Comment by TheGRS

  > a large part of HN audience doesn't especially care about privacy, and a good chunk of us are the ones that created the current privacy hellscape we have.

Any thread about Signal has top comments bashing Signal over something much more minor like backups, lack of stickers, Moxie's side project with MobileCoin, and/or some conspiracy about secret backdoors. Yet, there is never an alternative offered which my grandma could use. No, she can't use Matrix. Maybe your grandma is tech literate, but mine grandma is 90. Even my parents aren't tech literate! Hell, I couldn't even get my group of PhD level CS friends to try out Matrix with me, but I could strong arm half of them into using Signal while the other half just wanted to use iMessage.

Any thread on ZKP coins like ZCash devolve into conversations about how Monero is better.

Any thread on Firefox has a top comment about how much Firefox sucks because the icons are a bit different or how the dev tools are better or some other excuse. They all devolve into people just talking about their favorite color of Chrome (e.g. Brave, Opera, Edge). IDGAF, just install Firefox and uBlock on your family's computer, they won't notice the difference between FF and Chrome.

Or any number of other such topics. They devolve into purity tests and tribalism. The lack of perfection in some tool only becomes some excuse to continue licking the boot. Can we not acknowledge that things have flaws but that these flaws are a worthwhile cost to not living under surveillance capitalism? I hear so many people complain about surveillance capitalism and then only throw up their hands in the air to say "but what can you do?" or "it's the way things are." We're the fucking people who made it that way and we're the fucking people who continue to make things that way! Not every HN user works at big tech, but I'm willing to bet nearly every HN user is their family's goto tech support person. You at least have that power to influence your friends and family about how to solve these problems.

We're the people that other people look to for tech advice. We can have nuanced conversations all day, and I think we fucking should, but most of them turn into dumb flame wars like "vim vs emacs" or "spaces vs tabs" and all this ends up with is the system perpetuating. Can we just for one god damn month not roll around in the mud? All the time I hear about how we love merit and meritocracy. Well let's fucking do it then. And we're engineers, if there's flaws in these OPEN SOURCE SYSTEMS, then let's fucking fix them instead of just complaining about the flaws of living under the boot. Or do we just like to complain and they've won because they convinced us we have no power?

No, historically the vast majority of communication was not recorded, and so a warrant could not be used to access the communication. The fact of the modern world is that for the first time in history almost everything we do is recorded, and so subject to those warrants.

This is the crux of my belief system on the topic too. Along with the associated “burden of proof” and how making it less burdensome should not be anyone citizens goal or responsibility.

The irony is that it’s precisely why GPs dad had a job, with full transparency there’s essentially no need for any type of forensics.

> Actually that's a problem for a lot of libertarian minded tech, it starts being thought of as enabling freedom from oppressive governments and ends up being adopted by criminals - Bitcoin, Tor, etc.

This is such a sham though.

You have some privacy-protecting technology everyone would benefit from. Ordinary people don't really understand it but would use and benefit from it if it was the default.

Laws are passed that make it illegal to use or otherwise highly inconvenient, e.g. you have to fill out an onerous amount of paperwork even if you're not doing anything wrong. Ordinary people are deterred from using it and ordinary systems don't adopt it. Criminals continue using it because they don't care about breaking the paperwork laws if they're already breaking the drug laws.

Then people say look at this evil technology that only criminals use! As if the reason others don't use it wasn't purposeful.

> starts being thought of as enabling freedom from oppressive governments and ends up being adopted by criminals - Bitcoin, Tor, etc

Yes. Both are real facets of this type of tech. For all the handwringing about "but what if fascism" that we have here in the US, I'm pretty sure 90% of the actual worries American cryptocurrency users have in their hearts is either about tax evasion, money laundering, or using crypto to buy/sell something illegal (Granted, there are some things illegal to buy/sell that there could be an ethical argument shouldn't be illegal -- probably certain drugs for instance). If someone has made bitcoin transactions to say, donate to EFF, Planned Parenthood or ACLU, I would take a bet of 5 Bitcoin that he isn't going to be imprisoned for that fact in this country. Yes, even though Trump is President.

But I think we who believe in privacy make ourselves look bad if we try to pretend that there isn't a ton of that stuff going on.

It's a reasonable opinion to say that privacy is good, but I think the thing to argue and "prove" is that it outweighs the fact that this technology also enables all this bad stuff. Which is a value judgment and thus you need to convince people, rather than just point to the word "Freedom" and assert.

> No one ever answers the “what do you have to hide” question, which is a little sus.

Poe's Law strikes again, but for reference there are even several major categories:

Some things are nobody's business. If you have religious parents and you're gay, you may not want them to know that, even if your religious parents work for the government.

People have proprietary secrets. A drug company or tech company can't be spending a billion dollars on 95%-finished R&D only to have a random cop take a $10,000 bribe to hand it over to a foreign competitor.

It's important to protect the political opposition from the incumbents. The thing Nixon had to resign over? That.

Sometimes the bad guys work for the government. If your abusive ex is a cop, they shouldn't be able to trivially find you without a warrant.

The government shouldn't be able to go on a fishing expedition. If you do something that isn't illegal, or that you have a right to do, that shouldn't be an excuse to trawl through your life so you can be prosecuted for breaking a law that everybody breaks but only people who step on the toes of the powerful are prosecuted for.

"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him." -Cardinal Richelieu

"Saying you don't need privacy because you have nothing to hide is like saying you don't need freedom of speech because you have nothing to say." -Edward Snowden

Okay, so reply with your credit card numbers, links to all your cell phone photos, your DNA test results, your passwords, and your medical history. What do you have to hide?

You: "But you are randos on the internet, not the government!"

So I can get any of that from anyone if I just bribe the right government official? Or if I want that info for nefarious purposes I just have to get hired at the right agency? Or I can lobby to get a law passed that says everyone with the sequence "GATTACA" at a particular site on chromosome 7 is inherently evil and must be locked away for the public good? (Oh, what a surprise, it turns out that DNA sequence is incredibly common only for your particular race, huh.) Or if you're a celebrity, any cop can demand to search your phone without a warrant and get all of your private photos to sell to tabloids? You're genuinely ok with all of this? You find people who are concerned about these things suspicious?

Laws change. People in power do not always have your best interests at heart.

Not sure if you're being sarcastic but imo the lack of answers is because the phrasing begs the question. If you change "hide" to "protect" it suddenly becomes a bit more of a different proposition.