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Comment by darthdev | Hacker News Reader

“Now we have a big contract with Vodafone, and every month Vodafone has to give machine readable data to city hall. Before, that didn’t happen. They just took all the data and used it for their own benefit”

So, now Vodafone AND the city government has this data about the citizens. How is this fighting against surveillance? Am I missing something? :/

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The funny thing about democracy is that if you have a fairly egalitarian society, the government actually represents the views of, and works for the people. So the statement you quote is saying that the people, through their democratic system of represention, has control of the data. Local power structures like local government tend to be quite good.

They have a copy, not control. Ranked from most abused to least abused, you have secret misuse and leaks, corporate misuse and leaks, and democratic misuse and leaks; and if they all get a copy you take their individual leak+misuse outputs and add them.

Metaphorically, you go from a criminal with a gun at your head to a criminal and a friend both with guns at your head.

The democratic majority is not your friend unless you are part of it. Think about anyone convicted of socially reprehensible crimes. The information that you used to be a pedophile will certainly make your life a living hell when it is used for the good of the people.

You're not. They're only improving transparency a little bit, but ultimately that same data can and will be abused by whichever government comes into power next.

I also wanted to add how deeply involved into surveillance Vodafone seems to be. I've started noticing it since some Snowden and Wikileaks revelations back. Helping governments enable surveillance on their populations seems to be kind of Vodafone's side-business.

It looks like the title is absolute clickbait-misleading-almost-lying crap.

They paid Vodafone and Vodafone used the data. "Fair enough" (so to say). No they pay Vodafone and Vodafone and they use the data. "backslash".

You are indeed missing something. The same as I am.

Fair enough, but setting the expectation of participation and transparency is a worthwhile goal in and of itself, more important that any individual failure to actually realize it.

Indeed, with "fightback" I assumed either the citizens were destroying surveillance equipment or the city prevented surveillance equipment from being installed.

Turns out it's just the government getting its piece of the cake.

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