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>Governments could step in The OP-post is exactly about the (UK) government stepping in. (With disastrous consequences)

Silhouette 2y ago
Not exactly aimed at data capitalism though. We already have some well-intentioned data protection laws in the UK and some more that we inherited from the pre-Brexit EU GDPR. But their implementation has not been very effective at challenging the culture of harvesting whatever personal data businesses can and then attempting to monetise it. Meanwhile like any regulation they introduce a compliance cost for everyone. A better attempt in the same spirit but written by people who actually knew what they were doing and enforced by people who had both good intentions and sufficient resources could undermine a lot of the more toxic practices that have built up since the likes of Facebook and Google made planetary scale corporate surveillance a thing. We could get a long way just by banning two practices - keeping or using personal details provided to make purchases for anything other than administering those sales and incorporating phone-home surveillance into physical products where that surveillance has nothing to do with why a normal customer would buy that product (think TVs, laptops, or cars). It would also help if governments could lead by example on this issue. They necessarily deal with a lot of sometimes sensitive personal data. They - not just national/federal government but all the spin-out agencies and more local forms of government as well - also have a tendency to abuse data collection powers granted to them by broad surveillance law for debatable reasons.
- aboardRat4 2y ago
  >We already have some well-intentioned data protection laws in the UK and some more that we inherited from the pre-Brexit EU GDPR. See my experience with GDPR: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43155582 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43155582
  - Silhouette 2y ago
    If you're arguing that GDPR was poorly implemented and often did more harm than good then I'm afraid you're preaching to the choir here. It is one of my go-to examples of where I do believe that governments should be regulating the potentially harmful behaviours of organisations to protect the little guy but the people who wrote the actual rules we have today didn't really understand the problem or the possible solutions and they blew it.
- aboardRat4 2y ago
  >We could get a long way just by banning two practices - keeping or using personal details provided to make purchases for anything other than administering those sales and incorporating phone-home surveillance into physical products where that surveillance has nothing to do with why a normal customer would buy that product (think TVs, laptops, or cars). Don't get me wrong, but I don't believe that the government can do anything good in this respect. The only thing they can really do is to try to make data hoarding less profitable than it is now. For example it should be not just perfectly legal, but encouraged to scrape and repost bigtech data elsewhere. So that if you're unhappy with Google keeping your data on Google drive, you could switch to another cloud provider and they would already have all the same data. That is, instead of going from "all your data is supposedly protected, but actually not" to "all your data is private", we should go from "all your data is supposedly protected, but actually not" to "all your data is public, deal with it".
  - Silhouette 2y ago
    The only thing they can really do is to try to make data hoarding less profitable than it is now. FWIW I think this is a very practical response far more often than people realise. "Follow the money" is advice as old as money itself. Making behaviours we don't like unprofitable is one of the most reliable ways we have ever found to guide commercial organisations away from those behaviours. For example it should be not just perfectly legal, but encouraged to scrape and repost bigtech data elsewhere. So that if you're unhappy with Google keeping your data on Google drive, you could switch to another cloud provider and they would already have all the same data. Again FWIW I agree with busting the data hoarding walled gardens and supporting data portability. I couldn't disagree with you more strongly about making it all public by default but I also don't think that's the only way to solve the portability problem.

Not exactly aimed at data capitalism though. We already have some well-intentioned data protection laws in the UK and some more that we inherited from the pre-Brexit EU GDPR. But their implementation has not been very effective at challenging the culture of harvesting whatever personal data businesses can and then attempting to monetise it. Meanwhile like any regulation they introduce a compliance cost for everyone. A better attempt in the same spirit but written by people who actually knew what they were doing and enforced by people who had both good intentions and sufficient resources could undermine a lot of the more toxic practices that have built up since the likes of Facebook and Google made planetary scale corporate surveillance a thing. We could get a long way just by banning two practices - keeping or using personal details provided to make purchases for anything other than administering those sales and incorporating phone-home surveillance into physical products where that surveillance has nothing to do with why a normal customer would buy that product (think TVs, laptops, or cars). It would also help if governments could lead by example on this issue. They necessarily deal with a lot of sometimes sensitive personal data. They - not just national/federal government but all the spin-out agencies and more local forms of government as well - also have a tendency to abuse data collection powers granted to them by broad surveillance law for debatable reasons.

aboardRat4 2y ago
>We already have some well-intentioned data protection laws in the UK and some more that we inherited from the pre-Brexit EU GDPR. See my experience with GDPR: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43155582 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43155582
- Silhouette 2y ago
  If you're arguing that GDPR was poorly implemented and often did more harm than good then I'm afraid you're preaching to the choir here. It is one of my go-to examples of where I do believe that governments should be regulating the potentially harmful behaviours of organisations to protect the little guy but the people who wrote the actual rules we have today didn't really understand the problem or the possible solutions and they blew it.
aboardRat4 2y ago
>We could get a long way just by banning two practices - keeping or using personal details provided to make purchases for anything other than administering those sales and incorporating phone-home surveillance into physical products where that surveillance has nothing to do with why a normal customer would buy that product (think TVs, laptops, or cars). Don't get me wrong, but I don't believe that the government can do anything good in this respect. The only thing they can really do is to try to make data hoarding less profitable than it is now. For example it should be not just perfectly legal, but encouraged to scrape and repost bigtech data elsewhere. So that if you're unhappy with Google keeping your data on Google drive, you could switch to another cloud provider and they would already have all the same data. That is, instead of going from "all your data is supposedly protected, but actually not" to "all your data is private", we should go from "all your data is supposedly protected, but actually not" to "all your data is public, deal with it".
- Silhouette 2y ago
  The only thing they can really do is to try to make data hoarding less profitable than it is now. FWIW I think this is a very practical response far more often than people realise. "Follow the money" is advice as old as money itself. Making behaviours we don't like unprofitable is one of the most reliable ways we have ever found to guide commercial organisations away from those behaviours. For example it should be not just perfectly legal, but encouraged to scrape and repost bigtech data elsewhere. So that if you're unhappy with Google keeping your data on Google drive, you could switch to another cloud provider and they would already have all the same data. Again FWIW I agree with busting the data hoarding walled gardens and supporting data portability. I couldn't disagree with you more strongly about making it all public by default but I also don't think that's the only way to solve the portability problem.