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Why should it be illegal? I don’t understand the moral threat. Personally I feel that privacy gets too much airtime as a value — I see lots of other more direct
by dr_dshiv 3y ago
Why should it be illegal? I don’t understand the moral threat. Personally I feel that privacy gets too much airtime as a value — I see lots of other more direct issues (like political manipulation) that will remain an issue even with “strong privacy.”
- mcv 3y agoPolitical manipulation is a lot easier if the manipulator knows everything about you.
- Nextgrid 3y agoAnd doesn't even have to build & fund the infrastructure themselves. Same for government surveillance - adtech/marketing is a boon to it because they don't even have to build/maintain their own surveillance infrastructure anymore.
- thfuran 3y agoNot only that, but they can now just buy information that they wouldn't legally be able to collect themselves.
- hedora 3y agoModern political manipulation techniques rely on the same data as ad targeting. Ad targeting infrastructure is expensive and hard to hide, so banning it would defeat many political manipulation attacks.
- lewhoo 3y agoMaybe not illegal but optional (opt in not opt out). More issues are of course at hand but strong privacy should be a step in the right direction regardless. Let's not forsake traffic violations just because there are killers on the loose.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- fsflover 3y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_to_hide_argument https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_to_hide_argument
- sensanaty 3y agohttps://www.cs.ru.nl/~jhh/pub/secsem/solove-nothing-to-hide.pdf https://www.cs.ru.nl/~jhh/pub/secsem/solove-nothing-to-hide....
- teddyh 3y agoThe Eternal Value of Privacy, by Bruce Schneier in 2006: <https://www.wired.com/2006/05/the-eternal-value-of-privacy/ https://www.wired.com/2006/05/the-eternal-value-of-privacy/>
- poisonborz 3y agoWait until you read about Cambridge Analytica.
- shadowgovt 3y agoCambridge Analytica basically didn't work. For all the data it collected, it amounted to trying to build political influence by reading tea leaves. The strongest decider in the outcome of the 2016 election is that the Trump campaign spent something like a factor of three more on advertising across the board than the Clinton campaign. Cambridge Analytica was more representative of the notion that the Republicans were willing to spend money on anything that might work than on the efficacy of that specific approach. At the end of the day, that election came down to a combination of sexism in the voting base (Clinton's gender had a demonstrable effect on turnout among non-voters to vote against her; Americans don't want to admit it but in their hearts they're still pretty sexist) and good old fashioned, well understood rules of how spending on ads can move an election by a percentage point or two. The Democratic party as a whole believed Trump to be so unelectable that they pulled money from the presidential campaign to push it into campaigns down ticket in an attempt to win a massive political coup by controlling the House, Senate, and Presidency at the same time; they underestimated the political position of their opponents and it backfired spectacularly.
- crtasm 3y agoWhat's your view on their effect on elections in other countries? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Analytica#Elections https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Analytica#Elections
- shadowgovt 3y agoI don't have nearly enough visibility on the political process of other countries to comment. I can only extrapolate by observing that Cambridge Analytica's core business value (harvesting personal data, using it to build a political profile, and microtargeting ads based on that profile) was functionally no better than just "spending more on advertising" in the American 2016 race. So I put burden of proof on those who claim otherwise to show that CA had meaningful influence in any other race. It would be more surprising to me if they were uniquely unable to build a working psychological profile of an American voter versus any other voter then the simpler scenario that their entire concept was technological snake oil.
- tjoff 3y agoWhy should X be allowed to track me against my will?
- mjburgess 3y agoThe ability to aggregate personal information of large numbers of people is a form of political power. Facebook can, if it so wishes, provide a list of all gay people in an area; all supporters of gaza or of israel; all people who have recently commented on an article about drugs. The very ability to provide that list previously required an expensive secret police; today it does not. This is an extremely dangerous ability for anyone to have -- human rights (such as that to privacy) were won against oppression. They aren't optional, they're the system by which we prevent those previous eras from reoccurring. This is why i'm suspicious of the being a meaningful sense of 'consent' here -- if enough people consent, then the tracking agency acquires a novel political power over everyone. This is why the infrastructure of tracking itself is a concern.
- lefstathiou 3y agoYes, as can Apple, Google, every cable company, every telecom, the credit card companies, Grindr, health clinics
- mjburgess 3y agoHence, the GDPR's making a distinction between data essential for operation of the basic service vs. more broad collection. I take your point that some level of this power exists, necessarily, within internet-based companies with online users. But I think there's a big difference between, say, signing up to Grindr where you submit a basic form with limited information (and presumably) can retain some minimal anonymity in how you use the app --- and a system whereby the history of all your actions across your online life (banking, social media, dating apps, etc.) is collectable by a centralised agency. With laws like GDPR, broad datasets have become a liability for companies like telecoms, banks, etc. They don't want it. Accidentally forming 'rich user profiles' based on non-annoymous data is a legal liability. This is exactly the incentive structure needed. Rather than have companies with an existential profit motive to build mass surveillance systems. As far as whether a relational database that takes user data from a form is different to a whole system of streaming live event databases with massive streams of user monitoring across websites --- well, I think it wouldnt be hard to write a law against the latter. These are political, moral, legal and technical distinctions that can be drawn.
- ClumsyPilot 3y ago> Why should it be illegal? I don’t understand the moral threat Okay, then it should be legal for me to use Facebooks/Google's 'Intellectual Property' however I want. Why should it be legal for them to steal my data, but illegal for me to use their's?
- pb7 3y agoThey’re not stealing it, you’re giving it to them in exchange for using the products for free.
- dotnet00 3y agoThis is not true, as can be seen from Facebook maintaining 'shadow profiles' on people who don't have actual Facebook accounts but can in any way be connected to them (eg through third party data).
- xigoi 3y agoAlso, Facebook encourages users to tag people in photos even if they don't have a Facebook account.
- SantalBlush 3y agoIt seems dishonest to frame it as a market transaction when it clearly isn't. There is no explicit agreement, and most users probably don't have the slightest clue what data they're giving up.
- ClumsyPilot 3y agoGoogle ads trace you, and Facebook tracking pixels keep profiles on you even if you never used any services. It’s literal theft. It’s just allowed for corporation but if I do it, it’s harrasment and stalking.
- signal11 3y agoThe actual risk is data brokers, who aggregate this data and can use it for anything. Using it to sell you shampoo isn’t terrible (it can be super annoying though). The problem is using that data to eg figure out who might be in the market for pregnancy related products. Or, ominously, who have stopped buying pregnancy related products early. Or correlating interest in something they browse with voting intentions. Or interest in political action. There’s a lot of dodgy things you can do with that data. And little of this is being shared with *informed consent*. Ads are NOT the problem. I love browsing through ads in magazines I buy. If online ads worked like outdoor ads or magazine ads, I suspect a lot less people would have a problem.
- nunez 3y agoBecause i don't want some private entity using my habits and preferences (which I didn't ask them to collect, btw, and, no, throwing a five page manifesto typed in 8-pt don't and making me agree to it or else doesn't count) against me and manipulating how I think it's more than the ads. imagine if hacker news used ML to determine what articles you see on the front page based on whatever ad campaigns they think will result in a click from you. that would suck, right? that's what these platforms do though, and that's not okay
- falsaberN1 3y agoYou assume people stealing your private details for using it against you, are going to use it unaltered and in context. With enough bad faith and some manipulation, or just a bit of a twist, anything can be weaponized against you. If private data is stored, there's already a chance of it getting out. You may get lucky, you may not, but for someone that hates you enough, any random detail can be a weapon. Even stuff that doesn't depend on your actions, like religion, country of origin or even medical details. People you associate with, even at a superficial level, can make you guilty by association. And let's not get into stuff like porn habits... Political manipulation can be made real easy if they got dirt on you, too.
- equalsione 3y agoThe moral threat is that your private data is processed and transformed into influence. And it's been the case over an over again that that influence is wielded without accountability or care for those being targeted. The methods of applying that influence are sometimes sophisticated, sometimes crude but almost always effective. The only protections against this an individual has is privacy. Yes there are other forms of influence, but targeted campaigns feed from data that _should_ be private is vastly more toxic.
- lm28469 3y ago> like political manipulation Take 5 minutes to imagine how political troll campaigns are targeting their audience...
- __MatrixMan__ 3y agoHow does political manipulation look in a world where the platforms can't tell two users apart? Without the ability to tell a different story to each user, you're left trying to sway the masses all together. That's not manipulation, that's democracy.
- swatcoder 3y ago> The moral threat Forget fussy debates about morality. There is a practical threat to society when a few nation-sized corporations operate pipelines of data collection and profile aggregation on every online citizen of the world. Those profiles represent a massive amount of power, and that power is being let to accumulate in opaque organizations that have no explicit commitment to public benefit and extremely little accountability. That power is not yet being weaponized, but it doesn’t evaporate just because nobody’s using it for leverage or control yet. The responsible, long-term, practical way to ensure that legitimate governments and the people that constitute them continue to have the power to shape their own society is to make sure that these techniques for accumulating power are dismantled and the already-accumulated power is dissipated. Yes, we will lose some novelties and baubles in our online life when they can’t track you anymore. Yes, investing new power into government so that it can counter corporate profile-accumulation is dangerous as well. But the greater danger of inaction against these corporations is that they are already only lightly-accountable and are on the verge of escape from accountability forever if they gain enough power. Modern governments, meanwhile, are comparatively slow and dumb and can still be steered as their dangers become manifest.
- tsukikage 3y agoCool! I trust you won't object if I put a webcam in your bedroom, then?