7 ms·

This is a political problem, not a technological one. The USSR (alongside Germany and others) managed effective at scale spying with primitive technology: paper

This is a political problem, not a technological one. The USSR (alongside Germany and others) managed effective at scale spying with primitive technology: paperwork for everything and every movement, informants, audio surveillance, and so on. The reason such things did not come to places like the US in the same way is not because we were incapable of such, but because there was no political interest in it. And when one looks back at the past we've banned things people would never have imagined bannable. Make it a crime to grow a plant in the privacy of your own home and then consume that plant? Sure, why not? Make it a crime for a business to have the wrong opinion when it comes to who they want to serve or hire? Sure, why not? Going the nuclear route and making the collection of data on individuals, aggregated or otherwise, illegal would hardly be some major leap of reach of jurisprudence. The problem is not that the technology exists, but that there is 0 political interest in curtailing it, and we've a 'democracy' where the will of the people matters very little in terms of what legislation gets passed.

tehjoker 3y ago
COINTELPRO
kubb 3y ago
In the USSR and GDR, not everyone was under constant surveillance. This would require one surveillance worker per person. There was an initial selection process.
- rasz 3y ago
  Thats exactly how it worked. In fact there was always more than one pair of eyes on everyone, people were being coerced to snitch on each other. Im old enough to remember a nice man visiting my school asking us to listen carefully what parents talk about around the house and report to teachers any criticism of government or party. That was pre 1989 under Russian occupation of my country.
landemva 3y ago
In a democracy we would have a chance to vote on individual issues such as data privacy, or war against whomever. USA is a federal republic.
- t0bia_s 3y ago
  Most people don't bother about it. Consumerism makes people more conform and less conflicting.
- aijoe5pack 3y ago
  Correct. So get on the horn with your representative! Handling this through a democracy would be just horrible. Imagine the abuses that could be proffered to minorities with this.
Pxtl 3y ago
> wrong opinion That phrase is doing a lot of work.
nathanfig 3y ago
It's both. Technology really does make a difference. Its existence has effects.
matthewdgreen 3y ago
It is not as simple as being a political problem. Many of the policy decisions we think of as being political were actually motivated by the cost/availability of technology. As this cost goes down, new options become practical. We think of the Stasi's capabilities as being remarkable: but in fact, they would probably have been thrilled to trade most of their manual spying tools for something as powerful as a modern geofence warrant, a thing that is routinely used by US law enforcement (with very little policy debate.)
- asdff 3y ago
  While this is true, I don't think we are there yet with AI since its usually more expensive to run AI models than it is to perform more traditional statistical modelling.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - matthewdgreen 3y ago
    A text recognition and face/object recognition model runs on my iPhone every night. A small LLM is used for autocorrect. Current high-end smartphones have more than enough RAM and compute to run pretty sophiscated 7B-param quantized LLMs. This level of capability will find its way down to even entry-level Walmart phones in about five years. Server side, things are going to be even cheaper.
  - xcv123 3y ago
    > usually more expensive to run AI models Machine learning inferencing on phones is cheap these days https://apple.fandom.com/wiki/Neural_Engine https://apple.fandom.com/wiki/Neural_Engine
w-m 3y ago
Sure, everything is ultimately a political problem, but this one is completely driven by technological change. In the USSR (and GDR), it took them a staff of hundreds of thousands of people to write up their reports. Now it would take a single skilled person the better part of an afternoon to, for example, download a HN dump, and have an LLM create reports on the users. You could put in things like political affiliation, laws broken, countries travelled recently, net worth range, education and work history, professional contacts, ...
- __jambo 3y ago
  Great idea.
- salawat 3y ago
  Stop posting things like this, you're just giving them ideas, and you can't take it back once it's out there. I assure you, you may find the prodpect abhorrent, but there are people around who'd consider it a perfectly cromulent Tuesday.
  - aijoe5pack 3y ago
    Security by obscurity :). Accept that they will probably do this and work towards a counter-measure. Political solutions might be a counter-measure, as the Op of this thread is probably alluding to.
  - w-m 3y ago
    I’m not sure who “they” are, but I’m pretty sure they’re already doing that, and don’t need me to get the idea. I think it’s important to talk about what LLMs mean for privacy. Profiling every HN user might be a useful tool to are people more aware of the problems. But I totally get your unease, which is also why I haven’t done that myself. The cat is out of the bag, can’t get it back in by ignoring the fact.
JohnFen 3y ago
> This is a political problem, not a technological one. The political problem is a component of the technological problem. It's a seriously bad thing when technologies are developed without taking into account the potential for abuse. People developing new technologies can try to wash their hands of the foreseeable social consequences of their work, but that doesn't make their hands clean.
tech_ken 3y ago
> This is a political problem, not a technological one. Somewhat of a distinction without a difference, IMO. Politics (consensus mechanisms, governance structures, etc) are all themselves technologies for coordinating and shaping social activity. The decision on how to implement new (surveillance) tooling is also a technological question, as I think that the use of the tool in part defines what it is. All this to say that changes in the capabilities of specific tools are not the absolute limits of "technology", decisions around implementation and usage are also within that scope. > The reason such things did not come to places like the US in the same way is not because we were incapable of such, but because there was no political interest in it. While perhaps not as all-encompassing as what ended up being built in the USSR, the US absolutely implemented a massive surveillance network pointed at its citizenry [0]. >...managed effective at scale spying with primitive technology I do think that this is a particularly good point though. This is a not new trend, development in tooling for communications and signal/information processing has led to many developments in state surveillance throughout history. IMO AI should be properly seen as an elaboration or minor paradigm shift in a very long history, rather than wholly new terrain. > Make it a crime for a business to have the wrong opinion when it comes to who they want to serve or hire? Assuming you're talking about the Civil Rights Act: the specific crime is not "having the wrong opinion", it's inhibiting inter-state movement and commerce. Bigotry doesn't serve our model of a country where citizens are free to move about within its borders uninhibited and able to support oneself. [0] https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/historys-lesson-about-domestic-surveillance https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/hist...
justin66 3y ago
> The reason such things did not come to places like the US in the same way is not because we were incapable of such, but because there was no political interest in it. That might not be quite right. It might be that the reason such things did not come to the US was because the level of effort was out of line with the amount of political interest in doing it (and funding it). In that case, the existence of more advanced, cheaper surveillance technology and the anemic political opposition to mass surveillance are both problems.
digging 3y ago
> Make it a crime to grow a plant in the privacy of your own home and then consume that plant? Sure, why not? Make it a crime for a business to have the wrong opinion when it comes to who they want to serve or hire? Sure, why not? Wow, that's a hell of a comparison. The former case being a documented case of basic racism and political repression, assuming you're talking about cannabis. And the latter being designed for almost exactly the opposite. Restricting, um, "wrong opinions" on who a business wants to serve is there so that people with, um, "wrong identities" are still able to participate in society and not get shut out by businesses exercising their choices. Of course "wrong opinions" is not legal terminology. It's not even illegal to have an opinion that discrimination against certain groups is okay - it's just illegal to act on that. Offering services to the public requires that you offer them to all facets of the public, by our laws. But if you say believing in discrimination is a "wrong opinion"... I won't argue, they're your words :)
- JohnMakin 3y ago
  Don't know why you're getting downvoted for this, it's exactly what the parent said, and a completely wild (and off topic) statement.
  - janalsncm 3y ago
    I think the most charitable interpretation of their point is something along the lines of simply highlighting the far-reaching and ad-hoc nature of lawmaking capabilities. I don’t think antiracism laws were the best example though.
- gosub100 3y ago
  plenty of white people were charged with growing cannabis. I don't know where you are getting that idea from.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    In the US, prohibition of marijuana was enacted for overtly racist reasons. Latinos were the concern.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
giantg2 3y ago
No, it's not just a political problem intelligence gathering can happen at scale, including of civilians, by adversarial countries or international corporations. "Going the nuclear route and making the collection of data on individuals, aggregated or otherwise, illegal would hardly be some major leap of reach of jurisprudence." It would in fact be a huge leap. Sure, you could make illegal pretty easily, but current paradigms allow individuals to enter into contracts. Nothing stopping a society from signing (or clicking) away their rights like they already do. That would require some rather hefty intervention by congress, not just jurisprudence.
- janalsncm 3y ago
  > current paradigms allow individuals to enter into contracts And such contracts can be illegal or unenforceable. Just as the parent was suggesting it could be illegal to collect data, it is currently illegal to sell certain drugs. You can’t enter into a contract to sell cannabis across state lines in the United States for example.
  - giantg2 3y ago
    It's not going to be illegal or unenforceable based on existing jurisprudence though. You'd need legislative action from congress.
petsfed 3y ago
You and I are in agreement that the surveillance needs to stop, but I think we differ on how to explain the problem. My explanation follows, but note that its not directed at you. At its peak, the KGB employed ~500,000 people directly, with untold more employed as informants. The FBI currently employs ~35,000 people. What if I told you that the FBI could reach the KGB's peak level of reach, without meaningfully increasing its headcount? Would that make a difference? The technology takes away the cost of the surveillance, which used to be the guardrail. That fundamentally changes the "political" calculus. The fact that computers in 1945 were prohibitively expensive and required industrial logistics has literally zero bearing on the fact that today most of us have several on our person at all times. Nobody denies that changes to computer manufacturing technologies fundamentally changed the role the computer has in our daily lives. Certainly, it was theoretically possible to put a computer in every household in 1945, but we lacked the "political" will to do so. It does not follow that because historically computers were not a thing in society, we should not adjust our habits, morals, policies, etc today to account for the new landscape. So why is there always somebody saying "it was always technically possible to [insert dystopian nightmare], and we didn't need special considerations then, so we don't need them now!"?
- aidenn0 3y ago
  Cost is one factor, but so is visibility. If we replaced humans following people around with cheap human-sized robots following people around, it would still be noticeable if everybody had a robot following them around. Instead we track people passively, often with privately owned personal devices (cell phones, ring doorbells) so the tracking ability has become pervasive without any of the overt signs of a police state.
- dfxm12 3y ago
  I think if you bring up a dystopian nightmare, it assumes someone in power acting in bad faith. If their power is great enough, like maybe a government intelligence agency, it doesn't need things like due process, etc., to do what it wants to do. For example, Joe McCarthy & J. Edgar Hoover didn't need the evidence that could have been produced by AI-aided mass surveillance to justify getting people people who opposed his political agenda blackballed from Hollywood, jailed, fired from their jobs, etc. If everyone involved is acting in good faith, at least ostensibly, there are checks and balances, like due process. It's a fine line and doesn't justify the existence of mass spying, but I think it is an important distinction in this discussion & I think is a valuable lesson for us. We have to push back when the FBI pushes forward. I don't have much faith after what happened to Snowden and the reaction to his whistleblowing though.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
dfxm12 3y ago
Make it a crime for a business to have the wrong opinion when it comes to who they want to serve FWIW, businesses who refuse to do business with people generally win their legal cases [0], [1], [2], and I'm not sure if they are ever criminal... 0 - https://www.npr.org/2023/06/30/1182121291/colorado-supreme-court-same-sex-marriage-decision https://www.npr.org/2023/06/30/1182121291/colorado-supreme-c... 1 - https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/04/us/politics/supreme-court-sides-with-baker-who-turned-away-gay-couple.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/04/us/politics/supreme-court... 2 - https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/11/06/christian-wedding-photographer-who-refused-to-celebrate-same-sex-marriage-wins-settlement/ https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/11/06/christian-wedding-pho...
- mullingitover 3y ago
  These are selection bias, businesses who "refuse to do business with people" and then suffer the legal ramifications of their discrimination usually have lawyers who wisely tell them not to fight it in court because they'll rightfully lose. In these particular cases, it took a couple decades of court-packing to install the right reactionaries to get their token wins.
  - dfxm12 3y ago
    It would have been easy for the parent poster to not be so incredibly vague. I suspect it's because they are discussing this point in bad faith, ready to move the goalposts when any evidence to the contrary was brought up like this.
mym1990 3y ago
A difference in today's world is that private companies are amassing data that then gets turned around to the highest bidder. The government may not have had an interest in collecting the data before but now the friction to obtaining it and the insights is basically just money, which is plenty available. Your opinion on bannable offenses is pretty bewildering. There was a point in time when people thought it would be crazy to outlaw slavery, from your post I might think that you would not be in support of what eventually happened to that practice.
- aijoe5pack 3y ago
  And the highest bidder is often 'not spending legal fees on blocking the government requests'.
JakeAl 3y ago
I would say instead it's a PEOPLE problem, not a technology problem. To quote Neil Postman, politics are downstream from technology, because the technology (medium) controls the message. Just look at BigTech interfering with the messages by labeling them "disinfo." If one wants to say BUSINESS POLITICS, then that's probably more accurate, but we haven't solved the Google, MS, DuckDuckGo, Meta interfering with search results problem so I don't think we can trust BigTech to not exploit users even more for their personal data, or trust them not to design AI so it inherently abuses it's power for BigTech's own ends, and they hold all the cards and have been guiding things in the interest of technocracy.
forward1 3y ago
Laws limiting collection of data to solve privacy is akin to halting the production of fossil fuels to solve climate change: naive and ignorant of basic economic forces.
- salawat 3y ago
  Economic forces serve those that make the Market possible. People > Markets. Or to put it explicitly, people have primacy over Markets. I.e. two people does not a Market make, and a Market with no people is not thing.

tehjoker 3y ago

COINTELPRO

kubb 3y ago

In the USSR and GDR, not everyone was under constant surveillance. This would require one surveillance worker per person. There was an initial selection process.

rasz 3y ago
Thats exactly how it worked. In fact there was always more than one pair of eyes on everyone, people were being coerced to snitch on each other. Im old enough to remember a nice man visiting my school asking us to listen carefully what parents talk about around the house and report to teachers any criticism of government or party. That was pre 1989 under Russian occupation of my country.

landemva 3y ago

In a democracy we would have a chance to vote on individual issues such as data privacy, or war against whomever. USA is a federal republic.

t0bia_s 3y ago
Most people don't bother about it. Consumerism makes people more conform and less conflicting.
aijoe5pack 3y ago
Correct. So get on the horn with your representative! Handling this through a democracy would be just horrible. Imagine the abuses that could be proffered to minorities with this.

Pxtl 3y ago

> wrong opinion That phrase is doing a lot of work.

nathanfig 3y ago

It's both. Technology really does make a difference. Its existence has effects.

matthewdgreen 3y ago

It is not as simple as being a political problem. Many of the policy decisions we think of as being political were actually motivated by the cost/availability of technology. As this cost goes down, new options become practical. We think of the Stasi's capabilities as being remarkable: but in fact, they would probably have been thrilled to trade most of their manual spying tools for something as powerful as a modern geofence warrant, a thing that is routinely used by US law enforcement (with very little policy debate.)

asdff 3y ago
While this is true, I don't think we are there yet with AI since its usually more expensive to run AI models than it is to perform more traditional statistical modelling.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- matthewdgreen 3y ago
  A text recognition and face/object recognition model runs on my iPhone every night. A small LLM is used for autocorrect. Current high-end smartphones have more than enough RAM and compute to run pretty sophiscated 7B-param quantized LLMs. This level of capability will find its way down to even entry-level Walmart phones in about five years. Server side, things are going to be even cheaper.
- xcv123 3y ago
  > usually more expensive to run AI models Machine learning inferencing on phones is cheap these days https://apple.fandom.com/wiki/Neural_Engine https://apple.fandom.com/wiki/Neural_Engine

w-m 3y ago

Sure, everything is ultimately a political problem, but this one is completely driven by technological change. In the USSR (and GDR), it took them a staff of hundreds of thousands of people to write up their reports. Now it would take a single skilled person the better part of an afternoon to, for example, download a HN dump, and have an LLM create reports on the users. You could put in things like political affiliation, laws broken, countries travelled recently, net worth range, education and work history, professional contacts, ...

__jambo 3y ago
Great idea.
salawat 3y ago
Stop posting things like this, you're just giving them ideas, and you can't take it back once it's out there. I assure you, you may find the prodpect abhorrent, but there are people around who'd consider it a perfectly cromulent Tuesday.
- aijoe5pack 3y ago
  Security by obscurity :). Accept that they will probably do this and work towards a counter-measure. Political solutions might be a counter-measure, as the Op of this thread is probably alluding to.
- w-m 3y ago
  I’m not sure who “they” are, but I’m pretty sure they’re already doing that, and don’t need me to get the idea. I think it’s important to talk about what LLMs mean for privacy. Profiling every HN user might be a useful tool to are people more aware of the problems. But I totally get your unease, which is also why I haven’t done that myself. The cat is out of the bag, can’t get it back in by ignoring the fact.

JohnFen 3y ago

> This is a political problem, not a technological one. The political problem is a component of the technological problem. It's a seriously bad thing when technologies are developed without taking into account the potential for abuse. People developing new technologies can try to wash their hands of the foreseeable social consequences of their work, but that doesn't make their hands clean.

tech_ken 3y ago

> This is a political problem, not a technological one. Somewhat of a distinction without a difference, IMO. Politics (consensus mechanisms, governance structures, etc) are all themselves technologies for coordinating and shaping social activity. The decision on how to implement new (surveillance) tooling is also a technological question, as I think that the use of the tool in part defines what it is. All this to say that changes in the capabilities of specific tools are not the absolute limits of "technology", decisions around implementation and usage are also within that scope. > The reason such things did not come to places like the US in the same way is not because we were incapable of such, but because there was no political interest in it. While perhaps not as all-encompassing as what ended up being built in the USSR, the US absolutely implemented a massive surveillance network pointed at its citizenry [0]. >...managed effective at scale spying with primitive technology I do think that this is a particularly good point though. This is a not new trend, development in tooling for communications and signal/information processing has led to many developments in state surveillance throughout history. IMO AI should be properly seen as an elaboration or minor paradigm shift in a very long history, rather than wholly new terrain. > Make it a crime for a business to have the wrong opinion when it comes to who they want to serve or hire? Assuming you're talking about the Civil Rights Act: the specific crime is not "having the wrong opinion", it's inhibiting inter-state movement and commerce. Bigotry doesn't serve our model of a country where citizens are free to move about within its borders uninhibited and able to support oneself. [0] https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/historys-lesson-about-domestic-surveillance https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/hist...

justin66 3y ago

> The reason such things did not come to places like the US in the same way is not because we were incapable of such, but because there was no political interest in it. That might not be quite right. It might be that the reason such things did not come to the US was because the level of effort was out of line with the amount of political interest in doing it (and funding it). In that case, the existence of more advanced, cheaper surveillance technology and the anemic political opposition to mass surveillance are both problems.

digging 3y ago

> Make it a crime to grow a plant in the privacy of your own home and then consume that plant? Sure, why not? Make it a crime for a business to have the wrong opinion when it comes to who they want to serve or hire? Sure, why not? Wow, that's a hell of a comparison. The former case being a documented case of basic racism and political repression, assuming you're talking about cannabis. And the latter being designed for almost exactly the opposite. Restricting, um, "wrong opinions" on who a business wants to serve is there so that people with, um, "wrong identities" are still able to participate in society and not get shut out by businesses exercising their choices. Of course "wrong opinions" is not legal terminology. It's not even illegal to have an opinion that discrimination against certain groups is okay - it's just illegal to act on that. Offering services to the public requires that you offer them to all facets of the public, by our laws. But if you say believing in discrimination is a "wrong opinion"... I won't argue, they're your words :)

JohnMakin 3y ago
Don't know why you're getting downvoted for this, it's exactly what the parent said, and a completely wild (and off topic) statement.
- janalsncm 3y ago
  I think the most charitable interpretation of their point is something along the lines of simply highlighting the far-reaching and ad-hoc nature of lawmaking capabilities. I don’t think antiracism laws were the best example though.
gosub100 3y ago
plenty of white people were charged with growing cannabis. I don't know where you are getting that idea from.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  In the US, prohibition of marijuana was enacted for overtly racist reasons. Latinos were the concern.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

giantg2 3y ago

No, it's not just a political problem intelligence gathering can happen at scale, including of civilians, by adversarial countries or international corporations. "Going the nuclear route and making the collection of data on individuals, aggregated or otherwise, illegal would hardly be some major leap of reach of jurisprudence." It would in fact be a huge leap. Sure, you could make illegal pretty easily, but current paradigms allow individuals to enter into contracts. Nothing stopping a society from signing (or clicking) away their rights like they already do. That would require some rather hefty intervention by congress, not just jurisprudence.

janalsncm 3y ago
> current paradigms allow individuals to enter into contracts And such contracts can be illegal or unenforceable. Just as the parent was suggesting it could be illegal to collect data, it is currently illegal to sell certain drugs. You can’t enter into a contract to sell cannabis across state lines in the United States for example.
- giantg2 3y ago
  It's not going to be illegal or unenforceable based on existing jurisprudence though. You'd need legislative action from congress.

petsfed 3y ago

You and I are in agreement that the surveillance needs to stop, but I think we differ on how to explain the problem. My explanation follows, but note that its not directed at you. At its peak, the KGB employed ~500,000 people directly, with untold more employed as informants. The FBI currently employs ~35,000 people. What if I told you that the FBI could reach the KGB's peak level of reach, without meaningfully increasing its headcount? Would that make a difference? The technology takes away the cost of the surveillance, which used to be the guardrail. That fundamentally changes the "political" calculus. The fact that computers in 1945 were prohibitively expensive and required industrial logistics has literally zero bearing on the fact that today most of us have several on our person at all times. Nobody denies that changes to computer manufacturing technologies fundamentally changed the role the computer has in our daily lives. Certainly, it was theoretically possible to put a computer in every household in 1945, but we lacked the "political" will to do so. It does not follow that because historically computers were not a thing in society, we should not adjust our habits, morals, policies, etc today to account for the new landscape. So why is there always somebody saying "it was always technically possible to [insert dystopian nightmare], and we didn't need special considerations then, so we don't need them now!"?

aidenn0 3y ago
Cost is one factor, but so is visibility. If we replaced humans following people around with cheap human-sized robots following people around, it would still be noticeable if everybody had a robot following them around. Instead we track people passively, often with privately owned personal devices (cell phones, ring doorbells) so the tracking ability has become pervasive without any of the overt signs of a police state.
dfxm12 3y ago
I think if you bring up a dystopian nightmare, it assumes someone in power acting in bad faith. If their power is great enough, like maybe a government intelligence agency, it doesn't need things like due process, etc., to do what it wants to do. For example, Joe McCarthy & J. Edgar Hoover didn't need the evidence that could have been produced by AI-aided mass surveillance to justify getting people people who opposed his political agenda blackballed from Hollywood, jailed, fired from their jobs, etc. If everyone involved is acting in good faith, at least ostensibly, there are checks and balances, like due process. It's a fine line and doesn't justify the existence of mass spying, but I think it is an important distinction in this discussion & I think is a valuable lesson for us. We have to push back when the FBI pushes forward. I don't have much faith after what happened to Snowden and the reaction to his whistleblowing though.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

dfxm12 3y ago

Make it a crime for a business to have the wrong opinion when it comes to who they want to serve FWIW, businesses who refuse to do business with people generally win their legal cases [0], [1], [2], and I'm not sure if they are ever criminal... 0 - https://www.npr.org/2023/06/30/1182121291/colorado-supreme-court-same-sex-marriage-decision https://www.npr.org/2023/06/30/1182121291/colorado-supreme-c... 1 - https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/04/us/politics/supreme-court-sides-with-baker-who-turned-away-gay-couple.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/04/us/politics/supreme-court... 2 - https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/11/06/christian-wedding-photographer-who-refused-to-celebrate-same-sex-marriage-wins-settlement/ https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/11/06/christian-wedding-pho...

mullingitover 3y ago
These are selection bias, businesses who "refuse to do business with people" and then suffer the legal ramifications of their discrimination usually have lawyers who wisely tell them not to fight it in court because they'll rightfully lose. In these particular cases, it took a couple decades of court-packing to install the right reactionaries to get their token wins.
- dfxm12 3y ago
  It would have been easy for the parent poster to not be so incredibly vague. I suspect it's because they are discussing this point in bad faith, ready to move the goalposts when any evidence to the contrary was brought up like this.

mym1990 3y ago

A difference in today's world is that private companies are amassing data that then gets turned around to the highest bidder. The government may not have had an interest in collecting the data before but now the friction to obtaining it and the insights is basically just money, which is plenty available. Your opinion on bannable offenses is pretty bewildering. There was a point in time when people thought it would be crazy to outlaw slavery, from your post I might think that you would not be in support of what eventually happened to that practice.

aijoe5pack 3y ago
And the highest bidder is often 'not spending legal fees on blocking the government requests'.

JakeAl 3y ago

I would say instead it's a PEOPLE problem, not a technology problem. To quote Neil Postman, politics are downstream from technology, because the technology (medium) controls the message. Just look at BigTech interfering with the messages by labeling them "disinfo." If one wants to say BUSINESS POLITICS, then that's probably more accurate, but we haven't solved the Google, MS, DuckDuckGo, Meta interfering with search results problem so I don't think we can trust BigTech to not exploit users even more for their personal data, or trust them not to design AI so it inherently abuses it's power for BigTech's own ends, and they hold all the cards and have been guiding things in the interest of technocracy.

forward1 3y ago

Laws limiting collection of data to solve privacy is akin to halting the production of fossil fuels to solve climate change: naive and ignorant of basic economic forces.

salawat 3y ago
Economic forces serve those that make the Market possible. People > Markets. Or to put it explicitly, people have primacy over Markets. I.e. two people does not a Market make, and a Market with no people is not thing.