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The Fantasy of Opting Out

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Re: The Fantasy of Opting Out

#181

Post by excalibur »

bilbo0s wrote: post #117
excalibur wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The only thing you would do is put entirely unprofessional future mobs in place of the slightly unprofessional police we use currently. I would hope people could see the very real chance that your idea would make things worse. Worse than the status quo, yes. But you seem to be under the assumption that we will be able to maintain a police force at "slightly unprofessional" moving forward, when governments have the…

Governments can be ultra-controlling with slightly unprofessional police. It happens all the time across the globe. But without exception, wherever those police have been removed, poor though those police may have been, it has resulted in untold misery on the populace. Giving everyone the power to know exactly what everyone else is saying and doing is tantamount to taking data and removing all its police, and removin…

I'm not sure how much stock I put in this analogy, but you could be right.

It could also create an incentive to avoid collecting data in the first place, which would obviously be a good thing. But perhaps this could be better achieved through other methods.

Re: The Fantasy of Opting Out

#182

Post by roenxi »

whatshisface wrote: post #124
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #115

I'm very pessimistic about all this. It seems to me that the horse has already bolted: we are all under constant surveilance and there is not much we can do about it at all. Many of us don't even think it's a problem and even many who do think it is don't want to lose the benefits that are attached to the constant automated surveilance. As citizens of democratic countries we have uttely failed to protect our rights a…

History has consistently shown that the rights tend to arise after the violations, not the other way around. The Magna Carta was written in response to an awful king, the FDA was established as a response to widespread problems with people getting poisoned, slavery wasn't abolished until millenia after it was invented, and labor organization (leading to such modern niceties as the 40 hour week) did not arise until we…

To be totally fair, we would have difficulties detecting the opposite (rights preceding abuses) because people would presumably be organising against the abuses.

For example, murder is generally highly illegal everywhere without need for particularly violent murdering sprees to prompt action.

Re: The Fantasy of Opting Out

#183

Post by mortenjorck »

roenxi wrote: post #182
whatshisface wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

History has consistently shown that the rights tend to arise after the violations, not the other way around. The Magna Carta was written in response to an awful king, the FDA was established as a response to widespread problems with people getting poisoned, slavery wasn't abolished until millenia after it was invented, and labor organization (leading to such modern niceties as the 40 hour week) did not arise until we…

To be totally fair, we would have difficulties detecting the opposite (rights preceding abuses) because people would presumably be organising against the abuses. For example, murder is generally highly illegal everywhere without need for particularly violent murdering sprees to prompt action.

One cannot begin to count the number of murdering sprees ("invasions," "sacks," "pillages") in the history of civilization that very much prompted early societies to legislate against murder.

Re: The Fantasy of Opting Out

#184

Post by Retric »

viraptor wrote: post #176
Retric wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can do all of those things without logging that information. It’s a cheaper solution to the problem, but that does not mean it’s required. Which devolves your argument into collecting this information is significantly more profitable. Which I think is generally accepted as true, but not nessisarily enough to make it acceptable.

How would you match traffic from the same source without keeping the record of that source?

That’s a technique not a goal. What are you trying to do?

Re: The Fantasy of Opting Out

#185

Post by pmoriarty »

barberousse wrote: post #174
Affine_Stack wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm reminded of Foucault's work, Surveiller et punir. He discusses this obfuscation of power, specifically that we are being conditioned by unseen entities in our daily lives in ways which are entirely unnatural. He contrasts the more modern (and arguably unnatural) levels of discipline imposed by surveillance (specifically with respect to panopticism) to those imposed by the fear of bodily harm that existed in the d…

For regular folk, the book is Discipline & Punish in English translation You're explanation is fairly academic and I think we can be a little more concrete. Focault's point is really that discussions of power in the West tend to revolve around law and right, jurisprudence, when in fact the exercise of power qua something that alters your behavior is in almost every relationship we enter into with other human beings,…

"when we go to school (which is modeled on factories)"

I thought they were modeled on prisons.

Re: The Fantasy of Opting Out

#186

Post by somatic »

sokoloff wrote: post #158
squiggleblaz wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's absolutely daft. You can pick your lord, but they'll all demand unnecessary permissions. The road to serfdom looks like capitalism working according to spec - right up until you can't meaningfully vote.

The difference is in a great many cases, you can pick "no lord". Don't like being tracked with electronic tolling transponder? Don't use a toll transponder. Don't like giving Xiami permissions to use your personal data? Don't install a Xiami app. Don't like the supermarket tracking your purchases? Pay cash and don't use the loyalty card. The key is that you have to be willing to give up what those things give you as…

You have erected a hilarious false choice.

The supermarket is recording your image as you browse through the store, and within five years will assuredly be plugging you into facial recognition software.

It is not necessary for you to have a toll transponder in order for your car to be tracked. You have a license plate which can be trivially collected and indexed with off-the-shelf hardware and software. If you have a car made within the last few years, it probably has a permanent tether to the Internet.

Your cell phone is triangulated and your location is approximated to a handful of feet by your carrier.

In some not-too-distant future, it’s easy to imagine the death of cash, the outmoded way to pay: cryptocurrency is just so much sexier.

Newsflash: every man is not his own island.

In excusing those responsible for polluting my life, you are culpable also.

Re: The Fantasy of Opting Out

#187

Post by aSplash0fDerp »

JohnFen wrote: post #159
aSplash0fDerp wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those were some very good points! IMO, we're on the cusp of a level of individual freedoms that were not available in the past (in the western world) and are seeing those that are desparate for relevance, those unable to compete/comprehend or those not involved/behind doing their darndest to stifle the growth and progress. Most of the privacy exploitation sounds like that saying about "C managers" firing "A and B emp…

> IMO, we're on the cusp of a level of individual freedoms that were not available in the past I really, truly, wish I could share your optimism. What I think will happen is that things are going to continue to go strongly the opposite direction, until everything gets so egregious that people actually start fighting back in numbers. If that fight is successful, we'll just return to something close to, but not quite,…

>I really, truly, wish I could share your optimism.

Lol. If you mix all of the colors, you get black. If you mix all of the data, you get a black hole.

I had to come up with that one myself to keep my perspective in line.

Hope that helps!

Re: The Fantasy of Opting Out

#188

Post by misterdoubt »

pmoriarty wrote: post #185
barberousse wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For regular folk, the book is Discipline & Punish in English translation You're explanation is fairly academic and I think we can be a little more concrete. Focault's point is really that discussions of power in the West tend to revolve around law and right, jurisprudence, when in fact the exercise of power qua something that alters your behavior is in almost every relationship we enter into with other human beings,…

"when we go to school (which is modeled on factories)" I thought they were modeled on prisons.

Both, but the similarities in the three can be striking regardless of ordering.

Re: The Fantasy of Opting Out

#189

Post by viraptor »

Retric wrote: post #184
viraptor wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you match traffic from the same source without keeping the record of that source?

That’s a technique not a goal. What are you trying to do?

Find when a specific endpoint / AS / country starts sending dos levels of traffic, (or hack attempts) so they can be banned.

Re: The Fantasy of Opting Out

#190

Post by rapind »

dashwav wrote: post #127
mikelyons wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There will have to be time, but also immense harm and death before something will be done. It wont just take decades of the discomfort of wondering what they're doing with the data. It will take some sort of massive act against the people done with the data before the outcry will happen, as with any technology. People didn't invent and require seatbelts becasue "you could die" people did die. The question is what wil…

I think that one of the pervasive problems of these kinds of technology is that each individual violation can be individually tailored to the person in question. In my opinion, it's not going to be some blanket thing that is immediately obvious, but rather a collection of individual actions taken against individual people in exactly the way that is the least suspicious for that person specifically. Plus with the leve…

What's the ultimate end game though if you're one of these future (not so distant?) powerful elites in control? You turn everyone else into slaves? Will they remain happy and productive? Will they still invent shiny new things for you if they know they're slaves? Is your only job now to prevent the slaves from figuring it out? Is that even a fun job or is it sort of like a prison? Can you still find meaning? How long can you conspire with your peers until some of them get bored and rock the boat?

Sounds like a moronic shit show to me. We either find enlightenment before the earth swallows us up or we don't. I think it'd be cool if we figured it out.

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