How about F/OSS communities, programming blogs, and forums like HN stop allowing Google, Fb et al to index and link to their pages? Soon Google and co will find out there's not much content of value left in their garden. I for one can get along well with a couple sites such as github, stackoverflow, arstechnica, some EU quality journalism sites, etc. Most other stuff turns out to be self-promotion or ad-ladden feedbuzz for the digital precariat anyway (the kind of which you see on the subway and who can't stop fumbling with their smartphone for a even a second).
How to fight the surveillance economy
31–40 of 71 posts
Re: How to fight the surveillance economy
#32If you're a software developer the way to fight this is financial. Make a ton of money then pay journalists to write about it and pay other software developers to build the tools to evade it.[0] Regarding VPNs: What I want is a very small, open source program that I can give my credit card. It will light up little DigitalOcean droplets (and other VPSes to stop potential monitoring from them) and create VPNs here and…
>I also want to build my own browser that will be capable of making the rendering happen on these rented-for-a-minute servers then pipe back just the PNG. I think you want a browser running on a servet you access over a VNC, which will pipe back just the parts of the screen that have updated.
x2go is perfect for this. I used to run an instance on AWS, but I just keep one at home now. It pipes everything through a PIA vpn.
Re: How to fight the surveillance economy
#33I understand the concern but it does not bother me much. You are much more likely to have you data logged and used against you by visiting a small website than twitter or Facebook. CIA/FBI agents are known to hack websites and install trackers. The Firefox tor JavaScript exploit comes to mind.
Re: How to fight the surveillance economy
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
You forgot: 3. Legislation that enforces some notion of privacy rights. Similar arguments of economic necessity can be made for alcohol, tobacco, and gambling providers. All of these products are regulated in terms of how they can be manufactured, marketed, and sold because they have large negative externalities that impact their users. I don't see why surveillance for the purposes of advertising is any different.
In which case it should be regulation on the Ad industry, not necessarily regulation of data - because that's not getting at the core incentives. The data gathering is a symptom of the Ad market. If you don't address the Ad market incentives, they will simply find another vector to getting to you. Noam Chomsky has been very loud about this for a long time, well before data gathering was a thing. So it's a long term p…
There had to be a happier medium between command economy (we tell people what they want) and all out advertising (which is parasitical) but provides incentive for invention and progress.
Re: How to fight the surveillance economy
#35> Look for businesses that accept anonymous payment options and don’t force everyone to share personal information with a third-party payment provider. What anonymous payment options are there (other than many cryptocurrencies)? I do remember the days of sending cash through the post but I don't think that's what the author is suggesting.
this use case is a huge part of why bitcoin exists, it's hard to exclude from the conversation.
Re: How to fight the surveillance economy
#36The surveillance economy is a direct result of advertising becoming the default business model for Internet companies. At its root, advertising is attempting to predict an individual's preferences and subtlety nudge their preferences toward specific buying behaviors. With more granular and pervasive data inputs, you can arguably do better predictions and thus better targeting. The only counter to this is either: 1: p…
> 2. Changing the default business model for internet companies
Got any ideas?
Re: How to fight the surveillance economy
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
You forgot: 3. Legislation that enforces some notion of privacy rights. Similar arguments of economic necessity can be made for alcohol, tobacco, and gambling providers. All of these products are regulated in terms of how they can be manufactured, marketed, and sold because they have large negative externalities that impact their users. I don't see why surveillance for the purposes of advertising is any different.
In which case it should be regulation on the Ad industry, not necessarily regulation of data - because that's not getting at the core incentives. The data gathering is a symptom of the Ad market. If you don't address the Ad market incentives, they will simply find another vector to getting to you. Noam Chomsky has been very loud about this for a long time, well before data gathering was a thing. So it's a long term p…
The problem here is defining what is and is not an ad.
Do I want my communications, browsing, purchase and location history to be used to rank me for job applications? To be used to decide which news stories I see? Which products are the top when I search for something generic?
For some the answer is yes, for many it is no. The only way to square this is to restore consent and data decision-rights to users, and to dispel the fiction that continued use of a service represents informed consent to thousands of pages of non-negotiable legalese.
Re: How to fight the surveillance economy
#38> Look for businesses that accept anonymous payment options and don’t force everyone to share personal information with a third-party payment provider. What anonymous payment options are there (other than many cryptocurrencies)? I do remember the days of sending cash through the post but I don't think that's what the author is suggesting.
On my country at least there is a trend that only registered costumers have promotions and discounts, but what really happens is that the price of the things go up and the registered costumers pay the 'normal' price. I'm not buying anymore on theses type of stores (markets and restaurants mostly), but this is keeping growing difficult because every other week more and more business are starting to ask for my 'credent…
Use fakes. In the US there's a famous song called Jenny with the phone number 867-5309 in the lyrics. Everyone over age 30 knows that number by heart, and a fair number younger too.
Simply give (your local area-code)-867-5309 and there's a very good chance that someone's already signed up with that number. If not, I'll complete the signup with that number and whatever bogus name comes to mind. Jacob Blues, 1060 W Addison 60613 works well.
Just like AdNauseam, simply chaff the system until it's futile.
I'm sure there are similar characters in the public consciousness of every country.
Re: How to fight the surveillance economy
#39The surveillance economy is a direct result of advertising becoming the default business model for Internet companies. At its root, advertising is attempting to predict an individual's preferences and subtlety nudge their preferences toward specific buying behaviors. With more granular and pervasive data inputs, you can arguably do better predictions and thus better targeting. The only counter to this is either: 1: p…
Advertising is just the first thing to do with that data - I expect there will be more (or already there is more - just most of it secret). The problem is that there are huge network effects for information - because there can always be something interesting from a new set of data - so we'll bigger and bigger information stores until we all join the Borg.
Re: How to fight the surveillance economy
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s much worse than that. Companies you pay significant amounts of money to like ISP’s also reolized selling your data made them just slightly more money so now all large companies do so.
Right, except they are selling it to ad networks/companies, so it all comes back to the Ad market being the end consumer.
Online advertising is only a slice of this. From political campaigns to chains picking locations, collecting and interpreting vast amounts of data has become the norm.