> It's just that all these devices and microchips have opened a way to trade on data that we'll never be able to regulate and control with 100% clarity and precision. So we're definitely gonna have to get more clever than just asking the government to ban them.
There's nothing fundamentally different about the technology in the last ~decade that has caused this trade to explode. Bandwidth, storage and compute have all gotten cheaper, but there's not much more that has actually technologically changed to cause this explosion.
What has changed is that companies now see this sort of data-gathering as a potential source of profit and have essentially never had to pay more than a fraction of the costs that they incur on society when this data is abused/leaked, etc.
If there was actual civil and criminal liability attached to negligence, misuse of user data, etc. then most of these problems would disappear pretty quickly. The reason why this hasn't already happened is almost certainly related to the immense amounts of money and influence that the data-gathers can wield on politicians.
A key part of any sort of effective regulation in this space would also require that breaches or misuses of data that didn't involve negligence were also heavily punished (similar to how some toxic waste spills are handled). This would create a powerful incentive for companies to just not collect the data in the first place unless there was a serious business need for it which justified the additional risk to the company.
I can't see that ever being popular here though given how entrenched online advertising $$$ is in SV/YC/HN...
One big thing has changed in the last ten years though - smartphones. Literal sponges for data that all non-technical people just trust with everything. Could you imagine something like this 15 years ago? With computers? No way - I still remember my boomer parents being afraid to even pull out a credit card in front of a computer.
I think a lot of people around here know how the sausage is made. But when you’re designing meat grinders you’re not gonna call attention to where the meat is coming from.
I think the way the wind is blowing is slowly changing direction though.
Yeah, I think we're both in agreement that things need to change.
Fundamentally though, I think that there will have to be a bigger catalyst for that change to happen and while I think people are slowly becoming more aware of how bullshit the "consent" argument for data gathering is, I don't think a general "uneasy feeling about doing things online" will actually be enough to push for useful regulatory fixes when it would require going against the incredibly large resources of the various data-mining (credit & insurance industries, etc.) and tech lobbies.
One thing I would say about smartphones is that I think that humanity would probably be in a far better place (in terms of individual privacy) if mobile networks were about 10 years behind where they are now in terms of spectral efficiency and per-bit energy requirements.
That would mean that you would have fairly ubiquitous powerful mobile hardware where there was a serious performance/battery penalty to just transmitting data up to some cloud service at all times of the day but you'd still have enough local compute and storage to do just about everything that people use their phone for today (with the exception of mobile video streaming).
It makes me think that one of the sparks for a more privacy-respecting system could be if mobile data became very unreliable/expensive but phone/OS/app developers knew that they had to actually deal with this and couldn't just ignore the lack of connectivity. Unfortunately, I can't think of any situations where that could be the case which wouldn't involve some sort of massive social upheaval (like a war or significant and widespread infrastructure damage) so I certainly wouldn't be hoping for such an event to be the catalyst.
There's nothing fundamentally different about the technology in the last ~decade that has caused this trade to explode. Bandwidth, storage and compute have all gotten cheaper, but there's not much more that has actually technologically changed to cause this explosion.
What has changed is that companies now see this sort of data-gathering as a potential source of profit and have essentially never had to pay more than a fraction of the costs that they incur on society when this data is abused/leaked, etc.
If there was actual civil and criminal liability attached to negligence, misuse of user data, etc. then most of these problems would disappear pretty quickly. The reason why this hasn't already happened is almost certainly related to the immense amounts of money and influence that the data-gathers can wield on politicians.
A key part of any sort of effective regulation in this space would also require that breaches or misuses of data that didn't involve negligence were also heavily punished (similar to how some toxic waste spills are handled). This would create a powerful incentive for companies to just not collect the data in the first place unless there was a serious business need for it which justified the additional risk to the company.
I can't see that ever being popular here though given how entrenched online advertising $$$ is in SV/YC/HN...