The boiling frog of digital freedom

A mobile phone app can let users "deposit paper checks from home" without ever driving to the bank branch by taking a photo of the check with the smartphone camera. Last time I looked into it, a desktop website couldn't enable check deposits with a webcam. (EDIT: I don't mean technically not possible. I meant that the banks deliberately chose not to have the websites utilize desktop/laptop webcams as an alternative to smartphone apps.)

Smartphone bank apps also have "push notifications" to immediately alert you of suspicious activity on your account.

But if one never uses the extra features that smartphones bank apps enable, then yes, desktop bank websites can be seen as perfectly equivalent.

I mean my face is of course my fortune, but it is also my username. A frankly it's a username I have been using a lot longer than 'lifeisstillgood'.

my analogy is that one upon a time we were all walking dow the street in Victoria London during one of Sherlock Holmes "peasoupers". Only people who got up close to you could see what you were doing and even reognise you. But technology has cleaned up the air. Now anyone can see from who knows how far away. The privacy we thought we had because of the peasouper is revealed to be a mirage, we were always walking around naked, it just was harder to see.

We can simply accept this, or far more likely find a cultural consensus. Privacy can be violated for the public good (hunting offenders, medical epidemiologists etc), but otherwise you are not allowed to use the knowledge you have to exploit or influence. No adverts based on prior activity, no Cambridge Analytica creating ads just for you.

We are heading there. That Facebook and amazon more or less publish every ad campaign is incredible - imagine trying to persuade parliaments in 50 countries to pass that sort of legislation.

We are a long way from that "cultural consensus". We will probably get halfway there in the grey areas - like facebook deciding to publish all ads. The British politician Nick Clegg is likely able to make more influence globally at Facebook than if he became PM.

But we are in the culture wars, and we need to fight. The law, the application of the law - these matter online and offline.

So vote. And vote in primaries too because that shapes so much.

(Weird idea - Oz has compulsory voting to ensure votes reflect "everyone". What if we had compulsory political party membership so that parties and primaries reflected the population ...)

What needs to be updated is the the knowledge of the users and of the programmers. But we've been co-opted as an industry for the most part by very large bags of money and a service oriented eco-system is the capitalist response to the free software movement.

Doing an end run around that is hard to enforce (see the various licenses that address this loophole directly) without having the backing of a regulator. I see this as a simple swing of the pendulum, which it has done several times in the past regarding centralization and decentralization of computers: single machines -> single machines with terminals and time sharing -> mini computers with terminals -> microcomputers -> networked micro computers -> networked micro computers using peer-to-peer services -> networked micro computers with access to services -> special purpose computers (terminals!) with access to services. So if we want to do away with these we'd need to focus on the technical implementation of federated services that do not require central services at all. One thing you could advocate for is to restore peer-to-peer capabilities of residential internet but the fear of the hacker card will be played to counter that one. But there is also still pressure to push the pendulum one more step to the right: identified access to the internet and without that no service. This may well happen, I would expect a country like the UK or Australia to be first to implement this.

Also note that there is no actual technical driving force behind the pendulum, it doesn't have to swing at all, it could just as easily get stuck. The important common factor between all of the above was that someone (or lots of someones) made a lot of money by driving the swing.

You forgot the biggest threat: CloudFlare