The smart toilet era is here Ready to share your analprint with big tech?
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Back then, the idea of a futuristic toilet that could automatically detect early signs of bowel cancer and other health risks seemed like a technology that, while not "cool", would improve hundreds of millions of peoples' lives.
It's so sad that we've reached the stage now that our first reaction is not how many lives this could save, but how big tech are going to use it to fuck over the rest of society.
What the hell happened in the last 20 years?
This is a well known target for data collection, going back well beyond 20 years. It has been proposed before that municipal sewage systems be monitored for byproducts of explosive and chemical weapons manufacturing, as well as surveying illicit substance use. Ambassadors have long been careful about where they take their dumps, and porta-shitters occasionally pop up on embassy grounds during periods of high tension - despite having a functional sewage line.
https://www.wired.com/2015/10/familial-dna-evidence-turns-in...
This is what you get when you either outright lie regularly or are not careful about appearances of your words!
Decades before the modern form of Big Tech, there was plenty of serious conversation about the dystopian potential of our technological present and future. Every trope you can imagine was well-represented in these conversations: centralization, panopticons, loss of user/customer control; hell even addiction to online communities was well-trod ground in at least fiction.
These hazards are just inherent to these technologies. I won't go as far as claiming there was no way to avoid them as a society, but as a baseline everyone expected to be grappling with these issues.
Then venture capital got here, latched onto the terrible centralizing technologies like AJAX, and paid everyone enough to stop thinking - "don't be evil", etc. But even at the time, looking at the incentives, these businesses' benevolence was clearly unsustainable. But "it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it".
Now we're down to simply playing catch up. I can roll my own eyes every time some article cries about big tech cutting them off, safe knowing that I run my own infrastructure. But I'm well aware that I spend time and effort to maintain it. And doing so does little to change the larger societal expectation that people's digital lives can be arbitrarily destroyed at any time.
I can envision a Free and easy future story for things like private communication, filesharing, etc. But hardware like toilet sensors? Large scale analysis? I've got nothing. Best result is that someone reverse engineers a proprietary device's protocol, does some simple analysis on their own turds, and creates a niche community around it. Until the larger company gets word of that "security problem" with their hardware, smites them, and the community is stuck refurbishing used toilets off eBay until their numbers dwindle through attrition.
The real problem is there is little widespread pushback on these defective-by-design technologies before they're even adopted. The "average person's" expectation has been completely neutered between a combination of overwhelming advertising and the politics of corporations first.
As dysfunctional and regulatory captured as the US Government is, I'm increasingly thinking the only way forward for wider society is some GDPR equivalent legislation. Ideally we'd end up with a fiduciary relationship for personal data (after all, personal data is more sensitive than money). Or in the worst case storing personal data just becomes toxic such that most companies want to avoid it, and the behemoths that remain can be gradually reigned in through successive legislation and focused public concern.
No, I went out of my way to emphasize that I wasn't saying this:
> I won't go as far as claiming there was no way to avoid them as a society, but as a baseline everyone expected to be grappling with these issues.
The _challenges_ were inevitable. Failing to surmount them (to whatever extent you think we did) was not. But those two don't add up to where-did-that-come-from bewilderment at what happened, as failure was always a possibility.
If we've utterly failed at handling climate change in twenty years, a reasonable reaction wouldn't be "20 years ago we thought we'd be living in a perfect solarpunk future, who could have predicted climate dystopia?". The presence of a difficult problem implies the possibility of failure, which is incongruous with the GP comment's Pollyanna-ish view of the future when he was a kid.
> for the most part, us technical people were very concerned with dystopias, both the cynical and the wide eyed dreamers.
Yes, these are the people I was referring to when contrasting the GP's framing that when he was a kid, he didn't worry about the privacy etc concerns of technology.
Some people figured out that acquiring data on anyone and everyone, from every source possible, and collating it, could be used to make a profit. In the absence of any laws forbidding this, unregulated capitalism did what it always does: strip-mined the fuck out of this newly-discovered resource, without a single care for any damage done to the world in the name of their profits.
Anyone who had moral qualms with this was ignored in favor of increasingly absurd piles of money for the people running the companies doing this. These companies now have enough cash on hand to make it much harder to pass laws forbidding what they are doing.
#itsmyanus
I know the intentions are probably good, but imagine how the tech industry will abuse that much data. This shows the risks of failing to regulate big tech. We’ll miss out on genuinely useful data because a handful of people needed to get super rich by disseminating our personal, private info.