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If you personal info gets stolen from a company (or government) you entrusted it with, it ends up being your problem, despite any negligence on their part. Per

If you personal info gets stolen from a company (or government) you entrusted it with, it ends up being your problem, despite any negligence on their part. Personally, I believe that if it's negligence, there should be compensation - they lost something that belongs to you and is of value. But few people seem to really care. The info of 1 billion yahoo accounts was hacked, but who cares? Until that changes, the problem will continue to exist.

CaptSpify 9y ago
And this is why we see companies scooping up people's data and saving it with no regard to the individuals. We need to move to companies seeing that data as a liability, not an asset.
- kudokatz 9y ago
  > We need to move to companies seeing that data as a liability, not an asset this could lead to serious limitations on legitimate future progress including on anything built using statistical methods that require large training data sets.
  - CaptSpify 9y ago
    too bad, so sad. If companies were trustworthy with data, than that wouldn't be an issue. Why should they get a free lunch on my dime?
  - claytonjy 9y ago
    That's certainly a concern given the way things are currently, but I'm hopeful concepts like Google's federated learning [1] will become increasingly popular, and a change to data-as-a-liability would help drive development and adoption of such approaches. [1] https://research.googleblog.com/2017/04/federated-learning-collaborative.html https://research.googleblog.com/2017/04/federated-learning-c...
    - FridgeSeal 9y ago
      I really, really like this approach to data, and there's so many advantages beyond the ones outlined there: if you could turn that collection approach into a universal/OS-level API you could have some kind of setup where user data by default stays on the device, then to use it, the app/app server has to request it explicitly (allowing the user easy and powerful, but granular control over who gets what data) and then user data is further protected by the other measures talked about in their paper. Some level of public education is also required I think, to make people aware of the value/threat of just giving everything up every time someone asks for it.
  - Espressosaurus 9y ago
    And nothing of value was lost, except to marketers.
  - nkrisc 9y ago
    We choose to limit medical progress by restricting the experimentation that can be done on humans because we've deemed such protections worthy of the cost to progress. If protecting personal information limits or slows some progress, so be it. Also it could still be done, just more carefully.
  - mattgreenrocks 9y ago
    Yeah, cause they're doing so much with it now /s
  - eeZah7Ux 9y ago
    I see very little evidence that personal data is useful for that. Can you name real life examples? Most machine learning is done against anonymous dataset and works fine.
    - chadgeidel 9y ago
      Machine learning can also de-anonymize that anonymous dataset. How does one protect against that? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De-anonymization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De-anonymization
- iliketosleep 9y ago
  It should be both an asset and potential liability. There's no doubt that user info is valuable and can be an asset. But if a company is negligent with that info, perhaps they should be liable in some way.
unit91 9y ago
Superficially, you're right. But a company that wants to survive has to keep its users happy, and data loss is really bad for PR. How many people dumped Yahoo after the breach? I imagine a lot. And really the same is true for any company that has any sizeable PR problem, regardless of the cause. Examples: - Yahoo - Uber - United Airlines - Target

CaptSpify 9y ago

And this is why we see companies scooping up people's data and saving it with no regard to the individuals. We need to move to companies seeing that data as a liability, not an asset.

kudokatz 9y ago
> We need to move to companies seeing that data as a liability, not an asset this could lead to serious limitations on legitimate future progress including on anything built using statistical methods that require large training data sets.
- CaptSpify 9y ago
  too bad, so sad. If companies were trustworthy with data, than that wouldn't be an issue. Why should they get a free lunch on my dime?
- claytonjy 9y ago
  That's certainly a concern given the way things are currently, but I'm hopeful concepts like Google's federated learning [1] will become increasingly popular, and a change to data-as-a-liability would help drive development and adoption of such approaches. [1] https://research.googleblog.com/2017/04/federated-learning-collaborative.html https://research.googleblog.com/2017/04/federated-learning-c...
  - FridgeSeal 9y ago
    I really, really like this approach to data, and there's so many advantages beyond the ones outlined there: if you could turn that collection approach into a universal/OS-level API you could have some kind of setup where user data by default stays on the device, then to use it, the app/app server has to request it explicitly (allowing the user easy and powerful, but granular control over who gets what data) and then user data is further protected by the other measures talked about in their paper. Some level of public education is also required I think, to make people aware of the value/threat of just giving everything up every time someone asks for it.
- Espressosaurus 9y ago
  And nothing of value was lost, except to marketers.
- nkrisc 9y ago
  We choose to limit medical progress by restricting the experimentation that can be done on humans because we've deemed such protections worthy of the cost to progress. If protecting personal information limits or slows some progress, so be it. Also it could still be done, just more carefully.
- mattgreenrocks 9y ago
  Yeah, cause they're doing so much with it now /s
- eeZah7Ux 9y ago
  I see very little evidence that personal data is useful for that. Can you name real life examples? Most machine learning is done against anonymous dataset and works fine.
  - chadgeidel 9y ago
    Machine learning can also de-anonymize that anonymous dataset. How does one protect against that? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De-anonymization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De-anonymization
iliketosleep 9y ago
It should be both an asset and potential liability. There's no doubt that user info is valuable and can be an asset. But if a company is negligent with that info, perhaps they should be liable in some way.

unit91 9y ago

Superficially, you're right. But a company that wants to survive has to keep its users happy, and data loss is really bad for PR. How many people dumped Yahoo after the breach? I imagine a lot. And really the same is true for any company that has any sizeable PR problem, regardless of the cause. Examples: - Yahoo - Uber - United Airlines - Target