Hear me out. Google, Meta, etc. offer "free" services to a significant portion of the world's population. This isn't charitable work. They do this for data that makes them money. Lots of money. Data has real monetary value, but governments don't treat it as such. Few, if any, jurisdictions view data exports as taxable. It's simply not tracked. If data collection isn't tracked, how can one realistically enforce privacy standards?
If we tax data, then we'll have an incentive to track how data is being used and corporations will suddenly have a direct financial interest in not just casually collecting data if they don't need to. Such taxes should be gauged to be tolerable for Google and Meta, but high enough to make companies who make their money via other avenues (e.g. Smart TV sellers) to take a pass on data collection.
I can imagine this having negative consequences for open platforms, such as Wikipedia, Bluesky, Mastodon, Common Crawl, etc. It could have implications for Stack Exchange keeping their datasets downloadable, and general API availability of most platforms. How would this make provisions for keeping the things that are currently free to access still free? People are already buckling under the weight of subscription fatigue, and I can only see this making that worse. I'm willing to give up a lot for the sake of privacy, but the people who would be most affected by such a change could stand to lose a lot more.
If they are exporting data for sale, we can tax the value they are selling it at. If they are using data to generate ad revenue, we can tax that.
If we want to enforce privacy standards, we can make liability laws around sharing that data with third parties; we can make it harder for users to consent to the sharing of data by making users decide and approve on a case by case basis.
There is so much to do before exotic schemes, for instance way less intrusive things like making it so privacy policies legally survive bankruptcy.
I like the overall direction, but how to tax it without screwing over hobbyist archivists aka data hoarders? That is, how to assess the value of some datastore, somehow distinguishing between personal preference profiles, random LLM software slop and, say, vintage anime collections?
The article is exploring a broad topic but one area that seems to be overlooked is governments making privacy illegal or actively working to undermine it. The major privacy risk right now is things like social media age verification laws which, in principle, probably make pseudonymous sites like HN illegal or on the path to being illegal in many jurisdictions.
It is hard to maintain privacy when a law enforcement body insists that it isn't allowed. There are also indications that companies quickly become too enmeshed with intelligence services to be able to create properly private options even if tactically they might have an interest. Companies like Telegram stand out as looking difficult to run in practice because of the pressure from various snoops.
If it is legal to create private options then they will always exist because the people who care about specific aspects of privacy can self-serve.
A lot of value is left on the table because informed people don't give up data.
If simple regulation existed - say, "no one can use data for any purpose the user did not explicitly consent to, including product improvements AND including on-selling", that suddenly turns giving up data into a legally-binding, two-party transaction.
There'd be an explosion of really cool uses of data as a result of the trust that'd engender.
But today's status quo is lucrative - so here we stay.
Because there are numerous choke points where people need to use devices to do a thing and those devices can record you and the financial incentives for the companies that own these choke points is so great that they end up selling your data.
Even if Apple truly had perfect privacy you still need to use credit cards, bank accounts, insurance, cell towers, drive a car, etc.
I think that’s the underlying reason why privacy is so hard.
One thing interesting about the Church is that Kings, Inquisitors, Revolutionaries, Govts etc have all tried to break the seal of confession for thousands od years now. The Church has some how managed to defend it by saying we believe path to repair/forgiveness involves creating and maintaining space where people can confess their sins. If a priest shares those sins with the state, everyone looses trust in the system and therefore breaking the seal over any sin is equal to dismantling the institution itself. This argument is literally the same structure used to defend attorney client confidentiality, psychiatrist patient confidentiality, corporations(telcos, email providers, platforms) from handing all data to the state.
But for all those cases the state has manahed to add huge amount of expceptions which it has not been aable to do with the Church. So the Churchs defense of the seal almost since 1215 has stood on a Belief. A story literally. That privacy is requires for repair.
Everyone else just hasnt come up with a good enough story.
Secondly what is stored in the head of a priest is usually forgotten cuz human memory is flaky and no one is writing anything down in a central db. So every now and then a state attack on the seal work but the everything then reliea on how reliable the memory of a single priest is. Its like a terrible distributed atorage system that is constantly forgetting things. Notice this is literally what large platforms have now built to defend privacy. Its called data minimization and costs a huge amount that they constantly cry about.
So its really funny how the church just stumbled into a solution that is cheap and hard to attack.
The reason it works for churches is because the data told to churches are somewhat embarrassing for the confessor, and if leaked, will destroy the confessor's reputation (if not get into legal troubles).
The data that google collects are somewhat useless on their own, and is only valuable in aggregate with the millions of others they also collect. And for an individual, the leakage of this data (e.g., your advertising profile) is not detrimental unless the data is highly identifying (like your name, address, phone etc).
Therefore, people tend to simply ignore such leaks, and place zero value on the data. This difference in valuation is how google generates their money. The church, on the other hand, generates value from the gratitude of the confessors, and is therefore, aligned with the interest of the confessors.
There is no way Google does not have a good idea about the (sexual) kinks and (medical) issues that the majority of its users have. They know when you're shopping for an engagement ring. If they don't know when you're cheating, it's just because they don't want to know. Just wait for the ad: "is your relationship on the rocks, come to us for tele-counseling" and "caring for yourself post-breakup" (hopefully arriving after the actual breakup, but the whole thing is inferred so... you never know!).
My argument is: the data told in the confessional is as serious as what the ad networks know about you.
Very nice summary and we are definitely at an inflection point on privacy. The incentives are misaligned, and the temptation of free digital services cause users to overlook the very real cost of their privacy.
Privacy is hard because it’s not merely a technical problem. It’s applied to individuals by systems that most individuals have very limited influence into—and those that _do_ have influence often stand to benefit from eroding the privacy of others.
Precisely. And it's not only privacy, but individual sovereignty in general. I just wrote a mini essay about this half an hour ago on a different but related post and don't want to immediately repeat that, so here's the link to that comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49690354
My thought was to write legislation that gives 20% of my generated ad revenue to me the customer as legal tender (no store credit, coupons) then have the government tax that income.
1. government gets new income source.
2. government is invested in making sure they are not getting short changed.
3. failure to pay me is fraud.
4. When you pay me now I know your crap is spying.
5. Government taxes almost never go down, with this system it going down will immediately be visible to consumers who will balk.
Problems:
ad revenue is the new shrink-flation without it prices will rise.
companies will fight this tooth and nail, but voters get "free" money.
> ad revenue is the new shrink-flation without it prices will rise.
Some prices rise, some prices go down.
Ads aren't free money, the advertisers are paying for them (I know, seems obvious) but where do the advertisers get the money to advertise? Well, it's baked into the cost of the goods they advertise. That makes everything that advertises more expensive.
Privacy is only hard because comoanies are not telling/asking tgeir customers before sharing their data.
A way to solve this problem would be to create a portal where customer data is stored in control of the customer. Companies are only allowed to tell each other about customers, not even which data they hold.
And then each data request goes directly through the customers.
Then customers can decide who to share data with. And then those customers will be happy with their choices.
> a state in which one is not observed or disturbed by other people.
> the state of being free from public attention.
From this, it seems obvious that a person should not be observed in our digital spaces without clear consent, where consent is not tied to preclusion of goods or services (i.e. without coercion).
Sure. 20 years ago I would agree, and even 10 years ago I'd say there are some nuances to explore.
Today, though: governments are actively pushing policy to restrict the internet, legalize backdoors, and normalize mass surveillance. We're in the levels of obvious privacy violations that would make for an overly alarmist dystopian novel if published. There's not much nuance to worry about as of now.
If there isn’t a very strong incentive to share, nobody will. If there is, people will just share it as much as possible to get money, consequences be damned.
1) there's a lot of money to be made with data, so there are a lot of incentives to jump over any gates setup to protect privacy. If not actively tear down the gates and lobby to make it illegal to build more gates
2) The policy makers have a lot of power to be gained with data, so there are a lot of incentives to at worst, legalize backdoors so they get access to data, and at worst make it illegal to build more gates
Two powerful incentives in lockstep for once means an uphill battle for the force that is society. There's a lot of points brought up, but it mostly comes down to (the articles's points) 4) and 8). In my eyes, everything else is secondary and only serves to justify the ends of 4) (which includes 8, the only real barrier in the way).
The lack of privacy is due to a lack of regulation and funding of regulatory agencies. It happens precisely because the US is very adverse to adding new privacy laws or enforcing the ones on the books (you need to fund federal regulators if you want them to regulate).
Frankly, I think a large reason it goes unaddressed is because governments love to invade privacy just as much as advertisers do. Adding new laws to curtail consumer products from spying also means the likes of the NSA, FBI, or local law enforcement can't also tap into that spying machine. They want google to log everything you do because they are all to happy to use those logs.
Privacy isn't the problem. The problem has been the sea of bad actors trying to undermine it. That's the problem. Stop them, don't put the responsibility on the consumer to claw that privacy back.
It only takes one to be a problem. This isn't a two-way street the same way that communication or collaboration is a two-way street. This is entirely one-way in that the corporate levels are putting down apps, services and hardware designed to undermine privacy. Customers don't have any choice in the matter except to look for alternative packages, but this will stop working eventually (and already has in some markets). The set of possible safe hobbies and experiences continues to shrink as more and more of it becomes impossible to find without weapons against privacy. The only way to stop this is regulation.
Personal privacy is, and has always been, the job and responsibility of the individual. You can be as private or as public as you allow yourself to be through your own practices. Nobody can give you privacy, you must take it, which requires work and sacrifices that most people are simply unwilling to make, that's why nothing has changed. If it's privacy you want, stop being so public. Avoid surveillance. It's not easy but it's also not impossible, you have to actually value your privacy enough to do the work of establishing it. Good luck.
That is overly simplistic to the point where it is hard to interpret it as good faith.
We live in a world where both the government is increasingly spying on everything, often in secret, as well as companies in every aspect of modern life who constantly lie about this. It is not a fair choice with natural disadvantages.
Blaming all this on the individual reeks of bad faith.
> If it's privacy you want, stop being so public. Avoid surveillance. It's not easy but it's also not impossible, you have to actually value your privacy enough to do the work of establishing it
I can't avoid traffic cams by any sane means (like taking side roads?) I MIGHT be able to do without the electric company and water company (which I do during outages) but I am not seeing how to avoid the DMV and USPS, which sell my data.
Does a privacy seeker have to be a prepper? I certainly hope not.
Surveillance capitalism and policing is so pervasive. And the connection is money. Especially with Citizens United, laws are bought to trash any right to, or even possibility of privacy.
Not bashing your post, just pointing out the extreme difficulty.
Can you explain what you mean by "job" and "you must take it".. what does that mean in concrete terms?
And what do you mean by "sacrifices"? For example, if students don't agree to TurnItIn's policy, it becomes significantly harder to take classes. Do you mean to say students should have to suffer the consequences of these sacrifices just because we can't seem to support their right to privacy?
yes, if have zero friends and family, contact and talk to no one, move out in the boonies away from everyone else, then you can have privacy. Good to know
Yeah, and I think it's gotten much worse with LLMs. If someone wants to use an LLM privately, their two options are either redacting/morphing their data before sending it through or hosting locally, both of which are intractable for most users. And if someone chooses not to use an LLM they face a dramatic loss in productivity. I don't think the tradeoff between privacy and convenience has ever been this severe in history, with the exception of the smartphone.
We should tax data.
Hear me out. Google, Meta, etc. offer "free" services to a significant portion of the world's population. This isn't charitable work. They do this for data that makes them money. Lots of money. Data has real monetary value, but governments don't treat it as such. Few, if any, jurisdictions view data exports as taxable. It's simply not tracked. If data collection isn't tracked, how can one realistically enforce privacy standards?
If we tax data, then we'll have an incentive to track how data is being used and corporations will suddenly have a direct financial interest in not just casually collecting data if they don't need to. Such taxes should be gauged to be tolerable for Google and Meta, but high enough to make companies who make their money via other avenues (e.g. Smart TV sellers) to take a pass on data collection.
I can imagine this having negative consequences for open platforms, such as Wikipedia, Bluesky, Mastodon, Common Crawl, etc. It could have implications for Stack Exchange keeping their datasets downloadable, and general API availability of most platforms. How would this make provisions for keeping the things that are currently free to access still free? People are already buckling under the weight of subscription fatigue, and I can only see this making that worse. I'm willing to give up a lot for the sake of privacy, but the people who would be most affected by such a change could stand to lose a lot more.
I am not sure what the point of this is.
If they are exporting data for sale, we can tax the value they are selling it at. If they are using data to generate ad revenue, we can tax that.
If we want to enforce privacy standards, we can make liability laws around sharing that data with third parties; we can make it harder for users to consent to the sharing of data by making users decide and approve on a case by case basis.
There is so much to do before exotic schemes, for instance way less intrusive things like making it so privacy policies legally survive bankruptcy.
How does that work for non-profit web crawls like the Common Crawl Foundation?
Right, because if you want a solid solution to a problem, you ask governments to tax it! Always works.
I like the overall direction, but how to tax it without screwing over hobbyist archivists aka data hoarders? That is, how to assess the value of some datastore, somehow distinguishing between personal preference profiles, random LLM software slop and, say, vintage anime collections?
> how to tax it without screwing over hobbyist archivists
If you're a corporation, you're taxed. If you're a human, you're not.
Perhaps you are human that wants to isolate the expenses, activity and liability into a corporate organization, like Wikimedia?
The article is exploring a broad topic but one area that seems to be overlooked is governments making privacy illegal or actively working to undermine it. The major privacy risk right now is things like social media age verification laws which, in principle, probably make pseudonymous sites like HN illegal or on the path to being illegal in many jurisdictions.
It is hard to maintain privacy when a law enforcement body insists that it isn't allowed. There are also indications that companies quickly become too enmeshed with intelligence services to be able to create properly private options even if tactically they might have an interest. Companies like Telegram stand out as looking difficult to run in practice because of the pressure from various snoops.
If it is legal to create private options then they will always exist because the people who care about specific aspects of privacy can self-serve.
A lot of value is left on the table because informed people don't give up data.
If simple regulation existed - say, "no one can use data for any purpose the user did not explicitly consent to, including product improvements AND including on-selling", that suddenly turns giving up data into a legally-binding, two-party transaction.
There'd be an explosion of really cool uses of data as a result of the trust that'd engender.
But today's status quo is lucrative - so here we stay.
Because there are numerous choke points where people need to use devices to do a thing and those devices can record you and the financial incentives for the companies that own these choke points is so great that they end up selling your data.
Even if Apple truly had perfect privacy you still need to use credit cards, bank accounts, insurance, cell towers, drive a car, etc.
I think that’s the underlying reason why privacy is so hard.
One thing interesting about the Church is that Kings, Inquisitors, Revolutionaries, Govts etc have all tried to break the seal of confession for thousands od years now. The Church has some how managed to defend it by saying we believe path to repair/forgiveness involves creating and maintaining space where people can confess their sins. If a priest shares those sins with the state, everyone looses trust in the system and therefore breaking the seal over any sin is equal to dismantling the institution itself. This argument is literally the same structure used to defend attorney client confidentiality, psychiatrist patient confidentiality, corporations(telcos, email providers, platforms) from handing all data to the state. But for all those cases the state has manahed to add huge amount of expceptions which it has not been aable to do with the Church. So the Churchs defense of the seal almost since 1215 has stood on a Belief. A story literally. That privacy is requires for repair.
Everyone else just hasnt come up with a good enough story.
Secondly what is stored in the head of a priest is usually forgotten cuz human memory is flaky and no one is writing anything down in a central db. So every now and then a state attack on the seal work but the everything then reliea on how reliable the memory of a single priest is. Its like a terrible distributed atorage system that is constantly forgetting things. Notice this is literally what large platforms have now built to defend privacy. Its called data minimization and costs a huge amount that they constantly cry about.
So its really funny how the church just stumbled into a solution that is cheap and hard to attack.
The reason it works for churches is because the data told to churches are somewhat embarrassing for the confessor, and if leaked, will destroy the confessor's reputation (if not get into legal troubles).
The data that google collects are somewhat useless on their own, and is only valuable in aggregate with the millions of others they also collect. And for an individual, the leakage of this data (e.g., your advertising profile) is not detrimental unless the data is highly identifying (like your name, address, phone etc).
Therefore, people tend to simply ignore such leaks, and place zero value on the data. This difference in valuation is how google generates their money. The church, on the other hand, generates value from the gratitude of the confessors, and is therefore, aligned with the interest of the confessors.
> are somewhat useless on their own
There is no way Google does not have a good idea about the (sexual) kinks and (medical) issues that the majority of its users have. They know when you're shopping for an engagement ring. If they don't know when you're cheating, it's just because they don't want to know. Just wait for the ad: "is your relationship on the rocks, come to us for tele-counseling" and "caring for yourself post-breakup" (hopefully arriving after the actual breakup, but the whole thing is inferred so... you never know!).
My argument is: the data told in the confessional is as serious as what the ad networks know about you.
Very nice summary and we are definitely at an inflection point on privacy. The incentives are misaligned, and the temptation of free digital services cause users to overlook the very real cost of their privacy.
Privacy is hard because it’s not merely a technical problem. It’s applied to individuals by systems that most individuals have very limited influence into—and those that _do_ have influence often stand to benefit from eroding the privacy of others.
Precisely. And it's not only privacy, but individual sovereignty in general. I just wrote a mini essay about this half an hour ago on a different but related post and don't want to immediately repeat that, so here's the link to that comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49690354
If you want privacy, shut down your windows
And spend money on products you can install locally that do not connect to the web. Free products will always abuse your privacy
IMO it's not that it's hard but that nobody makes money from it the way they do from the panopticon so listed factors 4 and 8 have outsize influence.
My thought was to write legislation that gives 20% of my generated ad revenue to me the customer as legal tender (no store credit, coupons) then have the government tax that income.
1. government gets new income source.
2. government is invested in making sure they are not getting short changed.
3. failure to pay me is fraud.
4. When you pay me now I know your crap is spying.
5. Government taxes almost never go down, with this system it going down will immediately be visible to consumers who will balk.
Problems: ad revenue is the new shrink-flation without it prices will rise. companies will fight this tooth and nail, but voters get "free" money.
> ad revenue is the new shrink-flation without it prices will rise.
Some prices rise, some prices go down.
Ads aren't free money, the advertisers are paying for them (I know, seems obvious) but where do the advertisers get the money to advertise? Well, it's baked into the cost of the goods they advertise. That makes everything that advertises more expensive.
And yet advertising raises demand, which in intern causes people to offer to meet that demand which means competition, which lowers prices.
Lots of examples of this cycle you can search for.
That only works for smaller and unestablished brands. There are diminishing returns to the economy of scale.
Coca-cola, for example, isn't going to lower their prices in response to increased demand from their $4 billion marketing budget.
Privacy is only hard because comoanies are not telling/asking tgeir customers before sharing their data.
A way to solve this problem would be to create a portal where customer data is stored in control of the customer. Companies are only allowed to tell each other about customers, not even which data they hold.
And then each data request goes directly through the customers.
Then customers can decide who to share data with. And then those customers will be happy with their choices.
> Privacy is only hard
Privacy is one of those words that you think you understand until you try to define it.
the dictionary definition seems fine:
> a state in which one is not observed or disturbed by other people. > the state of being free from public attention.
From this, it seems obvious that a person should not be observed in our digital spaces without clear consent, where consent is not tied to preclusion of goods or services (i.e. without coercion).
Sure. 20 years ago I would agree, and even 10 years ago I'd say there are some nuances to explore.
Today, though: governments are actively pushing policy to restrict the internet, legalize backdoors, and normalize mass surveillance. We're in the levels of obvious privacy violations that would make for an overly alarmist dystopian novel if published. There's not much nuance to worry about as of now.
If there isn’t a very strong incentive to share, nobody will. If there is, people will just share it as much as possible to get money, consequences be damned.
It's fairly simple
1) there's a lot of money to be made with data, so there are a lot of incentives to jump over any gates setup to protect privacy. If not actively tear down the gates and lobby to make it illegal to build more gates
2) The policy makers have a lot of power to be gained with data, so there are a lot of incentives to at worst, legalize backdoors so they get access to data, and at worst make it illegal to build more gates
Two powerful incentives in lockstep for once means an uphill battle for the force that is society. There's a lot of points brought up, but it mostly comes down to (the articles's points) 4) and 8). In my eyes, everything else is secondary and only serves to justify the ends of 4) (which includes 8, the only real barrier in the way).
Because good privacy is not profitable.
The lack of privacy is due to a lack of regulation and funding of regulatory agencies. It happens precisely because the US is very adverse to adding new privacy laws or enforcing the ones on the books (you need to fund federal regulators if you want them to regulate).
Frankly, I think a large reason it goes unaddressed is because governments love to invade privacy just as much as advertisers do. Adding new laws to curtail consumer products from spying also means the likes of the NSA, FBI, or local law enforcement can't also tap into that spying machine. They want google to log everything you do because they are all to happy to use those logs.
Privacy isn't the problem. The problem has been the sea of bad actors trying to undermine it. That's the problem. Stop them, don't put the responsibility on the consumer to claw that privacy back.
It takes two to tango
It only takes one to be a problem. This isn't a two-way street the same way that communication or collaboration is a two-way street. This is entirely one-way in that the corporate levels are putting down apps, services and hardware designed to undermine privacy. Customers don't have any choice in the matter except to look for alternative packages, but this will stop working eventually (and already has in some markets). The set of possible safe hobbies and experiences continues to shrink as more and more of it becomes impossible to find without weapons against privacy. The only way to stop this is regulation.
Personal privacy is, and has always been, the job and responsibility of the individual. You can be as private or as public as you allow yourself to be through your own practices. Nobody can give you privacy, you must take it, which requires work and sacrifices that most people are simply unwilling to make, that's why nothing has changed. If it's privacy you want, stop being so public. Avoid surveillance. It's not easy but it's also not impossible, you have to actually value your privacy enough to do the work of establishing it. Good luck.
That is overly simplistic to the point where it is hard to interpret it as good faith.
We live in a world where both the government is increasingly spying on everything, often in secret, as well as companies in every aspect of modern life who constantly lie about this. It is not a fair choice with natural disadvantages.
Blaming all this on the individual reeks of bad faith.
> If it's privacy you want, stop being so public. Avoid surveillance. It's not easy but it's also not impossible, you have to actually value your privacy enough to do the work of establishing it
I can't avoid traffic cams by any sane means (like taking side roads?) I MIGHT be able to do without the electric company and water company (which I do during outages) but I am not seeing how to avoid the DMV and USPS, which sell my data.
Does a privacy seeker have to be a prepper? I certainly hope not.
Surveillance capitalism and policing is so pervasive. And the connection is money. Especially with Citizens United, laws are bought to trash any right to, or even possibility of privacy.
Not bashing your post, just pointing out the extreme difficulty.
Can you explain what you mean by "job" and "you must take it".. what does that mean in concrete terms?
And what do you mean by "sacrifices"? For example, if students don't agree to TurnItIn's policy, it becomes significantly harder to take classes. Do you mean to say students should have to suffer the consequences of these sacrifices just because we can't seem to support their right to privacy?
yes, if have zero friends and family, contact and talk to no one, move out in the boonies away from everyone else, then you can have privacy. Good to know
Yeah, and I think it's gotten much worse with LLMs. If someone wants to use an LLM privately, their two options are either redacting/morphing their data before sending it through or hosting locally, both of which are intractable for most users. And if someone chooses not to use an LLM they face a dramatic loss in productivity. I don't think the tradeoff between privacy and convenience has ever been this severe in history, with the exception of the smartphone.
Unrestricted invasion of privacy and considering it completely normal is just a libertarian fantasy