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Trading privacy for survival is another tax on the poor
- 4RealFreedom 8y ago“I get valuable government benefits in my mortgage home deduction, childcare tax credits, my employer health benefits aren’t taxed,” says Gilman. “Those are income transfers just as much as food stamps or welfare but I am not put through intrusive questioning, verification requirements, home visits, or anything like that to get those benefits.” This is disingenuous if not flat out fallacious. They certainly are not the same and I continue seeing this type of rhetoric repeated more and more lately.
- forrestthewoods 8y agoPeople have lost the ability to make the distinction between “taking less from someone” and “giving someone something”. Food stamps is giving someone something. A deduction of any kind is taking less from someone. These days people, whether they realize it or not, act as if the government has a natural right to everything you produce. And anytime the government takes less it’s welfare. If the government takes 50% but offers a rebate or a deduction to reduce the rake to 30% people are acting as if you should grateful! As if that were a handout! Suffice to say I disagree with this type of thinking.
- beat 8y agoI'm reminded of an observation a friend once made... "Light rail is how middle class people get to work. Bus is how poor people pick up their welfare checks." That's his nutshell parody of the mentality that makes rail projects okay, while buses are still bad. What makes it "welfare" is that it benefits poor people, not that the money comes from the government. What makes welfare "bad" is that it benefits poor people, not the middle class or the rich.
- randomacct3847 8y agoFirst thing that comes to mind is the new wave of fintech apps for pay/bill management (like Earnin) that take in your entire bank feed in exchange for spotting you before your next payday...
- techntoke 8y agoYou ever watch those HD antenna television shows? We spam the poorest people with some of the nastiest propaganda that exists. Even the shows they frequently play are legitimizing and glamorizing crime.
- segfaultbuserr 8y agoCan you elaborate? As a non-American and non-TV watcher, I always believe DVB-T is a good way to avoid paying to cable TV yet still be able get some basic TV programs like breaking news. What are the groups that dominate American digital antenna TV station? Who are their backers? What are their political leanings, and what kind of propaganda do they air?
- kevin_thibedeau 8y agoI don't know what OP is referring to. Broadcast TV in the US is more or less the same as it always was, just with a lot of extra content on the sub-channels that is mostly reruns of old shows. Nothing subversive in any of it. You don't see the partisan crap that occupies subscription TV in the US. The only notable difference is that certain advertisers don't bother with broadcast so you never see their promotions.
- asark 8y ago> You don't see the partisan crap that occupies subscription TV in the US. Well, aside from all these stations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_Broadcast_Group https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_Broadcast_Group
- techntoke 8y agoI think Sinclair Broadcast Group is a big one, but I am just going from what I've seen when I went to visit my friend who had one setup. All the commercials were preying on people's debts, advertising for high-interest rate car loans, payday loans, those shady schools with financial assistance, etc. The show he was watching was a violent cop show where the "good" guys were literally corrupt and involved in organized crime. They were glamorizing cheating, stealing, hard drugs, etc. I couldn't stand it. Maybe I was too high, but it really creeped me out.
- expertentipp 8y agoI predict that the next hit in the poverty industry will be the gambling businesses and loan sharks getting banking licenses. ...aaand it's gone!
- mlthoughts2018 8y agoSome type of regulatory-skirting financial account device that pools everyone’s money while the backing organization can gamble with it and extract huge overall fees regardless of whether they succeed at gambling... Sounds a lot like defined contribution retirement plans, asset managers, mutual funds and hedge funds...
- mrosett 8y agoThis seemed like a grab bag of "Here are some bad things about being poor that are vaguely related to privacy" with the only common thread being Professor Gilman's willingness to speak about them. Poverty is brutal, but I'm not convinced that the privacy lens really adds a lot. I'm also not convinced that privacy problems truly affect the poor more. The government surveillance mentioned here is a big problem. But on the commercial side, companies are a lot more interested in acquiring the personal, financial, and medical data of the rich. And as the article admits, people making higher incomes are more likely to have their information stolen. A lot of the evidence in this piece amounts to "surveys show that people earning under $40k worry about X more than people earning over $40k." That's a very weak form of evidence.
- UweSchmidt 8y agoI think the article is quite specific and articulate about the problem: "Employers of low-income workers listen to phone calls, conduct drug tests, monitor closed-circuit television, and require psychometric tests as conditions of employment." This makes government surveillance (as serious as it is) feel like a distant, abstract issue.
- AlexTWithBeard 8y agolisten to phone calls, conduct drug tests, monitor closed-circuit television In Wall Street these were mandatory since many years ago. Source: was tested for drugs as a part of my employment screening.
- mrosett 8y agoThey also pay low wages, don't provide paid sick days, fire you if you're late, provide less training, and so on. There's a lot of bad stuff about being poor; I'm not convinced that the privacy angle adds a lot. The sentence you quoted is framed to make some of those things sound worse than they are. "Listen to phone calls" - does that just refer to call centers recording calls for training/quality purposes? And "Monitor closed-circuit television" just is another way of saying "Many low-income employees work in places with security cameras." Finally, "require psychometric tests" sounds ominous, but a) college serves as a long psychometric test and b) interviews are informal psychometric tests. The unifying thread is that employers have to invest more in supervising low-productivity workers.
- gerbilly 8y agoThis is like offering a discount on car insurance if you consent to having a GPS tracker installed.[1] It's voluntary for now, but the industry is hoping people get used to it so it can be made effectively[2] mandatory. And because people seem caught in race to the bottom competition to give up the most privacy they can, stuff like this may regrettably catch on. [1]http://www.pewinternet.org/2016/01/14/scenario-auto-insurance-discounts-and-monitoring/ http://www.pewinternet.org/2016/01/14/scenario-auto-insuranc... [2] Effectively mandatory meaning that insurance without a tracker will be like 10x the price.
- cgriswald 8y ago> [2] Effectively mandatory meaning that insurance without a tracker will be like 10x the price. Or, once a critical mass is reached the insurance industry will lobby for it to be mandatory in all cars, selling it as a safety feature.
- JohnFen 8y agoI do think that ubiquitous, highly intrusive spying will become mandatory for all cars at some point. I don't think it will be because of insurance. I think it's more likely to come from the push for "self-driving" cars and automated roadways. I look at Tesla's spy system as the sort of dystopian future we can expect.
- ip26 8y agoSo, in your eyes, where should the privacy line be drawn? Is it OK the insurance company knows the VIN number of your car, the make, the model, the miles, the color, your name, age, address, credit score, credit card information, marital status, how many miles you drive a year, where the car is stored, your claim history, criminal history, etc? If that's all OK, what crosses the line about monitoring driving behavior?
- gerbilly 8y ago> what crosses the line about monitoring driving behavior? I think the privacy line is already drawn too far, but aside from that, I think if monitoring 'driving behaviour' involves GPS tracking, it crosses the line because you can use it to infer the people and groups you associate with.
- AlexandrB 8y agoThe ad-based content economy is beyond parody: the first thing I saw when I opened this article about poverty and privacy rights was a full-page, autoplay video ad for Lincoln cars. The whiplash between the content and the presentation was so severe I'm going to have to wear a neck brace.
- markdoubleyou 8y agoPrivacy Badger detected 16 potential trackers, and uBlock stopped requests to 13 out of 30 domains the page tried to connect to. It's not usatoday.com levels of absurdity, but it's getting there.
- deogeo 8y agoImagine surveillance being turned upside-down. Imagine a company unable to hire workers, because a union demands they first fire the CEO/management that looted company pensions at their previous company, or ran a predatory loan business, or tried to extort others through bogus patents. The world would be a much different place if corporate was held personally responsible for their actions the same way labor is.
- expertentipp 8y agowe need this
- dnautics 8y agoThe thing is corporations exist precisely to limit liability. You don't have to start a corporation - you can run your own business out of your own pocket and accept all the legal liability. However, we make this activity undesirable through policy: (personal income is taxable in a much more punishing way than corporate income, and the legal system is incredibly expensive - the more customers you have, the more you are likely to be exposed to a crazy customer who is going to abuse the system and personally bankrupt you with frivolous lawsuits. Who would want to start a business in that climate?
- pavel_lishin 8y agoYou're talking about legal liability; deogeo sounds like they're talking about social liability.
- NightMKoder 8y agoThis is a little off topic w.r.t. the article, but to some extent I like privacy as a currency. Despite the fact that you might make minimum wage and can’t realistically afford to pay for most services, Google gives you access to the majority of human knowledge, for free. Nobody forces you to use Google - if you can afford it, you can pay for it with time (i.e. worse results from places like DDG). Redistributing wealth to ensure fairness is hard, but at least when we use privacy as the currency we all start with some, almost equal, amounts. The downside is that realistically this approach only works when everyone participates - I don’t think hybrid “pay or we track you” would work out to be efficient at large scales.
- IshKebab 8y ago> “I can’t cross-examine an algorithm.” You should be able to!
- 7402 8y agoIf you haven't worked low-end jobs it may be a surprise, but if you are a clerk in certain chain stores, you are searched by a supervisor every time you leave the building (to make sure you aren't stealing anything).
- ams6110 8y agoWell, honestly that's because a lot of employees in jobs like that do steal stuff ("a lot" meaning enough that it's noticed and is a problem). Sure, everyone should have the presumption of innocence, but these things aren't just happening out of mean-spiritedness.
- pnw_hazor 8y agoIn some industries or retail sectors, a big part of being successful is preventing/reducing employee theft or employee fraud. For example, modern POS stations often run several cameras: one pointed at the cash drawer, one pointed at the customer, one or more pointed at the employee, all synced to journals or screen streams.
- exelius 8y agoI was thinking about this recently — the path to owning a small business in the 2020s goes through social media. Which means that the founder has to put an uncomfortable amount of their personal life on display in order to “sell” their brand. Anyone “hustling” at 2 or 3 gig jobs has to self-promote via those same platforms. Basically, the only workers who are allowed total privacy anymore are white-collar middle managers. We don’t trust low-level workers and feel the need to keep tabs on them, while executives have been expected to carefully cultivate a squeaky-clean public image for the last 30-ish years. But it basically comes down to “how much of my privacy to I have to trade for a paycheck?” The answer varies based on income level...
- joeshmoe24 8y agoEnough with that already, the whole concept of digital privacy is elitist nonsense that regular people don't care about.
- 908087 8y agoMeanwhile, Surveillance Valley CEOs like Zuckerberg continue to spin their privacy invasions as altruistic moves to help the poor.
- zsz 8y agoThis article is very lengthy and detailed, so eventually I gave up on trying to find in it any evidence (in the form of e.g. actual quotes from the SCOTUS decision -- which undoubtedly exist in detail and are publically available) that it isn't a one sided, alarmist emotional appeal. But perhaps I myself am letting emotions get the better of me by assuming the SCOTUS documents all their decisions, when in reality they (more) typically don't(?).
- MrQuincle 8y agoThis is probably not something a lot of people will agree with, but my two cents. The issue is autonomy and consent. If people are really owner of their own data they should be able to do whatever they want with it. They should be able to sell it. They should be able to exchange it for services. You can use WiFi for free. Why should that be frowned upon? It's your choice. We do not live in a nanny state. What should be clear is what kind of transaction you're in. What kind of data is collected. The deal should be transparent. You can't say that this data is valuable on one hand but forbid people to trade it on the other hand. Definitely not just with an argument based on autonomy.
- Arbalest 8y agoIn my opinion (a bit tangential to the article I know) The privacy thing is a symptom to the massive marketing budgets companies have available to them today. We're covering up the cost of living by redirecting them via advertising agencies who then get to direct the money however they want. I say, block ads. Steal from advertising companies, falsify data as much as possible. This is not the way people should be being paid. While this is a viable mechanism of subsiding the cost of living, no change will occur.