8 ms·

It looks like everything in tech got poisoned, smart TVs taking screenshots, web apps tracking and matching user clicks, smartphones tracking locations realtime

by bitL 7y ago

It looks like everything in tech got poisoned, smart TVs taking screenshots, web apps tracking and matching user clicks, smartphones tracking locations realtime and who knows what else, desktop apps monitoring other apps and peripherals, creepy companies building profiles on everyone, health institutions selling data of their users... I want out, I didn't get into this field, keeping myself up-to-date and super capable via top universities, to be just another cog in building a toxic monstrosity this industry is becoming just to make somebody with a limited lifespan feel powerful and rich.

sizzle 7y ago
"just to make somebody with a limited lifespan feel powerful and rich." Wow that last sentence really puts things into perspective. How can be reverse course and throw a wrench in the system? We are the makers, we should be able to wrestle back control and do it democratically and get politicians on our side to legislate this ad industry into the ground.
- bsanr2 7y ago
  Quickest thing you can do is quit your jobs en masse. At some index level of number of people * avg skill of people quitting, the industry becomes nonviable. Then you state your terms. Sounds like a union? Also sounds like Galt's Gulch. Weird dovetail, there. The kicker is that tech workers are in a FAR better position than the other groups that are pushing or considering a general strike. I suppose that makes the prospect more viable, but also more dangerous to the stability of the overall economy. I guess it's up to you if a shake-up now is worth stopping or forestalling the rising waters.
  - nerdponx 7y ago
    This. Tech workers need to organize. Unfortunately you have to convince tech workers that moral duty to society is better than their comfortable high-salary lifestyles, and good luck with that.
  - mdhardeman 7y ago
    This is a non-starter for achieving the end result. There's enough of a delta in both the money paid for online advertising of a target nature and in the better results that yields for the advertisers for them to fund a very rapid turn-over. There's enough money in it that if they must, they'll be able and willing to buy their way past any unionization issues.
- rapind 7y ago
  Sorry to break it to you but most of this "we" already sold out. Much like the corporate hippy boomers.
- bigiain 7y ago
  > "just to make somebody with a limited lifespan feel powerful and rich." > How can be reverse course and throw a wrench in the system? We start by taking the guillotines down to Sand Hill Road.
  - briandear 7y ago
    Good grief. Many of the people in privileged positions to complain about this stuff got to those positions through Sand Hill road. Telling some poor person that they have to pay $10 per month to use Google or send Facebook messages isn’t democracy. Don’t want surveillance? Don’t use the products the employ it, but some people, especially those that don’t have means, might be perfectly fine to trade privacy for a “free” service. Destroying the ad industry is elitism and tone deaf — ads are imperfect, but they have enabled people to do things that would have been impossible or unaffordable 20 years ago. This pitchforks and guillotines talk is ridiculous. Build something better if you don’t like the way things are.
    - specialist 7y ago
      Do you use ad blockers, VPN, etc?
    - fiblye 7y ago
      > Don’t want surveillance? Don’t use the products the employ it That’s as simple as saying “don’t like crime? Don’t be near criminals.” Data’s being stolen and we’re being watched whether we like it or not. Only sometimes can we easily opt out and have those decisions respected.
  - mdhardeman 7y ago
    It's not their fault they're exploiting a system that allows what they are doing. They're not good people, but if it weren't this set of people, another would take their place. The world is rife with opportunity for people of low morals. It is society's fault that we have not explicitly codified what will not be allowed and constructed the right laws and enforcement to ensure that violators are ruinously punished.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  First step would be to kill advertising-based models. Get them banned. Because it's the advertising industry's race to the bottom that poisons everything, and fuels the creation of surveillance infrastructure. With ad-related snooping gone, it will be much easier to rein in the remaining few players who misuse data in pursuit of optimizing their business models. (And yes, I know ads enable a lot of free content on-line. But as countless problems like this show, it's a bad tradeoff.)
  - bArray 7y ago
    There was a time before now where advertising was effective and didnt track you - it was the advent of targeted advertisement which really killed things off. Can we go back to the days where an advert was was just an image and a hyperlink? Where advertisement paid by the pixel and location on the website? Where JavaScript was unused unless in some rare and warranted cases? I still believe the web can be a free and open market place of ideas.
    - warent 7y ago
      Most ads that I remember when I was new to the internet were all running flash and had really annoying circus-game-like objectives such as "Can you shoot the basketball through the hoop?!?" I hate the means by which advertising is targeted today, but I would be lying if I said the format of the ads themselves were more annoying or less useful than the past.
    - mdhardeman 7y ago
      There are two troubles: 1. The uplift of targeted advertising is unbelievable until you see the actual statistics. It's like slowly sipping a cup of coffee to wake up versus waking up to snort a line of crack. 2. Advertisers were abused and defrauded by adtech. Which has inspired all kinds of surveillance hellscape because the advertisers finally caught wise and have renegotiated to pay for actual performance only -- not clicks -- actually closed sales. But adtech wants paid if you do your research online, respond to an ad online, and then buy in store. And a whole lot of adtech now allows for that. Attributing an in-store purchase with no customer interaction to a prior web session by that same party. The benefit of those two factors to the advertisers is such that we can't have a serious discussion about this shit going away without a law which assigns criminal penalties for being a beneficiary of the scheme.
- briandear 7y ago
  Why legislate it? Why not make a thing that doesn’t need advertising and charge people money for it. The way to “end” the industry you don’t like is democratically — using dollars as votes. The idea of using government to crush an industry is a bit totalitarian — it “the people” agree with you, they should be happy to pay you for your product. If they don’t agree, then there isn’t anything democratic about using a government to shut down an industry you don’t like — that’s not democracy, that’s fascism.
- Buttons840 7y ago
  Here's a radical idea. Embrace that technology will bring everything to light and essentially destroy privacy. Instead, let's ensure the powerful people in our society also have no privacy. Let's ensure we can watch the watchers with more eyes than they watch us with.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - throwaway2048 7y ago
    A person with a private security army, a 40 acre compound and a personal helicopter has very little to fear from the general populace knowing things. They never have to worry about the price of insurance, or getting a job, or securing a loan vs being homeless. This does not solve the problem, not even close.
    - 8bitsrule 7y ago
      They might have to worry about the aspiring plans of that security army. It's always something.
  - mdhardeman 7y ago
    Doesn't help at all. Privacy of varying levels is and has been a functional requirement for smooth working of free society. Economic disparities make the impact of lower levels of overall societal privacy have a disproportionate negative impact to those on the lower end of the scale.
- opepp0 7y ago
  Working on a Kubernetes based clone of Instagram. My plan is to deploy it and a VPN tunnel and give certain folks access to keep in touch. I’ll have instructions for self hosting and VPN key creation/sharing (Wireguard ftw) There’s absolutely no reason to bother with cloud services. They’re nothing but big corp coopting our problem solving. It always comes down to be gatekeeped but no one having the guts to gate keep a rich douche whose money to buy security goes away as soon as we do
  - cl0ckt0wer 7y ago
    My biggest challenge is communicating with non-technical family and friends. Teaching them Whatsapp was a challenge, but things like IG and FB are simple to install and log in to. I've never been able to quit them without suddenly being isolated.
    - opepp0 7y ago
      I never jumped on the “using social media means I am connected” band wagon. Still just using email. It’s web scale, and just needs UX love. But really even that is overkill. Self hosting is too easy and cheap for me to justify cloud services privacy and just generally being in the habit of externalizing every aspect of utilitarian life. I’m not talking webscale loads. And it could be a hub for IOT. My data streams are not Google scale. But don’t take your eye off them sticks & options. Ooo shiny Share my data with my doctor directly over local area WiFi, by making it adhere to a specific format. No data middle men needed. For a culture constantly climbing up its own ass about austerity in economics, we sure enjoy selling ridiculously uneconomical means of communication. It’s almost as if it’s a purpose built emotional response but who could believe so many people would fall for an emotional mass delusion?
  - rotterdamdev 7y ago
    There is already a FOSS replacement for Instagram, with privacy settings. Pixelfed.
  - sizzle 7y ago
    This is an awesome project, please post this to HN if you open source it (please do!)
- remote_phone 7y ago
  Create enough noisy data so that the data these companies receive is so unreliable that they give up. Have a Chrome extension that runs and clicks on things randomly or a separate app that controls the mouse that feeds bad data. If it ran on every computer maybe Google AdWords might become useless.
- beatgammit 7y ago
  IDK, my go-to strategy for now is to support products that respect my privacy and recommend them to friends and family. My friends and family don't know this is going on or that alternatives exist, so I'm their reference for what is and isn't good. I refuse to work for companies I don't agree with, which hurts me financially. I will never work at a FAANG company, for example, or most of the other heavy weights that are funny l functionally similar. For things without a clearly superior alternative, I have a list of business opportunities. For example, smart devices are becoming popular, and they're horrendous for privacy. That means there's a market for devices that don't spy on you, and the open source options after inconvenient enough that a packaged deal is attractive, even if it could be DIY. For example, I think there's room for a Ring competitor that is E2E encrypted, provided the app is well designed and the device is unobtrusive. Privacy respecting services and devices are unlikely to take over the alternatives, but merely existing puts pressure on the major players to act better.
  - sizzle 7y ago
    Thanks for taking a stand against FAANG, I know my wallet is hurting for doing the same.
Seenso 7y ago
> It looks like everything in tech got poisoned... > ...building a toxic monstrosity this industry is becoming just to make somebody with a limited lifespan feel powerful and rich. That's what you get when you combine shareholder-focused capitalism, the attitude that everything's OK as long as it's legal, and the attitude that we should avoid making things illegal through regulation (so as not to stifle innovation such as this). IMHO, all of those ideas should be rejected or greatly curtailed because of the poisonous tree that's grown from them (which bears delicious poison fruit).
- bradstewart 7y ago
  The real kicker, though, is the scale at which software allows that combination of ideas to affect people.
- Barrin92 7y ago
  you're getting downvoted just for pointing out why the problem exists. The discussions around these issues always follow the same pattern that reminds me of a dialogue I recently saw posted somewhere, where an Amish person and a non-Amish person talked about technology and the amish person asked the other one, "do you think having the television on is good for you and your family?" and the other person responded "no, but we don't want to get rid of it because it may be useful", and the amish guy responded with "that's the difference between us, if something is bad for our family we throw it out." The discussions around tech are the exact same. We all agree the modern internet is screwed, large companies put ads into everything, we're getting screwed over, non-profit domain spaces are being sold, everyone's unhappy, and we do .... nothing. Because of 'innovation' or some other conjured up fantasy term.
  - leppr 7y ago
    > everyone's unhappy, and we do .... nothing. Because of 'innovation' or some other conjured up fantasy term. The only reason "we" do nothing, is that "we" have no agency. Other reasons are just rationalization to cope with our powerlessness: we pretend ideological debates among the people decide the faith of the country. The only vote "we" have is voting with our wallet, which only works in a truly free market.
ssss11 7y ago
Well put, I’m ashamed at the current state of our industry.
II2II 7y ago
Is Wacom's driver an example of excessive monitoring? While the author presents the graphics tablet as a glorified mouse, tablets usually offer many more features. How those features interact with various applications is important, and they have to prioritize which applications they support. The data collection that the author describes may be viewed, internally, as part of that process. Now I am not claiming that Wacom is doing the right thing, nor am I claiming that they are doing the right thing in the wrong way. Yet it is entirely possible that they feel justified in collecting that data for product development without having ulterior motives. Their failure may simply lay in the failure to recognize that many people are sensitive to data collection due to real, potential, or perceived abuses by other parties.
- marta_morena 7y ago
  Or the failure may be on your end, believing that "many people are sensitive to data collection" while in fact, most people don't give a dusty fuck about it and happily share everything for saving a few bucks a month. Hackernews is NOT the people. HN represents a TINY TINY fraction of users.
  - rhizome 7y ago
    You're saying this group of "most people" knows what's being sent, that they're exercising informed consent? Surely you aren't hanging this argument on "common sense."
    - briandear 7y ago
      You are saying that most people doesn’t? Any polls or data supporting that assertion? Bring data to the discussion. Here’s some: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/03/27/americans-complicated-feelings-about-social-media-in-an-era-of-privacy-concerns/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/03/27/americans-c... 91% of Americans feel that they have lost control of their personal data and privacy. The logical conclusion is that at least that many understand what they have gotten themselves into. That would indicate that a majority of people are exercising informed consent, despite the vast majority of Americans feeling that way, they continue to use the gamut of products and services.
HomeDeLaPot 7y ago
I don't think we have to quit our day jobs to change the world. What we need to do is (1) change the expectations of the public via conversations, activism, migrating away from FB/Google/Microsoft products, etc. and (2) make it easier for people to prioritize privacy by building open-source apps and hardware. Inspiring examples that I use daily include Linux, git, and Bitwarden.
- basicplus2 7y ago
  The general public are too disinterested to make it possible to convince the majority to change the way they make decisions about software and hardware. Legislation is the only effective course.
  - horsawlarway 7y ago
    I'm not sure how you can propose legislation without the majority approval. A functioning democracy legislates according to the will of the people. That means you HAVE to convince the majority first. In a broken democracy, you still need to convince the powerful (although this might actually be easier). But you still have to convince them to apply the same standard to those without power, which is likely a hard sell.
    - mdhardeman 7y ago
      I'm convinced the parents of the US, and in turn broad bipartisan support, could get behind some sane legislation on this stuff if a massive dump like the New York Times one were deanonymized and focused on kids.
taneq 7y ago
On the bright side, as biotech advances eventually you’re gonna get rich powerful immortal bosses.
- bitL 7y ago
  Oh yes, the best/worst case scenario all at once.
  - komali2 7y ago
    Only best. Aged meat tastes better.
- ddalex 7y ago
  hello Altered Carbon
mixmastamyk 7y ago
Don't forget your employer selling your paycheck records, FFS.
- mdhardeman 7y ago
  The Work Number's entire sales pitch is... "We'll accept the data from you for free. You can give our our number and website to anyone who calls into your HR looking for employment reference, employment verification, etc. We'll field those calls for you." They don't pay for the paystub data. The employers give it to them. Although it's an invasion of privacy, to be sure, it actually does have some benefits for the employee. In places outside San Fran, where people actually get conforming mortgages, having your data in The Work Number's database automates and cuts out the employment & income verification so that you don't have to track down records and submit manually and can potentially skip multiple must-connect phone calls between the lender and employer.
friendlybus 7y ago
I wanted to add on the list of privacy invading examples. It's better I make the counter claim. The data collected has massive potential to improve medical research. Being able to validate database wide experiments on hundreds of millions of people at once is pretty incredible. There's likely to be a decade of insights to be found in this rapidly filling digital ocean of information. In several years the clamour to get off the known web will empower a lot of security apps (not "privacy" apps, that are the opposite of their name) that are growing behind the scenes.
- mixmastamyk 7y ago
  Seems like folks should get to choose what experiments they participate in? Medical ethics 101.
- bitL 7y ago
  You have a valid point, I did some Deep Learning-based medical research as well as analytics on top of FHIR and having more data is absolutely essential for e.g. finding correlations/covariate conditions/risk factors etc. However, there are massive privacy risks, economically-ruinous or literally life-threatening.
- Mizza 7y ago
  I recently encountered a company that uses ad-tech pioneered identification techniques to snake around patient privacy laws and clinical trial anonymity to sell re-identified data back to insurance companies. So no, fuck that.
- mdhardeman 7y ago
  I'm only one voice, but for my part, I am willing to forego the advancements that may come to medicine via this route. The societal costs of surveillance capitalism are only just starting to appear, and it's going to get so much worse before it gets better. And it's not all bad, but there's no preserving the little bit of good without canning the tons of bad.
tmpAa 7y ago
I'm 100% like you feel. I also did a top uni for years, it was super stressful but I eventually managed. Now I just got a work at a tech company similar to Wacom. I thought okay, we all know how unethical are Google, FB & friends, but a company selling hardware accessories only, c'mon no way it should not be too evil... Well that Wacom story is cute in comparaison to what they do. Ofc they also log all apps used like wacom, but they are also implementing systems to analyse if you have health issues from your peripheral logs, analyse your emotions and stress level from microphones & cameras, facial recognition, eye gaze, etc. I love technology and computer science but tech is so screwed up in terms of ethics. I wish we'd see more people coming together that care about this (like truely care, not the #Tethics of the sillicon valley) to make some open and private alternatives to all this toxicity. But it is super hard to make things change. I'll work in that direction in my free time, but I feel so alone. HN seems the only place people care a bit about that. Around me at uni or at work, the level of ethics and care for privacy is so low, it's depressing. It's not only that "rich boss" telling its employees to exploit people's data, it's also engineers themselves being happy collabo of this because they make huge salary working for those companies.
HelloNurse 7y ago
Poisoned tech anecdote: I recently noticed that in one of my favorite bars the coffee grinder has a screensaver. Considering what should and shouldn't be done is much less popular than finding ways to do it.
- mdhardeman 7y ago
  I think one of the great signals of good ethical behavior is the person who'll refuse to build a thing that they know should not exist, even when offered a great reward if they'll do so.
mdhardeman 7y ago
s/limited lifespan feel powerful and rich/limited lifespan powerful and rich/ It's a whole attitude. They're aware of their limited lifespan and intend to either buy their way into more and better lifespan (if possible), but in any event become actually powerful and rich. At least on a certain scale, they're not wrong. It does work. This is not to say, however, that they're not slugs deserving of a good salting.

by bitL 7y ago

sizzle 7y ago

"just to make somebody with a limited lifespan feel powerful and rich." Wow that last sentence really puts things into perspective. How can be reverse course and throw a wrench in the system? We are the makers, we should be able to wrestle back control and do it democratically and get politicians on our side to legislate this ad industry into the ground.

bsanr2 7y ago
Quickest thing you can do is quit your jobs en masse. At some index level of number of people * avg skill of people quitting, the industry becomes nonviable. Then you state your terms. Sounds like a union? Also sounds like Galt's Gulch. Weird dovetail, there. The kicker is that tech workers are in a FAR better position than the other groups that are pushing or considering a general strike. I suppose that makes the prospect more viable, but also more dangerous to the stability of the overall economy. I guess it's up to you if a shake-up now is worth stopping or forestalling the rising waters.
- nerdponx 7y ago
  This. Tech workers need to organize. Unfortunately you have to convince tech workers that moral duty to society is better than their comfortable high-salary lifestyles, and good luck with that.
- mdhardeman 7y ago
  This is a non-starter for achieving the end result. There's enough of a delta in both the money paid for online advertising of a target nature and in the better results that yields for the advertisers for them to fund a very rapid turn-over. There's enough money in it that if they must, they'll be able and willing to buy their way past any unionization issues.
rapind 7y ago
Sorry to break it to you but most of this "we" already sold out. Much like the corporate hippy boomers.
bigiain 7y ago
> "just to make somebody with a limited lifespan feel powerful and rich." > How can be reverse course and throw a wrench in the system? We start by taking the guillotines down to Sand Hill Road.
- briandear 7y ago
  Good grief. Many of the people in privileged positions to complain about this stuff got to those positions through Sand Hill road. Telling some poor person that they have to pay $10 per month to use Google or send Facebook messages isn’t democracy. Don’t want surveillance? Don’t use the products the employ it, but some people, especially those that don’t have means, might be perfectly fine to trade privacy for a “free” service. Destroying the ad industry is elitism and tone deaf — ads are imperfect, but they have enabled people to do things that would have been impossible or unaffordable 20 years ago. This pitchforks and guillotines talk is ridiculous. Build something better if you don’t like the way things are.
  - specialist 7y ago
    Do you use ad blockers, VPN, etc?
  - fiblye 7y ago
    > Don’t want surveillance? Don’t use the products the employ it That’s as simple as saying “don’t like crime? Don’t be near criminals.” Data’s being stolen and we’re being watched whether we like it or not. Only sometimes can we easily opt out and have those decisions respected.
- mdhardeman 7y ago
  It's not their fault they're exploiting a system that allows what they are doing. They're not good people, but if it weren't this set of people, another would take their place. The world is rife with opportunity for people of low morals. It is society's fault that we have not explicitly codified what will not be allowed and constructed the right laws and enforcement to ensure that violators are ruinously punished.
TeMPOraL 7y ago
First step would be to kill advertising-based models. Get them banned. Because it's the advertising industry's race to the bottom that poisons everything, and fuels the creation of surveillance infrastructure. With ad-related snooping gone, it will be much easier to rein in the remaining few players who misuse data in pursuit of optimizing their business models. (And yes, I know ads enable a lot of free content on-line. But as countless problems like this show, it's a bad tradeoff.)
- bArray 7y ago
  There was a time before now where advertising was effective and didnt track you - it was the advent of targeted advertisement which really killed things off. Can we go back to the days where an advert was was just an image and a hyperlink? Where advertisement paid by the pixel and location on the website? Where JavaScript was unused unless in some rare and warranted cases? I still believe the web can be a free and open market place of ideas.
  - warent 7y ago
    Most ads that I remember when I was new to the internet were all running flash and had really annoying circus-game-like objectives such as "Can you shoot the basketball through the hoop?!?" I hate the means by which advertising is targeted today, but I would be lying if I said the format of the ads themselves were more annoying or less useful than the past.
  - mdhardeman 7y ago
    There are two troubles: 1. The uplift of targeted advertising is unbelievable until you see the actual statistics. It's like slowly sipping a cup of coffee to wake up versus waking up to snort a line of crack. 2. Advertisers were abused and defrauded by adtech. Which has inspired all kinds of surveillance hellscape because the advertisers finally caught wise and have renegotiated to pay for actual performance only -- not clicks -- actually closed sales. But adtech wants paid if you do your research online, respond to an ad online, and then buy in store. And a whole lot of adtech now allows for that. Attributing an in-store purchase with no customer interaction to a prior web session by that same party. The benefit of those two factors to the advertisers is such that we can't have a serious discussion about this shit going away without a law which assigns criminal penalties for being a beneficiary of the scheme.
briandear 7y ago
Why legislate it? Why not make a thing that doesn’t need advertising and charge people money for it. The way to “end” the industry you don’t like is democratically — using dollars as votes. The idea of using government to crush an industry is a bit totalitarian — it “the people” agree with you, they should be happy to pay you for your product. If they don’t agree, then there isn’t anything democratic about using a government to shut down an industry you don’t like — that’s not democracy, that’s fascism.
Buttons840 7y ago
Here's a radical idea. Embrace that technology will bring everything to light and essentially destroy privacy. Instead, let's ensure the powerful people in our society also have no privacy. Let's ensure we can watch the watchers with more eyes than they watch us with.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- throwaway2048 7y ago
  A person with a private security army, a 40 acre compound and a personal helicopter has very little to fear from the general populace knowing things. They never have to worry about the price of insurance, or getting a job, or securing a loan vs being homeless. This does not solve the problem, not even close.
  - 8bitsrule 7y ago
    They might have to worry about the aspiring plans of that security army. It's always something.
- mdhardeman 7y ago
  Doesn't help at all. Privacy of varying levels is and has been a functional requirement for smooth working of free society. Economic disparities make the impact of lower levels of overall societal privacy have a disproportionate negative impact to those on the lower end of the scale.
opepp0 7y ago
Working on a Kubernetes based clone of Instagram. My plan is to deploy it and a VPN tunnel and give certain folks access to keep in touch. I’ll have instructions for self hosting and VPN key creation/sharing (Wireguard ftw) There’s absolutely no reason to bother with cloud services. They’re nothing but big corp coopting our problem solving. It always comes down to be gatekeeped but no one having the guts to gate keep a rich douche whose money to buy security goes away as soon as we do
- cl0ckt0wer 7y ago
  My biggest challenge is communicating with non-technical family and friends. Teaching them Whatsapp was a challenge, but things like IG and FB are simple to install and log in to. I've never been able to quit them without suddenly being isolated.
  - opepp0 7y ago
    I never jumped on the “using social media means I am connected” band wagon. Still just using email. It’s web scale, and just needs UX love. But really even that is overkill. Self hosting is too easy and cheap for me to justify cloud services privacy and just generally being in the habit of externalizing every aspect of utilitarian life. I’m not talking webscale loads. And it could be a hub for IOT. My data streams are not Google scale. But don’t take your eye off them sticks & options. Ooo shiny Share my data with my doctor directly over local area WiFi, by making it adhere to a specific format. No data middle men needed. For a culture constantly climbing up its own ass about austerity in economics, we sure enjoy selling ridiculously uneconomical means of communication. It’s almost as if it’s a purpose built emotional response but who could believe so many people would fall for an emotional mass delusion?
- rotterdamdev 7y ago
  There is already a FOSS replacement for Instagram, with privacy settings. Pixelfed.
- sizzle 7y ago
  This is an awesome project, please post this to HN if you open source it (please do!)
remote_phone 7y ago
Create enough noisy data so that the data these companies receive is so unreliable that they give up. Have a Chrome extension that runs and clicks on things randomly or a separate app that controls the mouse that feeds bad data. If it ran on every computer maybe Google AdWords might become useless.
beatgammit 7y ago
IDK, my go-to strategy for now is to support products that respect my privacy and recommend them to friends and family. My friends and family don't know this is going on or that alternatives exist, so I'm their reference for what is and isn't good. I refuse to work for companies I don't agree with, which hurts me financially. I will never work at a FAANG company, for example, or most of the other heavy weights that are funny l functionally similar. For things without a clearly superior alternative, I have a list of business opportunities. For example, smart devices are becoming popular, and they're horrendous for privacy. That means there's a market for devices that don't spy on you, and the open source options after inconvenient enough that a packaged deal is attractive, even if it could be DIY. For example, I think there's room for a Ring competitor that is E2E encrypted, provided the app is well designed and the device is unobtrusive. Privacy respecting services and devices are unlikely to take over the alternatives, but merely existing puts pressure on the major players to act better.
- sizzle 7y ago
  Thanks for taking a stand against FAANG, I know my wallet is hurting for doing the same.

Seenso 7y ago

> It looks like everything in tech got poisoned... > ...building a toxic monstrosity this industry is becoming just to make somebody with a limited lifespan feel powerful and rich. That's what you get when you combine shareholder-focused capitalism, the attitude that everything's OK as long as it's legal, and the attitude that we should avoid making things illegal through regulation (so as not to stifle innovation such as this). IMHO, all of those ideas should be rejected or greatly curtailed because of the poisonous tree that's grown from them (which bears delicious poison fruit).

bradstewart 7y ago
The real kicker, though, is the scale at which software allows that combination of ideas to affect people.
Barrin92 7y ago
you're getting downvoted just for pointing out why the problem exists. The discussions around these issues always follow the same pattern that reminds me of a dialogue I recently saw posted somewhere, where an Amish person and a non-Amish person talked about technology and the amish person asked the other one, "do you think having the television on is good for you and your family?" and the other person responded "no, but we don't want to get rid of it because it may be useful", and the amish guy responded with "that's the difference between us, if something is bad for our family we throw it out." The discussions around tech are the exact same. We all agree the modern internet is screwed, large companies put ads into everything, we're getting screwed over, non-profit domain spaces are being sold, everyone's unhappy, and we do .... nothing. Because of 'innovation' or some other conjured up fantasy term.
- leppr 7y ago
  > everyone's unhappy, and we do .... nothing. Because of 'innovation' or some other conjured up fantasy term. The only reason "we" do nothing, is that "we" have no agency. Other reasons are just rationalization to cope with our powerlessness: we pretend ideological debates among the people decide the faith of the country. The only vote "we" have is voting with our wallet, which only works in a truly free market.

ssss11 7y ago

Well put, I’m ashamed at the current state of our industry.

II2II 7y ago

Is Wacom's driver an example of excessive monitoring? While the author presents the graphics tablet as a glorified mouse, tablets usually offer many more features. How those features interact with various applications is important, and they have to prioritize which applications they support. The data collection that the author describes may be viewed, internally, as part of that process. Now I am not claiming that Wacom is doing the right thing, nor am I claiming that they are doing the right thing in the wrong way. Yet it is entirely possible that they feel justified in collecting that data for product development without having ulterior motives. Their failure may simply lay in the failure to recognize that many people are sensitive to data collection due to real, potential, or perceived abuses by other parties.

marta_morena 7y ago
Or the failure may be on your end, believing that "many people are sensitive to data collection" while in fact, most people don't give a dusty fuck about it and happily share everything for saving a few bucks a month. Hackernews is NOT the people. HN represents a TINY TINY fraction of users.
- rhizome 7y ago
  You're saying this group of "most people" knows what's being sent, that they're exercising informed consent? Surely you aren't hanging this argument on "common sense."
  - briandear 7y ago
    You are saying that most people doesn’t? Any polls or data supporting that assertion? Bring data to the discussion. Here’s some: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/03/27/americans-complicated-feelings-about-social-media-in-an-era-of-privacy-concerns/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/03/27/americans-c... 91% of Americans feel that they have lost control of their personal data and privacy. The logical conclusion is that at least that many understand what they have gotten themselves into. That would indicate that a majority of people are exercising informed consent, despite the vast majority of Americans feeling that way, they continue to use the gamut of products and services.

HomeDeLaPot 7y ago

I don't think we have to quit our day jobs to change the world. What we need to do is (1) change the expectations of the public via conversations, activism, migrating away from FB/Google/Microsoft products, etc. and (2) make it easier for people to prioritize privacy by building open-source apps and hardware. Inspiring examples that I use daily include Linux, git, and Bitwarden.

basicplus2 7y ago
The general public are too disinterested to make it possible to convince the majority to change the way they make decisions about software and hardware. Legislation is the only effective course.
- horsawlarway 7y ago
  I'm not sure how you can propose legislation without the majority approval. A functioning democracy legislates according to the will of the people. That means you HAVE to convince the majority first. In a broken democracy, you still need to convince the powerful (although this might actually be easier). But you still have to convince them to apply the same standard to those without power, which is likely a hard sell.
  - mdhardeman 7y ago
    I'm convinced the parents of the US, and in turn broad bipartisan support, could get behind some sane legislation on this stuff if a massive dump like the New York Times one were deanonymized and focused on kids.

taneq 7y ago

On the bright side, as biotech advances eventually you’re gonna get rich powerful immortal bosses.

bitL 7y ago
Oh yes, the best/worst case scenario all at once.
- komali2 7y ago
  Only best. Aged meat tastes better.
ddalex 7y ago
hello Altered Carbon

mixmastamyk 7y ago

Don't forget your employer selling your paycheck records, FFS.

mdhardeman 7y ago
The Work Number's entire sales pitch is... "We'll accept the data from you for free. You can give our our number and website to anyone who calls into your HR looking for employment reference, employment verification, etc. We'll field those calls for you." They don't pay for the paystub data. The employers give it to them. Although it's an invasion of privacy, to be sure, it actually does have some benefits for the employee. In places outside San Fran, where people actually get conforming mortgages, having your data in The Work Number's database automates and cuts out the employment & income verification so that you don't have to track down records and submit manually and can potentially skip multiple must-connect phone calls between the lender and employer.

friendlybus 7y ago

I wanted to add on the list of privacy invading examples. It's better I make the counter claim. The data collected has massive potential to improve medical research. Being able to validate database wide experiments on hundreds of millions of people at once is pretty incredible. There's likely to be a decade of insights to be found in this rapidly filling digital ocean of information. In several years the clamour to get off the known web will empower a lot of security apps (not "privacy" apps, that are the opposite of their name) that are growing behind the scenes.

mixmastamyk 7y ago
Seems like folks should get to choose what experiments they participate in? Medical ethics 101.
bitL 7y ago
You have a valid point, I did some Deep Learning-based medical research as well as analytics on top of FHIR and having more data is absolutely essential for e.g. finding correlations/covariate conditions/risk factors etc. However, there are massive privacy risks, economically-ruinous or literally life-threatening.
Mizza 7y ago
I recently encountered a company that uses ad-tech pioneered identification techniques to snake around patient privacy laws and clinical trial anonymity to sell re-identified data back to insurance companies. So no, fuck that.
mdhardeman 7y ago
I'm only one voice, but for my part, I am willing to forego the advancements that may come to medicine via this route. The societal costs of surveillance capitalism are only just starting to appear, and it's going to get so much worse before it gets better. And it's not all bad, but there's no preserving the little bit of good without canning the tons of bad.

tmpAa 7y ago

I'm 100% like you feel. I also did a top uni for years, it was super stressful but I eventually managed. Now I just got a work at a tech company similar to Wacom. I thought okay, we all know how unethical are Google, FB & friends, but a company selling hardware accessories only, c'mon no way it should not be too evil... Well that Wacom story is cute in comparaison to what they do. Ofc they also log all apps used like wacom, but they are also implementing systems to analyse if you have health issues from your peripheral logs, analyse your emotions and stress level from microphones & cameras, facial recognition, eye gaze, etc. I love technology and computer science but tech is so screwed up in terms of ethics. I wish we'd see more people coming together that care about this (like truely care, not the #Tethics of the sillicon valley) to make some open and private alternatives to all this toxicity. But it is super hard to make things change. I'll work in that direction in my free time, but I feel so alone. HN seems the only place people care a bit about that. Around me at uni or at work, the level of ethics and care for privacy is so low, it's depressing. It's not only that "rich boss" telling its employees to exploit people's data, it's also engineers themselves being happy collabo of this because they make huge salary working for those companies.

HelloNurse 7y ago

Poisoned tech anecdote: I recently noticed that in one of my favorite bars the coffee grinder has a screensaver. Considering what should and shouldn't be done is much less popular than finding ways to do it.

mdhardeman 7y ago
I think one of the great signals of good ethical behavior is the person who'll refuse to build a thing that they know should not exist, even when offered a great reward if they'll do so.

mdhardeman 7y ago

s/limited lifespan feel powerful and rich/limited lifespan powerful and rich/ It's a whole attitude. They're aware of their limited lifespan and intend to either buy their way into more and better lifespan (if possible), but in any event become actually powerful and rich. At least on a certain scale, they're not wrong. It does work. This is not to say, however, that they're not slugs deserving of a good salting.