Privacy isn't the problem. The problem has been the sea of bad actors trying to undermine it. That's the problem. Stop them , don't put the responsibility on the consumer to claw that privacy back.
It takes two to tango
Why is privacy so hard? (2019)
21–30 of 63 posts
Re: Why is privacy so hard? (2019)
#22A lot of value is left on the table because informed people don't give up data.
If simple regulation existed - say, "no one can use data for any purpose the user did not explicitly consent to, including product improvements AND including on-selling", that suddenly turns giving up data into a legally-binding, two-party transaction.
There'd be an explosion of really cool uses of data as a result of the trust that'd engender.
But today's status quo is lucrative - so here we stay.
Re: Why is privacy so hard? (2019)
#23The lack of privacy is due to a lack of regulation and funding of regulatory agencies. It happens precisely because the US is very adverse to adding new privacy laws or enforcing the ones on the books (you need to fund federal regulators if you want them to regulate).
Frankly, I think a large reason it goes unaddressed is because governments love to invade privacy just as much as advertisers do. Adding new laws to curtail consumer products from spying also means the likes of the NSA, FBI, or local law enforcement can't also tap into that spying machine. They want google to log everything you do because they are all to happy to use those logs.
Re: Why is privacy so hard? (2019)
#24Privacy isn't the problem. The problem has been the sea of bad actors trying to undermine it. That's the problem. Stop them , don't put the responsibility on the consumer to claw that privacy back.
It takes two to tango
It only takes one to be a problem. This isn't a two-way street the same way that communication or collaboration is a two-way street. This is entirely one-way in that the corporate levels are putting down apps, services and hardware designed to undermine privacy. Customers don't have any choice in the matter except to look for alternative packages, but this will stop working eventually (and already has in some markets). The set of possible safe hobbies and experiences continues to shrink as more and more of it becomes impossible to find without weapons against privacy. The only way to stop this is regulation.
Re: Why is privacy so hard? (2019)
#25One thing interesting about the Church is that Kings, Inquisitors, Revolutionaries, Govts etc have all tried to break the seal of confession for thousands od years now. The Church has some how managed to defend it by saying we believe path to repair/forgiveness involves creating and maintaining space where people can confess their sins. If a priest shares those sins with the state, everyone looses trust in the system and therefore breaking the seal over any sin is equal to dismantling the institution itself. This argument is literally the same structure used to defend attorney client confidentiality, psychiatrist patient confidentiality, corporations(telcos, email providers, platforms) from handing all data to the state.
But for all those cases the state has manahed to add huge amount of expceptions which it has not been aable to do with the Church. So the Churchs defense of the seal almost since 1215 has stood on a Belief. A story literally. That privacy is requires for repair.
Everyone else just hasnt come up with a good enough story.
Secondly what is stored in the head of a priest is usually forgotten cuz human memory is flaky and no one is writing anything down in a central db. So every now and then a state attack on the seal work but the everything then reliea on how reliable the memory of a single priest is. Its like a terrible distributed atorage system that is constantly forgetting things. Notice this is literally what large platforms have now built to defend privacy. Its called data minimization and costs a huge amount that they constantly cry about.
So its really funny how the church just stumbled into a solution that is cheap and hard to attack.
Re: Why is privacy so hard? (2019)
#26We should tax data.
Hear me out. Google, Meta, etc. offer "free" services to a significant portion of the world's population. This isn't charitable work. They do this for data that makes them money. Lots of money. Data has real monetary value, but governments don't treat it as such. Few, if any, jurisdictions view data exports as taxable. It's simply not tracked. If data collection isn't tracked, how can one realistically enforce privacy standards?
If we tax data, then we'll have an incentive to track how data is being used and corporations will suddenly have a direct financial interest in not just casually collecting data if they don't need to. Such taxes should be gauged to be tolerable for Google and Meta, but high enough to make companies who make their money via other avenues (e.g. Smart TV sellers) to take a pass on data collection.
Re: Why is privacy so hard? (2019)
#27One thing interesting about the Church is that Kings, Inquisitors, Revolutionaries, Govts etc have all tried to break the seal of confession for thousands od years now. The Church has some how managed to defend it by saying we believe path to repair/forgiveness involves creating and maintaining space where people can confess their sins. If a priest shares those sins with the state, everyone looses trust in the system…
The reason it works for churches is because the data told to churches are somewhat embarrassing for the confessor, and if leaked, will destroy the confessor's reputation (if not get into legal troubles).
The data that google collects are somewhat useless on their own, and is only valuable in aggregate with the millions of others they also collect. And for an individual, the leakage of this data (e.g., your advertising profile) is not detrimental unless the data is highly identifying (like your name, address, phone etc).
Therefore, people tend to simply ignore such leaks, and place zero value on the data. This difference in valuation is how google generates their money. The church, on the other hand, generates value from the gratitude of the confessors, and is therefore, aligned with the interest of the confessors.
Re: Why is privacy so hard? (2019)
#28My thought was to write legislation that gives 20% of my generated ad revenue to me the customer as legal tender (no store credit, coupons) then have the government tax that income. 1. government gets new income source. 2. government is invested in making sure they are not getting short changed. 3. failure to pay me is fraud. 4. When you pay me now I know your crap is spying. 5. Government taxes almost never go down,…
> ad revenue is the new shrink-flation without it prices will rise. Some prices rise, some prices go down. Ads aren't free money, the advertisers are paying for them (I know, seems obvious) but where do the advertisers get the money to advertise? Well, it's baked into the cost of the goods they advertise. That makes everything that advertises more expensive.
And yet advertising raises demand, which in intern causes people to offer to meet that demand which means competition, which lowers prices.
Lots of examples of this cycle you can search for.
Re: Why is privacy so hard? (2019)
#29Personal privacy is, and has always been, the job and responsibility of the individual. You can be as private or as public as you allow yourself to be through your own practices. Nobody can give you privacy, you must take it, which requires work and sacrifices that most people are simply unwilling to make, that's why nothing has changed. If it's privacy you want, stop being so public. Avoid surveillance. It's not eas…
yes, if have zero friends and family, contact and talk to no one, move out in the boonies away from everyone else, then you can have privacy. Good to know
Re: Why is privacy so hard? (2019)
#30IMO it's not that it's hard but that nobody makes money from it the way they do from the panopticon so listed factors 4 and 8 have outsize influence.