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Why we should end the data economy

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Re: Why we should end the data economy

#361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To the people whose lives are at stake, what difference does it make?

None, but if we're looking at this situation (where the government is finding secret homosexuals and prosecuting them) and asking "what policies ought we enact to fix this" if your answer is "better privacy" that seems like it's looking at the wrong problem.

You are assuming that perfect and fair governance is a reasonably achievable state. Reality begs to differ. In reality, there are people in the USA who are in the closet or of fear of persecution by their communities.

Privacy provides a fundemental protection from persecution by your government. This is precisely why the constitution includes specific privacy protections.

So while we should fight governments that persecute homosexuality, we also need to protect at least some aspects of privacy to keep protections for the next persecuted group.

Re: Why we should end the data economy

#362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To the people whose lives are at stake, what difference does it make?

None, but if we're looking at this situation (where the government is finding secret homosexuals and prosecuting them) and asking "what policies ought we enact to fix this" if your answer is "better privacy" that seems like it's looking at the wrong problem.

And what if it's a domestic company that is destroying those people's privacy and a foreign government that is using this to prosecute them?

Should we avoid preventing further damage that the domestic company is doing? Or should we limit ourselves to dealing with the issue diplomatically, and not do anything else for fear of "looking at the wrong problem"?

I don't understand why you'd seriously suggest that reducing the likelihood of known harm (by ensuring some level of privacy) is the wrong thing to think about when it doesn't prevent other actions from being taken too. It's possible for groups of people to do different things at the same time, after all.

Ultimately, your argument will never result in a situation where privacy is taken seriously because you could substitute in any issue and your conclusion could just as easily be that "better privacy is looking at the wrong problem."

Re: Why we should end the data economy

#363
post #54

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…

> We need a New Declaration of Human Rights for the 21st century that takes into account rapidly advancing technologies for collecting and acting on data at mass scale.

Sir Tim Berners Lee already came up with "The Contract for The Web": https://contractfortheweb.org/

Spread it around.

Re: Why we should end the data economy

#364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not so sure about that. Smartphones are a massive leap forward in low-power/energy-efficiency, but my 2013 desktop machine (KGPE-D16) still creams every smartphone ever manufactured on any metric other than power consumption. I'm kinda tired of hearing nontechnical people congratulate themselves on having a "supercomputer" in their pocket.

Compared to the supercomputers of the 1980s (if I remember right my dad had an old copy of Journal of the American Meteorological Society I found as a kid, with an ad for Cray talking about one gigaflop being state of the art), they're not wrong.

Nobody calls graphing calculators "supercomputers" even though that's what they would've been in the 1960s.

Re: Why we should end the data economy

#365
post #54

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…

That's not gonna happen. But there are services out there that are vastly more private such as ProtonMail, Telegram, Signal, etc.

If you want privacy, quit Facebook and Gmail. News flash: they're NOT gonna stop spying on you. You need to stop using them.

Re: Why we should end the data economy

#366

Somehow organizations get an immense amount of value out of tracking everything you do, say, think, and buy; everywhere you go; and everyone you meet. Two questions: 1. Why should they profit off of my data without my consent? (Hint: they shouldn't.) 2. Why is it so hard for me to get value out of it? Shit, if it's gonna be collected, aggregated, and analyzed anyway, I should just do it my damn self and actually get…

there are ways to be paid, just don’t expect google/apple/fb to do that until they will be forced. eg see new eu laws coming forward, and some companies soon will disrupt this space. it will happen like gdpr, someone is already preparing for it, without making too much noise...

Re: Why we should end the data economy

#367
post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both because someone could stole your money or authorize unwanted action. What other way of preventing that do you propose? Fingerprint? I will will send the data of fingerprint. Facial recognition? I will just grab your profile picture. What kind of method do you envise that could prove you are you and not somebody malicious?

I'm obviously not the expert, my point is we should try to seek the solution to the problem that arise when the information is public instead of trying to hide the information. Here is another example: some people argue for privacy because the information can be used to criminalized gay people. Well then fix the criminalization of gay people instead of trying to hide the fact that they are gay.

Don't change the example. I want to know how do you imagine a method of authentication not requiring any privacy could work. What could be the way to prevent a theft without PIN or private key if your credit card number leak to public?

Re: Why we should end the data economy

#368
post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm obviously not the expert, my point is we should try to seek the solution to the problem that arise when the information is public instead of trying to hide the information. Here is another example: some people argue for privacy because the information can be used to criminalized gay people. Well then fix the criminalization of gay people instead of trying to hide the fact that they are gay.

Don't change the example. I want to know how do you imagine a method of authentication not requiring any privacy could work. What could be the way to prevent a theft without PIN or private key if your credit card number leak to public?

> I want to know how do you imagine a method of authentication not requiring any privacy could work

>Facial Recognition?

That could be one way

> I will just grab your profile picture.

Then maybe fix it to detect whether its a real person or just a picture.

Or maybe there are better way, I don't know.

Like I said, I'm not the expert, I wouldn't know every solution to every problem.

My point is we should spent the effort on figuring out that problem instead of trying to keep thing hiding.

Re: Why we should end the data economy

#369
post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There are some countries where being gay is a criminal offense; So that is the actual problem, not the privacy.

Without some expectation of privacy it would have been impossible for people to gather together with others who had been similarly criminalized. Without those gatherings, organizing against anti-gay propaganda (equating it to pedophilia, claiming it would be the downfall of civilization, etc.) would have been impossible and it's unlikely that the laws criminalizing homosexuality would have ever been changed. If you k…

>Without some expectation of privacy it would have been impossible for people to gather together with others who had been similarly criminalized..

Impossible is a really strong word. I'm not saying that its going to be easy but I doubt that its impossible. That's my point lets spend the effort to figure out/solve this problem instead of trying to hide information.

>I doubt you actually believe that privacy doesn't matter however, because you're posting here under a pseudonym and haven't linked any social media accounts or anything which could reveal "private" details like your full legal name, place of residence/work, etc.

I would love to have everything for everyone to be public so that I don't have to worry about hiding those information. The problem is right now I can't. That's why I'm advocating we spent the effort on solving the problem that arise when the information is public rather than trying to hide information.

Likewise, if I'm gay I would much much prefer to have gay to be decriminalized rather than hiding my sexual orientation.

Re: Why we should end the data economy

#370
post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't change the example. I want to know how do you imagine a method of authentication not requiring any privacy could work. What could be the way to prevent a theft without PIN or private key if your credit card number leak to public?

> I want to know how do you imagine a method of authentication not requiring any privacy could work >Facial Recognition? That could be one way > I will just grab your profile picture. Then maybe fix it to detect whether its a real person or just a picture. Or maybe there are better way, I don't know. Like I said, I'm not the expert, I wouldn't know every solution to every problem. My point is we should spent the effo…

Since you yourself said you are not an expert, then ask yourself, why do experts make security based on hidden passwords instead of focusing on creating those public-indifferent solutions? Could it be that passwords/PINS/secrets are one of the easiest, cheapest and reliable way of preventing unauthorized access since the ancient times?
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