Yes, because private companies don't "loot" whatsoever. They definitely don't respond to accusations of obviously unethical and damaging but legal behaviour with "but it's legal!(continues looting)".
Doesn't government suck because our best and brightest often do not choose to work in government? Isn't that what we should really change?
Are they really though? I know a lot of some people, who would consider themselves "well meaning" (fair, honest, just, whatever) and they totally do this all the time.
When you combine the actually bad people with those people, isn't 30-40% of the population constantly fucking with the system?
See also: Democracy. App store reviews. The soundscape. Climate change. Etc.
I'd guess about 99% are basically ok with reviews. The trouble is if only 5% of those bother reviewing and 1% of the bad ones post a bunch of fakes.
Incidentally I use argos.co.uk a bit and have found the reviews there always ok so far. Maybe Argos polices it or that crowd doesn't bother faking? It's different from Amazon in that there are no independent sellers so the only people motivated to fake would be the manufacturers.
I think it only becomes a problem when the system gets big enough. If there's 20 different online storefronts, it's a lot more time and effort to game the reviews on all of them, than if there's only Amazon.
Isn't that a cop out argument? Just make it outright illegal and fine heavily per violation. You have profile information that a user didn't explicitly give you? $10k fine, each.
We have (kinda) world wide copyright laws. We have world wide drug laws. We have world wide sea and war laws. Why don't we have world wide privacy laws?
The Internet makes trying to enforce world wide privacy laws much harder than physical laws: anyone in the world can reach you and collect data about you.
> Just make it outright illegal and fine heavily per violation. You have profile information that a user didn't explicitly give you? $10k fine, each.
How do you propose to discover violations? Self-reporting won't ever happen. If you then propose to give draconian sanctions to trying to cover up such issues, congratulations, you've killed the ability of people to build anything and share it with the world.
I would happily pay for all of the services I use. The problem is that that isn't enough for them and it would still be an capitalistic greed anti-consumer shit show.
If I pay I want: No ads, no tracking, full access to my own data in sane export formats, schemas, no data mining, no data selling, no "sharing data with our partners", encryption options, no dumb hoops, no dark patterns, the ability to point a product at an API endpoint of my choosing, backup options that default to my infrastructure first and so on.
Actually let's add more: The data generated by my use of my data in the product. Non-canned support responses that don't ask for information I literally put in the ticket three weeks ago. Prominent indication of where (geographically and legally) data is stored and used. If/how often you do backups. If/how often you practice disaster recovery.
So really what I want to pay for is sanity and no bullshit.
Yet if I do pay, many services and companies will still do all of this shit in the background until midnight the day it's finally made illegal, all the while gaslighting me about "how much they value me as a customer" and how they "respect" our "relationship".
Yeah if you pay then they'll have strong identities linked to the accounts in addition to the tracking. Free services that can be accessed without a log in on the other hand have to correlate all the data. They are quite good at it, but not perfect.
Of course, the fact that you were subscribed was known to them, but which articles you read in your paper copy of the new york times they didn't know, unless you specifically told them. Nowadays the Reddit redesign tracks your mouse movements, Netflix when you pause a video, and Amazon which page of the book you are reading. I don't want any of this tracking for myself. I have no problem with people opting in, but don't make this tracking inescapable.
A tracking free format would involve in you downloading the entire newspaper issue, then reading inside in ways of your own choosing.
These companies still participate in advertising. All of these brands include the company logo and usually try to differentiate their design so that you, as the consumer, are a walking billboard for them. Beyond that, you can be assured that they collect any data on the consumer that they can. What they do with that data is out of the consumer's eyes.
It is also worth noting that there is plenty of advertising in Apple products. Heck, the last time I used one they had at least two digital storefronts built in. They may not be as crass as Microsoft is (e.g. with the use of the Start Menu), but it is data driven. Whether the advertising is plastered everywhere or not simply reflects the target market, rather than how they collect and use data.
I think including advertisements to have logo brands or linked purchase options is a bit of a disingenuous generalization, it's not what we're talking about with "advertising" in this context.
Yes, you are promoting Apple products if you carry around a Macbook with its logo, but you aren't being advertized to. The built-in stores might just barely meet the definition, but it is very different from a random ad during a TV show or on your desktop.
Yup. I was very disappointed to discover that with the purchase of my
My iPhone, the Settings app, the damn settings app, had ads plastered at the top of it. Two of them trying to sell me subscriptions to Apple Arcade and TV+. I’m very disappointed that, like every other garbage company, they’ve decided to subvert their own customers by following wherever the eyeballs go and sticking ads there.
They’re also not _settings_. They are unwelcome clutter that are not there to make my device serve me better while I go about my life. Just send me a marketing email so that I can mark it as spam.
What? Since when does a Hyundai car, Windows computers or Seiko watches have ads? Those are not the categories of things where ads are tolerated.
That's not what the previous commenter was talking about at all.
Some platforms and services have been selling "no ads" as a feature. Say Apple or YouTube Premium or 100s of 1000s of applications on Android. This does not mean they'll never open up to ads in the future. Maybe a future "premium value" will just be "fewer ads". And when they do, they're more likely to generate sales because they're customers who are already paying for premium services.
Have you ever looked at a fresh Windows 10 home install? It's full of ads. [1]
The argument says "the more you spend the more you are worth to advertisers, thus eventually you will see ads". It doesn't add, "there are some categories of products for which ads aren't tolerated but for all the others this holds"
There's more than enough examples anyway where cheaper options have ads and more expensive ones don't, like airplanes or restaurants and bars.
Maybe one day these things will be standard. We have to convince the mainstream these are goals worth pursuing... As long as most people accept how shit the status quo is, it won't improve.
The game is rigged, though. Mainstream is not in a position to say anything against the kind of crap modern technology is full of - and those who speak up anyway get labeled as "whiny".
FWIW, I also share the GP's wishlist 100%. But we're a niche in our own industry these days. I'm not having hopes the market will deliver - on the contrary, all these points are things for unscrupulous vendors to control to extract more profit.
So one of the things that bugs the crap out of me is hearing programmers complain about features or bugs in open source software while doing nothing.
Like, I know it's a lot of work to jump into a codebase and make a change and that some projects are a pain to work with, etc etc, but still. This is what OSS is supposed to fix, and we're exactly the demographic who is supposed to be able to contribute.
Obviously, the above is even a bigger lift, but at the same time -- if a community of online hackers, many skilled, many experienced, many damn near independently wealthy from decades at FAAMGs, can't build an Internet 3.0 to fix the Internet 2.0 we all got rich building on top of Internet 1.0, who is supposed to?
This is the least efficient answer. A more efficient answer is an independent entity that simply has the public trust and the capability to verify such claims. I can imagine a non-profit that pulls this off, if the will to execute were there.
Why is the idea of government regulation of fitness for purpose the "least efficient" answer. That's one of the primary purposes of governments, to ensure the quality and safety of what citizens consume and how it is delivered.
Otherwise, why are there regulators for advertising or for food or government standards for anything?
I'm not talking about censorship or somehow evaluating the quality of content, I'm talking about if a company is delivering a service and I am paying for it, then the conditions under which they deliver that service should be regulated to ensure a fair and competitive marketplace.
Apple shouldn't be getting plaudits for making privacy a unique selling proposition.
All the other companies should be getting told that their business is unfair and exploitative. Privacy should be a right, the control of my personal information should be mine and consent to have it should be able to be withdrawn at any time.
> Why is the idea of government regulation of fitness for purpose the "least efficient" answer.
Government requires thousands (literally) of people and political will in order to move any solution forward. In terms of cost and time, it is substantially less efficient than independent entities.
An independent entity could theoretically start immediately, with a small team, and focus explicitly on the stated goals of the team.
> Apple shouldn't be getting plaudits for making privacy a unique selling proposition.
Absolutely agree. The average citizen has no idea how hard they're being exploited.
> Privacy should be a right, the control of my personal information should be mine and consent to have it should be able to be withdrawn at any time.
Also agree, but the government has shown they have an interest in making that not happen. The ties between 3 letter agencies and large tech companies are just the tip of that iceberg.
EU government might be trustworthy enough to run an institution like this. US definitely isn't.
In the UK the soil association is a private charity which mostly decides which food is "organic" and which food is not and it does a pretty good job. In the US, the USDA decides whether you can call your food organic and from what I understand it's kind of meaningless.
> Given that this is one of the primary purposes of governments, what do you suppose has been keeping them from stepping in so far?
Businesses are much faster at inventing ways to abuse people than governments are to regulate them away, even if we ignore lobbying and corruption.
Such a hypothetical organization we seek needs to be both swift and impactful. This automatically suggests some ties to government, as it's the best way to fulfill the criterion of impact. Not sure how to handle the "swift" part, though. Can't do it through regular market mechanisms, because ultimately price trumps all on mass market. The government reacts slowly for (among others) a good reason - while an unscrupulous businessman needs to invent just one weird trick, the government regulates away whole classes of tricks by default, and they need to take care to not outlaw perfectly legit new ideas.
> The formation of something new, and independent, means it would also be less susceptible to corruption.
"independent" is doing a lot of work here. Government regulators are, at least in theory, independent because they're paid from taxes collected, and have no incentive . What mechanism is supposed to keep the new 'independent' entity, actually independent?
I can think of a few mechanisms that work but they all go after the money. It can be direct (betray the public trust, don't get donations) or indirect (betray the public trust and lose the beneficiary status on the trust that the government dumps your budget into...)
How it's designed is important, but even under the most elaborate schemes it would be less costly and human resource intensive than having the government directly take charge of it.
It's not that a private entity can't do it - I largely trust the TÜVs and UL and other NRTLs for example. It's that most auditors - especially once you leave the "ship a physical product with verifiable physical properties" sector - instead look like E&Y, which I trust less than most of the companies they have audited.
You eventually need to have someone who will be substantially at risk if the audit is insufficient - "skin in the game" to use the modern idiom - controlling the audit. In the case of UL that's insurances companies (which are highly regulated by... the government), for other NRTLs it's the government directly.
A search engine which only lists sites which adhere to a set of rules / quality standards is the only answer I see here. The question is would people use it? I don't think so. They won't even use DuckDuckGo and similar which attempts to address the issue for themselves but at the same time provide a complete index. Not enough care / awareness.
I have a product that does of what you ask, e.g., no ads, no tracking, no "Dear valued customer".
Unfortunately:
- competitors use revenue from ads, tracking, selling data to their advantage and undercut your value based on price.
- and free users love free stuff. I had a user ask me to include ads in exchange for paid features.
- and yet people still distrust you. Once I proudly posted a new feature to Show HK and the first response was "How does this post not qualify as 'spam'?". Some people automatically think you're a bad guy since you sell something.
- without advertising, how do you get the word out?
I rely on word-of-mouth, since it carries much trust, and news articles. This means it's a slow game.
It is very hard to find mutual respect (both ways) between user and maker. Most relationships start with distrust or "what is in it for me".
Randomly saw this comment & your profile and just wanted to say hello and well done on the app.
I recently started a historical time-series weather data api based on ERA5/GFS and your story really resonated with me. Similarly, I don't come from weather background and initially built it for my work with building energy analysis, with service live but still at an extremely early stage.
If I may add: stopping the payment should be as easy as it is to start it. Not "call us at this number in this time frame and jump through multiple hoops that we've set up to try to convince you to keep paying".
You're going to leave security, data integrity and privacy compliance up to random unaccountable anonymous strangers on the Internet who self-host?
You're going to trust them to have proper backups, proper disaster recovery, proper resiliency and scalability?
What you're describing works for small-time stuff like blogs, personal projects or other inconsequential things, but anything at the scale of Goodreads, where users are trusting years of data to someone just can't be hosted by random people.
I'm not saying I have the answer but "people should self-host this kind of thing on their Internet connections" is not it.
I wouldn't necessarily trust others with my data, but if a person wants to trust themselves then that's up to them.
Symmetrical high speed connections allows for the option of self-hosting one's own stuff and being able to serve it to the Internet (or connect to it remotely), but it is not mandatory for people to choose that option. They may not feel confident in their owns skills so choose the option of paying someone else to be responsible for it.
My main criticism is unfettered and immoral capitalistic behaviour. That doesn't automatically mean I want to replace it with a different unworkable -ism.
Rather like those awful gdpr notices which use Orwellian doublespeak like "We value your privacy" while presenting you with a dark pattern dialogue box which you have to opt out of, rather than (as the gdpr stipulates) opt in.
Nearly every time I contact customer services these days I'm fobbed off with obnoxious PR speak instead of just telling me straight.
> If I pay I want: No ads, no tracking, full access to my own data in sane export formats, schemas, no data mining, no data selling, no "sharing data with our partners", encryption options, no dumb hoops, no dark patterns, the ability to point a product at an API endpoint of my choosing, backup options that default to my infrastructure first and so on.
GDPR's right to data portability provides much of the export functionality you're after. It must be structured, in a format that is commonly-used and machine-readable. The ICO's guidance suggests that CSV, XML and JSON best meet this requirement.
Tracking is something else that GDPR helps with. Tracking of personal information via e.g. cookies require active consent. Silence is not consent.
"sharing data with our partners" requires a lawful basis when dealing with EU data subjects. This will normally be consent where data is sold to third-parties for e.g. marketing, so data subjects will be able to make an informed decision and opt out of this. Again, silence is not consent - and burying data sharing in an unreadable legal document is not informed consent.
> the ability to point a product at an API endpoint of my choosing
The right to data portability includes this:
> Individuals have the right to ask you to transmit their personal data directly to another controller without hindrance. If it is technically feasible, you should do this.
> Actually let's add more: The data generated by my use of my data in the product.
This is in scope for a Subject Access Request.
> Non-canned support responses that don't ask for information I literally put in the ticket three weeks ago
This is difficult to solve with regulation but I think it's an entirely reasonable thing to expect for your money. GDPR does not help here
Hopefully if there are multiple competitors in the space, customer support is something that providers can compete on.
> Prominent indication of where (geographically and legally) data is stored and used
Privacy information already must contain a transparent list of data processors:
> This includes anyone that processes the personal data on your behalf, as well all other organisations.
What we really need is for other countries to start taking data protection regulation seriously.
> I would happily pay for all of the services I use.
Idea: Move all online businesses to a new digital-only currency. Let people earn that currency by donating the processing power/storage/bandwidth of their devices, like the @Home projects. Of course people could always current existing currency to the new e-currency.
Let's say an hour of donating an average laptop = an hour of using Google, Facebook, etc.
And who is going be able to provide for all this shit? I'll tell you who - FAANG. Good luck starting your company when all of the above is a law! I've had enough clicks on GDPR's "OK" buttons. What did it change?
All this crying about tracking - how else the owner of the place can make product better? If I own a store - I can see where people go, how they shop, how they walk around, which basket size they prefer, what they buy. If I don't collect data on my website - I can't THINK about how to make my service better. I can only GUESS. What about data collections for simple functionality - like, when you come back to the half-filled form and I remember the values you already submitted by matching your cookies. Are you against this as well?
Sorry, but if this is the alternative - I would rather have Google know everything I do online and hope that they honestly don't store data on my Incognito browsing. If they do - worse for them.
I always hate the framing of something being "capitalistic greed". The market has decided that they don't care about their privacy. You are complaining about the wrong people, you should be complaining to your fellow consumers/users. I've lost count of the number discussions I've had with people where they said they don't care about their privacy.
As for legalities. It is a global world. There is no way to enforce this effectively globally. This is a pipe dream.
Also data in some cases must be shared with partners, those might be payment processor, ID checks etc.
The market is literally fueled by people full of capitalistic greed one-upping each other and forcing others to play by the same rules. It's a capitalistic greed optimization engine. For all benefits we yield from it, it's still fair to call it capitalistic greed and notice the ethical failures the market strongly encourages.
I cannot stand the gas-lighting here. Your perception of capitalism is one that is framed as a winner takes all mentality that been sold to you by propagandists.
Capitalism is about free market trade. You provide something and people choose whether they want to buy it or use it. People add greed qualifier in there so they can frame it as something illicit going on.
The fact still remains that if people cared about their privacy (and there is no evidence they do), they wouldn't use these sites.
Before it was done online. Store cards used to track purchases and spending habits in store in the same way that sites do today (however at a much greater scale) and customers were given vouchers in return.
In much the same way. Almost all the local stores have dissapeared to be replaced by large corps that can provide everything in super stores and in much the same way that is the fault of the consumer by not supporting their local stores.
> For all benefits we yield from it, it's still fair to call it capitalistic greed and notice the ethical failures the market strongly encourages.
No the failing is on us and the users of the site for using these services when we were warned by many people that this would be the case. Pretending otherwise is passing the buck.
I agree, the consumer has responsibility here, and leverage.
But that does not absolve the producer. They are still using ethically questionable methods.
The market doesn’t get to decide the rights and wrongs. It just allocates resources. That we have to do collectively if we want to call ourselves democratic.
But the free market literally cannot exist? The free market won't bring you back to life so you can "choose a different competitor" if it kills you.
That food? Bad. Dead. That tool? Dangerous. Dead. That work on your house? Dangerous. Dead. That car? Unroadworthy. Dead. Those aircraft parts? Counterfeit and not to spec. 300 people dead.
Every single thing humans do is already regulated in some way. Why? Because humans in the end, like all animals, try to achieve the best least effort : highest reward ratio they can.
In the modern world, these regulations need to be extended to automatically cover modern technologies and prevent inherent harm. They shouldn't be overbearing. They shouldn't be pointlessly excessive. But they are required for all things.
Many people think capitalism is greedy because they have literally spent a lifetime experiencing greed fueled capitalism first hand, not because they sit on YouTube watching propaganda videos.
> But the free market literally cannot exist? The free market won't bring you back to life so you can "choose a different competitor" if it kills you.
Life is full of risks. Lots of things were approved by bother government and experts in the past that was bad for you.
> That food? Bad. Dead. That tool? Dangerous. Dead. That work on your house? Dangerous. Dead. That car? Unroadworthy. Dead. Those aircraft parts? Counterfeit and not to spec. 300 people dead.
The FDA has stopped people from getting medication in the US that are over the counter medicines because they haven't been approved for use. It is a double edged sword.
>Every single thing humans do is already regulated in some way. Why? Because humans in the end, like all animals, try to achieve the best least effort : highest reward ratio they can.
Unfortunately. What has the current light regulation on the web brought us cookie popups that are irritating that people just click through and a GDPR warnings that don't actually solve the problem of collecting your data. I don't hold out much hope for future regulation, which btw will favour the big tech players that have been collecting our data thus far. BTW you don't know the names of many of them, because they are B2B players and provide services to the companies we do know the name of.
As for "best result for least effort". Well it depends how it manifests itself. It can either be laziness or efficiency. The latter is not a problem.
> In the modern world, these regulations need to be extended to automatically cover modern technologies and prevent inherent harm. They shouldn't be overbearing. They shouldn't be pointlessly excessive. But they are required for all things.
Inviting any sort of regulation will involve government. Government will try to justify itself by demanding more regulation. It will always be overbearing and that will cement these players in place.
At the moment, we have the best chance of these players being toppled. People are looking at alternatives to big tech and are going to smaller players, mainly due to censorship. The trickle has now become a stream, sooner or later it will be a flood. However because of regulation on the horizon (which doesn't address any of the issues we care about)
> Many people think capitalism is greedy because they have literally spent a lifetime experiencing greed fueled capitalism first hand, not because they sit on YouTube watching propaganda videos.
I suspect you are confusing corporatism (which is a form of fascism) with capitalism (which is a party of liberty).
As for propaganda. I never said anything about Youtube. Don't put words in my mouth. I am talking about how hollywood, novelists (since the 19th century), newspapers have framed it since forever. You are soo fermeted in it you don't even realise it is propaganda.
> What has the current light regulation on the web brought us cookie popups that are irritating that people just click through and a GDPR warnings that don't actually solve the problem of collecting your data. I don't hold out much hope for future regulation,
GDPR is quite decent as laws go; the problems you mention happen because the regulation enforcement is too weak. Displaying a cookie popup was never anything but an admission that you're doing something you're not supposed to. GDPR notices again mostly give the same evidence. A lot of them aren't even compliant. I honestly wish DPAs of EU member states would start beating these companies down until this bullshit stops.
> I suspect you are confusing corporatism (which is a form of fascism) with capitalism (which is a party of liberty).
Potayto, potahto. Capitalism structurally favors something resembling corporatism, because capital compounds - the more you have of it, the easier it is to get even more. The market is a dynamic system - what matters is what it evolves over time into.
> GDPR is quite decent as laws go; the problems you mention happen because the regulation enforcement is too weak. Displaying a cookie popup was never anything but an admission that you're doing something you're not supposed to. GDPR notices again mostly give the same evidence. A lot of them aren't even compliant. I honestly wish DPAs of EU member states would start beating these companies down until this bullshit stops.
All that sites will do is do a cost assessment of whether it is worth serving those in the EU and just block the IP range and people that want to use those services will just use VPNs anyway (which is what I do when I am banned by IP from a site because of the GDPR rules).
>Potayto, potahto. Capitalism structurally favors something resembling corporatism, because capital compounds - the more you have of it, the easier it is to get even more. The market is a dynamic system - what matters is what it evolves over time into.
No it doesn't. Corporatism is a collusion with government. If governments were smaller, buying influence wouldn't be effective. You don't even understand what you are arguing.
Yes the market is a dynamic system that why if you allow it to operate freely those companies that are abusing their position will start to lose market share when other competitors that don't will be more attractive to consumers. However once you involve regulation, then that mechanism doesn't happen because you just raised the bar higher for all the would be smaller players.
Again you always want to frame it in the worst light.
Anyway. Fuck this site, dissenting opinion is frowned upon here. So much for the hacker part.
The major barriers to competing with Google/Amazon/Facebook etc are not regulatory hassles, by far. Even in highly regulated industries, like space launch vehicles, the additional cost of compliance over your own due diligence isn’t the biggest barrier.
Also, consumers on average do a bad job of managing anticompetitive behaviour and harmful externalities, even if they know about them. Convenience and habit are strong motivators. And we need regulation to disincentivize companies from outright lying in the first place.
Companies and people in a fully free market system won’t magically become rational automata that behave ideally. We’re only human. Our superpower is the ability to collectively leverage our individual specialization. Foresight for negative externalities is a specialization that needs regulation to be effective.
There's plenty of room for dissenting opinion here. But if you're going to offer up an argument for capitalist-libertarianism that isn't any more than a largely evidence-free rehash of the same positions that filled talk.politics.theory on usenet in the 1990s, then yeah, you're probably not going to see a lot of support. Offer up a cogent, evidence-filled position that genuinely causes people to say "huh! gonna have to think/read about this ..." and I'm fairly sure you'd see a different response.
I've given my rationale. Calling it evidence-free when there are thousands of examples where it works and almost everytime there is government involvement it happens to be a mess. So piss off with you patronising response.
Thanks for your reply, it was really interesting and gave me some things to think about.
I agree that government intervention is not ideal, as government is also often dumb, evil or incompetent. But that's more our failure to set up a political system where only the best, skilled, most ethical, least selfish people can rise to the top. We are nowhere close.
Propaganda: I wasn't putting words in your mouth intentionally, I see your point though. It was a description of how your words felt to someone making a critism of capitalism, that for me to dare criticise I must be propaganda-ised.
I don't watch movies. I don't have a TV. I don't read newspapers. I read a lot but a broad spectrum of works from a variety of times.
I like your distinction between capitalism and corporatism, it's a great point. I wonder though: Corporations exist inside of capitalism, so isn't it a failure of capitalism to bring outrageous cooperations to heel?
I dislike your "fermeted" comment, you literally followed an accusation of fallacy from me to you, with a whole bunch of actually intentioned fallacy of your own?
A sort of freedom. Not free from taxes, free from interference. But that's really never the case.
Say you buy something from a store, and you expect their use of your data to follow the terms on the loyalty card. They've got a bunch of commercial-code laws that protect them. You can't pay with counterfeit money, or give yourself a 2-for-1 discount. If you use credit and don't pay, men from the state with the right to use violence come and collect for the store. They're totally legally protected. But how are you protected? Only at the end of a hugely expensive court case in the best outcome, but probably not at all.
The potential risk to the store from you is limited to the cost of goods, the risk to you is almost unbounded. You might lose healthcare coverage, or your boss might buy your data and use the store to link your id to your pornhub usage and fire you. Minimal, limited risk for them, huge unbounded and unprotected risk for you.
But then you discover after buying your gallon of milk, that they (knowingly) sold your data to someone who then sold it to, let's say an insurance company, in direct violation of the words on the back of the card. Now, how do you get made whole?
So, no. I don't actually feel that the free market meets that description for 99% of transactions. Between two citizens over a used lawnmower, yes. Between Warren Buffet and Bill Gates, yes. But between you and the supermarket - not even a little.
> Your perception of capitalism is one that is framed as a winner takes all mentality that been sold to you by propagandists.
Not really. My perception comes from thinking about the market as a dynamic system, and not a static picture described by pro- and anti-market propagandists.
> Capitalism is about free market trade. You provide something and people choose whether they want to buy it or use it.
That's a "motte and bailey" defense. Such a perfect free trade almost doesn't exist, and very few are privileged to partake in it. Market offerings aren't independent - they're in competition, which means a lot of possible products aren't provided, and those that are face competitive pressure to provide less value for more price.
The most important thing to recognize is that the market, as a dynamic system, optimizes for profitable companies. Not for maximizing value these companies deliver to their customers. Usually, providing value is the most straightforward way for profit. But there are other ways - ways to provide no value, or even negative value while still netting additional profit - and the market takes them as much as it can. Vendor lock-in and surveillance are just few ways of making money by providing negative value-add.
> People add greed qualifier in there so they can frame it as something illicit going on.
Not illicit. Immoral. Because after all is said and done, the market is still entirely made of people and their decisions, which get to be evaluated through the lens of ethics.
> The fact still remains that if people cared about their privacy (and there is no evidence they do), they wouldn't use these sites.
They care and they will use them anyway, because the market doesn't provide any other option.
> Store cards used to track purchases and spending habits in store in the same way that sites do today (however at a much greater scale) and customers were given vouchers in return.
In the store. Not across stores. And they gave vouchers back, not shoved extra ads in your face. And that's without touching the qualitative difference between a human clerk doing the surveillance and automated systems doing the same.
> Pretending otherwise is passing the buck.
I hate to invoke the concept of "victim blaming", because it's usually invoked very unreasonably, but - you can't expect individuals to be able to rationally make market decisions while working their asses off trying to make ends meet, having their attention DDoSed, and facing against compounding improvements in manipulation techniques (courtesy of the market). I'm willing to cut regular folks some slack, and instead focus on the people running these companies, who had a clear choice, and chose to engage in abusive practices. You don't impulse-adopt business models, so you can't excuse it as a moment of weakness either.
(But then I'm willing to cut these business folks some slack too; in many cases, it's the market pressures that force to choose the abusive option - which leads us back to my original point: the market is a capitalist greed optimization engine. It promotes business people who think that, much like your margin, your ethics are their opportunity.)
> Not really. My perception comes from thinking about the market as a dynamic system, and not a static picture described by pro- and anti-market propagandists.
Nonsense. Your framing is exactly the same. Don't gaslight me on this. I am not naive.
> That's a "motte and bailey" defense. Such a perfect free trade almost doesn't exist, and very few are privileged to partake in it.
Yes the free market doesn't exist because governments stick their noses in.
>Market offerings aren't independent - they're in competition, which means a lot of possible products aren't provided, and those that are face competitive pressure to provide less value for more price
What a load of nonsense. It is because of the free market we have niche products (Amiga accelerators would exist and that is pretty damn niche).
> The most important thing to recognize is that the market, as a dynamic system, optimizes for profitable companies. Not for maximizing value these companies deliver to their customers. Usually, providing value is the most straightforward way for profit. But there are other ways - ways to provide no value, or even negative value while still netting additional profit - and the market takes them as much as it can.
You are speaking out of both sides of your mouth.
> Vendor lock-in and surveillance are just few ways of making money by providing negative value-add.
If vendor lock in a problem if the customer is happy with it? It is up to the individual customer to decide.
> Not illicit. Immoral. Because after all is said and done, the market is still entirely made of people and their decisions, which get to be evaluated through the lens of ethics.
That is splitting hairs. No you want them to be evaluated through the lens of ethics because it benefits to do so in this argument.
> They care and they will use them anyway, because the market doesn't provide any other option.
You don't need yourtube, you don't need facebook, you don't need a lot of this nonsense.
> In the store. Not across stores. And they gave vouchers back, not shoved extra ads in your face. And that's without touching the qualitative difference between a human clerk doing the surveillance and automated systems doing the same.
You have no idea if that data wasn't sold to anyone else. The vouchers are in themselves ads.
These store cards proved two thinds. The first being that people will willingly give up their details for some trickets, and two that tracking customers and optimising via that works. It was a stepping stone.
> I hate to invoke the concept of "victim blaming", because it's usually invoked very unreasonably, but - you can't expect individuals to be able to rationally make market decisions while working their asses off trying to make ends meet, having their attention DDoSed, and facing against compounding improvements in manipulation techniques (courtesy of the market). I'm willing to cut regular folks some slack, and instead focus on the people running these companies, who had a clear choice, and chose to engage in abusive practices. You don't impulse-adopt business models, so you can't excuse it as a moment of weakness either.
Yes I do expect individuals to able to rationally make decisions. People have been told for years and year and years on end what these companies do and they don't care. So it is their fault.
Sure, but one available choice is "don't use x". The point is that he says it's obscene, but he acts like he prefers it to not having it.
One worry about the rising tide of anti-Facebook etc. sentiment is that it is driven by (a) a small number of vocal people who (b) say that x is horrible, but don't act like it. (I don't say whether this worry is always, or even mostly, correct. Just that it is worth considering.) The result can be problematic.
For example, like millions of people in the EU, before I use any new website, I now have to click "OK" on a GDPR button. I consider myself as caring about my privacy. But my behaviour tells me that I just click "OK" without even reading what they have to say. Obviously, my privacy is less important to me than the 10 seconds or 1 minute that it would take to read their policy and opt out from anything I dislike.
You can respond that this is a "dark pattern", and I agree. You could also say it would be better for me to be able to set my privacy once - say, via browser settings - and I indeed try to do that, having used various Firefox settings and plugins to manage my cookies. Nevertheless, the fact is that, as my behaviour reveals, I would rather get on with my life, than waste 10 minutes a day clicking on privacy policies. Given that, of course, I would also rather not be presented with the "GDPR OK button" at all. It's a fleabite of annoyance that I deal with many, many times, and every time I mutter to myself "screw the EU and screw the GDPR". I suspect I am not alone.
I also suspect I will be downvoted for this, by just the noble idealists about whom I am grumbling. Sigh.
Alot of blockchain services share that philosophy and have a decent revenue model with the tokens.
The only problem is that the consumers want to trade the tokens at a profit instead of as purchases.
But that isn’t really a problem for the service that sold them. It is revenue. But people have an uncomfortable relationship with other people making money when they can extrapolate how much and consider that a problem.
Many services now are completely client side and use the nearest node that you connect to as the backend. They store enough variables in their smart contracts on chain and do the rest of the calculations client side. So their web service isn’t tracking you. But if you reuse addresses other people are.
FindFace? It shut down its user-facing service several years ago and focused on selling its technology. There are rumors it has some government contracts.
Now there's FindClone instead. And I would consider finding somebody's identity by matching a photo of them with a database of VK profile pictures a privacy nightmare. I don't know If they got the pictures via an API or scraping, but it shows what can be done with easy access to this kind of data. People used FindFace to deanonymize porn actresses and out them to family for instance.
Question: Can I write my own assistant on mobile devices that is an actual assistant? As in, can listen for the key activation word in the background? Like the "official" assistants.
As far as I can tell, the assistant APIs seem to be like plugins? On Android for example, it appears custom assistants still run through Google assistant.
I want to be able to say "TriggerWord, do X and Y" and the OS activates my app, passes the voice sample and I take care of all the language processing from there. Which doesn't seem possible...
The custom home automation system I built relies on google's (very good) off-line voice recognition + automagic [i] + opencv face detection.
I did not want the home asst listening all the time - as it's highly likely to falsely trigger just listening to radio or tv it... so instead I use python+opencv to detect if the assistant (an old rooted samsung note) is being directly looked at - then it wakes up to listen for the trigger word and the command. Of course, I can also manually trigger it via any device in the house.
https://snowboy.kitt.ai/ is about the only good third party hotword detection engine. You can hook it into Assistant with a bit of work, and with Tasker/Automate and a rooted phone, you can open apps, press buttons, pass voice commands, and more.
Imo, Assistant is limited because of privacy, see how it asks you to opt in for a more personalized experience and it still won't unlock your phone for you.
Half on-topic: Is there an API on Android that allows you to write your own assistant with your own keyword set without sending everything over the wire?
An app with microphone permissions would obviously work-ish, but is it possible to listen in the background like the assistants do?
In the same vein, are there not a worryingly amount of adults with actual "adult responsibilities" that think conspiracy theories, failed political ideologies and screaming batshit insanity into social media are "palatable and reasonable ideas".
In fact, I'd argue they outweigh the younger audience by a far margin, are supported by media organisations and have done far more damage to our society and world.
Almost every young person I know wants one thing. A fairer, safer, more equal world. I can't say the same for most older people I know. If that makes them the extremists, then we are lost.
Doesn't government suck because our best and brightest often do not choose to work in government? Isn't that what we should really change?