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Explaining to people what they should do regarding matters that there are no ways to achieve the stated goals is the laziest, lowest value category of journalis
by anm89 5y ago
Explaining to people what they should do regarding matters that there are no ways to achieve the stated goals is the laziest, lowest value category of journalism. It's a plague.
- iso8859-1 5y agoDownvoted for clunky sentence construction.
- jtdev 5y agoUhhh, you can stop using said services and software that abuse privacy, e.g., Facebook, Google, Twitter, TicToc, etc.
- anm89 5y agoThat doesn't end the data economy. It sort of ends part of your personal interaction with the data economy.
- SahAssar 5y agoIf enough people end their own interaction with it it ceases to exist, right? If nobody gave their data to services that sell it on or use it for profit then there is no data economy.
- fsagx 5y agoA person would have to live a Kaczynski-like lifestyle to not interact with services that aggregate and sell data. No credit card, no cellphone, no internet. Cash only.
- SahAssar 5y agoThe point is that for each person that ends their interaction with these companies the less data they have on everyone. If only one tenth of my friends use facebook they will have less data on me than if 9 tenths do. Convincing even one person to choose more privacy friendly choices helps a little.
- anigbrowl 5y ago'sort of' doing a great deal of work here.
- lsb 5y agoYou can't opt out of cities' car culture by not driving: the rest of the city is all there all the time. You can't opt out of a data economy by your individual isolated action: the rest of the economy is vacuuming up similar people's data all the time.
- metalliqaz 5y agofacebook has a profile for you even if you don't have a facebook account
- egypturnash 5y agoHere's another industry that relies on aggregating your data: Credit reports. Go ahead. Figure out how to opt out of Experian, Transunion, or Equifax collecting everything they can about you, including pretty much every piece of data needed for identity theft, possibly confusing it with someone with a similar name, and then putting it in a badly-secured database. No, really, if you can figure it out I'd love to know. Every now and then I am reminded they exist and that they are silently creating these vast troves of data without anyone's consent, and all I can do is hope that if my identity information is included in a data breach, I am both small enough and lucky enough to not be impacted.
- gspq 5y agoAnd they have an API to these data. Selling your data to data vendors. And now this: https://www.melissa.com/industries/healthcare https://www.melissa.com/industries/healthcare Health records used for AI machine learning training . Your health data are in the vendor database . What possibly could go wrong?
- tejtm 5y agoTrue, but there is no practical way to get through our work days without them using us anyway.
- Nicksil 5y agoBut that doesn't stop their abuse. Think about all the other websites out there using Google Analytics, FaceBook "Like" buttons, Twitter excerpts, etc. You're ever getting away.
- ClumsyPilot 5y agoIts heartbreaking that on HN, the one place that should be informed about this, you still see the ignorant commend "well you don't have to use facebook" Even if you are homeless and living under a bridge, facebook will have photos of you, uploaded by others, they will know who you are and whwre you like will sell some data relating to you to someone
- Jorengarenar 5y agoIn theory. I've deleted my Facebook account. Few years later needed to create new one and used same e-mail address. Guess what welcomed me! My old account! Heck, even posts I had deleted and whole journal (or however its called) related to them, yes it was back again, waiting to be clicked "unhide".
- royaltjames 5y agoIn any form of communication, it's the worst.
- ginko 5y agoI certainly think there's ways to achieve this: Implement and enforce GDPR-like laws and fine spy corporations into oblivion.
- DennisP 5y agoWhich is what the article implies with statements like "we should not allow X." There are several specific rules it suggests, which clearly would have to be laws.
- Impassionata 5y agoThere's a way to achieve the stated goals: have the government come down real hard both on the low-level data crime and the big players that are supposedly legit. Burn it all down.
- bpodgursky 5y ago"Burn it all down" as a solution — inevitably applied to cultures, systems or industries viewed from the outside — is also a plague of laziness.
- NoGravitas 5y agoThe urge to destroy is also a creative urge.
- Judgmentality 5y agoI've never heard "hey this isn't working, let's start over from scratch!" be called laziness before.
- bpodgursky 5y ago"It isn't working" is also lazy, when you're describing an industry that powers half the economy, and frankly, civilization is trucking along pretty OK with the data industry warts and all. There are certainly problems, but you haven't put enough thought into what the statement even _means_ (Would this eliminate EMR systems? Bank transfers? Credit scores?) to consider what "burning it down" means, or "it's not working" means.
- awillen 5y agoIt's lazy when it doesn't come with a proposal to replace the stuff that you want to burn down. It's like the US tax code... it is insanely complicated and in a lot of ways doesn't serve the public well (because rich folks can use the complexity of it to escape taxation), so it's easy and popular to say let's just get rid of it and start with a new, simple tax code. The problem is it got to be the way it is for a reason. We want to incentivize people to own homes and buy electric cars and a thousand other things, and we use the tax code to do that. If you tear it down without a plan on how to keep incentivizing all the things you want, you're going to end up with some undesirable results that you then have to fix. It's fine to say let's throw it out and start over, but if that's as far as your plan goes then it's pretty lazy.
- dominotw 5y agowe should end this category of journalism.
- anm89 5y agoHa, well played.
- omgJustTest 5y agoJust because something is impractical or a solution is unknown doesn't make it valueless. There are possible truths that exist in mainstream math formalisms[1]... for which the formalism says there may be no proof of. Just because the formalism can't explain everything doesn't mean we should throw it out! I view communications like this as: a. making ppl aware (who may not be technical) b. doing the work that may not be worth $$$ c. avoiding future coordination failures of society All of these in a hyper-optimized and hyper-educated societies may seem inefficient, but in a non-optimized and not highly educated world we live in they are the difference between chaos and not. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompleteness_theorems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompleteness_...
- _vertigo 5y agoYou can point out a problem without having a solution. Part of the reason why this issue feels unsolvable is that people don't really care enough to do anything. A piece of journalism that makes people care more is a step in the right direction.