Comment by atoav | Hacker News Reader

Comment by atoav | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

≥ 2) the majority of internet users are oblivious to the data collection tactics employed by half the internet and I can't picture folks raising pitchforks for "pods" to become a standard.

Usually purely technical solutions to societal problems won't bring you far. It is still not bad to have them, because they essentially show what would be possible, if we just wanted. Helps in discussion as well if of all people Tim Berners-Lee was part of it.

However: we have issues of education around the topic and our jurisdictive let's the big internet corps get away with too much. Starting with taxes and privacy down to the societal effects their algorithms have.

What ad networks do is the digital equivalent of filming and spying on people who walk by your storefront. What they do, how they do it and the effects it has on society are wrong. Online Advertisement is probably one of the big drivers of the political division we are seeing lately, because controversial topics produce more engagement and more engagement is what people selling ads want.

If you'd explain the current practise to common folk, most of them clearly don't think is okay. This means both education and media isn't doing their job.

> What ad networks do is the digital equivalent of filming and spying on people who walk by your storefront.

Which is also legal, at least in the UK, and not many people have a problem with it. I think well-known, major abuses will need to occur before people take this seriously.

It is not legal in Germany and Austria at least. The UK is one of the most surveilled places in Europe.

Some of the new JCDecaux digital signage I've seen in Berlin definitely seems to have a camera lens on its top. There's no posted notice concerning video recording, but I wonder if it's just a lens with no camera, a camera but not attached to the rest of the device, or only disabled in software.

I've worked on JCDecaux smart signage. The camera is used for analytics purposes using computer vision (people counting, attentiveness, demographic data, dwell times, etc.). Nothing is recorded. In some cases, processing even happens at the edge.

> Nothing is recorded. In some cases, processing even happens at the edge.

If the data is not processed at the edge, how is nothing recorded? This smells like extremely minced words.

IANAL (definitely not a German one) but I'm almost certain that even post-2017 it's still illegal to take video in a public space and send it elsewhere, without a sign, even if that video is not in some sense "preserved" elsewhere.

If data stays in RAM and is not written to permanent storage, I think you can reasonably say it’s not recorded.

Frankly, I think you could even persist it to disk as long as it was pruned within 24 hours and reasonably say it’s not recorded.

Otherwise I’m not sure how you can argue ANY data is “unrecorded”. Writing to a hardware buffer in the camera module would seem like “recording” to me by the strict standard.

If I go and record a stranger in the street today in Germany I am quite certain that would be illegal even if I delete the recording within 24h.

And I studied Film in Germany and had to deal with precisely this a hundred times. If WallDecaux is doing this, it is at least a legal grey area, unless they operate on private property, look at their own private property and have a sign that says there is a camera in operation.

Ah yes, the "NES ROM" theory of public surveillance laws. Definitely well-considered.

Another theory that could place it in a loophole: It may be performing object detection without recording what we think of as normal video. Similar to self-driving technology and object recognition, useful data can be derived without actually recording the traditional thought of “HD video in color”.

> What ad networks do is the digital equivalent of filming and spying on people who walk by your storefront. What they do, how they do it and the effects it has on society are wrong.

wait a minute. i know there are currently startups that offer this exact type of analytics. and from what i know these types of analytics are extremely beneficial to both consumers and store owners. what exactly is the problem here?

> extremely beneficial to both consumers

What "extreme benefits" do I derive from being filmed and analyzed by stores I happen to walk past?

you get better products. the store gets better sales. it's a win win all around.

this is already happening and it's already providing value.

How do you get better products?

What does a filmed image give you that isn't reflected by sales numbers?

The goal of tracking isn't to make and sell better products, the goal is to create an environment in which the product you already got gets sold more. So essientially people who track you want to manipulate you into buying shit you don't need at prices you wouldn't pay unless manipulated.

Tracking people who would buy your product anyways isn't all that interesting: you've already got them.

If analytics are beneficial to customers, why aren't they opt-in but instead businesses try hard not to let them even opt out?

The value for the customer comes when they not opt in.

this question makes no sense.

since on street analytics are already beneficial to everyone, consumers and providers, why should they be opt-in? they should be, and currently are, automatic opt-in with an option to opt-out. you are walking on the street, so any privacy is gone just from walking outside of your home.

What doesn't make sense is to consider never leaving the house a realistic option. Nor does the phrase "automatic opt-in".

And I hope this:

> since on street analytics are already beneficial to everyone, consumers and providers, why should they be opt-in?

is a joke. It's pure authoritarianism.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com