I'm not sure about this, those who can change our behavior have power over us. knowing somebody does not necessarily mean I have power over said somebody.
likewise, there are things that have power over us without even having to know us.
however if someone has power over somebody AND knows a lot about said somebody then their power is (indeed) more effective.
Brunton & Nissenbaum describe some of the features and mechanics of the panopticon -- "the apparatus of total surveillance" -- but do not comment on the psychological effects of "total surveillance" on collective and individual behavior.
Foucault on 'Panopticism' addresses that far important aspect. Psychologically defeated people will not seek to "opt out". Opting out is the analog of escaping from prison: most prisoners do not seriously entertain such notions, much less act on them. "A real subjection is born mechanically from a fictitious relation."
"Hence the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. So to arrange things that the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action; that the perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary; that this architectural apparatus should be a machine for creating and sustaining a power relation independent of the person who exercises it; in short, that the inmates should be caught up in a power situation of which they are themselves the bearers. To achieve this, it is at once too much and too little that the prisoner should be constantly observed by an inspector: too little, for what matters is that he knows himself to be observed; too much, because he has no need in fact of being so. In view of this, Bentham laid down the principle that power should be visible and unverifiable. Visible: the inmate will constantly have before his eyes the tall outline of the central tower from which he is spied upon. Unverifiable: the inmate must never know whether he is being looked at at any one moment; but he must be sure that he may always be so. In order to make the presence or absence of the inspector unverifiable, so that the prisoners, in their cells, cannot even see a shadow, Bentham envisaged not only venetian blinds on the windows of the central observation hall, but, on the inside, partitions that intersected the hall at right angles and, in order to pass from one quarter to the other, not doors but zig-zag openings; for the slightest noise, a gleam of light, a brightness in a half-opened door would betray the presence of the guardian. The Panopticon is a machine for dissociating the see/being seen dyad: in the peripheric ring, one is totally seen, without ever seeing; in the central tower, one sees everything without ever being seen.
It is an important mechanism, for it automatizes and disindividualizes power. Power has its principle not so much in a person as in a certain concerted distribution of bodies, surfaces, lights, gazes; in an arrangement whose internal mechanisms produce the relation in which individuals are caught up. The ceremonies, the rituals, the marks by which the sovereign’s surplus power was manifested are useless. There is a machinery that assures dissymmetry, disequilibrium, difference. Consequently, it does not matter who exercises power. Any individual, taken almost at random, can operate the machine: in the absence of the director, his family, his friends, his visitors, even his servants (Bentham, 45). Similarly, it does not matter what motive animates him: the curiosity of the indiscreet, the malice of a child, the thirst for knowledge of a philosopher who wishes to visit this museum of human nature, or the perversity of those who take pleasure in spying and punishing. The more numerous those anonymous and temporary observers are, the greater the risk for the inmate of being surprised and the greater his anxious awareness of being observed. The Panopticon is a marvellous machine which, whatever use one may wish to put it to, produces homogeneous effects of power.
this level of monitoring can only become useful with tools that don't yet exist. it's only theoretically possible to aggregate all the available data on any individual. it will require advanced AI and vastly greater data sharing in order to make this a significant issue. i imagine though that by the time these are developed, they will have their teeth blunted by advanced, new, obfuscation techniques and technologies.
they're already abusing our data. adtech sells to the US army (pointedly: data from apps that are marketed to Muslims). if you wait for the exploitation to be absolute before dealing with it, you'll miss the opportunity to deal with it at all
The exploitation will never become absolute. Yes, blurred lines are very dangerous, and yes an opportunity is being missed here, but the scale of the danger is being overestimated. The next data crisis will be entirely unexpected but obvious in retrospect. (like every single google account being breached).
That's orthogonal to the discussion, though. The concern isn't about cybersecurity, or breaches - this is about governments and companies abusing their access. The concern is that given enough time / development / etc handing _anyone_ a "track all folks down to the millimeter" is a fundamentally dangerous proposition.
We know for a fact that government agencies misbehave. Imagine McCarthy's America, but with the ability to programatically crawl your every movement and spoken word. _That's_ the nightmare scenario.
imho Western Democracy is too strong and data gathering is too weak to make this an immediate concern. even if democracy unravels and the tech matures it may well be less potent and/or effective than feared. A far more pressing concern is a large data breach, which is possible and probable.
...which is not practical and therefore only of consequence for a person of interest, i.e. a criminal or suspected criminal. I'm not saying it isn't a big problem, (suspicions can be invented) i'm just pointing out it is unlikely to lead to a dystopia. I think that laws will be drafted to invalidate most data as evidence in court (since minor offenses are universal and can't all be prosecuted).
There will be a great spookiness to augmented reality.
Already, we invite soft surveillance into our private spaces, but will we agree to having those spaces mapped to the millimeter, our objects tracked in kind and location, our private actions (in addition to our words) persistently noticed, considered and logged?
I strongly recommend everyone watch Raph Koster's talk "Still Logged In: What AR and VR Can Learn from MMOs"[1] about the ethical issues involved in VR/AR... and how VR/AR can be used as a weapon.
Giving these big detailed anecdotes about how we're actively in a surveillance state isn't working. People don't care. A lot of those same people have probably helped, in the form of public opinion solidarity, to make it this way. When you support or make excuses for engineering firms that engage in aggressive tracking, you give them clearance. When you constantly murmur about immigration or terrorism, it provides tools and reasoning for these systems to exist. If you fear monger about all the "bad people" on the internet, you create pathways for things like real name policies, sentiment analysis, or private data collection to prove who you are and what faith you come in. Then there's people who will aid these people and say things like, "Well those governments and companies aren't quite sharing data yet!" as if mass aggregation at a governmental level or through private partnerships isn't already happening. When you put all this hand wringing together it forms a useful set of tools for governments and private companies to abuse or misuse. Privacy on the internet was never about one small thing, it was always about an aggregate of decisions that achieve an outcome.
My interpretation of this article is that the author wanted to remind us to engage, and to contribute the conversation because we don't know how to manage the situation. It sounds like you have some format of a game plan to deal with this, would you care to share it? I'm legitimately interested.
> There is no simple solution to the problem of privacy, because privacy itself is a solution to societal challenges that are in constant flux. Some are natural and beyond our control; others are technological and should be within our control but are shaped by a panoply of complex social and material forces with indeterminate effects. Privacy does not mean stopping the flow of data; it means channeling it wisely and justly to serve societal ends and values and the individuals who are its subjects, particularly the vulnerable and the disadvantaged. Innumerable customs, concepts, tools, laws, mechanisms, and protocols have evolved to achieve privacy, so conceived, and it is to that collection that we add obfuscation to sustain it — as an active conversation, a struggle, and a choice.
The author comes to the same conclusion I do. I just stated that making vivid images of what your loss of privacy looks like aren't really making a dent.
The author also says it best: there is no simple solution. Rather, the problem exists in people's behavior and belief systems. They feel justified in their beliefs for a cause, and once they are galvanized into that belief system they are no longer required to consider second and third order effects from their belief support. In fact, they're totally allowed to just dismiss people altogether as long as they are doing so in support of the cause.
This isn't anything new. Hot topics show that people just do this when they feel some type of way about a given topic. If you want to solve these problems I think the place to start is making vocal calls to people within your belief system that are encouraging a loss of privacy. This must be from within your belief system because people don't listen fully to people of polar belief systems and it must be vocal so that everyone sees the example.
More or less saying: privacy must be a common concern that is continually addressed and answered for in every discussion where we encourage change. It can no longer be an option.
Thank you for this. You managed to put fairly specific words to something that I constantly struggle to define, which is the process by which one affects and influences the culture they exist in. I think it's important to bring these things up and talk about them, especially with people who are not exposed to echo chambers like this one. Talking about these issues on HN is important, but only matters if you take the subject matter and expose it to folks in other contexts. You describe this process really well.
I wonder, too, how we as tech-minded hackers and programmers and doers can use what we have and what we work with to strengthen these signals. Like, facebook and twitter et al have optimized for things like raw engagement numbers / advertising exposure etc. Are there things we could do to optimize for engagement / cultural development? I pose this question in earnest. It's something I have thought about a lot without many good answers to show for it.
From Dan Geer's portentous talk "Cybersecurity as Realpolitik"[1][2]:
>> Privacy used to be proportional to that which it is impossible to observe or that which can be observed but not identified. No more -- what is today observable and identifiable kills both privacy as impossible-to-observe and privacy as impossible-to-identify, so what might be an alternative? If you are an optimist or an apparatchik, then your answer will tend toward rules of data procedure administered by a government you trust or control. If you are a pessimist or a hacker/maker, then your answer will tend towards the operational, and your definition of a state of privacy will be my definition: the effective capacity to misrepresent yourself.
Is there any hope in feeding the surveilance noise -- a lot of it? e.g., create bots with my credentials that visit random web sites, have a phone that reports bogus GPS coordinates, numerous dummy accounts, that sort of thing...
Or if enough folks gang up and feed the system an avalanche of random (or misdirected) information that we can drown our signature in a sea of noise?
short term: i expect so, long term not so much. At best, some occasional fuzz will mar an otherwise clear picture of you and your activities. Too many fake accounts will only force users to surrender more personal information in order to authenticate themselves.
I view it as a done deal, there's no escape and we need to plan for the future:
Our current laws are not very detailed, often times they are overly severe to serve as a determent and/or make assumptions based on available evidence (which was less before).
As we know more and more of an individual (due to gadgets, online activity, and cashless transactions)- laws and punishment need to take it all into account and be more tailored to actual crime and make less assumptions because there's plenty of evidence to go by.
Another important issue is that we should not allow those in power shield themselves from surveillance and accountability under a guise of safety or security.
I’m sure I’ll be called crazy for this, but the true solution to oppressive societal forces is personal space travel and colonization. When it becomes possible for a small group of people to fund their own “opt out” and escape into outer space, individuals will regain some bargaining power.
Obviously this won’t happen for centuries. But on the timeline of “future human existence”, it’s really not very long at all. I see this as an inevitable outcome of technological development, even if the Private Ownership of Spacecraft War of 2346 is bloody. That gives me hope for the future.
The more accessible opting out becomes, the more leverage regulator people will have when negotiating with the dominant social order.
Space travel like this is down the road, but it’s only a long road if you are thinking in terms of your own finite existence.
Also, opting out is in demand. From a more immediate perspective, I think that there is a lot of room for innovation around personal privacy and opting out. No system created by humans is permanent. More surveillance means that humans will create systems to subvert it or render it useless. This has already happened in many ways.
A system is nicer to its people when they are there voluntarily. These changes will also work to improve the quality of life of those in the system as well as those outside of it.
“It isn’t possible for everyone to live on principle; as a practical matter, many of us must make compromises in asymmetrical relationships, without the control or consent for which we might wish.”
Even if you could just “go off on your own into space”, you will likely need to transact with other humans in order to survive. Put differently, I think while it is an “option” in principle, it isn’t in reality.
How is that any different from someone deciding to opt out from society and move to... I dunno, the mountains? There's still a lot of places on Earth that are sparsely inhabited or completely uninhabited.
I suppose because the cost to reach you is greatly increased, meaning the cost to exercise authority is greatly increased, so actual authority is greatly deceased.
Right now the cost for the government to send their agents to "the mountains" is trivial, the most remote you could possibly get is "a few hours commute and a helicopter ride". The government is more than willing to pay that price in important cases.
I think they imagine that space travel can increase that price to "months or years" and "expensive vehicles that support people during that time". Rather like how much it would have cost to send government agents to remote places hundreds of years ago.
(Personally I'm not particularly convinced, the number of habitable rocks in the solar system is small. Living not on a rock means you need to import resources. Maybe if we get interstellar travel).
Most of these sort of attempts have been either poorly planned or deliberate shut down by nation states (like the ones near Italy and Thailand.)
I’d also imagine it’s far less exciting to live on a floating platform in the ocean than out in space. Certainly the marketing materials will be more appealing.
>I’m sure I’ll be called crazy for this, but the true solution to oppressive societal forces is personal space travel and colonization. When it becomes possible for a small group of people to fund their own “opt out” and escape into outer space, individuals will regain some bargaining power.
Besides the infissibility for billions to do so in the next 2-3-5 centuries at least, it will probably also be the total opposite if/when it happens.
Those space colonies won't be like roaming around in some empty earth. It will be like living in some very close knit community on Earth, when everybody is monitored and depends on everybody else don't doing something stupid/suicidal to put the colony in danger...
>I see this as an inevitable outcome of technological development
Why would it be inevitable?
There are big show stopping issues which are only handwaved away atm with "but, progress" (as if technological development is boundless and creativity can bypass any hard constraint).
Some issues as so hard physics problems, that (BS like "Alcubierre drive" aside) would mean the best we could ever do would be "generation ships".
By inevitable, I mean that space travel will become affordable enough to be personal, and that this is a question of time, not physical limitations.
We’re also talking about hundreds or thousands of years here. It seems totally reasonable to me to assume that a private spaceship priced at ~$500,000 in 2021 dollars will exist by say, 2500.
>By inevitable, I mean that space travel will become affordable enough to be personal, and that this is a question of time, not physical limitations.
Saying "a question of time, not physical limitations" however is the handwaving of physical limitations "because technology will advance" thing I wrote about.
Why would it be a question of time?
How is time gonna make "faster than light" travel possible, or bring the closest stars any closer than many light years?
If anything time has shown that space travel capability can go worse and languish completely for decades just as easily as some external force (like the Space Race in the Cold War, or easy excess credit to fund things like SpaceX today) makes it so -- it's still been 40+ years since we last went to the moon, and the US had let languish the capability to launch people into ISS for decades...
Why is faster than light travel necessary? Plenty of space in our own solar system.
Regarding technological development, again, on a long enough timeline, I don’t think it’s much of a concern. Technologies will continue to develop, quickly or slowly. It hasn’t even been a century since we walked on the moon. Deriving trends from this short period of time is not particularly relevant.
>Why is faster than light travel necessary? Plenty of space in our own solar system.
Between one unhabitable planet and another, plus some gas giants, etc., where's that plenty of space? Unless we also handwaving terraforming into the equation too (as we'll do with carrying any significant number of people via spaceships as opposed to small scientific missions, the 9+ months travel time, space radiation, lack of resources to eat/drink/breath there, etc).
assuming close enough to the sun to derive significant energy - why wouldn't the earth-based government have the technology to track you just as easily as they could on earth?
After all, what can you hide behind floating in space, fully illuminated by the sun?
by "personal spaceship" Do you mean something to carry you from earth surface into space (escape gravity well);
or something in which you can travel and survive living in space (mobile space habitat).
How will you overcome the lack of gravity causing muscle/bone-density loss?
assuming you camp out near the sun and derive power from solar - how do you get food and oxygen? you'll have to assume extreme air, water recycling, and some way of producing food.
I won’t call you crazy, but I will call you naive. Modern civilization was what brought us centralized states and corporations. And yet we always seem to think that that next hill, just over the horizon is where everything will flip on its head and we will be back to some mythical past where we could roam wherever we please—all enabled by technology of course.
I don’t see the early 19th century as a “mythical past”, nor did I say big changes were “just over the horizon.”
Space is quite literally limitless from a human perspective; to assume that somehow human beings will make zero progress on space travel 500 or 1,000 years from now seems naive to me.
I didn’t say something about the progress of space travel. I made an observation about how technological progress and centralization are correlated. And I don’t think societies in the age of space travel (with the technology that that entails) will be less centralized than what we have now.
But I don’t think technological process and centralization are necessarily correlated. It’s more like they go in cycles.
The progression from trains to cars is a good example. At first you had highly centralized, expensive transport. Then cars developed and became decentralized.
On a longer timeline, consider technologies like writing, or paper. Initially highly centralized, now so ubiquitous that we don’t even recognize them as technologies.
I’m basically just saying that on a long enough timeline, the chances that space transportation is controlled by a central authority seems nearly impossible.
> If the apparatus of total surveillance that we have described here were deliberate, centralized, and explicit, a Big Brother machine toggling between cameras, it would demand revolt, and we could conceive of a life outside the totalitarian microscope.
Really not sure how to turn this into actionable legislation, but the fundamental problem isn't the data collection. Rather, it's the massive reduction in cost in organizing and querying the data. The laws and norms were set up when the only way to tell if someone had walked down a specific street was to pay someone to watch or to knock on doors and talk to people with faulty memories. Cameras couldn't store years of footage, databases weren't invented yet, and machine facial recognition was pure fantasy.
Like, in the 19th century it'd be absolutely ridiculous to insist that you have a right of "privacy" that means that people can't recognize you when you're walking around in public. And for a long time, pointing a camera outside your window was basically just like looking out it, and it got treated that way. A database of camera footage looking out at a majority of public streets, recording 24/7 with 5 years of back footage, indexed by time + location + facial recognition match, on the other hand, exploits people's privacy in a way that is far more than the sum of parts.
Essentially, my view is that some databases are repugnant to public policy and should be illegal to build and to query. GDPR has well shown the problems involved in legislating this, and there's a massive free speech argument that torpedoes the whole thing anyhow, so I'm pessimistic about actually fixing things.
This is silly, we are all observed by other people almost all of our lives, but that's fine because they don't conspire behind our backs to create a comprehensive record that's handed over to the government. I don't mind if the building security records me entering the building, or the bank records me using the ATM, or that London Transport videos me on the train. What I object to is if all of those are stitched together and handed over to advertising agencies or my employer.
Likewise I don't care that Google knows what I searched for, or that Twitter knows what I tweeted, or that LinkedIn has my employment history. What I don't want is all of that being sold to Cambridge Analytica to then aggregate and sell on to someone else for goodness knows what purposes.
An awful lot of my life and interests are easily searchable. My handle here is basically just my name, and I use the same handle or even more complete versions everywhere I can. When I'm out in public, the public can see me. When I post in public, the public can read what I say. That's fine, that's why I said it.
However my private correspondences with my wife and kids on iMessage or WhatsApp are nobody else's business. My bank transactions and online shopping likewise, that latter is mainly between me and Amazon. Where I would get upset is if Amazon sold that data to Google to show me 'relevant ads', or show my purchases to my friends. Remember Facebook Beacon? There need to be clear, hard lines in the sand.
This is something I wish was noted more often. When I'm searching for something on Amazon, I have intentionally visited that storefront and am willfully handing them my data (in the form of search and browsing history); of course Amazon is going to keep that and use it to personalize my results. Frankly that's part of their value add, so this is neither surprising nor particularly upsetting.
What's surprising to most people (and should be the focus of any litigation, imho) is precisely this third-party data sharing. It's partly why the cookie law drives me nuts, since it's made all tracking the bogeyman, and in reality, most first party "tracking" is completely benign. If companies would agree not to sell or share my data with third parties (law enforcement serving a warrant being the major exception) then I have no real issue with the tech. The blatant sharing, and especially ad networks make my blood boil.
>> of course Amazon is going to keep that and use it to personalize my results. Frankly that's part of their value add
You think it is value add because you assume they are using the data to send you more relevant content. That's just not how data is always used. A google customer (eg an advertiser) might want to hit you with deliberately non-relevant ads, ads to divert you away from a competitor product. You might want to book a trip to visit family in Hawaii, but the Florida resort advertiser doesn't much care what you want actually. They will hit you with Florida ads in hopes that they can divert a potential traveler to a different destination. You will miss out on relevant Hawaii content simply because Florida has paid more to put content in front of you.
Don't misunderstand: this is a bad advertising practice. I don't like most advertising, relevant or otherwise, so if this happens as you describe then yes, the value add is negative. That doesn't make the data usage surprising though, and that was my point. It's okay if Amazon uses data I entered into search directly to advertise to me, even if they're not very good at it. Ethically, no line was crossed here.
What would be surprising (to most consumers) is if the Florida resort advertiser, instead of bidding on some broad target demographic, has access to enough data to target me individually. However that comes about, that is the line that is crossed. Why does the third party have direct(ish) access to this data? Why wasn't I informed? Etc. Whether that is direct sale of the data, or indirect targeting through unusually specific ad campaign targeting, the effect is the same: it's creepy.
> "...willfully handing them my data (in the form of search and browsing history); of course Amazon is going to keep that and use it to personalize my results."
sure for the few minutes that that data is relevant to selling you stuff you're looking for right now, but why would you expect them to keep it for longer, as this seems to imply?
the time dimension matters too. keeping that data for more than a few minutes should also be explicitly opt-in, as it's data being collected and potentially shared in the future (intentionally or not).
reach and accessibility are naturally limited 'in the old days' where a salesperson might remember your preferences, even writing them down to share with other salespeople, but that data hardly leaked out to other retailers (and potential competitors). it seems that that should be our baseline, and any further gathering/sharing be subject to explicit opt-in.
I agree that the time dimension should at a minimum be communicated, and longer term analytics on this kind of data can almost always be done without associating the data with individuals.
> It's partly why the cookie law drives me nuts, since it's made all tracking the bogeyman, and in reality, most first party "tracking" is completely benign.
There is a lot more disclosure about the use of cookies due to those laws. One of the things those disclosures will note is how many of those cookies are from third-parties. How many people have even reviewed a single disclosure? Of those who have, how many know how to disable third-party cookies? I am not surprised that tracking ended up as the bogeyman due to the amount of it, the dubious motives of most of it, and the limited control that people have.
Even if you eliminate third-party tracking and other forms of data sharing, the amount of tracking happening through first-party cookies is sometimes questionable. A company may be fully justified in figuring out how their services are used, but does that extend to creating profiles on individuals? There is a big difference between a business using aggregate data to improve sales and using data to tailor services to individuals. It is worth noting that many people would consider the former as being too manipulative, while it is reasonable to argue that the latter is exploiting the vulnerabilities of individuals.
Personally, I find any sort form of tracking beyond ensuring security and performance to be excessive since most of the other tracking is intended to establish a one-sided relationship to the benefit of the people doing the tracking. Arguing that it sometimes improves the lives those being tracked is missing the point since it is usually very much unintentional.
Counterpoint: Many of the tech giants are so big and all-encompassing that they are practically their own third party. Google can take your location history from Google Maps and use it to recommend videos on Youtube.
Perhaps more importantly, restricting third-party but not first-party sharing creates bad incentives. If Google could share search data with first-party services like Google Reviews, but not third-party ones like Yelp, what does that mean for Yelp? We'd just be encouraging the largest companies to bring even more of the world in-house.
If I'm not mistaken, this problem is exactly what is attempting to be solved by the current anti-trust suit against the big tech companies in the United States (this is the suit brought by Texas and a few other states). Depending on the outcome, vertical integration like you're describing could be deemed monopolistic and result in Google being spun off into separate entities for each of the parts you're describing.
I think views related to this topic somewhat depend on whether or not you consider Google a monopoly in the digital advertising space. If you do, it would seem that bringing more of the world in-house would be deemed illegal under anti-trust laws.
I do believe that Google, Facebook, Amazon, and even Apple ought to be broken up. However, I don't have a ton of faith that it will happen, and even if it does, I'm wary of policies that would encourage future consolidation.
Good, let us forbid cross-service sharing of data. Gmail can do everything it likes to with whatever data is generated while I am using that. Let us just not allow it to also use this data in google maps and on Youtube.
Anecdotally, I purchased a heated blanket from Amazon for my father and had it shipped to his address. When I went to look at order details, Amazon advertised to me other things the person I shipped this item to may like. Men Diapers, Pet treats etc... I don't own a pet due to allergies and I am very young to be searching for adult diapers. I found it very rude and unprofessional of Amazon to share such a personal suggestion with me.
I called Amazons customer service to complain about their suggestions. The representative said that their suggestions are based on my searches and purchases. I believe the suggestions are also based on the purchases made for that address.
My father doesn't even get an option to opt out of Amazon suggesting things he's purchased, to other people to purchase for him. There isn't an option for privacy.
> of course Amazon is going to keep that and use it to personalize my results
and yet after years of buying the same pair of shoes, year after year, amazon still doesn't know what's my shoe size and I have to check if my size is still available every time...
I believe they are not really trying to improve my experience, but their profits.
> If companies would agree not to sell or share my data with third parties (law enforcement serving a warrant being the major exception) then I have no real issue with the tech.
In many countries (Russia, China, Myanmar come to mind) you would not give the law enforcement exception. How certain are you that, in 20-40 years, your current political beliefs won't get you in trouble with the government?
> I would get upset is if Amazon sold that data to Google to show me 'relevant ads'
If the email account you use for Amazon is a Gmail account they email a receipt of purchase to that account, which Google will use for 'relevant ads'.
But of course in that case you are expressly granting permission for Amazon to contact google. If it was done via a TOS agreement or something then yes I agree, that would be concerning.
Even then, that's more a problem with google than amazon. Or, more accurately, it's a problem that we treat email as electronic mail. We feel we own the account like we own our address, Heck, for some stupid reason we use them for identification all over the internet.
But technologically, they are postcards sent to a business. And we just visit the business to pick up our postcards. Imagine every time you bought something, they sent the receipt to walmart for you to pick up. Not in an envelope, just handed to the guy at the counter and put into a box for you. We never should have let email get this far, but we did.
My go-to response for people who say "If you don't have anything to hide then why do you care if we know?" Is that clearly they have never bought Preparation-H or itch cream from the drugstore, or they're not thinking about how that purchase is not information their classmates or rivals need to know about.
I once told someone something about my kid, and they responded, "why haven't you told me this before???" My flat reply was, "because it's not the most interesting thing about her." I'm about 50-50 on smart versus stupid answers, but occasionally I surprise even myself. That's one of my best one-liners.
Setting aside police/surveillance state dystopias for a moment: People try to make you small by labeling you. The more things they know about you, the more labels they have. If you don't believe me just look at the sewer that flows through replies to AOC's tweets. Having depression as a teenager should not define you. Being a survivor of assault or harassment should not define you. Having a working class upbringing should not pigeonhole you. Having an itchy groin should not be ammo for somebody to derail and deflect what you're trying to do. Mind your own goddamned business and keep the conversation on topics that are actually relevant, like your embezzlement conviction or my ongoing bribery lawsuit.
>Likewise I don't care that Google knows what I searched for, or that Twitter knows what I tweeted, or that LinkedIn has my employment history. What I don't want is all of that being sold to Cambridge Analytica to then aggregate and sell on to someone else for goodness knows what purposes.
This logic would be fine if all google did was search, if all amazon did was shopping, but they don't. They have federal government contracts, they work with defense contractors and law enforcement, they control huge amounts of the internet infrastructure. Google, amazon, facebook gathering your data is more than just a search engine, a store front and a social network gathering it, even if theh share it with nobody other than their internal businesess, those ternal businesses have massive control over the internet qnd many people's lives.
> but that's fine because they don't conspire behind our backs to create a comprehensive record that's handed over to the government.
> I don't mind if the building security records me entering the building, or the bank records me using the ATM
Actually, I would pretty much bet the government in a bunch of states in the world can access your bank records. Places like the US, or China, or Russia. But let's ignore that.
> What I object to is if all of those are stitched together and handed over to advertising agencies or my employer.
The thing is, once the information is gathered, and stored, it's an easy transition to feed it somewhere. And judging by current trends, - some company will soon offer pay those disparate surveillers to feed such data to it, constantly - since it can processed and analyzed en masse, and monetized. Oh, and they'll probably send the government a copy of everything too (judging by what FAANG do, for example).
> Likewise I don't care that Google knows what I searched for
That's not "likewise". Google is already a huge stitcher of surveillance - the kind you said you disapprove of. And, again, they send everything to the US government.
> that latter is mainly between me and Amazon.
You mean between you and the entity controlling a huge chunk of all on-line commerce and whose operations are larger in monetary terms than most states in the world? And that acts like a government with its own body of rules and internal judicial system for disputes? ... yeah, it's "just" between you and them.
> Likewise I don't care that Google knows what I searched for, or that Twitter knows what I tweeted, or that LinkedIn has my employment history. What I don't want is all of that being sold to Cambridge Analytica to then aggregate and sell on to someone else for goodness knows what purposes.
So you don't like Cambridge Analytica, but Google, Twitter and LinkedIn using your data for goodness know what purposes is fine? I'm pretty sure they're running all that data through all sorts of machine learning algorithms and some of that might be used at some point for surveillance and censorship purposes or dystopian stuff in general. Not might, will be, if already isn't. Because you'd have to be stupid to have this amount of data and not use it to further your political agenda.
They need this information to provide the services they offer, if you don’t want the services don’t provide the data. I thought I made it abundantly, crystal clear I am against them arbitraging or selling this data for other purposes of the kind you describe. That’s what we need to focus on with regulation. Of course they want to use this data for other purposes, and we need to make sure they do not. I find it somewhat exasperating that you seem to think I believe otherwise.
Live in a glass house, tell me your complete sexual history including all of the kinks you're ashamed of, and give me your email password. I thought so.
Your viewpoint come across as extremely naïve until you've had political persecution, targeted harassment, or stalking issues. Privacy isn't something you or anyone else gets to decide no one else needs because you don't understand it or value it, but you're free to try living in a fantasy world so long as you don't put the lives of reporters or refugees at risk, or condone the invasion of the lives and personal effects of others.
I would think that all that data is being shared. And if its not being shared now, it is being recorded. And an AI will run through all that information and process it in the future. Why anyone would trust self-serving governments and corporations with private information amazes me!
It is a perfectly rational hypothesis to consider that a lot of the reasons governments use to take civil liberties away, are ones that they orchestrated themselves to facilitate their power grab. To not consider this as a possibility, in psychological terms, is like being the co-dependent in a narcissistic relationship, or like the victim in Stockholm syndrome - you can't imagine that someone would be that abusive, even though you know already that governments and corporations do NOT have your back.
All government conspiracy aside, anyone can see that one makes lots of decisions to do things (or not) on account of what it means to be in public. In your mind, contrast the idea of being in public in a busy city versus a quiet country road. You do not act in the same way! You are under greater stress in a city, you will conform with the social norms as you perceive them, you will not 'flower' as an individual.
This stuff is all known. We are better managed in cities hence 'they' want to move the mass of people into 'smart' (spy) cities. Its not a secret. Its been being planned for a long time. Look into technocracy.
Of course it is, I even game examples of data being used in that way (Beacon and Cambridge Analytica). How can you possibly think I’m not aware of activities I cited examples of? That’s exactly the sort of thing we need to focus our efforts on stopping,
Very few people articulate the upside of the data sharing well. And that is the internet allows people to connect with the long tail customers. All of a sudden I can make friends with other worm farmers in the world. Not only that, but using this data I can effectively find other people who would probably be interested in worm farming and tell them about it. And grow the community of worm farmers. Not only that but individuals can now build niche businesses based around worm farming because they can find their potential customers. You can replace worm farming with every esoteric interest.
On one hand the internet and the big data platforms of Amazon, facebook etc. have allowed this economy and communities based on esoteric interests, but on the other hand they are able to manipulate us else like nobodies business and greed ensures that if it isn't being used adversarially now it will certainly be in the future.
> This is silly, we are all observed by other people almost all of our lives, but that's fine because they don't conspire behind our backs to create a comprehensive record that's handed over to the government.
While I agree with most of what you say, and also almost everything from me is relatively easy to find, my parents and family experience living under Salazar´s dictatorship, or the lasting effects from Stasi over here in Germany, keeps me always aware to keep a good price in what we give away.
The world needs to move to making all data collection opt-in. There should be no negative impact to failing to opt in, unless absolutely necessary. Those exceptions should be clearly legislated, and be easily challenge in court.
This would require a right-to-privacy constitutional amendment in the US.
In today's society, the desire to be noticed is easily 50x the level of anxiety about being in a surveillance state.
We could start with the nonstop, look-at-me nature of Instagram (or any other social site). They satisfy a deep craving that just keeps growing. We could marvel at the Jan. 6 rioters posting their moments in history for all to see. It's endless, and it isn't slowing down.
Yes, there's a powerful argument to be made that nonstop surveillance could work out badly. But after 15 years of seeing such pieces thunder into obscurity, rehashing the same arguments in isolation seems futile.
Anyone who wants to contribute to the conversation needs to spend serious time thinking about the reasons why so many people want strangers to know about them. It's a deep-felt desire. For a lot of people, the dread of being unknown/un-noticed/ignored is greater than the risks that come from being noticed. Once we understand why that's so, we might be able to move forward.
These seem unrelated to me. I should be able to post on social media publicly while still wanting privacy in other aspects of my life. A desire to be seen is not in any way fulfilled by security cameras and tracking cookies.
The wast majority of people out there have no mental capacity to imagine how data they post online and provide to various orgs could be and most likely eventually will be used against them. This is evidenced by the continuing proliferation of dumb comments along the lines of "I am boring", "I am doing nothing wrong", etc.
There is a tremendous cognitive bias in play here. The idea that because most people around you don't weaponize certain types of information means no one anywhere will ever weaponize that information, even if it is globally and indefinitely available.
Agreed that a lot of people do things that are appealing now and not so wise later. But I think we'll get farther if we talk about this as a "short horizon" problem, rather than assailing their mental capacity.
It's all a variant of "candy today; diabetes in 20 years." Public health experts have probably thought the hardest about how to get people to take the long term into account. There must be something in their playbook that could benefit the anti-surveillance cause.
I would gladly just say "imagination" instead of "mental capacity to imagine", but that word has been ruined by making it sound like something only kids and painters have to exercise. Hard reality: modern world requires imagination to navigate.
For example, most people can imagine living with diabetes, but they have no idea what it would feel like if some entity started using their leaked data against them. It's a much more complex scenario with lots of possible outcomes and variables.
Capacity as relates to e.g. lung capacity - many people can grow their lung capacity and run or bike long distances, but many can't and don't.
So yeah, people can lack mental capacity without being stupid. They are nevertheless extremely uninteresting people who can't fathom, much like cattle, how they are being harvested.
Personally I don't take pictures of myself and don't have any of the real name or picture based social media sites (Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, etc.) I only use HN, Reddit, and Discord because I enjoy talking about current goings on and ideas with others, and to communicate about shared hobbies or interests.
Do I like to get some Karma on HN/Reddit or reactions on Discord or replies on all 3? Yeah, I do, but not because of some "desire to be noticed" (I think) but because it means someone thinks I have provided some input to a conversation and they want to talk about it at the very least it lets me know I'm not a crazy person talking out of my ass. In fact, I'd prefer that nobody knows my real name or what I look like on all 3 of those sites. I can be a bit more authentic and candid than I'd feel comfortable being otherwise.
You're right, but there's a crucial and fundamental difference between surveillance and posting to social media: the second is voluntary. The poster has chosen to share whatever it is. They may not be completely aware of the full range of consequences, but it's still their choice. In some measure, the tech is empowering them to do this thing that they want -- to be noticed.
Surveillance -- including stuff like profiling people by analyzing their voluntary social media posts -- is imposed on a person by someone else. It is taking away the surveilled person's free choice, and its entire purpose is to gain power over them.
There's also absolutely no inherent reason that surveillance -- the deliberate steps of gathering/cataloging/analyzing -- has to come along with people being able to post things in public. That's just a f'd-up practice that our society has adopted.
Is it really a deep craving, or even a real choice? I am working on an indie game. I really don’t want to play the social media game, I don’t even have Twitter or Facebook. Yet, I’m spending today researching how to make a YouTube channel and how to gain followers. Indie games just almost never sell unless you build an audience before release. Don’t assume everyone does this out of vanity or enjoys the idea of being talked about online
The issue will become obvious rather soon. It won't be the state that uses the surveillance like Stasi or Gestapo would have (although, it might come closer with excuses like IP or public health). Instead my bet is on online shopping.
Right now dynamic pricing is still asynchronous. If They do it, They have a model of you that fits some marketeers understanding of people. And this model suggests a price increase or maybe even a decrease.
But what will happen is real-time data exchange. Say you booked a nice hotel for your vacation and now search for flights. Wonder why your prices are 50% higher? Say your TV just broke, or your car didn't start this morning, or you mentioned on whatsapp how you need new sports equipment. Basically whenever you will need something, you will pay a Premium. No matter where the data comes from. That's the price of giving up privacy.
Privacy does not mean stopping the flow of data; it means channeling it wisely and justly to serve societal ends and values and the individuals who are its subjects, particularly the vulnerable and the disadvantaged.
I found the conclusion to be very open ended. Who decides what it means to channel the flow of data wisely and justly, and to what ends?
>"The browser plugins TrackMeNot and AdNauseam, which explore obfuscation techniques by issuing many fake search requests and loading and clicking every ad, respectively.
I would be curios to hear anyone's experience and/or feedback on these plugins.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 232 ms ] threadI'm not sure about this, those who can change our behavior have power over us. knowing somebody does not necessarily mean I have power over said somebody.
likewise, there are things that have power over us without even having to know us.
however if someone has power over somebody AND knows a lot about said somebody then their power is (indeed) more effective.
Foucault on 'Panopticism' addresses that far important aspect. Psychologically defeated people will not seek to "opt out". Opting out is the analog of escaping from prison: most prisoners do not seriously entertain such notions, much less act on them. "A real subjection is born mechanically from a fictitious relation."
https://foucault.info/documents/foucault.disciplineAndPunish...
"Hence the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. So to arrange things that the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action; that the perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary; that this architectural apparatus should be a machine for creating and sustaining a power relation independent of the person who exercises it; in short, that the inmates should be caught up in a power situation of which they are themselves the bearers. To achieve this, it is at once too much and too little that the prisoner should be constantly observed by an inspector: too little, for what matters is that he knows himself to be observed; too much, because he has no need in fact of being so. In view of this, Bentham laid down the principle that power should be visible and unverifiable. Visible: the inmate will constantly have before his eyes the tall outline of the central tower from which he is spied upon. Unverifiable: the inmate must never know whether he is being looked at at any one moment; but he must be sure that he may always be so. In order to make the presence or absence of the inspector unverifiable, so that the prisoners, in their cells, cannot even see a shadow, Bentham envisaged not only venetian blinds on the windows of the central observation hall, but, on the inside, partitions that intersected the hall at right angles and, in order to pass from one quarter to the other, not doors but zig-zag openings; for the slightest noise, a gleam of light, a brightness in a half-opened door would betray the presence of the guardian. The Panopticon is a machine for dissociating the see/being seen dyad: in the peripheric ring, one is totally seen, without ever seeing; in the central tower, one sees everything without ever being seen.
It is an important mechanism, for it automatizes and disindividualizes power. Power has its principle not so much in a person as in a certain concerted distribution of bodies, surfaces, lights, gazes; in an arrangement whose internal mechanisms produce the relation in which individuals are caught up. The ceremonies, the rituals, the marks by which the sovereign’s surplus power was manifested are useless. There is a machinery that assures dissymmetry, disequilibrium, difference. Consequently, it does not matter who exercises power. Any individual, taken almost at random, can operate the machine: in the absence of the director, his family, his friends, his visitors, even his servants (Bentham, 45). Similarly, it does not matter what motive animates him: the curiosity of the indiscreet, the malice of a child, the thirst for knowledge of a philosopher who wishes to visit this museum of human nature, or the perversity of those who take pleasure in spying and punishing. The more numerous those anonymous and temporary observers are, the greater the risk for the inmate of being surprised and the greater his anxious awareness of being observed. The Panopticon is a marvellous machine which, whatever use one may wish to put it to, produces homogeneous effects of power.
A real subjection is born...
We know for a fact that government agencies misbehave. Imagine McCarthy's America, but with the ability to programatically crawl your every movement and spoken word. _That's_ the nightmare scenario.
Already, we invite soft surveillance into our private spaces, but will we agree to having those spaces mapped to the millimeter, our objects tracked in kind and location, our private actions (in addition to our words) persistently noticed, considered and logged?
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgw8RLHv1j4
The author comes to the same conclusion I do. I just stated that making vivid images of what your loss of privacy looks like aren't really making a dent.
The author also says it best: there is no simple solution. Rather, the problem exists in people's behavior and belief systems. They feel justified in their beliefs for a cause, and once they are galvanized into that belief system they are no longer required to consider second and third order effects from their belief support. In fact, they're totally allowed to just dismiss people altogether as long as they are doing so in support of the cause.
This isn't anything new. Hot topics show that people just do this when they feel some type of way about a given topic. If you want to solve these problems I think the place to start is making vocal calls to people within your belief system that are encouraging a loss of privacy. This must be from within your belief system because people don't listen fully to people of polar belief systems and it must be vocal so that everyone sees the example.
More or less saying: privacy must be a common concern that is continually addressed and answered for in every discussion where we encourage change. It can no longer be an option.
I wonder, too, how we as tech-minded hackers and programmers and doers can use what we have and what we work with to strengthen these signals. Like, facebook and twitter et al have optimized for things like raw engagement numbers / advertising exposure etc. Are there things we could do to optimize for engagement / cultural development? I pose this question in earnest. It's something I have thought about a lot without many good answers to show for it.
From Dan Geer's portentous talk "Cybersecurity as Realpolitik"[1][2]:
>> Privacy used to be proportional to that which it is impossible to observe or that which can be observed but not identified. No more -- what is today observable and identifiable kills both privacy as impossible-to-observe and privacy as impossible-to-identify, so what might be an alternative? If you are an optimist or an apparatchik, then your answer will tend toward rules of data procedure administered by a government you trust or control. If you are a pessimist or a hacker/maker, then your answer will tend towards the operational, and your definition of a state of privacy will be my definition: the effective capacity to misrepresent yourself.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nT-TGvYOBpI
[2] http://geer.tinho.net/geer.blackhat.6viii14.txt
Or if enough folks gang up and feed the system an avalanche of random (or misdirected) information that we can drown our signature in a sea of noise?
Our current laws are not very detailed, often times they are overly severe to serve as a determent and/or make assumptions based on available evidence (which was less before).
As we know more and more of an individual (due to gadgets, online activity, and cashless transactions)- laws and punishment need to take it all into account and be more tailored to actual crime and make less assumptions because there's plenty of evidence to go by.
Another important issue is that we should not allow those in power shield themselves from surveillance and accountability under a guise of safety or security.
Obviously this won’t happen for centuries. But on the timeline of “future human existence”, it’s really not very long at all. I see this as an inevitable outcome of technological development, even if the Private Ownership of Spacecraft War of 2346 is bloody. That gives me hope for the future.
Why do you think colonies in space will be different and not see “societal forces” emerge?
The more accessible opting out becomes, the more leverage regulator people will have when negotiating with the dominant social order.
Space travel like this is down the road, but it’s only a long road if you are thinking in terms of your own finite existence.
Also, opting out is in demand. From a more immediate perspective, I think that there is a lot of room for innovation around personal privacy and opting out. No system created by humans is permanent. More surveillance means that humans will create systems to subvert it or render it useless. This has already happened in many ways.
A system is nicer to its people when they are there voluntarily. These changes will also work to improve the quality of life of those in the system as well as those outside of it.
“It isn’t possible for everyone to live on principle; as a practical matter, many of us must make compromises in asymmetrical relationships, without the control or consent for which we might wish.”
Even if you could just “go off on your own into space”, you will likely need to transact with other humans in order to survive. Put differently, I think while it is an “option” in principle, it isn’t in reality.
In MBA land they call it BATNA. Best alternative to a negotiated agreement.
Besides that, one shouldn’t have to be a hermit in order to avoid oppression.
Right now the cost for the government to send their agents to "the mountains" is trivial, the most remote you could possibly get is "a few hours commute and a helicopter ride". The government is more than willing to pay that price in important cases.
I think they imagine that space travel can increase that price to "months or years" and "expensive vehicles that support people during that time". Rather like how much it would have cost to send government agents to remote places hundreds of years ago.
(Personally I'm not particularly convinced, the number of habitable rocks in the solar system is small. Living not on a rock means you need to import resources. Maybe if we get interstellar travel).
I’d also imagine it’s far less exciting to live on a floating platform in the ocean than out in space. Certainly the marketing materials will be more appealing.
Besides the infissibility for billions to do so in the next 2-3-5 centuries at least, it will probably also be the total opposite if/when it happens.
Those space colonies won't be like roaming around in some empty earth. It will be like living in some very close knit community on Earth, when everybody is monitored and depends on everybody else don't doing something stupid/suicidal to put the colony in danger...
>I see this as an inevitable outcome of technological development
Why would it be inevitable?
There are big show stopping issues which are only handwaved away atm with "but, progress" (as if technological development is boundless and creativity can bypass any hard constraint).
Some issues as so hard physics problems, that (BS like "Alcubierre drive" aside) would mean the best we could ever do would be "generation ships".
We’re also talking about hundreds or thousands of years here. It seems totally reasonable to me to assume that a private spaceship priced at ~$500,000 in 2021 dollars will exist by say, 2500.
Saying "a question of time, not physical limitations" however is the handwaving of physical limitations "because technology will advance" thing I wrote about.
Why would it be a question of time?
How is time gonna make "faster than light" travel possible, or bring the closest stars any closer than many light years?
If anything time has shown that space travel capability can go worse and languish completely for decades just as easily as some external force (like the Space Race in the Cold War, or easy excess credit to fund things like SpaceX today) makes it so -- it's still been 40+ years since we last went to the moon, and the US had let languish the capability to launch people into ISS for decades...
Regarding technological development, again, on a long enough timeline, I don’t think it’s much of a concern. Technologies will continue to develop, quickly or slowly. It hasn’t even been a century since we walked on the moon. Deriving trends from this short period of time is not particularly relevant.
Between one unhabitable planet and another, plus some gas giants, etc., where's that plenty of space? Unless we also handwaving terraforming into the equation too (as we'll do with carrying any significant number of people via spaceships as opposed to small scientific missions, the 9+ months travel time, space radiation, lack of resources to eat/drink/breath there, etc).
After all, what can you hide behind floating in space, fully illuminated by the sun?
or something in which you can travel and survive living in space (mobile space habitat).
How will you overcome the lack of gravity causing muscle/bone-density loss?
assuming you camp out near the sun and derive power from solar - how do you get food and oxygen? you'll have to assume extreme air, water recycling, and some way of producing food.
New World 2.0 isn’t coming.
Space is quite literally limitless from a human perspective; to assume that somehow human beings will make zero progress on space travel 500 or 1,000 years from now seems naive to me.
The progression from trains to cars is a good example. At first you had highly centralized, expensive transport. Then cars developed and became decentralized.
On a longer timeline, consider technologies like writing, or paper. Initially highly centralized, now so ubiquitous that we don’t even recognize them as technologies.
I’m basically just saying that on a long enough timeline, the chances that space transportation is controlled by a central authority seems nearly impossible.
Really not sure how to turn this into actionable legislation, but the fundamental problem isn't the data collection. Rather, it's the massive reduction in cost in organizing and querying the data. The laws and norms were set up when the only way to tell if someone had walked down a specific street was to pay someone to watch or to knock on doors and talk to people with faulty memories. Cameras couldn't store years of footage, databases weren't invented yet, and machine facial recognition was pure fantasy.
Like, in the 19th century it'd be absolutely ridiculous to insist that you have a right of "privacy" that means that people can't recognize you when you're walking around in public. And for a long time, pointing a camera outside your window was basically just like looking out it, and it got treated that way. A database of camera footage looking out at a majority of public streets, recording 24/7 with 5 years of back footage, indexed by time + location + facial recognition match, on the other hand, exploits people's privacy in a way that is far more than the sum of parts.
Essentially, my view is that some databases are repugnant to public policy and should be illegal to build and to query. GDPR has well shown the problems involved in legislating this, and there's a massive free speech argument that torpedoes the whole thing anyhow, so I'm pessimistic about actually fixing things.
Likewise I don't care that Google knows what I searched for, or that Twitter knows what I tweeted, or that LinkedIn has my employment history. What I don't want is all of that being sold to Cambridge Analytica to then aggregate and sell on to someone else for goodness knows what purposes.
An awful lot of my life and interests are easily searchable. My handle here is basically just my name, and I use the same handle or even more complete versions everywhere I can. When I'm out in public, the public can see me. When I post in public, the public can read what I say. That's fine, that's why I said it.
However my private correspondences with my wife and kids on iMessage or WhatsApp are nobody else's business. My bank transactions and online shopping likewise, that latter is mainly between me and Amazon. Where I would get upset is if Amazon sold that data to Google to show me 'relevant ads', or show my purchases to my friends. Remember Facebook Beacon? There need to be clear, hard lines in the sand.
What's surprising to most people (and should be the focus of any litigation, imho) is precisely this third-party data sharing. It's partly why the cookie law drives me nuts, since it's made all tracking the bogeyman, and in reality, most first party "tracking" is completely benign. If companies would agree not to sell or share my data with third parties (law enforcement serving a warrant being the major exception) then I have no real issue with the tech. The blatant sharing, and especially ad networks make my blood boil.
You think it is value add because you assume they are using the data to send you more relevant content. That's just not how data is always used. A google customer (eg an advertiser) might want to hit you with deliberately non-relevant ads, ads to divert you away from a competitor product. You might want to book a trip to visit family in Hawaii, but the Florida resort advertiser doesn't much care what you want actually. They will hit you with Florida ads in hopes that they can divert a potential traveler to a different destination. You will miss out on relevant Hawaii content simply because Florida has paid more to put content in front of you.
What would be surprising (to most consumers) is if the Florida resort advertiser, instead of bidding on some broad target demographic, has access to enough data to target me individually. However that comes about, that is the line that is crossed. Why does the third party have direct(ish) access to this data? Why wasn't I informed? Etc. Whether that is direct sale of the data, or indirect targeting through unusually specific ad campaign targeting, the effect is the same: it's creepy.
sure for the few minutes that that data is relevant to selling you stuff you're looking for right now, but why would you expect them to keep it for longer, as this seems to imply?
the time dimension matters too. keeping that data for more than a few minutes should also be explicitly opt-in, as it's data being collected and potentially shared in the future (intentionally or not).
reach and accessibility are naturally limited 'in the old days' where a salesperson might remember your preferences, even writing them down to share with other salespeople, but that data hardly leaked out to other retailers (and potential competitors). it seems that that should be our baseline, and any further gathering/sharing be subject to explicit opt-in.
There is a lot more disclosure about the use of cookies due to those laws. One of the things those disclosures will note is how many of those cookies are from third-parties. How many people have even reviewed a single disclosure? Of those who have, how many know how to disable third-party cookies? I am not surprised that tracking ended up as the bogeyman due to the amount of it, the dubious motives of most of it, and the limited control that people have.
Even if you eliminate third-party tracking and other forms of data sharing, the amount of tracking happening through first-party cookies is sometimes questionable. A company may be fully justified in figuring out how their services are used, but does that extend to creating profiles on individuals? There is a big difference between a business using aggregate data to improve sales and using data to tailor services to individuals. It is worth noting that many people would consider the former as being too manipulative, while it is reasonable to argue that the latter is exploiting the vulnerabilities of individuals.
Personally, I find any sort form of tracking beyond ensuring security and performance to be excessive since most of the other tracking is intended to establish a one-sided relationship to the benefit of the people doing the tracking. Arguing that it sometimes improves the lives those being tracked is missing the point since it is usually very much unintentional.
Perhaps more importantly, restricting third-party but not first-party sharing creates bad incentives. If Google could share search data with first-party services like Google Reviews, but not third-party ones like Yelp, what does that mean for Yelp? We'd just be encouraging the largest companies to bring even more of the world in-house.
I think views related to this topic somewhat depend on whether or not you consider Google a monopoly in the digital advertising space. If you do, it would seem that bringing more of the world in-house would be deemed illegal under anti-trust laws.
I called Amazons customer service to complain about their suggestions. The representative said that their suggestions are based on my searches and purchases. I believe the suggestions are also based on the purchases made for that address.
My father doesn't even get an option to opt out of Amazon suggesting things he's purchased, to other people to purchase for him. There isn't an option for privacy.
and yet after years of buying the same pair of shoes, year after year, amazon still doesn't know what's my shoe size and I have to check if my size is still available every time...
I believe they are not really trying to improve my experience, but their profits.
But I have no proof.
In many countries (Russia, China, Myanmar come to mind) you would not give the law enforcement exception. How certain are you that, in 20-40 years, your current political beliefs won't get you in trouble with the government?
If the email account you use for Amazon is a Gmail account they email a receipt of purchase to that account, which Google will use for 'relevant ads'.
But of course in that case you are expressly granting permission for Amazon to contact google. If it was done via a TOS agreement or something then yes I agree, that would be concerning.
But technologically, they are postcards sent to a business. And we just visit the business to pick up our postcards. Imagine every time you bought something, they sent the receipt to walmart for you to pick up. Not in an envelope, just handed to the guy at the counter and put into a box for you. We never should have let email get this far, but we did.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/23/technology/gmail-ads.html
I'm not trying to separate myself from society. I'm just trying to keep the stalkers away.
A lot of companies seem to want to act less like members of society and more like stalkers.
I once told someone something about my kid, and they responded, "why haven't you told me this before???" My flat reply was, "because it's not the most interesting thing about her." I'm about 50-50 on smart versus stupid answers, but occasionally I surprise even myself. That's one of my best one-liners.
Setting aside police/surveillance state dystopias for a moment: People try to make you small by labeling you. The more things they know about you, the more labels they have. If you don't believe me just look at the sewer that flows through replies to AOC's tweets. Having depression as a teenager should not define you. Being a survivor of assault or harassment should not define you. Having a working class upbringing should not pigeonhole you. Having an itchy groin should not be ammo for somebody to derail and deflect what you're trying to do. Mind your own goddamned business and keep the conversation on topics that are actually relevant, like your embezzlement conviction or my ongoing bribery lawsuit.
This logic would be fine if all google did was search, if all amazon did was shopping, but they don't. They have federal government contracts, they work with defense contractors and law enforcement, they control huge amounts of the internet infrastructure. Google, amazon, facebook gathering your data is more than just a search engine, a store front and a social network gathering it, even if theh share it with nobody other than their internal businesess, those ternal businesses have massive control over the internet qnd many people's lives.
> I don't mind if the building security records me entering the building, or the bank records me using the ATM
Actually, I would pretty much bet the government in a bunch of states in the world can access your bank records. Places like the US, or China, or Russia. But let's ignore that.
> What I object to is if all of those are stitched together and handed over to advertising agencies or my employer.
The thing is, once the information is gathered, and stored, it's an easy transition to feed it somewhere. And judging by current trends, - some company will soon offer pay those disparate surveillers to feed such data to it, constantly - since it can processed and analyzed en masse, and monetized. Oh, and they'll probably send the government a copy of everything too (judging by what FAANG do, for example).
> Likewise I don't care that Google knows what I searched for
That's not "likewise". Google is already a huge stitcher of surveillance - the kind you said you disapprove of. And, again, they send everything to the US government.
> that latter is mainly between me and Amazon.
You mean between you and the entity controlling a huge chunk of all on-line commerce and whose operations are larger in monetary terms than most states in the world? And that acts like a government with its own body of rules and internal judicial system for disputes? ... yeah, it's "just" between you and them.
So you don't like Cambridge Analytica, but Google, Twitter and LinkedIn using your data for goodness know what purposes is fine? I'm pretty sure they're running all that data through all sorts of machine learning algorithms and some of that might be used at some point for surveillance and censorship purposes or dystopian stuff in general. Not might, will be, if already isn't. Because you'd have to be stupid to have this amount of data and not use it to further your political agenda.
Your viewpoint come across as extremely naïve until you've had political persecution, targeted harassment, or stalking issues. Privacy isn't something you or anyone else gets to decide no one else needs because you don't understand it or value it, but you're free to try living in a fantasy world so long as you don't put the lives of reporters or refugees at risk, or condone the invasion of the lives and personal effects of others.
I would think that all that data is being shared. And if its not being shared now, it is being recorded. And an AI will run through all that information and process it in the future. Why anyone would trust self-serving governments and corporations with private information amazes me!
It is a perfectly rational hypothesis to consider that a lot of the reasons governments use to take civil liberties away, are ones that they orchestrated themselves to facilitate their power grab. To not consider this as a possibility, in psychological terms, is like being the co-dependent in a narcissistic relationship, or like the victim in Stockholm syndrome - you can't imagine that someone would be that abusive, even though you know already that governments and corporations do NOT have your back.
All government conspiracy aside, anyone can see that one makes lots of decisions to do things (or not) on account of what it means to be in public. In your mind, contrast the idea of being in public in a busy city versus a quiet country road. You do not act in the same way! You are under greater stress in a city, you will conform with the social norms as you perceive them, you will not 'flower' as an individual.
This stuff is all known. We are better managed in cities hence 'they' want to move the mass of people into 'smart' (spy) cities. Its not a secret. Its been being planned for a long time. Look into technocracy.
On one hand the internet and the big data platforms of Amazon, facebook etc. have allowed this economy and communities based on esoteric interests, but on the other hand they are able to manipulate us else like nobodies business and greed ensures that if it isn't being used adversarially now it will certainly be in the future.
While I agree with most of what you say, and also almost everything from me is relatively easy to find, my parents and family experience living under Salazar´s dictatorship, or the lasting effects from Stasi over here in Germany, keeps me always aware to keep a good price in what we give away.
This would require a right-to-privacy constitutional amendment in the US.
We could start with the nonstop, look-at-me nature of Instagram (or any other social site). They satisfy a deep craving that just keeps growing. We could marvel at the Jan. 6 rioters posting their moments in history for all to see. It's endless, and it isn't slowing down.
Yes, there's a powerful argument to be made that nonstop surveillance could work out badly. But after 15 years of seeing such pieces thunder into obscurity, rehashing the same arguments in isolation seems futile.
Anyone who wants to contribute to the conversation needs to spend serious time thinking about the reasons why so many people want strangers to know about them. It's a deep-felt desire. For a lot of people, the dread of being unknown/un-noticed/ignored is greater than the risks that come from being noticed. Once we understand why that's so, we might be able to move forward.
Even security cameras are now part of performance culture
There is a tremendous cognitive bias in play here. The idea that because most people around you don't weaponize certain types of information means no one anywhere will ever weaponize that information, even if it is globally and indefinitely available.
It's all a variant of "candy today; diabetes in 20 years." Public health experts have probably thought the hardest about how to get people to take the long term into account. There must be something in their playbook that could benefit the anti-surveillance cause.
For example, most people can imagine living with diabetes, but they have no idea what it would feel like if some entity started using their leaked data against them. It's a much more complex scenario with lots of possible outcomes and variables.
So yeah, people can lack mental capacity without being stupid. They are nevertheless extremely uninteresting people who can't fathom, much like cattle, how they are being harvested.
Do I like to get some Karma on HN/Reddit or reactions on Discord or replies on all 3? Yeah, I do, but not because of some "desire to be noticed" (I think) but because it means someone thinks I have provided some input to a conversation and they want to talk about it at the very least it lets me know I'm not a crazy person talking out of my ass. In fact, I'd prefer that nobody knows my real name or what I look like on all 3 of those sites. I can be a bit more authentic and candid than I'd feel comfortable being otherwise.
Surveillance -- including stuff like profiling people by analyzing their voluntary social media posts -- is imposed on a person by someone else. It is taking away the surveilled person's free choice, and its entire purpose is to gain power over them.
There's also absolutely no inherent reason that surveillance -- the deliberate steps of gathering/cataloging/analyzing -- has to come along with people being able to post things in public. That's just a f'd-up practice that our society has adopted.
Well said. Brilliantly well said. Pithy and correct. I will be sharing your words.
Bruce Schneier disagreed with him in 2008 [3] (and probably still does).
[1] https://www.wired.com/1996/12/fftransparent/
[2] https://www.davidbrin.com/transparentsociety.html
[3] https://www.wired.com/2008/03/securitymatters-0306/amp
Right now dynamic pricing is still asynchronous. If They do it, They have a model of you that fits some marketeers understanding of people. And this model suggests a price increase or maybe even a decrease.
But what will happen is real-time data exchange. Say you booked a nice hotel for your vacation and now search for flights. Wonder why your prices are 50% higher? Say your TV just broke, or your car didn't start this morning, or you mentioned on whatsapp how you need new sports equipment. Basically whenever you will need something, you will pay a Premium. No matter where the data comes from. That's the price of giving up privacy.
I found the conclusion to be very open ended. Who decides what it means to channel the flow of data wisely and justly, and to what ends?
I would be curios to hear anyone's experience and/or feedback on these plugins.