4 ms·
It is incredible to me that location data harvesting (aka mass dystopian surveillance) is so pervasive that it requires a crowd-sourced investigative campaign.
by titzer 5y ago
It is incredible to me that location data harvesting (aka mass dystopian surveillance) is so pervasive that it requires a crowd-sourced investigative campaign. A generation ago it was neither technologically nor socially feasible to get even coarse-grained location data on a person's whereabouts.
I hate this future. We sleepwalked into dystopia because money.
- amelius 5y agoAll because of ads. We should just ban all ads. That would solve all of these problems. If people feel they still need ads, we can create a nice sandbox for watching ads.
- sebow 5y ago[dead]
- boplicity 5y ago> We should just ban all ads Please define what an ad is.
- m463 5y agoFolks think advertisements are "showing me something I can buy" But really ads are a huge detailed dossier on every person, being sold so that water filter companies can bid the highest to get a water filter ad in front of the people with the largest income. Meanwhile, you like legos and lego will never be able to bid high enough to show you a lego ad (probably they don't need to anyhow) and the off-label uses for these dossiers... I wonder if used car salesmen can find out your "price insensitivity" and charge accordingly?
- ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago> Please define what an ad is. I made this comment[0], where I talk about "building buzz." Basically, ads without ads. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28788169 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28788169
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- laserlight 5y agoI know it when I see it [0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it
- boplicity 5y agoI'm not sure how true that is for advertisements. For example, there are many forms of 'hidden' advertisements that are designed to not be seen, and yet influence people. Among them are product placements. Heck, even Hacker News is an advertisement for YCombinator, though it certainly isn't seen that way by many people.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 5y agoComments like this are a weird form of semantic catnip nerd sniping that unproductively derails the discussion. "We should ban tall buildings." "Oh yeah? Well define exactly how tall a tall building is." Clearly there's a thing as an ad, because it's a common word everyone understands. If your point is that it would be hard to pin down the part of that that's actionable, well of course. It's always hard to get regulations right.
- atatatat 5y agoI'm fine with two, maybe three story buildings. Higher screws up light. It's important to practice like you play the game (we should debate the way we want the regulations to read, if we stand a chance of ever being represented).
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 5y agoIt's fine to say "how tall of a building do you want to ban?" But time and again it derails things if you say "How tall is a tall building?"
- menomatter 5y agoAdblocks seem to have found a definition .. let's start with that.
- streamofdigits 5y agoI hate it that not enough peope hate it enough for there to be hope. Its just mind boggling that society can self-devour in this way, but apparently its part of "how things work"
- newbamboo 5y agoDemocracy doesn’t work and populism is a scare word. Bet on elite outrage or accept the future only a few sagacious, disregarded malcontents warned us about.
- dylan604 5y agoI don't know about the sleepwalking part. I'd say we sprinted towards it. We've had dystopian scifi for much longer than we've had the tech, but the reality makes some of the scifi authors look like they didn't have much of an imagination. Now that we've seen some of the "tech", the modern dystopian scifi like Black Mirror scares the bejeebus out of me. There's somebody out there that sees Black Mirror episodes and thinks "YES!! That's exactly what we need!" Except, we have the tech to actually do some of it.