Explaining to people what they should do regarding matters that there are no ways to achieve the stated goals is the laziest, lowest value category of journalism. It's a plague.
There are possible truths that exist in mainstream math formalisms[1]... for which the formalism says there may be no proof of. Just because the formalism can't explain everything doesn't mean we should throw it out!
I view communications like this as: a. making ppl aware (who may not be technical) b. doing the work that may not be worth $$$ c. avoiding future coordination failures of society
All of these in a hyper-optimized and hyper-educated societies may seem inefficient, but in a non-optimized and not highly educated world we live in they are the difference between chaos and not.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompleteness_...
Burn it all down.
There are certainly problems, but you haven't put enough thought into what the statement even _means_ (Would this eliminate EMR systems? Bank transfers? Credit scores?) to consider what "burning it down" means, or "it's not working" means.
It's like the US tax code... it is insanely complicated and in a lot of ways doesn't serve the public well (because rich folks can use the complexity of it to escape taxation), so it's easy and popular to say let's just get rid of it and start with a new, simple tax code.
The problem is it got to be the way it is for a reason. We want to incentivize people to own homes and buy electric cars and a thousand other things, and we use the tax code to do that. If you tear it down without a plan on how to keep incentivizing all the things you want, you're going to end up with some undesirable results that you then have to fix.
It's fine to say let's throw it out and start over, but if that's as far as your plan goes then it's pretty lazy.
And what do we want to replace targeted ads, surreptitious tracking, and a system that exploits its users for money while not being held accountable to its users with?
I'd say we're better off with nothing. So yes, in this instance, burn it all down actually is a solution.
I'm aware I'm ignoring the externalities, I'm aware it's complicated, and I'm aware what I'm proposing actually is lazy. I'm aware a bunch of people will lose their jobs (mostly in tech though so I really don't feel bad, having spent most of life in that industry). I'm saying in this instance it doesn't matter. We're still better off burning it all down.
And if you as the user want to share no data at all, you should have that option. This is the company's problem, not the customer's problem - or at least that's the world I want to live in.
And obviously don't hide anything behind dark patterns, and all the other common sense gotchas. Violations should be treated as criminal fraud with prison time (assuming they are found guilty in a court of law, and proving criminal fraud is notoriously difficult but the threat needs to be real).
[If we want] to incentivize...
While it's true that incentivization necessitates tax code complexity, we don't all agree on the necessity of incentivization in the first place.
"Burn it all down" is easy to say. You can apply it to anything, with no further thought. It's precisely what I'd call "lazy".
To avoid being lazy, you'd have to couple it with exactly what you intend to build from scratch, and ideally how you'd go about it. That's a ton of work, not just because you have to have a concrete idea, but because you have something that people can point out the flaws of. Many of whom will say, "It's terrible, burn it down."
People who diet non stop because they might get to day 20 and it isn't working and the solution is to start over in a week or so.
It is much easier to make yourself think that behavior will change if only one got a clean start. But inevitably you find yourself at a similar point, and a similar result.
In order to start from scratch and make it effective, you should have a reason why things will be different in the future.
I doubt the forefathers would have thought there needed to be a law against me passing on info.
I mean the Bible tells us about censuses by the Romans ~5BC, so depending what's in your list ...
Probably not, since it created a new powerful orgabization (the federal government) and mandated it to go around classifying everybody by a particular set of feature (whether they were a “free person”, an “indian not taxed”, or an “other person”.)
Given that when the framers were scared of a powerful organization doing something, their first concern tended to be about government doing it, and their response tended to be to prohibit at least the federal government from doing it, I think the fact that they mandated the federal government to do it indicates that it was neither something they feared nor something they failed to fear out of lack of consideration.
Easier said than done. What we're seeing is advertising as a business carried to its logical conclusion. If you "burn it all down", you have to end, in effect, all advertising. Advertisers try to target their budget as effectively as possible; the more they know about their target demographic, the better able they are to do that.
If nobody gave their data to services that sell it on or use it for profit then there is no data economy.
Convincing even one person to choose more privacy friendly choices helps a little.
Go ahead. Figure out how to opt out of Experian, Transunion, or Equifax collecting everything they can about you, including pretty much every piece of data needed for identity theft, possibly confusing it with someone with a similar name, and then putting it in a badly-secured database.
No, really, if you can figure it out I'd love to know. Every now and then I am reminded they exist and that they are silently creating these vast troves of data without anyone's consent, and all I can do is hope that if my identity information is included in a data breach, I am both small enough and lucky enough to not be impacted.
Health records used for AI machine learning training . Your health data are in the vendor database . What possibly could go wrong?
Think about all the other websites out there using Google Analytics, FaceBook "Like" buttons, Twitter excerpts, etc.
You're ever getting away.
Even if you are homeless and living under a bridge, facebook will have photos of you, uploaded by others, they will know who you are and whwre you like will sell some data relating to you to someone