5 ms·

I don't think one can make a meaningful comparison between Stasi- and post-privacy era: * you could not opt out of Stasi, but you can opt not to give up your d

by jlg23 11y ago

I don't think one can make a meaningful comparison between Stasi- and post-privacy era: * you could not opt out of Stasi, but you can opt not to give up your data voluntarily (at the cost of convenience) * Stasi was centralized whereas "innumerable commercial entities" are, by definition, not * snitches tend to report "bad" things only, information you volunteer about yourself tends to be "good" things only IMHO it is easy but very dangerous to liken the two because the latter has its own, distinct nature, dangers and MOs which should be addressed on their specific terms.

fweespeech 11y ago
> * you could not opt out of Stasi, but you can opt not to give up your data voluntarily (at the cost of convenience) 1) Many of the tools involved can't actually be opted out of without technical knowledge. 2) I know at least two services (Facebook, LinkedIn) who have profiles on me despite me not having accounts with them. 3) I know of at least one analytics tracking service that resells data and links things to social media that was successfully sued for using invasive ways of tracking people that was only possible to opt out of with javascript blocking. So while its decentralized for the most part, it really isn't possibly to actually opt-out in any substantial way without javascript & ad blocking [which I've met quite a few people who just turn it off because its "too confusing" or never install it in the first place].
yourapostasy 11y ago
I agree, it is too facile to conflate the two, that is why I tried to distance the real Stasi from the trends that I'm seeing by calling it "Stasi-lite". However, I'm seeing disturbing accretions of power over time enabled by the social networks' data harvesting, and the concomitant gold rush to gather any data, anywhere and plug it into everywhere it fits into a coherent "data narrative". I don't want to concern-troll; I'm young enough to still hold out hope, but old enough to understand human nature has not changed for millennia. Counter-examples to your points, with the full awareness that we are nowhere near the overtly oppressive levels of the Stasi. * We already have police cruisers harvesting license plates passing by. It is not long before surveillance camera feeds are hooked up to facial recognition engines ostensibly for highly-targeted in-store ads using new hyper-local delivery platforms (video screens beckoning you with a product pitch predicted to appeal to you, hyper-local audio only you can hear delivering the pitch). How long before simply walking around yields a minutely-detailed, fully-automated diary of your daily goings about that even in the glory days of the Stasi took punishing levels of manpower? * The consumers of the data might not be centralized, but as many have observed, tech is usually a winner-take-all game and the harvesting and collation of the data will more likely than not be another Google (or Google itself). The data will be sold in a highly-segmented manner to extract the maximum profit from the data, but the concentration of power enabled by pulling all that data together in 1-3 entities, not to speak of the Palantir-like statistical associative inferencing, will be unprecedented. Imagine human nature around that kind of data corpus. * People regularly air dirty laundry I would have never imagined in such a public setting. Alias doxxing only need happen once, and then everything negative ever said comes crashing home to roost out of never-erased archives. These are tools, with no intrinsic moral compass; how we use them is subject to moral evaluation. I observe that the output of these tools will be too expensive for individuals to access and use themselves, and it is only in the remit of very wealthy individuals and the larger commercial and governmental entities. These are to me the new, much more powerful suasion tools than newspapers and TV could ever hope to aspire to, for they can shape opinions using individualized social circles and will "feel more genuine/authentic". This might seem benign, until say, someone buys out massive, long-term campaigns designed to say, sway public opinion "at the grassroots level" to go against vaccinations. We live in a fascinating era.
pjc50 11y ago
Really we should call liken the post-privacy era not so much to the Stasi as to Hoover's FBI, which busied itself with sending death threats to MLK and suchlike. Or Guantanamo and its micro-gulag. There's a lot of brutality but it's aimed at an extremely small number of people.
PavlovsCat 11y ago
> * you could not opt out of Stasi, but you can opt not to give up your data voluntarily (at the cost of convenience) I.e. you can opt to not read or write anything online, and communicate with nobody, live underground, and never get ill? I'm not quite seeing it. > Stasi was centralized whereas "innumerable commercial entities" are, by definition, not Commercial entities themselves are often very centralized (there is a clear chain of ownership and command) and can be themselves be embedded in and/or used by more centralized organs. So one might as well say the Stasi wasn't centralized because it consisted of innumerable spooks and informants. Think of it as "The Stasi Cloud" or something, if that helps. Nothing is truly centralized, if you split hairs enough. > snitches tend to report "bad" things only, information you volunteer about yourself tends to be "good" things only We're not talking about information that is volunteered when openly asked though. And besides, that's besides the point. It is still a trampling on basic human rights on pretty much a global scale, by all sorts of nations and private entities. When I cannot communicate with anyone by phone, email, or a social website they can be bothered to use, then I do not have the right to have private friendships much less any means to organize politically to step on any powerful toes. I can't be a free human being without other free human beings. So do I have that right, or not? Sure, we got engineered into falling into trap voluntarily. It's no real consolation, other than that we could end it, if weren't so addicted to having new toys, preferably yesterday. But we are, and we don't, and if we won't ever, then it's really just a matter of the political climate changing drastically and widely once more, and then it may not change again for a long, horrible time span. Because another important difference between the Stasi and this is that there is no outside. We're not just talking about today, at least I'm not, we know what is possible and we see the world changing quickly. > should be addressed on their specific terms You only list things that are, in your opinion, different. What about what the knowledge that anything you (digitally) say to anyone might be recorded practically forever does in regards to self-censorship, how might it ultimately even stump thought? And what about the "decentralization of responsibility"? This can occur within a monolithic bureaucracy, but how much more so in a dog eat dog just doing my job world. And it's a very big factor in such things. You don't need strict, obvious centralization when you have enough people following along voluntarily, or making up their own little rationalizations why they do any of the 1000 voluntary things that ultimately all serve you more than them. You need enough people, and enough technology to multiply their power, and the rest just needs to be passive and/or divided. You might convince me that there are several smaller and bigger Stasis, some with just a little power, others with more, and that they overlap and differ in various ways. Just like the actual people the actual Stasi consisted of did. But other than that, I disagree on all points. The desire of people to be free from surveillance by practically unaccountable people who pull shit like wars of aggression, abductions, assassinations, can never be "dangerous" enough. Yes, crying wolf is also not productive, but I honestly think we're beyond that. There's something in the pen, and the only way to see how friendly or dangerous it is, is to call it out. If we're too scared to even do that, to enforce human rights no matter who goes there, it just might be a wolf. I mean, how "should" things be addressed? So far what little activism and education there was, has had very little results. It's not like the trend is changing, or even slowing down. So okay, being too "dramatic" or whatever is not okay, so what is okay? How big do you think the time window is?

by jlg23 11y ago

fweespeech 11y ago

> * you could not opt out of Stasi, but you can opt not to give up your data voluntarily (at the cost of convenience) 1) Many of the tools involved can't actually be opted out of without technical knowledge. 2) I know at least two services (Facebook, LinkedIn) who have profiles on me despite me not having accounts with them. 3) I know of at least one analytics tracking service that resells data and links things to social media that was successfully sued for using invasive ways of tracking people that was only possible to opt out of with javascript blocking. So while its decentralized for the most part, it really isn't possibly to actually opt-out in any substantial way without javascript & ad blocking [which I've met quite a few people who just turn it off because its "too confusing" or never install it in the first place].

yourapostasy 11y ago

I agree, it is too facile to conflate the two, that is why I tried to distance the real Stasi from the trends that I'm seeing by calling it "Stasi-lite". However, I'm seeing disturbing accretions of power over time enabled by the social networks' data harvesting, and the concomitant gold rush to gather any data, anywhere and plug it into everywhere it fits into a coherent "data narrative". I don't want to concern-troll; I'm young enough to still hold out hope, but old enough to understand human nature has not changed for millennia. Counter-examples to your points, with the full awareness that we are nowhere near the overtly oppressive levels of the Stasi. * We already have police cruisers harvesting license plates passing by. It is not long before surveillance camera feeds are hooked up to facial recognition engines ostensibly for highly-targeted in-store ads using new hyper-local delivery platforms (video screens beckoning you with a product pitch predicted to appeal to you, hyper-local audio only you can hear delivering the pitch). How long before simply walking around yields a minutely-detailed, fully-automated diary of your daily goings about that even in the glory days of the Stasi took punishing levels of manpower? * The consumers of the data might not be centralized, but as many have observed, tech is usually a winner-take-all game and the harvesting and collation of the data will more likely than not be another Google (or Google itself). The data will be sold in a highly-segmented manner to extract the maximum profit from the data, but the concentration of power enabled by pulling all that data together in 1-3 entities, not to speak of the Palantir-like statistical associative inferencing, will be unprecedented. Imagine human nature around that kind of data corpus. * People regularly air dirty laundry I would have never imagined in such a public setting. Alias doxxing only need happen once, and then everything negative ever said comes crashing home to roost out of never-erased archives. These are tools, with no intrinsic moral compass; how we use them is subject to moral evaluation. I observe that the output of these tools will be too expensive for individuals to access and use themselves, and it is only in the remit of very wealthy individuals and the larger commercial and governmental entities. These are to me the new, much more powerful suasion tools than newspapers and TV could ever hope to aspire to, for they can shape opinions using individualized social circles and will "feel more genuine/authentic". This might seem benign, until say, someone buys out massive, long-term campaigns designed to say, sway public opinion "at the grassroots level" to go against vaccinations. We live in a fascinating era.

pjc50 11y ago

Really we should call liken the post-privacy era not so much to the Stasi as to Hoover's FBI, which busied itself with sending death threats to MLK and suchlike. Or Guantanamo and its micro-gulag. There's a lot of brutality but it's aimed at an extremely small number of people.

PavlovsCat 11y ago

> * you could not opt out of Stasi, but you can opt not to give up your data voluntarily (at the cost of convenience) I.e. you can opt to not read or write anything online, and communicate with nobody, live underground, and never get ill? I'm not quite seeing it. > Stasi was centralized whereas "innumerable commercial entities" are, by definition, not Commercial entities themselves are often very centralized (there is a clear chain of ownership and command) and can be themselves be embedded in and/or used by more centralized organs. So one might as well say the Stasi wasn't centralized because it consisted of innumerable spooks and informants. Think of it as "The Stasi Cloud" or something, if that helps. Nothing is truly centralized, if you split hairs enough. > snitches tend to report "bad" things only, information you volunteer about yourself tends to be "good" things only We're not talking about information that is volunteered when openly asked though. And besides, that's besides the point. It is still a trampling on basic human rights on pretty much a global scale, by all sorts of nations and private entities. When I cannot communicate with anyone by phone, email, or a social website they can be bothered to use, then I do not have the right to have private friendships much less any means to organize politically to step on any powerful toes. I can't be a free human being without other free human beings. So do I have that right, or not? Sure, we got engineered into falling into trap voluntarily. It's no real consolation, other than that we could end it, if weren't so addicted to having new toys, preferably yesterday. But we are, and we don't, and if we won't ever, then it's really just a matter of the political climate changing drastically and widely once more, and then it may not change again for a long, horrible time span. Because another important difference between the Stasi and this is that there is no outside. We're not just talking about today, at least I'm not, we know what is possible and we see the world changing quickly. > should be addressed on their specific terms You only list things that are, in your opinion, different. What about what the knowledge that anything you (digitally) say to anyone might be recorded practically forever does in regards to self-censorship, how might it ultimately even stump thought? And what about the "decentralization of responsibility"? This can occur within a monolithic bureaucracy, but how much more so in a dog eat dog just doing my job world. And it's a very big factor in such things. You don't need strict, obvious centralization when you have enough people following along voluntarily, or making up their own little rationalizations why they do any of the 1000 voluntary things that ultimately all serve you more than them. You need enough people, and enough technology to multiply their power, and the rest just needs to be passive and/or divided. You might convince me that there are several smaller and bigger Stasis, some with just a little power, others with more, and that they overlap and differ in various ways. Just like the actual people the actual Stasi consisted of did. But other than that, I disagree on all points. The desire of people to be free from surveillance by practically unaccountable people who pull shit like wars of aggression, abductions, assassinations, can never be "dangerous" enough. Yes, crying wolf is also not productive, but I honestly think we're beyond that. There's something in the pen, and the only way to see how friendly or dangerous it is, is to call it out. If we're too scared to even do that, to enforce human rights no matter who goes there, it just might be a wolf. I mean, how "should" things be addressed? So far what little activism and education there was, has had very little results. It's not like the trend is changing, or even slowing down. So okay, being too "dramatic" or whatever is not okay, so what is okay? How big do you think the time window is?