261–270 of 329 posts
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> I should finally write that essay that I've been meaning to for the longest time. No need. Orwell already wrote it. I just don't get why you think you are alone.
> I just don't get why you think you are alone. I would hope I'm not but it sure feels that way. Maybe I'm not reading the right stuff or talking to the wrong people. Can you point me to some (contemporary) arguments along the line I propose?
I have two unrelated thoughts. "Chilling effect" has always been a profound term for me, because I imagine the "cold" (numbness really) sensation a human body often senses when something truly awful (disembowlment/dismemberment) occurs. The body's way of protecting itself is to go "cold", and in many ways that's exactly the effect taking place here, as well. There's also an undeniable part of this conversation that r…
Seatbelts, airbags, traffic lights, food safety, drug safety, pollution control, national defense and many more benefit pedophiles just as they protect good people.
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Every time one of millions of developers commits code to a centralized service, they have a hand in exposing individual's data to the surveillance society we live in today. Data exposure can come from being publicly available on the site itself, being obfuscated through aggregation in the service's APIs, leaked through security holes in implementation of said services, risk of theft by hackers looking for high value…
That is not what's typically meant by surveillance. Sure, it turns out using centralized web services has helped the government with things such as PRISM, but that doesn't mean we should blame people for those development practices rather than the government. Prior to PRISM, pretty much any reasonable person would assume that the blobs you store in S3 aren't going to be looked at anyone or, worst case, metadata will…
I beg to differ. Where you concentrate power, you have to expect abuse.
> It is true that customer data is trusted with a lot of services-of-services nowadays, but do you want to go back to the stone age where the only people who can store anything must run their own hardware with their own databases and so on?
That's a false dichotomy. Yes, I want to go back to people running their own hardware with their own databases. And to have that work as easily as your favourite cloud service. There isn't anything inherent in running your own hardware that requires that to be a major burden.
I have two unrelated thoughts. "Chilling effect" has always been a profound term for me, because I imagine the "cold" (numbness really) sensation a human body often senses when something truly awful (disembowlment/dismemberment) occurs. The body's way of protecting itself is to go "cold", and in many ways that's exactly the effect taking place here, as well. There's also an undeniable part of this conversation that r…
You always provide safety to bad guys along with the good. Seatbelts, airbags, traffic lights, food safety, drug safety, pollution control, national defense and many more benefit pedophiles just as they protect good people.
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Populists will claim to give you anything you want as long as you vote for them.
True, but from what I remember from my history lessons, NSDAP was actually doing good on those promises. Which is something that rarely happens in politics.
They made lots of promises that they never delivered on (or even planned to deliver on).
One of the more interesting ones:
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A lot of people are not blind about this at all. They understand fully that their data is collected and they expect nothing less than the top result of their Google, Amazon, and Facebook queries to match exactly what they are looking for.
A lot of people have an abstract idea that information is being collected, yes. I suspect that few people realize or know what the amount of information is, who has access to it, what purposes they use it for. Does anyone remember that angry email they sent 5 years ago where they were criticizing their boss? Google does. What kind of profile can you build from thousands and thousands of such emails, messages and quer…
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Still not convincing, at least not to me and many of the people that I know. I'm pretty sure my insurance company has already calculated my premiums based on my demographics and claim history. I made not have told them "I have more than five drinks almost every weekend", but they know. They were making inferences from Big Data since back when it was just "data". And practically, I don't think most insurance companies…
Imagine some type of insurance that typically costs 100 USD/month in premiums per person and where the insurance company typically pays out on average 90 USD/month for damages per person. Now, imagine that one insurance company has figured out a way to detect a certain group of people who will only have damages of on average 50 USD/month, which make up about 5% of the potential customers, and detecting which of their…
Personally, I would prefer if car insurers could price discriminate more based on data. I think this would lower rates for me personally, both in the short term because I try to cultivate safe driving habits, and in the long term because it would create an incentive for everybody to try to drive more safely.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Every time one of millions of developers commits code to a centralized service, they have a hand in exposing individual's data to the surveillance society we live in today. Data exposure can come from being publicly available on the site itself, being obfuscated through aggregation in the service's APIs, leaked through security holes in implementation of said services, risk of theft by hackers looking for high value…
That is not what's typically meant by surveillance. Sure, it turns out using centralized web services has helped the government with things such as PRISM, but that doesn't mean we should blame people for those development practices rather than the government. Prior to PRISM, pretty much any reasonable person would assume that the blobs you store in S3 aren't going to be looked at anyone or, worst case, metadata will…
I have hardware in my pocket that is hundreds of times more powerful than the first web servers I every worked on. There is no technological reason why that same hardware couldn't be used. I'd love to have a PAN based around my phone (which is way more local to me that much of the "hardward with their own databases" that I've ever worked on. Federation to Facebook/Google/Instagram/whatever the next big thing is would be amazing. And the reason it hasn't happened even though powerful hardware is everywhere isn't due to lack of technology.
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This is a good time to remind readers of this Upton Sinclair quote, too: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it".
Well, I actually feel it concerns much more than simply money. The avant-garde - be it technological, artistic or intellectual - has always shown a tendency to join forces with the darkest of regimes during the early stages.
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> I just don't get why you think you are alone. I would hope I'm not but it sure feels that way. Maybe I'm not reading the right stuff or talking to the wrong people. Can you point me to some (contemporary) arguments along the line I propose?
Richard Stallman, Lawrence Lessig, Cory Doctorow?
I was thinking more about something along the lines of Chomsky, McLuhan, and Orwell updated to the current day. But we'll see…