[HN Gopher] Class action against Oracle's worldwide surveillance...
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Class action against Oracle's worldwide surveillance machine
Author : trasz
Score : 366 points
Date : 2022-08-23 14:42 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.iccl.ie)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.iccl.ie)
| mistrial9 wrote:
| on a related note - I picked up a ten year old Mac laptop here in
| California, let the Chrome browser update itself so HTTPS will
| work, did a google search for a research paper PDF, and at the
| bottom of the search page it clearly said -- CityName,ZipCode
| based on your last activity. Login (the city and zip where I live
| and sometimes use a Google chromebook for YouTube)
|
| this older Mac laptop is not a google computer, no google account
| active, not logged in. That is a profile indicator, adding to my
| "dossier." How is this OK now?
| paxys wrote:
| When you visit a website it gets your IP address. It can look
| up a geolocation database to narrow down the IP to a
| city/region. You can use an anonymous VPN if you want to
| prevent this.
| vladvasiliu wrote:
| It seems to me that's pretty much the "current" location, since
| it's the "last used location to call google", which you just
| did when you did your search.
| rblatz wrote:
| Isn't that just IP Geolocation? That has been common place for
| at least a decade.
| dont__panic wrote:
| If you're using Chrome, you shouldn't be complaining about
| surveillance. That browser literally identifies everything you
| do on the internet with a single ID, fed directly to Google. At
| that point I don't think your IP geolocation is the largest
| infringement of your personal privacy.
| billsmithaustin wrote:
| Are we really referring to data records as dossiers now? I think
| of a dossier as a record of things like suspected infidelity or
| membership in a dangerous political group. Do credit ratings and
| purchase history really rate as a dossier?
| hedora wrote:
| Based on the information in the article, Oracle profiles
| provide enough information to uncover infidelity and membership
| in political groups. In particular, they track purchase
| history, physical location and online telemetry.
|
| Their marketing information explicitly says they use the above
| to build social graphs of consumer profiles. You'd have to be
| pretty paranoid to prevent that from linking you to your
| hypothetical mistress and militia buddies.
|
| You'd need to not carry a phone, pay with cash, stay masked
| (that's easy now, I guess) and avoid using a car with a built
| in cell modem or legible license plates. If Cory Doctorow is to
| be believed, gait tracking is also a thing now, so rotate
| through walking with thumb tacks and rocks in one or the other
| shoe.
|
| Even then, you're still thoroughly in Death Note territory
| where you'll accidentally feed a few (information theoretic)
| bits of information to the database every once in a while.
|
| Also, if you follow all my advice, this XKCD will apply to you:
| https://xkcd.com/1105/
|
| So, to answer your question, yes.
| kleiba wrote:
| I don't own any kind of mobile device, and many, many times in my
| life have I gotten the raised eyebrows with a puzzled "you as a
| computer scientist don't have a phone??". I usually I don't say
| it out loud but in my head the answer is always " _because_ I am
| a computer scientist I don 't have a phone".
|
| I've often wondered why I'm in such a tiny minority even among my
| CS peers...
|
| Then again, at least over here in Europe, new cars will
| mandatorily have tracking devices built in, so perhaps my whole
| effort was kinda moot to begin with.
| jahewson wrote:
| I'm doubtful about this lawsuit. Talk of "dossiers" is extremely
| hyperbolic.
|
| For those not familiar with it, Oracle's data platform is
| effectively a supermarket, stocking the freshest data indexed by
| "audience" - behavioural interest groups. This data comes from
| "data providers" - companies who hold data on the behaviours of
| specific audiences and (are supposed to) have the right to sell
| it on. They are paid a commission on each sale.
|
| Once you understand this then the lawsuit makes less sense - it's
| like suing Safeway because you don't like the ingredients of
| Cheez-Its. Now, there's more to it than that, of course, but
| "some data providers in the marketplace may have issues" is very
| different from "Oracle has lawless stack of 5bn of dossiers".
| hedora wrote:
| If a picture of Larry Ellison in front of a thirty foot screen
| with the title "Oracle Data Cloud: 5 billion consumer profiles
| in database; largest consumer identity graph in the world"
| isn't enough evidence that they're storing and providing access
| to consumer dossiers, then what would be?
| jahewson wrote:
| Lol, that's Larry's marketing material. Database = store
| shelves. Likewise Safeway has thousands of products on its
| shelves - they don't make any of them, not even the ones with
| their brand on.
| hedora wrote:
| So, the defense is that he's lying about having access to
| illegal goods, but selling them anyway.
|
| I went down to Safeway yesterday, and bought a kilo of
| cocaine. It turns out it was ground up sudafed and talcum
| powder.
|
| The cops were like "lolz. that's all on you; it's just how
| they market these days".
| jahewson wrote:
| Huh? He's just a CEO talking-up his product. Safeway has
| exclusive deals nowhere else has! Kind of... it's
| marketing spin but it's not a lie.
|
| Also having the same data in a database wouldn't
| necessarily be illegal, but it would be useless as
| behavioural data ages-out after 90 days or less.
| hedora wrote:
| His _definitely illegal_ product, based on the long list
| of violated laws in the article.
| jahewson wrote:
| Well, no that's for the court to decide. And it's a civil
| suit so no illegality here. This suit takes a very
| creative interpretation of California privacy law, let's
| look at one representative cause for action:
|
| > Oracle also collects minute details about Plaintiffs'
| and Class Members' offline activities, including their
| brick-and-mortar purchases and location information. By
| its very nature, Plaintiffs and Class members cannot be
| aware of or consent to this conduct.
|
| This is exactly what I mean by suing Safeway because of a
| problem with Cheeze-Its. Aptly in this example the actual
| entity collecting and selling your data could be a
| grocery store - That's who you should sue if you're
| bothered by, you know, them selling your data.
| t0mas88 wrote:
| You're correct that the data comes from data providers. What
| you may not know is how both Oracle and Salesforce implemented
| these products: They create a common identifier and copy all
| the audiences / attributes from the data providers in to the
| Oracle / Salesforce data cloud.
|
| So they indeed did not collect most of the data themselves
| (although Oracle owns a few of the biggest data sources...),
| but they are the ones that have a central database with 5
| billion+ identifiers in it and tens of thousands of attributes
| for each identifier. So they are really not as innocent as you
| suggest they are.
|
| When someone wants to use the data, that customer pays Oracle.
| So it's Oracle selling the dataset. That they then pay a fee to
| some of the data sources really doesn't change that. Especially
| not since they own several of the data sources themselves.
| j-bos wrote:
| Do you work for Oracle?
| 3np wrote:
| Look at the video in the link. It's straight from the horse's
| mouth.
| jahewson wrote:
| It's marketing fluff. I doubt Larry has any idea how these
| products work.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| Fascinating; I never realized Oracle is such a massive player in
| that space. Ugh :(
| nemothekid wrote:
| I think the lawsuit is probably referring to BlueKai which was
| a company Oracle bought in 2014. I'm not even sure if they are
| the biggest third party DMP out there
| ethbr0 wrote:
| 1. Is it profitable?
|
| 2. Is it evil?
|
| Then yes, Oracle is a big player in that space.
| Traubenfuchs wrote:
| Insulin pricing in the USA?
| zdragnar wrote:
| > 2. Is it evil?
|
| You're making the mistake of anthropomorphizing the lawn
| mower. It's not evil, it just is.
| thatguy0900 wrote:
| Not really fitting. Oracle is just a group of people. If
| you take away the rider, a lawnmower is still a lawnmower.
| If you take away the employees oracle entirely ceases to
| exist. You can't hand wave their moral responsibilities as
| humans.
| sockaddr wrote:
| Yes, but the lawnmower was designed and is being pushed by
| a human (Ellison), no?
|
| Then one could say it's an evil tool? It's really not that
| much of a stretch to anthropomorphize things when we view
| tools as extensions of ourselves.
| mintplant wrote:
| Ellison isn't pushing the lawnmower, he _is_ the
| lawnmower.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5170246
| sophacles wrote:
| What's the lawnmower here? The corporation? But
| corporations are people, so how is treating a person like a
| person anthropomorphification?
| mohaine wrote:
| You really need to watch the video but TL:DR is that
| Oracle isn't per say evil, it just chases profit like a
| lawnmower cuts grass.
|
| If you get your foot cut off by the lawnmower, it isn't
| the lawnmowers fault as it wasn't out to get you, just
| out to cut grass.
|
| The same is 'true' of Oracle wrt them chasing profit. If
| you stand between them and profit, that is your fault if
| you get hurt as you always know what Oracle is going to
| do in that situation.
| sophacles wrote:
| Oracle is people. Both in some abstract legal sense and
| in a literal sense: its a group of people doing things.
|
| As such they are accountable for their actions - what
| sort of utter stupidity is this "oh but since the word
| corporation is involved we don't need to hold people
| accountable" bullshit you are spewing?
| buscoquadnary wrote:
| For those curious check out the 3 minutes of this video.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=2601s
| sudden_dystopia wrote:
| Is it not run by people?
| mohaine wrote:
| Correct. Oracle doesn't care what comes after 1)
| petesergeant wrote:
| that seems like a pretty good definition of evil
| hristov wrote:
| Oracle is anthropomorphic. It is, after all, just a bunch
| of people. What Oracle does is done by people that hold
| various positions within Oracle.
| buscoquadnary wrote:
| The parent is referring to this talk:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=2601s
|
| Oracle is lawnmower, it doesn't hate you, it doesn't have
| feelings, Oracle is as mindless and soulless as a
| lawnmower, however instead of mowing the lawn it makes
| money.
|
| Oracle doesn't have feelings, it is for all intents and
| purposes the Borg.
| powerhour wrote:
| Except the Borg don't have individuality whereas the
| people at Oracle do. I'm tired of pretending that, say,
| individual human SEs are not responsible for their work
| because they're just doing what a corporation demands.
| josefx wrote:
| > Except the Borg don't have individuality whereas the
| people at Oracle do.
|
| Sadly we know that groupthink is a thing and that many
| people seek conformity over conflict and correctness. You
| can safely assume that anyone working for Oracle is a
| mindless Borg drone out for more money without any care
| what they destroy to reach that goal. They are still
| guilty as hell but from a general apathy and not some
| active choice to be evil.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Fine, you can try to hold the developers responsible..
| somehow.
|
| Except it won't mean anything. Because someone will just
| fill their shoes after they leave. There's enough money
| to make that possible. And in fact it's the companies
| doing the most icky things that have the most money to
| just go hire more. That's where the revenue firehose is.
|
| When I was at Google, it was internal culture for
| Googlers to raise a fuss about a lot of things all the
| time -- despite the company being an advertising company
| there was a general uneasiness about crossing various
| "lines in the sand". There was a very active internal
| dissent culture, on "memegen" and the weekly TGIF all-
| hands, and so on. It was broadly acceptible to stand up
| at TGIF and politely take Larry to task on some thing
| that was seen as crossing this line in the sand. It
| happened all the time.
|
| Over time the company just got better and better at
| evading responsibility to this pitchfork crowd. After
| all, they had investors to satisfy. And the "line in the
| sand" just got further and further out, and what was seen
| as "creepy" and "not Googley" and against company
| principles just got more and more watered down.
|
| And if you walked away from that (like I did, not that I
| was of any importance)? Google has plenty of money to go
| hire new SWEs.
|
| _The answer has to be regulation that sits above and
| beyond the corporations. Nationwide or global standards
| of behaviour, enforced by law, that set basic ground
| rules for what is permissible in the market. How we get
| there from here, I don 't know. Some jurisdictions have
| been better about this than others._
| pessimizer wrote:
| > Because someone will just fill their shoes after they
| leave.
|
| The fact that dictators are usually replaced by dictators
| doesn't mean dictators aren't actually the problem. This
| is akin to the common argument that other, bad people are
| also doing the same thing that I'm doing, therefore what
| I'm doing is good, or at least morally neutral.
|
| Just because there are people just as bad as you that can
| replace you doesn't make you not bad.
|
| > The answer has to be regulation that sits above and
| beyond the corporations. Nationwide or global standards
| of behaviour, enforced by law, that set basic ground
| rules for what is permissible in the market.
|
| We say this as if the institutions that would define and
| enforce this behavior aren't subject to the same self-
| interest as Google management. Soon, plenty of them will
| be ex-Google (and other tech) management, to which
| they'll return after delivering.
|
| What "we" need to do is dismantle and descope large
| institutions. But since there's really no "we" what we
| each need to do is protect ourselves from these
| institutions by creating smaller federated defensive
| institutions of narrower scope, and treating the Googles
| and the USAs of the world like the weather, or more
| accurately like natural disasters or invasive species.
| buscoquadnary wrote:
| I think you don't understand how Oracle works to put in
| perspective a 18th century Russian serf probably has more
| capability to influence his environment than does an SE
| at Oracle. You really need to look at the talk posted, an
| SE at Oracle is nothing more than a cog in a machine.
| Trust me the SE's at Oracle could do everything in their
| power to make some change happen in oracle and it would
| be similar to a gnat farting to try and change the
| direction a cruise liner is heading.
| zx85wes wrote:
| If I was Borg I would take offence
| hristov wrote:
| Sorry I did not realize the gp poster was referring to a
| meme.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| The 'lawnmower' is capitalism as a whole, not just
| Oracle.
|
| It is an incentive system which maximizes on only one
| kind of efficiency.
|
| Consumers and investors are not capable of making
| collective / aggregate market decisions on any criterion
| other than profit.
|
| Moral judgements play no part in it. Explicitly not so,
| in fact.
|
| The individual agents in this structure are merely
| transitory carriers of a larger overriding process. Even
| if as large as Oracle or Google or whatever.
|
| You could make Oracle go away but the logic remains. The
| hydra has many heads.
|
| And so here we are.
| clairity wrote:
| the conventional counter-argument to that is that
| anything we care about can be valued, which in turn can
| be monetized, so everything under (and including) the sun
| can be compared and optimized for in a decentralized way.
|
| that's much harder (and perhaps P=NP impossible) to do in
| practice for qualitative aspects of life (e.g., love,
| wonder, beauty, etc.), which is why we have such an
| imbalance of valuing things that are easier to value
| (food, machines, services, etc.).
| trasz wrote:
| >Oracle is anthropomorphic. It is, after all, just a
| bunch of people.
|
| And a human is just a bunch of cells?
| kaba0 wrote:
| 1. it is profitable? EOF
|
| Every big enough company is like that. They are the
| stereotypical paperclip machines. They only do something
| apparently moral thing if not doing that would impact
| profits.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| This is how we collectively got here: "This product doesn't work
| for me, I want something that does." We collectively asked for
| more product/service diversity, more on-demand personalization
| and lower prices and we got it.
|
| We need to accept that the attention/surveillance economy is a
| natural outcome of high volume personalized markets. I did my
| undergraduate thesis on "Nash equilibria to predict consumer
| decision making under uncertainty" under Dr. Bruce Lister WELL
| before machine learning was even a core field of Computer
| Science.
|
| People, individuals, you and me, demand increasing determinism
| from other stochastic humans so that we can better predict and
| manage our relationships with them. A corporation has the same
| instinct, so they are doing the reasonable thing and collecting
| data in order to predict the next state in the Markov Decision
| Process that is you.
|
| Every major technology (and some non-technology) corporation
| either has built or is building a similar system to optimize you
| for their system. People have chosen by a HUGE MARGIN to join
| these systems because the non-hidden benefits outweigh the hidden
| risks. For the people that recognize the externalities some are
| pushing back (like these lawyers), but most people don't even
| know this is happening and honestly don't care because you get
| benefits from it.
|
| The only thing shocking about this is that Larry said the quiet
| part out loud
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| What about the data being collected has relevance to
| "product/service diversity" "on demand personalization" and
| lower prices?
|
| Especially "lower prices"?
|
| This data doesn't help lower prices, and prices haven't
| lowered. Corporate profits are through the roof while wages for
| all but the top 10-20% have flatlined or gone down when
| adjusted for inflation/cost of living. Savings and home
| ownership rates are the lowest in half a century. Etc etc.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| I think there's two things here
|
| 1. It absolutely helped "lower" prices because you never pay
| anything for the services that are built around ad-networks
| from the start, specifically social media. Do you think 1.39
| billion people would pay $8 a month to use tik-tok (12BN
| rev/1.39B users)? No chance. The entire conceit of the
| consumer venture landscape since 2012 is: "How do you build a
| community on the back of VC money which forms the data source
| for your ad-network?"
|
| 2. There are certainly companies now that get the benefit
| from the data without "passing the savings on to consumers"
| but they are saving money in their costs.
| peteradio wrote:
| This seems less like people are demanding it, and more like
| people are being roofied.
| 331c8c71 wrote:
| The models are as good as their underlying assumptions.
| Economics is definitely guilty of pretending fancy (for a
| layman) mathematical models "prove" things and disregarding the
| messiness of the real life. You've shown it yourself by saying
| "the Markov Decision Process which is you".
|
| I've done both financial econ and biology/genomics and I by far
| prefer the latter as a field. It is not to say that biology
| research doesn't have flaws but at least everyone understands
| the mathematical models are only models.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| The thing is, the models are actually pretty predictive at
| this point and are only improving.
|
| Like scary predictive
|
| There is no "getting worse" for the mathematics of
| prediction. In fact we have people in this thread saying to
| actually behave randomly in order to fool the systems.
|
| So, you know, we actually figured out how to improve
| iteratively and it's increasing in speed of improvement of
| prediction
| 331c8c71 wrote:
| I don't dispute that. However the fact that predictive
| models work does not prove that people have choice and
| conciously choose to forego privacy. Look at apple/android
| there are huge scale effects/entry barriers at play so it's
| very hard for a more privacy-oriented competitor to emerge.
| Another thing is that people certainly don't understand how
| much data they provide and to what extent they are
| profiled.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| I don't think I'm being clear with my point
|
| It is possible to not be involved in the ad-economy,
| millions of people do it everyday. I would guess that
| most of these millions are old, illiterate, or are very
| poor, but you can do it without being any of those
| things.
|
| This population of people are not on the internet, they
| don't use credit cards, they don't have a cell phone.
| They work for cash, live in the same city they were born
| in etc..
|
| You and I are actively choosing not to live like that,
| when in fact it is a completely possible, reasonable way
| to live and by the way we have been living like that for
| basically all but the last few decades.
|
| Everyone has a choice.
| imchillyb wrote:
| > "We need to accept that the attention/surveillance economy is
| a natural outcome of high volume personalized markets."
| -@AndrewKemendo
|
| Hell NO we don't. YOU can accept the shitty surveillance. YOU
| can accept the personalized ads.
|
| Fuck off with that: We need to accept....
|
| What a load of pablum. We're not babes here mate, and you're
| not our trusted advisor.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| Great then do it!
|
| You can get out right now if you want. Yet here you are
| arguing with me on the internet and providing more data for
| the ad network.
| vesinisa wrote:
| Your comment makes little sense to me on many levels, but I
| strongly object to your assertion that "people have chosen by a
| HUGE MARGIN to join these systems". Oracle can not have
| possibly amassed consent from 5 billion individuals to mine
| data on them. People have certainly not opted-in for this kind
| of surveillance in exchange for "product diversity" or "lower
| prices." These objectionable consumer surveillance databases
| are being amassed and maintained regardless of whether they
| actually benefit the people in them or not.
| quinnjh wrote:
| What if i told you some of us dont read the _entire_ eula?
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| _Oracle can not have possibly amassed consent from 5 billion
| individuals to mine data on them_
|
| I would actually claim that not only did they consent, they
| did so in a legally binding way through the terms of service
| (that they didn't read).
|
| I'm as guilty as everyone else here, but the fact is there
| are options to keep yourself out of these systems if you want
| to - nobody is forcing you to use a credit card or be on the
| internet.
|
| Does it mean you will miss out on things that make life
| easier, faster, healthier, cheaper etc..? YES it does!
|
| That is entirely my point though. We are trading convenience
| and consumption for privacy willingly.
| perlgeek wrote:
| > I would actually claim that not only did they consent,
| they did so in a legally binding way through the terms of
| service (that they didn't read).
|
| Those 5 billion people don't all come from the same
| jurisdiction.
|
| Under GDPR, no consent for trading your data can come
| through an implicit, coerced action like consenting to
| terms of services.
|
| Under German law, clauses of terms of services are invalid
| if they aren't what a reasonable consumer would expect.
|
| > I'm as guilty as everyone else here, but the fact is
| there are options to keep yourself out of these systems if
| you want to - nobody is forcing you to use a credit card or
| be on the internet.
|
| I'd argue that having Internet access is quickly
| approaching the status of a human right (or should be), and
| buying things only is also getting increasingly common.
|
| Thing is, there doesn't _have_ to be this amount of data
| collection just to browse the Internet and buy things only.
|
| I'm also not sure if lots of companies having dossiers on
| me is actually improving my experience anywhere. It seems
| likely they'll just use it sell me crap that I don't really
| want or need, simply by them being very persuasive and me
| having limited will power.
| josephg wrote:
| I was in a cafe the other day. They had some QR code based
| ordering system. After we'd chosen what to order, the
| system asked for my phone number. Stupidly I entered my
| number correctly. I can't prove that they sold my data, but
| I've gotten about 3-4 spam texts via imessage since I was
| in the cafe.
|
| > Does it mean you will miss out on things that make life
| easier, faster, healthier, cheaper etc..? YES it does!
|
| I don't think having my data passed around between
| multinationals is ethical, necessary or value adding in any
| way. At least not value adding to me! The cafe experience
| was totally fine when I ordered via a menu. And it works
| fine via our phones without the part where my privacy data
| gets sold to soulless companies for a few pennies.
|
| Honestly I think the EU has the right of it in banning this
| stuff outright. Its disgusting, non consensual and
| sociopathic. Everyone involved should be ashamed of
| yourselves.
| JacobThreeThree wrote:
| How can the customer demand anything with respect to
| surveillance if it's not clear that it's happening? Just
| because a certain advertising mechanism is more effective than
| others doesn't mean that consumers are "demanding" that
| advertising mechanism, especially if the data collection part
| of it is obfuscated from the consumer.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| I don't claim that people are demanding advertising
|
| I am claiming the people demand free/cheap products that fit
| their exact demands to be immediately delivered to them
|
| The way that companies are solving "free or cheap" is by
| having someone else pay for the service on your behalf. There
| are only a few mechanisms for this that are "win-win"
| theoretically and advertising is the one that is the most
| popular.
|
| In order for advertising to be useful it needs to be targeted
| and attributable and it has to be fungible across
| advertisers. Therefore if you want to be able to create an
| ad-market to keep your product free/cheap then you need to
| offer the highest granularity predictions for your
| advertising dollar - hence why we have extremely granular ad
| systems.
| brutusborn wrote:
| I love the part where he said "This is scaring the lawyers.
| They're shaking their heads and covering their eyes"
|
| Makes you wonder how it got past the PR team.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| Unlike most public corporations, Larry is Dictator for Life
| so I don't think he has to ask anyone for permission to do
| anything.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _Makes you wonder how it got past the PR team._
|
| Because in most companies the PR team is near the bottom of
| the list of influence. Only slightly above coders. Certainly
| well below bean counters, salesfolk, and anyone with a TLA.
| monksy wrote:
| The problem is that this is not a clear and present trade off
| that people can consent to. When choosing an object on
| collecting data, lets go with a fairly noxious and bad example
| BMW, you can't have a clear understanding about how you
| accelerate, your speed, pictures from your car, etc are
| valuable.
|
| At the time of purchase you are coerced into a market where
| things are unequally priced out, and even if it's told to you
| that you must accept that you give out your data. It doesn't
| make it clear about how far that goes, how it's stored, who
| it's sold to and correlated with etc.
|
| "The user has to accept this" is a very authoritarian thing for
| you to say and to blame everyone here for.
| bitwrangler wrote:
| Many people don't realize that Larry started with CIA and they
| were his first customer. Maybe his endgame is related to his
| beginning.
|
| https://gizmodo.com/larry-ellisons-oracle-started-as-a-cia-p...
| drexlspivey wrote:
| Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphising Larry Ellison.
| tomxor wrote:
| Thank you, this made me laugh IRL :D
| beckingz wrote:
| Larry "paperclip maximizer" Ellison
| exhilaration wrote:
| For the uninitiated, that's from this video of Bryan Cantrill
| (from Sun), link goes to the right time:
| https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc?t=33m1s
| riazrizvi wrote:
| The endgame of having total access to peoples' private behavior
| to manipulate them for profit is not a CIA game. To my
| knowledge it's not a pattern to do a short stint in intel and
| then go into business to exploit the information you gathered.
| No this is different. This is the essence of the threat to
| democracy and to widespread economic opportunity, since it
| creates and insurmountable advantage for people with this
| information. Historically, power sharing doesn't survive when
| the balance of power is lost between narrow interests and the
| broader population. That balance is a rarity which is why so
| many civilizations throughout history settled into broadly
| 'disincensitivized' populations. If the US loses it, it would
| lose what makes it special.
| specialist wrote:
| Jill Lepore's book "If Then" covers the "why" justifying the
| early demographic modeling (friends of friends, social
| networks).
|
| Military types wanted to predict revolutions. Political types
| wanted to target voters. Marketing types wanted consumers.
|
| https://www.amazon.com/If-Then-Simulmatics-Corporation-
| Inven...
| TheRealDunkirk wrote:
| And running those databases were Sun machines. Sun's CEO, Scott
| McNealy's famous comment, "You have no privacy; get over it,"
| is all the more ominous in light of this. The fact that
| corporations now have all the data on us just brings them into
| parity with the government.
|
| https://www.wired.com/1999/01/sun-on-privacy-get-over-it/
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| What a non American saying. We should exile this traitor.
| tpmx wrote:
| So that's who Eric Schmidt (Google/Alphabet CEO/chairman
| 2001-2017) learned this from. He was at Sun in various high-
| level leadership positions in 1983-1997.
|
| "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know,
| maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place" - Eric
| Schmidt (2009)
|
| https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/12/google-ceo-eric-
| schmid...
| titzer wrote:
| > into parity with the government.
|
| lol, as it if were some kind of competition. The reality is
| the surveillance state knows no real boundaries. The federal
| intelligence agencies can get whatever they want with little
| or no friction. Most requests don't even rise to the level of
| a NSL, which is the "sudo" of "give me all your data on X".
| In reality there is a range of cooperative behaviors anywhere
| from _a payments system_ to _wholly owned subsidiary_ to
| warrant. The government loves the innovation that the private
| surveillance market has come up with. It 's a buffet at this
| point.
| jotm wrote:
| The German gov won't give you your tax return if you don't tell
| them your current place of residence (abroad, in DE they know
| everything) lol
|
| But yeah, private companies on top of governments is even worse.
| alexb_ wrote:
| If privacy is so obviously dead, why stay private? If the battle
| is You vs Team of Engineers Specifically Trying To Spy On You you
| are always going to lose. So why even try?
| j-bos wrote:
| Because wars are lost when the other side gives up.
| aprdm wrote:
| I interviewed at Oracle sometime ago, and the product was
| basically tracking where your eye ball was focusing.. pretty
| crazy times we live in.
| gordaco wrote:
| This is already deployed. My current employer (at least, my
| local branch) has some not-mandatory-but-actually-yes-mandatory
| "training" followed by tests where they do track your eyeball
| and you are penalised if you look away (they also disallow alt-
| tabbing, screenshots and many other basic operations). They are
| losing a lot of people (including me, very soon) and this is
| one of the main reasons, but I don't think they have any
| intention to stop, since this shit has probably been decided
| several levels above the line managers, who are the ones seeing
| the mess but don't have much decision power about it.
|
| I'd like to think that this insanity will be stopped relatively
| soon, since tech workers are still in high demand, so people
| mostly don't put up with this shit. For the vast majority of
| workers, who don't have that luxury, I don't think they will be
| able to get rid of this kind of software.
|
| Related link from two days ago: an article from Cory Doctorow
| describing workplace surveillance or "Bossware":
| https://doctorow.medium.com/workplace-surveillance-is-
| coming....
| wolongong942 wrote:
| So does anybody know from where they are collecting this data?
| dogman144 wrote:
| BlueKai/pixel tracking iirc is a core part, the rest of it is
| stuff like Bluetooth receivers on top of grocery isles while
| you have your Bluetooth on, etc.
| Calvin02 wrote:
| - Public records (property records, dmv, etc.) - Financial
| institutions/companies (plaid, banks, credit bureau, mortgage
| providers, reward credit cards, automotive loan providers,
| etc.) - Loyalty program (macy/nordstorms, safeway, vons,
| walgreens, etc.) - Warranty providers (appliance & car warranty
| registrations), etc..
|
| People and media get riled up about Google and Facebook but the
| data that they have on me is pretty coarse and pales in
| comparison to what DataLogix, which is a company that Oracle
| acquired, and other companies have been able to build. We are
| not rational when it comes to these arguments.
| rad_gruchalski wrote:
| If they have data of 5 billion people, they must buy it
| actively from every middleman.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| We always respond to the evil we see, not the evil unseen and
| looming in the shadows.
|
| If you're about to get stung by a scorpion then deal with
| that before dealing with the lion slowly stalking you.
| bogwog wrote:
| Well if the goal is better privacy laws, it doesn't really
| matter who the pitchforks are pointed at since the law
| affects everyone.
| Calvin02 wrote:
| That's fair but arguably the value exchange of searching
| for something and being served ads for that is
| significantly better than me signing up for a mortgage and
| now being bombarded by ads for life insurance.
|
| Alternative narrative: Google and Facebook are directly
| threatening news media while DataLogix isn't and therefore
| doesn't get the attention that it ought to get.
| nabakin wrote:
| My question as well
| buscoquadnary wrote:
| Oracle is a law firm that has an engineering department attached,
| and they specialize in proctology.
| trasz wrote:
| One of the defining moments in my view of the industry was
| discovering, some 10 years ago, that Oracle's client side
| library are still using 8-character function names internally.
| blantonl wrote:
| _and they specialize in proctology_
|
| ooof
| forinti wrote:
| I think of Oracle as a marketing company with a technology
| department.
| neodypsis wrote:
| Isn't it the case that most of their technology nowadays
| comes from acqui-hiring?
| neodypsis wrote:
| Here's a list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquis
| itions_by_Oracle
| ThePadawan wrote:
| I'm going to have to ask you to put quotes around
| "engineering".
|
| Had a colleague that interned at Oracle and was proud of how he
| learned to make better Powerpoint slidesets there.
|
| His tips included "Always make slide headings full sentences
| including full stops". He would rename a slide titled "System
| architecture overview" to "The system architecture is
| distributed in four microservices.". (This would be above the
| chart showing the actual architecture)
|
| Turns out Oracle execs famously print out slidesets, don't read
| them, but _do_ read the headings, so this was what he had to do
| to ... "succeed".
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > I'm going to have to ask you to put quotes around
| "engineering".
|
| I did my PhD at Oracle. We got several top-tier papers from
| the work we did. There's excellent engineering at Oracle.
| ThePadawan wrote:
| Fair do's.
|
| I based my half-joking statement on knowing exactly one
| colleague who worked at Oracle who couldn't program his way
| out of a wet paper bag, but could give you a 2-hour
| presentation with encompassing 80 slides on how many
| consultants you should hire to investigate the role of
| paper bags in your company.
| deltree7 wrote:
| Yeah, Oracle built some of the best Database and
| Datawarehouses and kicked serious ass. There is a reason it
| powered almost all fortune 500 companies in the 90s to
| pretty much 2015.
| debug-desperado wrote:
| Wow, that's the exact opposite advice I got doing an
| internship for an oil company a decade ago. They emphasized
| shorter (and hidden + animated bullet) points so that
| audience has to listen and engage with you, the presenter.
| Otherwise they just read your slides and put their brain in
| park.
|
| I'd take the oil companies suggestions to heart, not
| Oracle's.
| toast0 wrote:
| Better communication to your audience is an important
| engineering skill. Although I don't think headings should
| universally be full sentances, having the top level detail
| could be useful: System Architecture - Four Microservices
| could be much more useful than just System Architecture.
| ThePadawan wrote:
| That's not a full sentence that ends in a full stop, so he
| wouldn't let that fly.
|
| (I'm only pointing out that absurdity, I agree that there
| is a lot of flexibility to make slides appeal to different
| audiences)
| yazzku wrote:
| That presentation is utterly disgusting. We are people, not
| consumers to be spied on.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| maybe better to hate the game more than the individual players
| [deleted]
| perlgeek wrote:
| I have enough hate in me to hate both.
| peteradio wrote:
| Is that what you say when Dennis Rodman throws Pippen into
| the stands? This is a thread about a lawsuit after all, the
| games rules have apparently been violated.
| throwaway0asd wrote:
| Potential loss of privacy is inherent upon any data driven
| economy generally or use of centralized database specifically
| unless there are specific laws in place to guarantee privacy
| protections that provide a clear path to enforcement with
| devastating penalties.
|
| You have to incentivize businesses, as data storage entities, by
| destroying their financial solvency upon the face of privacy
| violations or privacy will always remain a discarded nuisance
| much like accessibility.
| fartcannon wrote:
| How about publicly shaming the developers who wrote the code to
| make this possible?
|
| Seems only fair, since they voluntarily shared ours private
| details.
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| How about shaming the advertisers who use these services?
| They're the ones who are paying for these systems to be
| developed.
| sillystuff wrote:
| Apparently some of them see no reason that they should feel
| shame. See comments on this article from yesterday. A person
| who used to work at Google in the Adwords group comments
| extensively on the thread. It was eye opening for me.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32549604
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32552749
|
| Edit: Note, they have edited some of their comments like
| their previous response to a comment, "Could it be that you
| can not understand the harms because you actively took part
| in creating this reality? I know it's condescending, but it's
| also human nature. Nobody likes to acknowledge he is a part
| of something harmful, and to deal with this cognitive
| dissonance we can put on very powerful blinders." where the
| previous response was "lol (and something the the effect of,
| no I don't care)".
| throwaway0asd wrote:
| Hypocritically people bitch about intrusive data collection
| from governments and yet simultaneously give away the same
| data, and encourage others to do the same, and more to
| private companies knowing that data will be weaponized
| against them. As such it's almost impossible to take any
| opinion promoting commercial violations of privacy
| seriously.
| winternett wrote:
| When I go shopping, or even to my doctor now, I leave my phone in
| my car.
|
| I work very hard to not let my phone be required for as many
| transactions as possible, and write my most important and private
| thoughts by hand on paper instead of in my phone.
|
| People think I'm crazy and paranoid, but their cell phone is
| probably still tracking me along with store cameras or whatever
| other BS invasive companies can concoct (less accurately), so at
| least it's someone else's fault now, rather than being my own.
|
| I'll eagerly look forward to getting my $1.39 from the class
| action suits once the lawyers all get paid.
| jotm wrote:
| I have a work/comms phone and a home/media phone. Don't care
| about privacy from companies/etc, that doesn't actually affect
| me irl right now.
|
| People I know affect me and those who insist I have to answer
| within 10 minutes are the insane ones.
| kornhole wrote:
| You are not crazy nor paranoid. You are just ahead of others.
| Those of us who take the precautions have heard it or ask
| ourselves the same thing quite often. I no longer use a SIM
| with my phone running a custom OS. I pay cash and wear a mask
| in stores to thwart the facial recognition. None of this is an
| inconvenience to me but rather a more liberated way of life.
| [deleted]
| toast0 wrote:
| > I'll eagerly look forward to getting my $1.39 from the class
| action suits once the lawyers all get paid.
|
| If you sign up for the $1.39, that's an admission of using an
| Oracle product, which allows them to force you to do a
| licensing audit. I hope you don't have any old JREs.
| blantonl wrote:
| The joke about the $1.39 made me laugh, but it also made me
| wonder:
|
| At what point will there be a tipping point where the
| pitchforks come out and the general public's "patience" with
| regulation catching up to this crap begins to unravel and
| actual violence or "direct action" begins to occur against
| these actors?
|
| Because while we're focused on individual political officials
| actions as a distraction, these types of warehouses are getting
| bigger and bigger, making more and more money for the owners,
| and becoming used more and more for malicious activities.
| winternett wrote:
| The best way for us as individuals to regain power and
| protest over misuse and collection of our data is to
| defiantly and deliberately "corrupt" that ill gotten data...
|
| Go into really kinky sex shops and just browse around... Go
| to Chuck E Cheese and crash a kid's birthday party and jump
| in the ball pit (especially if you don't have kids). Buy
| diabetic socks, especially when you don't need them, or even
| lingerie for the opposite gender from Target. Host wild phone
| conversations with your friends in a nonsensical language,
| and do it as much as possible... Cover your front phone
| camera with black tape when it's not in use... Talk
| frequently about the opposite of what your real plans are
| directly into every microphone placed on every Internet
| connected device... Never use the same password you use on
| important resources for social media...
|
| Adopt a great new pseudonym, and never verify yourself on any
| of your social media accounts, they can't demand that info,
| they're not the Government.
|
| Hack the planet. :P
| gowld wrote:
| Banana699 wrote:
| > lingerie for the opposite gender
|
| There is... there is lingerie for men ??
| winternett wrote:
| Anything is possible in Pennsylvania... Trust me (worth
| the downvotes, and I don't really live in PA mind you) :P
| edent wrote:
| Yes? Boys aren't restricted to superhero underoos and
| boxer shorts you know!
| winternett wrote:
| Underoos! now that's a blast from the past!! Hah!
| Banana699 wrote:
| God I hate the internet.
| neodypsis wrote:
| That reminds me of AdNauseam: adnauseam.io
| throw10920 wrote:
| Fundamentally, AdNauseam's approach is the correct one:
| corrupted data is _far_ worse for adtech than missing
| data. Highly suggest installing AdNauseam, and then
| applying its ideas to your everyday life. Maybe
| occasionally buy things with friends ' credit cards, then
| pay them back in cash?
| winternett wrote:
| I've had my comments and posts here turned into comedic
| bits and skits many times by certain YouTube channels
| (ehem)... Never got credit or a check for any it though.
| :P
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _what point will there be a tipping point where the
| pitchforks come out and the general public 's "patience" with
| regulation catching up to this crap begins to unravel and
| actual violence or "direct action" begins to occur against
| these actors?_
|
| There is no public consensus on this. American voters are
| fine with free, ad-supported software. They're fine with
| surveillance in exchange for convenience.
|
| They likely don't understand the cost. Personally or
| systemically. But a combination of digital-privacy thought
| leaders (a) overlapping with communities embracing political
| nihilism, (b) experiencing a filter bubble where popular
| support is perceived where there is none and (c) having been
| corrupted (politically speaking) by crypto has stymied policy
| progress.
|
| There are no pitchforks. There is no angry mob. To the degree
| there is consensus overseas, it arises from nationalism with
| respect to security (India) or competitiveness (Europe).
| jrm4 wrote:
| Correct, and this is where full-throated advocacy for
| government intervention is necessary. At this stage, not
| even for a change in practice -- simply an across the board
| disclosure of what the practices are, trade
| secrets/capitalism/ etc be darned.
| tqi wrote:
| > They likely don't understand the cost. Personally or
| systemically.
|
| How would you explain the cost to someone? Most of the
| discourse seems to boil down to some mix of "it's creepy"
| and "it could be used for a nefarious purpose", which is
| not super convincing.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _how would you explain the cost to someone?_
|
| For most commercial surveillance, I can't. Provable harm
| from the Equifax breach remains unquantified. We're only
| beginning to discuss those data for _e.g._ Facebook and
| teenagers. To give analogy, we 're in the 1960s on the
| smoking-regulation timeline [1].
|
| [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3894634/
| pygy_ wrote:
| There's the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
|
| It is very concrete, but that would automatically
| alienate quite a few people...
| WorldMaker wrote:
| What was the cost of the Cambridge Analytica scandal to
| the average user?
|
| There were a lot of people in the data set, certainly,
| but how many can quantify damages?
|
| If anything the Cambridge Analytica scandal was
| (disturbing) "win" for privacy loss: a lot of the
| Cambridge Analytica demographics markers were baked into
| the Facebook ad platform and became standard ad
| demographics soon after. The Cambridge Analytica scandal
| as played out _looked like_ Facebook was stamping out bad
| privacy practices using its platform, but the real
| message was Facebook eliminating a competitor to their ad
| business by eliminating their access to Facebook 's data.
| Lucky for Facebook the PR mostly stuck with the face
| value of "stamping out bad privacy practices", but even a
| lot of the people that saw/realized it was simply
| Facebook eliminating a competitor have mostly shrugged
| and continued to use Facebook (though Facebook did add
| _some_ opt-outs at that much more modest uproar, versus
| all the loud thundering noise Cambridge Analytica got).
| pygy_ wrote:
| It may have influenced the result of the 2016 US
| presidential election.
|
| IIRC, the Trump used that data set to send targeted ads
| to ~90M independent and republican voters. Independents
| got ads attacking Clinton and emphasizing prominent Trump
| supporters. Republicans got turnout-oriented ads.
|
| Provided he won by less than 100k votes (and lost the
| popular vote), the cost to the median US citizen was
| likely quite large.
|
| I didn't know the same demographic markers had been baked
| into the platform. This is very concerning.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Cambridge Analytica had no way to buy Facebook ads, which
| were the primary platform of these micro-targeted ads
| during the campaign, specific to people in the gathered
| data they had without Facebook platform support. Facebook
| ads never had an API that you could just give it user IDs
| or emails and target them specifically (and one would
| hope that Facebook would eye any such ad campaign with
| suspicion even before scandals like Cambridge Analytica).
| Cambridge Analytica had to encourage Facebook to add most
| of its same demographic markers into the platform to pull
| that off. That's definitely one of those "it takes two to
| Tango" sort of things where if it wasn't in Facebook's
| platform, how did they target those ads in 2016?
|
| Certainly they cross-compiled that data with other ad
| systems and phone lists and who knows what else, but
| given the scandal with respect to that specific campaign
| was primarily about their micro-targeted Facebook ad
| buys, Facebook is still left culpable as the platform
| owner at the end of the day.
|
| But I'm of the belief that micro-targeted ads should be
| illegal in general, and all of the micro-targeting
| enabling ad platforms seriously questioned for what
| they've enabled in the last decade or so. The fact that
| they are generally acceptable and multi-billion dollar
| revenue generators is its own reminder of what this
| thread is about that the average person doesn't seem to
| care about all of these invasive data privacy issues.
| pygy_ wrote:
| I didn't know FB had been actively involved in the
| process, I thought they had just been criminally
| negligent regarding the amount of data third parties were
| allowed to gather.
|
| _> the average person doesn 't seem to care about all of
| these invasive data privacy issues._
|
| I know, anecdotally, I became half a pariah in my family
| for refusing to register and share pics of my kids on
| WhatsApp. That was after the FB purchase, but before they
| changed the terms of service. I didn't trust FB, and was
| ultimately proven right.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Semi-related to that, when Facebook did finally roll out
| it's opt out from certain ad demographics tools in I want
| to say 2018-ish they included a view of your own
| demographics (if you could find your way through
| Facebook's maze of Privacy Settings with many corridors
| all alike), a Slack I was in at the time and I went
| through all of our personal demographics and one lasting
| result of that conversation was renaming one of the
| channels to #friendsofexpats because "Friend of Expats"
| was the creepiest, almost threatening sounding
| demographic tag that we all seemed to share (among other
| creepy, almost threatening demographic tags that don't
| actually sound useful to non-evil advertising). Because
| that was memorialized in a channel name that one has
| stuck with me since.
| winternett wrote:
| > There are no pitchforks. There is no angry mob. To the
| degree there is consensus overseas, they arise from
| nationalist impulses with respect to security (India) or
| competitiveness (Europe).
|
| If only the "anti-vax" mob could have been motivated
| towards upholding Internet privacy... We'd perhaps have a
| far more relevant and meaningful protest in the U.S.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _if only the "anti-vax" mob could have been motivated
| towards upholding Internet privacy_
|
| They're a natural demographic! But connecting to them
| requires showmanship, crossing a partisan line for some,
| and bridging to the anti-Big Tech crowd. No easy work.
| sillystuff wrote:
| > There are no pitchforks. There is no angry mob.
|
| This is true. Even Snowden's revelations didn't have much
| effect outside of tech circles. US congress even got away
| with passing a law to retroactively make some of the
| revealed illegal spying on Americans legal. The public
| either does not care or feels impotent.
|
| Governments love corporate surveillance as it allows them a
| source of data without having to worry about scrutiny they
| _might_ face by collecting the data directly.
|
| It feels hopeless that surveillance capitalism will ever be
| able to be reigned in.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Snowden 's revelations didn't have much effect outside
| of tech circles_
|
| This is not true. There were lasting changes in public
| perceptions around the surveillance of Americans [1]. And
| bulk collection under the Patriot Act was repealed [2].
| That is far from complete, but it's also far from
| nothing.
|
| [1] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/06/04/how-
| america...
|
| [2] https://www.wyden.senate.gov/news/press-
| releases/wyden-prais...
| sillystuff wrote:
| Congress retroactively legalized some of the spying:
|
| https://sgp.fas.org/crs/intel/RL34600.pdf [PDF]
|
| The reforms to bulk data collection were immediately
| after the revelations.
|
| Congress has been continuing/expanding surveillance in
| the years since. But, perhaps not to the degree they
| would have without Snowden's revelations? I want to
| believe that Snowden's great sacrifice made lasting
| changes, but I don't think the evidence supports it.
|
| E.g.,
|
| > Congress extends patriot act section 702 spying powers
| (2018)
|
| https://www.zdnet.com/article/congress-demanded-nsa-
| spying-r...
|
| > Congress extends patriot act section 215 spying powers
| (2019)
|
| https://www.aclu.org/news/national-security/congress-
| just-te...
|
| > With practically no public notice and no public
| hearings, the House of Representatives passed the College
| Transparency Act (CTA) on Feb. 4, 2022, by slipping it
| into a much larger unrelated bill called the America
| Competes Act, intended to better position the United
| States to compete with China. (2022)
|
| > creation of a comprehensive data system that would
| include the personal information of every student
| enrolled in college or another higher education
| institution, and track them after their [sic] graduate.
|
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/04/04/congr
| ess...
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Congress retroactively legalized some of the spying_
|
| Extensions of SSSS 702 and 215 didn't roll back the
| reforms in the USA Freedom Act [1], which was a
| hodgepodge of intelligence reauthorizations and
| admittedly minor reforms. (But reforms nonetheless.)
|
| > _House of Representatives passed the College
| Transparency Act (CTA) on Feb. 4, 2022, by slipping it
| into a much larger unrelated bill called the America
| Competes Act_
|
| Anyone claiming CTA was slipped into the ACA wasn't
| watching the ball. I first heard about it around 2021
| [2], which was itself a re-introduction of an earlier
| bill. It went through discussions across two
| administrations. The only opposition was from higher ed,
| who didn't want the record keeping burden.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USA_Freedom_Act#Title_V
| I:_FISA...
|
| [2] https://www.cassidy.senate.gov/newsroom/press-
| releases/cassi...
| sillystuff wrote:
| > The only opposition was from higher ed, who didn't want
| the record keeping burden.
|
| That kinda makes my point.
|
| I appreciate that from your perspective I am being far
| too pessimistic. But, I do not see reason for optimism.
|
| Still, I hope it turns out that you are right.
| zeruch wrote:
| "It feels hopeless that surveillance capitalism will ever
| be able to be reigned in. "
|
| It will likely by some combination of: 1. starts to
| impact the 1% (e.g. Congresswoman Feinstein didn't care
| about privacy a whole lot until she found out the NSA may
| have been bugging HER, etc) 2. an active interest in
| counter-measures (up to and including not buying or
| dismantling IoT options; people are already on forums in
| growing numbers looking for 'dumb' appliances and looking
| to hoard car parts to keep the ICE cars rolling
| indefinitely if possible) 3. a second Cambridge
| Analytical with any measurable, discrete, bad outcomes
| that follow (e.g. someone uses breach data to stalk a
| person, a group of shareholders get fleeced [aka see 1])
|
| There is no silver bullet here in my view. A confluence
| of events will at some point likely hit critical mass and
| force it. Almost no one thought data sovereignty
| regulation would take off, but GDPR, CCPA, and a growing
| list of similars have proven that was a misstep on the
| part of tech to avoid a balkanized regulatory universe,
| but they simply could not agree to give up on iota of
| adtech dollars....so they will lose it by endless smaller
| cuts. The legal/compliance industry will reap those
| profits instead.
| bogwog wrote:
| > There is no public consensus on this. American voters are
| fine with free, ad-supported software. They're fine with
| surveillance in exchange for convenience.
|
| Is that true though? When Apple made tracking opt-in,
| pretty much everyone refused. I think that's a clear
| indicator that the overwhelming majority do want privacy,
| and if they're actually given a choice, most will probably
| take it.
|
| The issue about not understanding the cost is real, but
| that's not unprecedented. There was a time when most people
| didn't understand the cost of cigarettes and tobacco, but
| that problem was solved through government intervention.
|
| Edit: to clarify, I said the tracking is "opt-in", but it's
| not a default. iOS explicitly asks you to choose between
| tracking or no tracking. It does not assume any default.
| indigochill wrote:
| > When Apple made tracking opt-in, pretty much everyone
| refused. I think that's a clear indicator that the
| overwhelming majority do want privacy...
|
| Or it could be a clear indicator that people will leave
| the defaults where they are, which is why there have been
| figurative wars over getting a particular browser to be
| the default browser of an operating system.
| jamiek88 wrote:
| It actually asks you though when you install apps. No
| default selected you have to make a choice.
| fredophile wrote:
| > When Apple made tracking opt-in, pretty much everyone
| refused. I think that's a clear indicator that the
| overwhelming majority do want privacy, and if they're
| actually given a choice, most will probably take it.
|
| I've seen this or equivalent statements a lot in
| discussion related to privacy, tracking, and the ios
| ecosystem. However, I don't think the results show what
| you're saying they do. All I see is that people accept
| the default behaviour of their devices. Unfortunately,
| there's no mobile ecosystem where you can easily opt out
| of tracking to compare to.
| bogwog wrote:
| > All I see is that people accept the default behaviour
| of their devices.
|
| There is no default though. The popup gives you two
| options like "Ask not to track" and "Allow" with no way
| to dismiss it.
| bragr wrote:
| >Is that true though? When Apple made tracking opt-in,
| pretty much everyone refused. I think that's a clear
| indicator that the overwhelming majority do want privacy,
| and if they're actually given a choice, most will
| probably take it.
|
| That option already existed in the settings. People
| couldn't be bothered to go set it because they don't
| really care.
| Kalium wrote:
| > Is that true though? When Apple made tracking opt-in,
| pretty much everyone refused. I think that's a clear
| indicator that the overwhelming majority do want privacy,
| and if they're actually given a choice, most will
| probably take it.
|
| Is it? Or is it a clear indication that most people will
| stick with whatever the default option handed to them is?
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _When Apple made tracking opt-in, pretty much everyone
| refused. I think that 's a clear indicator that the
| overwhelming majority do want privacy_
|
| Americans want privacy. There isn't consensus around the
| acceptable level of tradeoffs [1][2].
|
| > _was a time when most people didn 't understand the
| cost of cigarettes and tobacco, but that problem was
| solved through government intervention_
|
| In 1964, the Surgeon General's Advisory Committee marked
| a turning point for smoking in America [3]. The Tobacco
| MSA was entered into in 1998 [4], by when most smokers
| recognized their habit as an addiction. The government
| intervention followed evidencing harm, public discussion
| and massive changes in public behavior. We are still in
| the first phase for ad-funded tech.
|
| [1] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/06/04/how-
| america...
|
| [2] https://netchoice.org/zogby-memo-to-interested-
| parties-ameri...
|
| [3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3894634/
|
| [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobacco_Master_Settleme
| nt_Agre...
| huhtenberg wrote:
| > Americans want privacy.
|
| They are also completely ignorant about practical aspects
| of it.
|
| Almost half of the US population is rocking Android
| phones.
| ksaj wrote:
| Of course giving the option to opt out without
| consequences will entice people to opt out. But what if
| the software stops working unless you pay for it after
| you opt out? That changes everything.
|
| Then the question is no longer "Am I okay with tracking
| if I can shut it off and everything's still the same,"
| but becomes "Am I okay with tracking if it means I don't
| have to pay for the software or service?"
| bogwog wrote:
| That's true. I think that will be the real test for the
| market.
|
| Appstores/marketplaces will need to clearly show which
| apps are free without tracking so that consumers are
| aware that there are privacy-respecting alternatives, and
| don't feel like they have no choice.
|
| However, there's also the issue that the definition of
| "tracking" and "privacy" is too vague. If Google or
| Facebook offered a paid service with privacy, I
| personally still wouldn't trust them to not collect data
| on me.
| cmroanirgo wrote:
| Why should people have to buy extra services for a non
| free piece of hardware just to remain ad free on that
| hardware? Apple is double dipping here (probably triple
| dipping if you also include AppStore fees and charges).
|
| People want to be able to own the things they buy,
| without further nonsense.
| ksaj wrote:
| It also doesn't help when companies try things that can
| produce relevant ads for a user without tracking the
| users themselves, and they get blocked at every turn.
|
| For example, Twitter allows you to prune a list of ad
| subjects. You can add and subtract to that list. This
| could effectively reduce the need for tracking, but
| people reflexively block the ad accounts, rendering any
| form of ad campaign ineffective.
|
| I'm not saying that's the answer, btw. It may be, or it
| may not be. I am saying though, that people are so used
| to blocking ads and not paying, that finding solutions to
| keep online companies viable is extraordinarily difficult
| without tracking.
|
| If Twitter turned around and told everyone who did that,
| that they have to pay for a subscription, they'd quickly
| go out of business.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Never.
|
| Because we've allowed media to become entertainment and the
| internet killed print, and as a society we've lost the
| ability to sway the population with anything approaching
| fact.
| mindslight wrote:
| The pitchforks are _already_ out, as part of the larger anti-
| technocratic /bureaucracy movement. Unfortunately, as that
| movement has gained popularity, its energy has been captured
| by Trumpism with its siren song of simplistic not-even-wrong
| answers. I'm not singling out Trumpism here, despite its
| seemingly exceptional virulence. Basically every political
| movement gets coopted and neutered this way in the US, once
| it gains enough popularity. There's money to be made, after
| all.
| hcmacro wrote:
| Worth Googling "Larry Ellison Trump" or "Safra Catz Trump"
| archildress wrote:
| I've thought about this many times, and my answer is: when
| there is a massive, at-scale leak of seriously disruptive
| personal information. Think Google search history, medical
| files, or databases of credit card transactions. When it
| takes enough peoples' lives off the normal track, people will
| finally be fed up.
| gowld wrote:
| eldaisfish wrote:
| The north american credit rating agencies have seen
| numerous leaks of immensely disruptive personal
| information. This happened so many times that there are
| talk show episodes about it.
|
| This happened. The vast majority of people do not care or
| do not have time to care.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| That already happened with the OPM breach in 2015 It
| seriously messed up people's credit, work life and daily
| lives. [0]
|
| No slow down at all of data gathering.
|
| There's been dozens of the exact kind you're describing and
| nobody cares [1].
|
| [0] https://www.asisonline.org/security-management-
| magazine/arti...
|
| [1] https://www.purdueglobal.edu/blog/information-
| technology/wor...
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Also the Equifax breach seriously messed up people's
| credit, work life, and daily lives.
|
| Given Equifax's _one job_ is to protect people 's credit
| you would have hoped they'd have gotten more than a slap
| on the wrist of a class action lawsuit. At the very
| least, you would have expected their clients (banks) to
| have had trust issues in remaining their clients and
| something of a long term impact on their revenue. (It's
| done nothing but grow its revenue since the data breach.)
| mulmen wrote:
| What's really rich about the Equifax breach screwing up
| people's credit is that Equifax also makes up the credit
| ratings. It's the corporate equivalent of "nice
| reputation you have there, would be a shame if something
| happened to it" type of protection racket. And before
| anyone accuses me of hyperbole remember that Equifax
| themselves call it "identity theft _protection_ ".
| zx85wes wrote:
| The outrage would only be temporary (again). And then
| things would go back to 'normal'
| npc54321 wrote:
| npc54321 wrote:
| Someone should leak everyone's nudes from google
| photos/iCloud etc.
|
| Including names and everything.
|
| That would wake people up.
| buscoquadnary wrote:
| They did it was the fappenning. The only difference is it
| happened to celebrities so the police got right on
| solving that.
| NetOpWibby wrote:
| This should be done to politicians that lobby for data
| brokerages. They only do the correct thing when
| personally affected.
| techsupporter wrote:
| John Oliver supposedly did just this earlier this year:
| https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-
| radio/2022/apr/11/john-ol...
|
| But there's been nothing on it since. Given how Oliver's
| show tends to run, I figure the topic will be back
| towards the end of the season.
| adolph wrote:
| Why leave it in a car instead of using a Faraday bag?
|
| Example product, no affiliation:
| https://www.amazon.com/Mission-Darkness-Non-Window-Faraday-P...
| kurupt213 wrote:
| Lol, $1.39 for your lifelong internet history being submitted
| in discovery
| alexashka wrote:
| You're paranoid in the sense that you're making a conscious
| effort to prevent someone else doing something that doesn't
| harm you in any way.
|
| Wait until you find out the shit they put into your water, your
| air, your food and your mind through mass media. You'll end up
| living in the woods if you take your trail of thought to its
| logical conclusion.
|
| So either you're already in the woods, and then you'd not be on
| HackerNews, or you're playing 'I'm making a difference by
| drinking through a metal straw that I carry around to save the
| planet'.
| namaria wrote:
| This defeatist "give up civilization or accept all it's evils
| as inevitable" is a very simplistic way of seeing it. Open
| society will always have a chance of improving as long as
| some people are paying attention to something that interests
| them and making some effort.
| winternett wrote:
| Every bit f action driven by paranoia counts towards fighting
| the system. I'm not at the metal straw point yet though... I
| drink bottled water.
| neodypsis wrote:
| Do you use Android?
|
| Edit: why the downvotes? It is a valid question.
| chasil wrote:
| I use de-Googled Lineage. I've been thinking about switching
| to /e/os on my next devices.
|
| My carrier still knows where I am, but Google does not. They
| might get a subtle hint if I connect to wifi.
|
| My default browser is Bromite, configured to open everything
| incognito by default.
| ByThyGrace wrote:
| Won't your carrier have some data-sharing agreement with
| Google or an intermediary/subsidiary/associated third
| party?
| winternett wrote:
| There is absolutely no reassurance of any privacy any
| more. Several VPN providers have been caught for leaking
| data to corporations over time as well. There are too
| many points where any software can be compromised, e.g.
| the APIs and libraries required by any application, to
| ensure proper privacy.
|
| It's wiretapping conducted on everyone using devices they
| purchased by private companies (that uphold no
| responsibility for proper use or securing the data)
| without any justifiable cause... God help you these days
| if you do warrant a wire tap, but at least the Government
| is usually a bit more secure and regulated concerning
| storage and use of that data.
| LegitShady wrote:
| The carrier's 100% sell the data
| t0bia_s wrote:
| /e/os does not have good reputation. Why not IodeOS?
| chasil wrote:
| I was not aware of this distribution. Thanks, I'll look
| it over.
|
| This gives me pause:
|
| "The source for the ROM is not publicly available, and
| proprietary apps are included."
| neodypsis wrote:
| What is the difference between Lineage and /e/os? Both seem
| to be a de-Google Android?
|
| I've tried Lineage before but it simply stopped working
| with some apps.
| chasil wrote:
| The /e/os distribution bundles MicroG, which Lineage has
| flatly refused to consider.
|
| MicroG pretends to be Google Mobile Services, allowing
| more apps to run. It requires signature-spoofing, which
| is a major architectural change to Android.
| driverdan wrote:
| I didn't downvote but it could be because you provided no
| context to your question.
| neodypsis wrote:
| I thought the context (parent comment) was enough. Parent
| is concerned to the point of leaving the phone before going
| to the doctor. It is well-known that Android (the non-de-
| Googled version) actively tracks your location [1].
|
| [1]: https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/security/a
| 138190...
| thedougd wrote:
| My understanding is that Google sells targeted advertising,
| not dossiers or personal data. Is that incorrect?
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Sort of.
|
| You can use Google to push targeted messaging to people
| based on the dossiers you collect.
|
| They don't sell the dossier, but they can leverage it. In
| many cases they can make inferences without the dossier.
| For example, you can target anti-opioid or anti-extremist
| materials at people identified as risks.
|
| For example, you can target every pregnant woman in a
| geography and score her risk of giving birth to a child
| with an opioid addiction. That child will cost a health
| insurer ~$2M, so targeted ads that convert to intervention
| are very high value.
|
| Where it gets weird is you can reverse engineer the dossier
| at scale. You can target very specific conditions without
| google "selling" that data to you. If you're a 50 year old
| male searching for divorce attorneys who moved 6 times, the
| context of searching for "pain killers" or "target range"
| may have a different context than if you're an 18 year old
| athlete booking a cabin in rural Maine.
| hilbert42 wrote:
| _" When I go shopping, or even to my doctor now, I leave my
| phone in my car."_
|
| I don't blame you, I go one step further, I use a rooted
| deGoogled phone with location defaulted to off and all apps
| with few exceptions such as browsers are specifically denied
| access to the internet. Even then I use multiple browsers for
| different jobs/sites with JavaScript defaulted to off. Oh, and
| I nearly forgot to mention the phone's VPN-type firewall.
|
| When I go shopping I mostly use cash even for large purchases
| say up to $1k or so (I'll actively go to an auto teller and
| withdraw cash first rather than use my cards). I keep online
| purchases to an absolute minimum and when I do I make them with
| 'corporate' type cards.
|
| I don't see this as paranoia, rather it's common sense. Anyone,
| who runs a logcat log-displaying program on a rooted smartphone
| without additional privacy protection steps being taken is
| astounded - in fact horrified - at the amount information
| that's being stolen from one. The log entries flash past in
| their thousands much faster than it's possible for anyone to
| ever read them.
|
| I've little to hide and my lifestyle is really pretty boring
| and ordinary but I'm absolutely affronted how this situation
| developed without proper laws being in place or enacted (not
| long ago the privacy of telephone circuits was considered
| sacrosanct and laws rigorously protected us from being
| monitored).
|
| In the grand scheme of things I recognize that my efforts are
| pretty futile but at least I gain some satisfaction in trying
| to combat the bastards.
|
| I don't quite understand why the general attitude of the
| population to maintaining one's privacy has considerably
| lessened in recent decades, and similarly why existing privacy
| laws are not being upheld as they once were.
| Xeoncross wrote:
| It hasn't hit yet.
|
| The CCP hasn't come arrest me for speaking against a
| government official and the Saudi government hasn't arrested
| me for dancing and the Australian government hasn't arrested
| me for participating in a protest, etc...
|
| One day soon all Americans will start facing consequences for
| even benign actions and then they will care.
| monksy wrote:
| Well you aren't yet until you hit land there.
|
| Or the National Security Law is enforced in an extraditial
| manner as it's written.
|
| (Also, don't forget the US has extratraditial laws with
| punishment involving crimes of abuse and crimes of having
| unreported money in other countries [i.e. being american
| and working for a company+living in say the UK])
| hilbert42 wrote:
| Absolutely, like the frog in heating water, we'll realize
| the fact when it's too late.
| namaria wrote:
| I get the metaphor, but this is a myth. A frog, like you,
| will absolutely jump out of the water as soon as the
| temperature gets uncomfortable, let alone lethal.
| hilbert42 wrote:
| I know, donkey's years ago a teacher demonstrated the
| fact in the school's science lab much to the horror and
| chagrin of some students and to the gruesome delight of
| others. Within a few seconds the frog jumped out
| completly unharmed.
|
| No doubt today such experiments would be completely
| banned not to mention that anyone who dared tried it
| would experience the full wrath of Peta brought down upon
| him/her.
| upupandup wrote:
| > rooted deGoogled phone with location defaulted to off and
| all apps
|
| asking for a friend, she wants to know how to do this, she is
| very privacy conscious.
|
| > I nearly forgot to mention the phone's VPN-type firewall.
|
| also she wonders what vpn service you use here
|
| > logcat log-displaying program on a rooted smartphone
| without additional privacy protection steps being taken is
| astounded
|
| and one last thing she wants to know is how would you do this
| for a windows 10 laptop? can you hook it up to some raspberry
| pi device that can monitor outgoing and incoming packets? I
| suspect its rooted but people keep telling her how its
| impossible to trojan windows 10.
|
| > one's privacy has considerably lessened in recent decades,
|
| just to add my piece, people have been collectively
| brainwashed to place lot of value to essentially phantom
| points, be it instagram likes, followers on twitter, retweets
| and crypto. they are willing to go above and beyond to do the
| surveillance voluntarily.
|
| I watched a piece on instagram thieves who chuckled how easy
| their victims make their job for them by showing off what
| they've got and when they are away from home. _I imagine this
| is the same for people who believe they are building a
| startup legally_.
|
| Remember the quote from the biggest social media creator:
| "They trust me dumb **s"
| zen_1 wrote:
| > degoogled phone
|
| GrapheneOS on any pixel phone is my goto. It's way easier
| to install a custom ROM now than back in the day, anyone
| can do it if they can follow instructions (and reseat their
| phone cable if the process stalls after a phone reboot)
|
| some banking apps don't work but apart from that it's 100%
| functional
|
| > vpn
|
| Mullvad (Sweden based) and Proton (Switzerland based) are
| two VPNs with a good reputation imo.
| hilbert42 wrote:
| I'm sorry if I didn't explain the firewall VPN stuff
| well. Android lets one set up VPNs so firewalls exploit
| the concept to divert traffic from apps to a nul-VPN,
| apps think they've access to the internet but their
| traffic doesn't go anywhere.
|
| This satisfies apps that demand such access, they'll
| still work on the premise that they have internet access,
| it's just that it's down all the time.
|
| One such firewall app is Karma FW, it's available on
| Google's app store - and if you think you'd be violating
| your privacy even further by going there then use the
| Aurora Store app to spoof the download. As it violates
| Google's terms of service you have to get it from
| F-Droid's repository.
| zen_1 wrote:
| I haven't run into apps like that before. I've always
| just denied the network permission or used AFWall+ (when
| rooted) to block network access from apps I don't want
| phoning home
| hilbert42 wrote:
| The trouble with that (even on a rooted phone) is that
| the Google Play Services app collects info on everything,
| it's the most pernicious of any app. You only have to do
| the slightest thing on your phone and you can watch the
| size of its data file grow, thus routing its internet
| access to a VPN firewall is essential.
|
| Unfortunately, Play Services uses the internet for
| various necessary functions. The only truly satisfactory
| solution is to remove it altogether and replace it with
| GApps which is a sort of 'clone' with the anti-privacy
| stuff removed.
| zen_1 wrote:
| GrapheneOS supports installing Play services as a
| sandboxed unprivileged app [1] where you can revoke its
| network permissions and manually restore them if needed.
| I should know, it's what I do :).
|
| If I could avoid using google software completely, I
| would, but this is the second best option IMO.
|
| [1] https://grapheneos.org/faq#google-services
| upupandup wrote:
| no worries think its pretty obvious what to do with here.
|
| curious to know if some external firewall running on
| raspberry pi that sits between windows 10 desktop and the
| wifi exists. it would be ideal for inspecting network
| traffic
| hilbert42 wrote:
| Re rooted deGoogled phone. This is a huge topic and I
| cannot do it justice here. I suggest you look up the
| principles of phone rooting and or go to a repterable site
| on the subject such as XDA Developers.
|
| Re: VPN, see my comment below to _zen_1._.
|
| Re: Windows, yes, it's possible with routers and even a
| Raspberry Pi but it's equally complex and very different
| indeed to that of an Android phone.
|
| Finally, I could have largey expanded my reasons for why I
| failed to fully understand the reasons why values within
| the population have changed in respect of privacy but I
| don't have the wherewithal to do it justice in the space
| available.
| upupandup wrote:
| thanks very much my friend is very pleased.
| potatoman22 wrote:
| I wonder if Oracle will leverage their acquisition of Cerner to
| track people's health data as well.
| ByThyGrace wrote:
| Should I uninstall VirtualBox?
| sysadm1n wrote:
| I look for Oracle-specific traffic on VB and there's no
| telemetry or anything like that, which is surprising. I'm more
| concerned about malware escaping sandboxes when analyzing
| malware than Oracle spying on me through VB
| kstrauser wrote:
| If you're using the extension pack for work, and haven't paid
| for it, probably: https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Licensing_FAQ
| yazzku wrote:
| Fuck Oracle and surveillance capitalism.
| lizardactivist wrote:
| I presume iPhones and "regular" Android phones are the main pipes
| that fill these databases.
|
| It may not be of dire consequence to most of us regular people,
| but it surprises me that banks, political institutes,
| corporations, and even governments around the world happily let
| their people use these phones for work.
| hedora wrote:
| OK, so, hypothetically (really, hypothetically), someone caught
| my eye on the street, so I decided to face recognize them to get
| their real name and home address, then bought up access to all
| their credit card statements and their social media friends list.
| Next, I misrepresented myself to ingratiate myself with their
| friends, all in order to exploit them financially. I did some
| other stuff, like track their car, which let me infer all sorts
| of juicy things about their personal health and private life.
|
| I openly bragged about this on data-broker sites, and shared
| their info (for money) with people with similar interests. They
| had different end goals in mind, but I don't know what they were,
| so that's not on me right?
|
| Anyway, I managed to net $8 for my trouble, but got caught and
| they successfully sued me.
|
| Should I expect the damages to be more or less than the per-
| person pay out this lawsuit is likely to generate? How is what
| Oracle did any different?
| rblion wrote:
| I can't believe Elison 'owns' 99% of Lana'i too.
| cerol wrote:
| With enough data, you can model user behavior pretty accurately.
| But you can also use the same data to train models that generate
| valid user behavior patterns.
|
| The ad industry is very profitable, but it seems to hang in the
| balance. Ads are effective as long as data you use to segment
| users are accurate. What happens if data becomes corrupted?
| Something like "This Person Does Not Exist" [0], but for user
| data. Your user behavior just remarkably similar to your actual
| behavior, but you can filter out the sensitive parts.
|
| I'd love to see someone come up with a program or little gadget
| you can solder to the "smart"-things, and actual usage telemetry
| will train a locally deployed model that generates user behavior
| data that is indistinguishable from real user data, only it
| doesn't say anything about you.
|
| [0] https://www.thispersondoesnotexist.com/
| nojito wrote:
| This data is from an acquisition they made of BlueKai.
|
| Not sure why it's hitting the news now. There are equally large
| datasets available by other entities.
| NoImmatureAdHom wrote:
| Relevant copypasta:
|
| Fellow humans, there are alternatives to being tracked via cell
| phone! Your neck need not be under anyone's boot! You don't even
| need to give up any functionality:
|
| Data service:
|
| The simplest thing is to buy a prepaid SIM and top it off with
| cash. The lovely people over at /r/nocontract maintain a big
| spreadsheet so you can filter by various properties of the
| available contracts.
|
| Another way to go is to pay for a postpaid plan with a virtual
| credit card (VCC) like at privacy.com. It won't be linked to your
| name at the telco, but of course privacy.com knows who you are.
| There is also Abine Blur, and some others.
|
| Yet a third way to go, which is nascent, is buy an eSIM with
| crypto. You can also buy prepaid VCCs with crypto.
|
| All these methods make you /pseudo/nymous, but obviously you're
| still identifiable by subscriber number and possibly IMEI, to put
| aside correlational things like your traffic profile. You can
| help this problem by routing everything through a VPN. Then
| you're pseudonymous but the cell carrier knows nothing about you
| other than that you use a VPN. Pay for the VPN with crypto. Of
| course now the VPN provider knows your traffic, but you're much
| more anonymous to them than you are to a telco. You make your
| choices. Defense in depth. Etc.
|
| OS:
|
| GrapheneOS: https://grapheneos.org/ Very much like Calyx, but
| extra-hardened and with no MicroG. No involvement with Google at
| all by default. You can make a secondary profile in which you
| install Google Play Services to set up an environment where you
| can run unprivileged Play services + whatever crapware you need
| that requires them. Unprivileged here means it's like any other
| app: if you don't give it access to your location, it won't know
| where you are. If you end the profile session when you leave,
| Play Services stops running and stops talking to Google.
|
| CalyxOS: https://calyxos.org/ Privacy-respecting Android
| distribution that replaces Google spyware with MicroG, so you can
| have your cake and eat it too. Most everything will work as
| you're used to, but it does still talk to Google to make that
| happen.
|
| LineageOS: https://lineageos.org/ The successor to CyanogenMod,
| will work with many different phones. More privacy and control
| than stock Android.
|
| There are also many others: Sailfish, Replicant, e
|
| Hardware:
|
| CalyxOS and GrapheneOS run best on Pixel 3, 3a, 3XL, 4, 4a, 4XL,
| 5, 6, 6a. The path of least resistance is to get one of these
| phones and run CalyxOS (if there is an app you need to use that
| needs Google services like Firebase Cloud Messaging...note that
| many that can use FCM will run fine without), otherwise run
| GrapheneOS.
|
| You can also buy a Librem 5 https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/ If
| privacy and security and hacking are really important to you.
|
| Or a pinephone: https://www.pine64.org/pinephone/
| hedora wrote:
| Also, be sure the phone is never near you or places you've been
| when it is connected to the cell network.
| swader999 wrote:
| The only real way is to steal a device.
| deltree7 wrote:
| * It boils down to a simple question. Does this give me better
| lifestyle / standard of living?
|
| Will I get laid more often? Eat Better Food? Have better
| relationships? Create Wealth? Will I even get more freedom ?
| Love ?
|
| Then why the f** should I optimize my life around this
| incredibly stupid idea?
| tacker2000 wrote:
| Idealism is a thing. People do things because they believe in
| them, that the world will be "better". You dont have to agree
| with other opinions but dont call them "incredibly stupid".
| therealmarv wrote:
| What about Alphabet/Google, Apple, Amazon and Facebook/Meta?
| hedora wrote:
| There really need to be minimum statutory damages for this sort
| of thing, payable direct to consumer.
|
| I think $10,000 per offense would be a bit too low. I want to
| live in a world where shareholders can look at that slide and
| say:
|
| 5 billion victims times $10K means they have amassed $50T in
| toxic assets. I'm jumping ship, and/or joining a shareholder
| lawsuit.
| kasajian wrote:
| At first I was happy to see this trending as I thought this was
| going to talk about what I believe.
|
| What I believe: The reasons humans are the way we are is because
| of how natural selection favors survival of those who are better
| at propagating their genes. All other behaviors tie back to that
| single need. That criteria are the reasons why we don't want to
| be "turned off" with a switch. A computer does not evolve in the
| same way; they don't have that same prime directive. The idea
| that a computer should be asked if it's ok to be turned off is
| applying aspects of human condition, sentiency, to an entity to
| which it does not apply.
|
| One can argue that there's no way to prevent the possibility of
| humans eventually applying such an attribute to an entity that
| we've created only because that's all we know how to do. In other
| words, computers won't take over because one day they wake up and
| become sentient. It will happen because we have decided they
| should behave exactly as we expect a sentient being ought to
| behave . Thus, it becomes that way by definition.
|
| This article was disappointing -- it went in an entirely
| different direction. That the math doesn't add up? Really? You
| can't figure out the math so it can never be done? Kinda hard to
| take seriously, tbh.
| jamiek88 wrote:
| Was this the wrong thread you posted in?
| rvz wrote:
| Good.
|
| Time to get the rest of the other Big Tech surveillance machines
| created by Apple Inc., Meta Platforms Inc., Twitter Inc.,
| Microsoft Corp, Amazon.com Inc., and especially, Alphabet Inc.
|
| To downvoters: So you want more worldwide surveillance from the
| Big Tech companies then? Do you trust them not to abuse or
| collect more of your sensitive data like your passwords, phone
| numbers, location, etc? That includes TikTok's US 'secure cloud
| provider', Oracle Inc.
|
| Looks like there are lots of users here that are too scared to
| admit or confess helping the current tech dystopia that they are
| creating.
|
| This lawsuit can only be a good thing in clamping down on the
| daily mass surveillance done by these companies.
| hnburnsy wrote:
| Others have said it, but despite all this tracking I rarely see
| relevant advertising that is even close to targeting me, not on
| the web, not in my inbox, not on my TV, and not in my mail's box.
|
| I even have my YouTubetv set to allow personalized ads but the
| inserted Google ads are still just mass market ads for cars,
| movies, and insurance.
| [deleted]
| trustevertone wrote:
| Oracle is evil
| kaba0 wrote:
| Is there a similar one against Facebook, Google, etc?
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