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People definitely care on a deep level, but how could a non-technical person express their lack of consent? I hear people expressing their concerns in the form

People definitely care on a deep level, but how could a non-technical person express their lack of consent? I hear people expressing their concerns in the form of paranoid theories. But their theories are true. Many people I know already censor themselves around phones, assuming the devices are listening and sending personal conversations back to some server.

peller 10y ago
OK, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. If the (ostensible) purpose of laws is to keep people/corporations in check, and our representatives make the laws, then the answer to your question, it seems to me, would be political activism, would it not?
- Silhouette 10y ago
  There are reasonably well organised political advocacy groups around privacy, "digital rights", and so on. The trouble is, most of our elections are decided on a very small number of very high profile and high impact policies: economics, education, healthcare, and the like. Technology raises many minor issues that affect lots of people, often for the worse, but few are going to care about those issues more than their child's education or putting food on plates. Meanwhile, the tech firms getting insanely rich off these kinds of measures have small armies of lobbyists "advising" the technologically naive political classes on what they should be doing, backed by effectively unlimited war chests. Until we have political systems that aren't dominated by rare elections decided by very few issues, this will unfortunately continue.
  - peller 10y ago
    Oh sure, I agree. My point was that in order for our political systems to be less dominated by "the standard issues," people need to literally get out there, en masse, for anything to seriously change. (Think civil rights movement scale, not OWS). But I think you've hinted at the larger issue when you said "people care more about putting food on plates" - too many people simply do not have the freedom (time/resources) to care about anything other than "keeping their heads above water", as it were.

peller 10y ago

OK, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. If the (ostensible) purpose of laws is to keep people/corporations in check, and our representatives make the laws, then the answer to your question, it seems to me, would be political activism, would it not?

Silhouette 10y ago
There are reasonably well organised political advocacy groups around privacy, "digital rights", and so on. The trouble is, most of our elections are decided on a very small number of very high profile and high impact policies: economics, education, healthcare, and the like. Technology raises many minor issues that affect lots of people, often for the worse, but few are going to care about those issues more than their child's education or putting food on plates. Meanwhile, the tech firms getting insanely rich off these kinds of measures have small armies of lobbyists "advising" the technologically naive political classes on what they should be doing, backed by effectively unlimited war chests. Until we have political systems that aren't dominated by rare elections decided by very few issues, this will unfortunately continue.
- peller 10y ago
  Oh sure, I agree. My point was that in order for our political systems to be less dominated by "the standard issues," people need to literally get out there, en masse, for anything to seriously change. (Think civil rights movement scale, not OWS). But I think you've hinted at the larger issue when you said "people care more about putting food on plates" - too many people simply do not have the freedom (time/resources) to care about anything other than "keeping their heads above water", as it were.