Confines of privacy

Every person has the inalienable right to keep secrets. Its own, inviolable information territory, on which there is no entrance to strangers. Where is the boundary of this territory? The answer is always subjective. It depends on the profession, and on the position in society, and on society itself, and on the nature of the person. When the privacy area grows or decreases, it becomes worse somewhere, and better somewhere. In the extreme points of the minuses are clearly more than pluses. If the territory is zero, the person is naked and defenseless, like a lab rat in a numbered cage. If you cover everything with a secret - a person is infinitely lonely and almost all the benefits of modern civilization are beyond his reach. Somewhere between these poles there is an optimum. The most advantageous in terms of comfort and safety point.

Why do we protect our territory? What makes us feel uncomfortable when our secrets are revealed? We fear that others will harm us, knowing our secrets. They will steal, laugh, hit where it is most painful. If there is no possibility of causing damage, there is no point in keeping secrets. If you live in a state with low crime and corruption and simple moderate taxes, then there is no point in bothering to hide your income. If you live among people who don't give a damn about your religious beliefs or sexual preferences, then it makes no sense for you “to pretend” to go (or not) to church and diligently demonstrate “high morality”. If in your country the results of all elections are not known in advance, and journalists who publish vicious paskvili and captious investigations about presidents and ministers are all alive and healthy as they walk, they don’t have a reason to hide their low opinion of intellect and morality. current government.

So privacy has no value in and of itself. It is important only under adverse environmental conditions. In tropical countries, people get by almost without clothes. Closer to the poles - wrapped in several layers. Notice! Clothing is the simplest and most obvious, but at the same time the most inconvenient and unpromising way of dealing with the cold. It interferes, sometimes crushes and constrains movement (just like zerochki with encryption, keys and passwords!)
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How else can you stop suffering from the cold? You can go to a warm region, that is, to escape from poor conditions. However, this is not always possible and acceptable. You can build a warm house, that is, partially change the conditions. You can begin to harden and get rid of a piece of clothing, that is, change your reaction to external conditions. All these three methods require much more effort at the beginning, and are risky, but they give a much more sustainable and convenient solution.

Information security on the Internet is very similar to clothing from our climate metaphor. Encrypt, block, password-protect, delimit access - wrap up warmer. All this is absolutely necessary and important. Completely abandon the "clothing" is impossible. But one should not forget that all this is in some sense an emergency, temporary measure, that much greater safety and comfort in the future can be ensured only by influencing the source of the threat itself, or by making yourself immune to the threat without any additional protection.

What does this mean in terms of information security? The most important babay of the modern Internet is Big Brother. Governments, payment systems, special services, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Vkontakte are watching you! You can’t hide from them! Is it necessary? To boycott them, to encrypt, to hide - initially losing strategy.

Once I shot a story for news about how elephants were brought to the circus. Several huge four-tonne animals spent many hours in a close trailer. They were very unhappy. Each of them can easily crush a person, like a bug, but five trainers in a few minutes drove the elephants into an open-air cage and calmed them down, lifting them to the basin of the Cahors. Elephants only vigorously expressed dissatisfaction verbally (did you hear how elephants roar? From a distance of five meters? Without a grille? An unforgettable feeling! But slamming sweet wine from the road and eating, roaring peacefully. There is something between a kitten and a tank) .

If the trainers began to run away from the elephants at the first sign of disobedience, the work would not end with anything good. But they acted in concert and without panic. They knew the habits and character of animals. And, most importantly, the elephants, too, knew their trainers. After all, these are people who feed them, care for them, play with them. An elephant is a clever animal, it will not touch those it needs without good reason.

It is the same with Big Brothers. They are big and strong, but they depend on us no less than we do on them. If you don’t get involved with them at all - well then, live in the forest, or what? If you are afraid and hide - they will find it anyway, if need be. They can and should cooperate. But they need to be controlled. This we feed and contain. And that they should be afraid of us. Of course, if they beat off their hands and allow themselves too much, it is sometimes better to bristle with cryptography and anonymous proxies, but you cannot stop there. Although the temptation is great. We are uncomfortable to leave the familiar high-tech cocoon and look for a solution to the problem outside of the algorithms and protocols. Politics, protests, manifestos - all this is not for us. We better encrypt better and that's it. “Chik-chik, I'm in the house!” So ​​for most of the guarantees of our privacy (and indeed any of our rights and guarantees) we are obliged to thank the “crowd of hamsters” who were not afraid to go on strike somewhere, somewhere go to the protest and force governments and corporations to behave decently.

What is wrong with Google or Facebook having a lot of information about my affairs and interests, if I can be sure that if they misuse this information, they will lose a thousand times more than they gain? Their reputation rests on the fact that they do not disclose my secrets to anyone.

If it is absolutely impossible to do without advertising, then it is better to have small narrowly targeted messages, in which sometimes even a useful link can be than twenty irrelevant banners that I would have to contemplate if they did not collect personal information.

Instead of hiding by ourselves, it’s better to ensure that states and corporations have less secrets from us. Want to have a complete file on us? Please, just do not hide their activities. Even now, the need to publicly report, record, and provide information to citizens and shareholders about their work strongly binds the hands of unscrupulous "public servants." If they have more information about me, then I should have more information about them, to be sure that no one is abusing the knowledge of my secrets. This is a fair exchange.

At all times, servants knew a lot about the habits of the owners. Now cars have replaced us with servants. Here, by simple calculations, it is shown that a modern European spends an amount of energy equivalent to the labor of hundreds of slaves a year to satisfy his needs. The same thing on the Internet. How many man hours would it take to manually make a selection of links on any issue that Google issues in a few milliseconds? Opening part of your personal information space, we get many benefits. What is the use of servants who do not know the tastes and routines of their master? Anything can happen, servants can betray or rebel, but we must soberly assess the threat. On the construction site it is necessary to observe safety precautions, but walking down the street in a helmet is a diagnosis. Although yes, of course, theoretically, something may fall on the head.

I want to have as few secrets as possible. Behind every secret is some kind of trouble. I invent a password pozakovyristee not because I like it, but because the threat of hacking the account is very real. I would really like to go into my mailbox, as on the main Habra, without any authorization. I would like to open the door of my apartment with a kick when my hands are busy. Life without secrets is much nicer.

That is why most people are so disregard for information security, bringing cautious admins to hysterics. Yes, as a rule, they are too careless. But fighters for privacy and control over their own information are too concerned. Geeks tend to fall into the second category. After all, we, in contrast to other people, are too well aware of how conditional the access control is to “closed” information. Literally everything rests on an honest word or a byte somewhere in the server code. That is why we are so obsessed with ideas of cryptography, decentralization and host-proof. And people around us are looking at another project of a decentralized secure social network and they think:
- Well, what is better than Facebook?
- How!? Here is complete control over your personal data!
- And I can edit my data anyway ...
- No! This is not that! They are all stored in the Evil Corporation's datacenter.
- And what do I care? Vaughn, my salary is also on the card, not in the nightstand, so what? Everything works, everyone is happy, back off!

That's all. In order to “push through” safe decentralized technologies, there is not enough whip in the form of “Big Brother”. Need a gingerbread. BitTorrent managed to do this, because quickly downloading anything for free is cool and everyone understands that. Only by offering the necessary and understandable benefits to anyone, you can make the protocol and software based on it massive. The perceived territory of privacy, the zone in which the fear of losing control exceeds the discomfort from the use of safety equipment for an ordinary person is much less than that of a geek. Wrap a safe and secure technology in a beautiful and convenient wrapper, provide a set of useful, cheap and, preferably, unique functions, such as, for example, the creators of Skype - and people will use this technology.

But each time, successfully defending another corner of private life, it is worth considering how to make it so that it could not be protected at all? So that the descendants would be surprised at our stories that once it made sense to hide your address and telephone number, sexual orientation, political and religious views, or the amount in the bank account. So that they look at us the way we are now looking at this 19th century lady:



What, you see nothing unusual in it? And she is in a bathing suit!


PS This topic has grown from a couple of offers in the topic about the prospects of distributed P2P hosting . Since there are so many letters there, and the topic is drier and more technical, I decided to publish them separately, but at the same time.