281–290 of 390 posts
No one sane would ever want their relatives, friends, work colleagues, and neighbors to be able to know (quoting from the OP): > who you sleep with because both you and the person you share your bed with keep your phones nearby > whether you sleep soundly at night or whether your troubles are keeping you up > whether you pick up your phone in the middle of the night and search for things like "loan repayment" > your…
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Google search being free is an absolute enormous amount of value. How much would you pay for a subscription to Google if it weren't free?
Maybe a decade ago. Now using Google is an exercise of filtering out Amazon affiliate blogspam clogging the first several pages of results. “Advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of consumers” -Larry and Sergey in 1998
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That article is just describing gmail APIs, which requires explicit user consent via oauth to enable. This is no more shocking than gmail supporting IMAP.
"The companies said they had not asked users for specific permission to read their Gmail messages, because the practice was covered by their user agreements."
It also stifles original thought that is conceived independent of how things are or what people like ("culture becomes stuck").
When dealing with data you need to be aware of your own unfixable shortcomings as an observer. And if you can influence people's behavior at scale you're no longer an independent observer anyway, complicating things further (a measurement that becomes a target stops being a measurement).
There isn't one truth you could uncover in data; life is an open-ended chaotic system. Let's keep it that way.
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>I don't think that means we don't need privacy. It absolutely has value. I never heard any convincing argument about why privacy has value. >but that doesn't mean we should allow everything to be collected. Why ?
> I never heard any convincing argument about why privacy has value. You have either _never_ had to keep a secret (which I highly doubt, unless you happen to be a literal child) or you simply aren't arguing in good faith. Assuming that you are arguing in good faith, let's consider a potential reason why someone might value their privacy: Some people are born attracted to the same-sex (gay, lesbian, bi, pan, etc.). Th…
Viewing the world through the data lens makes you blind to the things you didn't measure or that you cannot conceive a measurement for. It also stifles original thought that is conceived independent of how things are or what people like ("culture becomes stuck"). When dealing with data you need to be aware of your own unfixable shortcomings as an observer. And if you can influence people's behavior at scale you're no…
Recognizing the limitation of these systems is key to be able to use them well and when not to use them.
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Google search being free is an absolute enormous amount of value. How much would you pay for a subscription to Google if it weren't free?
Maybe a decade ago. Now using Google is an exercise of filtering out Amazon affiliate blogspam clogging the first several pages of results. “Advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of consumers” -Larry and Sergey in 1998
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Would you please demonstrate to me how I, Joe Q. Public, can find out, via collected data that I can access, with whom another person is sleeping with? Or, in lieu of that, walk me through how that would be done with Facebook's, Google's, or Apple's data via your first-hand knowledge of those data and where and how they are stored and accessed? These fear mongering comments about data collection have never demonstrat…
Facebook, Google, et. al. might not make the data available to you, but they have it. If the information is stored on servers in China, then the Chinese government has it as well. Maybe you aren't a Chinese citizen so you don't care, but it's at least worth considering. The politicians we elect to craft and enact legislation that affects the big data companies are always at risk of being essentially blackmailed by th…
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>No one sane would ever want their relatives, friends, work colleagues, and neighbors to be able to know (quoting from the OP): The things you mentioned are kind of how it was before the advent modern civilization. Before Facebook tracking it was old biddy tracking. Through gossip everyone knew pretty much everyone's business. That said, there's not an immediately obvious connection between surveillance and our neigh…
I downvoted this because I can’t read this as anything but a disingenuous comparison. Surely you can understand the difference in scale and motive behind village gossip and global surveillance by profit-seeking corporations.
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I've never heard "hey this isn't working, let's start over from scratch!" be called laziness before.
I'm also surprised you haven't heard of this before. Every New Year millions make resolutions that are not kept because 'it is easier to start from scratch' or a clean slate, but it is very difficult to actually follow through. People who diet non stop because they might get to day 20 and it isn't working and the solution is to start over in a week or so. It is much easier to make yourself think that behavior will ch…
