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Every person, living and dead, has been uniquely identified and is tracked in near real time. Source: I read the news, don't suffer from amnesia or willful ign

Every person, living and dead, has been uniquely identified and is tracked in near real time. Source: I read the news, don't suffer from amnesia or willful ignorance. We used Seisent (since bought by LexisNexus) in the mid-aughts. At the time, every person in North America was accounted for, with pretty good coverage of the Caribbean and Central America. The NSA bought a few clusters, then wove in their own datasets (phone use, location tracking, credit cards, library usage, email, etc). There are many entities maintaining all encompassing panopticonic demographic databases. Governments and publicly traded companies. This is not refutable. Ironically, in the USA, both voter registration and gun ownership are explicitly excluded. Because reasons. (You can't manage what you don't measure.) We could, trivially, resolve all the policy food fights over vote registration "fraud", gun ownership, and conducting the consensus. Turn all those flash points into simple database queries. We could, trivially, outright stop all anonymous trolling and disinformation. Purveyors of social media don't authenticate their users because they don't want to. Their business models require that they remain willfully ignorant.

WebbWeaver 4y ago
All great points. >We could, trivially, outright stop all anonymous trolling and disinformation. Purveyors of social media don't authenticate their users because they don't want to. Their business models require that they remain willfully ignorant. Yes well what argument would you make, if you could or would, to change the current landscape?
- specialist 4y ago
  Since you asked... Social (popular) medias all eventually implode. Lifecycle maturity models and all that. Seems to me that Facebook and Twitter are well into the top of their S-curves. (I can't speak to TikTok.) If I wanted to accelerate their demise, I'd attack their revenue. Like pop the digital advertising bubble. Congressional and criminal investigations into digital ad fraud would mosdef do the trick. -- If we could go back in time, perhaps lessons for whatever comes next, I'd advocate three general categories of reforms. 1) All the "well duh" stuff that Sen Mark Warner et al advocate. Here's the PR for SAFE TECH Act and Warner's white paper. https://www.warner.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/2021/2/warner-hirono-klobuchar-announce-the-safe-tech-act-to-reform-section-230 https://www.warner.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/2021/2/warner... https://www.warner.senate.gov/public/_cache/files/d/3/d32c2f17-cc76-4e11-8aa9-897eb3c90d16/65A7C5D983F899DAAE5AA21F57BAD944.social-media-regulation-proposals.pdf https://www.warner.senate.gov/public/_cache/files/d/3/d32c2f... And a layperson's summary: https://diginomica.com/sen-mark-warners-15-common-sense-rules-for-social-media-platforms https://diginomica.com/sen-mark-warners-15-common-sense-rule... I particularly like clearly identifying bots. Some are authentic, legit activity. So not an outright ban of bots. "Media literacy" is quixotic; I guess they want to say they tried. I want to know more about "information fiduciaries"; see #3 below. 2) Nerf the algorithms, squelching instead of boosting viral content. Addressed by section 1.4 of this commission's recommendations. (Which also has a lot of "well duh" general purpose civil society stuff.) https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54901083 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54901083 https://informationdemocracy.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/ForumID_Report-on-infodemics_101120.pdf https://informationdemocracy.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/... 3) Most radically: Individual property rights over personal data. My data is me. If someone is using my data in some economic way, I want my cut. This nicely dovetails (necessitates) the misc proposals of treating aggregated data as a liability, instead of as an asset. Which would totally flip the current script for investors, regulators, insurers, etc. I've tried to understand the opposition to "personal data sovereignty" -- just came up with that, clever!, because I don't know what else to call it. I dimly recall some "privacy experts" in California concern trolling that state's initiatives. I think their reasoning was something like "we can't put a price on personal data because that'd encourage more collection". Um. Okay. Felt very cassandra, unattached to our reality. So a philosophical rather than a practical opposition, I suppose. FWIW, talking about this stuff is really hard. My "pay me for using my data" proposal doesn't make sense unless the audience already understands the current ecosystem. As I've said elsewhere, I worked on electronic medical records information exchanges. Our startup was bought by a national laboratory (Quest Diagnostics). I sat in various meetings and calls, with PHBs, lawyers, and other goons, brainstorming ways to further monetize medical records. Back in the mid-aughts, every single participant (doctors, hospitals, labs, scripts, insurers, pharma) absolutely considered patient data as "theirs". And our potential partners like Google Health and Microsoft HealthVault and Cerner and EPIC were all hellbound in trying to figure out how to monetize it. It was absolutely disgusting.
pjc50 4y ago
South Korea used to require that people log in with their government ID to websites. Through an ActiveX control, even. I believe they eventually gave up on this level of direct tracking. > We could, trivially, resolve all the policy food fights .. flash points into simple database queries. The flashpoint is that people don't want to be queryable. You can't wish that problem away.
- specialist 4y ago
  The great irony is that actual privacy requires unique identifiers, like RealID or equiv. GUIDs unlock the Translucent Databases achievement, actual per field encryption of PII data at rest. TLDR, clever applications of salting and hashing, just like with proper password storage. https://www.amazon.com/Translucent-Databases-Peter-Wayner/dp/0967584418 https://www.amazon.com/Translucent-Databases-Peter-Wayner/dp... http://wayner.org/node/46 http://wayner.org/node/46 I was utterly against RealID, until I figured this out. Much chagrin. Super embarrassing. Source: Worked on both electronic medical records and protecting voter privacy. Did a translucent database POC for medical records, back in the day. If there's another technical solution, I haven't found it. But I think to your point, people generally don't want the sensitive data being collected in the first place. I don't have an answer for that.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

WebbWeaver 4y ago

All great points. >We could, trivially, outright stop all anonymous trolling and disinformation. Purveyors of social media don't authenticate their users because they don't want to. Their business models require that they remain willfully ignorant. Yes well what argument would you make, if you could or would, to change the current landscape?

specialist 4y ago
Since you asked... Social (popular) medias all eventually implode. Lifecycle maturity models and all that. Seems to me that Facebook and Twitter are well into the top of their S-curves. (I can't speak to TikTok.) If I wanted to accelerate their demise, I'd attack their revenue. Like pop the digital advertising bubble. Congressional and criminal investigations into digital ad fraud would mosdef do the trick. -- If we could go back in time, perhaps lessons for whatever comes next, I'd advocate three general categories of reforms. 1) All the "well duh" stuff that Sen Mark Warner et al advocate. Here's the PR for SAFE TECH Act and Warner's white paper. https://www.warner.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/2021/2/warner-hirono-klobuchar-announce-the-safe-tech-act-to-reform-section-230 https://www.warner.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/2021/2/warner... https://www.warner.senate.gov/public/_cache/files/d/3/d32c2f17-cc76-4e11-8aa9-897eb3c90d16/65A7C5D983F899DAAE5AA21F57BAD944.social-media-regulation-proposals.pdf https://www.warner.senate.gov/public/_cache/files/d/3/d32c2f... And a layperson's summary: https://diginomica.com/sen-mark-warners-15-common-sense-rules-for-social-media-platforms https://diginomica.com/sen-mark-warners-15-common-sense-rule... I particularly like clearly identifying bots. Some are authentic, legit activity. So not an outright ban of bots. "Media literacy" is quixotic; I guess they want to say they tried. I want to know more about "information fiduciaries"; see #3 below. 2) Nerf the algorithms, squelching instead of boosting viral content. Addressed by section 1.4 of this commission's recommendations. (Which also has a lot of "well duh" general purpose civil society stuff.) https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54901083 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54901083 https://informationdemocracy.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/ForumID_Report-on-infodemics_101120.pdf https://informationdemocracy.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/... 3) Most radically: Individual property rights over personal data. My data is me. If someone is using my data in some economic way, I want my cut. This nicely dovetails (necessitates) the misc proposals of treating aggregated data as a liability, instead of as an asset. Which would totally flip the current script for investors, regulators, insurers, etc. I've tried to understand the opposition to "personal data sovereignty" -- just came up with that, clever!, because I don't know what else to call it. I dimly recall some "privacy experts" in California concern trolling that state's initiatives. I think their reasoning was something like "we can't put a price on personal data because that'd encourage more collection". Um. Okay. Felt very cassandra, unattached to our reality. So a philosophical rather than a practical opposition, I suppose. FWIW, talking about this stuff is really hard. My "pay me for using my data" proposal doesn't make sense unless the audience already understands the current ecosystem. As I've said elsewhere, I worked on electronic medical records information exchanges. Our startup was bought by a national laboratory (Quest Diagnostics). I sat in various meetings and calls, with PHBs, lawyers, and other goons, brainstorming ways to further monetize medical records. Back in the mid-aughts, every single participant (doctors, hospitals, labs, scripts, insurers, pharma) absolutely considered patient data as "theirs". And our potential partners like Google Health and Microsoft HealthVault and Cerner and EPIC were all hellbound in trying to figure out how to monetize it. It was absolutely disgusting.

pjc50 4y ago

South Korea used to require that people log in with their government ID to websites. Through an ActiveX control, even. I believe they eventually gave up on this level of direct tracking. > We could, trivially, resolve all the policy food fights .. flash points into simple database queries. The flashpoint is that people don't want to be queryable. You can't wish that problem away.

specialist 4y ago
The great irony is that actual privacy requires unique identifiers, like RealID or equiv. GUIDs unlock the Translucent Databases achievement, actual per field encryption of PII data at rest. TLDR, clever applications of salting and hashing, just like with proper password storage. https://www.amazon.com/Translucent-Databases-Peter-Wayner/dp/0967584418 https://www.amazon.com/Translucent-Databases-Peter-Wayner/dp... http://wayner.org/node/46 http://wayner.org/node/46 I was utterly against RealID, until I figured this out. Much chagrin. Super embarrassing. Source: Worked on both electronic medical records and protecting voter privacy. Did a translucent database POC for medical records, back in the day. If there's another technical solution, I haven't found it. But I think to your point, people generally don't want the sensitive data being collected in the first place. I don't have an answer for that.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]