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I honestly don't trust governments/bureaucrats to be able to come up with a solution for this issue. This is one of those problems that evolves very quickly, an

I honestly don't trust governments/bureaucrats to be able to come up with a solution for this issue. This is one of those problems that evolves very quickly, and the solution probably needs to be done by a private company or by each person individually.

oblio 6y ago
In 2016, I think, there were 0 airplane crashes and 0 air travel fatalities. Across 200 countries, hundreds of airlines and several airplane manufacturers, probably thousands of airports, millions of flights. If you think that was an easy feat, then I don't know what to tell you. Do you know how it was achieved? With finely tuned and ruthlessly efficient bureaucracy. When people really care, bureaucracy works wonders. Bureaucracy is basically formalizing social interactions for a specific topic. Formalizing something ossifies it, but it also prevents your pilot telling your copilot "Shut up!" just as the plane is about to crash into the mountain.
- MaxBarraclough 6y ago
  > 0 airplane crashes I presume you meant commercial aviation, rather than aviation in general. Unfortunately not quite true even there. Your broader point stands though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Aviation_accidents_and_incidents_in_2016 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Aviation_accidents_an...
  - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
    > Your broader point stands though. Well no, you've neatly disproved it. The reason it works for commercial aviation and not anything else -- not even aviation in general -- is that the bureaucratic processes used for commercial aviation incur a massive overhead. When you have a product which costs a hundred million dollars a unit anyway and can kill 300 people in one shot if it fails, you pay the cost. For anything else it's too expensive, but spending less money causes the bureaucracy to be ineffective. And even in commercial aviation, the overhead is still there, it's just capable of eating the loss. (Or maybe it isn't, given the miserable lack of competition in that industry now. And then where does that lead us on safety, Boeing?)
- Mirioron 6y ago
  And the aviation industry is not exactly a massive innovator at this point. The most commonly used commercial aircraft today were developed before the world wide web was even a thing. Why don't we just skip a few steps ahead - delete the internet and go back to cable TV? That's where we're headed for anyway.
- ben_w 6y ago
  > Do you know how it was achieved? With finely tuned and ruthlessly efficient bureaucracy. Not to dispute the effectiveness of a finely tuned and ruthlessly efficient bureaucracy, but pilots and airlines have a strong incentive to not have fatal accidents; websites however have a strong incentive to track their users. To use an analogy, enforcing this will be less like mandatory driving exams and more like net-zero carbon emissions.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - Retric 6y ago
    Airlines and airline manufacturers also have vast financial incentives to risk crashes by taking minor shortcuts. That doesn’t exist for your drivers test.
    - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
      That's not in the airline's interest because then the plane crashes and they lose a hundred million dollar plane and get sued and go bankrupt. It could be in an individual manager's interest because then they get a bonus and are working for some other company by the time the plane crashes, but the airline itself has the aforementioned incentive to put processes into place all on their own to prevent that from happening.
      - Retric 6y ago
        Losing a brand new hundred million dollar aircraft is a huge hit. Losing a 50 year old aircraft is a different story, especially when the options are to retire it or keep flying. Further risking a crash when your airline is facing bankruptcy suddenly looks like a reasonable trade off. It’s not like a major airline is going to intentionally crash an airplane, but if they can trade 1 billion dollars for an extra crash every 20 years that’s a net financial benefit.
        AnthonyMouse 6y ago
- pjc50 6y ago
  The thing is, there isn't a huge commercial vested interest in having plane crashes happen.
- hutzlibu 6y ago
  "but it also prevents your pilot telling your copilot "Shut up!" just as the plane is about to crash into the mountain. " I am curious? How does regulation prevents that? (and how does it prevent a suicidal pilot, from locking out the co pilot and crashing in a mountain on purpose? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_by_pilot https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_by_pilot )
  - slavak 6y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crew_resource_management https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crew_resource_management
- jnxx 6y ago
  I can't find it now, but I once read a fascinating history of train braking in the US. Before modern air brakes became mandatory, trains had brake men who had to jump from on car to the other in order to fasten brakes. That had a high risk of the brake operator fallng off the moving train - and the whole train becoming uncontrollable. It was an extremely dangerous job and at the time train companies thought it would be too costly to change the system, so they resisted change. > Bureaucracy is basically formalizing social interactions for a specific topic. One could even say that bureaucracy is one form of organized collective action. Which in general is quite necessary for humans as a social species.
black_puppydog 6y ago
Sorry, privacy as a personal responsibility has failed outright. For many services there is simply no (online, i.e. practically relevant) alternative, because none of the market players have an incentive to be privacy preserving (think major news outlets) or because the service is not interchangable due to network effects (facebook, twitter etc). The GDPR is actually sufficiently abstract IMO to make government enforcement possible and practical. And if you look at how tracking evolved, much of it is still the same old cookie-setting (from what, 25 years ago?) and the stuff that isn't (like ultrasonic profile matching and other shady stuff) is pretty clearly illegal. So it just needs political will on the national level where the enforcement agencies reside. Max Schrems' cases against facebook have shown time and again that these enforcement agencies are often simply unwilling to do their job, with the Irish one being a particularly bad example. But it is possible to do this. EDIT Also, regarding the personal responsibility aspect: we're being tracked by platforms we don't even have a user/customer relationship or any other contract with. Someone uploads a picture of me on facebook, and they build a profile based on that? Uncool. Is that a problem between me and the uploader? Certainly. Does that take responsibility from facebook to not mine that data? Nope.
- Mirioron 6y ago
  >For many services there is simply no (online, i.e. practically relevant) alternative, because none of the market players have an incentive to be privacy preserving (think major news outlets) or because the service is not interchangable due to network effects (facebook, twitter etc). But here's the big question: would these services have even existed in the first place if these laws had been in place? The internet has gained massive popularity because most of the resources on it are free. Look at porn - all of the known sites and run on ads, all the paid sites are essentially unknown. I don't know anybody who uses the latter. Wouldn't Facebook, Twitter, news sites etc have gone the same way if they required you to pay? Just look at what happens when a paywalled article gets posted. Either somebody posts a way to bypass it or a lot of people will never read the article.
  - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
    I would go the other way with it -- the problem is we don't have a low overhead system for anonymous micropayments, so ads are the only competitive way to offer a service with a very low cost (and thus price) per use. If there was an easy way to anonymously pay the site the five cents they get from the advertiser without incurring 500% payment processing overhead then would sites even be using advertising? But then we get to much the same result. What we need isn't new privacy rules, it's to delete the old banking rules that prevent efficient payment systems from operating.
hvidgaard 6y ago
They just have to create judicial precedent a few times and the system can easily hand out an impressive amount of warnings and fines.
distances 6y ago
I have the complete opposite view. Companies provably can't be trusted on anything touching privacy, and individuals don't have any power to act on it. Governmental oversight and bureaucracy is the only tool that works for a problem like this. It's a proven, efficient, and universally approved way to already enforce food, fire, travel safety and so on. It's only logical that privacy safety follows the same steps. GDPR seems to be a good approach for it, just pending on widespread enforcement of the rogue entities that aren't yet following the law.
- Nasrudith 6y ago
  But privacy isn't like food, fire or travel safety. Even assuming absolute cynicism it isn't very exploitable for them to use it for bad purposes. I liken the difference between actors to a housecat and a large dog with a lamb. The cat at worst could give some scratches but at worst would probably just annoy the lamb jumping into its wool and kneading it. The dog ideally would look after tbe lamb but could also inflict serious bites or even rip out its throat if it wants. Both may want the meat but only one has the ability to kill it to get what it wants. When it comes to unknowns as the lamb I would go with the cat as opposed to the dog out of sheer distrust.
  - black_puppydog 6y ago
    I'll actually argue that it very much is. First, there's the historic precedent of collected information eventually making it into the wrong hands. The Preussian "pink lists" are a classic example, but essentially everything that ended up as PRISM can be taken as a more modern example. And yes, putting power into government hands so regulate the collection of that data, and then arguing that it's dangerous because of the government might seem a bit contradictory. It's not in my mind. These types of legislation are supposed to disincentivize the collection by private entities after all. Government and intelligence services are (too) close but they are distinct. And then there's the very real [1] ([2] if you want it more juicy) possibility of corporations targeting individuals for one reason or another directly. Here in the west, this sort of thing would result in your Uber becoming more expensive or unavailable, but imagine being a government critic (or activist against e.g. organized crime) in Brazil right now. All that data going god-knows-where, with the express intent of the collectors to sell it to anynone? Not a great outlook. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greyball https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greyball [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23529035 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23529035
cycomanic 6y ago
I definitely don't trust private business to fix this. In case you haven't noticed private business efficiency is largely about externalising cost and internalising profits. So private business is completely I'll equipped to fix issues that effect society as a whole.

oblio 6y ago

In 2016, I think, there were 0 airplane crashes and 0 air travel fatalities. Across 200 countries, hundreds of airlines and several airplane manufacturers, probably thousands of airports, millions of flights. If you think that was an easy feat, then I don't know what to tell you. Do you know how it was achieved? With finely tuned and ruthlessly efficient bureaucracy. When people really care, bureaucracy works wonders. Bureaucracy is basically formalizing social interactions for a specific topic. Formalizing something ossifies it, but it also prevents your pilot telling your copilot "Shut up!" just as the plane is about to crash into the mountain.

MaxBarraclough 6y ago
> 0 airplane crashes I presume you meant commercial aviation, rather than aviation in general. Unfortunately not quite true even there. Your broader point stands though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Aviation_accidents_and_incidents_in_2016 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Aviation_accidents_an...
- AnthonyMouse 6y ago
  > Your broader point stands though. Well no, you've neatly disproved it. The reason it works for commercial aviation and not anything else -- not even aviation in general -- is that the bureaucratic processes used for commercial aviation incur a massive overhead. When you have a product which costs a hundred million dollars a unit anyway and can kill 300 people in one shot if it fails, you pay the cost. For anything else it's too expensive, but spending less money causes the bureaucracy to be ineffective. And even in commercial aviation, the overhead is still there, it's just capable of eating the loss. (Or maybe it isn't, given the miserable lack of competition in that industry now. And then where does that lead us on safety, Boeing?)
Mirioron 6y ago
And the aviation industry is not exactly a massive innovator at this point. The most commonly used commercial aircraft today were developed before the world wide web was even a thing. Why don't we just skip a few steps ahead - delete the internet and go back to cable TV? That's where we're headed for anyway.
ben_w 6y ago
> Do you know how it was achieved? With finely tuned and ruthlessly efficient bureaucracy. Not to dispute the effectiveness of a finely tuned and ruthlessly efficient bureaucracy, but pilots and airlines have a strong incentive to not have fatal accidents; websites however have a strong incentive to track their users. To use an analogy, enforcing this will be less like mandatory driving exams and more like net-zero carbon emissions.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- Retric 6y ago
  Airlines and airline manufacturers also have vast financial incentives to risk crashes by taking minor shortcuts. That doesn’t exist for your drivers test.
  - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
    That's not in the airline's interest because then the plane crashes and they lose a hundred million dollar plane and get sued and go bankrupt. It could be in an individual manager's interest because then they get a bonus and are working for some other company by the time the plane crashes, but the airline itself has the aforementioned incentive to put processes into place all on their own to prevent that from happening.
    - Retric 6y ago
      Losing a brand new hundred million dollar aircraft is a huge hit. Losing a 50 year old aircraft is a different story, especially when the options are to retire it or keep flying. Further risking a crash when your airline is facing bankruptcy suddenly looks like a reasonable trade off. It’s not like a major airline is going to intentionally crash an airplane, but if they can trade 1 billion dollars for an extra crash every 20 years that’s a net financial benefit.
      - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
pjc50 6y ago
The thing is, there isn't a huge commercial vested interest in having plane crashes happen.
hutzlibu 6y ago
"but it also prevents your pilot telling your copilot "Shut up!" just as the plane is about to crash into the mountain. " I am curious? How does regulation prevents that? (and how does it prevent a suicidal pilot, from locking out the co pilot and crashing in a mountain on purpose? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_by_pilot https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_by_pilot )
- slavak 6y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crew_resource_management https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crew_resource_management
jnxx 6y ago
I can't find it now, but I once read a fascinating history of train braking in the US. Before modern air brakes became mandatory, trains had brake men who had to jump from on car to the other in order to fasten brakes. That had a high risk of the brake operator fallng off the moving train - and the whole train becoming uncontrollable. It was an extremely dangerous job and at the time train companies thought it would be too costly to change the system, so they resisted change. > Bureaucracy is basically formalizing social interactions for a specific topic. One could even say that bureaucracy is one form of organized collective action. Which in general is quite necessary for humans as a social species.

black_puppydog 6y ago

Sorry, privacy as a personal responsibility has failed outright. For many services there is simply no (online, i.e. practically relevant) alternative, because none of the market players have an incentive to be privacy preserving (think major news outlets) or because the service is not interchangable due to network effects (facebook, twitter etc). The GDPR is actually sufficiently abstract IMO to make government enforcement possible and practical. And if you look at how tracking evolved, much of it is still the same old cookie-setting (from what, 25 years ago?) and the stuff that isn't (like ultrasonic profile matching and other shady stuff) is pretty clearly illegal. So it just needs political will on the national level where the enforcement agencies reside. Max Schrems' cases against facebook have shown time and again that these enforcement agencies are often simply unwilling to do their job, with the Irish one being a particularly bad example. But it is possible to do this. EDIT Also, regarding the personal responsibility aspect: we're being tracked by platforms we don't even have a user/customer relationship or any other contract with. Someone uploads a picture of me on facebook, and they build a profile based on that? Uncool. Is that a problem between me and the uploader? Certainly. Does that take responsibility from facebook to not mine that data? Nope.

Mirioron 6y ago
>For many services there is simply no (online, i.e. practically relevant) alternative, because none of the market players have an incentive to be privacy preserving (think major news outlets) or because the service is not interchangable due to network effects (facebook, twitter etc). But here's the big question: would these services have even existed in the first place if these laws had been in place? The internet has gained massive popularity because most of the resources on it are free. Look at porn - all of the known sites and run on ads, all the paid sites are essentially unknown. I don't know anybody who uses the latter. Wouldn't Facebook, Twitter, news sites etc have gone the same way if they required you to pay? Just look at what happens when a paywalled article gets posted. Either somebody posts a way to bypass it or a lot of people will never read the article.
- AnthonyMouse 6y ago
  I would go the other way with it -- the problem is we don't have a low overhead system for anonymous micropayments, so ads are the only competitive way to offer a service with a very low cost (and thus price) per use. If there was an easy way to anonymously pay the site the five cents they get from the advertiser without incurring 500% payment processing overhead then would sites even be using advertising? But then we get to much the same result. What we need isn't new privacy rules, it's to delete the old banking rules that prevent efficient payment systems from operating.

hvidgaard 6y ago

They just have to create judicial precedent a few times and the system can easily hand out an impressive amount of warnings and fines.

distances 6y ago

I have the complete opposite view. Companies provably can't be trusted on anything touching privacy, and individuals don't have any power to act on it. Governmental oversight and bureaucracy is the only tool that works for a problem like this. It's a proven, efficient, and universally approved way to already enforce food, fire, travel safety and so on. It's only logical that privacy safety follows the same steps. GDPR seems to be a good approach for it, just pending on widespread enforcement of the rogue entities that aren't yet following the law.

Nasrudith 6y ago
But privacy isn't like food, fire or travel safety. Even assuming absolute cynicism it isn't very exploitable for them to use it for bad purposes. I liken the difference between actors to a housecat and a large dog with a lamb. The cat at worst could give some scratches but at worst would probably just annoy the lamb jumping into its wool and kneading it. The dog ideally would look after tbe lamb but could also inflict serious bites or even rip out its throat if it wants. Both may want the meat but only one has the ability to kill it to get what it wants. When it comes to unknowns as the lamb I would go with the cat as opposed to the dog out of sheer distrust.
- black_puppydog 6y ago
  I'll actually argue that it very much is. First, there's the historic precedent of collected information eventually making it into the wrong hands. The Preussian "pink lists" are a classic example, but essentially everything that ended up as PRISM can be taken as a more modern example. And yes, putting power into government hands so regulate the collection of that data, and then arguing that it's dangerous because of the government might seem a bit contradictory. It's not in my mind. These types of legislation are supposed to disincentivize the collection by private entities after all. Government and intelligence services are (too) close but they are distinct. And then there's the very real [1] ([2] if you want it more juicy) possibility of corporations targeting individuals for one reason or another directly. Here in the west, this sort of thing would result in your Uber becoming more expensive or unavailable, but imagine being a government critic (or activist against e.g. organized crime) in Brazil right now. All that data going god-knows-where, with the express intent of the collectors to sell it to anynone? Not a great outlook. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greyball https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greyball [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23529035 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23529035

cycomanic 6y ago

I definitely don't trust private business to fix this. In case you haven't noticed private business efficiency is largely about externalising cost and internalising profits. So private business is completely I'll equipped to fix issues that effect society as a whole.