No, not even close. Facebook doesn't need you to have an account to gather information on you. It's an ad network tracking what you browse everywhere on the web via cookies.
It also know who you are via your accounts with other sites and agreement to share. So if your email address is connected to your friends contacts it know you connections before you even have an account.
I dont have the FaceBook app on my fresh Android phone. There's still the com.facebook.katakana service running, which I explicitly blocked via NetGuard. But they are still the tracking pixels and cookies remaining, via all the webpages with their Like button integration, and Google/Mozilla conspired to block browser extensions to disable those.
They know much more. What you liked or disliked, which ads you clicked on, which ads you closed immediately, which you waited till they finished. When you added people as friends. Which network were you in at the time. What browser/system/device were you using. How fast was your internet. How much battery you had. How often are you using their site, how it changes through the day and through the year, have you changed your timezone.
Each of these is insignificant and noisy, but when aggregated it allows 99.9% predictions on stuff like "who are you voting for", "how much do you earn", "are you expecting a child", "are you buying a house/car/trip/anything significant soon", "how's your health", "are you sleeping well", "where do you live", "are you on a trip", etc.
People get ads about health issues before they realize they have these issues, because the Algorithm knows better.
When you have enough noisy uncertain data it doesn't matter that it's uncertain and noisy.
>the ultimate harm: the growing power of tech giants willing to use their control over critical information infrastructure to compete with democratically elected lawmakers for societal dominance.
i thought that the "democratically elected lawmakers" are there to carry on the will of the people, not to dominate. And if instead you accept the system of societal dominance in principle, then does it really that matter who is going to dominate? I mean following the Churchill it becomes "now we're just negotiating".
Well there is no human institution on earth that runs without a domination and obedience based hierarchy. The internet has caused a bit of confusion because it initially didnt resemeble a hierarchy but hierarchical structures tend to emerge in complex systems or such systems tend to just collapse.
Internet is the first tool in history which allows to run complex systems without hierarchy - the hierarchy is a necessary optimization resulting from the physical limitations of information and control flows, and the internet removes those limitations.
>hierarchical structures tend to emerge in complex systems
one can say that many observed complex systems emerge as the way to facilitate/implement/support the hierarchy.
That is absolutely not true, regardless of what the hiers of Hobbes would like you to believe. Co-ops, mutual aid societies, some of the Kibbutzen, and various anarchistic communes have operated in non-hierarchical ways
You can debate the effectiveness of these arrangements; it’s clearly true that hierarchical orgs are the norm, and they have a tendency to expand via force. But to say that there is “no human institution on earth” that doesn’t use hierarchies and dominance is just not true.
Irrelevant. They said “no institution on earth” not “no meaningful institution”. The original statement is provably wrong, the latter is debatable given the larger co-ops, the Rojava, and one’s definition of “microscopic”.
And they will never survive against traditional hierarchical organizations that come bearing force. Like, say, any government on the planet. They are only allowed to exist within a frameworks of domination. They would never survive at scale and against an organized opponent.
While it's obviously true that even representative governments have been fairly eager to crush anarchist regions whenever they crop up, you are being way too broad in describing the past and the potential future.
History is littered with "never"s that eventually happened. Monarchies, aristocracy, slavery, feudalism, serfdom, empire, mercantilism, all would "never" be replaced ... until they were. Even three centuries ago the idea that we'd be discussing how representative democracies might react to the existence of an anarchistic commune would be an absurd conversation, just not in the way that you might think it is. Not too long ago to be a republican was to be unbelievably radical[0], now it's the majority position for the post-industrial world.
Furthermore, arguably there are plenty of cases of less hierarchical organizations beating out more hierarchical ones. This commonly crops up in military conflicts with decentralized decision making trouncing strict hierarchical militaries, usually in the form of guerilla warfare. I would also argue that the (so far) triumph of representative democracy and capitalism over feudalism and monarchy as a triumph of the less hierarchical over the more hierarchical.
Does that mean that anarchism will come? Heavens no. I would not deign to try and predict such chaotic things as revolutions and forms of government. The transition from monarchy to republic was chaotic and often unplanned, even by the very men and women who mounted the barricades to topple the old forms of government. But I would absolutely not be so confident to say "always" and "never", those statements are far too certain about an unpredictable process.
0 - In the early days of the French Revolution even Robespierre was opposed to toppling the monarchy and replacing it with a republic, and he was never exactly a moderate at any point in his life. The overton window on republicanism has moved a lot in a few centuries.
Mercantilism is certainly dead as a door nail. I can point to all the specific policies recommended by the mercantilists, but I think the most important thing is that mercantilism was about hoarding gold bullion. That is absolutely not the basic economic goal of many (if any) nations right now.
>"Early in the pandemic, for example, Apple and Google refused to adapt their operating systems to host contact tracing apps developed by public health authorities and supported by elected officials."
Their linked source actually says the two companies "refused to open their technology to governments pushing for centralized data storage, a strategy they considered vulnerable to state snooping."
Agreed TFA is misleading. Apple and Google refused to allow governments to track individuals through exposure notification apps and forced client-side, privacy-preserving notifications. I’d imagine HN would have supported the Apple/Google approach where everything’s local and anonymous rather than what many governments initially proposed where identity and/or location was logged by the apps. (I also agree that privacy-preserving exposure notifications are better than invasive tracking ones, especially in the US where the citizenry expects a right to privacy)
Source: ran the team that developed one of the first US state exposure notification apps based on EN Express, the protocol to which the linked source is referring.
>"Early in the pandemic, for example, Apple and Google refused to adapt their operating systems to host contact tracing apps developed by public health authorities and supported by elected officials."
I am one of the last people to defend Google and/or Apple, but in this case they just didn't weaken their existing guidelines for states to snoop the data of their citizens. A hypothetical contact tracing app that would have met the guidelines would have had no problems at all.
Great article, but the author puts too much hope in regulation. While I believe that new laws will help, the solution must ultimately come from new technologies, platforms, and protocols.
The kind of information extraction that these companies engage in is enabled by the way we built the internet, we could have chosen different paths and still can.
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[ 1.8 ms ] story [ 70.6 ms ] threadAll that they can get for sure is that you know someone.
That's way more limited compared to all of your thoughts likes dislikes beliefs location family members pets, etc that people share when logged in.
My point is that we complain about Facebook stealing our data but then log in to Facebook and freely give it to them.
Instead of waiting for the govt or some big regulatory entity to slap Facebook we can do it ourselves and just delete Facebook.
Why do you think people don't just do that?
I deleted FB, Insta and Twitter, and lost nothing. My life got better.
That's all they know for sure.
it's something but not much.
"Did Jane attend <event>?"
"Do you work with Jane an FooCorp?"
etc etc etc
Each of these is insignificant and noisy, but when aggregated it allows 99.9% predictions on stuff like "who are you voting for", "how much do you earn", "are you expecting a child", "are you buying a house/car/trip/anything significant soon", "how's your health", "are you sleeping well", "where do you live", "are you on a trip", etc.
People get ads about health issues before they realize they have these issues, because the Algorithm knows better.
When you have enough noisy uncertain data it doesn't matter that it's uncertain and noisy.
i thought that the "democratically elected lawmakers" are there to carry on the will of the people, not to dominate. And if instead you accept the system of societal dominance in principle, then does it really that matter who is going to dominate? I mean following the Churchill it becomes "now we're just negotiating".
>hierarchical structures tend to emerge in complex systems
one can say that many observed complex systems emerge as the way to facilitate/implement/support the hierarchy.
You can debate the effectiveness of these arrangements; it’s clearly true that hierarchical orgs are the norm, and they have a tendency to expand via force. But to say that there is “no human institution on earth” that doesn’t use hierarchies and dominance is just not true.
History is littered with "never"s that eventually happened. Monarchies, aristocracy, slavery, feudalism, serfdom, empire, mercantilism, all would "never" be replaced ... until they were. Even three centuries ago the idea that we'd be discussing how representative democracies might react to the existence of an anarchistic commune would be an absurd conversation, just not in the way that you might think it is. Not too long ago to be a republican was to be unbelievably radical[0], now it's the majority position for the post-industrial world.
Furthermore, arguably there are plenty of cases of less hierarchical organizations beating out more hierarchical ones. This commonly crops up in military conflicts with decentralized decision making trouncing strict hierarchical militaries, usually in the form of guerilla warfare. I would also argue that the (so far) triumph of representative democracy and capitalism over feudalism and monarchy as a triumph of the less hierarchical over the more hierarchical.
Does that mean that anarchism will come? Heavens no. I would not deign to try and predict such chaotic things as revolutions and forms of government. The transition from monarchy to republic was chaotic and often unplanned, even by the very men and women who mounted the barricades to topple the old forms of government. But I would absolutely not be so confident to say "always" and "never", those statements are far too certain about an unpredictable process.
0 - In the early days of the French Revolution even Robespierre was opposed to toppling the monarchy and replacing it with a republic, and he was never exactly a moderate at any point in his life. The overton window on republicanism has moved a lot in a few centuries.
I think that one is still wholly dominant. Personal initiative will always win.
The will of the people is supposed to dominate.
> And if instead you accept the system of societal dominance in principle, then does it really that matter who is going to dominate?
Yes, obviously. You're oversimplifying if you come to any other answer to that question.
Their linked source actually says the two companies "refused to open their technology to governments pushing for centralized data storage, a strategy they considered vulnerable to state snooping."
https://www.politico.eu/article/google-apple-coronavirus-app...
Source: ran the team that developed one of the first US state exposure notification apps based on EN Express, the protocol to which the linked source is referring.
I am one of the last people to defend Google and/or Apple, but in this case they just didn't weaken their existing guidelines for states to snoop the data of their citizens. A hypothetical contact tracing app that would have met the guidelines would have had no problems at all.