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Silicon Valley is terrified of California’s privacy law

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Re: Silicon Valley is terrified of California’s privacy law

#491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People will pay 5$ for 50 cents of coffee beans and enough sugar to drown a fly a day, but they will never pay 5$ a month to access nearly the entirety of mankind's collective knowledge at their fingertips in milliseconds I pay a lot more than $5/month for Internet service.

Would you pay $5 on top of that ISP charge to Google, so that your search experience is ad-free? Would you pay $5 for fastmail.com's standard plan over gmail?

I in fact do pay for fastmail.

Re: Silicon Valley is terrified of California’s privacy law

#492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most people don't understand the risks and how badly mass surveillance done by Google / Facebook / etc can be abused. This is totally dodging the issue. Would they pay instead of allowing that collection? Given the choice of "pay for this service", "stop using this service", "give up your data", even with a full understanding of the risks and the extent of this data, the general public has shown time and time again…

Agreed. I recall people were talking about turning back to piracy in response to the fragmentation of streaming services. Disney plus will cost around 7 dollars a month, Netflix costs 13, HBO costs 15. This is about 23, 45, and 50 cents per day respectively. Yet this change was enough to cause some people to angrily proclaim that they'll go back to illegally downloading movies and tv shows.

I'd think single source vs fleet of disparate services is a bigger concern. If I have to track and maintain 10 subscription services to get the stuff I want, I'd rather just pirate it, the inconvenience factor is too high otherwise.

Look at music, this seems solved there.

Re: Silicon Valley is terrified of California’s privacy law

#495
post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I strongly suspect that if you asked people 50 years ago whether it was ok for companies to eg. track everywhere most people go, I think the vast majority would have said no. Google et al. just started spying on everyone without any serious debate over whether it was right. Then once people caught on, they either had to stop caring about privacy, or they had be Richard Stallman and eschew pretty much all mainstream c…

> I strongly suspect that if you asked people 50 years ago whether it was ok for companies to eg. track everywhere most people go, I think the vast majority would have said no. Google et al. just started spying on everyone without any serious debate over whether it was right. Then once people caught on, they either had to stop caring about privacy, or they had be Richard Stallman and eschew pretty much all mainstream…

> Sure, but if you had phrased the question more fairly and said "Should it be ok for a company to give you free services in exchange for tracking everywhere you go?" I think almost everyone would have said yes.

Then you should add shadow profiling, data banks linking together data of dozens of different companies, politically targeted advertisement that pretends to be from human users.

Yes the free market is nice and all, still the internet is a hell of a creepy place. It is undeniable that the reason this was allowed (comparing to direct mail advertisement for example) is that it was always believed to be impossible.

Re: Silicon Valley is terrified of California’s privacy law

#496
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The gist of these laws are all the same. Just respect ALL users' data from the start, and you shouldn't have any difficulty with compliance.

Many companies have to RADICALLY change their architectures just to support these laws. And often the costs will be enormous. How do you scan all the logs that might somehow have an association with the requesting user that are in cold storage and alter data on write only archived optical media? You have to make an entire copy of it with those data removed. It's not about just treating customers better. It's governme…

> Many companies have to RADICALLY change their architectures just to support these laws. And often the costs will be enormous.

This harkens back to the GDPR hysteria. And that was a storm in a teacup: most companies that took compliance seriously were able to get to a good place with a medium amount of engineering work, and didn't suffer financially overmuch. A few companies did go out of business or suffer significantly--and most of those were sketchy, data-abusive entities. In other words, it worked.

Re: Silicon Valley is terrified of California’s privacy law

#497
post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The gist of these laws are all the same. Just respect ALL users' data from the start, and you shouldn't have any difficulty with compliance.

The GDPR is pretty bad for under 5 engineer startups. They can be very privacy respecting small businesses that charge for their product, like sql training courseware[0], and wouldn't mind clearing what little personal data they had on you (user server logs, billing info, etc). But being privacy respecting and properly complying with GDPR with audit log systems, etc are 2 different things that require hiring 1 or 2 e…

I've heard this line so many times, but there are vanishingly few examples of companies that really suffered for it ("just don't sell in Europe" implies, to me, that Europe wasn't valuable enough to you as a market to take the time engineering GDPR compliance--and that's just fine). The ones that did crash overwhelmingly seemed to be sketchy data brokers.

Re: Silicon Valley is terrified of California’s privacy law

#498
post #453
post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

General population is simply not aware of how much surveillance is involved and how much of their private information said companies collect, use or sell to 3rd parties. Many are happy to get "free" service in exchange for "some data", but most people people would be very much against someone data mining their health or pregnancy status, using some sophisticated algorithm to selling something harmful to their kids or…

I agree and this seems to be the main problem: we are losing privacy today but we will suffer most of the consequences tomorrow. So most of us are not aware of the real cost we're paying and unable to make an informed decision.

Welcome to democracy, where an individual with zero understanding of an issue can vote on it and is legally entitled to have their opinion taken seriously.

Re: Silicon Valley is terrified of California’s privacy law

#499
Many comments here make the false dichotomy of paying for a service with money vs paying with your data. That ship has sailed. In the current market selling user data will win every time. Only laws can make sure that a company you pay for “premium service” or “no ads” won't turn around and sell your data anyway.

Re: Silicon Valley is terrified of California’s privacy law

#500

How is this not a violation to the first amendment? Does the first amendment not extend as follows: (?) As a citizen don't I have the right to create a business and privately take notes on whatever I'd like to about my customers? If i run a dry cleaners and take notes about my customers, should I be obligated to disclose these notes or even the existence of these notes to my customers? I don't see why extending the d…

IANAL, but I think a human needs to be involved in the individuals' processing as a prerequisite to "speech." An automated process has no Constitutional rights.

> An automated process has no Constitutional rights.

Yet.

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