16 ms·

What does privacy mean under surveillance capitalism?

243 points by freddyym 6y ago

the_other 6y ago
I declined to accept all the tracking cookies and thus couldn't read the article.
- fabianhjr 6y ago
  Weird, I set my browser to block all third party cookies and upon inspection this page isn't using any cookies at all.
  - dogma1138 6y ago
    They do, get a nice GDPR notice too. You might be blocking everything.
    - Digit-Al 6y ago
      I thought their notice was terrible. A huge list of companies each of which has t be turned off individually as there is no reject all button as many of these things have. If I had unchecked all of them it would have taken me longer to do that than to read the article.
      - noja 6y ago
        That's illegal. It should be as easy to reject as to accept.
    - fabianhjr 6y ago
      Yeah, between uBlock origin and other privacy stuff I get almost no notices nor other anoying things while browsing. That should be the default for everyone. :/
      - dogma1138 6y ago
        I have privacy badger and ublock and I still got a GDPR notice. You can also see which cookies / tracking domains were blocked there are over 20 tracking cookies on that page...
- ignoramous 6y ago
  I use archive.is as a mirror at times for exactly that: https://archive.is/DHKhl https://archive.is/DHKhl
- bigbubba 6y ago
  Block javascript, it does you more harm than good: https://0x0.st/iC9f.png https://0x0.st/iC9f.png
  - meowster 6y ago
    "more harm than good" or "more good than harm"?
  - majjgepolja 6y ago
    Wow you even block CSS.
blakesterz 6y ago
"Too many of those acquiring our data want it for nefarious purposes: to betray our secrets to insurance companies, employers, and governments; to sell us things it’s not in our interest to buy; to pit us against each other in an effort to destroy our society from the inside; to disinform us and hijack our democracies. The surveillance society has transformed citizens into users and data subjects. Enough is enough. Those who have violated our right to privacy have abused our trust, and it’s time to pull the plug on their source of power—our data." That's a decent quote, not really anything new for most of us around here, but I think that hits on quite a few points in just one paragraph. I think this post is part of her book on Privacy? It's always funny to read stuff like this when it's on a site that shows almost 50 things blocked between Privacy Badger and uBlockO. I know it's out of the author's hands, but I wonder how she feels about being on a site that's part of the problem she's writing about. "The internet is primarily funded by the collection, analysis, and trade of data—the data economy."
- aww_dang 6y ago
  >to sell us things it’s not in our interest to buy; to pit us against each other in an effort to destroy our society from the inside; to disinform us and hijack our democracies. I liked the bit about data collection, the rest seems a little out there. Who says what is in our interest to buy? If people are not interested, they don't buy. Pit us against each other? Destroy 'our' society? What about individuals going their own way? Must we stay together and agree? Who gets to decide what is disinformation? Again, must we agree? Predictably, the next words are about democracy. The entire premise of democracy rests upon voters being able to consume and digest information on their own. If the author doesn't trust voters that far, then why trust them to vote on our lives and property?
  - AlexandrB 6y ago
    > If people are not interested, they don't buy. Unless they're convinced by persistent-enough marketing[1]. [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/02/how-an-ad-campaign-invented-the-diamond-engagement-ring/385376/ https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/02/ho...
bioinformatics 6y ago
Is it worse or better than Surveillance Communism?
- fabianhjr 6y ago
  Do you mean Mass Surveillance like the US, UK, and China? I haven't heard of "Surveillance Communism" as a developed distinct concept.
  - Ruthalas 6y ago
    I suspect the parent post is making facetious commentary on the phrase, "surveillance capitalism".
    - fabianhjr 6y ago
      Still though, surveillance capitalism is the commodification of personal data by private enterprise and on the other hand mass surveillance is meant to convey the surveillance of the whole (or a big part) of a population regardless of the mode of production. I guess if "capitalist mode of production absolutely good and communist mode of production absolutely bad" is taken as a given then the parent comment would be "facetious" as in dismissive of the article being discussed.
- java-man 6y ago
  Worse, I think. Surveillance communism used analog phone wiretaps and human agents, thus limiting the damage. NOTE: I meant a Soviet-style "communism", and not the current label that's widely applied to anything, and certainly not a Chinese-style regime. Think USSR and DDR. However, I fell into a trap: every time someone uses the loaded words like "capitalism" and "communism", it's safe to assume you are being manipulated, since the phenomenon needs to be clarified: is it an economic model, a model of government, or anything else.
  - ivojp 6y ago
    This is pretty narrow thinking; it assumes communism was some failed 1950's Soviet experiment and has no modern implementation. I doubt China limits it's surveillance to wiretaps and human agents.
chiefalchemist 6y ago
I caught a good part of this interview / discussion over the weekend. Years ago I read "Dragnet Nation" and this has renewed my fears. https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/living-under-surveillance-capitalism-on-the-media https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/living-und...
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
prophesi 6y ago
I hope the book goes in detail _how_ we are to take back control of our data. One person deleting their Facebook and having good privacy hygiene on the web won't make a dent. Telling others to do the same is futile as well. It's long past due for society to fear Big Corp instead of Big Government, as now we'll need the latter to tame the former.
- meekrohprocess 6y ago
  Shaming people who use mass-scale social media could help. Sort of like smoking: people used to do it because it was cool, even after the enormous health problems were well-understood. And it didn't stop being cool until enough people started to treat it like a gross and dirty habit.
  - mapme 6y ago
    Theoretically this is exactly the justification political mobs on twitter use to go after bad behavior that to them feels morally wrong. I think it’s one of the only ways to change society but it should be done with a light touch. With smoking I think people thought “it’s gross” not that you are a gross and morally repugnant person. So demonizing the act and not the person is important. Granted if people are not using social media the mobs will be smaller, but even if everyone is in communities the size of HN, it’s still possible to form “mob sentiment”
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - meekrohprocess 6y ago
      Right, exactly. The habit is gross, not the person. "Social-media-using" should be treated like an adjective that modifies the individual, not a noun that defines them. It's a shame that nuance seems like the first thing to go out the window when we use social media sites like this, but maybe someday we'll be able to do better.
  - decasteve 6y ago
02020202 6y ago
Cui bono? people are people
jart 6y ago
It's somewhat tepid to write a manifesto without a call to action. Here's what I think of when I read stuff like this: https://justine.storage.googleapis.com/privacydoom.mp4 https://justine.storage.googleapis.com/privacydoom.mp4
- Bakary 6y ago
  Action is usually the result of many manifestos and ideas glomming together into an unstoppable momentum
rebeccaskinner 6y ago
And yet this article is on a page completely saturated by trackers, 28 items blocked by Ublock Origin, and another 14 blocked by Privacy Badger by my count. I didn't even bother to check the number of items caught by the pihole, and I'm sure there are a few things that got through because they haven't made it into the relevant blocklists yet. People can bemoan the lack of privacy (and should) but it's empty words until we're willing to take a stand and not participate in the systems that are mining every bit of data that can be had en-mass.
- centimeter 6y ago
  LitHub is a shitty leftist agitprop outlet, so don’t expect consistency.
  - medicineman 6y ago
    As if the title didn't tell you everything you needed to know.
- ntsplnkv2 6y ago
  > People can bemoan the lack of privacy (and should) but it's empty words until we're willing to take a stand and not participate in the systems that are mining every bit of data that can be had en-mass. That's the problem that is so poignantly illustrated by this post - you can't not participate, or you lose. That's what makes it so insidious and why we shouldn't just dismiss good arguments out of hand for this reason.
  - Daho0n 6y ago
    >you can't not participate, or you lose Sure you can unless you shoot yourself in the foot and try to run an online ad business without ads or tracking.... Our businesses website has exactly zero trackers and zero external calls, yet we live just fine. If I really want to see some stats I can just look at it via the webserver logs. This is just people being lazy and/or greedy.
- sudosysgen 6y ago
throw1234651234 6y ago
Neuromancer has a quote - "As much privacy as I can afford". That is exactly the answer to the question in the OP, and my personal answer is "none".
NoOneNew 6y ago
Hi, you can apply current corporate surveillance issues under any type of economic or government system and still have the exact same discussion of, "oh woe is us, how terrible the people are up there". Or you can utilize the tools that capitalism offers everyone, even the poor. We set as either public practice or into law that people own their personal data, which is not a hard stretch. Think about that for a moment. What does it mean to own something in a capitalist system... think... think hard... YOU CAN SELL IT! Actually license in this case, but you get the point. If you're in the back of the class or still on the short bus, what I'm saying is this: a company can collect and sell YOUR data... for a fee. You get a percentage (or flat rate if that's your jam) of whatever they make, in perpetuity. Let's even classify your data as copyrighted content, just like books and other media. You do "create" your own data. After your death, your estate (children, etc.) get that fee as well for... I think it's 75 years after death, or is it 50... I don't remember how long book copyrights are. Exact number doesn't matter, but you get the point of where I'm going. But nay you say! Nay I say in return. Companies do this already. As a fond and active capitalist, I've made it a habit to get paid to learn new skills to great success. I've even held in shits so I can make sure I get paid to shit (only a few times and strictly so I can truthfully make this comment, again, you get the point). Anyways, companies do this by licensing their own data out to other companies. Now, since companies get taxed/treated as "people" (USA), there is ZERO reason actual people can't do this. Oh wait, I know why. "People" are better educated in the sex lives of celebrities, memes and what's the latest pop culture, superhero show/movie. The tools to solve this issue are built into capitalism and basic western governance in the last 100 years. Hell, it's also a decent way to redistribute wealth in a very fair method that's hard to argue in a capitalist society. No one is "overburdened" by letting someone else coast on someone else's work. Everyone thus has a "product" to sell in a mass format just like book publishers or movie streaming services. But hey, I'm the asshole that likes real world solutions that are based on centuries old established working principles instead of unicorn fantasies that have never worked, like communism.
- postingpals 6y ago
  This too is a unicorn fantasy. You claim the reason people are not selling their data is because they are too obsessed with culture or something. In reality there is an imbalance of negotiation power. A company can sell their data because they understand the game and have leverage over other companies. They can say "buy our data, it's valuable and there's only one of us". A citizen cannot do that. Besides your data is already in circulation and they don't necessarily need it to be tied to you in order for it to be a generally useful human data point. How do you 'tax' that which has been stripped of your ownership and distributed far and wide? Nevertheless I don't think you're going to get this put into law. Legislation is an unstable and unfair method of change that is biased towards people who can afford to partake in it.
ivojp 6y ago
I'll start with that I am all for the idea of intellectual privacy and the need for safe guards, but even I could only make it part way through this article (and if these are the people who are supposed to be leading the charge for ethics in AI, we are, surely, screwed). This perspective (and there are many like it), firstly, tries to tie the problem to capitalism as if it's the engine that corrupts, and, secondly, tries to equate whats going on to surveillance since we presumably can all agree that surveillance is bad. If you are to make an ass out of yourself or expose something private about yourself in public, its not surveillance if people form opinions about you or gather that information (the lifelock guy and his SSN come to mind - no one would argue his personal information was hacked). I think part of this stems from a bad mental model of what being on the internet is: if Facebook/Twitter/other social media are the new town halls or pubic fora, it's difficult to consider you can be in public from the privacy of your own home. It is also not some unavoidable aspect of capitalism for your data to be used for potentially nefarious purposes. Consumers are just poorly informed of the transaction that is taking place. To label it "surveillance capitalism" implies that removing the profit motive would mean no one would ever "spy" on you or collect your data. Even a cursory overview of the 20th century or modern China shows how dishonest that implication is. For a quick perspective on the economics of your data, Google reported $160B in revenue on 1B active monthly users in 2019. If google charged each user $13/month for access to all it's services, it would make the same amount of money. This is on par with a Netflix or Spotify subscription. Should companies be forced to offer some sort of paid tier where your data is not collected? Perhaps. Should consumers be made aware of what they are giving up when they use a certain "free" service? Sure. There are many problems with our current system and our current understanding of things, but one problem that we do not have is being subjugating to the predations of a "late-stage" "surveillance" capitalist machine.
- Bakary 6y ago
  Broadly speaking, we are being increasingly surveilled and this surveillance takes place under a capitalist machine, except perhaps in North Korea (although I will not venture in a semantic debate on that account). The winners in this world are getting larger and larger and accumulating ever more capital, so it could arguably be late-stage even if that concept is probably best left behind as too vague. Therefore, is surveillance capitalism such a bad expression to use? We can blame consumers for being unaware, or not active enough in defending their rights, or not careful enough in guarding their privacy and their mental models, but I am under the impression that it is more productive to work towards or at the very least orient ourselves towards a society where you do not have to be paranoid at every step instead of one that prioritizes simply assigning blame on an individual level and abandoning the idea of addressing structural problems. In a sense, arguing over what is real capitalism or not in a defensive posture doesn't really address the issue. Pointing out that a subscription model would be the same in terms of revenue misses the point that Google is growing too big to remain a positive force in people's lives. In both cases we start from flawed premises.
IanDrake 6y ago
I for one prefer surveillance capitalism to surveillance socialism. At least in one system you can opt out.
stiray 6y ago
I have checked her site, it has references to Facebook and is full of trackers. She is just some self promoting woman that has found a niche in privacy, where she doesnt follow what she preaches. Yes Survailance Capitalism is a nightmare and a real thing but such fake stars should be weeded out. It is just a shame how low can some people go.
- albatruss 6y ago
  Competence in writing and competence in technology are orthogonal matters, and it is not reasonable to "cancel" someone's contributions in one on account of their failure to live up to a standard in the other. Respectfully, for example, your spelling of "Survailance" does not call into question your worth as a privacy-conscious technologist.
  - stiray 6y ago
    Talk the talk, walk the walk. And she is only doing the first part. My "spelling" has nothing to do with meaning, but as a nice childish (and highly comparable to your statement) test, we can try your spelling in in my language. Or should we rather try one of other 5 languages (excluding english) that I am able to communicate in? Be my guest.
- eternalban 6y ago
  > She is just some self promoting woman Highly doubtful. She's sitting on a perch in Oxford. This is an establishment voice who is, no doubt, merely one voice in a (predicted) rising crescdendo of support for our "friends" at Central Banks (aka the Banksters) and their about to be unveiled (like it or not) Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC). https://hbr.org/2018/11/what-if-banks-were-the-main-protectors-of-customers-private-data# https://hbr.org/2018/11/what-if-banks-were-the-main-protecto... Not "self" promoting. She is (ultimatly) promoting CBDC Digital Identity.
processing 6y ago
a luxury good sadly.
atmosx 6y ago
The most convincing and scary take on the subject comes from Yuval Noah Harari, author of "Sapiens" best seller. His premise that as soon as a system knows us better than we know our selves (e.g. facebook) then we can diverge all choices (what to eat, who to marry, what to watch) to the machine and then it's a new kind of dystopia were no decision needs to be taken by a human who is comparatively uninformed. Now, as he points out, if the system has glitches a-la Matrix and Neo comes along, we basically keep being the "heroes" of our story, but what happens if the system _really works_ for us... What if a computer can match mine and another one's happiness with a % of success that it's impossible for me to match, what happens then?
- gramakri 6y ago
  Did he write an article about this or is it in the book?
  - atmosx 6y ago
    I came across this specific discussion in a YouTube video with Harare and Russel Brand. I believe that these ideas are in his book “21 lessons for the 21st century”.
- deltron3030 6y ago
  >What if a computer can match mine and another one's happiness with a % of success that it's impossible for me to match, what happens then? It might make you happy to be in control and to be able to choose yourself. AIs and their benefits are largely result oriented, but there's also process orientation, where the way or trajectory to a result is equally if not more important than the result. That's the kryptonite for computer systems.
- kridsdale1 6y ago
  I'm pretty convinced that ML produces better curated lists of things from corpuses that are enormous (billions of photos / posts / songs / dating partners / places to eat from) than a human curator does. I met my wife from an algorithmic match in an app. My resume was surfaced to my employer from a similar tool. My company makes money from the surveillance data economy which makes the originators of those funds (companies who want their ads to be seen by high probability product purchasers) happy. So yeah, throw me in the Matrix / Borg Cube.
sixothree 6y ago
Imagine being a juror on one of these Google lawsuits and they many ways they could destroy your life.
- croissants 6y ago
  Now I'm curious, is there any precedent for a company punishing a juror for voting against it?
metabagel 6y ago
The Solid Project, led by Tim Berners-Lee, is attempting to address at least part of the problem by allowing you to control your own data (e.g., Facebook posts and likes, not that I use Facebook) and move it from one service to another. The services would be the commodity, rather than your personal data. https://solidproject.org/ https://solidproject.org/
jdkee 6y ago
Why does lithub.com use 15 different trackers when I visit their webpage?
GekkePrutser 6y ago
Lol the beginning of that so reminded me of Person of Interest. "You're being watched every hour of every day". It's funny and sad; when PoI first came out this was considered fiction. Then Snowden happened and proved it reality. And still not much has changed 7 years later.
harlanji 6y ago
Anyone else get boxed in by Waymos throughout their daily routine? I’m a former software engineer now homeless in SF, and man do I feel like a Truman with these things sometimes. God willing, I’ll document the formations I’ve seen and see if I can cross referene a CCPA request with my info at times/locations that I happened to catch interesting dashcam footage or made a mention of it.
mrslave 6y ago
Censorship by private entities is fine but surveillance by them is not.
dkdk8283 6y ago
You know what’s funny is all the talk about data ubiquity. I recently did a job for ANPR/cams at a wealthy HOA and one of the requirements was to make data disappear. You know what privacy means under surveillance capitalism? The ability to erase. Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t covering up murder it’s more along the line of trimming the visitor list to hide infidelity.
nojvek 6y ago
The thing that makes me sad is how little US govt does to protect privacy. It goes the other way where for exaggerated reasons they want as much as they can slurp. Recent bills to ban encryption was a reality check. EU seems to care a bit more. Mostly because Google and FB aren’t European. How do we get a sane government that works for the people? Because voting just doesn’t cut it when there is little accountability for those who are elected.
greatgib 6y ago
What a shitty website! On one side you have an article that is supposed to inform us to defend our rights. But when you try to read it, you are blocked by one of the worst cookie content popup that I have ever seen. The only easily accessible option is "accept all". You have just a small discreet link to "see partners". If you click on it, then you have a list of hundreds shaddy ads/spy services. You can't disable them all, you would have to uncheck them all individually manually. And there is the shittiest thing: For each one you will see 2 check boxes. "Legitimate interest" (on by default) and "consent". Naively you would think that "legitimate interest" means that it is just the strict minimum for the service to be technically working. But no, if you go to see the details they both do the same thing, ie recording server side a custom profile for you based on what you see and do. The only difference is that with "consent" they additionally keep things in your cookies...
mro_name 6y ago
Impressive list of trackers on that webpage. All the usual suspects present. Not that the author wouldn't know. Author says "… they know you are reading them. …". Yes, the article is published in a way that tells them so.

243 points by freddyym 6y ago

the_other 6y ago

I declined to accept all the tracking cookies and thus couldn't read the article.

fabianhjr 6y ago
Weird, I set my browser to block all third party cookies and upon inspection this page isn't using any cookies at all.
- dogma1138 6y ago
  They do, get a nice GDPR notice too. You might be blocking everything.
  - Digit-Al 6y ago
    I thought their notice was terrible. A huge list of companies each of which has t be turned off individually as there is no reject all button as many of these things have. If I had unchecked all of them it would have taken me longer to do that than to read the article.
    - noja 6y ago
      That's illegal. It should be as easy to reject as to accept.
  - fabianhjr 6y ago
    Yeah, between uBlock origin and other privacy stuff I get almost no notices nor other anoying things while browsing. That should be the default for everyone. :/
    - dogma1138 6y ago
      I have privacy badger and ublock and I still got a GDPR notice. You can also see which cookies / tracking domains were blocked there are over 20 tracking cookies on that page...
ignoramous 6y ago
I use archive.is as a mirror at times for exactly that: https://archive.is/DHKhl https://archive.is/DHKhl
bigbubba 6y ago
Block javascript, it does you more harm than good: https://0x0.st/iC9f.png https://0x0.st/iC9f.png
- meowster 6y ago
  "more harm than good" or "more good than harm"?
- majjgepolja 6y ago
  Wow you even block CSS.

blakesterz 6y ago

"Too many of those acquiring our data want it for nefarious purposes: to betray our secrets to insurance companies, employers, and governments; to sell us things it’s not in our interest to buy; to pit us against each other in an effort to destroy our society from the inside; to disinform us and hijack our democracies. The surveillance society has transformed citizens into users and data subjects. Enough is enough. Those who have violated our right to privacy have abused our trust, and it’s time to pull the plug on their source of power—our data." That's a decent quote, not really anything new for most of us around here, but I think that hits on quite a few points in just one paragraph. I think this post is part of her book on Privacy? It's always funny to read stuff like this when it's on a site that shows almost 50 things blocked between Privacy Badger and uBlockO. I know it's out of the author's hands, but I wonder how she feels about being on a site that's part of the problem she's writing about. "The internet is primarily funded by the collection, analysis, and trade of data—the data economy."

aww_dang 6y ago
>to sell us things it’s not in our interest to buy; to pit us against each other in an effort to destroy our society from the inside; to disinform us and hijack our democracies. I liked the bit about data collection, the rest seems a little out there. Who says what is in our interest to buy? If people are not interested, they don't buy. Pit us against each other? Destroy 'our' society? What about individuals going their own way? Must we stay together and agree? Who gets to decide what is disinformation? Again, must we agree? Predictably, the next words are about democracy. The entire premise of democracy rests upon voters being able to consume and digest information on their own. If the author doesn't trust voters that far, then why trust them to vote on our lives and property?
- AlexandrB 6y ago
  > If people are not interested, they don't buy. Unless they're convinced by persistent-enough marketing[1]. [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/02/how-an-ad-campaign-invented-the-diamond-engagement-ring/385376/ https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/02/ho...

bioinformatics 6y ago

Is it worse or better than Surveillance Communism?

fabianhjr 6y ago
Do you mean Mass Surveillance like the US, UK, and China? I haven't heard of "Surveillance Communism" as a developed distinct concept.
- Ruthalas 6y ago
  I suspect the parent post is making facetious commentary on the phrase, "surveillance capitalism".
  - fabianhjr 6y ago
    Still though, surveillance capitalism is the commodification of personal data by private enterprise and on the other hand mass surveillance is meant to convey the surveillance of the whole (or a big part) of a population regardless of the mode of production. I guess if "capitalist mode of production absolutely good and communist mode of production absolutely bad" is taken as a given then the parent comment would be "facetious" as in dismissive of the article being discussed.
java-man 6y ago
Worse, I think. Surveillance communism used analog phone wiretaps and human agents, thus limiting the damage. NOTE: I meant a Soviet-style "communism", and not the current label that's widely applied to anything, and certainly not a Chinese-style regime. Think USSR and DDR. However, I fell into a trap: every time someone uses the loaded words like "capitalism" and "communism", it's safe to assume you are being manipulated, since the phenomenon needs to be clarified: is it an economic model, a model of government, or anything else.
- ivojp 6y ago
  This is pretty narrow thinking; it assumes communism was some failed 1950's Soviet experiment and has no modern implementation. I doubt China limits it's surveillance to wiretaps and human agents.

chiefalchemist 6y ago

I caught a good part of this interview / discussion over the weekend. Years ago I read "Dragnet Nation" and this has renewed my fears. https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/living-under-surveillance-capitalism-on-the-media https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/living-und...

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

prophesi 6y ago

I hope the book goes in detail _how_ we are to take back control of our data. One person deleting their Facebook and having good privacy hygiene on the web won't make a dent. Telling others to do the same is futile as well. It's long past due for society to fear Big Corp instead of Big Government, as now we'll need the latter to tame the former.

meekrohprocess 6y ago
Shaming people who use mass-scale social media could help. Sort of like smoking: people used to do it because it was cool, even after the enormous health problems were well-understood. And it didn't stop being cool until enough people started to treat it like a gross and dirty habit.
- mapme 6y ago
  Theoretically this is exactly the justification political mobs on twitter use to go after bad behavior that to them feels morally wrong. I think it’s one of the only ways to change society but it should be done with a light touch. With smoking I think people thought “it’s gross” not that you are a gross and morally repugnant person. So demonizing the act and not the person is important. Granted if people are not using social media the mobs will be smaller, but even if everyone is in communities the size of HN, it’s still possible to form “mob sentiment”
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - meekrohprocess 6y ago
    Right, exactly. The habit is gross, not the person. "Social-media-using" should be treated like an adjective that modifies the individual, not a noun that defines them. It's a shame that nuance seems like the first thing to go out the window when we use social media sites like this, but maybe someday we'll be able to do better.
- decasteve 6y ago

02020202 6y ago

Cui bono? people are people

jart 6y ago

It's somewhat tepid to write a manifesto without a call to action. Here's what I think of when I read stuff like this: https://justine.storage.googleapis.com/privacydoom.mp4 https://justine.storage.googleapis.com/privacydoom.mp4

Bakary 6y ago
Action is usually the result of many manifestos and ideas glomming together into an unstoppable momentum

rebeccaskinner 6y ago

And yet this article is on a page completely saturated by trackers, 28 items blocked by Ublock Origin, and another 14 blocked by Privacy Badger by my count. I didn't even bother to check the number of items caught by the pihole, and I'm sure there are a few things that got through because they haven't made it into the relevant blocklists yet. People can bemoan the lack of privacy (and should) but it's empty words until we're willing to take a stand and not participate in the systems that are mining every bit of data that can be had en-mass.

centimeter 6y ago
LitHub is a shitty leftist agitprop outlet, so don’t expect consistency.
- medicineman 6y ago
  As if the title didn't tell you everything you needed to know.
ntsplnkv2 6y ago
> People can bemoan the lack of privacy (and should) but it's empty words until we're willing to take a stand and not participate in the systems that are mining every bit of data that can be had en-mass. That's the problem that is so poignantly illustrated by this post - you can't not participate, or you lose. That's what makes it so insidious and why we shouldn't just dismiss good arguments out of hand for this reason.
- Daho0n 6y ago
  >you can't not participate, or you lose Sure you can unless you shoot yourself in the foot and try to run an online ad business without ads or tracking.... Our businesses website has exactly zero trackers and zero external calls, yet we live just fine. If I really want to see some stats I can just look at it via the webserver logs. This is just people being lazy and/or greedy.
sudosysgen 6y ago

throw1234651234 6y ago

Neuromancer has a quote - "As much privacy as I can afford". That is exactly the answer to the question in the OP, and my personal answer is "none".

NoOneNew 6y ago

Hi, you can apply current corporate surveillance issues under any type of economic or government system and still have the exact same discussion of, "oh woe is us, how terrible the people are up there". Or you can utilize the tools that capitalism offers everyone, even the poor. We set as either public practice or into law that people own their personal data, which is not a hard stretch. Think about that for a moment. What does it mean to own something in a capitalist system... think... think hard... YOU CAN SELL IT! Actually license in this case, but you get the point. If you're in the back of the class or still on the short bus, what I'm saying is this: a company can collect and sell YOUR data... for a fee. You get a percentage (or flat rate if that's your jam) of whatever they make, in perpetuity. Let's even classify your data as copyrighted content, just like books and other media. You do "create" your own data. After your death, your estate (children, etc.) get that fee as well for... I think it's 75 years after death, or is it 50... I don't remember how long book copyrights are. Exact number doesn't matter, but you get the point of where I'm going. But nay you say! Nay I say in return. Companies do this already. As a fond and active capitalist, I've made it a habit to get paid to learn new skills to great success. I've even held in shits so I can make sure I get paid to shit (only a few times and strictly so I can truthfully make this comment, again, you get the point). Anyways, companies do this by licensing their own data out to other companies. Now, since companies get taxed/treated as "people" (USA), there is ZERO reason actual people can't do this. Oh wait, I know why. "People" are better educated in the sex lives of celebrities, memes and what's the latest pop culture, superhero show/movie. The tools to solve this issue are built into capitalism and basic western governance in the last 100 years. Hell, it's also a decent way to redistribute wealth in a very fair method that's hard to argue in a capitalist society. No one is "overburdened" by letting someone else coast on someone else's work. Everyone thus has a "product" to sell in a mass format just like book publishers or movie streaming services. But hey, I'm the asshole that likes real world solutions that are based on centuries old established working principles instead of unicorn fantasies that have never worked, like communism.

postingpals 6y ago
This too is a unicorn fantasy. You claim the reason people are not selling their data is because they are too obsessed with culture or something. In reality there is an imbalance of negotiation power. A company can sell their data because they understand the game and have leverage over other companies. They can say "buy our data, it's valuable and there's only one of us". A citizen cannot do that. Besides your data is already in circulation and they don't necessarily need it to be tied to you in order for it to be a generally useful human data point. How do you 'tax' that which has been stripped of your ownership and distributed far and wide? Nevertheless I don't think you're going to get this put into law. Legislation is an unstable and unfair method of change that is biased towards people who can afford to partake in it.

ivojp 6y ago

I'll start with that I am all for the idea of intellectual privacy and the need for safe guards, but even I could only make it part way through this article (and if these are the people who are supposed to be leading the charge for ethics in AI, we are, surely, screwed). This perspective (and there are many like it), firstly, tries to tie the problem to capitalism as if it's the engine that corrupts, and, secondly, tries to equate whats going on to surveillance since we presumably can all agree that surveillance is bad. If you are to make an ass out of yourself or expose something private about yourself in public, its not surveillance if people form opinions about you or gather that information (the lifelock guy and his SSN come to mind - no one would argue his personal information was hacked). I think part of this stems from a bad mental model of what being on the internet is: if Facebook/Twitter/other social media are the new town halls or pubic fora, it's difficult to consider you can be in public from the privacy of your own home. It is also not some unavoidable aspect of capitalism for your data to be used for potentially nefarious purposes. Consumers are just poorly informed of the transaction that is taking place. To label it "surveillance capitalism" implies that removing the profit motive would mean no one would ever "spy" on you or collect your data. Even a cursory overview of the 20th century or modern China shows how dishonest that implication is. For a quick perspective on the economics of your data, Google reported $160B in revenue on 1B active monthly users in 2019. If google charged each user $13/month for access to all it's services, it would make the same amount of money. This is on par with a Netflix or Spotify subscription. Should companies be forced to offer some sort of paid tier where your data is not collected? Perhaps. Should consumers be made aware of what they are giving up when they use a certain "free" service? Sure. There are many problems with our current system and our current understanding of things, but one problem that we do not have is being subjugating to the predations of a "late-stage" "surveillance" capitalist machine.

Bakary 6y ago
Broadly speaking, we are being increasingly surveilled and this surveillance takes place under a capitalist machine, except perhaps in North Korea (although I will not venture in a semantic debate on that account). The winners in this world are getting larger and larger and accumulating ever more capital, so it could arguably be late-stage even if that concept is probably best left behind as too vague. Therefore, is surveillance capitalism such a bad expression to use? We can blame consumers for being unaware, or not active enough in defending their rights, or not careful enough in guarding their privacy and their mental models, but I am under the impression that it is more productive to work towards or at the very least orient ourselves towards a society where you do not have to be paranoid at every step instead of one that prioritizes simply assigning blame on an individual level and abandoning the idea of addressing structural problems. In a sense, arguing over what is real capitalism or not in a defensive posture doesn't really address the issue. Pointing out that a subscription model would be the same in terms of revenue misses the point that Google is growing too big to remain a positive force in people's lives. In both cases we start from flawed premises.

IanDrake 6y ago

I for one prefer surveillance capitalism to surveillance socialism. At least in one system you can opt out.

stiray 6y ago

I have checked her site, it has references to Facebook and is full of trackers. She is just some self promoting woman that has found a niche in privacy, where she doesnt follow what she preaches. Yes Survailance Capitalism is a nightmare and a real thing but such fake stars should be weeded out. It is just a shame how low can some people go.

albatruss 6y ago
Competence in writing and competence in technology are orthogonal matters, and it is not reasonable to "cancel" someone's contributions in one on account of their failure to live up to a standard in the other. Respectfully, for example, your spelling of "Survailance" does not call into question your worth as a privacy-conscious technologist.
- stiray 6y ago
  Talk the talk, walk the walk. And she is only doing the first part. My "spelling" has nothing to do with meaning, but as a nice childish (and highly comparable to your statement) test, we can try your spelling in in my language. Or should we rather try one of other 5 languages (excluding english) that I am able to communicate in? Be my guest.
eternalban 6y ago
> She is just some self promoting woman Highly doubtful. She's sitting on a perch in Oxford. This is an establishment voice who is, no doubt, merely one voice in a (predicted) rising crescdendo of support for our "friends" at Central Banks (aka the Banksters) and their about to be unveiled (like it or not) Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC). https://hbr.org/2018/11/what-if-banks-were-the-main-protectors-of-customers-private-data# https://hbr.org/2018/11/what-if-banks-were-the-main-protecto... Not "self" promoting. She is (ultimatly) promoting CBDC Digital Identity.

processing 6y ago

a luxury good sadly.

atmosx 6y ago

The most convincing and scary take on the subject comes from Yuval Noah Harari, author of "Sapiens" best seller. His premise that as soon as a system knows us better than we know our selves (e.g. facebook) then we can diverge all choices (what to eat, who to marry, what to watch) to the machine and then it's a new kind of dystopia were no decision needs to be taken by a human who is comparatively uninformed. Now, as he points out, if the system has glitches a-la Matrix and Neo comes along, we basically keep being the "heroes" of our story, but what happens if the system _really works_ for us... What if a computer can match mine and another one's happiness with a % of success that it's impossible for me to match, what happens then?

gramakri 6y ago
Did he write an article about this or is it in the book?
- atmosx 6y ago
  I came across this specific discussion in a YouTube video with Harare and Russel Brand. I believe that these ideas are in his book “21 lessons for the 21st century”.
deltron3030 6y ago
>What if a computer can match mine and another one's happiness with a % of success that it's impossible for me to match, what happens then? It might make you happy to be in control and to be able to choose yourself. AIs and their benefits are largely result oriented, but there's also process orientation, where the way or trajectory to a result is equally if not more important than the result. That's the kryptonite for computer systems.
kridsdale1 6y ago
I'm pretty convinced that ML produces better curated lists of things from corpuses that are enormous (billions of photos / posts / songs / dating partners / places to eat from) than a human curator does. I met my wife from an algorithmic match in an app. My resume was surfaced to my employer from a similar tool. My company makes money from the surveillance data economy which makes the originators of those funds (companies who want their ads to be seen by high probability product purchasers) happy. So yeah, throw me in the Matrix / Borg Cube.

sixothree 6y ago

Imagine being a juror on one of these Google lawsuits and they many ways they could destroy your life.

croissants 6y ago
Now I'm curious, is there any precedent for a company punishing a juror for voting against it?

metabagel 6y ago

The Solid Project, led by Tim Berners-Lee, is attempting to address at least part of the problem by allowing you to control your own data (e.g., Facebook posts and likes, not that I use Facebook) and move it from one service to another. The services would be the commodity, rather than your personal data. https://solidproject.org/ https://solidproject.org/

jdkee 6y ago

Why does lithub.com use 15 different trackers when I visit their webpage?

GekkePrutser 6y ago

Lol the beginning of that so reminded me of Person of Interest. "You're being watched every hour of every day". It's funny and sad; when PoI first came out this was considered fiction. Then Snowden happened and proved it reality. And still not much has changed 7 years later.

harlanji 6y ago

Anyone else get boxed in by Waymos throughout their daily routine? I’m a former software engineer now homeless in SF, and man do I feel like a Truman with these things sometimes. God willing, I’ll document the formations I’ve seen and see if I can cross referene a CCPA request with my info at times/locations that I happened to catch interesting dashcam footage or made a mention of it.

mrslave 6y ago

Censorship by private entities is fine but surveillance by them is not.

dkdk8283 6y ago

You know what’s funny is all the talk about data ubiquity. I recently did a job for ANPR/cams at a wealthy HOA and one of the requirements was to make data disappear. You know what privacy means under surveillance capitalism? The ability to erase. Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t covering up murder it’s more along the line of trimming the visitor list to hide infidelity.

nojvek 6y ago

The thing that makes me sad is how little US govt does to protect privacy. It goes the other way where for exaggerated reasons they want as much as they can slurp. Recent bills to ban encryption was a reality check. EU seems to care a bit more. Mostly because Google and FB aren’t European. How do we get a sane government that works for the people? Because voting just doesn’t cut it when there is little accountability for those who are elected.

greatgib 6y ago

What a shitty website! On one side you have an article that is supposed to inform us to defend our rights. But when you try to read it, you are blocked by one of the worst cookie content popup that I have ever seen. The only easily accessible option is "accept all". You have just a small discreet link to "see partners". If you click on it, then you have a list of hundreds shaddy ads/spy services. You can't disable them all, you would have to uncheck them all individually manually. And there is the shittiest thing: For each one you will see 2 check boxes. "Legitimate interest" (on by default) and "consent". Naively you would think that "legitimate interest" means that it is just the strict minimum for the service to be technically working. But no, if you go to see the details they both do the same thing, ie recording server side a custom profile for you based on what you see and do. The only difference is that with "consent" they additionally keep things in your cookies...

mro_name 6y ago

Impressive list of trackers on that webpage. All the usual suspects present. Not that the author wouldn't know. Author says "… they know you are reading them. …". Yes, the article is published in a way that tells them so.