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The Internet With A Human Face

idlewords.com

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Re: The Internet With A Human Face

#61
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's uploaded talks in this format before. Thoreau 2.0 [0] is a particularly good one. [0]: https://static.pinboard.in/xoxo_talk_thoreau.htm Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eky5uKILXtM

I also like "Our Comrade the electron": https://static.pinboard.in/webstock_2014.htm I'm generally not a writing geek, but Maciej is one of the (very) few people whose writing makes me wildly jealous.

This might be my favorite of the three of his talks that I've read. Is there a list with URLs out there of his talks?

Re: The Internet With A Human Face

#62

This is going to be a fairly controversial opinion, and I fully expect this text to end up about one shade off white approximately five minutes after posting (at least if my last few attempts mean anything, hence the following wall of text), but I notice a few things, without fail, whenever this topic comes up. 1) The advocates for all of these restrictions on data are incapable of doing so without resorting to flawe…

The author is right in the diagnosis, but as you showed, wrong in his prognosis. It's a serious problem and getting worse. I don't agree that when everyone has dirt on everyone it all just nets to zero. Rather, that would be a sick society. Sure, one ought to reserve judgement, but in practice people usually crave judgement. For better or worse, we are categorising beasts.

My alternative prognosis is much, much more data. Instead of unenforceable rules, I propose digital chaff. When everone has near infinite information on them from many and varied sources, if nearly all of it is bullshit only those already in the know can discern the truth and even then with rapidly diminishing confidence levels. Such chaff would poison many business models so it'd be a disruptive change. My proposal gets to the heart of the author's concern about the disparity between memory and storage, which I share.

Re: The Internet With A Human Face

#63
post #31

I'm now more hard-line than this on data privacy: I have come to believe that businesses should not be legally allowed to store any consumer data unless it's obvious to the consumer that it's absolutely required for the primary function of the service, and they should only be allowed to store data for that one function, with an exception if the consumer explicitly and voluntarily opts-in for each additional function.…

I don't think this will happen, for two reasons. 1. The issue of what is "in your interest" is not so black and white. For instance, one of the reasons Google is still so popular is because it more consistently returns the results we want. On many DDG discussions (or Bing-related discussions when it was still being discussed), this has been raised as a deal-breaking issue for many people. Google's results are often m…

1. Sure. My point is that I should have the right to choose what's in my interest, rather than have a company tell me what's in my interest. At a minimum, companies should explicitly say exactly what they are doing with my data. That's part of our agreement, after all. I use DDG for this reason. Actually I'm not super-happy with DDG in this respect: I believe there is some shady blurring of their promotional message vs the small print. But I would rather support DDG than Google, for now.

I don't think DDG needs to or should be catering for the people who find a lack of super-personalised results deal-breaking:

a) the world certainly doesn't need DDG to ape Google. There needs to be more competition in this space, and DDG's position distinguishes it. I hope and believe there is a market for a variety of search engines (as there are around the world).

b) in blind-testing, I'm not aware there is any evidence that Google does better.

2. I hold out hope that the EU data protection principles will one day be properly upheld within the EU. I have no such hope for the US government.

Re: The Internet With A Human Face

#65
post #17

> There was an ad for the new Pixies album. This was the one ad that was well targeted; I love the Pixies. I got the torrent right away. I laughed very hard on this! In all, an excellent article. I disagree with blind faith in technology to solve all our problems and not create new ones People often forget that technology is tools (and not always neutral tools, as is another naive belief: some inventions have larger…

> I laughed very hard on this!

Really? It made me think he was a bit of an asshole.

Re: The Internet With A Human Face

#66
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also like "Our Comrade the electron": https://static.pinboard.in/webstock_2014.htm I'm generally not a writing geek, but Maciej is one of the (very) few people whose writing makes me wildly jealous.

This might be my favorite of the three of his talks that I've read. Is there a list with URLs out there of his talks?

Not that I'm aware of. His blog is also highly recommended, see for example http://idlewords.com/2010/03/scott_and_scurvy.htm.
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