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>If people voluntarily visit my site and send me data Plenty of serfs were voluntary as well. If your only problem with feudalism is that some serfs weren't th

>If people voluntarily visit my site and send me data Plenty of serfs were voluntary as well. If your only problem with feudalism is that some serfs weren't then maybe you are a feudalist. >the natural consequence is that I now have that data and can do whatever I want with it. Anything other than that would be an artificial restriction No no no. Nothing here is "natural" OR "artificial." Property relations, your ownership of a website at all, the fact that you receive any data about who is visiting it, all of these things can be said to be as natural or artifical as the person speaking wishes them to be.

JoshTriplett 9y ago
My problem with the term "feudalism" is that it utterly fails as an analogy. People use websites, and draw value from them, and give data to them (and random partner sites and ad networks, which is a bigger problem). They don't swear fealty to them. It's an intentionally provocative term with little bearing on concrete details, and I have about as much interest in arguing about whether it applies as I do in arguing whether data is blue, yellow, or green. As for natural and artificial, my point is that regardless of the nature of the relationship, it's artificial to hand someone a pile of data but then arbitrarily restrict what they can do with that data. That's true whether you're talking about copyright, DRM, or personal data.
- frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago
  >As for natural and artificial, my point is that regardless of the nature of the relationship, it's artificial to hand someone a pile of data but then arbitrarily restrict what they can do with that data. That's true whether you're talking about copyright, DRM, or personal data. Your ownership of a website is just as artificial as a government restricting what you can do with it. That's why I say the terms natural and artifical have no place here. >People use websites, and draw value from them, and give data to them Serfs use tenures and draw value from them and give loyalty to them. The problem in your sentence is that I believe it should be rephrased like this: "People use websites, and draw value from them, and give data to their owners" which makes the feudal analogy a lot clearer and represents your own views better, for example the "I" in this sentence: "I do own my data, including my data about the people who visited my website." >They don't swear fealty to them. By fealty you mean what? Swearing service to a lord in exchange for a plot of land? But you expect visitors to your website to swear some of their data to you in exchange for the info on your site. >It's an intentionally provocative term with little bearing on concrete details You and I disagree on that then.
  - JoshTriplett 9y ago
    > Your ownership of a website is just as artificial When you bought and paid for the server, and you're the only one who has administrative access to it, that's not at all artificial. That's a simple question of who created it and who controls it. The natural state of affairs is for anyone who has bits to be able to process and copy those bits. Any restrictions on that, whether in the form of copyright or data-collection laws, are necessarily artificial. That doesn't make those restrictions wrong; for instance, I think it's entirely appropriate and likely uncontroversial to prohibit any public disclosure of people's physical location (e.g. home address or current GPS location), for safety reasons. I'm simply arguing that any such restrictions are artificially constructed, so we should talk about which restrictions are necessary and reasonable. By contrast, a framing that treats data about someone as somehow "belonging" to them implies restrictions on basic things like the ability to communicate with others. (At the most basic level, you'd be talking about telling another person some personal information about you and expecting your "please don't share that information" to have some force of law; that's a restriction on that person's natural ability to communicate any knowledge they have.) Such a framing flips the polarity around from "which restrictions are necessary to protect people" to "which limited rights are granted over that data in order to accomplish things", and I think that's a fundamentally broken approach. > Serfs use tenures and draw value from them and give loyalty to them. Castles and towns in the middle ages got rather poor Internet service, and changing loyalties tended to be frowned upon, to say the least. Your continuous attempts to reframe things in those terms are not welcome. What changes, precisely, do you want to see? If you want to talk about regulations on the collection and use of data, let's talk about those. I'm not going to spend time trying to map that into some arbitrary and intentionally provocative analogy about "serfs", any more than I'm going to attempt to map websites to analogous models of cars or gothic architectural styles. > But you expect visitors to your website to swear some of their data to you in exchange for the info on your site. I'm ignoring the charged term "swear", here. I expect that they voluntarily provide data they're willing to provide in exchange for things they see value in that use that data, yes. For instance, they might provide information on what things they like or dislike, or make connections with other users, or at a lower level, their browser may make a series of requests with a given order, timing, and parameters.

JoshTriplett 9y ago

My problem with the term "feudalism" is that it utterly fails as an analogy. People use websites, and draw value from them, and give data to them (and random partner sites and ad networks, which is a bigger problem). They don't swear fealty to them. It's an intentionally provocative term with little bearing on concrete details, and I have about as much interest in arguing about whether it applies as I do in arguing whether data is blue, yellow, or green. As for natural and artificial, my point is that regardless of the nature of the relationship, it's artificial to hand someone a pile of data but then arbitrarily restrict what they can do with that data. That's true whether you're talking about copyright, DRM, or personal data.

frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago
>As for natural and artificial, my point is that regardless of the nature of the relationship, it's artificial to hand someone a pile of data but then arbitrarily restrict what they can do with that data. That's true whether you're talking about copyright, DRM, or personal data. Your ownership of a website is just as artificial as a government restricting what you can do with it. That's why I say the terms natural and artifical have no place here. >People use websites, and draw value from them, and give data to them Serfs use tenures and draw value from them and give loyalty to them. The problem in your sentence is that I believe it should be rephrased like this: "People use websites, and draw value from them, and give data to their owners" which makes the feudal analogy a lot clearer and represents your own views better, for example the "I" in this sentence: "I do own my data, including my data about the people who visited my website." >They don't swear fealty to them. By fealty you mean what? Swearing service to a lord in exchange for a plot of land? But you expect visitors to your website to swear some of their data to you in exchange for the info on your site. >It's an intentionally provocative term with little bearing on concrete details You and I disagree on that then.
- JoshTriplett 9y ago
  > Your ownership of a website is just as artificial When you bought and paid for the server, and you're the only one who has administrative access to it, that's not at all artificial. That's a simple question of who created it and who controls it. The natural state of affairs is for anyone who has bits to be able to process and copy those bits. Any restrictions on that, whether in the form of copyright or data-collection laws, are necessarily artificial. That doesn't make those restrictions wrong; for instance, I think it's entirely appropriate and likely uncontroversial to prohibit any public disclosure of people's physical location (e.g. home address or current GPS location), for safety reasons. I'm simply arguing that any such restrictions are artificially constructed, so we should talk about which restrictions are necessary and reasonable. By contrast, a framing that treats data about someone as somehow "belonging" to them implies restrictions on basic things like the ability to communicate with others. (At the most basic level, you'd be talking about telling another person some personal information about you and expecting your "please don't share that information" to have some force of law; that's a restriction on that person's natural ability to communicate any knowledge they have.) Such a framing flips the polarity around from "which restrictions are necessary to protect people" to "which limited rights are granted over that data in order to accomplish things", and I think that's a fundamentally broken approach. > Serfs use tenures and draw value from them and give loyalty to them. Castles and towns in the middle ages got rather poor Internet service, and changing loyalties tended to be frowned upon, to say the least. Your continuous attempts to reframe things in those terms are not welcome. What changes, precisely, do you want to see? If you want to talk about regulations on the collection and use of data, let's talk about those. I'm not going to spend time trying to map that into some arbitrary and intentionally provocative analogy about "serfs", any more than I'm going to attempt to map websites to analogous models of cars or gothic architectural styles. > But you expect visitors to your website to swear some of their data to you in exchange for the info on your site. I'm ignoring the charged term "swear", here. I expect that they voluntarily provide data they're willing to provide in exchange for things they see value in that use that data, yes. For instance, they might provide information on what things they like or dislike, or make connections with other users, or at a lower level, their browser may make a series of requests with a given order, timing, and parameters.