Hacker News Reader

Comment by Skunkleton | Hacker News Reader

To me the issue here is that this data is collected in the first place. It seems wrong to me that private corporations are tracking my every move.

View on HN

How is anyone in SV going to eat if private corporations can't track our every move? I mean, not everyone takes cab rides or rents private homes when they travel, but almost everyone uses the internet for something. And those people need to be tracked, or there's no money to be made.

"The internet would not exist without advertising"

Utterly wrong. The Internet wouldn't exist without gigantic state funding. The early Internet was completely free of commercial influence.

In case you didn't realize, my comment and the parent's comment are satirical.

> How is anyone in SV going to eat if private corporations can't track our every move?

I work for an ISP and we do not track our customers. At all. We bill them and they receive a reliable service that performs as advertised. Maybe we could go back to the oldschool model of actually selling a product or service, delivering it to the customer, and keeping the customer happy?

Which ISP is this? (interested)

I’m not walrus01 but I know of a few ISPs in the Bay Area that put an emphasis on net neutrality and users’ privacy, on top of running a good service: Wave on the SF/Daly City side, and Sonic’s running fiber in the East Bay. Both have impressed me, especially Sonic which provides their own VPN and runs a public wiki that rivals my company’s internal IT wiki. I’ve also heard good things about LMI but I have no personal experience with them.

I'd rather not mix my sometimes controversial comments on HN with work - everything I write here is very much not in my "official" capacity... But I can say it's west coast, small to medium sized, clueful, and doesn't suck.

I think it's because it's private property, so they can. I mean they can't just install scanners on a public (gov't) freeway, for example. Some jurisdictions, like Tiburon, in CA, scans every vehicle entering and exiting (only one way in and one way out of town.)

It won't solve the license plate issue, but wearing a burka in public is starting to sound like a sensible response to the modern world just so you don't end up with your face scanned and location logged 38 times on your way to work in the morning.

A niqab might do for now, but I'm guessing height, gate and precise location might provide too much fingerprinting information.

Many countries have anti-masking laws now, which make it illegal to cover your face, unless you have a "reasonable need".

Regrettably, the notoriously anti-immigration government here in Denmark has instituted just such a law, apparently because of a couple thousand women who wear niqabs and maybe 20 who wear burqas. They claim it's to "fight social control", which I find extremely ironic since it's the women who'll be getting fined!

And of course, the excuse the government uses is that it's for "public safety during demonstrations and for identification purposes in banks and similar situations".

I'm not actually sure whether it's actually meant to target the niqab/burqa-wearing women, or if it's because of the left-wing protests against the government, where some of the participants wear masks. Either way, banning specific types of clothes usually only happens in totalitation states.

I don't see any difference between tracking cars and guns, except cars kill more people every year in the US.

What are you even talking about? They aren't tracking my car to make sure I don't run some one over, they are tracking it so that they can sell more stuff.

Good point, we should do away with car registration. I’ve never lived in a state with a gun registry.

agreed. this is simply unacceptable... even LEO should have probable cause to pull you over and make your life inconvenient or at worst hell.

Then don't go on to their private property to conduct business?

So hole up in a cave because someone might be tracking you every time you leave the house?

It's perfectly reasonable to require companies to tell us what data they're collecting and how it will be used.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com