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The problem of creeping commercial surveillance (2022)

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Re: The problem of creeping commercial surveillance (2022)

#31

Post by nerdponx »

voidpepe wrote: post #15
bobim wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Insurance companies are very interested by your workout routine and how you drive your car, so they can adjust their offering specially for you… We can’t get laws banning this soon enough.

Insurance companies get these information from more direct sources. For example how you drive your car is sourced straight from the car manufacturers. And they pay big time for it. I can confirm this at least for one large automotive company that I cannot mention because of legal reasons, but they were founded by one infamous failed artist.

Doesn't mean they should be allowed to. Or that your car should even be sending that data without your explicit consent.

Re: The problem of creeping commercial surveillance (2022)

#32

Post by thfuran »

23B1 wrote: post #21

They're not just storing and using this data for their own private/commercial purposes. They're also licensing it and selling it to third parties, which in turn will sell it to government(s) or other third-parties; the data ramifies and spreads throughout the digital panopticon. There is very little you can do as an individual to escape this. The privacy settings on your phone, in your apps, on your laptop, your rout…

>Heavy top-down regulation won't work, never has.

That's utter nonsense. There will never be perfect compliance, but regulations absolutely can curb undesired behavior.

Re: The problem of creeping commercial surveillance (2022)

#33

Post by numpad0 »

I just assume everyone knows from who I am to how much coffee beans I have left in the jar, and I just try to be a non-factor when I don't need to and other times casually look for ways surveillances could be leveraged to bend things my ways. If you put an intelligent entity in a learning but otherwise nonintelligent feedback loop, the entire loop eventually becomes centered around that entity.

Re: The problem of creeping commercial surveillance (2022)

#34

Post by friendzis »

IAmNotAFix wrote: post #30
z_ack wrote: post #12

I did an experiment: I deleted all the cookies using privacy settings of my browser then I avoid to click anything about cookies' authorisation, i.e. if a page present that kind of requests I immediately close the page itself. At the and, I verified that cookies are presente on browser's storage despite my absence of authorisation, even third parties cookies. So, yes, I agree: commercial surveillance is creepy and I…

Only tracking cookies require consent. Cookies could be about the last time you saw the website's weather content, in which case it's purely functional and need no consent.

No. Unless you have other lawful grounds of processing, all functional cookies still have to be session scoped at worst

Re: The problem of creeping commercial surveillance (2022)

#35

Post by Xeoncross »

numpad0 wrote: post #33

I just assume everyone knows from who I am to how much coffee beans I have left in the jar, and I just try to be a non-factor when I don't need to and other times casually look for ways surveillances could be leveraged to bend things my ways. If you put an intelligent entity in a learning but otherwise nonintelligent feedback loop, the entire loop eventually becomes centered around that entity.

> I just try to be a non-factor

That's the problem though. History on every continent is filled with normal people who were suddenly targeted as the slaves/villains/cause-of-the-recent-issue based on their language/skin/background/etc...

Re: The problem of creeping commercial surveillance (2022)

#36

Post by nerdponx »

23B1 wrote: post #21

They're not just storing and using this data for their own private/commercial purposes. They're also licensing it and selling it to third parties, which in turn will sell it to government(s) or other third-parties; the data ramifies and spreads throughout the digital panopticon. There is very little you can do as an individual to escape this. The privacy settings on your phone, in your apps, on your laptop, your rout…

It's also worth mentioning that "they" includes entities that you have never heard of and have never had a business relationship with.

Basically nothing can be done other than strict legislation. Claiming that top down regulation won't work is not based on evidence and is needlessly fatalistic. If anything, history shows that the thing big corporations fear most is having their profits regulated away. Of course they like regulation when it allows them to build a "regulatory moat" around their business, but when the regulations actually come for their own profit margins, they comply.

Re: The problem of creeping commercial surveillance (2022)

#37

Post by psd1 »

gausswho wrote: post #14
bobim wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Insurance companies are very interested by your workout routine and how you drive your car, so they can adjust their offering specially for you… We can’t get laws banning this soon enough.

Which begs the idea: how would one successfully pollute insurance data. I am now a non-smoking vegan ironman.

It's not obvious to me that working out will reduce your car premiums. I can imagine a gym rat being more likely to crash than a saggy middle-ager.

Re: The problem of creeping commercial surveillance (2022)

#38

Post by numpad0 »

ant_li0n wrote: post #26
afpx wrote: post #5

What do they even do with this information? The ads they feed me haven’t become more relevant.

User data (and the resultant behavioral prediction) is the new gold rush. Even if the data is not immediately useful, it can be stored and used later. There's the (now) old saying, "if the product is free, then you are the product" but that's not entirely accurate. You are the source of raw materials. These materials can then be fed into a model which will predict your behavior. Right now this can be seen simply in t…

> "if the product is free, then you are the product" but that's not entirely accurate. You are the source of raw materials.

Yup. You're one of suppliers, $freemiumco are middle men, and consumer product companies are consumers. Which means you can raise prices and dilute contents, currently without even issuing a Product Change Notification. That isn't a bad position other than there are quite a few alternative suppliers, only slightly less than everyone thinks there are.

Re: The problem of creeping commercial surveillance (2022)

#39

Post by Swizec »

z_ack wrote: post #12

I did an experiment: I deleted all the cookies using privacy settings of my browser then I avoid to click anything about cookies' authorisation, i.e. if a page present that kind of requests I immediately close the page itself. At the and, I verified that cookies are presente on browser's storage despite my absence of authorisation, even third parties cookies. So, yes, I agree: commercial surveillance is creepy and I…

> I avoid to click anything about cookies' authorisation, i.e. if a page present that kind of requests I immediately close the page itself. At the and, I verified that cookies are presente on browser's storage

I have recently had to implement some of these banners. Here’s what I learned: click reject.

The way America’s version of the cookie banner law (not sure about EU) works is that cookies are default allowed. They are set before the banner even shows. Rejecting the cookies then sets a cookie that you’d like cookies rejected. The cookies remain, but the banner’s scripts block tracking requests based on those cookies on subsequent requests.

So if a site uses GA and you reject cookies, you still get and keep a GA cookie. But the cookie banner later turns GA’s javascript into “text/plain” so your browser doesn’t execute it. This is what [at least some of] the banners mean by “reject cookies”.

Yes it’s stupid and confusing. Possibly on purpose.

Re: The problem of creeping commercial surveillance (2022)

#40

Post by jgeada »

There is an easy way to fix this: make the companies collecting the data be criminally liable for any misuse or leaks of this data. Something with teeth, such x% of total revenue, not our current “sorry, we leaked your data, tough for you”

If this data is so important it should be treated with the same care & auditing that their income stream gets.

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