throwaway1959

You may be right. The facial recognition does seem to interact with the 4th amendment, at least. But then it happens in the public place? I don't know the answer to that one. I fear that in the age of social media and Antifa, the protections that we had before are no longer enough. Now we have additional actors on the streets who may turn to physical violence on a dime. I feel that the streets should be free from physical violence.

My instinct for self-preservation tells me that this is not a good thing. I understand the need for privacy, but what happens if somebody puts a gun (or a knife) to your face? I think that the need for privacy could be solved through the legislation: we can have very severe restrictions on who could look at this data and why. Also, we can have severe restrictions on the admissibility of such data in court. Unfortunately, I have not seen any credible efforts from politicians, right or left, to introduce privacy protections from the surveillance abuses.

Should we be worried about the future of JetBrains' products? I love their IDEs, especially PyCharm and CLion, but when the "woke" comes in, the competency seems to go out the door next, although it takes a few extra years. What would be the reason for doing this? Especially by the Russian team out of Prague?

I think this is a prime example of the "narrative engineering" done by Facebook. Before, the narrative was supposed to be X (e.g. no Wuhan leak) and now it's Y (it's Ok to think/talk about Wuhan leak). Who controls the narrative? We don't know, but presumably special interest groups with direct influence over Facebook senior management?

The study I cite was published in Sep 2016, so it predates Trump.

Of course not. I am not actually sure how to solve this problem. I think a good start would be to move back towards encouraging freedom of speech on campus and dialog between people with different opinions.

I fully support the concerns that the author brings up. It's a big problem and we need to figure out how to address it. At the same time, I can't help but notice that this is coming from the ACM itself. The credibility of ACM has really tanked in my eyes in the last 2 - 3 years. Communications of the ACM magazine is full of articles that belong to the "social engineering magazine" and not to the Computer Science publication. Last time I was renewing my membership, I had to sign some kind of a pledge "not to harass people". Are you kidding me? What are we, 12? Because of that, while it's a very important issue, I am very distracted thinking about ACM itself. I guess this is a lesson that reputation and credibility is important. Once you lose it, everything you say, even if it's truly good, gets colored in a certain way.

Maybe I am too cynical, but I think in Google's case, the difference between targeting based on data and having the data will be several extra zeros in their price point.

Just to make sure: this protects you from your co-worker/spouse looking at your search history at your desk/device. The advertisers and corporations can freely purchase your search history from Google. It does not seem like a significant step towards privacy to me.