Surveillance on UK council websites [pdf] • Hacker News Board

Re: Surveillance on UK council websites [pdf]

#71

Post by salawat » Wed, Feb 05, 2020, 5:42 PM UTC

627467 wrote: post #48

I don't want to be overly critical here but If we rush to call this 'widespread surveillance' (intended or not) I worry that we'll quickly start losing words/expressions to describe the stuff that snowden unveiled or whethever the government does in China...

How ya figure? It's same in type. Pervasive monitoring/metadata collection is an attack.

PRISM/CALEA/ubiquitous surveillance via facial recognition, social credit scoring don't just magically stop being linguistically addressable because we've tossed another specific example into the generic bucket. It just means that we're getting better at identifying exploitative forms of unnecessary data collection.

Unless I'm reading your statement wrong, I'm just not seeing a here your worry comes into play. There's no Orwellian language leak there, and I'm usually pretty sensitive to that just because it does drive me nutswhen people try to do that intentionally.

Re: Surveillance on UK council websites [pdf]

#72

Post by weekay » Wed, Feb 05, 2020, 5:43 PM UTC

What is interesting is the fact that none of the revenue / income from advertising if any, is showing in the accounts of the council. Checked a few at random and none of the account statements mention income from ads. Begs the question then not just of moral bankruptcy but of accounting this. If it's not implemented for income to the council then why ?

Re: Surveillance on UK council websites [pdf]

#73

Post by pier25 » Wed, Feb 05, 2020, 5:45 PM UTC

weekay wrote: post #72

What is interesting is the fact that none of the revenue / income from advertising if any, is showing in the accounts of the council. Checked a few at random and none of the account statements mention income from ads. Begs the question then not just of moral bankruptcy but of accounting this. If it's not implemented for income to the council then why ?

Maybe there is a document somewhere that enforces certain practices when making websites for public institutions?

Re: Surveillance on UK council websites [pdf]

#74

Post by asdfasdf1231 » Wed, Feb 05, 2020, 5:47 PM UTC

weekay wrote: post #72

What is interesting is the fact that none of the revenue / income from advertising if any, is showing in the accounts of the council. Checked a few at random and none of the account statements mention income from ads. Begs the question then not just of moral bankruptcy but of accounting this. If it's not implemented for income to the council then why ?

> If it's not implemented for income to the council then why

analytics? To better serve you? to think-of-the-children?

Re: Surveillance on UK council websites [pdf]

#75

Post by butler14 » Wed, Feb 05, 2020, 5:49 PM UTC

gumby wrote: post #62

butler14 wrote: post #20

This is one of the downsides of using an ad-blocker It's literally never occurred to me, as a user of these websites, that local government websites would even have adverts on them -- let alone Google AdSense / junk from Google's Display Network.

How is that a downside?

I thought that was self explanatory.

But lozaning has done a perfectly eloquent job of explaining above.

Re: Surveillance on UK council websites [pdf]

#76

Post by jszymborski » Wed, Feb 05, 2020, 5:58 PM UTC

mpeg wrote: post #41

jszymborski wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, but are you suggesting that the Google ad servers are not going to use that information to sell to these visitors on other websites that are showing ads from the GDN?

I'm not a Google fan by any means, but DFP is the #1 ad server in the world and an industry standard, and I definitely don't think they would use DFP data to populate GDN segments because it would be a privacy nightmare. You have to consider DFP is a software tool, it would be like Slack selling your data so other SaaS can target you when you are talking about buying a new CMS.

"it would be a privacy nightmare."

Right, but being a privacy nightmare is their business plan

Re: Surveillance on UK council websites [pdf]

#77

Post by Scoundreller » Wed, Feb 05, 2020, 6:01 PM UTC

toyg wrote: post #69

Council are the victims here. They are forced to debase themselves because central government, in the Tory era since 2010, simply offloads competencies to local authorities, without allocating extra funds or even slashing existing ones. So the priority has become to keep the lights on and find every way possible to monetize anything remotely monetizable, from parking to this (as well as cutting tons of jobs, closing…

That kind of fiscal « downloading » is also a way to keep wealth within your council, and poor areas can just get bent because they’ll have more needs, but the least ability to get revenue.

(If council’s primary revenue source is council tax within their own council).

Re: Surveillance on UK council websites [pdf]

#78

Post by shadowgovt » Wed, Feb 05, 2020, 6:02 PM UTC

"This report should spur Elizabeth Denham, the UK Information Commissioner, to finally enforce the GDPR."

What is the status of GDPR in the UK now that Brexit has occurred? Is the UK still beholden to the terms of the law, or does the UK have a parallel law that applies now that they're no longer part of the EU?

Re: Surveillance on UK council websites [pdf]

#79

Post by JohnFen » Wed, Feb 05, 2020, 6:02 PM UTC

mpeg wrote: post #61

chriswarbo wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Where do you stop? Is Google Analytics evil too? Absolutely. > What about Twitter feeds? In what context? Including/embedding Twitter cookies and/or Javascript in pages paid-for by citizens, which citizens are required to use to exercise their rights? Absolutely. As a non-exclusive outlet to disseminate information via an independent site (twitter.com), which anyone is free to avoid and ignore? That's fine.

In reality, what happens is lots of council services (including police) use twitter as the main real-time source of information for citizens. Should they use an alternative platform? probably not, because twitter is the biggest and best known, so you could argue you can reach the most people with it.

> use twitter as the main real-time source of information for citizens.

So they're excluding people who don't use twitter? Why can't their web pages be the main source of real-time information?

Re: Surveillance on UK council websites [pdf]

#80

Post by JohnFen » Wed, Feb 05, 2020, 6:04 PM UTC

lozaning wrote: post #32

basilgohar wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is this a downside to using an ad-blocker? I think it's quite the opposite. An ad-blocker would prevent most of this external JS from being loaded.

I've so successfully created a personal technology environment that hides ads, that I have no situational awareness about what these companies are up to. If someone out there is selling my healthcare data and running ads around it directed towards just me, I'd never know, but I'd want to.

So block tracking, not ads.