The case for cities where you’re a sensor, not a thing to be sensed
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
I guess that would make the Guardian a “smart website”.
> The problem is that the smart city, as presently conceived, is a largely privatised affair designed as a public-private partnership to extract as much value as possible from its residents
I looked quite hard for any evidence in the article that this was the case other than ‘I don’t know, it feels kind of icky’ but couldn’t find any.
> If you want to page a minibus – something like an Uber Pool, but run by the city, licensed, safe, paying a living wage and not mining your data – you can summon one, and yes, this exposes your identity so that the driver can find you.
Ah, and there’s the nub of it. It’s fine for a responsible (read public-sector) technocrat to mine and process your data, but it’s evil when a company does it.
The DMV in some states have started to sell people's data, that's fucked.
Having the government (that also controls the police, the military etc) collect & analyze large amounts of data on citizens is a recipe for disaster even if they never sell that data to a third party. I hear people say "but we can write laws that they cannot use that data for anything nefarious" and I'm amazed that there are still people alive that believe that laws have ever stopped a government.
I'm fine with "let's limit the amount of data corporations can collect on citizens", but I'm really not fine with "let's allow the state to collect any data on citizens other than absolutely necessary to provide basic services, at least they don't sell it".
It’s good in that it’s the government providing transparency into the records they hold, and allowing them to be corrected. It’s bad in that it’s a big treasure trove of data for companies or individuals who want to mis-use it.
https://www.wyff4.com/article/the-dmv-sells-your-information...
Like most government spending, I'm sure it's excessive. However, I'm not clear what your counter-point was. Yes, producing a CSV costs less than $42M. No, producing a CSV file is not what this service entails.
If I could edit my comment, I might say something more accurate, like "trying to evaluate this number without more context is not useful."
I guess that would make the Guardian a “smart website”.
It's perfectly possible to deliver services using only the data necessary to deliver the service. Selling none of it to advertisers or other third parties, gathering nothing other than that necessary to make the service the best you can provide. Not only would it feel a much more equitable exchange for the customers providing the data, it would no doubt end up with a better service. Adding data mining for sale corrupts every service, as they twist to gather ever more for less, or poorer and poorer results. You become a data cow for the milking.
This is spot on. Technology has always been, and will always be, a means to project our will onto our surroundings, nothing less, nothing more. The only question to be asked is, whose will is being projected onto whose surroundings? Do those surroundings include other people?
To me, all this talk of "smart" household devices is just marketing bullshit designed to mask the fact that the manufacturer is imposing their will onto users. The devices are dumb as fuck. They have no capacity to make any kind of judgment call. The manufacturer does, as they have the source code. Calling the devices "smart" makes it look like they're learning and making decisions for the owner's benefit when they really aren't.
My fridge and air purifier wants internet access for some reason but I'm not giving it to them. I'm not buying a smart TV and probably never will. I prefer my appliances dumb and simple. After all, uneducated and isolated slaves are far less likely to revolt. As soon as they are given a voice of their own, they'll begin to speak for someone else's interests! (Who knew that 19th century slave owners' arguments would turn out to be surprisingly convincing when the slaves aren't humans?)
What kind of insights do we lose? Is it simply just advertisers who lose, or will we also lose other things?
For example, if I can track your path around a city, wouldn’t I be able to make better predictions about traffic then if I could only track the aggregated count of locations that had been visited over the course of a time period?
Value to whom?
>What kind of insights do we lose? Is it simply just advertisers who lose, or will we also lose other things?
Who is "we"? Who gets to collect that data, control access to it, etc? How do they get it? Who would lose other things in the absence of that data collection?
>For example, if I can track your path around a city, wouldn’t I be able to make better predictions about traffic then if I could only track the aggregated count of locations that had been visited over the course of a time period?
Maybe, but that doesn't mean I want you tracking me.
Buy you can't. Metadata.
And then they is the Google problem. If other are collecting everything they may have a competitive advantage in the future. To the poit your business will most certainly die.
If you place more value on knowledge of the collective rather than the specifics of the individual (which is arguably a good way for governance and stewardship bodies to operate) then I feel like it might be true.
to me, the perk of this totally non-specific data is that it can theoretically be public, and so there's less incentive to advocate for scary information asymmetry in private hands (neither corp nor gov). Yes, there's asymmetry in who can derive insight from public aggregate data, but in theory access can be ubiquitous, and that's less than the towering asymmetry (of access) that currently exists with our understandable lip service to personal privacy
I also recall reading about apps that warn about video surveillance. But that's a difficult thing to search for.
It does mean we all need to become proficient at using those data flows - to become coders as we are all readers and writers today.
That said, I don't think "topless computing" is an ideal phrase, because the image many people will get is a woman typing while topless.
Pretty sure that's extremely unlikely to (ever) happen for even a majority of the population.
a) People have their own interests and goals. They generally aren't going to put time into anything like this unless it seems like it'll help them achieve one of their interests/goals
b) Not everyone is "switched on" technologically. Kids, elderly, even just some people with non-technical personality types. :/
Edit ... not that you are a fool :-)
For example, my father - who used to be able to do at least basic programming in C and Python - is no longer able to grasp the concepts for any length of time.
eg teach him, verify he's gotten it... and the next day it's a blank. Repeatedly. :/
That plan was shelved after a search of GitHub turned a few examples of usage in the wild.
So surveillance is certainly no silver bullet. If you check the literature, you'll find that it tends to have modest benefits mostly on property crime, but some of that is simply moved to other areas.
Violent crime is decidedly rare these days. I guarantee you there is no city or town in the US today that is not far safer now than the US average in the 70s.
Of the remaining violence, murders are rarely committed by strangers. Just 11% in the US in 2016, for example. And those tend to be either mass shootings or otherwise psychologically disturbed individuals, who rarely care about capture.
0: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/18/nyregion/killed-by-a-stra...