91–100 of 128 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Leadership != fascism Leadership + time = fascism
Are you really implying that all groups of organized people are fascist sleeper cells? That MLK and Gandhi were saved from their Hitlerism by assassination by heroic ethnic-separatists?
This seems like such a losing battle. Payments on public transit could become anonymous, but the video feeds would still be recorded, and facial recognition could be easily performed. The cat is out of the bag. Information technology makes this data accumulation inevitable. Likely even for those who walk around with a face covering all day, pay only cash, and don't use smartphones. By doing those things you actually…
How about wearing huge Sombrero so that your face is invisible for cameras mounted above your head?
I wish we could find a way to apply the model of the vending machine to mass commerce. A vending machine doesn't make notes of who buys its products. A vending machine doesn't keep logs of its transactions or of the payment methods used. A vending machine does not make "recommendations" of what the consumer might like based on their past purchases. You give the vending machine a dollar, it gives you a soda. The trans…
Haha sure we have, it just isn't as profitable as the current solutions which are to collect as much data as you can and use that information secondary income such as selling to marketers or using for "analytics" or "targeting"
Service builders just have to care about designing their systems like this. Every single person in this thread who works with or for one of these information collecting companies is responsible for the current state of the world.
> If someone paid $1500 for their laptop, however, they're going to want that convenience of being able to prove they purchased the laptop from XX retailer and be compensated if the thing is a lemon.
That can easily be solved. Either by using GNU Taler as Stallman describes, or by issueing cryptographic receipts of a purchase, whereby the vendor digitall signs the receipt so they can recognize it later if presented, but internally they just don't store a record of that transaction, or they don't store any information about who purchased that.
It's not a hard problem to just not store personally identifiable information, you just don't store it.
What is a hard problem is convincing people in these industries that they should care, that they should protect user privacy by not collecting the information in the first place.
We need new business models which depend on user-owned data, rather than treating privacy like a charitable contribution for saving the trees. Instead of citizens sending data to the cloud, corporations can send code to citizen-owned devices where local computation can take place, with data only leaving via an open-source content inspection engine that enforces citizen-consent policy.
This seems like such a losing battle. Payments on public transit could become anonymous, but the video feeds would still be recorded, and facial recognition could be easily performed. The cat is out of the bag. Information technology makes this data accumulation inevitable. Likely even for those who walk around with a face covering all day, pay only cash, and don't use smartphones. By doing those things you actually…
As another pointed out, the article covers this topic, explicitly.
>The best safeguards are to create strong institutions
I would replace 'strong' with 'transparent and honest'. Further, calling it a losing battle is a bit defeatist.
>Yet, those technologies have severe downsides for both individuals and society at large.
Out of curiosity, what are some of these downsides?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean, they're kinda wrong. You can care plenty about these issues but not see an actual way to have impact such that your concerns are addressed. If society isn't caring, then either society doesn't see why there's a concern, or society recognizes that atomically it does not have agency to address the issue, and the people who do have that agency are the ones that don't give a shit.
Saying "society needs to care more" is the last stop before the final destination of "this can't be done". Getting great many people to coordinate on something that's beneficial to them long-term, but carries an (even insignificant) short-term cost is one of the hardest (if not the hardest) things to do, out of all the things humans ever tried.
...
The basic principle is that a system must be designed not to collect certain data, if its basic function can be carried out without that data."
Frills on the system, such as [some feature conceived by PM or developer], are not part of the basic function, so they can't justify incorporating any additional surveillance."
These additional services could be offered separately to users who request them."
The title is "A radical proposal to keep your data safe."
But this doesnt sound "radical" at all.
To recap:
1. Dont collect data when unnecessary for the user.
2. Applications which perform a single function.
3. Additional "features" (i.e. more code) that add more functionality and make applications more complex are fine but they should be optional (e.g. not pre-installed or automatically added via "updates").
"There are so many ways to use data to hurt people that the only safe database is the one that was never collected . ... The basic principle is that a system must be designed not to collect certain data, if its basic function can be carried out without that data." Frills on the system, such as [some feature conceived by PM or developer], are not part of the basic function, so they can't justify incorporating any addi…
It really is radical to the current culture of silicon valley where every product must be "smart," collect user data to provide recommendations and "analytics."
There is little restraint done by companies on what data they collect, only on access to that data once collected. It really is a radical culture shift for these companies, and all the engineers that work for them, to switch to a attitude of only collecting what is truly necessary.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How about wearing huge Sombrero so that your face is invisible for cameras mounted above your head?
Then they just track the person with the huge Sombrero!
Or walk around in grey suits and bowler hats with apples in front of our faces