21–30 of 67 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I worked on a financial product based on one of Intuit's. I was shocked to realize that this Intuit product was impersonating people (using their username and password) to log on to their bank accounts and download all transactions - which our product was then analyzing. I was sure nobody would allow that; who will give a third-party their bank username and password? I was extremely surprised to find out that the ans…
cough Mint
This is a good example of why the "I don't have anything to hide" argument is incorrect. That way of thinking only works as long as your goals and positions are aligned with the entity collecting information about you to begin with. If they're not, or the situation changes, imbalances of information lead to disadvantages for you pretty quickly. All it took was some bureaucrat feeling petty.
Not only in alignment with some entity collecting the information, in alignment with every entity that might ever look at the information -- for the rest of your life.
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Not only in alignment with some entity collecting the information, in alignment with every entity that might ever look at the information -- for the rest of your life.
This is the strongest point. Not having anything you're ashamed of does not mean not having anything to hide - it's all too possible for completely harmless traits like ethnicity and sexuality to become targets for someone else.
In the event that this release was illegal, I really do feel for the people at the agency. Someone made public false allegations about them and they are legally forbidden from proving that person wrong. It's a tough position to be in. I don't have a good solution to this, but I do think that there should be a legal way to prove a person is lying if they directly make accusations about you. After all, they are the one…
> there should be a legal way to prove a person is lying if they directly make accusations about you. "about you "? Her article did not name or provide identifying information about any individual employee of Centrelink.
Is there some meaningful distinction here that means false allegations about an organization of humans should go unrefuted, but false allegations about a single human should be refuted?
The power corporations are accumulating with information on intimate customer behavior and the glacial response of society to this is a daily refrain on HN. Has anyone seen a comprehensive, or at least collected, list of canonical examples of strong arguments for: * Raising awareness amongst non-technical folks that such incredible stocking up of PII can raise complicated ethical risks? * Giving legislative represent…
https://www.humanservices.gov.au/customer/dhs/centrelink
I see no evidence that Centrelink collects any data on people who don't approach it with their hand out.
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> there should be a legal way to prove a person is lying if they directly make accusations about you. "about you "? Her article did not name or provide identifying information about any individual employee of Centrelink.
In my post, "you" refers to the corporate person that is the Centrelink government agency (and implicitly the humans behind that corporate person), about which false allegations were made. Is there some meaningful distinction here that means false allegations about an organization of humans should go unrefuted, but false allegations about a single human should be refuted?
To me, false allegations against individuals are more serious than false allegations against organizations for a few reasons. First, I care about the well-being of organizations only to the extent they positively impact the well-being of humans (or, to a lesser extent, animals). Second, a single false allegation against an individual human seems to be able to have a much more damaging effect than one against an organization.
I suspect this is a well-worn topic and that I would consider many of the other objections to corporate personhood to be "meaningful distinctions".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not only in alignment with some entity collecting the information, in alignment with every entity that might ever look at the information -- for the rest of your life.
This is the strongest point. Not having anything you're ashamed of does not mean not having anything to hide - it's all too possible for completely harmless traits like ethnicity and sexuality to become targets for someone else.
The second was a tactic often used by the Stasi to create more operatives - call someone in for questioning, accuse them of a crime for which they have no alibi, such as spying, and when they protest their innocence, ask them to help the government with something to show their good faith. That something could easily be to provide a pretext for arresting the real target.
No doubting the veracity of this occurrence, but it is baffling that it happened nonetheless - federal government departments here (Australia) are usually cautious to a paranoid level when it comes to people even looking at information. I remember cases when curious internal staff members at the tax and social security offices being sacked on the spot for merely doing searches on celebrity names without due reason. B…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In my post, "you" refers to the corporate person that is the Centrelink government agency (and implicitly the humans behind that corporate person), about which false allegations were made. Is there some meaningful distinction here that means false allegations about an organization of humans should go unrefuted, but false allegations about a single human should be refuted?
> Is there some meaningful distinction here that means false allegations about an organization of humans should go unrefuted, but false allegations about a single human should be refuted? To me, false allegations against individuals are more serious than false allegations against organizations for a few reasons. First, I care about the well-being of organizations only to the extent they positively impact the well-bei…
Even if it were a private organization, such allegations could directly result in harm to the human owners. For example, false allegations about bad food at a restaurant would mean the human owners and employees lose money. In much the same way, false allegations about a human might result in them losing their job.
This story follows a pattern of coordinated attacks on public services in The Guardian and other left leaning media outlets. Usually with the agenda of demanding more money and funding. No doubt, mistakes happen in large bureaucracies but the story is usually slanted as some evil agency trying to destroy certain 'marginalised' sections of society. Whereas the truth is probably nothing like that. I cannot help but thi…
> No doubt, mistakes happen in large bureaucracies but the story is usually slanted as some evil agency trying to destroy certain 'marginalised' sections of society. Whereas the truth is probably nothing like that.
The truth is that as an individual, especially one from a marginalized section of society, you are up against a powerful bureaucracy that has the ability to completely screw up your life, by mistake or not. So we as a society depend on holding these bureaucracies to very high standards.
It is also true that in any large bureaucracy, mistakes inevitably happen from time to time. One would wish for a leadership of said bureaucracy to handle these mistakes with integrity and from a position of confidence. By, for example, contacting this women directly, quietly resolving this issue and then adding this problem to the yearly statistics to prove you run a good ship. Who knows, this woman might have written a blog post singing your praises, after you resolved her problem for her. Certainly the better PR strategy.
If, on the other hand, you resolve to attacking your clients in public, violating their privacy rights in the process, then maybe you're too close to running an evil, rather than a responsible agency.
> Read the linked Centrelinks response and several things are refuted, so why in these comments is there an automatic pile on one side?
Did you read the refutation of the refutation as well ? I found the article presents the different viewpoints quite well. Including that this sort of pressure is able to stir up strong emotions.