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I try to avoid sarcasm online. It can be taken the wrong way. But I would like to welcome the NYT to 20 years or so ago when Google realized that there was mone

I try to avoid sarcasm online. It can be taken the wrong way. But I would like to welcome the NYT to 20 years or so ago when Google realized that there was money in the data. Or ten years ago or so, as privacy advocates started seriously bouncing off the walls realizing that we were tagging and tracking people in a way dictators of the past could only dream of. I'm glad they might be catching up, but for a big news organization like that, it's sad to see it take so long. I wonder if, like so many of these blow ups in the past, there'll just be a spike of public interest and then it'll all die away. One of the most amazing things about the news in the last few years is how stories that used to have international, severe impact and political repercussions just drift off into the ether now. No follow-up, no continuing coverage. It's all about immediate spikes in shares, likes, tweets, and readers. They know people don't care about the follow-up that much; heck the data tells them that. So there's no follow-up, only the next sensation. I hope this amounts to something. I have my reservations.

BLKNSLVR 7y ago
> there'll just be a spike of public interest and then it'll all die away Panama Papers, Paradise Papers. Very little has come out of this and it's so disappointing. What this says to me is that enough of the people powerful enough to change any of it are in on it. Or, there just isn't the critical mass at the bottom, and this, where we find ourselves as a global population, is the stability between comfort and outrage. The "Or" above, maybe should be an "And". I wonder whether one of the reasons that seemingly illogical conservatism is as successful as it is, is because the bigger the world economy gets, and the larger the population, the harder it is to change anything meaningful without wiping out a pillar-sized part of the economy, the results of which are too unpredictable for anyone in power to want to take responsibility for. This position only leads to further conservatism, in that any changes 'we let pass' must be war-gamed to the nth degree to ensure they don't cause societal collapse. I'm not conservative, but the above is almost the only way I can process seemingly illogical conservatism that is actually anything other than "maintaining the status quo because I'm part of it". It's almost believing their own FUD. Hubbard-style. But it might not be entirely wrong.
- est31 7y ago
  > Panama Papers, Paradise Papers. Very little has come out of this and it's so disappointing. It seems to be quite a lot to me: https://www.icij.org/investigations/panama-papers/what-happened-after-the-panama-papers/ https://www.icij.org/investigations/panama-papers/what-happe...
  - Semaphor 7y ago
    a) Thanks for the link, I, too, had heard very little of the fallout and it’s really nice to see all those things together. b) I really wish sites would stop with this weird presentation style.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 7y ago
  Well, there is no impact that is immediately visible, bit since you mentioned Panama Papers, their content was studied by various entities providing lists to the banks. The last 100gb breach resulted in fallout from Formations Company. We still don't know how much of the recent 2TB drop will be utilized.. There are people who watch this stuff. You are right that an average person does not seem to care.
- oblio 7y ago
  Data is today's oil. We knew that lead made people dumb back in the Roman times and yet we created leaded gasoline in 1925. In the US it was banned in 1996, after 70 (!!!) years. There's still some countries that haven't banned it, 90 years later.
- Strang 7y ago
  > seemingly illogical conservatism I'd suggest you engage more with your fellow citizens and their ideas. Conservatives believe in their ideas just as earnestly as others and it is possible for people of good faith to disagree on fundamental issues.
  - gizmo686 7y ago
    Conservatism and conservatism are 2 very different things. One is a political movement, and one is an aversion to change. Regardless of political ideology, large organizations tend towards conservatism.
tyingq 7y ago
If they would focus on outing personal data of Senators, Congressmen, etc, that's a fairly direct path to action. I imagine there's some curious location data there.
- HorstG 7y ago
  But the outcome would probably just be a law exempting politicians from the location tracking.
  - dylan604 7y ago
    Or the action would be that the leaker of that information would be strung up as a perpetrator of an illegal act and have the book thrown at them. This would drown out the fact that the leaked information was accurate and true. It wouldn't be known if an illegal act hadn't been committed to release it in the first place.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  A realisation hit me a few years back that those in power are not especially shielded from this, with cases that emerge periodically. There was General David Petraeus, brought down through a shared Gmail account (he and a lover would compose, but not send, messages). The FBI got on-board to that. Various investigations associated with major politicians. The known hacking of both Democratic and GOP politicians' personal accounts (notably John Podesta and Colin Powell, though certainly others), and more. Other cases -- Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein are both exemplars -- show that widely-known incriminating information can remain in broad circulation for decades without harm. It's somewhat less the information itself than the political and power balances surrounding it, which precipitate the final fall. In the film Das Leben den Anderen (The Lives of Others), a fictional-but-highly-realistic account of the East German surveillance state, among the most poignant aspects was not the brutal suppression of political opposition, but the corruption and co-option of the surveillance system for personal gain and enjoyment -- the East German official coercing Christa-Maria (played by Martina Gedeck) into an affair that was effectively rape. I've pointed out that Herbert Simon's defence of a data-intensive world on the grounds that the Nazis accomplished their atrocities without the benefit of automated data processing has since proven quite false: IBM were a willing and active enabler. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21599647 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21599647 Data and information change behaviours in subtle ways. I'm strongly convinced of this, though I wouldn't be able to define or describe all the ways.
raxxorrax 7y ago
Big news corporation all participate in tracking. Not a single large org doesn't have direct business relations with Google or Facebook. I remember the day some years ago when my favorite paper (not US based) claimed it would try to still report critically about Facebook even while they are engaged in a cooperation and how such a market situation could be detrimental to independent news covering. They needed to do that because these sites mainly drive engagement. Today, they also write a lot about the hot button topics of today, which isn't any different than boulevard really. They still have good content, but that doesn't put the meals on their table anymore.
germinalphrase 7y ago
Garry Kasparov - along with many others, of course - has attributed this “drifting into the ether” to a shift in how authoritarian leadership maintains compliance. Where old school authoritarian organizations would attempt to actively stifle the flow of truth (aka the Great Firewall), today they seek to obscure the truth with a firehose of partial truths/could be truths/outright lies such that the average person is unable to accurately discern what is fundamentally true about any given situation. The tool of oppression is fake news, norms erosion, and maximizing confusion.
- FeepingCreature 7y ago
  How is that differentiable from a world in which a large amount of partial/incomplete information is produced naturally?
  - germinalphrase 7y ago
    Scale and intentionality. Kasparov has talked about reading an interview he “gave” to a supposedly anti-Putin newspaper in which his political positions are acknowledged, but subtle changes are made that weaken his arguments and discredit him personally. The ability to create entire media organizations, websites, troll farms, etc. with the explicit intention of sowing confusion and kneecapping the ability of the populations to discern what is actually happening in the world around them is only a tool available - at scale - to a certain class of people.
  - inimino 7y ago
    The bias of the partial information matters.
  - asdff 7y ago
    When supposed figures of authority like the POTUS are contributing to the junk for their own benefit
    - FeepingCreature 7y ago
      I feel like that would happen regardless.
mbesto 7y ago
> I hope this amounts to something. I have my reservations. > news in the last few years is how stories that used to have international, severe impact and political repercussions just drift off into the ether now. Wait, so you're relying on news organizations to provide detailed investigations into how companies abuse their power. Isn't that why we elect government officials?
TeMPOraL 7y ago
> One of the most amazing things about the news in the last few years is how stories that used to have international, severe impact and political repercussions just drift off into the ether now. No follow-up, no continuing coverage. It's all about immediate spikes in shares, likes, tweets, and readers. They know people don't care about the follow-up that much; heck the data tells them that. So there's no follow-up, only the next sensation. I sometimes joke here that A/B testing is how Satan interacts with this world. With each passing day, it seems less and less like a joke, though. And in all honesty, data science itself is fine - the problem is that some thing should not be optimized beyond a point.
mfer 7y ago
This isn’t about what the news organizations know. It’s about writing to their audience and what the audience knows. The audience has a lack of awareness. One thing that could use a lot more press is what companies do with this information. Many people who know they have it believe it to be harmless.
danso 7y ago
> But I would like to welcome the NYT to 20 years or so ago when Google realized that there was money in the data Nothing against snark, but I'm confused with what you're saying here. Are you implying that the NYT and media in general have not covered Google and other companies' threats to privacy? Or are you arguing that they haven't covered it enough, and your metric for this, ostensibly, is that these companies still exist and/or no one has been imprisoned or otherwise heavily sanctioned? I ask because the story under discussion is explicitly not an investigation of illegal activity, but more the revelation/explanation of how closely our lives can be surveilled via smartphone through our consent. The article outright says that what's being described isn't illegal: > Today, it’s perfectly legal to collect and sell all this information. In the United States, as in most of the world, no federal law limits what has become a vast and lucrative trade in human tracking. Only internal company policies and the decency of individual employees prevent those with access to the data from, say, stalking an estranged spouse or selling the evening commute of an intelligence officer to a hostile foreign power. – and let's face it, if the authors hadn't emphasized this, half of us here would be ripping the authors for dishonest hype and clickbait for trying to "fool" the public into an outrage. > One of the most amazing things about the news in the last few years is how stories that used to have international, severe impact and political repercussions just drift off into the ether now. No follow-up, no continuing coverage. Given your opening statement, it's hard for me to know if this is an empirical assessment based on what you've observed, or whether your ability to pay attention to unfolding investigations/scandals are unreasonably dampened by skepticism and unreasonable impatience. This year alone we've seen severe and international repercussions from the Epstein scandal, which was catalyzed by Julie Brown, a Miami reporter who had been following him for years, long enough to know to keep digging when Trump's nominated labor secretary happened to be the Florida prosecutor who gave Epstein his sweet 2010 deal. I assume, like most people, you are dissatisfied that Epstein suddenly died before the possibility of a trial. Are you under the impression that journalists, including Brown, have dropped looking into Epstein? Or that something/anything should be happening faster and more noticeable to you and the public? The reality is, many investigations happen (especially at the local level) that do effect important change, but after the initial public outrage and sanctions, if the change perpetuates, its through years-long process of policy and legislation, which you aren't likely to notice (almost by definition, if something is fixed, we take it for granted) The press itself is not given the power to directly make that change itself, and I think this is acceptable by anyone (i.e. just about everyone who is not part of the press) who hates the phenomenon of "trial by press". All that said, I am curious what exemplary investigations you have in mind that, back in the better days, met your standard for to speedy, significant, and systemic change? For the U.S. press, Watergate is still seen as the gold standard for a major impact investigation. It took a more than 2 years from the break-in to when Nixon resigned in 1974. In that span, Nixon won re-election by the biggest landslide in American history, and many people who experienced this period would be justified (until 1974) into thinking Watergate amounted to very little.

BLKNSLVR 7y ago

> there'll just be a spike of public interest and then it'll all die away Panama Papers, Paradise Papers. Very little has come out of this and it's so disappointing. What this says to me is that enough of the people powerful enough to change any of it are in on it. Or, there just isn't the critical mass at the bottom, and this, where we find ourselves as a global population, is the stability between comfort and outrage. The "Or" above, maybe should be an "And". I wonder whether one of the reasons that seemingly illogical conservatism is as successful as it is, is because the bigger the world economy gets, and the larger the population, the harder it is to change anything meaningful without wiping out a pillar-sized part of the economy, the results of which are too unpredictable for anyone in power to want to take responsibility for. This position only leads to further conservatism, in that any changes 'we let pass' must be war-gamed to the nth degree to ensure they don't cause societal collapse. I'm not conservative, but the above is almost the only way I can process seemingly illogical conservatism that is actually anything other than "maintaining the status quo because I'm part of it". It's almost believing their own FUD. Hubbard-style. But it might not be entirely wrong.

est31 7y ago
> Panama Papers, Paradise Papers. Very little has come out of this and it's so disappointing. It seems to be quite a lot to me: https://www.icij.org/investigations/panama-papers/what-happened-after-the-panama-papers/ https://www.icij.org/investigations/panama-papers/what-happe...
- Semaphor 7y ago
  a) Thanks for the link, I, too, had heard very little of the fallout and it’s really nice to see all those things together. b) I really wish sites would stop with this weird presentation style.
A4ET8a8uTh0 7y ago
Well, there is no impact that is immediately visible, bit since you mentioned Panama Papers, their content was studied by various entities providing lists to the banks. The last 100gb breach resulted in fallout from Formations Company. We still don't know how much of the recent 2TB drop will be utilized.. There are people who watch this stuff. You are right that an average person does not seem to care.
oblio 7y ago
Data is today's oil. We knew that lead made people dumb back in the Roman times and yet we created leaded gasoline in 1925. In the US it was banned in 1996, after 70 (!!!) years. There's still some countries that haven't banned it, 90 years later.
Strang 7y ago
> seemingly illogical conservatism I'd suggest you engage more with your fellow citizens and their ideas. Conservatives believe in their ideas just as earnestly as others and it is possible for people of good faith to disagree on fundamental issues.
- gizmo686 7y ago
  Conservatism and conservatism are 2 very different things. One is a political movement, and one is an aversion to change. Regardless of political ideology, large organizations tend towards conservatism.

tyingq 7y ago

If they would focus on outing personal data of Senators, Congressmen, etc, that's a fairly direct path to action. I imagine there's some curious location data there.

HorstG 7y ago
But the outcome would probably just be a law exempting politicians from the location tracking.
- dylan604 7y ago
  Or the action would be that the leaker of that information would be strung up as a perpetrator of an illegal act and have the book thrown at them. This would drown out the fact that the leaked information was accurate and true. It wouldn't be known if an illegal act hadn't been committed to release it in the first place.
dredmorbius 7y ago
A realisation hit me a few years back that those in power are not especially shielded from this, with cases that emerge periodically. There was General David Petraeus, brought down through a shared Gmail account (he and a lover would compose, but not send, messages). The FBI got on-board to that. Various investigations associated with major politicians. The known hacking of both Democratic and GOP politicians' personal accounts (notably John Podesta and Colin Powell, though certainly others), and more. Other cases -- Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein are both exemplars -- show that widely-known incriminating information can remain in broad circulation for decades without harm. It's somewhat less the information itself than the political and power balances surrounding it, which precipitate the final fall. In the film Das Leben den Anderen (The Lives of Others), a fictional-but-highly-realistic account of the East German surveillance state, among the most poignant aspects was not the brutal suppression of political opposition, but the corruption and co-option of the surveillance system for personal gain and enjoyment -- the East German official coercing Christa-Maria (played by Martina Gedeck) into an affair that was effectively rape. I've pointed out that Herbert Simon's defence of a data-intensive world on the grounds that the Nazis accomplished their atrocities without the benefit of automated data processing has since proven quite false: IBM were a willing and active enabler. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21599647 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21599647 Data and information change behaviours in subtle ways. I'm strongly convinced of this, though I wouldn't be able to define or describe all the ways.

raxxorrax 7y ago

Big news corporation all participate in tracking. Not a single large org doesn't have direct business relations with Google or Facebook. I remember the day some years ago when my favorite paper (not US based) claimed it would try to still report critically about Facebook even while they are engaged in a cooperation and how such a market situation could be detrimental to independent news covering. They needed to do that because these sites mainly drive engagement. Today, they also write a lot about the hot button topics of today, which isn't any different than boulevard really. They still have good content, but that doesn't put the meals on their table anymore.

germinalphrase 7y ago

Garry Kasparov - along with many others, of course - has attributed this “drifting into the ether” to a shift in how authoritarian leadership maintains compliance. Where old school authoritarian organizations would attempt to actively stifle the flow of truth (aka the Great Firewall), today they seek to obscure the truth with a firehose of partial truths/could be truths/outright lies such that the average person is unable to accurately discern what is fundamentally true about any given situation. The tool of oppression is fake news, norms erosion, and maximizing confusion.

FeepingCreature 7y ago
How is that differentiable from a world in which a large amount of partial/incomplete information is produced naturally?
- germinalphrase 7y ago
  Scale and intentionality. Kasparov has talked about reading an interview he “gave” to a supposedly anti-Putin newspaper in which his political positions are acknowledged, but subtle changes are made that weaken his arguments and discredit him personally. The ability to create entire media organizations, websites, troll farms, etc. with the explicit intention of sowing confusion and kneecapping the ability of the populations to discern what is actually happening in the world around them is only a tool available - at scale - to a certain class of people.
- inimino 7y ago
  The bias of the partial information matters.
- asdff 7y ago
  When supposed figures of authority like the POTUS are contributing to the junk for their own benefit
  - FeepingCreature 7y ago
    I feel like that would happen regardless.

mbesto 7y ago

> I hope this amounts to something. I have my reservations. > news in the last few years is how stories that used to have international, severe impact and political repercussions just drift off into the ether now. Wait, so you're relying on news organizations to provide detailed investigations into how companies abuse their power. Isn't that why we elect government officials?

TeMPOraL 7y ago

> One of the most amazing things about the news in the last few years is how stories that used to have international, severe impact and political repercussions just drift off into the ether now. No follow-up, no continuing coverage. It's all about immediate spikes in shares, likes, tweets, and readers. They know people don't care about the follow-up that much; heck the data tells them that. So there's no follow-up, only the next sensation. I sometimes joke here that A/B testing is how Satan interacts with this world. With each passing day, it seems less and less like a joke, though. And in all honesty, data science itself is fine - the problem is that some thing should not be optimized beyond a point.

mfer 7y ago

This isn’t about what the news organizations know. It’s about writing to their audience and what the audience knows. The audience has a lack of awareness. One thing that could use a lot more press is what companies do with this information. Many people who know they have it believe it to be harmless.

danso 7y ago

> But I would like to welcome the NYT to 20 years or so ago when Google realized that there was money in the data Nothing against snark, but I'm confused with what you're saying here. Are you implying that the NYT and media in general have not covered Google and other companies' threats to privacy? Or are you arguing that they haven't covered it enough, and your metric for this, ostensibly, is that these companies still exist and/or no one has been imprisoned or otherwise heavily sanctioned? I ask because the story under discussion is explicitly not an investigation of illegal activity, but more the revelation/explanation of how closely our lives can be surveilled via smartphone through our consent. The article outright says that what's being described isn't illegal: > Today, it’s perfectly legal to collect and sell all this information. In the United States, as in most of the world, no federal law limits what has become a vast and lucrative trade in human tracking. Only internal company policies and the decency of individual employees prevent those with access to the data from, say, stalking an estranged spouse or selling the evening commute of an intelligence officer to a hostile foreign power. – and let's face it, if the authors hadn't emphasized this, half of us here would be ripping the authors for dishonest hype and clickbait for trying to "fool" the public into an outrage. > One of the most amazing things about the news in the last few years is how stories that used to have international, severe impact and political repercussions just drift off into the ether now. No follow-up, no continuing coverage. Given your opening statement, it's hard for me to know if this is an empirical assessment based on what you've observed, or whether your ability to pay attention to unfolding investigations/scandals are unreasonably dampened by skepticism and unreasonable impatience. This year alone we've seen severe and international repercussions from the Epstein scandal, which was catalyzed by Julie Brown, a Miami reporter who had been following him for years, long enough to know to keep digging when Trump's nominated labor secretary happened to be the Florida prosecutor who gave Epstein his sweet 2010 deal. I assume, like most people, you are dissatisfied that Epstein suddenly died before the possibility of a trial. Are you under the impression that journalists, including Brown, have dropped looking into Epstein? Or that something/anything should be happening faster and more noticeable to you and the public? The reality is, many investigations happen (especially at the local level) that do effect important change, but after the initial public outrage and sanctions, if the change perpetuates, its through years-long process of policy and legislation, which you aren't likely to notice (almost by definition, if something is fixed, we take it for granted) The press itself is not given the power to directly make that change itself, and I think this is acceptable by anyone (i.e. just about everyone who is not part of the press) who hates the phenomenon of "trial by press". All that said, I am curious what exemplary investigations you have in mind that, back in the better days, met your standard for to speedy, significant, and systemic change? For the U.S. press, Watergate is still seen as the gold standard for a major impact investigation. It took a more than 2 years from the break-in to when Nixon resigned in 1974. In that span, Nixon won re-election by the biggest landslide in American history, and many people who experienced this period would be justified (until 1974) into thinking Watergate amounted to very little.