UK Network Operators Target iCloud Private Relay in Complaint to Regulator
While I don&#x27;t have tons of sympathy for the complaint, it exemplifies a trend we’ve been seeing for a long time: privacy at all costs, trust nobody. I think this stance is dangerous when deployed wholesale and without nuance to our technologies and protocols.<p>Here’s what I mean: rather than technology sewing a ski mask onto my head so that nobody can see me online, I’d rather have technology inform me about the nature of the site or network I’m using so I can make the choice of what my posture should be. I <i>want</i> to trust the services I use because they’re respectable and have earned my trust. If everyone is wearing a mask then how can I trust anyone? I’m not super excited about an internet where we trust nobody.<p>A concrete example: TLS 1.3. What if I want to trust a 3rd party to help me keep an eye on my traffic at a network level? Can’t now because sites can always know if there’s a MITM and of course they assume that’s always bad and unintended. (Perhaps they’re actually more interested in retaining proprietary access to <i>their</i> traffic.) Instead why can’t TLS allow me to configure a cipher-suite that allows me to e.g. run my own proxy for &lt;insert reason&gt;?<p>Same for browsers. Shouldn’t the browser be <i>asking me</i> which pieces of information and which APIs I want to allow a site to access (with sensible defaults, of course) rather than locking all the useful stuff behind “secure contexts”? It’s really hard to not see some of this privacy paranoia as conveniently enabling a lot of subversive platform control…