8 ms·

Surveillance Kills Freedom by Killing Experimentation

279 points by humanetech 8y ago

_Schizotypy 8y ago
People on MySpace censored themselves after 9/11? I didn't know middle and high schoolers were so politically aware.
- wand3r 8y ago
  I didnt see this in the article and myspace was started in 2003, 2 years after 9/11.
  - coldtea 8y ago
    The parent makes a sarcastic comment, based on: > In the months and years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, many of us censored what we spoke about on social media or what we searched on the internet. from the TFA. i.e. Which those "many of us" were, and what "social media" were they censoring themselves in around 9/11? Since (a) the only successful website that one would classify as "social media" back then was MySpace, and (b) it was mostly for teens, (the parent asks) if people on social media back then censored themselves, does that mean that teens of MySpace censored themselves? Either the article is BS on that part, or teens at the time quite politically aware....
    - _Schizotypy 8y ago
      Thank you. Not sure why I'm getting so many down votes, maybe people are super passionate about MySpace time-line accuracy
    - dredmorbius 8y ago
      "Social media" as a term was not well-established at the time, but the notion of online user-generated and social content predates even the Web: Usenet and mailing lists date to the 1970s. By 2001, there were these, blogs, and aggregators such as Slashdot, as well as many online news and magazine sites, especially in the infotech space. So an active community. The post-9/11 era extended well through the aughts. GeoCities was one of the Internet's earliest social networking websites, appearing in November 1994, followed by Classmates in December 1995, Six Degrees in May 1997, Open Diary in October 1998, LiveJournal in April 1999, Ryze in October 2001, Friendster in March 2002, LinkedIn in May 2003, hi5 in June 2003, MySpace in August 2003, Orkut in January 2004, Facebook in February 2004, Yahoo! 360° in March 2005, Bebo in July 2005, Twitter in July 2006, Tumblr in February 2007, and Google+ in July 2011. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=social+media&year_start=1990&year_end=2008&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Csocial%20media%3B%2Cc0 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=social+media&y...
    - slededit 8y ago
      MSN messenger would have counted. We definitely joked about the CIA reading conversations. It also seemed like my more outlandish comments would get send error's more frequently than normal but perhaps that was just me being paranoid.
    - acct1771 8y ago
      The TFA?
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
  - _Schizotypy 8y ago
    So which social media site were YOU active on in 2001?
vbuwivbiu 8y ago
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/animal-emotions/201602/ravens-know-theyre-being-watched-bird-brain-theory-mind https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/animal-emotions/2016... People (and ravens) cannot help but act differently when they're being watched. Being watched (by anonymous viewers) is a stressful vigilance state.
- tokai 8y ago
  I feel a little bad about it, but scaring corvids have become somewhat of a past time for me. You can get very close to them, when they are foraging on the ground, if you turn your face away from them and only look indirectly. Then when you've gotten close you stare directly at the poor bird. Except for jackdaws, I haven't met any corvid that isn't gravely startled by a such sudden leer. City birds are very used to us humans paying them no attention and happily dart around our legs. But if they get the sense you are watching, can no amount of french fries make them take the risk of sticking around.
  - tzs 8y ago
    Careful! Crows (and probably other corvids) learn to recognize individual humans, and are smart enough to know that whether a human is friendly, indifferent, or hostile varies from human to human and is fairly consistent for a given human. Oh, and there is evidence that they have some way of communicating their knowledge of individual humans, so a crow that has decided to dislike you can tell other crows you are bad, and they will start acting as if you had wronged them, too, and can pass on the message. Corvids are fun to play with. I've got several Steller's jays [1] coming by every day to get peanuts, and recently a flock of about 20 crows. But with the crows I'm limiting my messing with them to things that they can't interpret as hostile or annoying, because I do not want 20 crows trying to annoy me back. The crows would win. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steller%27s_jay https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steller%27s_jay
    - hyperpallium 8y ago
      Worse for the corvids too: it's surprise-tokai!
tatrajim 8y ago
In China now the goal is the make surveillance omnipresent. Already in premier universities, including Peking University, classroom lectures are routinely surveilled to monitor inappropriate discourse.
- SubiculumCode 8y ago
  Can China have an innovative science and technology sector under persistent omnipresent surveillance??
  - pmarreck 8y ago
    No. But let them figure it out the hard way. Those who do not remember history are doomed to repeat its mistakes.
    - chongli 8y ago
      It's a terrible thing for well over a billion people to have to go through in order for a tiny elite to learn. I can't think of a better solution, though.
      - petre 8y ago
        It was by their own and their ancestor's choice. Taiwan chose differently.
      - pmarreck 8y ago
        > It's a terrible thing for well over a billion people to have to go through in order for a tiny elite to learn And this is why we have democracies. Also, if history is any indication, it won't end well (although East Germany's end was remarkably peaceful).
    - coldtea 8y ago
      Remember what history? Of some older state that didn't have "innovative science and technology" because of surveillance? The only history to remember would be USSRs, and even had quite a good track record in science and engineering (given their meagre resources).
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
djacobs 8y ago
This is the way we should be talking about privacy. Using vivid examples that are relevant to everyday people’s lives on both sides of the political divide. Avoiding broad, philosophical-sounding proclamations. I hope people on HN are taking note.
hazeii 8y ago
Not a new result, but should be more widely known and understood. An argument easily extended to running an adblocker suggests you'd going to be more creative and productive because there are fewer eyes watching you.
moretai 8y ago
It's odd that people welcome it. I've had a person tell me that he doesn't mind being watched because it helps catch terrorism and crimes and such.
- Valmar 8y ago
  That's because they've been brainwashed into blindly accepting mass surveillance being supposedly necessary, due to terrorism, crime, etc. Problem with the reasoning is that surveillance doesn't really stop terrorism and crime. Indeed, if I were a criminal worth my salt, I'd slither into positions where I am effectively exempt from surveillance, or could control how surveillance is used against me.
  - ben_w 8y ago
    While I am sympathetic to your line of reasoning, I would like to point out that most people are massively underestimating what computers (and by extension computer aided surveillance) can do. For example, people are still regularly amazed when I show off Google Translate’s augmented reality mode, whose technology is nearly 8 years old now. Other tech demos I have seen include: • Wall penetrating radar using ambient WiFi to do pose detection • Remote sensing of pulse and breathing from RGB video • Audio recovery from normal speed (sans audio channel) RGB video footage by taking advantage of the rolling shutter • Lip reading to the level that specific speakers can be isolated or removed from the audio stream of a clip • Non-voice audio isolation/removal, e.g. guitar
  - cronix 8y ago
    Exactly. And look at the freedoms we've given up, billions of dollars we've spent (maybe more - we'll never know how much the NSA/CIA put into their data-collecting infrastructure), hours wasted (you used to be able to arrive at the airport 20 minutes before your flight left, and still board on time), etc. IIRC - it "only" cost the 9/11 terrorists about $1M to pull it off. Terrorism is quite effective. It's almost like an amplified reflection DDoS attack - cheap to pull off and expensive to defend against. https://www.aclu.org/other/top-ten-abuses-power-911 https://www.aclu.org/other/top-ten-abuses-power-911 "Those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety" - Ben Franklin
pmarreck 8y ago
Also ever relevant are Martin Fowler’s thoughts on the matter of privacy or lack thereof https://martinfowler.com/articles/bothersome-privacy.html https://martinfowler.com/articles/bothersome-privacy.html
_mu_ 8y ago
As a librarian at a large university library I feel this. I'm uncomfortable poking too much around in scihub. Even though it's not something a national security agency would care about (I hope). Could any connection between papers from scihub and myself, be a huge issue both with my career and potentially for my institutions position when negotiating licenses. It might be paranoid, but there are so many possible ways to be compromised, that I choose to direct attention elsewhere. I find it sad that I'm afraid to inquire on one of the most important developments in scholarly dissemination in resent years. I'm a research librarian for Price's sake.
- kanzure 8y ago
  I have a few thoughts about privacy for you. Don't use academia.edu or researchgate. It's a big story waiting to get out. There's absolutely no privacy on these sites and they track everything. I get an email notification from these sites every time someone does a search query that happens to display my paper as a result. I also get notified when someone has been reading a paper through their platform. The privacy implications are really gross. I hope that they delete this data, stop collecting it, and that nobody ever gets a copy of that. Academic PDFs downloaded from academic publishers include deanonymizing information such as your name, your institutional affiliation, IP address, and sometimes your email address. I wrote a tool to help remove this information from pdfs: https://github.com/kanzure/pdfparanoia https://github.com/kanzure/pdfparanoia As for scihub, many of your concerns can be mitigated by having an offline copy. There are torrents published by scihub (or libgen's scimag, which is supposedly a mirror of scihub?). I have had a lot of trouble getting a relatively complete copy due to low seeder bandwidth and lack of seeders. There's a forum somewhere that you can request libgen users to seed certain torrents, your mileage will vary. I think every academic library should have a complete copy of scihub. Keep in mind, scihub isn't just using library ezproxy accounts, she also has a large cache of files. Supposedly that's 70 million papers at the moment. It's about ~50 terabytes or something. My recommendation is that scihub should be running pdfparanoia on all of their papers. It only removes visible watermarks. I haven't investigated invisible watermarks yet. I'm definitely interested in those. Turning up the paranoia dial a little more, I am concerned that scihub may have a deal with a nation state actor for the purposes of phoning home about research article downloads from certain countries, in exchange for allowing scihub to continue to operate. Going further, this could include pdf malware (or metadata tainting for fingerprinting) or browser exploits. This level of international espionage would be very useful to a nation, and might explain any nation's interest in keeping scihub operational despite political or civil court pressures. Of course, it's also helpful that scihub is running in an area of the world that doesn't really care about demands from U.S. courts, so none of this is necessary to explain the continued existence of scihub. Ever since I began thinking about the deanonymizing data inserted into pdfs by academic publishers, I've been wondering about collaboration between academic publishers and nation state entities. This is a concern even in absence of scihub existing. Also, many of these publishers have really bad web security and it's trivial to take data like apache logs or whatever, because they are publishers not software experts especially the smaller publishers. Who else is taking that data, and what can they do with it? Academic privacy is extremely important for the freedom of science and human progress, and I haven't figured out how to juggle those priorities against the priority of making complete mirrors of scihub. I am deeply worried about that data trove disappearing. It's one of our most important data sets...
zzo38computer 8y ago
Certainly there is too much surveillance which not only prevent your freedom but also waste too much energy.
oedmarap 8y ago
The generalization and broadening of scope of such laws is one of the most troubling agendas/trends of the surveillance state. From what I've observed, countries are only more and more eager to adopt intelligence gathering methodology in a collective manner (à la Five Eyes). I'll quote Atlas Shrugged for this one: > There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What's there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted—and you create a nation of law-breakers—and then you cash in on guilt.
- hi5eyes 8y ago
  girl uses song lyrics in a instagram caption post gets slapped with "an eight-week community order, placed on an eight-week curfew and told to pay costs of £500 and an £85 victim surcharge." https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-merseyside-43816921 https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-merseyside-43816921 oddly enough I had just learned about this and laughed about it 2 days ago surveillance state ethos is becoming a joke in the mainstream zeitgeist with memes propogating about "the fbi man" watching our selfie cameras and asking our google home/alexa device "wiretap" what the best recipes are available... most people are very aware of what's happening with their data and they've chosen convenience
  - RileyJames 8y ago
    Who wouldn’t choose convienince when their data is being used for their benefit? Unfortunately, data is a double edged sword. Once collected it can also be used against you, but once out of your control you have no ability to remove consent or reclaim the data. On top of that, how do you steam music via your mobile phone without providing data to a 3rd party? And if your solution involves anything more than an App Store, and doesn’t include any form of customer support, I’m not sure you truely understand who you are specifying this solution to. Now of the solutions realistically available to this user, which do not capture and retain data on the given user? And which will not change their policy in the future to do so? People are aware, and tired. But I think you could better relate to their situation if you considered trying to live your life without creating carbon, or at least to become carbon neutral. What you understand about your carbon footprint, others understand about their data footprint. Zero, or worse still, a bunch of half baked and misconceived ideas that result in a negative outcome.
mar77i 8y ago
Interesting to see hard-learned lessons in software development generalized into the rest of life so neatly. > We can’t really justify all our decisions, many them are hunches, many of them are wrong. https://mikehadlow.blogspot.com/2014/06/heisenberg-developers.html https://mikehadlow.blogspot.com/2014/06/heisenberg-developer...

279 points by humanetech 8y ago

_Schizotypy 8y ago

People on MySpace censored themselves after 9/11? I didn't know middle and high schoolers were so politically aware.

wand3r 8y ago
I didnt see this in the article and myspace was started in 2003, 2 years after 9/11.
- coldtea 8y ago
  The parent makes a sarcastic comment, based on: > In the months and years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, many of us censored what we spoke about on social media or what we searched on the internet. from the TFA. i.e. Which those "many of us" were, and what "social media" were they censoring themselves in around 9/11? Since (a) the only successful website that one would classify as "social media" back then was MySpace, and (b) it was mostly for teens, (the parent asks) if people on social media back then censored themselves, does that mean that teens of MySpace censored themselves? Either the article is BS on that part, or teens at the time quite politically aware....
  - _Schizotypy 8y ago
    Thank you. Not sure why I'm getting so many down votes, maybe people are super passionate about MySpace time-line accuracy
  - dredmorbius 8y ago
    "Social media" as a term was not well-established at the time, but the notion of online user-generated and social content predates even the Web: Usenet and mailing lists date to the 1970s. By 2001, there were these, blogs, and aggregators such as Slashdot, as well as many online news and magazine sites, especially in the infotech space. So an active community. The post-9/11 era extended well through the aughts. GeoCities was one of the Internet's earliest social networking websites, appearing in November 1994, followed by Classmates in December 1995, Six Degrees in May 1997, Open Diary in October 1998, LiveJournal in April 1999, Ryze in October 2001, Friendster in March 2002, LinkedIn in May 2003, hi5 in June 2003, MySpace in August 2003, Orkut in January 2004, Facebook in February 2004, Yahoo! 360° in March 2005, Bebo in July 2005, Twitter in July 2006, Tumblr in February 2007, and Google+ in July 2011. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=social+media&year_start=1990&year_end=2008&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Csocial%20media%3B%2Cc0 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=social+media&y...
  - slededit 8y ago
    MSN messenger would have counted. We definitely joked about the CIA reading conversations. It also seemed like my more outlandish comments would get send error's more frequently than normal but perhaps that was just me being paranoid.
  - acct1771 8y ago
    The TFA?
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
- _Schizotypy 8y ago
  So which social media site were YOU active on in 2001?

vbuwivbiu 8y ago

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/animal-emotions/201602/ravens-know-theyre-being-watched-bird-brain-theory-mind https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/animal-emotions/2016... People (and ravens) cannot help but act differently when they're being watched. Being watched (by anonymous viewers) is a stressful vigilance state.

tokai 8y ago
I feel a little bad about it, but scaring corvids have become somewhat of a past time for me. You can get very close to them, when they are foraging on the ground, if you turn your face away from them and only look indirectly. Then when you've gotten close you stare directly at the poor bird. Except for jackdaws, I haven't met any corvid that isn't gravely startled by a such sudden leer. City birds are very used to us humans paying them no attention and happily dart around our legs. But if they get the sense you are watching, can no amount of french fries make them take the risk of sticking around.
- tzs 8y ago
  Careful! Crows (and probably other corvids) learn to recognize individual humans, and are smart enough to know that whether a human is friendly, indifferent, or hostile varies from human to human and is fairly consistent for a given human. Oh, and there is evidence that they have some way of communicating their knowledge of individual humans, so a crow that has decided to dislike you can tell other crows you are bad, and they will start acting as if you had wronged them, too, and can pass on the message. Corvids are fun to play with. I've got several Steller's jays [1] coming by every day to get peanuts, and recently a flock of about 20 crows. But with the crows I'm limiting my messing with them to things that they can't interpret as hostile or annoying, because I do not want 20 crows trying to annoy me back. The crows would win. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steller%27s_jay https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steller%27s_jay
  - hyperpallium 8y ago
    Worse for the corvids too: it's surprise-tokai!

tatrajim 8y ago

In China now the goal is the make surveillance omnipresent. Already in premier universities, including Peking University, classroom lectures are routinely surveilled to monitor inappropriate discourse.

SubiculumCode 8y ago
Can China have an innovative science and technology sector under persistent omnipresent surveillance??
- pmarreck 8y ago
  No. But let them figure it out the hard way. Those who do not remember history are doomed to repeat its mistakes.
  - chongli 8y ago
    It's a terrible thing for well over a billion people to have to go through in order for a tiny elite to learn. I can't think of a better solution, though.
    - petre 8y ago
      It was by their own and their ancestor's choice. Taiwan chose differently.
    - pmarreck 8y ago
      > It's a terrible thing for well over a billion people to have to go through in order for a tiny elite to learn And this is why we have democracies. Also, if history is any indication, it won't end well (although East Germany's end was remarkably peaceful).
  - coldtea 8y ago
    Remember what history? Of some older state that didn't have "innovative science and technology" because of surveillance? The only history to remember would be USSRs, and even had quite a good track record in science and engineering (given their meagre resources).

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

djacobs 8y ago

This is the way we should be talking about privacy. Using vivid examples that are relevant to everyday people’s lives on both sides of the political divide. Avoiding broad, philosophical-sounding proclamations. I hope people on HN are taking note.

hazeii 8y ago

Not a new result, but should be more widely known and understood. An argument easily extended to running an adblocker suggests you'd going to be more creative and productive because there are fewer eyes watching you.

moretai 8y ago

It's odd that people welcome it. I've had a person tell me that he doesn't mind being watched because it helps catch terrorism and crimes and such.

Valmar 8y ago
That's because they've been brainwashed into blindly accepting mass surveillance being supposedly necessary, due to terrorism, crime, etc. Problem with the reasoning is that surveillance doesn't really stop terrorism and crime. Indeed, if I were a criminal worth my salt, I'd slither into positions where I am effectively exempt from surveillance, or could control how surveillance is used against me.
- ben_w 8y ago
  While I am sympathetic to your line of reasoning, I would like to point out that most people are massively underestimating what computers (and by extension computer aided surveillance) can do. For example, people are still regularly amazed when I show off Google Translate’s augmented reality mode, whose technology is nearly 8 years old now. Other tech demos I have seen include: • Wall penetrating radar using ambient WiFi to do pose detection • Remote sensing of pulse and breathing from RGB video • Audio recovery from normal speed (sans audio channel) RGB video footage by taking advantage of the rolling shutter • Lip reading to the level that specific speakers can be isolated or removed from the audio stream of a clip • Non-voice audio isolation/removal, e.g. guitar
- cronix 8y ago
  Exactly. And look at the freedoms we've given up, billions of dollars we've spent (maybe more - we'll never know how much the NSA/CIA put into their data-collecting infrastructure), hours wasted (you used to be able to arrive at the airport 20 minutes before your flight left, and still board on time), etc. IIRC - it "only" cost the 9/11 terrorists about $1M to pull it off. Terrorism is quite effective. It's almost like an amplified reflection DDoS attack - cheap to pull off and expensive to defend against. https://www.aclu.org/other/top-ten-abuses-power-911 https://www.aclu.org/other/top-ten-abuses-power-911 "Those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety" - Ben Franklin

pmarreck 8y ago

Also ever relevant are Martin Fowler’s thoughts on the matter of privacy or lack thereof https://martinfowler.com/articles/bothersome-privacy.html https://martinfowler.com/articles/bothersome-privacy.html

_mu_ 8y ago

As a librarian at a large university library I feel this. I'm uncomfortable poking too much around in scihub. Even though it's not something a national security agency would care about (I hope). Could any connection between papers from scihub and myself, be a huge issue both with my career and potentially for my institutions position when negotiating licenses. It might be paranoid, but there are so many possible ways to be compromised, that I choose to direct attention elsewhere. I find it sad that I'm afraid to inquire on one of the most important developments in scholarly dissemination in resent years. I'm a research librarian for Price's sake.

kanzure 8y ago
I have a few thoughts about privacy for you. Don't use academia.edu or researchgate. It's a big story waiting to get out. There's absolutely no privacy on these sites and they track everything. I get an email notification from these sites every time someone does a search query that happens to display my paper as a result. I also get notified when someone has been reading a paper through their platform. The privacy implications are really gross. I hope that they delete this data, stop collecting it, and that nobody ever gets a copy of that. Academic PDFs downloaded from academic publishers include deanonymizing information such as your name, your institutional affiliation, IP address, and sometimes your email address. I wrote a tool to help remove this information from pdfs: https://github.com/kanzure/pdfparanoia https://github.com/kanzure/pdfparanoia As for scihub, many of your concerns can be mitigated by having an offline copy. There are torrents published by scihub (or libgen's scimag, which is supposedly a mirror of scihub?). I have had a lot of trouble getting a relatively complete copy due to low seeder bandwidth and lack of seeders. There's a forum somewhere that you can request libgen users to seed certain torrents, your mileage will vary. I think every academic library should have a complete copy of scihub. Keep in mind, scihub isn't just using library ezproxy accounts, she also has a large cache of files. Supposedly that's 70 million papers at the moment. It's about ~50 terabytes or something. My recommendation is that scihub should be running pdfparanoia on all of their papers. It only removes visible watermarks. I haven't investigated invisible watermarks yet. I'm definitely interested in those. Turning up the paranoia dial a little more, I am concerned that scihub may have a deal with a nation state actor for the purposes of phoning home about research article downloads from certain countries, in exchange for allowing scihub to continue to operate. Going further, this could include pdf malware (or metadata tainting for fingerprinting) or browser exploits. This level of international espionage would be very useful to a nation, and might explain any nation's interest in keeping scihub operational despite political or civil court pressures. Of course, it's also helpful that scihub is running in an area of the world that doesn't really care about demands from U.S. courts, so none of this is necessary to explain the continued existence of scihub. Ever since I began thinking about the deanonymizing data inserted into pdfs by academic publishers, I've been wondering about collaboration between academic publishers and nation state entities. This is a concern even in absence of scihub existing. Also, many of these publishers have really bad web security and it's trivial to take data like apache logs or whatever, because they are publishers not software experts especially the smaller publishers. Who else is taking that data, and what can they do with it? Academic privacy is extremely important for the freedom of science and human progress, and I haven't figured out how to juggle those priorities against the priority of making complete mirrors of scihub. I am deeply worried about that data trove disappearing. It's one of our most important data sets...

zzo38computer 8y ago

Certainly there is too much surveillance which not only prevent your freedom but also waste too much energy.

oedmarap 8y ago

The generalization and broadening of scope of such laws is one of the most troubling agendas/trends of the surveillance state. From what I've observed, countries are only more and more eager to adopt intelligence gathering methodology in a collective manner (à la Five Eyes). I'll quote Atlas Shrugged for this one: > There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What's there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted—and you create a nation of law-breakers—and then you cash in on guilt.

hi5eyes 8y ago
girl uses song lyrics in a instagram caption post gets slapped with "an eight-week community order, placed on an eight-week curfew and told to pay costs of £500 and an £85 victim surcharge." https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-merseyside-43816921 https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-merseyside-43816921 oddly enough I had just learned about this and laughed about it 2 days ago surveillance state ethos is becoming a joke in the mainstream zeitgeist with memes propogating about "the fbi man" watching our selfie cameras and asking our google home/alexa device "wiretap" what the best recipes are available... most people are very aware of what's happening with their data and they've chosen convenience
- RileyJames 8y ago
  Who wouldn’t choose convienince when their data is being used for their benefit? Unfortunately, data is a double edged sword. Once collected it can also be used against you, but once out of your control you have no ability to remove consent or reclaim the data. On top of that, how do you steam music via your mobile phone without providing data to a 3rd party? And if your solution involves anything more than an App Store, and doesn’t include any form of customer support, I’m not sure you truely understand who you are specifying this solution to. Now of the solutions realistically available to this user, which do not capture and retain data on the given user? And which will not change their policy in the future to do so? People are aware, and tired. But I think you could better relate to their situation if you considered trying to live your life without creating carbon, or at least to become carbon neutral. What you understand about your carbon footprint, others understand about their data footprint. Zero, or worse still, a bunch of half baked and misconceived ideas that result in a negative outcome.

mar77i 8y ago

Interesting to see hard-learned lessons in software development generalized into the rest of life so neatly. > We can’t really justify all our decisions, many them are hunches, many of them are wrong. https://mikehadlow.blogspot.com/2014/06/heisenberg-developers.html https://mikehadlow.blogspot.com/2014/06/heisenberg-developer...