Google’s new reCAPTCHA has a dark side

I meant more like in a literal sense, but okay. Point taken.

> No. Noting which door a customer came into your store seems fine to me. That by default customers come in wearing the logo of the last store they visited is weird, but entirely something they can control. Having people shadowing all your customers while in the store looking and listening for tidbits they can report back on to get more info about those people is pretty creepy. As you suggest, the way to get around most of that is to dress blandly and say nothing

These human metaphors are powerful, but don't map at all to basic analytics concepts. There is no person watching you. There is no intelligence judging you. There are a series of conditions in a deterministic system provoked by your actions. If we could have done this before now, we would have because it's a whole hell of a lot more ethical.

> Here's the thing, we're a market economy.

I dunno where you are but I'm in the US which is most definitely not "a market economy" without a whole hell of a lot of qualifiers.

> There's a transaction going on, where we're trading away something (our information and privacy) to a company for some product, or possibly the right to view a product we might consider buying. How many people are actually aware of this transaction?

Roughly as many, I imagine, as folks who realized the shopkeeper could see them enter and leave. Most folks know local proprietors can and will kick you out and put up a photo if you act up.

> The difference here is that most of our government systems don't apply any rights of ownership to this information, so our regular rules don't apply.

This is just flatly false. I don't know what you're thinking writing this, but it's clearly neglecting copyright and patents. For what it's worth, I think the later is a bad system an the former is in desperate need of reform to sharply limit it.

> it's obvious that something is lost in the transaction, whether the person losing it realizes it at the time, or views it as important enough to make a big deal about when they notice.

I am trying to read your comment in the spirit it was intended rather than the literal delivery, so please forgive me if there is a subtle impedance mismatch here but...

Welcome to the future, I guess? The top 50% earners of the world has access to computers that would have once bankrupted a nation to produce, and the options are still surprisingly good for the next quartile. With that power, it means that the people around you are going to start noticing things and making decisions about them with the information they can now process.

Ideally, this will be a distributed thing, but right now due to the nature of our society, authority of this sort is highly concentrated. But the dam has broken. A total surveillance system for up to a modestly sized city, with realtime tracking and long term data storage, is well within the reach of anyone with $10000USD to spend on hardware. They can self-host it. The banality of this cannot be overstated. It's boring to do this now. It's not new ground. So much so that average people can monitor their homes with it, or know if their friends have gone missing with it.

To some extent, there is just no undoing this. Society will have fewer secrets and those secrets will be much more deliberate, and the only response that can work is to change your attitude.

I don't think it's creepy because there's a (theoretical) person watching me, I think it's creepy because they're cataloguing all my actions in a systemic was which pierces the veil of perceived privacy (mostly through anonymity).

> I dunno where you are but I'm in the US which is most definitely not "a market economy" without a whole hell of a lot of qualifiers.

I'm not sure how to respond to this without a specific criticism of how you think it's incorrect. That said, it's somewhat tangential to the point, even if it would be an interesting conversation.

> Roughly as many, I imagine, as folks who realized the shopkeeper could see them enter and leave.

I don't know. If every time I entered my local 7-eleven someone picked up a clipboard, flipped to a specific page, looked back at me, nodded to their self and then marked something on the page, I might decide to go somewhere else, at least most the time. If I knew the info was shared with all the other 7-elevens, and the local grocery chain, and some hardware stores, that makes me want to use all the places less.

> This is just flatly false. I don't know what you're thinking writing this, but it's clearly neglecting copyright and patents. For what it's worth, I think the later is a bad system an the former is in desperate need of reform to sharply limit it.

I said "this" to qualify what I was referring to (personal information) and distinguish it from other types of protected information, of the type you reference.

> To some extent, there is just no undoing this. Society will have fewer secrets and those secrets will be much more deliberate, and the only response that can work is to change your attitude.

I don't think that's the only response that can work. It's the only one that works completely, as deciding to not care is always a solution to caring, if you can pull it off.

The alternative is new laws. Are they perfect? No. Will they solve the problem adequately? Likely not. Do they have a chance of making a positive difference across the board for massive amounts of people by empowering them with regard to their own information? I dunno. Maybe? I think it's worth pushing for though. Otherwise, why do we have minimum wage and labor laws? At some point we could have thrown our hands up and said "screw it" about that stuff, but people pushed for it, and while they aren't perfect, I think we're all better off for them.

I don't believe there will be any perfect solution to this ever, or even a good or acceptable solution all that soon. I do think it's still worth raising my voice over, because I think there are some possible futures that are better than others with regard to privacy and personal information, and I think that's worth pushing towards.

"We track all of your activities and provide third parties the ability to do so as well - to provide a better user experience - and we may or may not sell or distribute the collected data at our own discretion and continued use of this site grants us permission in perpetuity. Further, should you decide to sue us, you agree to binding arbitration at a venue chosen by us, conducted by an arbiter of our choosing, in which case you promise to lose regardless of outcome. If you disagree, please leave the site now but just know, by being here and reading this, you have already granted us this power and we've mostly already collected what we needed from you. Thank you. Stop wasting our bandwidth now. Fuck off!"

My main point is that the amount of effort you have to go through to achieve that is very high, and I wish it was considerable lower. There are technological changes that could help with this, and legal changes that could help with this.

I think a comfortable place would be if you visit the same online location using your main browser using one IP, and a private browsing instance of that same browser on another IP (through a VPN, proxy, or just new public lease), it would be nice if there was some expectation they didn't immediately have a high degree of certainty you were the same individual. For the general populace, this falls on its face.

Tor has quite a few mitigations to help here (e.g. simulated window/screen values), and Firefox has started to adopt some of them, but as mentioned here on HN frequently, Firefox sometimes has problems with CAPTCHAs and certain sites (I haven't had those problems, but I'm also not usually using it through a VPN), and I know Tor is sometimes blocked outright.

The point is that until most these protections (technological and hopefully some legal) are mainstream, completely protecting yourself is a double edged sword, since you also ostracize yourself from some sites and services. Tor is the equivalent of walking around in padded, baggy clothes and a ski-mask. Sometimes, like in the snow, it may seem fairly normal. Other times, like at the beach, it may preserve your privacy, but it's very uncomfortable and may cause people to avoid you, if not outright shun you and run you off. If everyone starts wearing masks and covering their hair, if you do the same you probably have a fairly high degree of anonymity and privacy through it.

In summary, I think Tor is a useful and necessary tool, but nowhere near sufficient for where I think we need to be generally.

An even bigger issue, for me, is having my face added to their facial recognition algorithms, despite never once tagging myself in a photo. Is there a way to opt out of this?