, it doesn't matter much that the communications are in the clear. You can layer something on top just to be sure, but the foundation is laws and a functioning political system. If there's no functioning political system, the government will just do whatever, like buying the same data they ostensibly can't collect from commercial providers (who weren't restricted from collecting it because there's no US GDPR). If a country has a functioning political system, it can just do things like ban gun ownership, introduce mandatory IDs, publish everyone's yearly income, or criminalise calling other people slurs in public and not become an uncontrollable dictatorship. If it doesn't, corruption and democratic backsliding will happen regardless. Hyper-focusing on a few tools and superficial traits of a particular system in a particular moment is myopic.

by audunw 2mo ago

jolmg 2mo ago

> The surveillance is implicit and hidden. If we understand that it’s nearly impossible for a non-tech person to avoid being tracked by corporations and governments, then we start working on the things that really help: super tight regulations about what can and can’t be tracked. We can't get perfect privacy so we should normalize not having any? Leave it to the government we're distrusting to handle our privacy? > If they become authoritarian enough to worry, they will impose far tighter surveillance anyway. What is this logic? Let's not worry about creeping there because if they want it they'll force it? That's not how it works. Getting to a surveillance state needs acceptance. To get that, rather than dropping people in boiling water, you slowly heat the pot, which is what this is.

dgroshev 2mo ago
Just a few decades years ago, everyone's names and phones in the US were freely available to anyone with a phone book. Communications were done in the clear, either via letters (hardly tamper-proof), or via phone (that anyone with access could tap). Did every American live in a "surveillance state" back then?
- jolmg 2mo ago
  What could be tracked from phones back then compared to now is completely different. Phones are basically only called "phones" for historical reasons.
  - dgroshev 2mo ago
    So what? Some things are exceptionally hard to track now (like e2ee messages) that were trivial to track back then. Every remote communication could only be had in the clear. Everyone was fine with that. Was the US in the 80s a surveillance state?
    - jolmg 2mo ago
      Back then there was only the possibility of listening-in on particulars, and even then people did worry. They weren't fine with that. That's why there's wiretapping laws enacted in the 80s. Today, and as things continue to progress with speech-recognition, LLMs, video recognition, etc. surveillance can be automated. It's looking conceivable to be able to process all communication population-wide in real-time. That would have been unimaginable back then. Now, texts and calls today are only a small role of phones. For many people, it's their primary general computing device. It's how they interact with the world. It contains their entire digital life. Couldn't look at your photo reels and videos, and diary, and every purchase you've ever made, every opinion you've ever said on a public space, every community you've ever interacted with, every location you've ever been in down to the room, from wiretapping a phone in the 80s. > Some things are exceptionally hard to track now (like e2ee messages) that were trivial to track back then. Can be easier than back then if stuff like chat-control comes to pass, because now the message can be obtained, processed and stored indefinitely in an automated fashion for everybody at once. E2EE becomes security theater for the most part.
      - dgroshev 2mo ago
        You just said it yourself: the perceived danger of overreach was averted through new laws and control over what the government is doing. If citizens still have a capacity to restrict the government via (enforced) laws, it doesn't matter much that the communications are in the clear. You can layer something on top just to be sure, but the foundation is laws and a functioning political system. If there's no functioning political system, the government will just do whatever, like buying the same data they ostensibly can't collect from commercial providers (who weren't restricted from collecting it because there's no US GDPR). If a country has a functioning political system, it can just do things like ban gun ownership, introduce mandatory IDs, publish everyone's yearly income, or criminalise calling other people slurs in public and not become an uncontrollable dictatorship. If it doesn't, corruption and democratic backsliding will happen regardless. Hyper-focusing on a few tools and superficial traits of a particular system in a particular moment is myopic.