[HN Gopher] FTC Report Confirms: Commercial Surveillance Is Out ...
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FTC Report Confirms: Commercial Surveillance Is Out of Control
Author : glitcher
Score : 199 points
Date : 2024-09-29 15:38 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.eff.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.eff.org)
| glitcher wrote:
| Report link at beginning of article:
|
| https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/09/...
|
| https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/Social-Media-6b...
|
| Edit: added link to pdf
| techjamie wrote:
| > Based on the data collected, the staff report said many
| companies assert that there are no children on their platforms
| because their services were not directed to children or did not
| allow children to create accounts.
|
| Funny how they have advertising cohorts drilled into every
| niche interest or happening, but they just can't perfect the
| technology to determine if someone is a child. Very elusive
| tech they've definitely been working day and night to implement
| for years.
|
| Almost like they benefit from acting blissfully ignorant.
| mrbluecoat wrote:
| A four year investigation to tell us what we already know. The
| real question is: What is the federal government (or anyone else)
| going to do about it?
| llamaimperative wrote:
| There are plenty of people who "know" things that are actually
| wrong. This investigation is an important first step for _the
| government_ to feel confident they know what 's going on before
| exercising state power, which is, you know, a good thing.
| Vibes- or rumor-based exercise of state power is ill advised.
|
| The Biden FTC has been quite aggressive against all sorts of
| anti-consumer practices throughout the economy which tend to
| follow these types of reports. I suspect action is coming
| relatively soon.
| janalsncm wrote:
| A lot of people wonder why we study and document things that
| are already "common knowledge". This is true of scientific
| studies as well. What a waste of money, right?
|
| The answer is, until you actually do the work you don't
| actually know. Scientists and government officials can't cite
| common knowledge. And even if you were right about the
| conclusion, the details matter. The amount matters. The
| mechanisms matter.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| > government officials can't cite common knowledge
|
| Government officials can cite whatever they want, including
| stuff they pulled out of their ass, as long as they have the
| votes.
| iterance wrote:
| High-quality studies also lay out a methodology for
| evaluating, assessing, and ultimately characterizing the
| issue, so that the impact of policy changes can be properly
| assessed. Even showing that well-known investigatory methods
| function adequately for a given problem is of value.
|
| Put another way, "you can't control what you can't measure"
| (or in this case, characterize more generally).
| sixothree wrote:
| This report gives us a framework for legislation. In no way
| does it "tell us what we already know".
| fallingknife wrote:
| Nothing because the government wants to do this surveillance
| itself but can't by law. The availability of corporate
| surveillance means the government can use it too, so it
| benefits them.
| exfildotcloud wrote:
| Agreed. Out in public yet encrypted is something I've been
| playing with as https://exfilcloud.com has no protection against
| access other than encryption.
| meonkeys wrote:
| This looks kinda sus. Why would or should anyone use this,
| @exfildotcloud?
| exfildotcloud wrote:
| Good question. All encryption happens in the browser. I may
| release the code but it's really just Go Age WASM with a KV
| backend.
|
| What's suspicious?
| agentultra wrote:
| Finally. We all "know" that corporations will always choose
| profits over literally anything else. Glad to see the come back
| of the FTC. It seems we only get meaningful progress when there's
| strong regulation.
|
| Other notable examples: the EPA. There was a time when people had
| to wear gas masks out doors in some cities because the pollution
| was so bad before regulations and enforcement came into place.
| Similar stories with CFC emissions.
|
| The development of the Internet has been accelerated under mostly
| conservative leadership which has been walking back regulations.
| And while much innovation has happened in that time I think a
| great deal more could have been achieved if it weren't focused on
| this kind of profit-at-all-costs environment it's been simmering
| in.
| mgraczyk wrote:
| Needing to wear gas masks outside sounds like a pretty bad,
| tangible harm caused by a lack of pollution regulation.
|
| Do you have any examples of similar tangible harm caused by
| lack of regulation on data collection?
| hotspot_one wrote:
| People in Texas facing murder charges for traveling to other
| states to get an abortion.
|
| People facing criminal charges for helping people in Texas
| learn about what options for managing their own reproductive
| health and bodies.
| mgraczyk wrote:
| Do you have a link for the first one? I don't think that
| has happened (although it could under Texas law as I
| understand it)
|
| Is there an actual case where data described in the article
| was used for anything like what you're suggesting? The
| actual cases involve people reporting each other (a man
| reporting a woman he is dating for example).
|
| Sounds to me like blaming the acid rain on the acid
| detectors
| gaganyaan wrote:
| Targeted advertising dragging people down rabbit holes into
| extremism
| mgraczyk wrote:
| Ads don't do that. Maybe you're thinking of organic posts,
| which are not ads? Or do you have examples of "extremist"
| ads?
|
| Having worked on this stuff, I can tell you that the data
| relevant to extremist rabbit holes is not what the FTC is
| talking about. Facebook learns enough from which posts you
| click on to know which extremist content to suggest (and
| then they intentionally do not suggest it)
| t0bia_s wrote:
| Consumerism makes society less conflict. This idea was
| implemented by propaganda in 30's by Edward Bernays.
| Propaganda was later changed to term public relations after
| connection with Nazism during WW2.
| bitnasty wrote:
| Identity theft
| mgraczyk wrote:
| Do you have any examples where the data was obtained from
| sources that collected it for ads? As I understand it, the
| sort of data that is collected for behavioral advertising
| isn't useful for identity theft and has not been used in
| that way.
|
| For identity theft you need things like names, addresses,
| SSN, W2 income, etc
| aierou wrote:
| Many people fear that a corrupt or authoritarian regime might
| misuse data to cause harm. However, the reality is that such
| regimes tend to carry out harmful actions regardless of the
| data they collect. Data can make their efforts more
| efficient, but the real danger lies in the regime's intent,
| not necessarily the data itself.
| mgraczyk wrote:
| Exactly, historical authoritarian states got by just fine
| by reading the mail and listening to conversations. You
| don't need to know which fragrance I bought last week to
| oppress me, and it wouldn't help anyway
| monkaiju wrote:
| But they broadly didnt actually get along just fine...
| Almost without exception they have falleb, commonly due
| to internal resistance. Making that internal resistabce
| harder via enhanced surveillance is the issue that could
| make future scenarios even worse.
| mgraczyk wrote:
| Is there an example of an authoritarian state that failed
| due to internal resistance?
| vaindil wrote:
| I'm sick of needing to spend weeks researching which couch or
| mattress to buy because corporations will happily sell me a
| terrible couch for $3,000 that only cost them $50 to make.
| It'll fall apart in a year or two, conveniently after the
| warranty expires, but hey, their profits are going up so who
| cares about the buyer?
|
| I'm sick of events like the Boar's Head listeria outbreak
| killing 10 people happening with regularity now. Last year it
| was eye drops causing blindness. The companies don't care
| beyond the lawsuits they'll face, who cares if people die as
| long as their profits go up?
|
| I'm sick of oil companies lying about the environmental harms
| they cause. Their profits are going up, so why should they
| care about climate change or the tainted groundwater their
| fracking causes?
|
| I'm sick of seeing ads and billboards for corporations
| everywhere I go. I'm sick of being tracked because
| corporations can make x% more money with my data than they
| can without it. Installing uBlock Origin is easy, but we now
| have facial recognition systems with physical cameras in the
| real world. Can't do anything about those unless I just never
| leave my home.
|
| I'm sick of people defending this behavior by asking "what
| tangible harm have you experienced?". The tangible harm is
| that I'm fucking tired. I'm tired of living in a society that
| requires expending so much mental energy just to exist.
|
| I should be able to just trust (within reason, of course)
| that a $1,000 mattress will work for X years without needing
| to research whether the company is decent or known to be
| awful. I should be able to buy chocolate from the grocery
| store without needing to research whether the corporation (or
| any of its 24 parents and subsidiaries) used slave labor to
| produce it. I shouldn't need to worry about bottled water
| being stolen from aquifers by corporations that will simply
| move on after destroying the communities that depend on that
| water.
|
| I vote, because it's all I can do, but that accomplishes
| nothing because we're stuck in a two-party system that won't
| let me vote for a candidate far enough left to actually fix
| things. Instead we continue to maintain the status quo,
| because corporations have more money and political power than
| civilians.
|
| I'm well aware that this reads like an overdramatic
| manifesto. I'm just sick of everything feeling like it's
| getting worse all the time, and it seems pretty causally
| linked to the rise of corporations. Is it too much to ask
| that I be able to live without them invading _every single
| aspect of my life_? I don't think it is, but I think we're
| too far gone at this point for it to ever change.
| mgraczyk wrote:
| None of these have anything to do with data collection.
|
| Billboards don't use your data
|
| Oil companies don't use your data to drill for oil
|
| Listeria isn't caused or made worse by your data
|
| Sorry I don't care that you are tired. Some people would
| say the same about seeing the sun (Asimov famously) but
| that doesn't mean we should ban windows on buildings
| throwaway35imi wrote:
| > I'm well aware that this reads like an overdramatic
| manifesto.
|
| No, it reads like you are reading my mind. Well said,
| especially the point that this is _every single aspect_ not
| just an infraction here and there.
| rrdharan wrote:
| Try not worrying about as much stuff?
|
| 100 years ago well before the invention of so-called
| surveillance capitalism, people were making soft drinks out
| of radium, and inhaling asbestos.
|
| Many things are better since then. Some new things are
| probably worse, but every reasonable measure of human
| welfare suggests we are better off than we were previously.
|
| Something some subset of us are worried about right now,
| whether it's WiFi or 5G or Covid vaccines, will turn out to
| have had horrible consequences and you can't really fault
| the rest of us that we didn't listen to the crazies.
|
| Just embrace panglossian optimism because the alternative
| is to just be angry and exhausted and indignant all the
| time and then you're no fun at parties.
| Const-me wrote:
| > similar tangible harm caused by lack of regulation on data
| collection?
|
| There's a spike in teenager suicides, girls in particular.
| The phenomenon is well researched, it correlates with
| popularity of social media among teenagers. I believe that's
| causation not just correlation, because social media didn't
| became popular everywhere at once, they did gradually for
| different countries/languages, the teenager suicides spike
| follows.
|
| Restricting data collection will fix that by dismantling the
| business model. Will be harder for tech companies to convert
| screen time into profits. Will even flip the motivation
| developing addictive apps: the more time users will spend
| there the more bandwidth they consume i.e. profits will turn
| into costs. Which is good for most people, except employees
| and stock owners of social media companies.
|
| P.S. Personally, I prefer more radical approach: total ban of
| advertisements on the internets. Many cities did it for
| billboards, I don't see why we shouldn't do the same online.
| mgraczyk wrote:
| Banning online advertisements would essentially cripple
| small businesses in the US. Even local businesses today
| rely on online ads for foot traffic. Banning ads would send
| us back to the economy of the 1950s, where most profit
| accrues to a number of powerful corporations, and small
| manufacturers and creators have no market power.
|
| I used data and ran experiments to measure and mitigate
| teen well being and harm at Instagram. I was not on the
| team responsible for this, but I worked on organic ranking
| and was responsible for understanding and measuring the
| impact of these things. I can say with certainty nobody
| cares more about teen well being than Meta. It's their
| future, and the success Instagram over Snapchat is
| essentially completely due to better positive interventions
| for well being. We measured this carefully with RCTs and
| had more data than anyone on the planet.
|
| Overall Instagram is net good for the majority of teens
| across a wide variety of well being metrics, and net
| negative for a small percentage. Meta spends hundreds of
| millions trying to fix those latter, rarer cases.
| OneLeggedCat wrote:
| > "While not every investigated company committed the same
| privacy violations, the conclusion is clear: companies
| prioritized profits over privacy. "
|
| Why wouldn't they? A capitalist shareholder system requires that
| they do exactly this, to whatever extent it does not impact
| sales.
|
| It's on citizens to demand regulation, and yet in the US, a
| probable majority of voting citizens don't like regulation, and
| think that government is too large or too untrustworthy. Combine
| that with the control that corporations have over our
| politicians, and further combine that with low public
| understanding of the issue, and there is nothing realistic that
| can be done.
|
| So I consider surveillance capitalism to be permanent in the US.
| Regardless of the fact that most people don't like being spied on
| and manipulated constantly. Perhaps some really large, really bad
| event could galvanize the public, but I doubt it.
| OutOfHere wrote:
| As true as that is, I think the people should still worry 100x
| more about government surveillance than about commercial
| surveillance. Commercial surveillance is only trying to sell you
| something you don't need. In contrast, government surveillance,
| with or without cooperation from commercial entities, is trying
| to lock you up for victimless crimes or on flimsy evidence
| because they have run out of real terrorists to fight. The
| government's data collection is vastly larger than of anyone
| else, all paid for by you with your taxes. Encryption,
| cybersecurity, and minimizing data retention are the primary ways
| to fight it.
| janalsncm wrote:
| When the government is allowed to buy information which would
| otherwise require a warrant, private surveillance becomes
| government surveillance.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Exactly, there is no difference. In fact in some ways it is
| worse because the government can say with a straight face
| they aren't collecting your data and monitoring you... they
| just pay someone else for that service.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| Yep, and I keep harping on that one simple point. If that
| data is collected at all, it will be used. Even with laws
| protecting it. Look how HiPAA has become something of a
| joke now between regular breaches and app everything, which
| skirt as much as they can.
| fallingknife wrote:
| They lean on social media companies to violate your 1st
| amendment rights and then buy from them to violate your
| 4th.
| mrexroad wrote:
| This should be the top rated comment. This [1] is the tactic
| that is used by government agencies to actively work around
| protections afforded by the Constitution of the United
| States.
|
| [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/04/26/constit
| uti...
| throwawayqqq11 wrote:
| > Commercial surveillance is only trying to sell you something
| you don't need.
|
| Besides the maximimization of revenue, the profit motive also
| dictates the reduction of risk. Consider any application for
| insurance, membership, coverage...
|
| >government surveillance, is trying to lock you up because they
| have run out of real terrorists to fight
|
| "Government is surveilling/fighting you because who else" is
| easily applicable to $EvilCorp monopolies, because its
| tautological.
| politelemon wrote:
| > Commercial surveillance is only trying to sell you something
| you don't need.
|
| This simply isn't true. Commercial surveillance is a means and
| method of inserting itself further into your workflows or
| lives. Just think of all the health and identity related
| 'features' being rolled out (and celebrated), and how
| governments are readily capitulating to them. It isn't far
| fetched or tinfoil to consider that these commercial entities,
| at some point in the future, can become the arbiters of
| decisions that affect you.
|
| This isn't even about commercial vs government surveillance,
| they are equally dangerous, and of both you should be equally
| wary; governments are far more careful with actions, even with
| malicious intent, whereas commercial entities with deep pockets
| are often abstracted away sufficiently to escape blame or
| consequences. However, governments that delegate to commercial
| for decision making means that there is little to no difference
| in the 'type' of surveillance.
|
| Minimizing your own ecosystem lockin is extremely important.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| > health and identity related 'features'
|
| But it's easy enough to just opt out of all that. I don't use
| fitness or health wearables. I don't have my DNA or ancestry
| analyzed. I don't use online/telehealth services. Hell I
| don't even visit the doctor very often. I don't trust
| healthcare _at all_ because it 's very easy for them to use
| "scare" marketing to get people to pay for all kinds of stuff
| that (a) they don't need and (b) has very little real benefit
| and (c) that in most cases is for conditions that common
| sense and a little self-discipline can avoid.
|
| You're free to think that doctors and health organizations
| operate on some higher plane of morality but the truth is
| they are businesses and need to compete for customers just
| like any other business does.
| red_admiral wrote:
| I assume that all data the commercial providers have on you,
| the government can access too if they would like to. Probably
| the government is even happy they can "outsource" a lot of data
| collection.
| myprotegeai wrote:
| A company recently demoed to me that they have the ability to see
| the work history, credit report, and bank balance of a visitor
| that visits a site with some tracking code, in under 500ms. They
| use this information for a product that qualifies leads for sales
| teams, so the sales team knows who is a waste of time to go after
| and who isn't.
|
| Creeps me the fuck out, and the owners seem to have no ethical
| qualms about buying, selling, and using this data.
| anjel wrote:
| Soon to be combined with palantir face recognition tech. No
| need to chip your citizenry!
| bofadeez wrote:
| Sounds like vaporware. Might be possible for a negligibly small
| % of visitors. And even then cold outreach is not very
| effective.
| drdaeman wrote:
| It's basically same as classic approach of correlating
| salaries with ZIP codes, just with more parameters. Which
| sort of works statistically, because there _are_ correlations
| - but is nothing more than a hallucination at individual
| visitor scale.
| whycombinater wrote:
| Just beat them to death.
|
| Jury nullification.
|
| Or vote, or whatever the site rules permit, good luck with
| that.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| Wait.. physical site like a store or a web site? Not that
| either would make it that much better than the other, but you
| got me really curious.
| luckylion wrote:
| "A visitor" as in "any visitor"? Or rather "a visitor", i.e. a
| specific one, about whom they already possess all this data and
| it's just a look up?
|
| The latter I absolutely believe. The former I'd file under sci-
| fi marketing tales that anyone with some amount of knowledge
| about web technologies wouldn't fall for.
| next_xibalba wrote:
| None of it is accurate and almost all of it is modeled from
| sparse, low quality training sets. Banks are not selling PII'ed
| account balance data to shady aggregators.
|
| To me, the more interesting and outrageous story is how many
| aggregators are able to sell garbage data so successfully.
| hammock wrote:
| >Banks are not selling PII'ed account balance data to shady
| aggregators.
|
| But is Plaid?
|
| And banks do sell account balance data, they also sell credit
| and debit transaction history
| dml2135 wrote:
| Seems like Plaid would be f'd six ways til Sunday if it got
| out that they were selling consumer data to 3rd parties,
| no? A huge part of their business model is based on trust
| and doing that would completely burn it.
| hedvig23 wrote:
| That logic suffices as truth to you?
| hammock wrote:
| https://finledger.com/articles/plaid-settled-58-million-
| laws...
| dml2135 wrote:
| Sorry, maybe "third party" isn't the correct term. Let me
| try to lay out my point a bit more clearly:
|
| Plaid's business model is -- Company A needs a consumer's
| data from Bank B. Plaid takes the consumer's banking
| credentials, gets the data, and sells it to Company A.
|
| At no point in this process does Plaid go and sell this
| data to another unrelated Company C. The lawsuit cited
| was about Plaid not sufficiently explaining its position
| between Company A and Bank B to the consumer. It was not
| about Plaid going and selling the data to the highest
| bidder.
| mystified5016 wrote:
| Pretty much no corporation in the last 40 years has
| suffered the consequences of their actions. Boeing has
| killed how many people and it's taking an act of Congress
| to even _start_ talking about some consequences later,
| maybe.
| Seattle3503 wrote:
| > But is Plaid?
|
| Or any of those budgeting apps that integrate with your
| bank account.
| myprotegeai wrote:
| Maybe they are using garbage data, but at least for the
| credit checks, he was running them on-demand at $0.75 a pop.
| He also mentioned browser fingerprint databases that he has
| purchased. Half of his job seemed to be processing and
| importing different databases that he had purchased.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| > _None of it is accurate and almost all of it is modeled
| from sparse, low quality training sets. Banks are not selling
| PII'ed account balance data to shady aggregators._
|
| Part of the problem though is that much of this data is
| _persistent_ , across order-of-human-lifetime.
|
| How often does your employer salary history have to be
| obtained to be useful? Maybe once every 10 years?
|
| I have zero faith that in jurisdictions without national laws
| prohibiting it (and laws that prevent usage of extra-national
| data) that's not happening.
| vundercind wrote:
| The first time I saw a session replay of all the mouse
| movements and input of a user on _their own fucking computer_
| that some marketing website-spyware had recorded was the moment
| I decided the Internet was a mistake.
| rexarex wrote:
| You mean the free product Microsoft Clarity that everyone
| uses?
| vundercind wrote:
| Nah, it was some smallish company's SAAS thingy. This was
| maybe 2015.
| a13n wrote:
| fullstory
| vundercind wrote:
| It was already common then, I gather--the ex-developer-
| product-owner guy who showed it to me (in the course of
| doing something else) didn't seem to think it was
| remarkable, just an assumed capability. I don't recall
| the name of the product, but it'd record all the input
| and page content for an entire session, you could watch
| it play back like a video. Exactly like standing over
| someone's shoulder while they used their computer. Creepy
| as fuck, but some genius renamed "spyware" to "telemetry"
| and that was enough to get every developer on board
| because we're super insecure and will jump at the chance
| to pretend we're building Mars rovers or something else
| real while we make yet another "app" the world doesn't
| need (I suppose that's why that label was so successful
| at changing attitudes, anyway)
| jonhohle wrote:
| Isn't this how heatmaps were generated as far back as the
| late 2000s?
| vundercind wrote:
| Click-mapping came earlier, and there may have been a few
| places mouse-movement and cross-page-load session
| tracking some sessions, but I don't think it was a "just
| turn it on and leave it on" thing for even most large
| sites. And a lot of early heat maps came from user
| studies, which is the _right_ way to do that.
|
| [edit] also, that just happened to be the first time I'd
| seen a single session represented that way, rather than
| aggregates. Again, it wasn't some brand-new thing then,
| it'd been around long enough to have multiple companies
| offering it as a service, not just an internal tool at a
| couple giants.
| mason55 wrote:
| Pretty much every analytics product does this now. Amplitude,
| Statsig, Posthog, etc.
|
| Not saying it's a good thing but assume that most websites
| are recording your session at this point.
| jerlam wrote:
| An intern at my company built a proof-of-concept of this
| within a month, under a mistaken direction to build
| "analytics tools". When the intern presented this to the
| team, everyone was horrified and we never brought it up again
| after the intern left.
| ranger_danger wrote:
| Nothing like this exists for data on the general public and it
| would be illegal anyways. Either one of you is not aware of
| what that product actually isn't, or are being intentionally
| deceitful and spreading FUD.
| bitnasty wrote:
| Ever heard of the national public data breach?
| advisedwang wrote:
| https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/national-public-
| da... does not mention work history, credit reports, or
| bank balances.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| The Experian breaches did. ADP sells recurring payroll as
| well. Shouldn't be too hard to cross reference.
| nipponese wrote:
| Name the company please.
| tonetegeatinst wrote:
| What data broker would even sell this data?
| m463 wrote:
| What if it was your daughter?
|
| 22 years old, height proportional to weight, poor decision
| making skills.
|
| What about your son?
|
| I've seen this offered to young kids paying rent:
|
| "Flex lets you pay rent on a schedule that works better for
| your monthly budget and frees up your cash flow."
|
| "Help you pay rent on time. Improve your cash flow. Build your
| credit history."
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| And what was the FTC doing all these years?
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| Election year. The assumption is it is simultaneously posturing
| for current administration, validating its existence and
| funding to potential new one, and PR for the public.
|
| Before that? I don't remember that much from the past few
| years, but I think a good chunk of federal agencies were kinda
| in a weird stalemate ( which is kinda what the US is system is
| built for anyway ).
| kibwen wrote:
| _> Election year._
|
| This FTC has been extremely active and assertive since 2021,
| for which I'm thankful. People only pay attention in election
| years.
| Scipio_Afri wrote:
| Under a different administration in the previous 4 years.
|
| Any large institution takes some time to change, senate
| confirmations for the leads of major agencies don't occur
| immediately upon swearing in of a new President - it's often
| months later. Then, after that occurs, change from the top down
| occurs.
|
| Additionally for any sufficiently large group of people it
| takes a long time to get people to take any sort of collective
| action, let alone an organization with processes, years long
| funding and contracts already in place. Then there are
| sometimes/often legal challenges to the awarding of contracts,
| the issuing of regulations.
|
| How long do you think this study would've taken to execute by
| itself? Okay now how long do you think it would've taken to
| plan the methodology for what they should do to execute. Before
| that they have to have a proposal of what they would like to
| study and then get the money approved / allocated to do the
| previous work I just mentioned, such as a detailed methodology.
|
| Again, this administration has been in charge of the FTC for
| only 3 ish years and had to probably rebuild it towards
| focusing on holding businesses to account.
|
| Not quite sure what else you're expecting, it takes companies
| as well many months and even years to change focus, or to
| deliver a robust product. And that's generally with an agreed
| upon a singular focus.
| tsunamifury wrote:
| This will make optimal global pricing an insane world where
| everything will cost the maximum you can pay but the overall
| system will collapse as people will consume way less and be more
| miserable within it.
| sanchezxa wrote:
| Damn...
| motohagiography wrote:
| that horse left the barn over a decade ago. my attitude has
| changed to where I used to do security and privacy work to
| mitigate risk from a coming corporate cyberpunk dystopia, but now
| I think the idea of governments getting a monopoly on
| surveillance is the worst possible outcome.
|
| a real solution would be to legally privilege and disqualify
| classes of personal information from civil and non-violent
| criminal legal proceedings based on how they were collected, and
| PII collection sources material to commercial decisions must be
| disclosed in offers and contracts.
|
| insurers and creditors would actually have to take risk again
| instead of being rentiers, police are servants and not governors,
| and the provenance of PII as evidence would have to be proven as
| from a legal and prescribed source that included explicit
| consent. there is no stopping the flow of data collection, but we
| can improve laws to manage it.
| t0bia_s wrote:
| For me it's hypocrisy to regulate surveillance of private
| companies by state. You have option to not use their data
| collecting technologies. You cannot opt out to surveillance by
| state!
|
| Let's not play game to makes states good guys and companies the
| bad boys.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _it 's hypocrisy to regulate surveillance of private
| companies by state_
|
| Now do arms.
| kristjank wrote:
| I really hate to defend state surveillance here, but at least
| that provides me with some (arguably false) sense of security
| and uninterested crimefighting. The private sector private eyes
| provide me only with never-ending ad slurry that's been wearing
| me down by the day.
| kristjank wrote:
| I have become more and more inclined to deem the advertising
| industry considerably worse than the military industrial complex,
| and I hope that some higher force smites the executives involved
| with great vengeance and furious anger someday.
| fromMars wrote:
| The information Credit Bureaus and Banks store is much scarier.
| They know your salary every place you've worked and lived. And
| with all the recent links anyone can find this information on the
| dark web.
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