471–480 of 628 posts
I find it fascinating reading hacker news, full of IT folk who simultaneously build software that enables and profits from the advertising and personal information selling & tracking industry - are also the same people who complain the loudest about it. Unbelievable.
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People will share their whole list because it’s simpler
Or because they were tricked. eg. LinkedIn’s “Connect with your contacts” onboarding step which sounds like it’ll check your contacts against existing LinkedIn users but actually spam invites anyone on your contact list that doesn’t have an account.
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Except not everyone in a corporation has the right to speech. I'm prohibited by my employer to say anything on the company's behalf, but the C-suite and board are able to speak on my behalf. So, the company's leadership has a right to free speech, I don't.
You still have that right; you simply entered into a voluntary agreement with your employer not to exercise it in exchange for money. Happens all the time.
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Linkedin is so terribly evil these days. I also see the shenanigans of adding new 'privacy' settings and setting them open by default. Another typical Microsoft ploy by the way.
They were evil before. Previously they’d take your LinkedIn password and try using that to log in to your email account to grab your contacts.
And I kinda get it, some services external to your bank can help you manage your finances etc. But it's why banks should offer APIs where the user can set limited and timed access to these services. In Europe this is PSD2 (Revised Payment Services Directive).
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Honestly, kudos. The rules should apply to the ones foisting this system upon us as well. This is probably the only way to make anyone in power reconsider current setup. And people laughed at Red Reddington when he said he had no email.
> The rules should apply to the ones foisting this system upon us as well. This is probably the only way to make anyone in power reconsider current setup. Unless your problem is with the company doing the privacy violations, this doesn’t make any sense.
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> The rules should apply to the ones foisting this system upon us as well. This is probably the only way to make anyone in power reconsider current setup. Unless your problem is with the company doing the privacy violations, this doesn’t make any sense.
Pretty much all companies are doing the privacy violations. You think your doctors office doesn't sell their contact list?
They probably outsource processing the data and storing it to other entities, but that will be under contracts which govern how the data may be used and handled. I assume that's not what "sell the data" means in this conversation.
It would be such an egregious violation of local data protection law to sell patient personal details for unrestricted commercial use, including their contact info, and it would make the political news where I live if they were found out.
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They don't need to adjust. Here's a real-life example: You show up alone at the airport with a full-face mask and gray coveralls. You are perfectly hidden. But you are the only such hidden person, and there is still old cam footage of you in the airport parking lot, putting on the clothes. The surveillance team can let you act anonymous all you want. They still know who you are, because your disguise IS the unique fi…
It's kind of how people used to make fun of the CIA types and "undercover" operatives. Look for the guy wearing a conspicuously plain leather jacket and baseball cap. "Why hello there average looking stranger I've never met. Psss, 'tis a fair day, but it'll be lovelier this evening.'" "Oh ... it's Murphy the spy you want." Also, found out the CIA declassified a bunch of jokes several years back in searching to respon…
One big privacy issue is that there is no sane way to protect your contact details from being sold, regardless of what you do. As soon as your cousin clicks "Yes, I would like to share the entire contents of my contacts with you" when they launch TikTok your name, phone number, email etc are all in the crowd. And I buy this stuff. Every time I need customer service and I'm getting stonewalled I just go onto a marketp…
I stopped keeping a mobile number many years ago. Phone is wifi only. In particular, I do not use the contacts functionality built into the phone. (This is /e/OS, which helps, but I'll be moving to Mobian as soon as it is viable.)
Sure, there may be the occasional honest actor in the industry, but they're so marginal and outcompeted by dishonest and shady ones that it really doesn't matter. IMHO the right move is to simply ban any collection that's not strictly necessary. Kind of like GDPR but without the "if the user agrees" exceptions.
Reminds me of a regulation about artificial stone (?) being banned in Australia, not because it's impossible to use safely but because the regulator concluded that the entire supply chain is unwilling to and disincentivized from using the material safely, so the best move at this point was to ban it outright.
Edit: found that article