OP here, did not know of the existence of “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences”! I agree, that's a whole other level.
Yeah, this resonated with me. It's strange we need real-world equivalent stories to get a real sense for how strange some of this conduct is.
One problem I see is that the invasion/violation is abstract, instantaneous and committed by an inanimate thing. I wrote something about it here along the same lines:
I've been getting very positive responses on this short essay / thought experiment on privacy. Very curious what the HN crowd thinks.
I'm Dutch and in The Netherlands WhatsApp is ubiquitous, it's hard to live without it. I live in Switzerland, and here it's similar (although not as bad).
It disgusts me how FB/WA seem to keep pushing the limit on what they collect on us, but until now I didn't think it was viable to convince my friends and family to move to another platform.
Now I think there are many platforms that offer better guarantees and that work according to healthier incentives than WhatsApp. This essay was to help convince my friends of this.
I've been trying to convince my friends to use Signal and in the process I've done some writing to figure out exactly what I believe. This analogy has been the result.
Valid point, but this doesn't amount to a very convincing promise to many users imo. You're relying on the service provider to not abuse their power. If that were sufficient I don't think we would see these e2e services pop up to begin with.
> This part had me scratching my head. Most established non-privacy-preserving products have been slowly killing interoperability because data lock-in provides a moat against users leaving and against potential competitors accessing valuable user data. There's no economic reason why privacy-preserving products should have worse interoperability than privacy-violating ones. Especially in product categories where interoperability does not imply sending PII to third parties.
I agree. I don't see a strong economic reason this would be the case. But there's a strong practical reason (which perhaps has economic consequences): loss of control. If you make it easy for your users to interface with other services which don't have the same privacy guarantees, you're increasing the risk of their privacy being violated. If you implement an interface that's so secure, that no leakage or abuse is possible, then you win. But if that's not possible, and you end up restricting things that would otherwise lead to cool, productivity features, then you've hit the trade-off I touch on in the essay.
Hey, OP here. Thanks for taking the time to read and respond.
> The Figma example that's given seems to completely undercut the "Productivity vs Privacy" argument. Figma didn't discover those use cases by spying on users, they did it by talking with users and working WITH them. You know, using that whole consent thing?
Figma is a great example of non-obvious productivity gains being _discovered_. I believe building a multiplayer experience like Figma would be considerably more difficult if you would need to also keep everything e2e, managing multiple keys, etc. In that sense I think there might be some tension with privacy-preservation. The primary reason I mentioned Figma, though, was the discovery part. I could've made that more clear.
> And you can be very interoperable and maintain privacy - but your users will need to choose to enable that interopability. Facebook can "promote interopability" by linking my Instagram and Facebook, or forcing me to use Facebook on Oculus and that is interopability - but it's sort of by force and not in a way that is acting with my consent. On the other hand, my email I send with Protonmail is perfectly interoperable - I can email anyone and get email from anyone, import and export emails and use whatever client I want - as long as I choose to allow it to be by decrypting my emails.
You can be interoperable, but I see many scenarios where it's not straight forward. For instance, you lose control over the preservation of privacy when your ProtonMail user forwards an email to his Gmail friend with an entire conversation in it, even though on a technical level you're completely interoperable.
I published some thoughts here about a trade-off I see playing out between productivity and privacy.
It's unfortunate, but it seems that a service provider's choice for preserving your privacy, often leads to a situation where they cannot leverage your data to offer you a better experience.
Search, which hinges on the ability to scan and index your files, is a canonical example.
It seems clear there's a trade-off, what's less clear is: how big of a deal is it? Have you experienced any trade offs in productivity by opting for a privacy-preserving workflow?