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>Remember that massive surveillance capitalism apparatus that has been created for years? Now everyone must pay for it to legally comply with whatever arbitrary

by gruez 1y ago

>Remember that massive surveillance capitalism apparatus that has been created for years? Now everyone must pay for it to legally comply with whatever arbitrary bullshit Calling geoip databases "surveillance capitalism" seems like a stretch. It might be used by "surveillance capitalism", but you don't really have to surveil people to build a geoip database, only scrape RIR allocation records (all public, btw) and BGP routes, do ping tests, and parse geofeeds provided by providers. None of that is "surveillance capitalism" in any meaningful sense.

TGower 1y ago
If selling the physical location information of users isn't surveillance capatalism, then the term doesn't mean anything. "We don't surveil people, we just try to find out where they live and sell that data"
- gruez 1y ago
  If that's "surveillance capitalism", what's your opinion on databases that map phone numbers to locations? eg. when you get a phone call from 217-555-1234, and it shows "Springfield, IL"? Is that "surveillance capitalism"? That's basically all geoip databases are. Moreover there's plenty of non "surveillance capitalism" uses for geoip that make it questionable to call it "surveillance capitalism". Determining the region for a site, or automatically selecting the closest store, for instance. Before the advent of anycast CDNs, it was also basically the only way to route your visitors to the closest server.
  - TGower 1y ago
    Is there a single company out there making it's money selling access to an area code database? GeoIP databases are much higher resolution and use active scanning methods like ping timing. If a company was spam calling me to estimate distance based on call connection lag, yes that would be surveillance capitalism.
    - gruez 1y ago
      >Is there a single company out there making it's money selling access to an area code database? So if someone is making money off of it it's suddenly "surveillance capitalism"? What makes it more or less "surveillance capitalism" compared to aws selling cloudfront to some ad company? Moreover you can do better than area level code granularity. When landlines were more common and local number portability wasn't really a thing, can look at the CO number (second group) to figure out which town or neighborhood a phone number was from. Even if this was all information you could theoretically determine yourself, I'm sure there are companies that package up the data in a nice database for companies to use. In that case is that "surveillance capitalism"? Where's the "surveillance" aspect? It's not like you need to stalk anyone to figure out where a CO is located. That was just a property of the phone network. >GeoIP databases are much higher resolution and use active scanning methods like ping timing. If a company was spam calling me to estimate distance based on call connection lag, yes that would be surveillance capitalism. Why is the fact it's "active" or not a relevant factor in determining whether it's "surveillance capitalism" or not? Moreover spam calling people might be bad for other reasons, but it's not exactly "surveillance".
      - TGower 1y ago
        Surveillance definition "Systematic observation of places and people by visual, aural, electronic, photographic or other means." If you are pinging someone's IP to determine their physical location, you are engaged in a form of surveillance. If you have a copy of the table of area codes to city mapping, you are not engaged in surviellance. If you aren't trying to make money, you are not engaged in capitallism.
        gruez 1y ago
        >Surveillance definition "Systematic observation of places and people by visual, aural, electronic, photographic or other means." If you are pinging someone's IP to determine their physical location, you are engaged in a form of surveillance. Setting aside the problem with pinging home IPs (most home routers have ICMP echo requests disabled), your definition of "systematic observation" seems very flimsy. Is monitoring the global BGP routing table "systematic observation"? What about scraping RIR records? How is sending ICMP echo requests and observing the response times meaningfully similar to what google et al are doing? I doubt many people are upset about google "systematically observing"... the contents of books (for google books), or the layout of cities (for google maps, ignoring streetview). They're upset about google building dossiers on people. Observing the locations of groups of IP addresses (I'm not aware of any geoip products that can deanonymize specific IP addresses) seems very divorced from that, such that any attempts at equating the two because "systematic observation" is non-nonsensical.
lmm 1y ago
> Calling geoip databases "surveillance capitalism" seems like a stretch. It might be used by "surveillance capitalism", but you don't really have to surveil people to build a geoip database, only scrape RIR allocation records (all public, btw) and BGP routes, do ping tests, and parse geofeeds provided by providers. None of that is "surveillance capitalism" in any meaningful sense. How is it not? Most "normal" surveillance works the same way - you look up public records for the person you're going after, cross-reference them against each other somehow, and eventually find enough dirt on them or give up. This is surveillance, and it's being done by and in the interests of capitalism.

by gruez 1y ago

TGower 1y ago

If selling the physical location information of users isn't surveillance capatalism, then the term doesn't mean anything. "We don't surveil people, we just try to find out where they live and sell that data"

gruez 1y ago
If that's "surveillance capitalism", what's your opinion on databases that map phone numbers to locations? eg. when you get a phone call from 217-555-1234, and it shows "Springfield, IL"? Is that "surveillance capitalism"? That's basically all geoip databases are. Moreover there's plenty of non "surveillance capitalism" uses for geoip that make it questionable to call it "surveillance capitalism". Determining the region for a site, or automatically selecting the closest store, for instance. Before the advent of anycast CDNs, it was also basically the only way to route your visitors to the closest server.
- TGower 1y ago
  Is there a single company out there making it's money selling access to an area code database? GeoIP databases are much higher resolution and use active scanning methods like ping timing. If a company was spam calling me to estimate distance based on call connection lag, yes that would be surveillance capitalism.
  - gruez 1y ago
    >Is there a single company out there making it's money selling access to an area code database? So if someone is making money off of it it's suddenly "surveillance capitalism"? What makes it more or less "surveillance capitalism" compared to aws selling cloudfront to some ad company? Moreover you can do better than area level code granularity. When landlines were more common and local number portability wasn't really a thing, can look at the CO number (second group) to figure out which town or neighborhood a phone number was from. Even if this was all information you could theoretically determine yourself, I'm sure there are companies that package up the data in a nice database for companies to use. In that case is that "surveillance capitalism"? Where's the "surveillance" aspect? It's not like you need to stalk anyone to figure out where a CO is located. That was just a property of the phone network. >GeoIP databases are much higher resolution and use active scanning methods like ping timing. If a company was spam calling me to estimate distance based on call connection lag, yes that would be surveillance capitalism. Why is the fact it's "active" or not a relevant factor in determining whether it's "surveillance capitalism" or not? Moreover spam calling people might be bad for other reasons, but it's not exactly "surveillance".
    - TGower 1y ago
      Surveillance definition "Systematic observation of places and people by visual, aural, electronic, photographic or other means." If you are pinging someone's IP to determine their physical location, you are engaged in a form of surveillance. If you have a copy of the table of area codes to city mapping, you are not engaged in surviellance. If you aren't trying to make money, you are not engaged in capitallism.
      - gruez 1y ago
        >Surveillance definition "Systematic observation of places and people by visual, aural, electronic, photographic or other means." If you are pinging someone's IP to determine their physical location, you are engaged in a form of surveillance. Setting aside the problem with pinging home IPs (most home routers have ICMP echo requests disabled), your definition of "systematic observation" seems very flimsy. Is monitoring the global BGP routing table "systematic observation"? What about scraping RIR records? How is sending ICMP echo requests and observing the response times meaningfully similar to what google et al are doing? I doubt many people are upset about google "systematically observing"... the contents of books (for google books), or the layout of cities (for google maps, ignoring streetview). They're upset about google building dossiers on people. Observing the locations of groups of IP addresses (I'm not aware of any geoip products that can deanonymize specific IP addresses) seems very divorced from that, such that any attempts at equating the two because "systematic observation" is non-nonsensical.

lmm 1y ago

> Calling geoip databases "surveillance capitalism" seems like a stretch. It might be used by "surveillance capitalism", but you don't really have to surveil people to build a geoip database, only scrape RIR allocation records (all public, btw) and BGP routes, do ping tests, and parse geofeeds provided by providers. None of that is "surveillance capitalism" in any meaningful sense. How is it not? Most "normal" surveillance works the same way - you look up public records for the person you're going after, cross-reference them against each other somehow, and eventually find enough dirt on them or give up. This is surveillance, and it's being done by and in the interests of capitalism.