Tech companies are profiling us from before birth

A child born since Facebook's inception will be approaching 18 soon, and might have had parents who posted the child's entire life on Facebook from the ultrasound all the way to (maybe?) high school graduation.

When that child turns 18 and the child does not consent to tracking, what happens to all those photos, behavior, and YouTube videos that kid has watched? Maybe the kid starts as a clean slate since they've reached an age of majority, but how can you technically even keep track of that?

And it's worth noting that this is not about collection of data but use of data - if the legal basis of the processing was consent (perhaps there was a different legal basis, then consent isn't relevant) then withdrawing the consent does not make the earlier processing illegal, but it does require the controller to stop processing (using) the data they collected while they had consent and ensure that any processors to whom they delegated data processing do so as well.

I'm more interested in how decentralized platforms might impact the current trend of verified accounts and use of real names. I can see a couple potential outcomes with decentralized platforms:

1) The use of pseudonyms grows further and speech gets even more divisive as people can speak without it coming back tarnish their real-life identity.

2) The use of real names grows more popular as people want to own their speech without fear of being de-platformed.

This also happens to adequately describe how it feels to live in Brooklyn, NY these days...

The problem is not individual bad people or bad companies. Take out the ones that exist now and a sea of new adtech startups will take their place.

No problem, you just need simultaneously to change your name, your address, your bank account and credit card, your friends, your hobbies, and your biometric properties. Of course, also buy a new computer with different hardware, and install different applications.

Then hope you didn't forget anything, otherwise you need to do the whole thing again.

You are correct that right to be forgotten does not outweigh you right to remember and share what you remember with others. The law does not restrict this right - GDPR, including that clause, does not apply to private persons personal activity.

However, that right is more narrow than you imply. First, you personally have the right to share your memories with others, but companies and businesses do not have such a right. Second, you do not have a right to have your content indexed by a search engine - your right to talk about these things in everyday outweighs the other persons right to privacy, but their right to privacy outweighs your privilege to publish your memories in mass media. Yes, you would be effectively deplatformed, but that does not violate your right to speak about this - the right to privacy is a fundamental human right, the right to a platform is not; any rights to free speech does not include a right to be widely disseminated.

What's on those sites is based off source materials. And those are generally disparate: oral witnesses, family members, documents found in private archives,... but also public records found in your city archives.

Where I live, different offices kept population records through out time e.g. city hall, the Church,... You can easily walk in, and access records from the 18th century and figure out when someone was born, who they married to and when they died.

However, legal provisions prohibit access to those public records pertaining to births, marriages and deaths which are less then 100 years old. Meaning you don't get access to lists of names of all everyone were born in 1936.

Why? Privacy for the living. e.g. someone could walk in and assert that your parents aren't your real parents.

Moreover, privacy legislation states that you need consent from living people before you can publish personal information regarding their names, addresses and so on. It means that even if someone passes away, you can't just publish that they were married or about their children if any of those are still alive.

Publishing pictures is even more fraught. You need consent from the person depicted, and consent from the photographer. That means ascertaining whether they are still alive, or getting consent from their estate in the case of the photographer. In the latter case, it might mean you may have to wait for 70 years after their death before those pictures enter the public domain. Genealogy websites allowing people to simply upload pictures without constraints expose themselves to copyright liability in that regard.

... and then there's the issue of how those legal provisions are upheld on the Internet. For instance, any ancestry/genealogy site who wants to operate in the EU has to comply with EU legislation including GDPR, copyright, right to be forgotten and so on.

For sure, being able to dig into your own ancestry and being able to rely on other people's work through digital technology is awesome. But, as with anything digital, it does come with the same challenges that confront any business case leveraging personal information.

TL;DR: Genealogy is fraught with legal challenges. You don't just get to publish, let alone scour and use those data without consent.

Only if you don't violate the copyright of the dead person - which, depending on the country, can last 50 to 90+ years after the person's death. Thus to publish you'd have to get the right to do so from said person's estate.

There are many instances where private correspondence, etc. has been banned from publication/the public domain for this reason.

There are some resitcitions there, for example the Private letters and Diaries would still be covered under copyright and the estate of the person could come after you for Copyright violations if it was with in 70 years of their death.

Also the Estate of a person could absolutely sue you are defamation provided the Estate has a person actively working to police that activity and the resources to hire a lawyer to do it.

So your position that "dead people have no privacy" is really false as they have just as much privacy as people alive it is just most dead people do not have anyone around that will expend the resources to enforce it like a live person

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fped.2017.00202...

My wife took maternity leave from 3 months before her due date for this very reason. I understand not everyone can, but it baffles my mind that often those who are able to, choose to continue to work rather than taking time off to care for themselves and their unborn child.

ToS popups need a textarea field where I can submit my terms.

Do you mean sent via https or encrypted in JavaScript before transmission? If the former, that’s pretty par for the course.

it would be very time consuming to try and determine what that data actually is.

It would be easy for a researcher who wants to answer the question: what data is it?

JavaScript debugger + breakpoints.

Populating a variable based on the current user so as to segment them in analytics or advertising - regardless of whether it’s that the user is pregnant or they said their favorite color is blue - is different than “sharing” structured pregnancy data or favorite color data that a 3rd party can inspect.

If this sort of wide-scale actual sharing of data exists, then I’d expect to see job postings for the role of coordinating data exchange, schemas for pregnancy data in XML format, API documentation for transmitting ‘sensitive’ data to 3rd parties, leaks containing this sort of sensitive data in unexpected places, etc.

That said, the title of the article says “profiling” and not “sharing”, so maybe Facebook and Google can derive that particular theoretically opaque segmentation values from particular apps represent pregnancy status.

Or maybe an opaque, trained model outputs that for certain users with certain segmentation values in certain apps, those users are more likely to click on ads relating to pregnancy.

Edit: The WSJ article notes that Facebook has acknowledged that the latter is possible via a filed patent. FB say it doesn’t use that technique.

But I think Hyperion Cantos by Dan Simmons would fit better.

Nobody is holding a gun to our heads.

Many today argue that the internet is largely unusable if we block all the FAANG hostnames, and for many this may be true, but it's becoming less and less of a sacrifice every day to disconnect from these massive centralized blobs.

I understand many people feel an unquenchable urge to legislate these kinds of things into being, but we really cannot "will" things like this into existence. It's, actually, much easier to incentivize and promote a practical means towards adoption. In our case, we need to begin promoting technologies that promote decentralizing and owning our own communications protocols.

Frankly, given the average driver, I think reducing max speed and adding another set of eyes & brain to the mix would be a pretty good thing :)