Comment by digging
Comment by digging 8 hours ago
> and people are ok with that
I've seen no evidence of this. People mostly either don't understand it for feel powerless against it.
Comment by digging 8 hours ago
> and people are ok with that
I've seen no evidence of this. People mostly either don't understand it for feel powerless against it.
And I'd bet over 99% of those people have never once considered that said camera could even be capable of saving any data without them operating it.
Very doubtful they've not considered it. When I go to coffee shops, I see maybe a quarter-to-half the laptops have a shade over the webcam. But when I see people using their phones, I've never once seen them use a shade, piece of tape, or post-it note.
They use the front-facing camera of their phone so often that the temporary inconvenience of removing a shade outweighs the long-term inconvenience of malware snapping an exposing photo.
But do you think they're taking a measured inventory of the possible consequences, both personal and societal, and saying, "No, I don't value that" ?
Extremely few decisions that people make are deeply calculated with cold logic. Most decisions are primarily unconscious, automatic, and emotional.
Example: A persons hears it's good to have a webcam cover, so they get one. Nobody mentions doing it for their phone, so they never even think about it. Then someday a friend does mention it, but that would be an inconvenient change, so the person's gut puts up resistance against considering it too strongly. They give in to their emotional response, instead of doing the hard work of changing their emotions based on the knowledge they have.
At no point in the above scenario would the person state "I don't think mass surveillance is a bad thing." For me, that's why I mean when I say people "aren't ok with it."
If one's definition of people being "ok with mass surveillance" just means they tolerate it, that they don't sufficiently resist it (and what level of resistance is sufficient? For a person with a webcam cover but no phone cam cover? Does adding a phone cam cover mean they've declared their opposition to mass surveillance?), then how can you say people aren't okay with literally everything evil or wrong? Most people just won't summon enough activation energy to fight any given injustice around them, no matter how egregious it is. That's not a reflection of their morals and values, it's a reflection of how fucking tired we all are.
I would challenge you to offer up in detail how strongly you have worked to resist mass surveillance in your life. You're logged in and posting on HN, so my guess is, you haven't worked hard enough at it according to someone's metric. Do you have a cover on your phone camera? Just the front one or both? Do you have a cover on the microphones? Do you let others add your number in their contacts or do you refuse to ever give out your real phone number?
The cover over the webcam might not be for security per se. It could be they don't want anyone at work - or home? - to accidentally see where they are. If you cover the camera you don't have to worry any such accidents.
My gut says that for most people is the reason.
Snowden couldn't convince people that the privacy he was talking about meant a limit on government power. Not sensitive data. And honestly, nobody cares about anyone taking a shit.
You can advocate for limiting govt. power ("LGP") without leaking any NSA docs. I don't think a single story about "LGP" changed due to the leaks. Everyone knows the government can do a lot of violence on you. So it's very hard.
If you're a high drama personality, yeah you can conflate all these nuanced issues. You can make privacy mean whatever you want.
This is my experience as well. I talked to a LOT of people after the Snowden debacle (techies and otherwise) and the general attitude was "so what? they aren't using the information for anything bad!" or "I have nothing to hide!" (in this thread, for instance: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41594775)
I think people don't really understand what an enormous sleeping dragon the entire thing is.
> I think people don't really understand what an enormous sleeping dragon the entire thing is.
Isn't that what I said? Mostly we're debating semantics. My deeper point is that it's counterproductive and borderline misanthropic to argue "People just don't care about evil being done!" whereas the argument that "People seriously have no idea yet what they're 'agreeing' to" opens the door to actual solutions, for one inclined to work on them.
But won't you think of the children!
(EU is trying to implement chat control again...)
We need more real-world analogies... "see, this is like having a microphone recording everything you say in this bar"... "see, this is like someone ID-ing you infront of every store and recording what store you've visited, and then following you inside to see what products you look at. See, this is like someone looking at your clothes and then pasting on higer price tags on products. ..."
There's also a vast amount of people that were just too young to be aware of Snowden's revelations. These people are now primarily on TikTok what not, and I doubt there's much in those feeds to bring them to light while directly feeding the beast of data hoarding.