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> ...shouldn't be it a society that needs to somehow change (I've no idea how, though), rather than technologies killed because it threats existing societal stu

by Syonyk 5y ago

> ...shouldn't be it a society that needs to somehow change (I've no idea how, though), rather than technologies killed because it threats existing societal stuff? We've allowed, collectively, anything that falls in the "tech" realm to deploy first, ask questions later, and more or less force society to conform. I think it's been absurd, we see more and more backlash against it, and rightly so. A company shouldn't be able to just ignore the law and do whatever they want because they use computer chips, but we've seen more or less exactly that in a number of cases. - Uber/AirBnB can be seen as venture-capital funded, money losing ways around existing taxi/hotel/rental laws, and their tendency to expand into a market without permission and then demand the right to stay there against the laws that prohibit exactly such things, is an example of this model. - The various "Dump tons of scooters in a city without asking, profit, and make cleanup the city's problem" is another example here. It's littering, really, but somehow tech companies involved get a pass because it's neat. - Literally every "We collect all the behavioral data you don't realize we're collecting to improve our models of you so we can sell better advertisements to our actual customers" business model does the same thing - take first, ask permission never (or, at least, try very hard to never have the topic come up). I'm not OK with this, and I hope more and more people aren't OK with it either. > I hate to say this but it really feels that our assumptions of privacy are becoming outdated and there's no going back. Privacy shouldn't be something subject to the current state of technological surveillance. We should, as a society, decide what privacy ought to be, and then limit tech companies accordingly. Europe seems to be making decent headway on this front, with "No, you can't just keep doing that..." rulings against tech companies. I hope that spreads.

drdaeman 5y ago
> I'm not OK with this, and I hope more and more people aren't OK with it either. Cool, that's a societal change - awareness. I can't argue against your ridesharing datamining examples. I can't say the data they've hoarded is actually valuable - just based on the fact almost all their ads are complete misses. I've yet to see any personal data hoarder company to be able to actually pull off anything sensible, not that some ML model realizing nonsense in lines of "meatbag bought a sofa, meatbag must love sofas, let me show him all the sofa recommendations" (lol). Anyway, that's not the point. I don't fancy this data collection and sure agree it's not a bad thing to stop it. Just as I'm fed up with small prints, shrinkwrap licenses and other things we pretend people read and understand that they don't. When I wrote my comment I thought about somewhat different things. Tracker devices or face recognition is different because it can be done in what marketing calls a "privacy-respecting" way, on device. Yet, it's a fact if someone can point a camera on you, they can match you with their previous data, and if someone can plant a device on you (and devices get smaller and smaller every few years) they can know your location. And it's not about companies producing something, it's about the technologies itself, when the technology can be used for both good and bad things. Like a knife or a laser pointer. It doesn't make sense to me to tell companies to not produce such technologies. It's impossible to make technologies be usable for good things and not usable for bad things. A knife is always a weapon (or it's not a knife and you can't use it to make yourself a sandwich), a key tracker can always be used to stalk (or it won't be ever useful to find stolen things). But some people are so desperate for "safety" they do want to nerf anything that can be even theoretically abused to absolute uselessness. Things like this is what bothers me.

by Syonyk 5y ago

drdaeman 5y ago

> I'm not OK with this, and I hope more and more people aren't OK with it either. Cool, that's a societal change - awareness. I can't argue against your ridesharing datamining examples. I can't say the data they've hoarded is actually valuable - just based on the fact almost all their ads are complete misses. I've yet to see any personal data hoarder company to be able to actually pull off anything sensible, not that some ML model realizing nonsense in lines of "meatbag bought a sofa, meatbag must love sofas, let me show him all the sofa recommendations" (lol). Anyway, that's not the point. I don't fancy this data collection and sure agree it's not a bad thing to stop it. Just as I'm fed up with small prints, shrinkwrap licenses and other things we pretend people read and understand that they don't. When I wrote my comment I thought about somewhat different things. Tracker devices or face recognition is different because it can be done in what marketing calls a "privacy-respecting" way, on device. Yet, it's a fact if someone can point a camera on you, they can match you with their previous data, and if someone can plant a device on you (and devices get smaller and smaller every few years) they can know your location. And it's not about companies producing something, it's about the technologies itself, when the technology can be used for both good and bad things. Like a knife or a laser pointer. It doesn't make sense to me to tell companies to not produce such technologies. It's impossible to make technologies be usable for good things and not usable for bad things. A knife is always a weapon (or it's not a knife and you can't use it to make yourself a sandwich), a key tracker can always be used to stalk (or it won't be ever useful to find stolen things). But some people are so desperate for "safety" they do want to nerf anything that can be even theoretically abused to absolute uselessness. Things like this is what bothers me.