Comment by ohyes | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ohyes | Hacker News Reader

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Assume that a hypothetical future government that you find yourself living under is not good.

Assume furthermore that a future hypothetical company is equally not good and the two collude to do not good things together.

Now assume you’re motivated to do something about it. Sucks for you, they have already predicted that and cleansed you because they know everything you’ve ever read and it was a high probability that you’d be against them.

Consider another situation where hypothetical evil overlords know exactly what buttons press in order to influence you to act a certain way. They press them regularly. You dance as expected.

Both circumstances undermine your personal autonomy and right to self determination. Furthermore they undermine the humanity that we share where our society is no longer controlled by the needs of humans, but instead arbitrary algorithms coded for whatever mundanely evil purpose.

And that’s the point (that you’ve more or less hit on), this is evil, but also so boring that it is actually a threat to society because no one will care enough to do anything.

For those that want a more practical example, Russia has just passed a law requiring that all internet traffic be sent to their equivalent of the NSA and FBI, with all traffic sent in the clear [1]. If you're an adtech company in Russia, with historical data you are probably being subpoenaed for that historical information. Think about Turkey, which has had mass purges since 2016. Academics, judges, ordinary citizens have been jailed or disappeared for having gone to the wrong school, having attended the wrong house of worship, for being friends with the wrong people. The government isn't tracking these people down via paper records, they're tracking them down using ordinary technology.

It's not about step 1, which is to sell you more barbies. It's about step 4, step 5 where suddenly a bad actor has access to all this data and can see that people who make this search have a 10% chance of opposing the current leader/president/ruling party etc.

[1] https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2019/04/21/russias-sovereign-...

Does increased government authority over the tech industry make abusive access to its data and eyeballs less likely, or more likely? How would such a collaboration start? My money's on "It sure would be a shame if we audited the shit out of your infrastructure and hit you with everything we can find in the 500,000 page rulebook... or you could do me this one favor."

Doing something about a bad government is called terrorism. Rooting out such people before they act is called preventing radicalization, stemming the flow of hatred and bigotry (the #1 talking point in calls to regulate tech).

Knowing what buttons to press to influence populations to act a certain way is called called campaigning. Belief in democracy is exactly equal to belief that whoever is best at that each election cycle should have the most power.

Abuses are just that. If a corrupt person is using the law corruptly in order to achieve something illegal, and getting away with it, that is something we should root out. Including your hypothetical racket.

Creating laws to prevent the population from being abused and manipulated via big data is somewhat orthogonal to that, as it would be a separate set of laws. we can’t not do something just because it might be abused by those implementing it. We have to include reasonable limits to the powers we grant.

We don’t do away with all rule of law because it is occasionally abused, we prosecute the abusers under said laws and create new laws when loopholes are inevitably found.

Isnt the government the problem?

Why punish google?

This is about potential for abuse not whether the abuser is a public or private entity.

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