A radical proposal to keep your personal data safe
theguardian.com
A radical proposal to keep your personal data safe
1–10 of 128 posts
Re: A radical proposal to keep your personal data safe
#2I don't know about this, but I'd love to see Apple make 3rd party data aggregators individually authorized or not via system dialogs. It would require some policing, but shifting these to opt-in instead of opt-out would be an amazing step in the right direction.
App authors would then be able to decide whether they wanted to let you use their app despite you declining to let them send/sell* your data to a third party.
* most app creators would claim they don't sell users data. But they need to acknowledge that when they receive free telemetry services for their app from a 3rd party, they are doing exactly that: selling user data in exchange for a service that would otherwise have some expense (in dev time or otherwise).
Re: A radical proposal to keep your personal data safe
#3The article raises good points. One important aspect is missing though; the reliance on web services, SaaS, and the like. Free software is not enough. We need free software that runs locally and offline.
Re: A radical proposal to keep your personal data safe
#4Obviously this proposal will be rejected because both companies and governments are addicted to the power to control and manipulate that data gives them. We need a strong leader who will go against the grain of these massive entrenched interests and be willing to stand up to the media onslaught such a stance will bring. The mainstream media will attack anyone who threatens their advertising based business model. When will there ever be a leader that doesn’t bend to the will of the media and deep state surveillance machine.
Re: A radical proposal to keep your personal data safe
#5Even if such a law would become effective somewhere I could imagine ways around this:
What would happen if a transportation service provider would also offer the service of collecting points dependant on the used stations and those points can be used for special offers.
This way they 'need' to collect movement data to check for abuse of the system in order to offer the 'basic' functionality.
I agree with RMS, but it might be difficult to express such law without loopholes for companies.
Re: A radical proposal to keep your personal data safe
#6The article raises good points. One important aspect is missing though; the reliance on web services, SaaS, and the like. Free software is not enough. We need free software that runs locally and offline.
When it's RMS, free means Free (under Libre terms) & Open Source. And yes, I agree; back to local and offline first applications is a must.
Re: A radical proposal to keep your personal data safe
#7I wish we could find a way to apply the model of the vending machine to mass commerce.
A vending machine doesn't make notes of who buys its products. A vending machine doesn't keep logs of its transactions or of the payment methods used. A vending machine does not make "recommendations" of what the consumer might like based on their past purchases. You give the vending machine a dollar, it gives you a soda. The transaction between consumer and vendor is done, and no tangible evidence of the transaction remains, other than the exchanged goods.
But we haven't figured out a way to scale the vending machine model yet, because when the machine gets stuck and fails to dispense its product, the consumer gets an attendant to help or kicks the thing a few times in frustration and walks away, because the lost dollar isn't worth the hassle. If someone paid $1500 for their laptop, however, they're going to want that convenience of being able to prove they purchased the laptop from XX retailer and be compensated if the thing is a lemon.
I'm not sure we can solve this problem, completely. But we might do better if we actively aspired to make our services more like vending machines.
EDIT: Yes, I'm aware that some vending machines these days can be paid by credit card. My university even had one where you could pay using your Student ID, which was linked to the balance allocated for your meal plan.
Re: A radical proposal to keep your personal data safe
#8We need new business models which depend on user-owned data, rather than treating privacy like a charitable contribution for saving the trees.
Instead of citizens sending data to the cloud, corporations can send code to citizen-owned devices where local computation can take place, with data only leaving via an open-source content inspection engine that enforces citizen-consent policy.
Re: A radical proposal to keep your personal data safe
#9The article raises good points. One important aspect is missing though; the reliance on web services, SaaS, and the like. Free software is not enough. We need free software that runs locally and offline.
Alan Kay has made this point rather eloquently in the past. Like stallman, his good points were not enough to stop free market from perverting the technology, with disastrous consequences.
Re: A radical proposal to keep your personal data safe
#10The article raises good points. One important aspect is missing though; the reliance on web services, SaaS, and the like. Free software is not enough. We need free software that runs locally and offline.
RMS is also against SaaS (or Software as a Service Substitute, SaaSS), but AGPLv3 SaaS would be a step in the right direction. At least then you could examine the source code and see what data is collected.
Edit: s/GPL/AGPL/