I think the fundamental problem with the pro-privacy side of the debate is an inability to communicate why privacy matters in way that makes sense to people who think like this. The argument always seems to come down to some dystopian future in which this information is abused, but hypotheticals like that are just never very motivating when people have so many more pressing issues that are causing clear and immediate harm rather than some hypothetical future harm.
If someone knows the normal hours you are at home, they can enter your home without much risk. They can plant evidence, Interfere in your life in ways that you can't easily fix, or even create situations where you get harmed or die from an accident. Information gathering is a necessary pre-requisite for a successful attack, and by itself it is an act of hostile intent.
The argument doesn't come down to dystopian future. It comes down to the fact that people in corrupt systems lie, and those lies can torture the victim without any recourse.
Information is abused regularly.
Once you see it, you can memorize it and transmit it without a paper trail. You can even have a plausible reason for needing to access that information in the first place.
It is ephemeral and its security relies on trust of an untrustable entity that trends towards corruption as a structural flaw.
All centralized hierarchies as a structure involving people either perform action based on a distribution of labor that is incentivized (away from a loss function), or they do so through corruption (in its absence).
In either case, there is incentive and there is no other means to overcome the natural friction towards inaction.
>hypothetical future harm
Does a non-techy boomer worry that Microsoft is going to use their cookie-research browsing data to harass/coerce/blackmail them?
You're describing what a hypothetical future-booggieman can do; not what to be feared now that the nontechy is reading about on the news.
Unfortunately no, being deadly serious here I'm describing what can be done today fairly trivially (to any target), and done in a way without alerting the victim that its even happening. They simply seem to have bad luck with a monkey on their back that they can't see everywhere they go in society. They are deprived of opportunities without their knowledge, be it gender relations, labor relations, citizen-government relations etc; its applies equally at all levels.
There are multiple ways than just what follows to do this:
Shall we go down the rabbit hole?
Starting off with a compromise and transparent SSL proxy termination through failures at the network edge (firmware level, between Router or Cable Modem and ISP/Internet).
Note the point the guy makes that Cable Modem standards require 56bit encryption to remain working, and there being no authentication for sensitive requests (i.e. query then update that firmware for one of something like 8 models of microcontroller architecture).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hk2DsCWGXs
From here, middle man most traffic (it says encrypted to the victim, its not encrypted), Deny service selectively (delayed update of antivirus, certificate revocation, etc), deny service selectively of inbound email and/or remove specific emails (breaking communication with a non-response you never receive), close opened resolution processes posing as the user, or the vendor CSR using generated correspondence or voice AI based in unofficial versions of GPT. The more induced frustration the better (higher cost).
Analyse traffic behavior for time spent on entertainment as potential targets. Isolate communications, prune social networks gradually.
Delay interrupt driven communications to the point of uselessness (friends ignore you, relationships wither and die, they see it as you not being interested/flaky, you see it as them not being interested; no way to validate and a lack of belief that it follows you across services; they firmly believe you are either crazy or are ghosting them and withdraw because you don't respond to communications they send you which you don't know about, and communications on their side are not impaired with other people).
ISPs may extend their cellular coverage through edge-based repeaters/mesh network allowing interception. Prevent or delay SMS/Voice Communications of all forms targeted and intermittently. (i.e. medical communications to coordinate scheduling/testing for cancer/mortal diseases early? etc...) Failures are systemic failures of the company not an adversary... or so they perceive. "It is just everyone is so incompetent, it can't be malice", someone would have ensured this is unthinkable.
If they love something (what your identity is based on), like chess, pose as the chess server and always match and win against them using an engine to demoralize. They would see perfect play 7/10 times, assume its representative of the state of thing, and despite having the expectation that they are playing against people they are constantly being the victim of deceit. This Distorts Reflected Appraisal changing their worldview subtly, the more wide in subject/situation, the worse the distortion gets; it destructively interferes with Self Concept and their Identity hollowing them out inducing hypnotic states commonly known and seen in torture from WW2/Mao but without that physical threat (its just an omnipresent threat). The mind in these states is malleable and remembers details more easily, this is where ads come in. Induce hate, disunity, derision, disgust in every one and thing they love; segment the victim into a cohort.
Make what they love shit, pose as the user for any number of harmful effects (i.e. request mail forwarding to some other address now the victim gets no mail and it goes to lost mail once the forwarded address says not here), report the property as vacant, intercept e-file make it so it appears to be submitted (when it doesn't); what happens when you don't file taxes or pay taxes?, or replace with incorrect taxes posing as the user (fraud, whose responsible?).
Google Information Services can have a fake business listing registered at an address. The victims own devices generate a busy time graph as they do for any business which is public. This is when they are home.
A Roku/Smart TV may be remotely triggered to enable the voice control mic to turn on regularly and place shows that destructively interfere with your view in their queues. They would see this as the company.
All this happens outside the users ability to perceive or largely control. It forms the basis for a struggle session (mental coercion/torture) they cannot escape from it.
With isolation and distorted view of the world you can ramp this up continually until they break psychologically, no physical presence needed. Slow, steady, and increasing the anaconda coils. If you don't minutely adjust within some arbitrary viewpoint the anaconda eats you.
If you've made fun of those insane Trump Supporters that are still with him despite everything he has done, this is a perfect example of the long-lasting permanency of mental coercion with persistence that naturally comes with demagogues, but is also being engineered using the same elsewhere for purpose.
The victims of this menticide either disassociate no longer contributing anything to anyone or reacting to anything, commit suicide, or become psychotic taking it out on other people violently until they are stopped. No physical presence needed because every single IOT/tech system has been shimmed towards benefiting a malicious adversary without a trace (since detailed network logs aren't kept longer than a certain period due to storage costs).
Need I continue?
Psychologically unstable people can be easily manipulated by timely showing solutions or ways out that temporarily resolve difficulties (pay for play to be that solution) in the middle of such torture.
Ever talk about purple dog collars with friends for awhile repeating the word and then see purple dog collars in all those ads on all your devices for up to 2-3 days later?
How do you think they know to show you those ads? The devices largely don't have the hardware specifications to do that computation at the edge so its collected, aggregated into a profile centrally, and used against you in sophisticated brainwashing/torturous ways that are simply claimed to be harmless marketing/adtech (you have to prove otherwise).
Incidentally, this is the why and how false confessions to crimes people didn't do are made, its been known since the 1950s.
Tech makes the links ephemeral with a false but generalized presumption that they are working in all cases unless you can prove otherwise which has no paper trail because it vanished immediately after it happened.
If you'd like to research these mechanisms for Thought Reform and indoctrination from sound expert material further (its dark), I'd suggest Robert Lifton "Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism", and John Meerloo "Rape of the Mind" for the foundational material. Its not absurd like most people are conditioned to believe from the irrational association of this depicted subject in media.
Communists use this as a divide a conquer strategy for regime change (most governments do too).
Monopolists use this to pressure consumers to buy things they wouldn't normally buy. This is how they capitalize on the inducements of anxiety and other emotional states they paid for via their marketing budget.
Governments use the shimmed parts to spy. Everyone benefits but the individual.
It is why the world today feels like torture to many rational people; it actually is torture and you just didn't realize it because you were not educated properly, and it was snuck in when you were not looking. It is also de-facto protected by the first amendment because of lack of standing and any interference by government to correct is a violation of the constitution.
It has been known by experts that free-will isn't guaranteed and has largely been broken for quite some time absent few exceptional individuals. These things warp people into stilted lesser versions of themselves that are incapable of further growth (by purposeful design).
Yes most of these things are very much against the law, but those laws are not self-enforcing and you have no proof, and opsec is simple when so many things are shimmed and ephemeral. Outside extreme measures coupled with extreme expertise it is impossible to detect, and equally challenging to hold those engaging in such evil to account.
Even most IT professionals lack an appropriate background knowledge to properly analyse firmware or log signal data between non-standard interfaces (i.e. coax beyond the demarcation point of responsibility, where law may punish any observer) which would be needed to overturn that irrational presumption that everything is working (uphill battle in any centralized/corrupt structure).
If you are thinking, this is crazy-making nightmare fuel...
It is, and it has valid and sound basis, and few outside the deepest niches and technical circles know (not belief).
It is an uphill battle just communicating the danger, in opposition to indoctrination caused by the many hidden systems designed for malign corruption and influence.
Edit: If you want to rip some of that indoctrination conditioning to shreds, I'd suggest Bazzel's book: Open Source Intelligence 10th Edition.
You can't really predict what factor is gonna get you targeted. You also can't predict the particular manner in which data that's being collected about you will be used to harm you. Sometimes it's about secrets you'd want to keep private, but often it's about correlations drawn that may even be wrong. Like if public sentiment or government scrutiny were to turn against tech in a huge way, maybe even just a post history on hackernews existing for you, regardless of what's in it, correlates you to some kind of cybercrime they're pursuing with a dragnet, and this gets your credit pinged when you try to buy a house, and someone freezes your bank account because something's going on here and we should just lock it down to be safe until we figure this out. Who knows? The erosion of privacy is a powderkeg that makes everyone more vulnerable to these sorts of things, but the effects aren't felt by everyone all at once, but chaotically based on circumstances beyond your control, sometimes even truly random ones. I can't predict the actual threat model that will become relevant to you because the attack surface is enormous already and the problem is about how it's ever-growing
It's hard to convince people that "you are more likely to be targeted and there is more that can be done if you are but it may never happen to you in particular and there's basically no way to know" is something they should care about. Intuitive risk assessment that our brains are good at can't fucking fathom the world we actually currently live in. Nonetheless, that is the form risk takes, and you should care about factors that expose you to it, even probabilistically
Muslim and trans people don’t want to hide their status, they want people to accept their status. Their effort would be more efficiently used advocating for acceptance than advocating for privacy.
Same goes for identity theft. That isn’t caused by bad privacy regulations, it is caused by bad financial regulations that put too much of the burden of fraud on the individual and not the company who fell for the fraud.
In any debate about privacy, it never seems like privacy should be the number one concern for the people involved. Like if you are worried about your credit report being hit for your HN comments, maybe spend some effort trying to change that credit system rather than trying to hide your HN account.
They want both (stealth/passing and acceptance)
The reason they're getting more scrutiny is because of the negative impact of pro-trans ideological policies on women's rights.
I can't speak for the US, but in the UK the turning point was a combination of two things: firstly, the right-wing Conservative government announcing that they were going to remove all barriers for anyone to change their "legal sex", with no medical diagnosis required at all. Secondly, press coverage, from news outlets across the political spectrum, of a male rapist incarcerated in a women's prison, who sexually assaulted several female prisoners there.
This caused an uprising of women, initially groups of left-wing feminists who most rapidly organised, to push back against this "gender self-id" policy proposal and against men in women's prisons. And then against the whole principle of males identifying themselves as female and being given special privileges because of this.
Only later on did right-wing groups take an interest in this as a division against the mainstream political left who were still very much in favour of these policies. Though we've just got a new centre-left Labour government and it seems likely now, based on what they said during the election campaign, that they're going to prioritise protecting single-sex spaces for women over the desires of males who demand to access them.
And this is because they've realised that they can't just unilaterally diminish women's rights and expect the electorate to follow along. The increased scrutiny worked.
>Secondly, press coverage, from news outlets across the political spectrum, of a male rapist incarcerated in a women's prison, who sexually assaulted several female prisoners there.
This is a good example of what that manipulation looks like in action. I agree that prisoners should have a right to safety despite their crimes. But what should the priority be for someone with this position? It certainly wouldn't be putting more attention on a single case of assault over some 999 other examples of a prisoner getting assaulted[1]. The focus on the one case involving a trans person shows that the motivation isn't actually prisoner safety.
[1] - https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/may/13/revealed-alm...
