Class action against Oracle’s worldwide surveillance machine
iccl.ie
iccl.ie
I work very hard to not let my phone be required for as many transactions as possible, and write my most important and private thoughts by hand on paper instead of in my phone.
People think I'm crazy and paranoid, but their cell phone is probably still tracking me along with store cameras or whatever other BS invasive companies can concoct (less accurately), so at least it's someone else's fault now, rather than being my own.
I'll eagerly look forward to getting my $1.39 from the class action suits once the lawyers all get paid.
At what point will there be a tipping point where the pitchforks come out and the general public's "patience" with regulation catching up to this crap begins to unravel and actual violence or "direct action" begins to occur against these actors?
Because while we're focused on individual political officials actions as a distraction, these types of warehouses are getting bigger and bigger, making more and more money for the owners, and becoming used more and more for malicious activities.
There is no public consensus on this. American voters are fine with free, ad-supported software. They’re fine with surveillance in exchange for convenience.
They likely don’t understand the cost. Personally or systemically. But a combination of digital-privacy thought leaders (a) overlapping with communities embracing political nihilism, (b) experiencing a filter bubble where popular support is perceived where there is none and (c) having been corrupted (politically speaking) by crypto has stymied policy progress.
There are no pitchforks. There is no angry mob. To the degree there is consensus overseas, it arises from nationalism with respect to security (India) or competitiveness (Europe).
Is that true though? When Apple made tracking opt-in, pretty much everyone refused. I think that's a clear indicator that the overwhelming majority do want privacy, and if they're actually given a choice, most will probably take it.
The issue about not understanding the cost is real, but that's not unprecedented. There was a time when most people didn't understand the cost of cigarettes and tobacco, but that problem was solved through government intervention.
Edit: to clarify, I said the tracking is “opt-in”, but it’s not a default. iOS explicitly asks you to choose between tracking or no tracking. It does not assume any default.
Americans want privacy. There isn't consensus around the acceptable level of tradeoffs [1][2].
> was a time when most people didn't understand the cost of cigarettes and tobacco, but that problem was solved through government intervention
In 1964, the Surgeon General's Advisory Committee marked a turning point for smoking in America [3]. The Tobacco MSA was entered into in 1998 [4], by when most smokers recognized their habit as an addiction. The government intervention followed evidencing harm, public discussion and massive changes in public behavior. We are still in the first phase for ad-funded tech.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/06/04/how-america...
[2] https://netchoice.org/zogby-memo-to-interested-parties-ameri...
[3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3894634/
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobacco_Master_Settlement_Agre...
They are also completely ignorant about practical aspects of it.
Almost half of the US population is rocking Android phones.
I've seen this or equivalent statements a lot in discussion related to privacy, tracking, and the ios ecosystem. However, I don't think the results show what you're saying they do. All I see is that people accept the default behaviour of their devices. Unfortunately, there's no mobile ecosystem where you can easily opt out of tracking to compare to.
There is no default though. The popup gives you two options like “Ask not to track” and “Allow” with no way to dismiss it.
Or it could be a clear indicator that people will leave the defaults where they are, which is why there have been figurative wars over getting a particular browser to be the default browser of an operating system.
Is it? Or is it a clear indication that most people will stick with whatever the default option handed to them is?
Then the question is no longer "Am I okay with tracking if I can shut it off and everything's still the same," but becomes "Am I okay with tracking if it means I don't have to pay for the software or service?"
Appstores/marketplaces will need to clearly show which apps are free without tracking so that consumers are aware that there are privacy-respecting alternatives, and don’t feel like they have no choice.
However, there’s also the issue that the definition of “tracking” and “privacy” is too vague. If Google or Facebook offered a paid service with privacy, I personally still wouldn’t trust them to not collect data on me.
People want to be able to own the things they buy, without further nonsense.
To whit, anywhere the software is provided "free" it is actually just included in the price. It is no coincidence they don't let you upgrade the actual version of that software without paying (or jail breaking as the case may be). Most phones and tablets are kept at whatever version you bought them at, by design.
If you buy a hardware firewall, you still have to pay for its software and maintenance. If you buy a car, you still have to buy winter tires at the appropriate time of year, and pay for the car's regular checkup. For tires, you even may have to pay for yearly rotation, balancing, etc. This business model shows up in many variants all over the place. Different divisions or people work on something, it's a separate pay item.
For example, Twitter allows you to prune a list of ad subjects. You can add and subtract to that list. This could effectively reduce the need for tracking, but people reflexively block the ad accounts, rendering any form of ad campaign ineffective.
I'm not saying that's the answer, btw. It may be, or it may not be. I am saying though, that people are so used to blocking ads and not paying, that finding solutions to keep online companies viable is extraordinarily difficult without tracking.
If Twitter turned around and told everyone who did that, that they have to pay for a subscription, they'd quickly go out of business.
That option already existed in the settings. People couldn't be bothered to go set it because they don't really care.
How would you explain the cost to someone? Most of the discourse seems to boil down to some mix of "it's creepy" and "it could be used for a nefarious purpose", which is not super convincing.
For most commercial surveillance, I can't. Provable harm from the Equifax breach remains unquantified. We're only beginning to discuss those data for e.g. Facebook and teenagers. To give analogy, we're in the 1960s on the smoking-regulation timeline [1].
Legislators made it far worse because they demanded additional data to be saved for "security purposes". So not even here people are informed about the problem. On the contrary, we regularly have old farts making everything much worse.
Frankly, those that believe they can save some bucks when they share their data probably aren't the best to understand the larger picture. The data is valuable for different purposes but it is also difficult to put a price tag on it.
It is very concrete, but that would automatically alienate quite a few people...
There were a lot of people in the data set, certainly, but how many can quantify damages?
If anything the Cambridge Analytica scandal was (disturbing) "win" for privacy loss: a lot of the Cambridge Analytica demographics markers were baked into the Facebook ad platform and became standard ad demographics soon after. The Cambridge Analytica scandal as played out looked like Facebook was stamping out bad privacy practices using its platform, but the real message was Facebook eliminating a competitor to their ad business by eliminating their access to Facebook's data. Lucky for Facebook the PR mostly stuck with the face value of "stamping out bad privacy practices", but even a lot of the people that saw/realized it was simply Facebook eliminating a competitor have mostly shrugged and continued to use Facebook (though Facebook did add some opt-outs at that much more modest uproar, versus all the loud thundering noise Cambridge Analytica got).
IIRC, the Trump used that data set to send targeted ads to ~90M independent and republican voters. Independents got ads attacking Clinton and emphasizing prominent Trump supporters. Republicans got turnout-oriented ads.
Provided he won by less than 100k votes (and lost the popular vote), the cost to the median US citizen was likely quite large.
I didn’t know the same demographic markers had been baked into the platform. This is very concerning.
Certainly they cross-compiled that data with other ad systems and phone lists and who knows what else, but given the scandal with respect to that specific campaign was primarily about their micro-targeted Facebook ad buys, Facebook is still left culpable as the platform owner at the end of the day.
But I'm of the belief that micro-targeted ads should be illegal in general, and all of the micro-targeting enabling ad platforms seriously questioned for what they've enabled in the last decade or so. The fact that they are generally acceptable and multi-billion dollar revenue generators is its own reminder of what this thread is about that the average person doesn't seem to care about all of these invasive data privacy issues.
> the average person doesn't seem to care about all of these invasive data privacy issues.
I know, anecdotally, I became half a pariah in my family for refusing to register and share pics of my kids on WhatsApp. That was after the FB purchase, but before they changed the terms of service. I didn't trust FB, and was ultimately proven right.
This is true. Even Snowden's revelations didn't have much effect outside of tech circles. US congress even got away with passing a law to retroactively make some of the revealed illegal spying on Americans legal. The public either does not care or feels impotent.
Governments love corporate surveillance as it allows them a source of data without having to worry about scrutiny they might face by collecting the data directly.
It feels hopeless that surveillance capitalism will ever be able to be reigned in.
This is not true. There were lasting changes in public perceptions around the surveillance of Americans [1]. And bulk collection under the Patriot Act was repealed [2]. That is far from complete, but it's also far from nothing.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/06/04/how-america...
[2] https://www.wyden.senate.gov/news/press-releases/wyden-prais...
https://sgp.fas.org/crs/intel/RL34600.pdf [PDF]
The reforms to bulk data collection were immediately after the revelations.
Congress has been continuing/expanding surveillance in the years since. But, perhaps not to the degree they would have without Snowden's revelations? I want to believe that Snowden's great sacrifice made lasting changes, but I don't think the evidence supports it.
E.g.,
> Congress extends patriot act section 702 spying powers (2018)
https://www.zdnet.com/article/congress-demanded-nsa-spying-r...
> Congress extends patriot act section 215 spying powers (2019)
https://www.aclu.org/news/national-security/congress-just-te...
> With practically no public notice and no public hearings, the House of Representatives passed the College Transparency Act (CTA) on Feb. 4, 2022, by slipping it into a much larger unrelated bill called the America Competes Act, intended to better position the United States to compete with China. (2022)
> creation of a comprehensive data system that would include the personal information of every student enrolled in college or another higher education institution, and track them after their [sic] graduate.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/04/04/congress...
Extensions of §§ 702 and 215 didn't roll back the reforms in the USA Freedom Act [1], which was a hodgepodge of intelligence reauthorizations and admittedly minor reforms. (But reforms nonetheless.)
> House of Representatives passed the College Transparency Act (CTA) on Feb. 4, 2022, by slipping it into a much larger unrelated bill called the America Competes Act
Anyone claiming CTA was slipped into the ACA wasn't watching the ball. I first heard about it around 2021 [2], which was itself a re-introduction of an earlier bill. It went through discussions across two administrations. The only opposition was from higher ed, who didn't want the record keeping burden.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USA_Freedom_Act#Title_VI:_FISA...
[2] https://www.cassidy.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/cassi...
That kinda makes my point.
I appreciate that from your perspective I am being far too pessimistic. But, I do not see reason for optimism.
Still, I hope it turns out that you are right.
It will likely by some combination of: 1. starts to impact the 1% (e.g. Congresswoman Feinstein didn't care about privacy a whole lot until she found out the NSA may have been bugging HER, etc) 2. an active interest in counter-measures (up to and including not buying or dismantling IoT options; people are already on forums in growing numbers looking for 'dumb' appliances and looking to hoard car parts to keep the ICE cars rolling indefinitely if possible) 3. a second Cambridge Analytical with any measurable, discrete, bad outcomes that follow (e.g. someone uses breach data to stalk a person, a group of shareholders get fleeced [aka see 1])
There is no silver bullet here in my view. A confluence of events will at some point likely hit critical mass and force it. Almost no one thought data sovereignty regulation would take off, but GDPR, CCPA, and a growing list of similars have proven that was a misstep on the part of tech to avoid a balkanized regulatory universe, but they simply could not agree to give up on iota of adtech dollars....so they will lose it by endless smaller cuts. The legal/compliance industry will reap those profits instead.
If only the "anti-vax" mob could have been motivated towards upholding Internet privacy... We'd perhaps have a far more relevant and meaningful protest in the U.S.
They’re a natural demographic! But connecting to them requires showmanship, crossing a partisan line for some, and bridging to the anti-Big Tech crowd. No easy work.
No slow down at all of data gathering.
There's been dozens of the exact kind you're describing and nobody cares [1].
[0] https://www.asisonline.org/security-management-magazine/arti...
[1] https://www.purdueglobal.edu/blog/information-technology/wor...
Given Equifax's one job is to protect people's credit you would have hoped they'd have gotten more than a slap on the wrist of a class action lawsuit. At the very least, you would have expected their clients (banks) to have had trust issues in remaining their clients and something of a long term impact on their revenue. (It's done nothing but grow its revenue since the data breach.)
Oh, they've got their hands more pies than credit ratings
> Equifax also offers fraud prevention products based on device fingerprinting such as "FraudIQ Authenticate Device."
> selling consumer credit and insurance reports and related analytics to businesses in a range of industries.
> Equifax sells businesses credit reports, analytics, demographic data, and software.
This happened. The vast majority of people do not care or do not have time to care.
Including names and everything.
That would wake people up.
oh c'mon, nobody wants to see that. Send me a goatse [dot] cx link or something more vanilla
But there's been nothing on it since. Given how Oliver's show tends to run, I figure the topic will be back towards the end of the season.
But because it was celebrities people just thought "oh it wouldn't happen to me".
Go into really kinky sex shops and just browse around... Go to Chuck E Cheese and crash a kid's birthday party and jump in the ball pit (especially if you don't have kids). Buy diabetic socks, especially when you don't need them, or even lingerie for the opposite gender from Target. Host wild phone conversations with your friends in a nonsensical language, and do it as much as possible... Cover your front phone camera with black tape when it's not in use... Talk frequently about the opposite of what your real plans are directly into every microphone placed on every Internet connected device... Never use the same password you use on important resources for social media...
Adopt a great new pseudonym, and never verify yourself on any of your social media accounts, they can't demand that info, they're not the Government.
Hack the planet. :P
No chance. No one cares if the data they have on you is accurate or not, least of all ad companies. They'll happily push ads at you all day and it doesn't matter to them what they're for. Companies will continue to use that false data to force you to pay more. An employer who refuses to hire you because of a false understanding of your spending habits or political views will never know the difference and neither will you. You'll just not get the job, you won't know why.
The data collected on you will be used against you no matter how accurate it is. Feeding the system "corrupt data" is still just handing them ammo to hit you with. It will always be better for you to avoid handing them data at all.
That's not a coherent response to my point - I have no idea what you're trying to say here.
> No one cares if the data they have on you is accurate or not, least of all ad companies.
This is wildly, factually incorrect. There's literally no reason for anyone to gather data if it's going to be consistently inaccurate. In the case of ad companies, they want correct data because they think it allows them to target ads better - they definitely care about accuracy.
> They'll happily push ads at you all day and it doesn't matter to them what they're for.
This is irrelevant. The problem of "I'm being shown ads" is completely orthogonal to the problem of "an organization is collecting a bunch of personal data about me". My comment was explicitly about the latter, yours is about the former and so shouldn't be a response to mine.
> An employer who refuses to hire you because of a false understanding of your spending habits or political views
That's an edge case that's easily worked around - just make your noise-introducer not add hazardous content.
> The data collected on you will be used against you no matter how accurate it is.
You're assuming that the data collected is actually useful as a weapon, and there's no reason to assume that. Your noise-detector could just add interests in a bunch of different products (avoiding the hazardous ones) - very low risk, and very confusing for an adtech company.
> It will always be better for you to avoid handing them data at all.
This is true in theory, but unfortunately very difficult in practice. Ad Nauseam's approach is the realistic, pragmatic one that survives contact with reality.
If they cared, at all, they'd provide a means for people to confirm the accuracy of the assumptions they make about you and correct mistakes. They also wouldn't bother with buying from data brokers who gather data from any number of unreliable sources. It's quantity over quality every time.
I'm not even sure ad companies actually think all the data allows them to better target ads or even that targeted ads are preferable. They have to convince their clients of that though. Really all they care about is pushing ads and collecting money.
> just make your noise-introducer not add hazardous content.
Good luck. There are an endless number of things that might prejudice someone against you. Your lifestyle, your politics, your religion, the people you associate with, your sexual history, your hobbies, your medical conditions, etc. The longer you go filling your dossier with random information the more likely it is that you'll end up hitting one of them.
> You're assuming that the data collected is actually useful as a weapon,
No one is collecting your data for your benefit. It is always to benefit themselves at your expense. Every scrap of data that is taken from you will be leveraged against you or sold to someone else on the promise that it could be.
The reason there is a multi-billion dollar a year industry around buying and selling the most mundane aspects of your life is because it gives others huge advantages over you. It allows them to take more of your money, to punish you, to erode your ability to enact change, and to manipulate you into supporting positions favorable to them.
The data they collect allows them to do this no matter how inaccurate their assumptions about you are. You may not 'deserve' to be targeted by an extremist group who got your name and address from a data broker, but they'll still punish you for what they think you are or have done. You might not have as much money as your dossier suggests, but a store is going to raise their prices for you based on that data anyway while charging your neighbor less. You might not actually eat out as often, but your health insurance rates are still going up if the insurance company gets the wrong idea. You might not have actually been looking up rope, hacksaws, tarps, and duct tape on November 12th, but the police will still question you if they see it in your search history and will gladly throw you behind bars if they think you'll be easy to convict for the crime.
Ad Nauseam's approach fails to have any meaningful impact on the outcome. You'll still get abused and be taken advantage of, just sometimes it will be for the wrong reasons.
You can't always avoid giving any data away, but stuffing your dossier with more and more data (no matter how random or inaccurate) will always be worse for you.
False, because if I feed false & non-incriminating pieces of data to a surveillance system - which is not an edge case, but the exact idea that we are arguing about in this thread - then it will not be leveraged against me, and in fact it will decrease the amount of leverage that the system has against me.
> or sold to someone else on the promise that it could be
Right, at which point it will make that system worse, as well.
> The reason there is a multi-billion dollar a year industry around buying and selling the most mundane aspects of your life is because it gives others huge advantages over you. It allows them to take more of your money, to punish you, to erode your ability to enact change, and to manipulate you into supporting positions favorable to them.
Yes, I know this, and the point of feeding fake data is to prevent people from doing this. There's no point in putting this in, because that isn't the interesting part of the discussion, it's whether fake data actually works. Why do you keep putting completely irrelevant material into your comments?
> The data they collect allows them to do this no matter how inaccurate their assumptions about you are.
No. No no no. This is false. "Inaccurate data", just by itself, is worthless. It doesn't do anything. It's only inaccurate data along specific dimensions ("incriminating" data) that actually matters, and it's straightforward (if not easy) to "shape" the fake data that you feed to surveillance systems to that which is simultaneously (a) damaging to ad systems and (b) not incriminating at all.
And the rest of this paragraph? Pure speculation. You cannot make a connection between these kinds of negative outcomes and Ad Nauseam (and related techniques) because it has never happened.
> Ad Nauseam's approach fails to have any meaningful impact on the outcome.
You have precisely zero evidence for this, and I have counter-evidence: Google specifically banned Ad Nauseam from the Chrome Store[1], which is very good evidence for the fact that it is effective in ways that adblockers and anti-fingerprinting tools are not.
Your entire comment is filled with ridiculous assertions, completely irrelevant tangents, illogical leaps, and pure speculation. None of it lines up with reality.
[1] https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/google/google-bans-adn...
I clearly can't convince you, but I strongly encourage you to educate yourself if you honestly think none of the things I described have ever happened or could ever happen. Pretty much all of it is happening and/or has happened.
Extremist groups buying data to target and harass others? Already happened with people at abortion clinics (https://www.mass.gov/news/ag-reaches-settlement-with-adverti...)
see also:
https://www.techdirt.com/2022/05/04/data-brokers-selling-loc...
https://themarkup.org/privacy/2022/01/27/gay-bi-dating-app-m... https://sites.sanford.duke.edu/techpolicy/wp-content/uploads...
https://siliconangle.com/2022/05/02/grindr-user-location-dat...
Stores changing prices on a per person basis based on their data?
"For example, ZipRecruiter, an online employment marketplace, indicates that it could increase profits by 84% by experimenting with personalized prices (Wallheimer 2018). Other players, such as travel sites (e.g., Orbitz, Hotel Tonight; DeAmicis 2015; Mattioli 2012), retailers (e.g., Amazon.com, Home Depot, Staples; Streitfeld 2000; Valentino-DeVries et al. 2012), and even grocery stores (e.g., Safeway; Clifford 2012) have also reportedly begun implementing personalized prices for their customers based on individual characteristics." (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/s41272-019-00224-3)
Other fun ways stores use your data to discriminate against you? They can tell you their return policy is that they don't accept returns or have a very short return window while the next person who walks in the door gets told their return policy is extremely generous. Some even use it to decide how long to leave you on hold, bumping you down to the bottom of the queue when someone with a better "consumer reputation" calls in.
Health insurance rates being influenced by big data? There has been going on for a long time and there's a massive push to increase it.
"Insurers contend they use the information to spot health issues in their clients — and flag them so they get services they need. And companies like LexisNexis say the data shouldn’t be used to set prices. But as a research scientist from one company told me: “I can’t say it hasn’t happened.” (https://www.propublica.org/article/health-insurers-are-vacuu...)
Police using search histories to fish for suspects?
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/police-google-reverse-k...
https://www.cnet.com/news/privacy/google-is-giving-data-to-p...
Seriously, all of this stuff is happening. The vast majority of the ways the data you hand over to companies are being used against you happen without your ever being made aware of it, but be assured that your life has already been impacted by the data you've provided and you will be dealing with the fall out of that data being out there for the rest of your life. Adding more data to that pile, accurate or not, will only hurt you.
Google banning Ad Nauseam is not proof that it will save you. Google is in the ad business and it's possible they banned it because they objected to the concept, thought it could have hurt the perception that their data was accurate, had concerns about how it would impact payouts, or any other reason, but it would do nothing to prevent any of the abuses described above and actually opens you up to more risk.
It's not like anyone is throwing out the file they have on you because there might be a mistake in it. Data brokers get paid the same no matter how accurate their data is. Feel free to get yourself flagged as being/doing more and more random things on top of all the real data you give up if you like, but I hope that you'll give it some real thought because it can, is, and will be used against you, and all that data (real or not) never ever goes away.
There is... there is lingerie for men ??
Because we’ve allowed media to become entertainment and the internet killed print, and as a society we’ve lost the ability to sway the population with anything approaching fact.
Media always was entertainment. Internet is just print v2.0. As a society, we never were able to sway the population with facts.
If you look at the history you will see the same things happening over and over again. That doesn't mean we shouldn't fight for what is right, just don't be discouraged if the effect is less than desired.
I don't blame you, I go one step further, I use a rooted deGoogled phone with location defaulted to off and all apps with few exceptions such as browsers are specifically denied access to the internet. Even then I use multiple browsers for different jobs/sites with JavaScript defaulted to off. Oh, and I nearly forgot to mention the phone's VPN-type firewall.
When I go shopping I mostly use cash even for large purchases say up to $1k or so (I'll actively go to an auto teller and withdraw cash first rather than use my cards). I keep online purchases to an absolute minimum and when I do I make them with 'corporate' type cards.
I don't see this as paranoia, rather it's common sense. Anyone, who runs a logcat log-displaying program on a rooted smartphone without additional privacy protection steps being taken is astounded - in fact horrified - at the amount information that's being stolen from one. The log entries flash past in their thousands much faster than it's possible for anyone to ever read them.
I've little to hide and my lifestyle is really pretty boring and ordinary but I'm absolutely affronted how this situation developed without proper laws being in place or enacted (not long ago the privacy of telephone circuits was considered sacrosanct and laws rigorously protected us from being monitored).
In the grand scheme of things I recognize that my efforts are pretty futile but at least I gain some satisfaction in trying to combat the bastards.
I don't quite understand why the general attitude of the population to maintaining one's privacy has considerably lessened in recent decades, and similarly why existing privacy laws are not being upheld as they once were.
The CCP hasn't come arrest me for speaking against a government official and the Saudi government hasn't arrested me for dancing and the Australian government hasn't arrested me for participating in a protest, etc...
One day soon all Americans will start facing consequences for even benign actions and then they will care.
Or the National Security Law is enforced in an extraditial manner as it's written.
(Also, don't forget the US has extratraditial laws with punishment involving crimes of abuse and crimes of having unreported money in other countries [i.e. being american and working for a company+living in say the UK])
No doubt today such experiments would be completely banned not to mention that anyone who dared tried it would experience the full wrath of Peta brought down upon him/her.
asking for a friend, she wants to know how to do this, she is very privacy conscious.
> I nearly forgot to mention the phone's VPN-type firewall.
also she wonders what vpn service you use here
> logcat log-displaying program on a rooted smartphone without additional privacy protection steps being taken is astounded
and one last thing she wants to know is how would you do this for a windows 10 laptop? can you hook it up to some raspberry pi device that can monitor outgoing and incoming packets? I suspect its rooted but people keep telling her how its impossible to trojan windows 10.
> one's privacy has considerably lessened in recent decades,
just to add my piece, people have been collectively brainwashed to place lot of value to essentially phantom points, be it instagram likes, followers on twitter, retweets and crypto. they are willing to go above and beyond to do the surveillance voluntarily.
I watched a piece on instagram thieves who chuckled how easy their victims make their job for them by showing off what they've got and when they are away from home. I imagine this is the same for people who believe they are building a startup legally.
Remember the quote from the biggest social media creator: "They trust me dumb **s"
Re: VPN, see my comment below to zen_1..
Re: Windows, yes, it's possible with routers and even a Raspberry Pi but it's equally complex and very different indeed to that of an Android phone.
Finally, I could have largey expanded my reasons for why I failed to fully understand the reasons why values within the population have changed in respect of privacy but I don't have the wherewithal to do it justice in the space available.
GrapheneOS on any pixel phone is my goto. It's way easier to install a custom ROM now than back in the day, anyone can do it if they can follow instructions (and reseat their phone cable if the process stalls after a phone reboot)
some banking apps don't work but apart from that it's 100% functional
> vpn
Mullvad (Sweden based) and Proton (Switzerland based) are two VPNs with a good reputation imo.
This satisfies apps that demand such access, they'll still work on the premise that they have internet access, it's just that it's down all the time.
One such firewall app is Karma FW, it's available on Google's app store - and if you think you'd be violating your privacy even further by going there then use the Aurora Store app to spoof the download. As it violates Google's terms of service you have to get it from F-Droid's repository.
Unfortunately, Play Services uses the internet for various necessary functions. The only truly satisfactory solution is to remove it altogether and replace it with GApps which is a sort of 'clone' with the anti-privacy stuff removed.
If I could avoid using google software completely, I would, but this is the second best option IMO.
The ROM community, especially those that cared about privacy, was quite small few years ago, especially for non-Pixel devices
microG is still viable afaik, but I prefer GrapheneOS's sandboxed google play approach since it's much more feature complete, and supports e.g. my 2fa hardware key, while that's currently missing from microG.
> The ROM community, especially those that cared about privacy, was quite small few years ago, especially for non-Pixel devices
Yeah Pixel devices are still the only ones you can expect to be supported by GrapheneOS and CalyxOS etc..., for anything else I think your best bet is to install LineageOS(formerly cyanogenmod) and microG if you can accept the current https://github.com/microg/GmsCore/wiki/Implementation-Status
curious to know if some external firewall running on raspberry pi that sits between windows 10 desktop and the wifi exists. it would be ideal for inspecting network traffic
If you sign up for the $1.39, that's an admission of using an Oracle product, which allows them to force you to do a licensing audit. I hope you don't have any old JREs.
Example product, no affiliation: https://www.amazon.com/Mission-Darkness-Non-Window-Faraday-P...
People I know affect me and those who insist I have to answer within 10 minutes are the insane ones.
Wait until you find out the shit they put into your water, your air, your food and your mind through mass media. You'll end up living in the woods if you take your trail of thought to its logical conclusion.
So either you're already in the woods, and then you'd not be on HackerNews, or you're playing 'I'm making a difference by drinking through a metal straw that I carry around to save the planet'.
Edit: why the downvotes? It is a valid question.
My carrier still knows where I am, but Google does not. They might get a subtle hint if I connect to wifi.
My default browser is Bromite, configured to open everything incognito by default.
I've tried Lineage before but it simply stopped working with some apps.
MicroG pretends to be Google Mobile Services, allowing more apps to run. It requires signature-spoofing, which is a major architectural change to Android.
This gives me pause:
"The source for the ROM is not publicly available, and proprietary apps are included."
All apps are optionable to install or not in IodéOS. Only source code that is closed is their inbuild adblocker, which is also possible to uninstall.
It's wiretapping conducted on everyone using devices they purchased by private companies (that uphold no responsibility for proper use or securing the data) without any justifiable cause... God help you these days if you do warrant a wire tap, but at least the Government is usually a bit more secure and regulated concerning storage and use of that data.
You can use Google to push targeted messaging to people based on the dossiers you collect.
They don’t sell the dossier, but they can leverage it. In many cases they can make inferences without the dossier. For example, you can target anti-opioid or anti-extremist materials at people identified as risks.
For example, you can target every pregnant woman in a geography and score her risk of giving birth to a child with an opioid addiction. That child will cost a health insurer ~$2M, so targeted ads that convert to intervention are very high value.
Where it gets weird is you can reverse engineer the dossier at scale. You can target very specific conditions without google “selling” that data to you. If you’re a 50 year old male searching for divorce attorneys who moved 6 times, the context of searching for “pain killers” or “target range” may have a different context than if you’re an 18 year old athlete booking a cabin in rural Maine.
[1]: https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/security/a138190...
We need to accept that the attention/surveillance economy is a natural outcome of high volume personalized markets. I did my undergraduate thesis on "Nash equilibria to predict consumer decision making under uncertainty" under Dr. Bruce Lister WELL before machine learning was even a core field of Computer Science.
People, individuals, you and me, demand increasing determinism from other stochastic humans so that we can better predict and manage our relationships with them. A corporation has the same instinct, so they are doing the reasonable thing and collecting data in order to predict the next state in the Markov Decision Process that is you.
Every major technology (and some non-technology) corporation either has built or is building a similar system to optimize you for their system. People have chosen by a HUGE MARGIN to join these systems because the non-hidden benefits outweigh the hidden risks. For the people that recognize the externalities some are pushing back (like these lawyers), but most people don't even know this is happening and honestly don't care because you get benefits from it.
The only thing shocking about this is that Larry said the quiet part out loud
I would actually claim that not only did they consent, they did so in a legally binding way through the terms of service (that they didn't read).
I'm as guilty as everyone else here, but the fact is there are options to keep yourself out of these systems if you want to - nobody is forcing you to use a credit card or be on the internet.
Does it mean you will miss out on things that make life easier, faster, healthier, cheaper etc..? YES it does!
That is entirely my point though. We are trading convenience and consumption for privacy willingly.
Those 5 billion people don't all come from the same jurisdiction.
Under GDPR, no consent for trading your data can come through an implicit, coerced action like consenting to terms of services.
Under German law, clauses of terms of services are invalid if they aren't what a reasonable consumer would expect.
> I'm as guilty as everyone else here, but the fact is there are options to keep yourself out of these systems if you want to - nobody is forcing you to use a credit card or be on the internet.
I'd argue that having Internet access is quickly approaching the status of a human right (or should be), and buying things only is also getting increasingly common.
Thing is, there doesn't have to be this amount of data collection just to browse the Internet and buy things only.
I'm also not sure if lots of companies having dossiers on me is actually improving my experience anywhere. It seems likely they'll just use it sell me crap that I don't really want or need, simply by them being very persuasive and me having limited will power.
> Does it mean you will miss out on things that make life easier, faster, healthier, cheaper etc..? YES it does!
I don't think having my data passed around between multinationals is ethical, necessary or value adding in any way. At least not value adding to me! The cafe experience was totally fine when I ordered via a menu. And it works fine via our phones without the part where my privacy data gets sold to soulless companies for a few pennies.
Honestly I think the EU has the right of it in banning this stuff outright. Its disgusting, non consensual and sociopathic. Everyone involved should be ashamed of yourselves.
I am claiming the people demand free/cheap products that fit their exact demands to be immediately delivered to them
The way that companies are solving "free or cheap" is by having someone else pay for the service on your behalf. There are only a few mechanisms for this that are "win-win" theoretically and advertising is the one that is the most popular.
In order for advertising to be useful it needs to be targeted and attributable and it has to be fungible across advertisers. Therefore if you want to be able to create an ad-market to keep your product free/cheap then you need to offer the highest granularity predictions for your advertising dollar - hence why we have extremely granular ad systems.
Makes you wonder how it got past the PR team.
Because in most companies the PR team is near the bottom of the list of influence. Only slightly above coders. Certainly well below bean counters, salesfolk, and anyone with a TLA.
I've done both financial econ and biology/genomics and I by far prefer the latter as a field. It is not to say that biology research doesn't have flaws but at least everyone understands the mathematical models are only models.
Like scary predictive
There is no "getting worse" for the mathematics of prediction. In fact we have people in this thread saying to actually behave randomly in order to fool the systems.
So, you know, we actually figured out how to improve iteratively and it's increasing in speed of improvement of prediction
It is possible to not be involved in the ad-economy, millions of people do it everyday. I would guess that most of these millions are old, illiterate, or are very poor, but you can do it without being any of those things.
This population of people are not on the internet, they don't use credit cards, they don't have a cell phone. They work for cash, live in the same city they were born in etc..
You and I are actively choosing not to live like that, when in fact it is a completely possible, reasonable way to live and by the way we have been living like that for basically all but the last few decades.
Everyone has a choice.
Especially "lower prices"?
This data doesn't help lower prices, and prices haven't lowered. Corporate profits are through the roof while wages for all but the top 10-20% have flatlined or gone down when adjusted for inflation/cost of living. Savings and home ownership rates are the lowest in half a century. Etc etc.
1. It absolutely helped "lower" prices because you never pay anything for the services that are built around ad-networks from the start, specifically social media. Do you think 1.39 billion people would pay $8 a month to use tik-tok (12BN rev/1.39B users)? No chance. The entire conceit of the consumer venture landscape since 2012 is: "How do you build a community on the back of VC money which forms the data source for your ad-network?"
2. There are certainly companies now that get the benefit from the data without "passing the savings on to consumers" but they are saving money in their costs.
At the time of purchase you are coerced into a market where things are unequally priced out, and even if it's told to you that you must accept that you give out your data. It doesn't make it clear about how far that goes, how it's stored, who it's sold to and correlated with etc.
"The user has to accept this" is a very authoritarian thing for you to say and to blame everyone here for.
We didn’t ask for it. Corporations made it desirable.
Hell NO we don't. YOU can accept the shitty surveillance. YOU can accept the personalized ads.
Fuck off with that: We need to accept....
What a load of pablum. We're not babes here mate, and you're not our trusted advisor.
You can get out right now if you want. Yet here you are arguing with me on the internet and providing more data for the ad network.
https://gizmodo.com/larry-ellisons-oracle-started-as-a-cia-p...
"If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place" - Eric Schmidt (2009)
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/12/google-ceo-eric-schmid...
lol, as it if were some kind of competition. The reality is the surveillance state knows no real boundaries. The federal intelligence agencies can get whatever they want with little or no friction. Most requests don't even rise to the level of a NSL, which is the "sudo" of "give me all your data on X". In reality there is a range of cooperative behaviors anywhere from a payments system to wholly owned subsidiary to warrant. The government loves the innovation that the private surveillance market has come up with. It's a buffet at this point.
Military types wanted to predict revolutions. Political types wanted to target voters. Marketing types wanted consumers.
https://www.amazon.com/If-Then-Simulmatics-Corporation-Inven...
2. Is it evil?
Then yes, Oracle is a big player in that space.
Every big enough company is like that. They are the stereotypical paperclip machines. They only do something apparently moral thing if not doing that would impact profits.
You're making the mistake of anthropomorphizing the lawn mower. It's not evil, it just is.
Oracle is lawnmower, it doesn't hate you, it doesn't have feelings, Oracle is as mindless and soulless as a lawnmower, however instead of mowing the lawn it makes money.
Oracle doesn't have feelings, it is for all intents and purposes the Borg.
Except it won't mean anything. Because someone will just fill their shoes after they leave. There's enough money to make that possible. And in fact it's the companies doing the most icky things that have the most money to just go hire more. That's where the revenue firehose is.
When I was at Google, it was internal culture for Googlers to raise a fuss about a lot of things all the time -- despite the company being an advertising company there was a general uneasiness about crossing various "lines in the sand". There was a very active internal dissent culture, on "memegen" and the weekly TGIF all-hands, and so on. It was broadly acceptible to stand up at TGIF and politely take Larry to task on some thing that was seen as crossing this line in the sand. It happened all the time.
Over time the company just got better and better at evading responsibility to this pitchfork crowd. After all, they had investors to satisfy. And the "line in the sand" just got further and further out, and what was seen as "creepy" and "not Googley" and against company principles just got more and more watered down.
And if you walked away from that (like I did, not that I was of any importance)? Google has plenty of money to go hire new SWEs.
The answer has to be regulation that sits above and beyond the corporations. Nationwide or global standards of behaviour, enforced by law, that set basic ground rules for what is permissible in the market. How we get there from here, I don't know. Some jurisdictions have been better about this than others.
The fact that dictators are usually replaced by dictators doesn't mean dictators aren't actually the problem. This is akin to the common argument that other, bad people are also doing the same thing that I'm doing, therefore what I'm doing is good, or at least morally neutral.
Just because there are people just as bad as you that can replace you doesn't make you not bad.
> The answer has to be regulation that sits above and beyond the corporations. Nationwide or global standards of behaviour, enforced by law, that set basic ground rules for what is permissible in the market.
We say this as if the institutions that would define and enforce this behavior aren't subject to the same self-interest as Google management. Soon, plenty of them will be ex-Google (and other tech) management, to which they'll return after delivering.
What "we" need to do is dismantle and descope large institutions. But since there's really no "we" what we each need to do is protect ourselves from these institutions by creating smaller federated defensive institutions of narrower scope, and treating the Googles and the USAs of the world like the weather, or more accurately like natural disasters or invasive species.
Sadly we know that groupthink is a thing and that many people seek conformity over conflict and correctness. You can safely assume that anyone working for Oracle is a mindless Borg drone out for more money without any care what they destroy to reach that goal. They are still guilty as hell but from a general apathy and not some active choice to be evil.
It is an incentive system which maximizes on only one kind of efficiency.
Consumers and investors are not capable of making collective / aggregate market decisions on any criterion other than profit.
Moral judgements play no part in it. Explicitly not so, in fact.
The individual agents in this structure are merely transitory carriers of a larger overriding process. Even if as large as Oracle or Google or whatever.
You could make Oracle go away but the logic remains. The hydra has many heads.
And so here we are.
that's much harder (and perhaps P=NP impossible) to do in practice for qualitative aspects of life (e.g., love, wonder, beauty, etc.), which is why we have such an imbalance of valuing things that are easier to value (food, machines, services, etc.).
And a human is just a bunch of cells?
Then one could say it's an evil tool? It's really not that much of a stretch to anthropomorphize things when we view tools as extensions of ourselves.
If you get your foot cut off by the lawnmower, it isn't the lawnmowers fault as it wasn't out to get you, just out to cut grass.
The same is 'true' of Oracle wrt them chasing profit. If you stand between them and profit, that is your fault if you get hurt as you always know what Oracle is going to do in that situation.
As such they are accountable for their actions - what sort of utter stupidity is this "oh but since the word corporation is involved we don't need to hold people accountable" bullshit you are spewing?
And... now that I said it, number 1 is also not necessary, Oracle will take their profits from bribed markets or courts if they need, it doesn't have to come from a normal market relation.
Had a colleague that interned at Oracle and was proud of how he learned to make better Powerpoint slidesets there.
His tips included "Always make slide headings full sentences including full stops". He would rename a slide titled "System architecture overview" to "The system architecture is distributed in four microservices.". (This would be above the chart showing the actual architecture)
Turns out Oracle execs famously print out slidesets, don't read them, but do read the headings, so this was what he had to do to ..."succeed".
I'd take the oil companies suggestions to heart, not Oracle's.
I believe this is the point of the strategy. Imagine the presenter is hired in as a consultant, but the audience are the ones footing the bill without any knowledge of the actual work, timeline, etc. involved.
All they want is a white dude in a shirt, tie and suit to talk a lot and sound smart. The easier it is to convince the audience of that, the more suitable to purpose the presentation is.
I did my PhD at Oracle. We got several top-tier papers from the work we did. There’s excellent engineering at Oracle.
I based my half-joking statement on knowing exactly one colleague who worked at Oracle who couldn't program his way out of a wet paper bag, but could give you a 2-hour presentation with encompassing 80 slides on how many consultants you should hire to investigate the role of paper bags in your company.
(I'm only pointing out that absurdity, I agree that there is a lot of flexibility to make slides appeal to different audiences)
ooof
The ad industry is very profitable, but it seems to hang in the balance. Ads are effective as long as data you use to segment users are accurate. What happens if data becomes corrupted? Something like "This Person Does Not Exist" [0], but for user data. Your user behavior just remarkably similar to your actual behavior, but you can filter out the sensitive parts.
I'd love to see someone come up with a program or little gadget you can solder to the "smart"-things, and actual usage telemetry will train a locally deployed model that generates user behavior data that is indistinguishable from real user data, only it doesn't say anything about you.
https://datacloudoptout.oracle.com/request-your-data/verify-...
dunno how it works for anyone anywhere else, but I'm finding out!
For those not familiar with it, Oracle’s data platform is effectively a supermarket, stocking the freshest data indexed by “audience” - behavioural interest groups. This data comes from “data providers” - companies who hold data on the behaviours of specific audiences and (are supposed to) have the right to sell it on. They are paid a commission on each sale.
Once you understand this then the lawsuit makes less sense - it’s like suing Safeway because you don’t like the ingredients of Cheez-Its. Now, there’s more to it than that, of course, but “some data providers in the marketplace may have issues” is very different from “Oracle has lawless stack of 5bn of dossiers”.
So they indeed did not collect most of the data themselves (although Oracle owns a few of the biggest data sources...), but they are the ones that have a central database with 5 billion+ identifiers in it and tens of thousands of attributes for each identifier. So they are really not as innocent as you suggest they are.
When someone wants to use the data, that customer pays Oracle. So it's Oracle selling the dataset. That they then pay a fee to some of the data sources really doesn't change that. Especially not since they own several of the data sources themselves.
I went down to Safeway yesterday, and bought a kilo of cocaine. It turns out it was ground up sudafed and talcum powder.
The cops were like "lolz. that's all on you; it's just how they market these days".
Also having the same data in a database wouldn’t necessarily be illegal, but it would be useless as behavioural data ages-out after 90 days or less.
> Oracle also collects minute details about Plaintiffs’ and Class Members’ offline activities, including their brick-and-mortar purchases and location information. By its very nature, Plaintiffs and Class members cannot be aware of or consent to this conduct.
This is exactly what I mean by suing Safeway because of a problem with Cheeze-Its. Aptly in this example the actual entity collecting and selling your data could be a grocery store - That’s who you should sue if you’re bothered by, you know, them selling your data.
Pardon?
I'd like to think that this insanity will be stopped relatively soon, since tech workers are still in high demand, so people mostly don't put up with this shit. For the vast majority of workers, who don't have that luxury, I don't think they will be able to get rid of this kind of software.
Related link from two days ago: an article from Cory Doctorow describing workplace surveillance or "Bossware": https://doctorow.medium.com/workplace-surveillance-is-coming....
I've often wondered why I'm in such a tiny minority even among my CS peers...
Then again, at least over here in Europe, new cars will mandatorily have tracking devices built in, so perhaps my whole effort was kinda moot to begin with.
I openly bragged about this on data-broker sites, and shared their info (for money) with people with similar interests. They had different end goals in mind, but I don't know what they were, so that's not on me right?
Anyway, I managed to net $8 for my trouble, but got caught and they successfully sued me.
Should I expect the damages to be more or less than the per-person pay out this lawsuit is likely to generate? How is what Oracle did any different?
I think $10,000 per offense would be a bit too low. I want to live in a world where shareholders can look at that slide and say:
5 billion victims times $10K means they have amassed $50T in toxic assets. I'm jumping ship, and/or joining a shareholder lawsuit.
It may not be of dire consequence to most of us regular people, but it surprises me that banks, political institutes, corporations, and even governments around the world happily let their people use these phones for work.
People and media get riled up about Google and Facebook but the data that they have on me is pretty coarse and pales in comparison to what DataLogix, which is a company that Oracle acquired, and other companies have been able to build. We are not rational when it comes to these arguments.
If you're about to get stung by a scorpion then deal with that before dealing with the lion slowly stalking you.
Alternative narrative: Google and Facebook are directly threatening news media while DataLogix isn't and therefore doesn't get the attention that it ought to get.
Plus there is a very overlooked category of corporate software selling data, like payrolls. This can be used to target you better (eg can you afford that product). Another example is Salesforce selling consumer data to marketing departments: https://www.salesforce.com/products/marketing-cloud/data-sha...
Their marketing information explicitly says they use the above to build social graphs of consumer profiles. You'd have to be pretty paranoid to prevent that from linking you to your hypothetical mistress and militia buddies.
You'd need to not carry a phone, pay with cash, stay masked (that's easy now, I guess) and avoid using a car with a built in cell modem or legible license plates. If Cory Doctorow is to be believed, gait tracking is also a thing now, so rotate through walking with thumb tacks and rocks in one or the other shoe.
Even then, you're still thoroughly in Death Note territory where you'll accidentally feed a few (information theoretic) bits of information to the database every once in a while.
Also, if you follow all my advice, this XKCD will apply to you: https://xkcd.com/1105/
So, to answer your question, yes.
Haven't you been to an airport? or survived this covid period? The fear is proportional to the advantage.
If there's a 1000$ behind a door that costs 500$ to open then you open it no? Then the people who own everything must raise the price of opening the door or they'll have mutiny on their hands. We've seen the price steadily go up and it's not a coincidence.
Not sure why it's hitting the news now. There are equally large datasets available by other entities.
I even have my YouTubetv set to allow personalized ads but the inserted Google ads are still just mass market ads for cars, movies, and insurance.
Unfortunately my car has a cellular modem built in, but I pretty much disabled it by disconnecting the antenna and replacing it with a dummy load.
But yeah, private companies on top of governments is even worse.
You have to incentivize businesses, as data storage entities, by destroying their financial solvency upon the face of privacy violations or privacy will always remain a discarded nuisance much like accessibility.
Seems only fair, since they voluntarily shared ours private details.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32549604
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32552749
Edit: Note, they have edited some of their comments like their previous response to a comment, "Could it be that you can not understand the harms because you actively took part in creating this reality? I know it's condescending, but it's also human nature. Nobody likes to acknowledge he is a part of something harmful, and to deal with this cognitive dissonance we can put on very powerful blinders." where the previous response was "lol (and something the the effect of, no I don't care)".
Fellow humans, there are alternatives to being tracked via cell phone! Your neck need not be under anyone's boot! You don't even need to give up any functionality:
Data service:
The simplest thing is to buy a prepaid SIM and top it off with cash. The lovely people over at /r/nocontract maintain a big spreadsheet so you can filter by various properties of the available contracts.
Another way to go is to pay for a postpaid plan with a virtual credit card (VCC) like at privacy.com. It won't be linked to your name at the telco, but of course privacy.com knows who you are. There is also Abine Blur, and some others.
Yet a third way to go, which is nascent, is buy an eSIM with crypto. You can also buy prepaid VCCs with crypto.
All these methods make you /pseudo/nymous, but obviously you're still identifiable by subscriber number and possibly IMEI, to put aside correlational things like your traffic profile. You can help this problem by routing everything through a VPN. Then you're pseudonymous but the cell carrier knows nothing about you other than that you use a VPN. Pay for the VPN with crypto. Of course now the VPN provider knows your traffic, but you're much more anonymous to them than you are to a telco. You make your choices. Defense in depth. Etc.
OS:
GrapheneOS: https://grapheneos.org/ Very much like Calyx, but extra-hardened and with no MicroG. No involvement with Google at all by default. You can make a secondary profile in which you install Google Play Services to set up an environment where you can run unprivileged Play services + whatever crapware you need that requires them. Unprivileged here means it's like any other app: if you don't give it access to your location, it won't know where you are. If you end the profile session when you leave, Play Services stops running and stops talking to Google.
CalyxOS: https://calyxos.org/ Privacy-respecting Android distribution that replaces Google spyware with MicroG, so you can have your cake and eat it too. Most everything will work as you're used to, but it does still talk to Google to make that happen.
LineageOS: https://lineageos.org/ The successor to CyanogenMod, will work with many different phones. More privacy and control than stock Android.
There are also many others: Sailfish, Replicant, e
Hardware:
CalyxOS and GrapheneOS run best on Pixel 3, 3a, 3XL, 4, 4a, 4XL, 5, 6, 6a. The path of least resistance is to get one of these phones and run CalyxOS (if there is an app you need to use that needs Google services like Firebase Cloud Messaging...note that many that can use FCM will run fine without), otherwise run GrapheneOS.
You can also buy a Librem 5 https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/ If privacy and security and hacking are really important to you.
Or a pinephone: https://www.pine64.org/pinephone/
Will I get laid more often? Eat Better Food? Have better relationships? Create Wealth? Will I even get more freedom ? Love ?
Then why the f** should I optimize my life around this incredibly stupid idea?
As for why, it's a good question. I think it's because I don't want to live in a world where it's impossible to do the "wrong" thing, or even think the "wrong" thing. Our legal system has evolved to be effective in a world where it's very hard to observe what people are actually doing or saying, and I fear a quick transition to ubiquitous surveillance will mean rigid enforcement of laws that were never meant to be enforced rigidly. In a world with ubiquitous surveillance, how do you get marijuana or gay sex legalized? How do you change things?
There's also the problem of concentration of power. The surveillance network we've built would be the envy of the Stasi, and we as a species are only just learning what can be done with it. I fear a small group of people will be able to seize and hold on to a lot of power.
So, these are reasons to care. But it doesn't really respond to your point, which is more like: "What's the immediate benefit?". There is one in that it's a great way to subtly signal that you're technologically competent in situations where that's important, but beyond that there probably isn't one. It's just costs. It's costs I gladly pay, though, because I want to raise the likelihood of a better world in the coming years. The present value of that better world over the one where I do nothing makes the investment worth it.
this older Mac laptop is not a google computer, no google account active, not logged in. That is a profile indicator, adding to my "dossier." How is this OK now?
What I believe: The reasons humans are the way we are is because of how natural selection favors survival of those who are better at propagating their genes. All other behaviors tie back to that single need. That criteria are the reasons why we don't want to be "turned off" with a switch. A computer does not evolve in the same way; they don't have that same prime directive. The idea that a computer should be asked if it's ok to be turned off is applying aspects of human condition, sentiency, to an entity to which it does not apply.
One can argue that there's no way to prevent the possibility of humans eventually applying such an attribute to an entity that we've created only because that's all we know how to do. In other words, computers won't take over because one day they wake up and become sentient. It will happen because we have decided they should behave exactly as we expect a sentient being ought to behave . Thus, it becomes that way by definition.
This article was disappointing -- it went in an entirely different direction. That the math doesn't add up? Really? You can't figure out the math so it can never be done? Kinda hard to take seriously, tbh.
Time to get the rest of the other Big Tech surveillance machines created by Apple Inc., Meta Platforms Inc., Twitter Inc., Microsoft Corp, Amazon.com Inc., and especially, Alphabet Inc.
To downvoters: So you want more worldwide surveillance from the Big Tech companies then? Do you trust them not to abuse or collect more of your sensitive data like your passwords, phone numbers, location, etc? That includes TikTok's US 'secure cloud provider', Oracle Inc.
Looks like there are lots of users here that are too scared to admit or confess helping the current tech dystopia that they are creating.
This lawsuit can only be a good thing in clamping down on the daily mass surveillance done by these companies.