4 ms·

Face it y'all, privacy is dead. Sure, GDPR and the current FB outrage will result in some new rules, legislation, etc. Perhaps we'll all have to opt-in for ce

Face it y'all, privacy is dead. Sure, GDPR and the current FB outrage will result in some new rules, legislation, etc. Perhaps we'll all have to opt-in for certain data tracking activities. Maybe the way our personal data flies around the internet will be a little less obfuscated. But we live in a digital world and it's very easy to track every packet of data we send and receive. And because we can do it, eventually we will do it. The new standards we setup may give us a false sense of control but, over time, apathy and convenience will lead us back to about where we're at now.

cmsj 9y ago
Agreed. Privacy is dead simply because privacy is something that other people give you, and the web has very very clearly indicated that it, as a whole, has no interest in giving us privacy. All that leaves is secrecy, so we'll have to live with running blockers of various kinds, in a shitty arms race with the web people who want all the data they can get their grubby little hands on. Fuck the web. It was one of the last truly successful open protocols from the early era of the internet, and it's turned out to be one of the worst (not just because of all the tracking, also because of the insane attitude of web people that it should try and compete with native applications).
- tatersolid 9y ago
  > also because of the insane attitude of web people that it should try and compete with native applications To be clear, the cause of the rise of the “web application” was that there was no other cross-platform, automatically updating, mostly standardized and stable application platform available on every device. Simple economics demand those features from an application platform, but nothing else offered it. Not Java, Flash, QT, nor any of the mobile native app platforms. Web apps are the “least bad” solution that meet those critical requirements. And they will never die because of it.
  - cmsj 9y ago
    The web barely offers the things you describe. The platforms vary so widely in terms of display and input hardware, the standards change so much and are implemented with enough quirks/incompleteness, that it's really not a stable platform. What you actually end up with are apps that are really hard to test, very poorly integrated with 100% of the platforms they are used on, hard to find and difficult to use if your connectivity isn't consistent. And it's only going to get worse as WebAssembly really takes hold.
    - tatersolid 9y ago
      Web apps I wrote back in 1998-99 in Classic ASP are still in productive use at a few companies. The only real maintenance has been OS and SQL Server version upgrades. How is that not “stable”?

cmsj 9y ago

Agreed. Privacy is dead simply because privacy is something that other people give you, and the web has very very clearly indicated that it, as a whole, has no interest in giving us privacy. All that leaves is secrecy, so we'll have to live with running blockers of various kinds, in a shitty arms race with the web people who want all the data they can get their grubby little hands on. Fuck the web. It was one of the last truly successful open protocols from the early era of the internet, and it's turned out to be one of the worst (not just because of all the tracking, also because of the insane attitude of web people that it should try and compete with native applications).

tatersolid 9y ago
> also because of the insane attitude of web people that it should try and compete with native applications To be clear, the cause of the rise of the “web application” was that there was no other cross-platform, automatically updating, mostly standardized and stable application platform available on every device. Simple economics demand those features from an application platform, but nothing else offered it. Not Java, Flash, QT, nor any of the mobile native app platforms. Web apps are the “least bad” solution that meet those critical requirements. And they will never die because of it.
- cmsj 9y ago
  The web barely offers the things you describe. The platforms vary so widely in terms of display and input hardware, the standards change so much and are implemented with enough quirks/incompleteness, that it's really not a stable platform. What you actually end up with are apps that are really hard to test, very poorly integrated with 100% of the platforms they are used on, hard to find and difficult to use if your connectivity isn't consistent. And it's only going to get worse as WebAssembly really takes hold.
  - tatersolid 9y ago
    Web apps I wrote back in 1998-99 in Classic ASP are still in productive use at a few companies. The only real maintenance has been OS and SQL Server version upgrades. How is that not “stable”?