Media companies that also sell personal data | Hacker News Reader

Media companies that also sell personal data

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158 pointskjhughes59 comments

I think the main harm identified here is summed up in the line;

"The truth is pay-walled, but lies are for free"

It's not what information is or isn't collected. It can be valuable, and great social good can come out of so-called "big data". And we can, as a society, sensibly decide what is allowable in terms of prediction and prejudice (which are essentially the same thing in this context).

The problem is utility asymmetry. Having a few for-profit corporations own and trade our data is a societal catastrophe in the making, and can only tend toward fascism.

I read recently about the concept of "civic databases" - someone pointed out the absurdity of the worlds scientific papers being "catalogued by one post grad on the run, but used by everyone".

Yeah. But even if you gave me access to every data set worldwide I still would have trouble making head or tail of it. but it's a start

It stuck with me too. Who's going to write the stored procs and views? Unless it's all going to be tables only.

"Software Diffusion, infer relationships about these tables and create an explorer for me."

jancsika's comment [1] in a thread on The Cypherpunk Manifesto:

> There should be a sustainable solution to bootstrapping civic databases to archive and make available/discoverable all the shits citizens care about without waiting 70+ years for it to enter the public domain.

> It's absurd as it is now. We've got a scientific database duct-taped together by a fucking grad student in hiding, and AFAICT nearly every researcher uses it.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33555419

> Who's going to write the stored procs and views? Unless it's all going to be tables only.

My upshot was: sci-hub/libgen is a civic database. It exists. Frankly, its current content is some of the most important content that could populate any database.

Given that, what are the most sensible political policies/processes that could stand a chance of keeping it from burning down the way previous civic databases did?

Judging by the responses I got, there may not currently be enough public policy domain expertise on HN for such an effort to succeed. (And almost surely not enough time to organize before it burns down.) But I think it's still worth pursuing, if only to begin to generate that experience in the first place.

Whatever the case, if you're talking about which data fields ought to populate which structs, you're quite far afield from the effort I was trying to describe. That's why I started by asking: what would a cipherpunk not do? That was meant to be tongue in cheek, but let's take it seriously and call it plaintextpunk. :)

I think we are all in violent agreement - SciHub is an excellent example of a civic dataset, and frankly a great "cause celebre" for the idea of defending / funding / supoorting civic datasets.

As for having time to lobby for change, I only have optimism to fall back on. But we should try anyway.

I think we could all do more to counter and neutralise disinformation.

There was a disgraceful episode where th City Of London police allowed themselves be mobilised as useful idiots at the behest of Elsevier etc, against SciHub, spreading factually misleading information. I discussed this with several leading security researchers who all recognised it as cheap politicisation of fake-security news and fearmongering.

So it follows that the most sensible political policies/processes that could stand a chance of keeping Sci-hub from burning down are also tied to policies/processes that could stand a chance of keeping the police from being mobilized as useful idiots at the behest of any corporation big enough (whatever those processes are).

It may very well be the case that law enforcement overreach and corruption is gnawing at the very pillars of civilization.

Yes that one.

Glad it reverberated a little across this corner of the internet.

It's a great term - conveys what we mean. Maybe "Civic DataSets"

> The problem is utility asymmetry. Having a few for-profit corporations own and trade our data is a societal catastrophe in the making, and can only tend toward fascism.

It occurred to me that a few centuries ago every knight had his own little army that was loyal to him, and lent out to the king in the time of need. The idea that the army would belong to the people was alien at the time, however today few question the wisdom (even dictators pay lip service to it).

Could it be that the idea of big information belonging to the people will one day also seem entirely commonplace?

>The idea that the army would belong to the people was alien at the time,

It's still alien to me now. We the people don't tell the armies where to go. If a single person can tell the armies where to go, it's not we the people. To even come close to a we the people decision, the orders would have to be from a committee of reps. Good gawd could you imagine the US military being told what to do by the senate or, gasp, the house of reps? If there's a 2/3 majority rule, the military would never do anything.

It's unfortunately like this with quite a bit of our technology that emerges from the for profit landscape. Companies work hard to guard and legally build a mote around what could be even more valuable technology if proliferated to more thinkers and problem solvers, because that's more profitable to a small segment of investors in the near term. It doesn't matter if its even more beneficial to our world as a whole to let that idea loose, if it means putting a personal cash cow at risk. It also leads to overall ossified process. It really seems that we can't get anything done as a society unless we've greatly incentivized an opportunity for a lucky few to profit. Sure, we are great at delivering new cellphones across the globe and turning that into enormous profits for shareholders, but not really effective at the things that actually matter, like getting a hold of our emissions so they don't reshape our environment faster than we can adapt to it, or protecting genetic diversity among species that is necessary for adaptation and the emergence of traits that we could all benefit from.

To those working on closed source software: fight for it to be opened. Share the knowledge you've painstakingly gained, leave the ladder down behind you, do humanity a service by leaving behind your notes. You will find that its even easier to prove your worth as an engineer for new opportunities if you can point to the very commits you've pushed to the public source code.

Because it is unlikely this data will ever become a common good available to all, we can use creative ways to poison it. For example, I buy things for me under the kids names and have my partner use my card to buy things for herself. I only have one real ID social media account which is intentionally enigmatic and stale. Of course my networks obfuscate a lot. Unfortunately this is a systemic problem, and the one percent like me are a drop in the bucket.

> "The truth is pay-walled, but lies are for free"

Verified, researched information is more costly to build than lies, which anyone can just make up out of thin air.

But a vast majority of research is publicly funded (by tax payers). So if it's paid for by said individuals should they have to pay again to see the results?

That seems to be changing, slowly.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/ostp/news-updates/2022/08/25/brea...

https://www.science.org/content/article/white-house-requires...

The same is true for court proceedings: we paid for it, it's our data.

It's not so simple. Good lies, the kind of disinformation that swings elections, wins wars, and controls populations, can be extraordinarily difficult to build. Think Operation Mincemeat. The backstories, legends, covers and dissemination costs can rival research in pursuit of truth. And by the same token, deep truths are sometimes there in the open for anyone with eyes and the wits to observe and write-up.

What I think you're talking about is "bullshit", which is really a kind of ephemeral non-data, like spam, advertising and opinions.

Flooding the public sphere with that, especially now using ever more plausible generative "AI" tools, devalues public truth and makes private intelligence stores seem more attractive and valuable.

In the limit this can even become a justification for cloistered data, as the Church understood so well with Latin scriptures. We'll be told "The people can't be trusted with the truth".

> It can be valuable, and great social good can come out of so-called "big data". And we can, as a society, sensibly decide what is allowable in terms of prediction and prejudice (which are essentially the same thing in this context).

Let's agree to disagree

I wish you'd quoted less.

Disagreement is good and helps me think.

But do you disagree that we might usefully leverage large datasets and bring social benefits?

Or that a democratic concensus on policy is possible?

Or that prediction and prejudice amount to the same thing?

> "The truth is pay-walled, but lies are for free"

Maybe on the internet. irl we have something called a "public library". more people should check them out

imo both truth and lies are paywalled. It's just that truth tends to be a lot more boring than lies, and a lot easier to take in with just a glance

> and a lot easier to take in with just a glance

meant a lot harder

The truth has always been paywalled. Good information comes at a cost, information asymmetry is power. What is different now is that information of all types is being shadowbanned

> information of all types is being shadowbanned

That sounds interesting, please say more.

If we did, that too would shadowbanned. For example, look at how people were pointing to early studies that the mRNA jabs caused heart issues in males 40 and under about 1.5 years ago. Raising such concerns was enough to get account here shadowbanned even when they posted to papers.

The interesting thing is the truth there was not behind a paywall. It was in the anarchic corners of the internet that allowed such heresy. What was behind the paywalls was pure state serving propaganda.

The last few years have been a real lesson to those who are paying attention. Unfortunately I've been really disappointed with how few of my friends have kept an open mind despite the poisoned information landscape.

> It was in the anarchic corners of the internet that allowed such heresy.

Which is part of the reason I deem kiwifarms more beneficial than not. Because a lot of shit they document is REALLY bad shit.

The biggest problem I have with them is posting dox's, altough, every one that I saw came from public information.

The only reason the Internet was a "bastion of truth" for awhile was that the whole thing was outside the walls.

The walls have moved and the truth has been confirmed, everything that is outside the walls is heresy, don't even think of going to look at it, as it is bad.

Counterpoint: Public media. While I don't think there's any statutory obligation, you will likely never find paywalls or brokered data. And the content is very reliable.

> Counterpoint: Public media. While I don't think there's any statutory obligation, you will likely never find paywalls or brokered data. And the content is very reliable.

That's because the cost has been sent towards the government, & indirectly paid for via taxes & government bonds. Effectively, the cost is shouldered by the general public without them noticing.

That's not true. Public media gets very little government funding. The CPB gets a Congressional appropriation once a year and sends it via grants to various public media orgs. But PBS, NPR all their affiliates, the Associated Press, Pro Publica etc are all private orgs that get most of their funding from donors and sponsors.

> That's not true. Public media gets very little government funding. The CPB gets a Congressional appropriation once a year and sends it via grants to various public media orgs. But PBS, NPR all their affiliates, the Associated Press, Pro Publica etc are all private orgs that get most of their funding from donors and sponsors.

That still means that the cost is shouldered by multiple entities, each with their own goals & agendas. The cost of the media itself doesn't go away because someone else bore it.

In fact, given that they're bearing the cost, there'll inevitably be a larger sway in placating to the cost bearer's desires & beliefs in order to have a greater chance at continuing to receive donations from them in the future. Failure to do so may prompt the donator(s) to see their money as being lit on fire instead of being properly spent.

Even in the best base of a "blind donator", who doesn't care about the media produced & will fund it regardless of the stances of the produced media, the money from them is still finite & requires (their earnings > their expenditures).

It's somewhat ironic that I cannot view the full article; it's paywalled, and I am not a Wired subscriber.

Using wget pretending to be something else will probably see you right. Text based without JavaScript pulls Wired articles nicely.

https://archive.ph/pQQV1

This is not remotely true. Lies can be very much pay-walled too.

facts can be found everywhere, for free or for pay.

But what is harder to find is what people really want, which is to be told how to feel about something, and that's more and more behind a paywall.

(Which can still be completely wrong mind you!)

Being told how to feel is more behind a paywall? This is also not remotely true.

Oh wow. Elsevier alone has much more grip on global academia than any one company should have (what the article didn't mention, they also own Overleaf, so they have access to a non-negligible fraction of all STEM research before it is available to anyone but the authors). But I didn't know that it is part of an even larger conglomerate l (LexisNexis alone would make for a formidable Elsevier competitor).

I couldn't find this link between Elsevier and overleaf. What I did find is that overleaf is owned by digital science UK which is owned by Holtzbrinck Publishing Group. The later owns a lot of publication companies and group. They own Nature and more than 50 share in Springer. Am I missing something?

Hmm, I remember hearing that they purchased Overleaf several years ago - maybe I misremembered, or things have changed again since then.

Perhaps you're thinking of the Mendeley reference organization software? Elsevier purchased it in 2013.

https://www.elsevier.com/solutions/mendeley

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mendeley

Yeah, I might have had those mixed up

based on their academic services, I wouldn't be too worried because those services are crap. Their academic analytics stuff barely passes the test and is mostly used because nobody wants to make a competitor. Most academic metadata is openly available to anyone who wants to use it, but people know that academia is more about networking, PR, politics etc rather than the exactness of academic analytics. Then elsevier's own websites were pretty crap for the (pre-SciHub) times i used them , sometimes being offline, other times with stupid web design etc. They don't have a technical moat other than being so entrenched in academic politics.

I assume something similar is going on in the other spaces. They live in a legacy world that will be replaced with AI overnight.

> people know that academia is more about networking, PR, politics etc rather than the exactness of academic analytics

This is generally true, but academics (I am one) are at least vaguely worried that analytics will take over.

Any good department chair will be prepared, at any time, to give their dean and provost an account of how our department is doing really fantastic work, despite how badly you underfund us, you should really direct more resources to us right away.

Since academic work looks so different from discipline to discipline, administrators find it difficult to evaluate who is actually doing good work. And thus swoop in companies like Elsevier, Clarivate, Academic Analytics, etc. with bright shiny dashboards, with tables and bar graphs that purport to measure productivity. Sure, their measurement is shit but the alternative is often simply to take people at their word.

As a working academic, I do not wish any of these companies well. But I wouldn't underestimate them.

Isn't RELX basically an operation started by Ghislaine Maxwell's dad? YIKES

I'm not so sure quiet captues the moment. The invasion has been effective due to pointless distraction after pointless distraction - and algorithms tuned to surface those distractions. A monopoly of the collective mind.

Few can hear this coming, not because it's quite but because of the excessive volume from excessive noise.

"Big Tech" is a distraction. They barely even "sell" data; rather, they use it to power platforms where advertisers can target users without learning who they are. At such a large scale there are obviously exceptions (see: Cambridge Analytica), but directly selling user data is generally not how they make their money.

The abuses of the companies you never hear about are orders of magnitude worse. They are plugged into every institution of society you interact with in your daily life, so you essentially can't opt out, and their primary business model is siphoning off sensitive de-anonymized personal data and selling it to anybody willing to pay. It ought to be criminal, and the fact that it isn't just goes to show how captured and neutered our government has become.

I assume our legislators' PR focus on "Big Tech" wrt. data privacy is by design. If the American people really understood the true shape of things, there'd be blood in the streets.

(I'm not saying "Big Tech" doesn't cause substantial harm, but in my view it's harm of a different sort.)

Very much like a soldier refusing to execute immoral orders, we need the smartest engineers working at these companies to stop implementing such features. As it stands, engineers working in big tech are often celebrated on platforms like HN. Especially the companies that are just creating spying machines, and addictive time-wasters.

We outlaw addictive chemical substances, and maybe such tech should also be looked at in similar light.

At our company, the use of cell phones is not permitted inside certain manufacturing zones. It's a bit sad to see some of the younger employees being very restless when they can't check their phone every 30 seconds.

Once you have more than 100 people - and there are obviously more than 100 "smartest engineers" - solutions of the form "everyone should be ethical enough not to do this, without further incentives" are impractical.

The incentive to not work at a company that makes spying tech is already there. It needs to be highlighted at every opportunity.

> We outlaw addictive chemical substances, and maybe such tech should also be looked at in similar light.

Yeah, so the solution is not to convince engineers, but to convince politicians to get laws like GDPR. Trying to convince workers or companies to stop earning money has never worked well.

Smartest engineers have an abundance of choice as to where they can work. There needs to be a stigma where working on spying tech is frowned upon.

>Trying to convince workers or companies to stop earning money has never worked well.

I neither said, nor implied it. Please don't put words in my mouth.

> We outlaw addictive chemical substances, and maybe such tech should also be looked at in similar light.

Maybe we should ban sugar also? /s

There is no positive benefit of technology created to spy on people online. We have seen social media bubbles that arise due to algorithmically driven content discovery/suggestions.

As such, there is no inherent superiority to laws that currently exist versus those that don't. We should change laws as we see fit so that we are creating a society where all humans can flourish.

Maximal personal freedom leading to a maximal 'good' of human society is just a belief, not a fact. And like all beliefs, they are subject to debate.

Sugar is a carbohydrate, and carbohydrates are nutrients. As with all things you put in, or do to, your body, you have to do it in moderation, and with consideration. Homeostasis is your friend (usually!).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeostasis

> There is no positive benefit of technology created to spy on people online.

There definitely is. Personalization is more effective than blind advertising. This can be either a benefit or an extreme drawback depending on how you see the economic system

> We have seen social media bubbles that arise due to algorithmically driven content discovery/suggestions.

Imo these platforms are bad for personal growth and should be avoided, but so should TV for the exact same reason. You could replace internet with TV in this situation, the addiction problem would still be the same. Getting rid of social media wouldn't solve the media addiction problem

The additional problem with bubbles and personalization is it targets more aggressively, which can lead to people getting targeted by predatory advertisements. The initial problem here isn't the personalization, it's the fact that the economic system is predatory. Personalization is just pouring gas on the fire

The word benefit here was in the larger social context. I believe that privacy is a legal right, and so I see the issue a bit differently. You're implying the data can be misused, my point is the data should not be collected to begin with.

I strongly believe that removing the apparatus itself is the best method to prevent misuse. The moment you have a data collection division - the very first thing they're going to want to do is self-preservation. And the best way to preserve a division and get raises is to show how valuable they are. The easiest way to do this is by linking it to revenue in some fashion. Its so very human.

No, BigTech are the biggest data-miners in the industry as they have daily regular and "unrestricted" access to our lives through the devices we use everyday. Thanks to our mobile phones, computers and the internet, they even have insights and personal data from all the other services we use. BigTech also purchases and partners with data brokers. And all of them do sell their data to the government (as the new government data center in Utah highlight, the PRISM program is thriving). BigTech is the most successful privatisation of intelligence gathering in the history of our world, and I'd say even a monument to capitalism.

While a triumph for capitalism, this is unfortunately also really bad for us ordinary citizens in a democracy as it upsets the balance of power between the rich and our elected representatives. The last time this happened, and a government fought to correct this balance with them (the British vs the East india Company), the British empire itself crumbled. If left unchecked, I fear history will repeat itself again with our current and sole superpower too.

> The abuses of the companies you never hear about are orders of magnitude worse. > They are plugged into every institution of society you interact with in your daily life, so you essentially can't opt out, and their primary business model is siphoning off sensitive de-anonymized personal data and selling it to anybody willing to pay.

This would be much more impactful if you named one of these companies and gave some concrete examples of what they are doing.

For a start, you should probably read OP's article. I know often HN commenters don't read the article before commenting, and I'm sometimes guilty of this myself, but in this case the linked article offers fairly important context for my comment in the sense that it explicitly names at least one such company and gives concrete examples of what they are doing with your data.

For another salient example, check out this article^[1] about cell carriers selling their customers' real-time location data without consent.

^[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/02/fcc-issues-wrist...

Big Tech will kill old media. Thats why they are gunning for it using dishonest messaging (e.g. "selling data").

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