7 ms·

The poignant part of the headline here is "sell it to your boss". I think we have already lost the battle over data mining. It is happening, and will continue t

by wfo 9y ago

The poignant part of the headline here is "sell it to your boss". I think we have already lost the battle over data mining. It is happening, and will continue to happen and it seems to me there is really nothing we can do short of drastically restructuring the entire Internet. The biggest problem is when you combine intrusive massive surveillance with a ultra-powerful entity that can be capricious, malicious, and often abuses and punishes its underlings. This is why I am far more concerned (as a selfish American, thinking for now only about the concerns of Americans) about the FBI having unlimited surveillance powers than the NSA: the FBI has a history of committing crime, horrifying suppression of speech, dissents, political movements, of destroying the lives of innocents, etc. The FBI can knock on your door with guns and throw in you a cage for decades. It has massive power over us so it is important we do not give it massive information about us at the same time. The same is true with bosses. One technique to deal with this is to try and firewall the information off away from the powerful. This is what we did to the FBI before parallel construction (bills that say data will be collected "only for terrorism" -- a lie, obviously, as it always is, but one that made the collection palatable). The article focuses on this approach, which is in my view a lost cause, but a lost cause worth fighting for nonetheless. The other approach is to take away power from bosses. Right now a boss has complete and total power over his employees without labor unions or worker protections (i.e. the current state of affairs in the US). It is this combination with the information that is so disgusting and dystopian. So we could, instead, talk about taking away the power, rather than taking away the information -- which would have the added benefit of solving many other social problems along the way.

gaius 9y ago
The biggest problem is when you combine intrusive massive surveillance with a ultra-powerful entity that can be capricious, malicious, and often abuses and punishes its underlings. I am not so worried about that as I am about the cost. Consider: You could always get the dirt on someone if you were willing to drop a few grand on a private dick. That created a bit of friction - you had to really want to get at that person. But what if you can get all the dirt you could ever use for just $1, or some trivial cost? Someone so inclined could go on a fishing expedition on a whim. Your HR department could routinely do everyone in the company, and every supplier and customer, because why not? That's the way this will be weaponized.
SCHiM 9y ago
I see many people argue that fighting for privacy is a lost cause. That it'd take too much effort to reverse current trends. I think that you and others are too cynical, although I agree that it might become worse before it gets any better. If we look at history we can see that other societies had the will, if not the means, to engage in data mining on the scale that ours does through the internet and massive analysis through machine learning/statistics. The Stasi is an example of an organization that certainly displayed the will to violate privacy as much as possible. But it also becomes apparent that the privacy violating priorities of those organizations and societies can change, in an almost Hegelian dialectic manner, to protecting privacy. These days counter culture is still going strong in Germany, relative to other parts of Europe. People that belong to a counter culture will resist tools that exert control over them, such as extensive surveillance, by definition. This is in addition to the fact that Germany is more privacy friendly than most of its European neighbours. Things can and do change over time. Through history a pendulum swings from one extreme to another. We just need to wait until something goes horrendously wrong with the way our privacy is currently being violated before it starts to swing in the other direction.
- Retric 9y ago
  I think privacy feelings are often misplaced. Using the internet may feel private, but it's like setting up a giant antenna on your roof and using radio to chat with someone else. IMO, the fight should focus on things like secretly turning on the microphone on your internet connected device (cellphone etc) and listing in. That's the kind of situation where we could get useful long term precedent and most people would agree with the intent. Because, if we are not careful that can quietly change and AI will make listing to every conversation anyone has in the county a real possibility.
  - DerfNet 9y ago
    I always found it crazy that they didn't carry over the hardware "recording" LED to cellphone cameras. I'd really like to see that become a thing, and maybe another LED for the microphone, wired into the circuit so that the camera and/or microphone cannot be in use without the LED lighting up. I'd basically like a row of status LEDs like an old Thinkpad for monitoring all systems on my devices.
alexandercrohde 9y ago
What do you mean lost? I deleted my linked in over a year ago when I learned about them selling my data to recruiters and it being used to assess my likelihood of leaving a job.
luxuryballs 9y ago
a boss only has power over you so far as you're being paid to act on behalf of the company, and that's the proper power you should have when you need to run a company, clearly having employees be able to harness some law and create a kind of capture on the employer wouldn't be ideal you could end up with job seekers that are just seeding for predatory lawsuits, or people end up squatting on a company to get whatever they can regardless of what cost/value impact they are having on the company, terrible for both businesses and competitive job seekers alike even if they made a law that says "you can't fire people for things discovered using data mining" you now run into the situation of having to provide some reason for firing someone, which is a messy situation, because you shouldn't need to provide proof or reasoning for no longer wanting to work with someone, it would make it dangerous to work with anyone that showed any potential risk for making things difficult, and we don't want to make it more risky and expensive for people to get jobs
- wfo 9y ago
  >a boss only has power over you so far as you're being paid to act on behalf of the company This is obviously untrue. You can be fired for any reason, anytime. Whether what you're doing is at work or not. Your boss can see you at a protest and fire you. Your boss can call you at 2am on your personal line and fire you if you don't pick up the phone. Your boss can fire you for not liking the right music or restaurants, or for refusing to go to certain parties (it's just not a good culture fit). > clearly having employees be able to harness some law and create a kind of capture on the employer wouldn't be ideal No, it wouldn't be ideal, but it would be very, very good. Asking for something ideal is a little Utopian, so I'll take the massive improvement you are suggesting. >people end up squatting on a company to get whatever they can regardless of what cost/value impact they are having on the company You have just described most bosses and corporate owners. >you now run into the situation of having to provide some reason for firing someone, which is a messy situation, because you shouldn't need to provide proof or reasoning for no longer wanting to work with someone This is how it works in nearly every developed country in the world, and how it used to work in the US. It works just fine. There is no need to give bosses ultimate complete power over all aspects of their employee's lives. There is no reasonable justification for it I have ever seen except ideological devotion to the unquestioned authority and power of the wealthy.
elhudy 9y ago
An approach we can take on an individual level is to be mindful of the data we are giving up. If you are employed and in the process of job hunting, then stop "liking" the article headlined "10 Reasons why you deserve better from your company".
- wfo 9y ago
  This is giving in to surveillance: allowing it to define what you are allowed to say and do. It is also not feasible. Sure, you can stop doing that, but there are millions of other 'tells' that you will give up through your actions online that can predict this information. Machine learning will pick up features you cannot control or even imagine that will accurately predict whether or not you are on the job hunt, no matter what you do to hide it short of just disconnecting from the Internet. Which is likely a tell itself.
- FridgeSeal 9y ago
  That's just acquiescing to surveillance. That's not a solution. Surveillance capitalism and government spying on the populace (enabled by the former) has gone far enough, to acquiesce to a degree like that is to give them an inch, and if you give them an inch, they will take a mile and we'll be back to where we started.
- Trav5 9y ago
  I call BS on the comments that say doing what you suggest is giving up... To me, "Liking" something implies expressing your opinion publicly, probably via Facebook. When I receive a job application, the first thing I do is check to see what the person has publicly posted. That's not surveillance. Before the general population starts to worry about surveillance, they need to think about the public image they are portraying online. I can't hire someone who posts stupid shit publicly. It could damage my business if my clients look them up.
  - gaius 9y ago
    That's not surveillance Yes it is. No less than if you got their postal address from their CV, parked outside their house and watched who came and went. After all they volunteered their details and the street outside their house is public... right?
forapurpose 9y ago
> I think we have already lost the battle over data mining. It is happening, and will continue to happen and it seems to me there is really nothing we can do short of drastically restructuring the entire Internet. Let's say we've lost so far, but certainly we can change. Europe, for example, has much stronger protections than the U.S. Laws cleaned up the environment in cities, brought a revolution in civil rights to billions .... certainly we can provide privacy to end users if we put our minds to it. (I'm not saying it will be easy.)
oldandtired 9y ago
As a non-USAian, I would suggest that USAians take the approach of referring to the FBI and its ilk as the Gestapo, KGB or the Stasi (or any other well known like group). Keep the references up and you might just see some changes. It's possible it won't make changes but, hey, ya neva no wot can appen.
- gred 9y ago
  I think referring to the FBI as "the KGB" or "the Gestapo" would be counterproductive, making it harder for open-minded friends and family to hear valid concerns, and more likely that they just roll their eyes and tune us out -- similar to the effect of the euphemism "non-USAian" on this non-nonUSAian.
- ajdlinux 9y ago
  As a fellow non-USAian, I don't think it's helpful to equate US law enforcement agencies with Nazis and Communists. The FBI is nowhere near as evil an organisation as the Gestapo, the NKVD, and so on. Using Nazi allegories all the time limits your ability to escalate rhetoric when they actually do something Nazi-like.
- irrational 9y ago
  I stopped reading when I reached "USAian". What a stupid term.
mjevans 9y ago
Enabling the average worker to take risks like searching for a better job or maybe even starting a company of their own (if they can argue the business model to a funding entity or have sufficient savings or grant incentives) is the proper way of defusing that power. Everyone should have access to quality healthcare (as a birth/emigration right); tax everyone, single payer (the government) negotiates with doctors in an area for the best price; everyone that needs a service done picks from among the open local doctors and just gets treated. No secondary bills, no annoying billing department, just treatment. Second would be to actually have a national ID, and among other things, to have (an abstracted) public shipping address for registered mail to reach that person. First Class (normal post) would be able to lookup the address as part of the service. Anyone could thus mail to #NATIONALID# and not need to worry about where someone has moved or re-located. Third is enforcing market competition for basic supplies (of all kinds, but I'll focus on housing since that's a major concern on HN). This would mean that if there isn't enough housing in an area people want to be, more would be encouraged, and if that isn't enough to match demand special arrangements would be called for to do things like buy out whole neighborhoods (at once) at something like 2-5 times current market value per unit and re-develop an area to a correctly targeted density.
- woolvalley 9y ago
  It doesn't need to even be a #nationalid#. It could be like an email address you register with USPS.
  - TheCoelacanth 9y ago
    Even better would be unlimited aliases to your national id where only you and USPS know who the alias points to (unless, of course, you tell someone else yourself).
Crontab 9y ago
Corporate surveillance is, in my life, a bigger deal than government surveillance. I think Zeynep Tufekci described the situation really well with the title of her recent Ted Talk: "We're building a dystopia just to make people click on ads".
- sophacles 9y ago
  I don't think it makes sense to separate those two... if that data is collected by a third party and made available for sale, the government can buy it too.
  - Crontab 9y ago
    Most people, myself included, wouldn't survive if directly targeted by the government - so I exclude them from my threat model. But I do hope that being wary of commercial surveillance will at least reduce the footprint I leave behind.
imgabe 9y ago
Absolutely. Privacy is basically security through obscurity. It's never going to stop a malicious government or even employer. We need better mechanisms to prevent such entities from becoming malicious in the first place.
- speedplane 9y ago
  Privacy is more than just security. It's about being able to act freely without being judged and controlling one's personhood.
peteretep 9y ago
> I think we have already lost the > battle over data mining Who is we? GDPR comes into force in 6 months' time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regulation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regula...
- wastedhours 9y ago
  Really? In a lot of cases, we give our consent for our data to be processed, and the terms of which - do you really think, even with a more up front disclosure statement and post-process record keeping, that for most people it'll have a large impact on data from opted-in networks? And the subsequent (consented) use of it in all manner of ways? It's not a combative question - I'm genuinely interested as to whether I've misinterpreted GDPR requirements or not? From what I've seen, as a lot of personal data is willingly traded by people, and the greyness around "legitimate interests" of the controller, the landscape wont look massively different (just perhaps a more invasive privacy notice on first visit?)
  - peteretep 9y ago
    I think I have a slightly different perspective, from various business dealings I have. Firstly, I am elbow deep in the recruitment sector, and GDPR is a Major Fucking Deal for everyone. Software companies in the recruitment space are spending a huge amount of time and treasure making sure they are on top of the game for GDPR. Recruitment consultancies are too. The industry is taking it super seriously. Recruitment is (amazingly, and contrary to what people tend to believe) generally pretty good about this sort of stuff (with almost all shady shit coming from individual recruiters with too little oversight), so maybe the industry is over-reacting, but I don't think so. Secondly, I am pretty aware of a lot of shady internet marketing and retargetting type shit. I don't know how that industry is reacting because I'm not close enough, but I'm pretty sure they should be in a panic if they're not. The law as I understand it will make it difficult for companies to use catch-all privacy policies without being specific, and companies will have to make an explicit case for -- for example -- reselling your data to advertising companies if that's not explicitly what you signed up for.

by wfo 9y ago

gaius 9y ago

The biggest problem is when you combine intrusive massive surveillance with a ultra-powerful entity that can be capricious, malicious, and often abuses and punishes its underlings. I am not so worried about that as I am about the cost. Consider: You could always get the dirt on someone if you were willing to drop a few grand on a private dick. That created a bit of friction - you had to really want to get at that person. But what if you can get all the dirt you could ever use for just $1, or some trivial cost? Someone so inclined could go on a fishing expedition on a whim. Your HR department could routinely do everyone in the company, and every supplier and customer, because why not? That's the way this will be weaponized.

SCHiM 9y ago

I see many people argue that fighting for privacy is a lost cause. That it'd take too much effort to reverse current trends. I think that you and others are too cynical, although I agree that it might become worse before it gets any better. If we look at history we can see that other societies had the will, if not the means, to engage in data mining on the scale that ours does through the internet and massive analysis through machine learning/statistics. The Stasi is an example of an organization that certainly displayed the will to violate privacy as much as possible. But it also becomes apparent that the privacy violating priorities of those organizations and societies can change, in an almost Hegelian dialectic manner, to protecting privacy. These days counter culture is still going strong in Germany, relative to other parts of Europe. People that belong to a counter culture will resist tools that exert control over them, such as extensive surveillance, by definition. This is in addition to the fact that Germany is more privacy friendly than most of its European neighbours. Things can and do change over time. Through history a pendulum swings from one extreme to another. We just need to wait until something goes horrendously wrong with the way our privacy is currently being violated before it starts to swing in the other direction.

Retric 9y ago
I think privacy feelings are often misplaced. Using the internet may feel private, but it's like setting up a giant antenna on your roof and using radio to chat with someone else. IMO, the fight should focus on things like secretly turning on the microphone on your internet connected device (cellphone etc) and listing in. That's the kind of situation where we could get useful long term precedent and most people would agree with the intent. Because, if we are not careful that can quietly change and AI will make listing to every conversation anyone has in the county a real possibility.
- DerfNet 9y ago
  I always found it crazy that they didn't carry over the hardware "recording" LED to cellphone cameras. I'd really like to see that become a thing, and maybe another LED for the microphone, wired into the circuit so that the camera and/or microphone cannot be in use without the LED lighting up. I'd basically like a row of status LEDs like an old Thinkpad for monitoring all systems on my devices.

alexandercrohde 9y ago

What do you mean lost? I deleted my linked in over a year ago when I learned about them selling my data to recruiters and it being used to assess my likelihood of leaving a job.

luxuryballs 9y ago

a boss only has power over you so far as you're being paid to act on behalf of the company, and that's the proper power you should have when you need to run a company, clearly having employees be able to harness some law and create a kind of capture on the employer wouldn't be ideal you could end up with job seekers that are just seeding for predatory lawsuits, or people end up squatting on a company to get whatever they can regardless of what cost/value impact they are having on the company, terrible for both businesses and competitive job seekers alike even if they made a law that says "you can't fire people for things discovered using data mining" you now run into the situation of having to provide some reason for firing someone, which is a messy situation, because you shouldn't need to provide proof or reasoning for no longer wanting to work with someone, it would make it dangerous to work with anyone that showed any potential risk for making things difficult, and we don't want to make it more risky and expensive for people to get jobs

wfo 9y ago
>a boss only has power over you so far as you're being paid to act on behalf of the company This is obviously untrue. You can be fired for any reason, anytime. Whether what you're doing is at work or not. Your boss can see you at a protest and fire you. Your boss can call you at 2am on your personal line and fire you if you don't pick up the phone. Your boss can fire you for not liking the right music or restaurants, or for refusing to go to certain parties (it's just not a good culture fit). > clearly having employees be able to harness some law and create a kind of capture on the employer wouldn't be ideal No, it wouldn't be ideal, but it would be very, very good. Asking for something ideal is a little Utopian, so I'll take the massive improvement you are suggesting. >people end up squatting on a company to get whatever they can regardless of what cost/value impact they are having on the company You have just described most bosses and corporate owners. >you now run into the situation of having to provide some reason for firing someone, which is a messy situation, because you shouldn't need to provide proof or reasoning for no longer wanting to work with someone This is how it works in nearly every developed country in the world, and how it used to work in the US. It works just fine. There is no need to give bosses ultimate complete power over all aspects of their employee's lives. There is no reasonable justification for it I have ever seen except ideological devotion to the unquestioned authority and power of the wealthy.

elhudy 9y ago

An approach we can take on an individual level is to be mindful of the data we are giving up. If you are employed and in the process of job hunting, then stop "liking" the article headlined "10 Reasons why you deserve better from your company".

wfo 9y ago
This is giving in to surveillance: allowing it to define what you are allowed to say and do. It is also not feasible. Sure, you can stop doing that, but there are millions of other 'tells' that you will give up through your actions online that can predict this information. Machine learning will pick up features you cannot control or even imagine that will accurately predict whether or not you are on the job hunt, no matter what you do to hide it short of just disconnecting from the Internet. Which is likely a tell itself.
FridgeSeal 9y ago
That's just acquiescing to surveillance. That's not a solution. Surveillance capitalism and government spying on the populace (enabled by the former) has gone far enough, to acquiesce to a degree like that is to give them an inch, and if you give them an inch, they will take a mile and we'll be back to where we started.
Trav5 9y ago
I call BS on the comments that say doing what you suggest is giving up... To me, "Liking" something implies expressing your opinion publicly, probably via Facebook. When I receive a job application, the first thing I do is check to see what the person has publicly posted. That's not surveillance. Before the general population starts to worry about surveillance, they need to think about the public image they are portraying online. I can't hire someone who posts stupid shit publicly. It could damage my business if my clients look them up.
- gaius 9y ago
  That's not surveillance Yes it is. No less than if you got their postal address from their CV, parked outside their house and watched who came and went. After all they volunteered their details and the street outside their house is public... right?

forapurpose 9y ago

> I think we have already lost the battle over data mining. It is happening, and will continue to happen and it seems to me there is really nothing we can do short of drastically restructuring the entire Internet. Let's say we've lost so far, but certainly we can change. Europe, for example, has much stronger protections than the U.S. Laws cleaned up the environment in cities, brought a revolution in civil rights to billions .... certainly we can provide privacy to end users if we put our minds to it. (I'm not saying it will be easy.)

oldandtired 9y ago

As a non-USAian, I would suggest that USAians take the approach of referring to the FBI and its ilk as the Gestapo, KGB or the Stasi (or any other well known like group). Keep the references up and you might just see some changes. It's possible it won't make changes but, hey, ya neva no wot can appen.

gred 9y ago
I think referring to the FBI as "the KGB" or "the Gestapo" would be counterproductive, making it harder for open-minded friends and family to hear valid concerns, and more likely that they just roll their eyes and tune us out -- similar to the effect of the euphemism "non-USAian" on this non-nonUSAian.
ajdlinux 9y ago
As a fellow non-USAian, I don't think it's helpful to equate US law enforcement agencies with Nazis and Communists. The FBI is nowhere near as evil an organisation as the Gestapo, the NKVD, and so on. Using Nazi allegories all the time limits your ability to escalate rhetoric when they actually do something Nazi-like.
irrational 9y ago
I stopped reading when I reached "USAian". What a stupid term.

mjevans 9y ago

Enabling the average worker to take risks like searching for a better job or maybe even starting a company of their own (if they can argue the business model to a funding entity or have sufficient savings or grant incentives) is the proper way of defusing that power. Everyone should have access to quality healthcare (as a birth/emigration right); tax everyone, single payer (the government) negotiates with doctors in an area for the best price; everyone that needs a service done picks from among the open local doctors and just gets treated. No secondary bills, no annoying billing department, just treatment. Second would be to actually have a national ID, and among other things, to have (an abstracted) public shipping address for registered mail to reach that person. First Class (normal post) would be able to lookup the address as part of the service. Anyone could thus mail to #NATIONALID# and not need to worry about where someone has moved or re-located. Third is enforcing market competition for basic supplies (of all kinds, but I'll focus on housing since that's a major concern on HN). This would mean that if there isn't enough housing in an area people want to be, more would be encouraged, and if that isn't enough to match demand special arrangements would be called for to do things like buy out whole neighborhoods (at once) at something like 2-5 times current market value per unit and re-develop an area to a correctly targeted density.

woolvalley 9y ago
It doesn't need to even be a #nationalid#. It could be like an email address you register with USPS.
- TheCoelacanth 9y ago
  Even better would be unlimited aliases to your national id where only you and USPS know who the alias points to (unless, of course, you tell someone else yourself).

Crontab 9y ago

Corporate surveillance is, in my life, a bigger deal than government surveillance. I think Zeynep Tufekci described the situation really well with the title of her recent Ted Talk: "We're building a dystopia just to make people click on ads".

sophacles 9y ago
I don't think it makes sense to separate those two... if that data is collected by a third party and made available for sale, the government can buy it too.
- Crontab 9y ago
  Most people, myself included, wouldn't survive if directly targeted by the government - so I exclude them from my threat model. But I do hope that being wary of commercial surveillance will at least reduce the footprint I leave behind.

imgabe 9y ago

Absolutely. Privacy is basically security through obscurity. It's never going to stop a malicious government or even employer. We need better mechanisms to prevent such entities from becoming malicious in the first place.

speedplane 9y ago
Privacy is more than just security. It's about being able to act freely without being judged and controlling one's personhood.

peteretep 9y ago

> I think we have already lost the > battle over data mining Who is we? GDPR comes into force in 6 months' time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regulation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regula...

wastedhours 9y ago
Really? In a lot of cases, we give our consent for our data to be processed, and the terms of which - do you really think, even with a more up front disclosure statement and post-process record keeping, that for most people it'll have a large impact on data from opted-in networks? And the subsequent (consented) use of it in all manner of ways? It's not a combative question - I'm genuinely interested as to whether I've misinterpreted GDPR requirements or not? From what I've seen, as a lot of personal data is willingly traded by people, and the greyness around "legitimate interests" of the controller, the landscape wont look massively different (just perhaps a more invasive privacy notice on first visit?)
- peteretep 9y ago
  I think I have a slightly different perspective, from various business dealings I have. Firstly, I am elbow deep in the recruitment sector, and GDPR is a Major Fucking Deal for everyone. Software companies in the recruitment space are spending a huge amount of time and treasure making sure they are on top of the game for GDPR. Recruitment consultancies are too. The industry is taking it super seriously. Recruitment is (amazingly, and contrary to what people tend to believe) generally pretty good about this sort of stuff (with almost all shady shit coming from individual recruiters with too little oversight), so maybe the industry is over-reacting, but I don't think so. Secondly, I am pretty aware of a lot of shady internet marketing and retargetting type shit. I don't know how that industry is reacting because I'm not close enough, but I'm pretty sure they should be in a panic if they're not. The law as I understand it will make it difficult for companies to use catch-all privacy policies without being specific, and companies will have to make an explicit case for -- for example -- reselling your data to advertising companies if that's not explicitly what you signed up for.