7 ms·

Or, and hear me out, _maybe our computers shouldn't spy on us in the first place_?

jachee 7mo ago
“Impossible to get a man to understand a thing, when his paycheck depends on his not understanding it.”
ToucanLoucan 7mo ago
I'm reminded of a video essay I watched about AI once, which took a side tangent into surveillance capitalism: "Google's data harvesting operation became a load bearing piece of the Internet before the public understood digital privacy. And now we can't get rid of it." The public has been conditioned to expect web services free at point of use. Legitimately it's hard to monetize things like YouTube without ads, and I get that. But turning our entire ecosystem of tech into a massive surveillance mini-state seems like an astonishingly shitty idea compared to just... finding a way to do advertising that DOESN'T involve 30 shadowy ad companies knowing your resting blood pressure. My otherwise creative and amazing industry seems utterly unwilling to confront this. Edit: Like, I don't know, am I crazy for thinking that simply because we can target ads this granularity, that it simply must be that? I get that the ad-tech companies do not want to go back to blind-firing ads into the digital ether on the hope that they'll be seen, but that's also plus or minus the entirety of the history of advertising as an industry, with the last 20 or so years being a weird blip where you could show your add to INCREDIBLY specific demographics. And I wouldn't give a shit except the tech permitting those functions seems to be socially corrosive and is requiring even further erosion of already pretty porous user privacy to keep being legally tenable.
- adi_kurian 7mo ago
  You are not crazy for thinking that. However it appears that it takes pretty disasterous consequences for us to be able to walk anything back.
- halfcat 7mo ago
  Society won’t delay reward now for future good on its own. Even if one person will, there’s a line of people who will step in to pollute the lake or kill the whales for a bag of money. It will just decay until it’s a short squeeze into oligarchy or worse (the corrupt will be forced into an arms race of accelerating corruption as opportunity becomes scarce). Then some other country who isn’t leaving it up to their society to do the right thing will be in charge. Until the same happens to them. This is the value of religion historically, one of the few ways of coercing a population into doing the right thing for their own good. But every group can be spoiled or hijacked by a small handful of bad actors who are willing to do what others are not.
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
Dylan16807 7mo ago
So which situation do you want instead of anonymous age verification: A) 18+ content is behind a pinky swear B) 18+ content is behind a parental control (what this bill would do) C) The internet can't have 18+ content anymore D) Some other system? Please describe it.
- roenxi 7mo ago
  Does "the government doesn't get to decide what people can look at on the internet" count as C or D to you? It is the situation we've been in technically for 20 years now anyway; the world hasn't ended and it generally seems to be pretty workable. The status quo isn't an especially radical one.
  - fcarraldo 7mo ago
    20 years ago was only 2006. The internet has been around for much longer. The first consumer focused ISPs launched in the early 90’s, 35 years ago, but CompuServe and others were providing access to chat and BBS’s in the 80s. I’d say nearly 50 years is precedent enough that government intervention is unnecessary.
    - roenxi 7mo ago
      Yeah but most people weren't on the internet access in the early 90s. It is more a 2005+ phenomenon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Internet_usage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Internet_usage
- ekidd 7mo ago
  (A), honestly. You might think you can keep 16 year olds from looking at porn, if they want to. You can't. You have never been able to. All you can do is teach them that the law is stupid and pointless, and they should treat rules with contempt. But they'll still be able to look at porn. What you can do is allow the government and private companies to track everyone, everywhere, all the time. And you can create more gatekeepers that hold personal identity data, misuse it, and leak it.
gloosx 7mo ago
It's not the gun that kills. It's not the computer that spies.
xtiansimon 7mo ago
Once you force OS to communicate data about the user, here we’re talking age, is it a slippery slope? Once the architecture is created, why not put other things about you in there?
dadysgirl1 7mo ago
Agreed! We shouldn't be because wouldn't we go to jail for shit like that if it were you or I?

“Impossible to get a man to understand a thing, when his paycheck depends on his not understanding it.”

I'm reminded of a video essay I watched about AI once, which took a side tangent into surveillance capitalism: "Google's data harvesting operation became a load bearing piece of the Internet before the public understood digital privacy. And now we can't get rid of it." The public has been conditioned to expect web services free at point of use. Legitimately it's hard to monetize things like YouTube without ads, and I get that. But turning our entire ecosystem of tech into a massive surveillance mini-state seems like an astonishingly shitty idea compared to just... finding a way to do advertising that DOESN'T involve 30 shadowy ad companies knowing your resting blood pressure. My otherwise creative and amazing industry seems utterly unwilling to confront this. Edit: Like, I don't know, am I crazy for thinking that simply because we can target ads this granularity, that it simply must be that? I get that the ad-tech companies do not want to go back to blind-firing ads into the digital ether on the hope that they'll be seen, but that's also plus or minus the entirety of the history of advertising as an industry, with the last 20 or so years being a weird blip where you could show your add to INCREDIBLY specific demographics. And I wouldn't give a shit except the tech permitting those functions seems to be socially corrosive and is requiring even further erosion of already pretty porous user privacy to keep being legally tenable.

adi_kurian 7mo ago
You are not crazy for thinking that. However it appears that it takes pretty disasterous consequences for us to be able to walk anything back.
halfcat 7mo ago
Society won’t delay reward now for future good on its own. Even if one person will, there’s a line of people who will step in to pollute the lake or kill the whales for a bag of money. It will just decay until it’s a short squeeze into oligarchy or worse (the corrupt will be forced into an arms race of accelerating corruption as opportunity becomes scarce). Then some other country who isn’t leaving it up to their society to do the right thing will be in charge. Until the same happens to them. This is the value of religion historically, one of the few ways of coercing a population into doing the right thing for their own good. But every group can be spoiled or hijacked by a small handful of bad actors who are willing to do what others are not.

deleted 7mo ago

[deleted]

Dylan16807 7mo ago

So which situation do you want instead of anonymous age verification: A) 18+ content is behind a pinky swear B) 18+ content is behind a parental control (what this bill would do) C) The internet can't have 18+ content anymore D) Some other system? Please describe it.

roenxi 7mo ago
Does "the government doesn't get to decide what people can look at on the internet" count as C or D to you? It is the situation we've been in technically for 20 years now anyway; the world hasn't ended and it generally seems to be pretty workable. The status quo isn't an especially radical one.
- fcarraldo 7mo ago
  20 years ago was only 2006. The internet has been around for much longer. The first consumer focused ISPs launched in the early 90’s, 35 years ago, but CompuServe and others were providing access to chat and BBS’s in the 80s. I’d say nearly 50 years is precedent enough that government intervention is unnecessary.
  - roenxi 7mo ago
    Yeah but most people weren't on the internet access in the early 90s. It is more a 2005+ phenomenon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Internet_usage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Internet_usage
ekidd 7mo ago
(A), honestly. You might think you can keep 16 year olds from looking at porn, if they want to. You can't. You have never been able to. All you can do is teach them that the law is stupid and pointless, and they should treat rules with contempt. But they'll still be able to look at porn. What you can do is allow the government and private companies to track everyone, everywhere, all the time. And you can create more gatekeepers that hold personal identity data, misuse it, and leak it.

gloosx 7mo ago

It's not the gun that kills. It's not the computer that spies.

xtiansimon 7mo ago

Once you force OS to communicate data about the user, here we’re talking age, is it a slippery slope? Once the architecture is created, why not put other things about you in there?

dadysgirl1 7mo ago

Agreed! We shouldn't be because wouldn't we go to jail for shit like that if it were you or I?