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I hate this situation so much. I can block a lot with my browser but then often websites stop working, so while that is a solution since I have the technical k

I hate this situation so much. I can block a lot with my browser but then often websites stop working, so while that is a solution since I have the technical knowledge to handle it there is no way in hell I am going to tell my parents to install something that will block this stuff. Throw in the tracking in apps and potential server side tracking that there is nothing I can do about. We need some serious laws to be implemented. I have removed Facebook and google as much out of my life as possible, but they still collect data about me without my consent and it is very frustrating. I despise that other people can consent to have my data given to these companies (by my data being on their devices as my phone number, texts, whatever) and then these companies can consent for me to have my data sent just by going to their website.

A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
Those are the kinds of moments I wish I had some charisma and run for an office myself, because I genuinely feel I lack any kind of real representation as a constituent. The issue, however, is simple. There is real money on the table so anyone even thinking of running ( and making a change ) must be able to withstand likely quick and solid stomp, must be techy enough to understand the risks and PRy enough to be able to move in today's media landscape. Those skills tend of be somewhat rare on their own. Combination of those traits is likely more rare. << Throw in the tracking in apps and potential server side tracking that there is nothing I can do about. And after that, almost inevitable hacks ( inevitable due to misaligned incentives for companies ).
- nerdjon 4y ago
  Regarding your last part, it is true that hacks are a serious concern. I guess I just can't bring myself to think about that (for this data) since I already feel powerless. Plus these companies are already doing stuff with my data that I don't want so how much worse could hackers be? (I know seriously much worse but for me there is not much difference between Facebook/google having this data and hackers... I still did not consent to it). I agree on people running. I have been saying for several years that if a candidate came out and said "I don't have a strong technical understanding of [insert important technical discussion], but here are the people I will keep personally employed to help me with that to answer that question" will mean a lot to me. But I also know that admitting you don't know something will be picked up by the media and they will be destroyed for saying that, even though in admitting it is really a great sign. Many of the people in power may have people that can explain it, but they will never truly understand it. Especially when they have so many other things they also have to deal with.
- moolcool 4y ago
  Even if you could somehow guarantee that there will never be hacks, I'd say that the very existence of this data is almost exclusively to the detriment of the "consumer". If, for example, one of the anti-abortion states wanted to subpoena Meta for location data of all of its residents who flew out of state to visit an abortion clinic, they easily could. If an insurance company wanted to partner with Google to see if you're getting your 10k steps every day, or speeding in your car, and adjust your rates accordingly, they easily could. We're living in a dogshit digital panopticon, and we need to take laws to reign this in extremely seriously.
- randomdata 4y ago
  > Those are the kinds of moments I wish I had some charisma and run for an office myself, because I genuinely feel I lack any kind of real representation as a constituent. If you won you'd still be beholden to the constituents as their representative, and seeing as how they, as a whole, do not align with your personal position, you're not going to be any further ahead. At least not without moving to a new constituency where the people are more likely to align – which is something you can also do as a constituent.
  - michaelt 4y ago
    To an extent - but a politician might have to deal with 30 different issues, and choosing the right stance on 5 of them will get you enough support to get elected. Say the right things on taxes, guns and abortion and you can get elected regardless of your stance on nuclear power or microplastics or cryptocurrency.
    - randomdata 4y ago
      The election is merely the hiring process. Getting elect is necessary, but not where the job ends. It is post-election when the constituents start hammering you with their demands and as their representative you have to find the general sentiment of the crowd. It is true that not everyone believes in the democratic process and, as such, will never speak to their representative again, if they even managed to during the election campaign, but then they're not really constituents in any meaningful sense and can be safely ignored.
  - pdpi 4y ago
    You don't get elected on your personality alone, but rather on some sort of electoral platform. Presumably, your platform aligns with your personal position, and part of your mandate is precisely to make good on those promises.
    - randomdata 4y ago
      The constituents would never want you to actually follow through with your platform as, even if well intentioned, is long outdated by the time you are able to do anything with it. Making decisions based on outdated and incomplete information would be considered horrendous by any reasonable person. A platform merely provides points of interest to open the door to talk to the people who are interviewing you for the position. It's a cover letter, so to speak. There is good reason why the constituents will show up at your office following the election to go over what actually needs to be done, just as any employer would. This is where the actual direction is set. There may end up be some overlap with the platform here – even a broken clock is right twice a day – but only after deeper consideration. If you are not speaking to your hired representative regularly to ensure that your input in the direction is given, you're not participating in democracy. And, well, I guess as the saying goes: If you don't participate you can't complain. What is certain is that representatives, even the best ones, are not mind readers.
taylodl 4y ago
Serious laws have been implemented in the countries we bemoan for being "socialist." This is free market capitalism doing its thing. Just remember this when you hear the libertarians blather on about government and how the market will sort this all out. Uh-huh.
- FpUser 4y ago
  >"This is free market capitalism doing its thing." This "free capitalism" does not mind when Government protects their copyright, patents etc. etc. They should not mind Government protecting us either. Otherwise let's get even and remove their protections. Then see how they like it.
  - taylodl 4y ago
    Reminds me of the big bank bailouts in 2008 - capitalism on the way up, socialism on the way down. They only want to win, never lose. They will rapidly switch between whatever "ism" is needed to ensure they always win.
- Am4TIfIsER0ppos 4y ago
  Without the socialist government robbing you through taxes there would be no need for the "tax websites" so there would be nothing to send to facebook.
makestuff 4y ago
At the very least I should get paid for my data. If I steal a patent that google has you better believe I am going to be paying up, but they can collect my personal data (or my personal intellectual property for lack of a better term) and not pay me a dime for it. I get if you are using their services for free then that kind of makes sense, but if you are not using any of their services why in the hell should they be able to act like the NSA.
- texasbigdata 4y ago
  The worse is the payroll companies leaking to equifax. In some states you can “disclose” car loan data on consumers to a certain extent, mortgage balances, etc. Each one alone is troublesome and when aggregated it’s super annoying every American can basically be a voyeur target for a few dollars, and not even have to option to consent to this happening.
  - bradleyankrom 4y ago
    I kind of like the term “digital voyeurism” for this, though it is a euphemism for “spying.”
- mindslight 4y ago
  No, this is not what you want - because the straightforward outcome would be that your personal data was declared to be worth $X, which you were compensated for and then traded away as consideration to use the service. So then the service has an ongoing license to your data, which they sublicense to Facebook, and absolutely nothing changes besides legally cementing their surveillance regime. What we need is the definition of consent ala the GDPR that does not allow personal information to be permanently bought but only temporarily licensed with the requirement of ongoing consent that can be withdrawn at any time.
  - datavirtue 4y ago
    It needs to be bid on. Garden variety capitalism and market activity.
cbtacy 4y ago
they suck. no question. all you can do is blackhole all facebook domains in your /etc/hosts file.
Calvin02 4y ago
Wouldn't a more effective strategy be to put pressure on tax companies to stop using this data for advertising? Which, I guess, is what the article is trying to do.
- m463 4y ago
  You shouldn't call it "advertising". That term seems benign. "advertising" makes people think it will be used to sell them sweaters in a pop up ad, but it can be easily used to deny access to housing, jobs or loans.
MichaelCollins 4y ago
The US government isn't going to stop this shit anytime soon, since it was their idea in the first place. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_LifeLog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_LifeLog > LifeLog was a project of the Information Processing Techniques Office of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) of the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD). According to its bid solicitation pamphlet in 2003, it was to be "an ontology-based (sub)system that captures, stores, and makes accessible the flow of one person's experience in and interactions with the world in order to support a broad spectrum of associates/assistants and other system capabilities". The objective of the LifeLog concept was "to be able to trace the 'threads' of an individual's life in terms of events, states, and relationships", and it has the ability to "take in all of a subject's experience, from phone numbers dialed and e-mail messages viewed to every breath taken, step made and place gone".[1] > The LifeLog program was canceled on February 3, 2004 (one day before the launching of Facebook), If you live in any other country, you should lobby your government to ban Facebook, to ban all foreign social media entirely. But I fear the situation is hopeless for us Americans.
- andrewstuart2 4y ago
  "The government" is hardly a single organism with a unified will. So I wouldn't expect one organization doing or proposing an idea would mean the rest of the government organizations would just be like "oh dang they're right, it was our idea, better not touch it."
  - MichaelCollins 4y ago
    - colpabar 4y ago
      Easy with the conspiracy theories! As we all know, every three letter agency is 100% good. All the bad stuff is behind them and they'll never do any of it ever again. They told us so; don't you trust them?

A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago

Those are the kinds of moments I wish I had some charisma and run for an office myself, because I genuinely feel I lack any kind of real representation as a constituent. The issue, however, is simple. There is real money on the table so anyone even thinking of running ( and making a change ) must be able to withstand likely quick and solid stomp, must be techy enough to understand the risks and PRy enough to be able to move in today's media landscape. Those skills tend of be somewhat rare on their own. Combination of those traits is likely more rare. << Throw in the tracking in apps and potential server side tracking that there is nothing I can do about. And after that, almost inevitable hacks ( inevitable due to misaligned incentives for companies ).

nerdjon 4y ago
Regarding your last part, it is true that hacks are a serious concern. I guess I just can't bring myself to think about that (for this data) since I already feel powerless. Plus these companies are already doing stuff with my data that I don't want so how much worse could hackers be? (I know seriously much worse but for me there is not much difference between Facebook/google having this data and hackers... I still did not consent to it). I agree on people running. I have been saying for several years that if a candidate came out and said "I don't have a strong technical understanding of [insert important technical discussion], but here are the people I will keep personally employed to help me with that to answer that question" will mean a lot to me. But I also know that admitting you don't know something will be picked up by the media and they will be destroyed for saying that, even though in admitting it is really a great sign. Many of the people in power may have people that can explain it, but they will never truly understand it. Especially when they have so many other things they also have to deal with.
moolcool 4y ago
Even if you could somehow guarantee that there will never be hacks, I'd say that the very existence of this data is almost exclusively to the detriment of the "consumer". If, for example, one of the anti-abortion states wanted to subpoena Meta for location data of all of its residents who flew out of state to visit an abortion clinic, they easily could. If an insurance company wanted to partner with Google to see if you're getting your 10k steps every day, or speeding in your car, and adjust your rates accordingly, they easily could. We're living in a dogshit digital panopticon, and we need to take laws to reign this in extremely seriously.
randomdata 4y ago
> Those are the kinds of moments I wish I had some charisma and run for an office myself, because I genuinely feel I lack any kind of real representation as a constituent. If you won you'd still be beholden to the constituents as their representative, and seeing as how they, as a whole, do not align with your personal position, you're not going to be any further ahead. At least not without moving to a new constituency where the people are more likely to align – which is something you can also do as a constituent.
- michaelt 4y ago
  To an extent - but a politician might have to deal with 30 different issues, and choosing the right stance on 5 of them will get you enough support to get elected. Say the right things on taxes, guns and abortion and you can get elected regardless of your stance on nuclear power or microplastics or cryptocurrency.
  - randomdata 4y ago
    The election is merely the hiring process. Getting elect is necessary, but not where the job ends. It is post-election when the constituents start hammering you with their demands and as their representative you have to find the general sentiment of the crowd. It is true that not everyone believes in the democratic process and, as such, will never speak to their representative again, if they even managed to during the election campaign, but then they're not really constituents in any meaningful sense and can be safely ignored.
- pdpi 4y ago
  You don't get elected on your personality alone, but rather on some sort of electoral platform. Presumably, your platform aligns with your personal position, and part of your mandate is precisely to make good on those promises.
  - randomdata 4y ago
    The constituents would never want you to actually follow through with your platform as, even if well intentioned, is long outdated by the time you are able to do anything with it. Making decisions based on outdated and incomplete information would be considered horrendous by any reasonable person. A platform merely provides points of interest to open the door to talk to the people who are interviewing you for the position. It's a cover letter, so to speak. There is good reason why the constituents will show up at your office following the election to go over what actually needs to be done, just as any employer would. This is where the actual direction is set. There may end up be some overlap with the platform here – even a broken clock is right twice a day – but only after deeper consideration. If you are not speaking to your hired representative regularly to ensure that your input in the direction is given, you're not participating in democracy. And, well, I guess as the saying goes: If you don't participate you can't complain. What is certain is that representatives, even the best ones, are not mind readers.

taylodl 4y ago

Serious laws have been implemented in the countries we bemoan for being "socialist." This is free market capitalism doing its thing. Just remember this when you hear the libertarians blather on about government and how the market will sort this all out. Uh-huh.

FpUser 4y ago
>"This is free market capitalism doing its thing." This "free capitalism" does not mind when Government protects their copyright, patents etc. etc. They should not mind Government protecting us either. Otherwise let's get even and remove their protections. Then see how they like it.
- taylodl 4y ago
  Reminds me of the big bank bailouts in 2008 - capitalism on the way up, socialism on the way down. They only want to win, never lose. They will rapidly switch between whatever "ism" is needed to ensure they always win.
Am4TIfIsER0ppos 4y ago
Without the socialist government robbing you through taxes there would be no need for the "tax websites" so there would be nothing to send to facebook.

makestuff 4y ago

At the very least I should get paid for my data. If I steal a patent that google has you better believe I am going to be paying up, but they can collect my personal data (or my personal intellectual property for lack of a better term) and not pay me a dime for it. I get if you are using their services for free then that kind of makes sense, but if you are not using any of their services why in the hell should they be able to act like the NSA.

texasbigdata 4y ago
The worse is the payroll companies leaking to equifax. In some states you can “disclose” car loan data on consumers to a certain extent, mortgage balances, etc. Each one alone is troublesome and when aggregated it’s super annoying every American can basically be a voyeur target for a few dollars, and not even have to option to consent to this happening.
- bradleyankrom 4y ago
  I kind of like the term “digital voyeurism” for this, though it is a euphemism for “spying.”
mindslight 4y ago
No, this is not what you want - because the straightforward outcome would be that your personal data was declared to be worth $X, which you were compensated for and then traded away as consideration to use the service. So then the service has an ongoing license to your data, which they sublicense to Facebook, and absolutely nothing changes besides legally cementing their surveillance regime. What we need is the definition of consent ala the GDPR that does not allow personal information to be permanently bought but only temporarily licensed with the requirement of ongoing consent that can be withdrawn at any time.
- datavirtue 4y ago
  It needs to be bid on. Garden variety capitalism and market activity.

cbtacy 4y ago

they suck. no question. all you can do is blackhole all facebook domains in your /etc/hosts file.

Calvin02 4y ago

Wouldn't a more effective strategy be to put pressure on tax companies to stop using this data for advertising? Which, I guess, is what the article is trying to do.

m463 4y ago
You shouldn't call it "advertising". That term seems benign. "advertising" makes people think it will be used to sell them sweaters in a pop up ad, but it can be easily used to deny access to housing, jobs or loans.

MichaelCollins 4y ago

The US government isn't going to stop this shit anytime soon, since it was their idea in the first place. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_LifeLog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_LifeLog > LifeLog was a project of the Information Processing Techniques Office of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) of the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD). According to its bid solicitation pamphlet in 2003, it was to be "an ontology-based (sub)system that captures, stores, and makes accessible the flow of one person's experience in and interactions with the world in order to support a broad spectrum of associates/assistants and other system capabilities". The objective of the LifeLog concept was "to be able to trace the 'threads' of an individual's life in terms of events, states, and relationships", and it has the ability to "take in all of a subject's experience, from phone numbers dialed and e-mail messages viewed to every breath taken, step made and place gone".[1] > The LifeLog program was canceled on February 3, 2004 (one day before the launching of Facebook), If you live in any other country, you should lobby your government to ban Facebook, to ban all foreign social media entirely. But I fear the situation is hopeless for us Americans.

andrewstuart2 4y ago
"The government" is hardly a single organism with a unified will. So I wouldn't expect one organization doing or proposing an idea would mean the rest of the government organizations would just be like "oh dang they're right, it was our idea, better not touch it."
- MichaelCollins 4y ago
  - colpabar 4y ago
    Easy with the conspiracy theories! As we all know, every three letter agency is 100% good. All the bad stuff is behind them and they'll never do any of it ever again. They told us so; don't you trust them?