kaxline

That question is what I'm struggling with. My current explanation is that Evolution doesn't even care about itself. If it becomes more adaptable to leave its clutches, then it will push in that direction. It all depends on the environment to which we are adapting. So if the environment changes to value thinking that is anti-Evolution, Evolution will still reward that drift ...

Am I making sense? I honestly can't tell.

Not sure how much interest there is in this, but you can AMA here as well.

That's a good point. I think it's hard to definitively know the best way to resolve issues like this without an actual platform to test it on.

One point that I wasn't able to fit into the article is that this idea isn't a homerun. There are lots of difficult things to figure out. I just think that it's hard to find a problem more deserving of solving, and right now we have our best minds solving the problem of how to spy on people better instead.

If an algorithm is not scanning the contents of your emails, and potentially leaking/saving their entire contents outside your account, isn't that more private by definition?

That's pretty crazy to hear. Is that public knowledge? What's being routed to NSA clusters? All content such as emails?

Nothing's wrong with the free tiers, but for many people the average storage would put them into a paid plan after a while so I don't really consider these free in the same way.

My thinking is that you just don't know what will be important to you in the future. Those photos probably weren't that important to you when they were first taken, but now they are. I would advise that everyone store even the seemingly most trivial piece of data. There could be an algorithm in the future for which that is the missing key. I trust in our inability to predict the future more than our ability to predict it.

Yes, but there's something about the lack of knowledge on the part of many software users that makes the consent portion debatable. That, and there's no other way to pay to use a service that you want to use.

Understood. Any alternative ideas?

Yes, I've been thinking about this. I still think the focus should be on individual ownership, because then that individual could opt-in to a bundled data purchase. Their cut would be small, but maybe it's automated so you get a lot of small payments without doing anything. I think you need to leave the door open for an individual's data having stand alone value though, like a unique mutation in their genes that cures cancer.

You bring up some good points and I don't have an answer for how data ownership would affect every industry or product category.

On the $10/month figure, I would point out that this is likely per data silo. So Facebook's data on you may be around $10/month, but also Google's, which is a different data set. And so on. It's not much money now because it's only available to advertisers who want to buy ads on a specific platform.

If you owned and controlled your data, you may have 100 different buyers at $10/mo, ranging from medical researchers to product marketers, which starts adding up. I don't have figures to back this up, but my intuition is that all the data we've been creating for decades will only have more and more value as we try to feed our machine learning algorithms with more data, to get more insights.

I sort of agree with this. I'm cynical that the genie can be put back in the bottle. I also think for a certain crowd whose support you'll need for any changes along these lines, the term "freedom of speech" has become politicized too much. I'm not sure it's an ideal that we can still rally around as a country.

What we seem to be able to rally around is money. And I think once people realize they're sitting on some real monetary value, they'll be galvanized to pursue some of the things we hope to get with privacy advocacy.

These are great things to point out and part of why I started this blog. I knew there were smarter people out there that would think of all the things I'm not thinking of.

The burden is something I worry about myself, but I imagine smart people could solve this or automate it. Perhaps I have a profile of any types of requests that I automatically approve, so I only get notifications on the outliers.

Also, I think it changes the annoyance level when there's real money on the other side of it. If 2 minutes gets me $10, that's probably a trade most people would make over and over again. I don't know if the numbers will end up being that good, worse, or better, but I think it's worth exploring.

People don't avoid investing in stocks or a house because of all the administration involved. They're happy to put in the work because the gains are worth it.

Good points, thanks for reading even though you disagree.

In my mind data ownership makes the arguments against those questions stronger. They can't track your location because you didn't give them permission. Right now we have the situation where they do track your location, or could if they wanted to, with no real legal fallout. If they were clearly stealing this data in the eyes of the law, that would give more teeth in court. And it would give standing to those outside of existing cases to bring law suits based purely on this theft. It would be like if the FBI used your house to spy on your neighbors without telling you.

The idea that you could prevent them from collecting it in the first place is perhaps an ideal I agree with, but I can't see how that would happen. Even the most tech savvy people leak data left and right. And it's easier and easier to infer insights from less and less data. This might be more of a reality on a decentralized web, but isn't it a waste to just throw away that data that you're keeping from potential spies? Why not at least be given the chance to monetize it if you so choose.

And about keeping stuff from Facebook. People obviously want to use social networks, probably with varying degrees of openness and sharing. Shouldn't they be able to use a service like that knowing that if anyone uses their data, it's akin to property theft? Enforcement is another issue, but if we're talking about ideals, I think privacy is a subset of data ownership, and in the form I'm thinking of it, it would only add value to any of privacy's goals, not take away.

I agree with you in principle, but then we're giving up the redundancy and safety offered by multiple data centers. The cost also comes down at cloud scale so that you're only paying a few dollars a month instead of large up front purchases.

There's also a technical hurtle for the average person. Are they going to manually sync all their data from devices every time?

There are types of situations where I think it gets really blurry and complicated, but I think we need to start with things that we intuitively feel like we own, like DNA, or the 3D map of our face. Then as we move out into grayer territory we can rely on precedent, social norms, or consensus to draw lines where needed.

Yes, it's imperfect for sure, but I'm trying to get people who don't think about these things to understand how the thefts is analogous to physical items we value. Data has its own unique properties so any physical metaphor or analogy is going to fail pretty quick. Tried to keep it simple to make the point.

There were a lot of questions about VPNs in response to this post, so I addressed them here: https://thetoolsweneed.com/one-sorta-simple-way-to-vastly-im...

Great points, thanks for posting. I'll try to incorporate this nuance in future posts.

I'm thinking more of media sites that rely on ad dollars to pay the bills. Unless they have a direct subscription option or other way to pay for the service, you're eating into their bottom line. The real world analog would be newspapers and the ads they run.

Mobile isn't so bad! No complaints so far after about a month.

Yeah, I wrestled with including this step, but I wanted to keep it mostly straightforward for relatively non-technical users. I have a different network level ad blocker and love it.

I recommended Firefox mostly because it's been around longer and people have probably heard of it. For your average person, the steps in this article are already asking a lot so I wanted to keep things as familiar as possible. Even if someone doesn't use Firefox currently, they've probably heard of it, and that decreases the friction of taking actions to switch.

while i don't disagree with holman's statements, i do think he misses the point. for me, trunk's article was about how the statement 'women should work at startups' is patronizing because it implies that they are less capable of making that decision for themselves than men.

advocating for a more equal distribution of startup awareness and technical training across demographics is a separate issue and i think holman and some of the commenters are confusing trunk's message as a denial of that. this is why her analogy of saying men should stay home and raise children is so apt. if they wanted to, they would. they don't need anyone's help or special attention to make sure they know all the opportunities for them in the stay-at-home-dad scene so that we have an equal number of men and women at home raising kids. maybe to some degree it's ok that different parts of society are skewed towards one gender or another since men and women are different.

we don't need to go around forcing our utopian vision of equality on systems as long as everyone has the opportunity to make the choice for themselves. whether or not women have that opportunity is a separate question. i think a lot of women do and it can be a slight to suggest otherwise based solely on their gender.