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Utterly unsurprising. The idea that the military will accept having less freedom of action than a private company is absurd and was never going to last. Hones

Utterly unsurprising. The idea that the military will accept having less freedom of action than a private company is absurd and was never going to last. Honestly, I'm not sure why people care so much about the US government having access to this data while simultaneously not caring that any entity with a sufficiently large bank account can get it. Maybe it's because so many of the people here work at the businesses that generate this data?

DenisM 6y ago
The government has more guns than your garden variety rich guy.
- chordalkeyboard 6y ago
  More to the point, the government has the socially assigned role of deciding whether anyone’s use of said guns is legal or not.
- some_random 6y ago
  I _wish_ guns were required to cause harm to others.
- jancsika 6y ago
  I love the presence of this talking point here because its usefulness is self-refuting in this case. 1. To guard against tyranny, always focus more on government overreach than corporate overreach because the government is the one with the guns. 2. Corporations scooping up endless streams of data don't get the same level of scrutiny and pithy talking points from libertarians as the entity with the guns. 3. Class of data-mining corporations collect so much data that it's functionally equivalent to a tyrannical government demanding direct access to everyone's location data. 4. The government-- the entity with the guns that we want to protect ourselves against-- simply buys access to the data from corporations to get around the law. 5. We've done a poor job of guarding against tyranny! Edit: clarification
salawat 6y ago
Oh, people do care about that part. It's just that the capability to reatrain that organization is highly constrained through the Government edifice. That the overnment edifice itself is at the center of the problem is even more cause for alarm.
- some_random 6y ago
  So then why do so many seem to want to start by constraining the organization with the highest level of trust? Right now, individuals, businesses, and the US military can obtain this data without a warrant or due process. How can you look at this and say "let's start by reigning in the military"? Who, I might add, have a far more limited scope than businesses since the military only cares about information related to whatever mission they're tasked with.
eue6e6ey 6y ago
I'm not sure it makes sense to suggest people who work with data are normally the other way around. People who work with data and their activists are why regular Americans are at all scared of government digital surveillance. On the other side of that, people who don't work with data use free digital services everyday and so even if they know those products are built with their data they are more likely to be sympathetic because in their minds it's a fair trade for the utility they've gained and even the trades they didn't make still serve as evidence to them of how useful doing things this way is. An interesting experiment would be if a single city went all-in on digital surveilance and monetization so that the country could see clearly what was being gained and lost for the participants.
- some_random 6y ago
  I cannot push back against the idea that ordinary people consent to collection when they use free services enough. This is an utterly transparent myth that data collectors, aggregators, and consumers tell themselves and others to justify their actions. People do not understand what is being collected. I and probably everyone here has heard speculation that phones are constantly monitoring for keywords which are used in ads. It's an incredibly common idea that (afaik) isn't true, but shows just how little people understand how data collection works and again, what is actually being collected. People do not understand how this data is used. The best example I can think of is with pregnant women. Every ad on every platform suddenly revolving around pregnancy and caring for a newborn is not the expected outcome of just googling for some mayoclinic articles. And of course if they're trying to conceal their pregnancy or worse, have a miscarriage, this has resulted in real world harm. Finally, people cannot possibly consent to how this data will be used in the future. This should be pretty self explanatory. Those who work for organizations that sell data or information gained from data such as Google or Facebook have to convince themselves the above is not true. In which case, it makes complete sense to insist that the US military needs to have a warrant in order to collect, since obviously a warrant is needed if the target for collection doesn't consent.
  - eue6e6ey 6y ago
    Just because people don't understand all the technical details doesn't mean they are sufficiently ignorant to cash in on power words like consent. While I realize it's shortsighted reasoning, it's incredibly common to hear some variant of "x already knows everything about me so who cares" or "my stuff's already in the cloud, I bet x could get to it if it mattered". People in the mainstream are /already/ assuming the worst case scenario, they just don't care as much as we think they should and the only reason the Europeans do is because they're not the ones running the services so the power balance is different.
austhrow743 6y ago
People do care, just not as much. Governments have murdered, kidnapped, tortured, and oppressed several magnitude more people than private enterprise.
- some_random 6y ago
  Of course, we need to give the common stalker and cutthroat corporations a chance to make up the gap.
  - austhrow743 6y ago
    Yeah that’s definitely the concern.
    - some_random 6y ago
      Apparently I wasn't clear enough. The reason that individuals and corporations have a smaller kill count than governments is because governments historically have more resources and freedom of action in order to commit atrocities. In the cases where corporations have had the opportunity, such as colonial companies or the United Fruit Company[1] for a more recent example they have not refrained from any action on moral grounds. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Fruit_Company#Aiding_and_abetting_a_terrorist_organization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Fruit_Company#Aiding_an...
- arcticbull 6y ago
  Oh, I'm not sure that's true. That's a very modern take. Have you met the British East India Company [3] and the Dutch East India Company (VOC) [4]? The VOC even has a genocide to it's name [1]. [edit] Make that two. [2] A lot of colonialism was actually carried out by private enterprise. Substantially all of slavery. Once you reach a certain size and scale, is there really even a difference between government and enterprise - except that the voters control one and shareholders the other? [1] https://historibersama.com/the-voc-genocide-historia/ https://historibersama.com/the-voc-genocide-historia/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amboyna_massacre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amboyna_massacre [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_India_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_India_Company [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_East_India_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_East_India_Company
publicola1990 6y ago
Because the military may use the information for actually killing people. Remember "We kill people on the basis of metadata" speech by a CIA official.
AmericanChopper 6y ago
I think many members of the general public are probably not very well informed on the actual risks that arise from these sorts of privacy issues. If you pay attention to mainstream media coverage of privacy/surveillance issues, you’ll often hear the old “if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear” trope promoted as if it were actually a reasonable counter argument. Maybe I’m just a tinfoil hat wearing conspiracy theorist, but I have a hard time believing media outlets are capable of giving reasonable coverage to those issues, given their entire revenue model is based upon exploiting mass data gathering in the form of modern ad tech.
Accujack 6y ago
Most people want there to be laws governing what can be done with aggregate personal data... whether it can be collected, whether it can be sold, what's allowed to be done with it. A person's right to be forgotten should include their location. Right now, the law doesn't even consider something like this as a possibility. The laws in the US governing information and what can be done with it haven't been updated for the computer age... yet another failure of our corrupted government. People are concerned about the military and law enforcement getting the data because they're the typical "greatest threat". If they did obey the law and not gain access to the data, people would then worry about corporations getting it and what they do with it. Priorities.
- trident5000 6y ago
  Big tech just keeps greasing the politicians with donations and political favors.

DenisM 6y ago

The government has more guns than your garden variety rich guy.

chordalkeyboard 6y ago
More to the point, the government has the socially assigned role of deciding whether anyone’s use of said guns is legal or not.
some_random 6y ago
I _wish_ guns were required to cause harm to others.
jancsika 6y ago
I love the presence of this talking point here because its usefulness is self-refuting in this case. 1. To guard against tyranny, always focus more on government overreach than corporate overreach because the government is the one with the guns. 2. Corporations scooping up endless streams of data don't get the same level of scrutiny and pithy talking points from libertarians as the entity with the guns. 3. Class of data-mining corporations collect so much data that it's functionally equivalent to a tyrannical government demanding direct access to everyone's location data. 4. The government-- the entity with the guns that we want to protect ourselves against-- simply buys access to the data from corporations to get around the law. 5. We've done a poor job of guarding against tyranny! Edit: clarification

salawat 6y ago

Oh, people do care about that part. It's just that the capability to reatrain that organization is highly constrained through the Government edifice. That the overnment edifice itself is at the center of the problem is even more cause for alarm.

some_random 6y ago
So then why do so many seem to want to start by constraining the organization with the highest level of trust? Right now, individuals, businesses, and the US military can obtain this data without a warrant or due process. How can you look at this and say "let's start by reigning in the military"? Who, I might add, have a far more limited scope than businesses since the military only cares about information related to whatever mission they're tasked with.

eue6e6ey 6y ago

I'm not sure it makes sense to suggest people who work with data are normally the other way around. People who work with data and their activists are why regular Americans are at all scared of government digital surveillance. On the other side of that, people who don't work with data use free digital services everyday and so even if they know those products are built with their data they are more likely to be sympathetic because in their minds it's a fair trade for the utility they've gained and even the trades they didn't make still serve as evidence to them of how useful doing things this way is. An interesting experiment would be if a single city went all-in on digital surveilance and monetization so that the country could see clearly what was being gained and lost for the participants.

some_random 6y ago
I cannot push back against the idea that ordinary people consent to collection when they use free services enough. This is an utterly transparent myth that data collectors, aggregators, and consumers tell themselves and others to justify their actions. People do not understand what is being collected. I and probably everyone here has heard speculation that phones are constantly monitoring for keywords which are used in ads. It's an incredibly common idea that (afaik) isn't true, but shows just how little people understand how data collection works and again, what is actually being collected. People do not understand how this data is used. The best example I can think of is with pregnant women. Every ad on every platform suddenly revolving around pregnancy and caring for a newborn is not the expected outcome of just googling for some mayoclinic articles. And of course if they're trying to conceal their pregnancy or worse, have a miscarriage, this has resulted in real world harm. Finally, people cannot possibly consent to how this data will be used in the future. This should be pretty self explanatory. Those who work for organizations that sell data or information gained from data such as Google or Facebook have to convince themselves the above is not true. In which case, it makes complete sense to insist that the US military needs to have a warrant in order to collect, since obviously a warrant is needed if the target for collection doesn't consent.
- eue6e6ey 6y ago
  Just because people don't understand all the technical details doesn't mean they are sufficiently ignorant to cash in on power words like consent. While I realize it's shortsighted reasoning, it's incredibly common to hear some variant of "x already knows everything about me so who cares" or "my stuff's already in the cloud, I bet x could get to it if it mattered". People in the mainstream are /already/ assuming the worst case scenario, they just don't care as much as we think they should and the only reason the Europeans do is because they're not the ones running the services so the power balance is different.

austhrow743 6y ago

People do care, just not as much. Governments have murdered, kidnapped, tortured, and oppressed several magnitude more people than private enterprise.

some_random 6y ago
Of course, we need to give the common stalker and cutthroat corporations a chance to make up the gap.
- austhrow743 6y ago
  Yeah that’s definitely the concern.
  - some_random 6y ago
    Apparently I wasn't clear enough. The reason that individuals and corporations have a smaller kill count than governments is because governments historically have more resources and freedom of action in order to commit atrocities. In the cases where corporations have had the opportunity, such as colonial companies or the United Fruit Company[1] for a more recent example they have not refrained from any action on moral grounds. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Fruit_Company#Aiding_and_abetting_a_terrorist_organization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Fruit_Company#Aiding_an...
arcticbull 6y ago
Oh, I'm not sure that's true. That's a very modern take. Have you met the British East India Company [3] and the Dutch East India Company (VOC) [4]? The VOC even has a genocide to it's name [1]. [edit] Make that two. [2] A lot of colonialism was actually carried out by private enterprise. Substantially all of slavery. Once you reach a certain size and scale, is there really even a difference between government and enterprise - except that the voters control one and shareholders the other? [1] https://historibersama.com/the-voc-genocide-historia/ https://historibersama.com/the-voc-genocide-historia/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amboyna_massacre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amboyna_massacre [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_India_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_India_Company [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_East_India_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_East_India_Company

publicola1990 6y ago

Because the military may use the information for actually killing people. Remember "We kill people on the basis of metadata" speech by a CIA official.

AmericanChopper 6y ago

I think many members of the general public are probably not very well informed on the actual risks that arise from these sorts of privacy issues. If you pay attention to mainstream media coverage of privacy/surveillance issues, you’ll often hear the old “if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear” trope promoted as if it were actually a reasonable counter argument. Maybe I’m just a tinfoil hat wearing conspiracy theorist, but I have a hard time believing media outlets are capable of giving reasonable coverage to those issues, given their entire revenue model is based upon exploiting mass data gathering in the form of modern ad tech.

Accujack 6y ago

Most people want there to be laws governing what can be done with aggregate personal data... whether it can be collected, whether it can be sold, what's allowed to be done with it. A person's right to be forgotten should include their location. Right now, the law doesn't even consider something like this as a possibility. The laws in the US governing information and what can be done with it haven't been updated for the computer age... yet another failure of our corrupted government. People are concerned about the military and law enforcement getting the data because they're the typical "greatest threat". If they did obey the law and not gain access to the data, people would then worry about corporations getting it and what they do with it. Priorities.

trident5000 6y ago
Big tech just keeps greasing the politicians with donations and political favors.