Hacker News.

Just a decade after a global backlash was triggered by Snowden reporting on mass domestic surveillance, the state-corporate dragnet is stronger and more invasive than ever.

  • Nate Cox@programming.dev
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    10
    ·
    2 months ago

    “I don’t have anything to hide” is such an insidious little lie. A colloquial fib we feel compelled to utter as a mock defense, like asserting innocence will assuage suspicion.

    We all have something to hide. Probably many, many things to hide. Even just in the narrow context of the law, there are hundreds of thousands of laws that apply to any one of us at any given time, and you are almost certainly breaking some of them without even knowing it.

    Personal security through privacy is so very, very important. I wish more people could see that.

    • redlemace@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      2 months ago

      “I don’t have anything to hide” is such an insidious little lie

      And easy to debunk. Take their phone, ask the pin. 9 out of 10 won’t. Open bank app ask pin again. You won’t get that far.

    • Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      2 months ago

      Let me put things this way:

      • Hands up anybody who doesn’t believe that, if they can, Health Insurance companies won’t mine the shit out of your purchase data and Car Insurance mine the shit out of your driving data to try and fine tune your risk group in their models and find out any change if your conditions that impact their bottom line (and dump you if they can if you switch to a high risk group)

      Even if one’s relaxed about data mining of private data for the purpose of serving you custom adverts, there are plenty of other use cases which can actually cost you money, not to mention the risk when the Authorities start running crime-predictive models sold to them by slimy Tech Investors with high enough rates of false positive that you run the risk of being tagged a “Terrorism” for some stupid shit like buying more bleech than the average person.

      Even you think you’re above board on everything and about as boring and uninteresting a person as possible, there are plenty of ways in which others known everything about you might come around and bit you in the ass in very concrete ways.