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>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 thos

>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.

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.