> And because giants like Meta, Google, and Apple must collect as much of your personal data as possible, there’s little they can do to protect your privacy.
I quite disagree with the "must" there. They choose to collect as much data as possible, because that's their business model.
And the good news is, it's fairly easy to opt out of quite a lot of that.
Turn location services off, turn your phone off when moving about, and pay cash without "personal tracking cards" associated with you. Just about everywhere has [local area code] 867-5309 registered, if you care.
Which means they know everything you have posted, everywhere you've gone, everywhere you've worked, what you think politically, and almost certainly have AI profilers trying to "precog" you.
To say nothing of camera surveillance, gait analysis, facial recognition, license plate tracking, cell phone signal interceptors.
All it takes is for one authoritarian to walk in and turn the key and POOF we have perfect.
Are we in danger of that? Oh right, no politics on HN. Don't worry, be happy folks.
Priority #1 seems to be defending state moneymaking interests and state adjacent/intertwined BigCos
Priority #2 seems to be expanding their own power
Priority #3 seems to be micromanaging in social issues at the behest of various special interests to distract from #1 and #2
Keeping us all from keeling over from heavy metal poisoning or whatever is way, way, way down the list unless it bleeds up to #3 for whatever reason.
It was the entire "Klondike-5" block, but got narrowed.
The is a Systemic problem. Doesn't matter what the individuals do.
Safety comes from dysfunctional governance. Surveillance is a property of functional governance. Embrace disfunction.
Plenty of ineffective dictatorships will happily line you up against the wall with bogus surveillance. And shitty surveillance states will happily fake surveillance or data to look more effective.
The danger with these types of State organs is they are constantly trying to justify their existence and cover up their mistakes, and if you can be thrown in the gears, some places are happy to do that.
Sure, but that's the exception. Governments have a pyramid of needs too. Governments don't throw a bunch of resources on things with poor returns, like shooting people who haven't done much wrong, when there's easier fruit to pick. Sure, you can go full jackboot on specific issues here and there but that's not sustainable on a "will I retire in peace of will I hang from the overpass" timeline. And even if you're the dictator's henchman and want to go down some rabbit hole of killing people you don't like the the fact that the dictator may have you shot for waste or as a sacrifice when that provokes unrest or dissatisfaction among the people generally keeps the government in line. And the government really doesn't want to be killing people because it needs people to do things and pay taxes.
Look at all the historically violent dictatorships that lasted a long time and for many leaders. They all provide for their people generally. They might not be competitive absolutely but they keep things generally moving in a positive direction decade over decade and keep the country doing at least as well as its peers. The ones that don't tend to fall apart after a couple bad leaders.
I really shouldn't need to be explaining this. This is how every European monarchy worked just with god and birthright as justification instead of backroom dealing and politics and false elections.
And unlike an effective/accurate surveillance system, you can’t be safe by just not being the AK weilding guys. In fact, sometimes you’re safer because you’re more dangerous, and they’d rather find someone easier to pick on.
Third world places aren’t what they are because of a lack of rules or systems (usually), but rather because the rules and systems aren’t fit for purpose and produce the wrong outcomes.
The problem is that we really need something like herd immunity. If you opt out, but the rest of the people in your life do not, then it's possible to discover most of your data most of the time. You might have location services off, but your friends and family don't, so much of the time there's a good guess where you are at. Or you might not share your phone #, but it can be collected by those that you text or call and shared that way. Creating "shadow accounts" is very advanced these days.
Not to mention, "opt out" has to be actually true and not just a facade.
In a country with the rule of law like the USA, the government can know you committed a crime, you know you committed a crime, society may suspect you of committing a crime, but criminal law requires a jury to convict beyond reasonable doubt. With a good lawyer this is a very tough bar, it's how organized crime gets away with so much (and despite the mafia being out of the news, they operate extremely well to this day).
So selectively you choose when to be anonymous. You pick your battles.
As a practical matter that may help the average HN normie, if you have a family you likely have life insurance. Never, ever, buy alcohol, marijuana, or cigarette / vapes / nicotine products with a credit card. Always pay cash. If you die the insurance company will go through everything to try and deny.
In the reverse case, the modern day can help you. If you drive, get a dashcam. You don't have to reveal video if you are at fault. But if not at fault, the video is gold. Put cameras around your house.
If you have rental property attached to your primary domicile, never have the internet under your own primary internet, lest you give reason for a wayward tenant to cause a search of your own home.
You aren't protecting yourself for the 99.99% time, you are prepared for the 0.01% case
I used to play with Twitters firehose back in the day and there's quite a lot of personal data you derive from private accounts. We could tell the city someone likely lived if they followed a certain amount of people from a specific city, etc. Could also guess their gender with 95% accuracy with just using n-grams from their tweets. We'd test our algorithms with public accounts.
I think there's too much power and money in personal information for it to stop.
Ironically, we told you all for years that if you abused terms like fascist, Nazi, racist, etc then they would lose their power and their impact and people would ignore them in future. You were warned what would happen if you cried wolf.
MAGA is a right-wing political movement that:
-seeks to return the nation to a mythical superior past, by
-empowering an extraordinary leader who represents the will of the people, in order to
-expel inferior/unworthy ethnicities, and
-expunge left/“Marxist” influences from art and culture.
These are all characteristics of Fascism specifically, not the authoritarian actions that people casually call fascist.
Is this happening? Or a stated goal?
I know they're deporting people who aren't here legally (that's a whole other debate), but I'm not aware of them actively targeting anyone based on race of ethnicity regardless of their legal status.
Now if they go off script and act outside the law, that's a whole other story.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/05/politics/biden-administration...
There has also been posts from schools in Texas recommending kids on field trips keep legal documentation on them because ICE is stopping school buses for investigations.
https://www.newsweek.com/texas-school-district-bus-immigrati...
At what point do you pull your head out of the sand and stare into reality.
However, your third point is a bit breathless. They aren't expelling anyone based on ethnicity. They want to deport illegal aliens. It isn't their fault so many of those aliens are from one country. The Nazis were expelling and killing Jews that had been in Europe for centuries lawfully. And, yknow, the whole killing them thing! The human experiments. The slave labour camps.
You are forgetting that fascist regimes go to war with their neighbours for territory, ignore the law, suspend democracy and have secret police to enforce political orthodoxy. Trump is an isolationist and he hasn't done any of the rest, yet at least.
Also don't forget that for all the stick Trump gets about immigration, all the Democratic presidents I can remember claim that they want to control the border too, and claim they can do so better. Hardly illustrative of fascism...
Changing the name of some water isn't territorial expansion or authoritarianism.
Solemeni was a terrorist. A dead terrorist is a good terrorist. If you attack a sovereign country then you should expect to be targeted. Fuck around? Find out.
Obama closed Gitmo. He promised to, remember, so he must have. And he withdrew from Afghanistan, remember? He said so in between claiming that marriage was only between a man and a woman. What a hero of the left.
Feel free to tell me I am wrong when I actually am instead of just when your imagination runs wild and you see "authoritarianism" in your cereal. Killing terrorists is authoritarianism lol. And drone striking children isn't?
One of the problems with this community is there are no mechanisms for intellectual accountability beyond the span of a news cycle.
Like there is no threat to Medicaid? Here’s the authoritarianism: Trump is clearly setting us up for a major constitutional crisis by way of his lying bullshit. Go see the way he talked to the governor of maine and tell me you dont hear the threats? You might not be a Nazi, but you’re sure damn close.
Germans loved Hitler until Stalingrad.
The Hank Show https://www.amazon.com/dp/1250209277/
Has been since 9/11. Remember, there's the omnipresent neverending war on terror.
However, to call the UK “totalitarian” is just an abuse of language. The country is not run by a single all-powerful party or dictator. It’s especially odd to use this word and then make a comparison to the US, which (though it is not totalitarian either by any stretch of the imagination) is currently in the midst of an executive power grab, with demands for a level of partisan loyalty from civil servants that remains unthinkable in the UK.
I don’t know what your goal is here, but if you want to persuade the average person in the UK to change their minds about the extent to which the government should be able to access surveillance data, it helps not to bundle your arguments together with wild misstatements.
If so, that was a judgment about legislation that is no longer current (and wasn’t when the judgment was issued). It may be that current legislation is also incompatible with EU law (IANAL, I’m not arguing that point), but AFAIK there is no court judgment to that effect.
> It may be that current legislation is also incompatible with EU law (IANAL, I’m not arguing that point), but AFAIK there is no court judgment to that effect.
Quite possibly but that wasn't my point. The point is that the UK is by far more of a surveillance state than any EU country, at least to my knowledge. UK legislation is not typical for a European country in that respect. People can go to prison in the UK for not handing over an encryption password and the UK has just effectively banned end-to-end encryption (if you put a backdoor in it, it's no longer end-to-end encryption).
There are EU countries with key disclosure laws. See e.g. France and Ireland on this list: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_disclosure_law
What I do know is that I won't be able to sell my software in the UK or to any UK citizens or to any citizens who want to use to to communicate with UK citizens because it uses secure end-to-end encryption. That's the important bit for me personally.
Every rich country is a surveillance state.
Stopped reading there. If someone tries to sell a lie like that in their first five sentences, I can't trust anything they say.
Apple does collect some of your data, but their business doesn't depend on it, and I have some degree of control over how much I participate.
I think it's a category error to include all three in the same sentence, but I don't think the author is lying. I do agree somewhat with the sentiment that such a lack of distinction calls the content into question, or at least the author's framing of it.
No one is being precious about it. They're debating whether or not the article is written in good faith. Jumping to a bad faith-based defence isn't going to change the mind of people who are concerned about things being done in bad faith.
The point here is that bad faith is doing exactly that: making the legitimacy of the argument presented by the author fundamentally questionable. Comparing the core business model of a company that has invested in capabilities like Advanced Data Protection with Meta in an article highlighting the ways authorities can get your data...seems disingenuous at best, and just plain wrong/misleading.
> we're skipping past that entirely to deconstruct a single sentence as a "gotcha"
When someone sets up a false premise, then yes, everything that comes after it is suspect.
Next time you're observing this, try to imagine the outrage if the government official were a white South African government official talking to a black South African citizen. There's the same level of condescending animosity and supremacist ideology at play, just along a completely different axis - employer rather than skin color.
There's people that think this only happened during the Biden Administration?
Not Obama? Not Trump? Not Bush? Just Biden?
The gullibility of Americans in aggregate is stunning at times. If you're one of those still out preaching the quasi-religions of "left" or "right", you're honestly a large part of the problem at this point. And you're probably too submerged in the holy waters of your quasi-religion's divine scriptures to even begin to understand why.
Maybe go outside and take a breath of fresh air?
I'm not necessarily supporting or defending that position, but we should at least strive to argue against the steelman version of our opponent's position, rather than the strawman position, no?
ie - no reinterpretation at all.
But even taking your reinterpretation at face value, it still couches the issue in terms of the "left" and "right" quasi-religions, no?
I personally detest covert surveillance and social influence operations being waged by taxpayer-funded organizations (regardless of whether public or private in nature) against their own citizenry, and I oppose this across the political aisle. I think it reeks of institutions that distrust and fear us more than they represent our collective interests, and that's an ugly mindset unbecoming of a government or enterprise that publicly paints itself as a champion of free and open democracy on the world stage, regardless of whether it's an intelligence agency or an international social media platform. But I also recognize that it's bipartisan, and that most people seem to care more about deploying force against the other side than they do about reducing the amount of force that is deployed against all of us.
Where does your definition of steelman come from?
ie - Strawman is to argue an easy to refute point they're not making. Whether that point is stronger or weaker is irrelevant. The key is you came prepared to refute the point. Steelman is to argue the point they're making.
But we're getting into irrelevant semantics at this point. Neither the poster's point, nor mine centered on the definitions we have of steelman or strawman.
My material point was on the tendency of people to embed what amount to using quasi-religious scripture quotations in discussions of completely non-religious problem areas. To the point of making it difficult for any, uh, "non-believers", out there to make any progress towards improvements.
Or, put another way, being the problem.
Conservative administrations are worst tho. That is the objective reality. And as of now, there is not left wing analogy to what conservatives are doing. Democrats are not perfect, but common, the aggression and fanatization of the actual party is not even close. It is moderate center on the "left side" vs the thing we see on the right.
One sided lens are the ones that achieve "equality" by euphemism away conservative goals and behaviors while trying to paint their opposition in worst possible light. Obama wore tan suit which totally breaks respectability of the presidency and therefore, he is equal to Trump who talks about "grabbing women by the <body part>" kind of false equality.
Those were wrong and bad and Democrats should be emotionally honest with themselves about that in the same way Republicans should be emotionally honest with themselves about the fact that laws criminalizing out of state abortions (like the one on the books in Oklahoma) are a reprehensible attack on some of the most foundational values of both western society and the American nation - freedom of movement and states only being allowed to regulate activity within their own borders. That Oklahoma law is more befitting of North Korea than Oklahoma, and Republicans should be as righteously indignant about this moral atrocity as they are about Obama drone bombing civilians.
We should all be honest with ourselves and with eachother when our elected officials do objectively bad things that violate human rights rather than expanding and upholding them. Less partisan mud slinging about dumb stuff like tour bus tapes and suit colors and more serious discussion about the wrongs actually happening, why the wrongs are wrong, and how to make them right.
Most obviously, who was President when Snowden leaked things?
Methinks you are overly sensitive on behalf of your chosen boss.
OR you are trying to deflect from the surveillance by making it a partisan thing.
MAGA does not love trans people. Anti-trans rhetoric was thick during the campaign. Trans members of the military are being forced out. If you attempt to enter the US with a passport that indicates a different gender than you were assigned at birth, you might be banned from ever entering the US again. Significant effort has been taken to erase the concept of trans people from government websites and media.
A couple tokens does not change this. The actions speak for themselves.
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2024/oct/29/tweets/cla...
If instead we voted with permutations of {+1, +0.5, -0.5} assigned to a single combination of up to 3 candidates without duplication of score or candidate, we would be voting for the outcome of the decision matrix and avoiding the tragedy of the commons.
But we didn't, and won't, so we brave the new world of tragically aligned AGI known as government. If the pattern isn't recognized, real AGI (rather than the metaphor of government) would definitely learn from it and wipe out humanity at this rate.
And if there were pies in the sky, nobody would go hungry.
Sorry, but you have to work with the system you have, not the system you want.
If more people showed up to vote, Republicans would have no power.
The only good path forward is to elect Democrats and then push them further left. Anything else is fantasy.
The right is passing laws saying that you can't teach about trans people or gender in schools. Part of the job of schools is to teach kids about the various important social/cultural/ideologies that make up the world; things like history, capitalism, communism, democracy, dictatorships, the various world religions, atheism, etc. Forbidding teaching of a major element of society like transgender people is in effect an attempt to erase them from social consciousness.
The right is passing laws anti-drag laws that define obscenity so broadly that it can be used as a threat to suppress drag performance. Attacking a culture's artistic movements is a classic way to attempt to suppress it from the public sphere.
Same for gender identity and trans. It should be fine to inform pupils that some people in our culture believe that everyone has a gender identity, and that they also believe that this is what defines if someone is a woman or man or, as is described within this belief system, neither. But teaching this as if it's a fact is problematic.
A sensible policy would ensure that the curriculum is agnostic to these beliefs.
Furthermore, I had the gut reaction that your portrayal of how gender identity is taught in public schools is likely bad, but I did't have the time to run that stuff down. So as a consolation prize I offer one of GPT 4.5's takes on your response; Specifically I asked it to identify the hypocrisy in your response. I should probably have a more nuanced prompt in this case, and I would also encourage you to have a more nuanced view of teaching religion in public school.
The hypocrisy in the comment lies in the author’s claim that others are acting in “bad faith,” while simultaneously misrepresenting the opposing argument. Specifically, the commenter criticizes the original poster for allegedly exaggerating (“malicious lie,” “breathless idiot”) when interpreting certain conservative actions as denying the existence of trans people. Yet, in doing so, the commenter engages in their own distortion—downplaying the genuine impact of policies that functionally erase or severely limit the recognition and legitimacy of transgender identities.
Moreover, the commenter clearly distinguishes between literal existence and societal allowance for billionaires, yet refuses to apply the same nuance to the original comment regarding transgender identities. This selective application of interpretative generosity constitutes the core hypocrisy.
So when he says “dead — killed by the woke mind virus” he might be trying to garner figurative sympathy as if he lost a child. It certainly coincides with a call to criminalize any facet of trans health care for trans youth.
And when he says “America will go bankrupt” without him, he might be issuing a threat or maybe just a warning. Donald Trump is no stranger to bankruptcy and certainly must see that politicians only mention debt rhetorically. His administration added more than $8T, or $5900 per capita per year.
So if we must accept only extreme solutions to things that were never problems, maybe their intention really was those urges?