Just came up with my father again.
He blames me that mother forgot her phone’s and Google password because I recommended against it being a word.
I mentioned encryption, “not necessary unless you’re doing something illegal”.
When mentioning lack of privacy with targeted advertisements, he said that he actually really likes them, because he bought a couple of things he wanted for years.
I don’t really have good arguments.
“arguing that you don’t care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don’t care about free speech because you have nothing to say.” -Edward Snowden
I posted the following somewhere else recently:
“nothing to hide”
Secrecy and privacy are two different things.
Secrecy is hiding something you don’t want anyone to know because it’s “Bad/illegal”.
Privacy is acknowledging that it’s none of ANYONE’S business where you put gas in your car, what route you drive home, what brand of underwear you buy, what kind of music you listen to, your eating habits, etc…
The more you are ok with data being collected, the more data they will try to collect until finally your life isn’t yours anymore.
You don’t close the bathroom door because you’re doing something illegal, you close the bathroom door because it’s none of anyone’s business and you aren’t interested in being watched.
Our personal data is valuable and holds power over us. Unfortunately it’s only been recent decades that this concept REALLY started to sink in and unfortunately big corporations figured it out a little quicker than we did
Gotta also point out, if they were things he ‘wanted for years,’ he already knew about them, knew he wanted them, and would have bought them. The ads were of no value in that situation.
But the big thing I have to question in this is, does this person have anyone they care about? It’s not all about them. Do they want those they love to be tracked and manipulated based on the data? Would they be comfortable with a system that tracked their daughter’s menstrual cycle based on the data they collected? If so, would they still be okay with it if the companies used that data to push unhealthy options on her when she’s being hit with PMT and feels like shit? What if the ad space was bought by a group who wanted to push her into a religion? Or an abortion? Or a political position they disagree with?
And let’s say they don’t have any problem with the people who they know have access to it now. Do they think the people who have it now will be unwilling to sell it? Is there someone out there they wouldn’t be comfortable with having access to their data? Because basically anyone can buy info from a data broker. Would they like it if their porn history was shared with potential employers? Or their health history? Even if they don’t put in anything they aren’t comfortable sharing, do they think no one else might put in info they don’t want shared? What about just plain misinformation? Do they want the data on them to be available to employers after someone with a grudge has had a chance to order BDSM gear in their name and create a profile for them on a fetish site or twenty? How about someone with no grudge, just who taps into his wifi because he hasn’t updated his security firmware in a bit? And all that info would be delivered to anyone who asks and is willing to pay <$20. He’ll never be told, ‘you didn’t get the job/loan/invite because of what we found on you.’ It’ll just be a silent wall between them and the other things they want, just because they liked that one time the company, which didn’t actually care what he wants, convinced him to buy something he would have bought anyway and spent the rest of the time selling access to him and his information, benefitting him not at all.
“Why do you shit with the door closed? What are you doing there, drugs?”
If I was to answer that type of argument, I would consider those:
- why do you close the door of the bathroom when you use it?
- Can I watch you fuck?
- Show me your last income declaration
- Give me your credit card
- Why do you wear clothing?
- Why do you lock the door of the house?
but I tend to ignore people using the “I have nothing to hide” argument
I just be direct.
The people making this argument have already built an implicit stage in their mind where they’re talking about when authority is trying to investigate you for being “one of the bad ones.”
They’re not “counting” personal privacy in this context like modesty and personal private space.
I just say “Because when the long arc of history swings the other way like it has for thousands of years, do you want your scary, blue-haired antifa boogymen to have the power to investigate you and your personal life and habits?”
If it’s a male conservative, you can have great success with “So if someone says they need to check your hard drive for every image and video you’ve ever looked at, you’re fine with that? I know a guy who can immediately restore every file you’ve ever deleted.”
Sometimes they turn white.
Also: why does your wife, mom, daughter close the bathroom door? Do you watch your mom or daughter fuck?
That persons opinion of privacy would affect other people too.
I’m reminded of a story I heard about a woman in South America (I don’t remember the country.) Her best friend attended a protest one year. She makes a post on Facebook about supporting her best friend. A few years pass, and the government started becoming more and more authoritarian. Finally, she gets a visit from the police, asking about her ties to her best friend, and is threatened with arrest unless she can prove she’s not tied to the protest as well.
I’m probably getting some details wrong, but it’s a thought that stuck with me. She didn’t have anything to hide at the time. But things change, and you can’t always predict what you’ll have wish you had kept private before.
2 big things for me.
First is that everyone, and I mean absolutely everyone has something they want to hide. People assume “I’m not a violent person or a criminal” except yes you are, and you’ve done something. A great example is everyone in the US speeds, absolutely everyone. Does that mean you want every office to know every instance of you speeding if you get pulled over? So, yes everyone has something they’d rather not say.
Second is more of an example of you should be allowed to go places without everyone knowing. The example was about 5 years ago police used location data to find a person who broke into someone’s home. Problem is that the location data they used returned one person who happened to be on that street around the same time. They were riding their bike down the street. To the police they had the person there, they had proof, it was good enough. Except it wasn’t, and he obviously wasn’t the person they were looking for. Location data put him there though, and sold him out. So maybe not the best thing for whoever to know exactly where you are at any given time.
As for encryption, ask him for his porn history. If he gets upset, just say “why it’s not illegal”
but, I agree with the other person. If you’re dad is like mine and countless others, you’re not fighting against him but propaganda. If that’s the case, you aren’t going to win this. The only winning is turning off the source.
I wouldn’t say everyone speeds as not everyone even drives. The biggest thing for me is that even if you don’t have something you’re ashamed of it could still be something you could be targeted for, like political views, disability or gender identity etc.
While targeted advertisements may be nice because it’s only showing you things that they think that you’ll want/need/like, the other side of surveillance based advertising is surveillance pricing.
Surveillance pricing analyzes massive troves of your personal information to predict the price you would be willing to pay for an item—and charge you accordingly. Retailers can charge a higher price when it thinks you can afford to spend more—on payday, for example. Or when you need something the most, such as in an emergency.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/08/fight-surveillance-pricing-we-need-privacy-first
“I need privacy not because my actions are questionable, but because your judgement and intentions are.”
“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
Surprised I didn’t see this quote yet:
“Ultimately, arguing that you don’t care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don’t care about free speech because you have nothing to say.” ― Edward Snowden
Compare it to free speech. Saying you don’t need privacy because you have nothing to hide is like saying you don’t need free speech because you have nothing to say. Eventually, through no fault of your own, there will come a time when you have something worth saying or hiding, and you will regret having surrendered your right to do so.
Another way to put it is: I don’t need privacy because my judgment and intentions are shady, but because the authorities’ judgment and intentions are, or one day will be. Allowing the authorities to invade your privacy and suppress your speech diminishes your ability to hold them accountable.
Something you don’t need to hide today may be something you need to hide tomorrow. And there’s no going back.
“Any people that would give up liberty for a little temporary safety deserves neither liberty nor safety.”
I’m going to be real. I was part way through an explanation before I deleted it. What you are dealing with sounds like a situation where you simply won’t win by using logic. To continue to labor under the presumption that a good and logical reasoning will have an effect is just going to stress you out and achieve nothing.
Google password because I recommended against it being a word.
IT nerds help me out here, but I’ve been under the impression that the best defense against brute force attacks is a very long password, and the idea of sprinkling in special characters or numbers is outdated. Something like “iwenttothestoreandboughtabirthdaycake” is a more secure password than “$6jds_*WghP6”.
edit: Also the mantra to never write down any passwords is more of a workplace piece of advice. I personally think, and this would probably be helpful for older people, that writing down passwords in a notebook which is kept secure in their home is pretty safe. Short of a home invasion, that notebook is safe, and having it can encourage them to diversify their passwords on different accounts. So, if you are going to keep at the issue, taking an angle of using something they are more comfortable with like a paper notebook is going to be accepted more easily than trying to sell them on a password manager or something.
It doesn’t even have to be that long. 12-16 characters and it’ll be infeasible to brute-force for the foreseeable future. But unless you’re talking a high-value target like government, military, or executive suite at a company, no one bothers to brute-force anyway because there’s easier ways to gain access.
The biggest issue with password security is reuse and sharing. The most secure password in the world doesn’t mean a damn thing if you use the same email/password combination across a hundred different websites, because all it takes is for just one of them to suffer a leak and now your credentials are in a dump with millions of others that can be bought for a song and a dance.
This is why it’s imperative to use 2FA for your most important accounts, because it can mean the difference between an attacker getting access and hitting an error page and trying the next poor fucker’s credentials instead.
But also, no one wants to try to remember a hundred different unique passwords so it’s also a good idea to use a password manager. Chrome and Firefox both have them built-in (note that Firefox stores passwords unencrypted on disk unless you set a master password!), but there’s also services like OnePass or Bitwarden that have stronger guarantees.
While being aware that leaking passwords and reusing them is a major risk, I was just asking about the construction of the password as it relates to being attacked directly.
But also, no one wants to try to remember a hundred different unique passwords so it’s also a good idea to use a password manager.
Absolutely. I recommended the notebook approach only because I think people of a certain mindset would be more open to it than a password manager, even if it isn’t as elegant of a solution. At the end of the day it still diversifies passwords. I’m vividly picturing my mom throwing a fit any time a doctor or other office wants her to fill out a form on a tablet instead of paper.
Bitwarden sold keys recently. Chrome and firefox are the same product now and neither should be allowed to hold anything important.
If you can’t get keepass going, I second pen and paper.
Bitwarden sold keys recently.
Source?
Chrome and firefox are the same product now and neither should be allowed to hold anything important.
Source?
Is there something that would perhaps also work on Android? Also, how do you move the passwords from password manager into the fields? My problem with clipboard is that anything can read it. Of course, that means there has to be something to exfiltrate the data, but 1 problem is better than 2.
Most of those password managers are also available on android, and automatically clear the clipboard after 30 seconds.
But that’s a bit like plugging a leak when the tanks empty. If they managed to get a tool onto your device to read the clipboard, what else is there to get? They’ll almost certainly have a key logger installed as well, if not a full backdoor.
And that’s assuming they’ll even go through the effort of installing anything and not just using ransomware to brick your device.
The first thing about security is knowing who you’re defending against, and you’re not defending against targeted attacks by nation states (if you as an individual are, you’ve already lost). Your main adversary is spray-and-pray “script kiddies”, maybe the occasional private actor.
Clearing the clipboard also makes it less likely that you’ll accidentally paste your password in a text box somewhere when you meant to tap “Copy” and missed.
I was thinking of Android, and whatever some apps may be doing. They should already be pretty limited in what they can do, so it might be forced to just read the clipboard from time to time and hope you don’t notice (android now shows pop-up when something reads clipboard).
Password managers on Android (and frankly all platforms) actually try to avoid using the clipboard. They prefer the auto-fill service, which is intended for applications just like this. Unfortunately this isn’t working in all cases, but you can also set your password manager as a keyboard (temporarily), so it can directly input a selected username/password without anyone else seeing it.
Examples where I know this is the case are open source keepass options (Keepass2Android, KeepassDX). But I’d assume bitwarden and the like also work this way.
Keypass has apps which supposedly support autofill (I’ve never bothered with setting them up because I hate using a phone), but it might go through the clipboard. You can also set it to clear the clipboard so its at least not just sitting there indefinitely.
As far as I know, the thing is that randomly chosen words will be more secure because there’s simply too many words. However, sentences will be more predictable. And a single word will give quick access to someone with a sufficient wordlist.
Honestly, I don’t remember what exactly my recommendation was, just that I recommended against something quite simple (common word), and that she shouldn’t tell me or anyone else what it is.
Edit: but I am not a professional, so don’t use me for advice.
The difference for random Vs chosen sentences is when brute forcing a password (short of a few common or predictable sentences) the attack works by trying out combinations of different words randomly (if they’re even that advanced in the first place instead of using characters). That means any sentences you come up with, based on 3 things in the room, are so unpredictable that it doesn’t matter that they aren’t truly random.
You can also change the space characters. Use - then _ then + and repeat:
Instead of
iwentshoppingformilklastsaturdayuse can usei-went_shopping+for-milk_last+saturday. The amount of variables are just too high for it to truly matter.Now all you need to deal with is the banking login being so poorly designed it only allows a max of 8 characters or BS like that, in which case you’ve lost before you even started.
in which case you’ve lost before you even started.
And once I came across even better limitation. “Only English characters and numbers are permitted. Passwords are case-insensitive.”
OK, the last one wasn’t actually mentioned, but I just found out the case didn’t matter either.Yikes, you just know those are stored in a file called
passwords-donotsteal.txt…The fourth largest bank in America, Wells Fargo, has cases insensitive passwords
Word based passwords are (typically) not more secure, but they’re easier to remember than random text, which makes them more secure than the lesser alternative, but not more than the better alternative: just as long, but fully random text stored and generated by a password manager. You’re right that substituting text with numbers or symbols is bad, those are easily cracked. But fully random text with symbols and numbers is the best.
Why? Badly remembered passwords are often reused and written down, sometimes even on the computer itself, in emails, chat software, text files. And any password created by a person inherently will fall victim to shortcuts, as humans are often just not as creative as you might hope, there’s patterns. Common words might be used, too little words might be used. With a dictionary attack that checks common words, the entropy of such passwords can become drastically smaller to the point they can be cracked very quickly, and you have to be aware of that constantly when using words. Using uncommon words or more difficult words can prevent that, but that’s typically not what people do, when “password123” is the best they come up with otherwise.
A notebook at home would suffice, but it’s not great for the same reason as word based passwords. A password manager can create passwords that are guaranteed to be entropically complex passwords that can’t be cracked basically ever. There’s no guessing, no shortcuts to take, no human laziness to slip in and curse the password to easy cracking. And it does so uniquely for every login you have. That’s essentially unbeatable.
A notebook at home would suffice, but it’s not great for the same reason as word based passwords.
I’m aware. I’ve explained it elsewhere, but having dealt with irrationally tech adverse older people myself, I’ve learned sometimes decent solutions they’ll actually use are better than great ones they’ll resist. I’ve found that any new software, like a password manager, no matter how user friendly and logical is treated with suspicion and disdain.
I gotcha, yeah then it’s probably better for them. As other people in the thread explained, it should save them from most crackers that just give up if the password isn’t cracked easily.
For my parents I save their passwords into my password manager whenever I set stuff up for them after learning the hard way several times.
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