411–420 of 441 posts
I don't understand why the state has to become involved. Let the free market work and people decide for themselves. I stopped using WhatsApp the moment I read that facebook bought it.
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That's a terrible straw man. My counterargument to the "indeterminate potential for future abuse that makes it important" is that the same logic applies to all human transactions, so it's a moot premise. Increased security standards on metadata for human transactions is actually the right response to the existence of bad actors, but increased security != forcing bans on the use of metadata.
It's not about outright banning, it's about limiting to the minimum amount required to perform the service. Btw. nobody complains about WhatsApp holding metadata about connections between people. We complain about WhatsApp transmitting this data in a quite hidden fashion to Facebook.
That's not how the German government is defining their ban.
>We complain about WhatsApp transmitting this data in a quite hidden fashion to Facebook.
FB announced last month [1] that they were sharing specific types of data between Whatsapp and FB. That's not "hidden".
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/26/technology/relaxing-privac...
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So now FB is the equivalent of a hot meal. I think you're comically making my point.
No; what both FB and a hot meal have in common that they're things we do for pleasure, that are not necessary from biological standpoint, that you can stop using them at any time without much issue, but which many people use anyway because of the benefits it brings - in terms of both personal pleasure and strenghtening social ties. Instead of calling people addicts, it'd be better to give them an actual compelling re…
So instead of heating your own food, or finding someone else to heat it - they demand politicians to intervene - to make sure Zuck - and all future food heaters - are properly blindfolded to respect your delicate sensibilities.
My fear is for the future of food heating technologies that don't involve Zuck. Hint: All the rest of them.
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One problem is that they collect "shadow" profiles of people who aren't even on the service. If someone who has your contact info is on the service, they'll start a profile of you based on that. Plus, there's many web sites that are connected to Facebook and send info back to it without you even knowing about it, just by having a Facebook share button on the page. It's very difficult to avoid having any of your data…
Ah, shadow profiles again. Maybe the real problem here is that people talk about "your data". There's no "your data" in a shadow profile of you. There's data about you . I have a feeling that talking about the data as if it belonged to the person it refers to makes people reach weird conclusions. I'm having problems with articulating clear examples, but I don't like the very concept of ownership of facts - whether th…
Amazon knows a great deal about my buying habits but that makes complete sense. Facebook knowing what articles I read from the Globe and Mail and the CBC is something else.
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I never disputed that there are dangers and negative externalities to lack of privacy. But democracy falling apart isn't one of them. Your logic is flawed. You are reversing cause and effect. Where there is a lack of democracy, privacy is often taken away in order to make it easier to oppress political opponents. But giving up some privacy in exchange for services doesn't make that happen. Yes the Stasi would love Fa…
> Your logic is flawed. You are reversing cause and effect. Where there is a lack of democracy, privacy is often taken away in order to make it easier to oppress political opponents. But giving up some privacy in exchange for services doesn't make that happen. Your logic is flawed. You are reversing cause and effect. There simply is no unidirectional causation between lack of privacy and lack of democracy. Obviously,…
I'm not convinced that this is reason enough to ban advertising based business models in democratic countries. We can't live our lives preparing for the day democracy ceases to exist. Any negative effect the lack of privacy has on stable democracies seems small and rather speculative in the first place. I don't believe it's a real threat. You do believe that. So we're going to have to agree to disagree on that one.
Also, I'm not convinced that globally the effect of Facebook, Google or Twitter on democracy is a negative one. On the contrary. Free services provided by overseas companies are often the only way for people in undemocratic countries to get around their local police state. Pay services are even more at odds with privacy than ad based business models.
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If I give someone money, it is their money and they can do what they want with it, it does not matter to me. If I give someone information about myself, it's still connected to me, but now it's under their control. They can use it to exploit or harm me, and so can anyone they sell it to, or anyone who steals it. It's that indeterminate potential for future abuse that makes it important. That's why we consider it diff…
I hate to break it to you, but when you make a payment online, the recipient learns your legal name, probably a billing address i.e. where you live, and you probably don't even think about it. I do see a lot of double standards in these discussions. People never articulate who is specifically being hurt or what the specific problem is. Instead allusions to fascist governments are made, which would be fine, if these c…
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I'm not sure I mind FB collecting data on my when using FB directly. OTOH today I read a 10 minute article on an unrelated site about loneliness. When I got to the end of the article an in page popup appeared that said something along the lines of "Liked by 9571 people including your friend John Smith". I was extremely creeped out. What right does FB have for knowing that I read some article on an unrelated website?…
Clicking "like" on an article is a action that you take only if you want that like to be seen by your friends. It is an inherently public action, don't see anything wrong here.
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Clicking "like" on an article is a action that you take only if you want that like to be seen by your friends. It is an inherently public action, don't see anything wrong here.
I didn't click "like". I didn't in any way directly interact with Facebook. I googled articles on loneliness, picked one, read it. When I got to the bottom without clicking anything I was effectively informed that Facebook knew and recorded I had just read the article.
But I'd like to better understand where you're coming from, because personally, I wouldn't be bothered by the relationship between the site and FB while I was logged into FB. If FB's algorithm knows I visited a specific site and uses that to improve the relevancy of what is shown to me in my feed, then everyone benefits. Help me understand what's creepy here?
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> GPLv2 ... AGPLv3 ... BSD 3-clause None of those licenses are for the user of the software. Some are long(-ish) because they address copyright law and are intended to be read by software authors and distributors, who presumably have the luxury of time to read and research which license they would like to use for their software or 3rd party software they want to redistribute. > Licenses are long and complex not only…
> None of those licenses are for the user of the software Of course licenses are for the user! Without a license, copyright law forbids you from downloading and running an application, let alone copying it to your other PC or emailing a copy to your friend. Addressing copyright law doesn't makes licenses longer, it makes them exist in the first place. It's true that the GPL talks about some additional things like acc…
That is an idiotic interpretation of copyright that has only been upheld in some court cases. The only copy being made by the user is the transient "copy" in memory. Selling someone a download to use as software while later claiming the necessary and transient copy in memory is a violation of copyright is simply fraud at the point of sale.
> copying it to your other PC or emailing a copy to your friend
Making additional copies is an entirely separate matter. Do not confuse use of software (or any other creative work) with copying. You seem to be intentionally conflating these terms, probably because of your erroneous belief that some type of permission is needed for use.
> GPL talks about some additional things
The GPL only talks about distributing extra copies. Have you even read it? From The FSF's FAQ[1] on the GPL:
You are not required to agree to anything to merely
use software which is licensed under the GPL.
> But you also need it, or some license, to use the software at all.
If this was true, we'd be in real trouble because the GPL does not grant any kind of usage license. When you last used a typical Linux distro you used software without usage licenses.
> Networked services don't fall under copyright law,
Correct, though their output may fall under copyright. This is why the AGPL exists to help with the problem of immoral Services as a Software Substitute[2].
> Very few people ever give informed consent when editing Wikipedia.
Nor do they need to. The copyright issues are orthogonal to the risks associated with logging personal (meta)data. As far as I know, there isn't any hidden safety risk associated with editing Wikipedia.
> I can't be sure I fully understand them myself!
While I have studied a lot about data-exposure risks, I know that I only see a tiny portion of the risk-space. Similar to the Schneier Principle where anybody can make crypto that they themselves cannot break (i.e. you're not the smartest person in the world), the risks of data aggregation are probably more numerous than anybody realizes.
That's kind of my point: when we have potentially open-ended risk, you need to minimize your exposure. More data stored in more locations is all additional attack surface.
> Obviously this isn't practical for Internet services.
Security is often in conflict with usability. I personally think that the impact on usability can be minimized through better UI or other solution (which may not exist yet).
Perhaps something like a small set of standardized licenses that are very clear and specific in scope. People could be expected to know what those "standard agreements" mean because those licenses could be taught outside of any particular business transaction.
> Banning everything until there's a solution is neither practical nor desireable.
If the Underwriters Laboratories didn't exist, you wouldn't think it was acceptable to continue using cheap wire ("A more desirable price for the consumer!") and unsafe designs ("it isn't practical to redesign all of our products"). You would (hopefully) insist that your products shouldn't set your house on fire and that we probably need some sort of higher standard (like those provided by the UL and other safety standards).
The precautionary principle cautions that when you don't know the risk, you should take the safer path. Making products or services that create massive amounts of new attack surface with completely unknown risk is not the safe path.
[1] https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#ClickThrough
[2] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-s...
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Secret chats are only for person-to-person communication in Telegram. You cannot have group secret chats. They're also restricted to the specific device that started the conversation and do not sync across devices. For a platform that does, look at Wire [1]. [1]: https://wire.com
I'm not using any group chat, so for me personally that's fine. so far wire is not available on f-droid either, although it's unclear (for me) whether their client now runs without the google play framework. there's discussion about it [0] but no clear answer yet (or I'm missing something). the moment it's available through f-droid, it's a different story overall. [0] https://github.com/wireapp/wire-android/issues/5