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Trying to understand consumer privacy behaviors outside the prevalent social contract that the vast majority of people operate under is bound to missinterpret w

Trying to understand consumer privacy behaviors outside the prevalent social contract that the vast majority of people operate under is bound to missinterpret what is happening and why. We live in a regulated "supermarket" economy. What surfaces on a screen is entirely analogous to what surfaces on a shelf: People check the price and make their choices based on taste, budget etc. They are not idiots, they operate under a simplifying assumption that makes life in a complex world possible. The implicit assumption central to this way of organising the economy is that anything legally on sale is "safe". That it has been checked and approved by experts that know what they are doing and have the consumer interest as top priority. People will not rush back home to their chemistry labs to check what is in their purchased food, whether it corresponds to the label (assuming that such a label even exists) and what might be the short or long term health effects. They dont have the knowledge, resources and time to do that for all the stuff they get exposed to. What has drifted in the digital economy is not consumer standards, it is regulatory standards. Surfacing digital products with questionable short and long term implications for individuals and society has become a lucrative business, has captured its regulatory environment and will keep exploiting opportunities and blind spots until there is pushback. Ultimately regulators only derive legitimacy from serving their constituencies, but that feedback loop can be very slow and it gets tangled with myriad other unrelated political issues.

nonrandomstring 2y ago
Not sure that regulatory capture explains the poor quality of digital goods and how people value them. I think it's that cargo cults (what we have) are antithetical to true technological societies (which is what we say we want) A fault I see in Bruce Schneier's article, and the general hypothesis of "frame/baseline shifting" - it's not that people have been conditioned or forgotten the value of privacy, but that we're looking at the world through ever smaller lenses. The story in the article is that science is guilty of that too. The decline has been around education and perspective in general, not just attitudes to a small issue like "privacy". We thought the internet would widen our scope. It narrowed it. In the UK we have a great travel and culture show by Romesh Ranganathan. (I highly recommend it, so get on your VPN to watch BBC or find it on the torrents). It will cheer you up [0]. He's a funny guy. But also the cultural vista is breath-taking. Looking at life in central Africa it's great to be reminded of the diversity of humankind. Watch for the little things - like a whole bus queue of people, none of whom are on mobile phones. What the Internet promised - the great "conversation of mankind" - never emerged. Instead we got cat memes and social control media that forced people into ever smaller parochial silos. HN is no different. Here it's cool to have a bleak outlook on humanity and technology. "Oh it's too late... we're doomed... oh woe is me!" C'mon hackers... what happened to the joy of shaping the world? :) Bruce Schneier appeals to a macro systems theory metaphor, and mentions Daniel Pauly [1]. But he neglects some of the more profound lessons that Forrester, Meadows and actually Norbert Weiner gave us about feedback and the empty dream of cybernetic governance. Nothing as big as humanity will fit in bottle that small unless you're willing to destroy it in the process. And what you're destroying is the very innovative base that gave you the technology in the first place. This is why they should teach history, geography and other cultures in schools. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romesh_Ranganathan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romesh_Ranganathan [1] https://oceans.ubc.ca/2023/05/19/daniel-pauly/ https://oceans.ubc.ca/2023/05/19/daniel-pauly/
- classified 2y ago
  Norbert Wiener https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norbert_Wiener https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norbert_Wiener Otherwise, I completely agree.
  - nonrandomstring 2y ago
    Ouch. Thanks.
- whilenot-dev 2y ago
  > We thought the internet would widen our scope. It narrowed it. > What the Internet promised - the great "conversation of mankind" - never emerged. Instead we got cat memes and social control media that forced people into ever smaller parochial silos. The internet economy enabled browsing on a global scale and, because no kind of agency could keep up with its development speed, pushed everything into an "on demand" culture - what evolved with it is the higher responsibility for consumers. I feel the state of economy before the internet was on a scale of "everything is possible" (in the western hemisphere at least), only to discover years later that "our greed has consequences we just couldn't see before". Our cognitive load feels higher than ever to just cover the basics of survival and not get screwed over, or screw someone else over, constantly. > This is why they should teach history, geography and other cultures in schools. I think system thinking should become a thing in schools early on too. Every defined system is a mere conceptual view with artificial boundaries - a system without boundaries isn't a system, but a universe. It's good to enable new resources to think about new systems, or rethink existing systems, but we also should discuss the boundaries required for its concept to make any sense. I feel that this understanding gets sometimes lost, and its naivety gets regretfully relabeled as "innovation".
  - soco 2y ago
    In a MBA-led economy anything which doesn't create immediate monetary value gets pushed aside - humanities and education in general, for instance. And before somebody jumps: we did have innovation before this just as well.
peacechance 2y ago
Incorrect. We operate in a military smorgasbord where the war hungry U.S. government gets an unlimited budget of trillions of dollars year after year and their modus operandi is COLLECT IT ALL ... EXPLOIT IT ALL. The government believes that they are the only one's entitled to privacy for National Security™ purposes and their crimes are covered by criminal and conspiratorial compartmentalization. They go after journalists and whistle blowers like Julian Assange and Edward Snowden with dictatorial fury because the true enemy of fascist governments is Privacy for the People. Your perspective is cute business school brain washing but the real fact is that businesses like the FAANGS have realized that they can tap into fascist daddy's money faucet and sidestep the shelf-joke analysis you portrayed. Why worry about stocking shelves with good products to maybe sell units to individual consumers when you can sell to one big monstrous entity who can sign a billion dollars' large contract to ingest and process everything against the masses who barely have $100 to pay for a piece of software. We have a U.S. military problem here.
- peacechance 2y ago
  Nailed it. https://www.propublica.org/article/microsoft-solarwinds-golden-saml-data-breach-russian-hackers https://www.propublica.org/article/microsoft-solarwinds-gold...
- meitham 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - novariation 2y ago
    To be very honest I'm tempted to downvote this , not because I would disagree if this was the topic at hand, but because it seems like a deranged rant that's very loosely related to the comment it's replying.
    - b112 2y ago
      Not to mention, if you compare the US, its citizen's intentions, and its government's intentions, and yes the DnD's intentions to all but a tiny handful of countries, the US is a golden boy of good. Compare today's US to, for example colonial powers. The US is pure in comparison. Compare the US to what happens to journalists in Russia, China, Iran. The US is a beacon of justice. Is the US perfect? Nope. But do a little comparative analysis, and the result is that the world has never, ever seen such a peaceful empire. The rancor often displayed on such comments makes me wonder.
alvah 2y ago
"The implicit assumption central to this way of organising the economy is that anything legally on sale is "safe". That it has been checked and approved by experts that know what they are doing and have the consumer interest as top priority. People will not rush back home to their chemistry labs to check what is in their purchased food, whether it corresponds to the label (assuming that such a label even exists) and what might be the short or long term health effects. They dont have the knowledge, resources and time to do that for all the stuff they get exposed to." What you describe is a feature of a high-trust society, where you don't have to double-check every single transaction or interaction you enter into, but can take most statements on trust. This allows people to get on with the fundamental task at hand, rather than dealing with the overhead of checking their food in the chemistry lab, or whatever the equivalent is for the specific transaction. I have read suggestions that this was a major contributor to the growth of the Western economies, relative to other low-trust societies. If this was the case, we are in for a bumpy ride, as we seem to be rapidly changing from a high-trust to a low-trust society.
- soco 2y ago
  "I have read suggestions that this was a major contributor to the growth of the Western economies, relative to other low-trust societies." I'm not sure I follow, what are other low trust societies? Otherwise I'm with you here - living in a cabin in the woods survivalist-mode does nothing to progress a society.
  - dbspin 2y ago
    This pew research article from 2008 (prior to the decline of trust in the West) illustrates some examples and the knock on or related differences between low and high trust societies - https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2008/04/15/where-trust-is-high-crime-and-corruption-are-low/ https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2008/04/15/where-trust-is...
  - _heimdall 2y ago
    > living in a cabin in the woods survivalist-mode does nothing to progress a society. Not everyone's goal is to progress a society though. If one's goal is to live a quiet life and do what makes them happy, what's wrong with living in a cabin in the woods? That would only be a fundamental problem if everyone owes something to society. That's a much different conversation though, whether everyone is born into a debt that must be paid back to society.
benterix 2y ago
> The implicit assumption central to this way of organising the economy is that anything legally on sale is "safe". That it has been checked and approved by experts This applies to certain producs only and even in the EU where these laws are more strict some products are regularly withdrawn from sale (these are mostly quality issues, not intentional actions), even as far as drugs are concerned. It's one of the reasons I tend to buy fresh products and from bio shops mostly - to increase my chances.
- soco 2y ago
  I like the way you put it "to increase my chances" because I've heard more than once from adepts of bio products promoting as it would be the holy grail. Bio producers can make mistakes too, they can be neglecting or even nasty too, it's just, chances are higher with them to get better quality produce. If you can afford it, that is.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  There are a lot of products. Mistakes are a statical certainty at this scale, and regular recalls are a sign the system is working, at least to an extent (I'd say it works quite well, safety-wise). Interesting choice wrt. bio foods. I'm the opposite: I don't trust organic/bio food at all. There is a lot of vanity products clearly meant to pay more to make yourself feel you're choosing a healthier alternative. Plus, I trust the established industrial processes more - they're thoroughly regulated and tested. A devil I know. Bio/organic stuff, who knows what they're doing - and what poisons they're spraying on their produce, that let you keep "organic" label but are otherwise more toxic than industrial pesticides.
pjc50 2y ago
Schneier used to talk about "the Exxon Valdez of privacy", the idea that there would be a single giant spill that had significantly bad effects enough that it would force change. That has basically not happened. It sometimes seems that the situation has got worse in terms of public debate, due to the usual bad-faith actors. For example, the TikTok discussion is not framed around privacy in general but focuses on "China bad". With the implication that an algorithmic megacorp controlling political sentiment through feeds is completely fine so long as it's Americans doing it. And the voting security discussion: there were questions about voting machines long before 2020, but partisan attacks focused on discrediting valid results.
- frapaconi 2y ago
  Yeah keep in mind that both political parties heavily use private data farms to narrowcast campaign advertising. Facebook is just one of those. Basically there’s a private sector spying industry and the government enjoys the benefits too. TikTok is messed up for many reasons. One being it’s a waste of everyone’s time. Two, foreign nations getting a treasure trove of video footage on a massive populace in the age of AI. This WILL lead to a faked mass-casualty event using real identities of people to cause political unrest. Just a matter of time—and data. Going back to the article though, the social media baseline needs to be fixed as well. The OG Facebook platform was actually GOOD—lots of good-natured value in human connections. Then they started cutting in the bad shit reducing its purity. TikTok took that to a whole new level and put in some home grown Singaporean crack. Ironically, the Chinese and Singapore have hefty penalty’s for drugs—and yet they thrust it onto the western sensibility. After all, it’s the WILD WEST.
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    > Ironically, the Chinese and Singapore have hefty penalty’s for drugs—and yet they thrust it onto the western sensibility. After all, it’s the WILD WEST. One almost wants to say, revenge for the opium.
  - frapaconi 2y ago
    Got lots of down-votes. HN needs to implement a feature requiring a REASON for down votes.
djtango 2y ago
You chose an analogy close to my heart! I have managed to convince myself that most "food" in the supermarket is inedible poison! It's exhausting and a real nuisance to my quality of life but I equally refuse to knowingly consume excess additives unless completely in a pinch. Needless to say I'm also very suspicious of online businesses. Although I'm actually getting a bit fatigued/defeatist by privacy issues. We're all so overwhelmingly in this ship that I don't know what I really stand to gain by constantly hamstringing myself digitally... If we wake up in the worst case scenario, I'm sure I have enough of a footprint I wouldn't be able to meaningfully hide much from a determined bad actor...
- A4ET8a8uTh0 2y ago
  << I don't know what I really stand to gain by constantly hamstringing myself digitally... I hear that and I will admit that lately it does seem to get in the way a lot more often than expected ( my bank in my recent interaction removed branch connection for a specific application and moved everything to an online process, to which direct link is an ad tracker ). Still, wife now has gotten used to no ads ( almost ) anywhere and is starting to see what the benefits can be. << determined bad actor Sadly, if I am targeted, there is no escape. I am privacy conscious, but I also have a family and try to live in a society in a sufficiently comfortable manner. It is a tough balancing act. In a sense, it is not that different from guerrilla warfare. There is no defense against sufficiently motivated entity that is not exhausting. My only solace is that I am a low value target so it does not seem that likely. Still, what are the odds of me pissing off someone sufficiently important? Non-zero for certain.
- kenjackson 2y ago
  > It's exhausting and a real nuisance to my quality of life but I equally refuse to knowingly consume excess additives unless completely in a pinch. Why not? Unless you have severe allergies the excess additives will probably do very little to your health. And the quality of life and exhaustion wins probably make it a net win for you. Is it a principled stand?
  - djtango 2y ago
Citizen_Lame 2y ago
Regulatory standards have not drifted. They have been captured by companies as big as some countries. Entire political and social system has been slowly eroding and reverting back to the Charles Dicken's times. We are just living in the times were cracks are visible enough and we can clearly see them. Tech bros never faced the same scrutiny as regular industries do (or at least there were no consequences).
1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago
The article referred to the beliefs of fisheries scientists and what the authors have suggested are their analogous counterparts today in the "security community". It is not focused on the beliefs of computer users. For many years on HN I have seen comments that constantly try to shift the focus away from articles like these and place blame on computer users. This is old hat. We are past that nonsense. This article is addressed to the "security community". But some HN commenter is trying once again to shift the focus to computer users, making sweeping, generalised, incorrect, and ridiculous assumptions about them. There is a commercial motive for destroying privacy and collecting data. Computer users are not voluntarily "giving up on privacy", or "trading away their data", with informed consent, to enrich software developers. It is being taken, without notice, often unbeknownst to the victims. There is no "contract". Regulation will continue to gain momentum as it is obvious to anyone outside of the so-called "tech" companies and their supporters that this is a bad deal for society. The problem is not the behaviour of the victims, it is the behaviour of the perpetrators.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago
  It is like blaming fish for being overfished. "Until fish start caring about being caught and changing their natural behaviour, ..."
Draiken 2y ago
All of these systems you mentioned have already failed. We are simply very slow to accept it. Even in the (almost) mainstream media with shows like John Oliver, you can see just how deep the degradation of all our regulatory entities really is. In today's world, almost everything we purchase is pure garbage. The food is overly processed and with excessive use of chemicals and added sugar, the furniture is from cheap material and shoddily built, the building we live in was built cutting corners and skirting laws as much as possible, the software we use is mostly garbage thrown together to "ship fast and break things", the doctors we go to are uninformed and trained to dismiss you as fast as possible, the car repair service wants to rip us off based on our lack of knowledge. I could go on forever here. It's honestly a joke. We are all the proverbial boiling frogs and allowed everything around us to fall into ruin (and continue to do so). This assumption you presented only works for the uninformed masses. If you investigate for 5 seconds into anything we purchase, we pierce the veil and see how it's mostly utter garbage. Most of these regulatory institutions became a facade where big corporations get a pass and we pretend they are doing a good job. Regulators can't ever win this battle. Even if they aren't corrupt, they can't be insulated from the influence of big corporations and they are, and will always be, underfunded because regulation inevitably means less profits. We can't have that, can we?
- Aerroon 2y ago
  I think it's fitting that the parent poster used supermarkets. They're a relatively recent thing and often seen as lower quality. In my country it's still relatively common for people to forage for mushrooms and berries in the forests. There's no regulatory oversight over that, but people are still fine. Supermarkets and this kind of regulation hasn't necessarily stood the test of time. It's hard to say if it will considering how every system that gets built seems to slowly get corrupted or bent in somebody's favor.
  - skybrian 2y ago
    People are fine if they didn’t eat the wrong mushrooms.
    - 2y ago
ProdSecBurner 2y ago
This is the liberal viewpoint (I subscribe to it too). The conservative viewpoint is to do mostly do what our ancestors did (given it worked for many generations). My problem with this approafh is that it limits progress and favours folks who are already doing well.
ericjmorey 2y ago
I think you're romanticizing the past that brought us to the current state of consumer markets. Until the 1930s in the US, the primary guiding principle was caveat emptor and it took a lot of regulations to change expectations.
guardiang 2y ago
It's way past time that consumer-first became modus operandi for Tech. LLMs (GPT-4 quality or better) have the potential to enable that future. It'll take an avalanche of high quality products coming out of small-footprint companies. Each company utilizing LLMs to shore up any limitations due to their size, and every one of them having a consumer-first mindset from the get-go. It can be done.
m463 2y ago
> People will not rush back home to their chemistry labs to check... https://www.dranniesexperiments.com/laundry-experiments/my-laundry-tips https://www.dranniesexperiments.com/laundry-experiments/my-l...
veunes 2y ago
Consumers rely on the assumption that products on the market are safe, and this trust must be maintained through effective regulation

nonrandomstring 2y ago

Not sure that regulatory capture explains the poor quality of digital goods and how people value them. I think it's that cargo cults (what we have) are antithetical to true technological societies (which is what we say we want) A fault I see in Bruce Schneier's article, and the general hypothesis of "frame/baseline shifting" - it's not that people have been conditioned or forgotten the value of privacy, but that we're looking at the world through ever smaller lenses. The story in the article is that science is guilty of that too. The decline has been around education and perspective in general, not just attitudes to a small issue like "privacy". We thought the internet would widen our scope. It narrowed it. In the UK we have a great travel and culture show by Romesh Ranganathan. (I highly recommend it, so get on your VPN to watch BBC or find it on the torrents). It will cheer you up [0]. He's a funny guy. But also the cultural vista is breath-taking. Looking at life in central Africa it's great to be reminded of the diversity of humankind. Watch for the little things - like a whole bus queue of people, none of whom are on mobile phones. What the Internet promised - the great "conversation of mankind" - never emerged. Instead we got cat memes and social control media that forced people into ever smaller parochial silos. HN is no different. Here it's cool to have a bleak outlook on humanity and technology. "Oh it's too late... we're doomed... oh woe is me!" C'mon hackers... what happened to the joy of shaping the world? :) Bruce Schneier appeals to a macro systems theory metaphor, and mentions Daniel Pauly [1]. But he neglects some of the more profound lessons that Forrester, Meadows and actually Norbert Weiner gave us about feedback and the empty dream of cybernetic governance. Nothing as big as humanity will fit in bottle that small unless you're willing to destroy it in the process. And what you're destroying is the very innovative base that gave you the technology in the first place. This is why they should teach history, geography and other cultures in schools. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romesh_Ranganathan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romesh_Ranganathan [1] https://oceans.ubc.ca/2023/05/19/daniel-pauly/ https://oceans.ubc.ca/2023/05/19/daniel-pauly/

classified 2y ago
Norbert Wiener https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norbert_Wiener https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norbert_Wiener Otherwise, I completely agree.
- nonrandomstring 2y ago
  Ouch. Thanks.
whilenot-dev 2y ago
> We thought the internet would widen our scope. It narrowed it. > What the Internet promised - the great "conversation of mankind" - never emerged. Instead we got cat memes and social control media that forced people into ever smaller parochial silos. The internet economy enabled browsing on a global scale and, because no kind of agency could keep up with its development speed, pushed everything into an "on demand" culture - what evolved with it is the higher responsibility for consumers. I feel the state of economy before the internet was on a scale of "everything is possible" (in the western hemisphere at least), only to discover years later that "our greed has consequences we just couldn't see before". Our cognitive load feels higher than ever to just cover the basics of survival and not get screwed over, or screw someone else over, constantly. > This is why they should teach history, geography and other cultures in schools. I think system thinking should become a thing in schools early on too. Every defined system is a mere conceptual view with artificial boundaries - a system without boundaries isn't a system, but a universe. It's good to enable new resources to think about new systems, or rethink existing systems, but we also should discuss the boundaries required for its concept to make any sense. I feel that this understanding gets sometimes lost, and its naivety gets regretfully relabeled as "innovation".
- soco 2y ago
  In a MBA-led economy anything which doesn't create immediate monetary value gets pushed aside - humanities and education in general, for instance. And before somebody jumps: we did have innovation before this just as well.

peacechance 2y ago

Incorrect. We operate in a military smorgasbord where the war hungry U.S. government gets an unlimited budget of trillions of dollars year after year and their modus operandi is COLLECT IT ALL ... EXPLOIT IT ALL. The government believes that they are the only one's entitled to privacy for National Security™ purposes and their crimes are covered by criminal and conspiratorial compartmentalization. They go after journalists and whistle blowers like Julian Assange and Edward Snowden with dictatorial fury because the true enemy of fascist governments is Privacy for the People. Your perspective is cute business school brain washing but the real fact is that businesses like the FAANGS have realized that they can tap into fascist daddy's money faucet and sidestep the shelf-joke analysis you portrayed. Why worry about stocking shelves with good products to maybe sell units to individual consumers when you can sell to one big monstrous entity who can sign a billion dollars' large contract to ingest and process everything against the masses who barely have $100 to pay for a piece of software. We have a U.S. military problem here.

peacechance 2y ago
Nailed it. https://www.propublica.org/article/microsoft-solarwinds-golden-saml-data-breach-russian-hackers https://www.propublica.org/article/microsoft-solarwinds-gold...
meitham 2y ago
[flagged]
- novariation 2y ago
  To be very honest I'm tempted to downvote this , not because I would disagree if this was the topic at hand, but because it seems like a deranged rant that's very loosely related to the comment it's replying.
  - b112 2y ago
    Not to mention, if you compare the US, its citizen's intentions, and its government's intentions, and yes the DnD's intentions to all but a tiny handful of countries, the US is a golden boy of good. Compare today's US to, for example colonial powers. The US is pure in comparison. Compare the US to what happens to journalists in Russia, China, Iran. The US is a beacon of justice. Is the US perfect? Nope. But do a little comparative analysis, and the result is that the world has never, ever seen such a peaceful empire. The rancor often displayed on such comments makes me wonder.

alvah 2y ago

"The implicit assumption central to this way of organising the economy is that anything legally on sale is "safe". That it has been checked and approved by experts that know what they are doing and have the consumer interest as top priority. People will not rush back home to their chemistry labs to check what is in their purchased food, whether it corresponds to the label (assuming that such a label even exists) and what might be the short or long term health effects. They dont have the knowledge, resources and time to do that for all the stuff they get exposed to." What you describe is a feature of a high-trust society, where you don't have to double-check every single transaction or interaction you enter into, but can take most statements on trust. This allows people to get on with the fundamental task at hand, rather than dealing with the overhead of checking their food in the chemistry lab, or whatever the equivalent is for the specific transaction. I have read suggestions that this was a major contributor to the growth of the Western economies, relative to other low-trust societies. If this was the case, we are in for a bumpy ride, as we seem to be rapidly changing from a high-trust to a low-trust society.

soco 2y ago
"I have read suggestions that this was a major contributor to the growth of the Western economies, relative to other low-trust societies." I'm not sure I follow, what are other low trust societies? Otherwise I'm with you here - living in a cabin in the woods survivalist-mode does nothing to progress a society.
- dbspin 2y ago
  This pew research article from 2008 (prior to the decline of trust in the West) illustrates some examples and the knock on or related differences between low and high trust societies - https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2008/04/15/where-trust-is-high-crime-and-corruption-are-low/ https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2008/04/15/where-trust-is...
- _heimdall 2y ago
  > living in a cabin in the woods survivalist-mode does nothing to progress a society. Not everyone's goal is to progress a society though. If one's goal is to live a quiet life and do what makes them happy, what's wrong with living in a cabin in the woods? That would only be a fundamental problem if everyone owes something to society. That's a much different conversation though, whether everyone is born into a debt that must be paid back to society.

benterix 2y ago

> The implicit assumption central to this way of organising the economy is that anything legally on sale is "safe". That it has been checked and approved by experts This applies to certain producs only and even in the EU where these laws are more strict some products are regularly withdrawn from sale (these are mostly quality issues, not intentional actions), even as far as drugs are concerned. It's one of the reasons I tend to buy fresh products and from bio shops mostly - to increase my chances.

soco 2y ago
I like the way you put it "to increase my chances" because I've heard more than once from adepts of bio products promoting as it would be the holy grail. Bio producers can make mistakes too, they can be neglecting or even nasty too, it's just, chances are higher with them to get better quality produce. If you can afford it, that is.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
TeMPOraL 2y ago
There are a lot of products. Mistakes are a statical certainty at this scale, and regular recalls are a sign the system is working, at least to an extent (I'd say it works quite well, safety-wise). Interesting choice wrt. bio foods. I'm the opposite: I don't trust organic/bio food at all. There is a lot of vanity products clearly meant to pay more to make yourself feel you're choosing a healthier alternative. Plus, I trust the established industrial processes more - they're thoroughly regulated and tested. A devil I know. Bio/organic stuff, who knows what they're doing - and what poisons they're spraying on their produce, that let you keep "organic" label but are otherwise more toxic than industrial pesticides.

pjc50 2y ago

Schneier used to talk about "the Exxon Valdez of privacy", the idea that there would be a single giant spill that had significantly bad effects enough that it would force change. That has basically not happened. It sometimes seems that the situation has got worse in terms of public debate, due to the usual bad-faith actors. For example, the TikTok discussion is not framed around privacy in general but focuses on "China bad". With the implication that an algorithmic megacorp controlling political sentiment through feeds is completely fine so long as it's Americans doing it. And the voting security discussion: there were questions about voting machines long before 2020, but partisan attacks focused on discrediting valid results.

frapaconi 2y ago
Yeah keep in mind that both political parties heavily use private data farms to narrowcast campaign advertising. Facebook is just one of those. Basically there’s a private sector spying industry and the government enjoys the benefits too. TikTok is messed up for many reasons. One being it’s a waste of everyone’s time. Two, foreign nations getting a treasure trove of video footage on a massive populace in the age of AI. This WILL lead to a faked mass-casualty event using real identities of people to cause political unrest. Just a matter of time—and data. Going back to the article though, the social media baseline needs to be fixed as well. The OG Facebook platform was actually GOOD—lots of good-natured value in human connections. Then they started cutting in the bad shit reducing its purity. TikTok took that to a whole new level and put in some home grown Singaporean crack. Ironically, the Chinese and Singapore have hefty penalty’s for drugs—and yet they thrust it onto the western sensibility. After all, it’s the WILD WEST.
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  > Ironically, the Chinese and Singapore have hefty penalty’s for drugs—and yet they thrust it onto the western sensibility. After all, it’s the WILD WEST. One almost wants to say, revenge for the opium.
- frapaconi 2y ago
  Got lots of down-votes. HN needs to implement a feature requiring a REASON for down votes.

djtango 2y ago

You chose an analogy close to my heart! I have managed to convince myself that most "food" in the supermarket is inedible poison! It's exhausting and a real nuisance to my quality of life but I equally refuse to knowingly consume excess additives unless completely in a pinch. Needless to say I'm also very suspicious of online businesses. Although I'm actually getting a bit fatigued/defeatist by privacy issues. We're all so overwhelmingly in this ship that I don't know what I really stand to gain by constantly hamstringing myself digitally... If we wake up in the worst case scenario, I'm sure I have enough of a footprint I wouldn't be able to meaningfully hide much from a determined bad actor...

A4ET8a8uTh0 2y ago
<< I don't know what I really stand to gain by constantly hamstringing myself digitally... I hear that and I will admit that lately it does seem to get in the way a lot more often than expected ( my bank in my recent interaction removed branch connection for a specific application and moved everything to an online process, to which direct link is an ad tracker ). Still, wife now has gotten used to no ads ( almost ) anywhere and is starting to see what the benefits can be. << determined bad actor Sadly, if I am targeted, there is no escape. I am privacy conscious, but I also have a family and try to live in a society in a sufficiently comfortable manner. It is a tough balancing act. In a sense, it is not that different from guerrilla warfare. There is no defense against sufficiently motivated entity that is not exhausting. My only solace is that I am a low value target so it does not seem that likely. Still, what are the odds of me pissing off someone sufficiently important? Non-zero for certain.
kenjackson 2y ago
> It's exhausting and a real nuisance to my quality of life but I equally refuse to knowingly consume excess additives unless completely in a pinch. Why not? Unless you have severe allergies the excess additives will probably do very little to your health. And the quality of life and exhaustion wins probably make it a net win for you. Is it a principled stand?
- djtango 2y ago

Citizen_Lame 2y ago

Regulatory standards have not drifted. They have been captured by companies as big as some countries. Entire political and social system has been slowly eroding and reverting back to the Charles Dicken's times. We are just living in the times were cracks are visible enough and we can clearly see them. Tech bros never faced the same scrutiny as regular industries do (or at least there were no consequences).

1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago

The article referred to the beliefs of fisheries scientists and what the authors have suggested are their analogous counterparts today in the "security community". It is not focused on the beliefs of computer users. For many years on HN I have seen comments that constantly try to shift the focus away from articles like these and place blame on computer users. This is old hat. We are past that nonsense. This article is addressed to the "security community". But some HN commenter is trying once again to shift the focus to computer users, making sweeping, generalised, incorrect, and ridiculous assumptions about them. There is a commercial motive for destroying privacy and collecting data. Computer users are not voluntarily "giving up on privacy", or "trading away their data", with informed consent, to enrich software developers. It is being taken, without notice, often unbeknownst to the victims. There is no "contract". Regulation will continue to gain momentum as it is obvious to anyone outside of the so-called "tech" companies and their supporters that this is a bad deal for society. The problem is not the behaviour of the victims, it is the behaviour of the perpetrators.

1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago
It is like blaming fish for being overfished. "Until fish start caring about being caught and changing their natural behaviour, ..."

Draiken 2y ago

All of these systems you mentioned have already failed. We are simply very slow to accept it. Even in the (almost) mainstream media with shows like John Oliver, you can see just how deep the degradation of all our regulatory entities really is. In today's world, almost everything we purchase is pure garbage. The food is overly processed and with excessive use of chemicals and added sugar, the furniture is from cheap material and shoddily built, the building we live in was built cutting corners and skirting laws as much as possible, the software we use is mostly garbage thrown together to "ship fast and break things", the doctors we go to are uninformed and trained to dismiss you as fast as possible, the car repair service wants to rip us off based on our lack of knowledge. I could go on forever here. It's honestly a joke. We are all the proverbial boiling frogs and allowed everything around us to fall into ruin (and continue to do so). This assumption you presented only works for the uninformed masses. If you investigate for 5 seconds into anything we purchase, we pierce the veil and see how it's mostly utter garbage. Most of these regulatory institutions became a facade where big corporations get a pass and we pretend they are doing a good job. Regulators can't ever win this battle. Even if they aren't corrupt, they can't be insulated from the influence of big corporations and they are, and will always be, underfunded because regulation inevitably means less profits. We can't have that, can we?

Aerroon 2y ago
I think it's fitting that the parent poster used supermarkets. They're a relatively recent thing and often seen as lower quality. In my country it's still relatively common for people to forage for mushrooms and berries in the forests. There's no regulatory oversight over that, but people are still fine. Supermarkets and this kind of regulation hasn't necessarily stood the test of time. It's hard to say if it will considering how every system that gets built seems to slowly get corrupted or bent in somebody's favor.
- skybrian 2y ago
  People are fine if they didn’t eat the wrong mushrooms.
  - 2y ago

ProdSecBurner 2y ago

This is the liberal viewpoint (I subscribe to it too). The conservative viewpoint is to do mostly do what our ancestors did (given it worked for many generations). My problem with this approafh is that it limits progress and favours folks who are already doing well.

ericjmorey 2y ago

I think you're romanticizing the past that brought us to the current state of consumer markets. Until the 1930s in the US, the primary guiding principle was caveat emptor and it took a lot of regulations to change expectations.

guardiang 2y ago

It's way past time that consumer-first became modus operandi for Tech. LLMs (GPT-4 quality or better) have the potential to enable that future. It'll take an avalanche of high quality products coming out of small-footprint companies. Each company utilizing LLMs to shore up any limitations due to their size, and every one of them having a consumer-first mindset from the get-go. It can be done.

m463 2y ago

> People will not rush back home to their chemistry labs to check... https://www.dranniesexperiments.com/laundry-experiments/my-laundry-tips https://www.dranniesexperiments.com/laundry-experiments/my-l...

veunes 2y ago

Consumers rely on the assumption that products on the market are safe, and this trust must be maintained through effective regulation