chopin24

Thanks for the recommendation on The Transparent Society. I haven't read it, but certainly will.

The idea that the surveillance tools are "put in the hands of masses" neglects the part where the "masses" includes corporations that do it better, because they have the ability to pay handsomely thousands of people to make it effective. So rather than accept the defeatist position -- "We are powerless to stop technology," even though surveillance capitalism is a choice, and one that we don't have to accept -- we can choose meaningful laws which restrict those actions. We can choose meaningful laws which change the economic imperatives so that corporations don't profit from tracking and shaping human behavior. Will it be perfect? Absolutely not. Is defeat inevitable? Perhaps. But sitting on the sidelines and choosing not to shape that future because of some sense of foregone inevitability.... that cannot be the future, unless we believe that those now with the ability to shape it (and someone will -- Google, Facebook, or someone else) deserve to have that right without being challenged.

I cannot accept that. I will not be gaslit into believing that I'm 'too concerned' or 'reading too much into it'. This does not have to be our future.

I don't have any expectations for how they will address their transgressions. They don't have a right to my personal data, don't have a right to track me, don't have a right to sell my attention to modify my behavior. People who are the target of their data collection -- which includes users and innocent bystanders -- are victims, and we don't expect victims to come up with performance improvement plans for their abusers.

That Google’s management is so unaware of their data collection software that they allowed engineers to drive around spying on people for three years does not inspire trust. Incompetence or malice is besides the point. Google did not take responsibility for the error, and in fact stonewalled Congress for more than a year when it was investigated.

Not saying you are one such person, or that you are doing so intentionally, but this argument is a clever sleight of hand employed by surveillance capitalists and their apologists to deflect attention away from the real issue: that thousands of well-paid, highly intelligent engineers devote 40+ hours a week to coming up with ways to influence your behavior.

“Selling personal data” — as if your particular affinity for left handed baseball gloves were of special interest to large corporations — is a red herring. Let’s stop perpetuating it.

I'm happy that HN has accepted a change in the article's title, which appears as "Google says it may have found a privacy-friendly substitute to cookies." This terminology -- "found" -- has been used by Google and others to imply that their capture of behavioral "exhaust" is somehow a natural phenomenon, rather than a conscious, deliberate, profit-driven choice. Google didn't "find" a substitute. They are developing it because they are getting pushback from users and companies who object to their tracking methods and they're desperate to find something that convinces users they've Really Changed This Time.

Don't fall for it. Break up with Google. They are abusive.

You should read “ IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation.” It’s not either/or, it’s both/and.

This fucking matters. Letting corporations off the hook because they were just following orders enables genocide.

How do you run A/B to prove this hypothesis?

Don’t worry. I already gave up on the sign-up flow when I entered my preferred username and password, then tapped register in the top right corner, only to be confronted with a prompt to —- again enter a username and password of my choice.

I would have to spend hours getting my family signed up for this thing.

You pose this as centralization vs decentralization. This is actually Facebook vs Open Source, and for every feature that isn’t at parity with the existing solution, you lose users.

Is now the time to be dogmatic about decentralization?

The first launch on iPhone asks me if I want to share my contacts, and then outlines a massive paragraph explaining something about identity servers that I’m expected to choose.

This is a friction-filled experience for someone coming from WhatsApp

I tapped this link on my iPhone. There’s nothing that says create account. It says I have to download an app called Element. But you said it was called Matrix.

This is the level of technical ability that you need to be targeting.