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 not comfortable assuming the best intentions from a $1.2T company whose business model relies on tracking my behavior. They burned that bridge after the war-driving "Wi-Spy" scandal, which went on from 2007-2010. [0].

It's clear that Google sees a threat to their business model, and they'll use any PR-friendly language they can to convince people that they're addressing the user concerns. Just like they did in 2010, when they ascribed their willful malfeasance to a "rogue engineer" who they then put in charge of StreetView.

If I'm "reading too much into it" it's because we collectively haven't been reading enough into it for the past 15 or so years, and in that time our Overton window has shifted too far.

[0]https://www.theregister.com/2019/07/23/google_wispy_payout/

Let's dispense with this fiction, once and for all, that "targeted" or "customized" advertisements were ever for the users' benefit. They are, and always have been, for the benefit of Google and the advertisers. Google wants you to believe that advertisements are an inevitable, unavoidable feature of the web, despite the fact that they didn't want to be in this business when they started the company. They even go so far as to tug at your heart strings to and say how "hard" they work to make sure their product is "safe, unobtrusive, and as relevant as possible," implying that capturing your attention to part you from your money effectively is the ideal outcome. [0]

This is gaslighting. Interest-based advertising on the web is not an immutable feature, a naturally occurring phenomenon. It's a scourge invented to further surveillance capitalism and it must be abolished.

All this is to say, I'd change your letter to say:

Dear Advertisers:

Stop tracking me or I'll block you entirely at every turn. Your business model does not concern me. My attention is not for sale. Change, or be regulated out of business.

[0]https://policies.google.com/technologies/ads?hl=en-US

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.

Right. But one of these is secure and the other isn’t. State action against telegram is eminent.

For all of you saying we should switch to Matrix, please outline the user sign up flow in your comment. Be detailed. Your audience is your 50 something aunt who calls her iPad her Facebook.

Telegram is insecure and also being swamped with right wingers. Doesn’t seem promising.

This theory implies a level of coordination and agreement that the US Government is simply not capable of. The group most interested in such backups (intelligence) does not coordinate with the regulatory committees, and even if they did such an agreement wouldn’t be disclosable to the public and wouldn’t hold up if demands for regulation got hot.

The most likely reason we haven’t seen antitrust action is more boring: it’s hard, our politicians are old and don’t even use email, and they’ve been consumed with more pressing matters.

(2020)

Thanks, this works! It fails when one video isn't found, but gets 60% of the way there. I'll see if I can exclude that one and get it to keep going

Any tips on easily making an offline copy of these? I'm afraid by the time I started some of these would go dark.

Have we really seen the power return to the people because of social media? That was the theory during, e.g., The Arab Spring. But, it doesn't seem like it's held. It feels like the old guard has taken over social media and used it to their ends, putting us back where we started.

The belief that free speech must have limits is necessarily equivalent with the belief that a large part of the people are stupid and they must be protected by the smart people by preventing them to hear anything that might influence their feeble minds and make them act in a wrong way.

You're leaving out some very well-established restrictions on free speech, including slander, libel, copyright infringement, obscenity, privacy violation... in short, absolutism hasn't been a prevailing philosophy for centuries. This sudden resurgence of it feels like a refusal to engage with the very real, very difficult debate on what speech deserves censorship.

It doesn't have anything at all to do with intelligence, but the observed consequences of certain kinds of speech. Lies, for example, that manipulate peoples' emotions. This is not unique to "stupid people."

Perhaps there's a middle way, something I've been experimenting with myself personally when it comes to digital devices: A digital Sabbath. Don't call it that of course, since it has religious connotation, but instead just... Turn Twitter off 1 day a week. Doesn't even have to be the weekend. Just close up shop on Tuesdays, give everyone a break.

We long ago learned that you can't be 'on' 24/7, yet we let ourselves fall into it with digital media/social networks.

worse without it

Why do you think so?

I'm with you. I care about free speech. I care about the implications of censorship. But I'm also just tired of it all. If (for example) banning Trump from Twitter means we stop having entire articles and public radio pieces devoted to talking about them... it's hard for me to fight that.

It is hard to craft rules that allow everything without leaving a site unusable

Does government cheese have to be tasty? The point is to provide the public square, in all its public square glory. If you want something slick and curated, you're going to have to give up some rights.

There's already a law that says advertising messages have to be labelled as such (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAN-SPAM_Act_of_2003). Shouldn't be too challenging. Is anyone really going to violate the law on a government website?

I was thinking publicsquare.gov, but this is a good one too.

Spam can be blocked, though, right? Edit: To address the commenter below, Congress has addressed spam before, in the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003.

Post needs a title change to match the original article.

But, the op-ed is spot on. The government is inducing tech companies to do what they can't do legally, and this started with the "elective affinity" between the CIA and Google starting post-9/11, which kicked off a whole host of data collection that the CIA couldn't do itself, but can get very easily from Google and others.

I'm beginning to think the only solution is a "public option" social network moderated by these out of work folks, similar to the CCP's 五毛黨, except with the rule of law. That way, these private corporations can go about censoring whoever they want, and there'll always be the public square moderated with the actual laws of the land.