The problem of creeping commercial surveillance (2022)
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That being said, I am now running into what I call the "Non-App Tax". The most prominent example I can think of in my own experience is my towns local parking payment system. You actually don't need to use the app to find parking or pay. You can scan a QR code and pay via text. Then I looked at the prices on the app vs prices via text and the prices were a decent amount higher ($1-2 more) and less flexible than if I had just used the app. Kinda shitty and I can absolutely see this becoming the norm.
Or a "discount" for using the app. /s
I wish that was actually enforced.
I can see why some might be enticed.
Edit: also, landlords are not doing these things because they are "right", they are doing them because they are regulated to do so
Building codes exist because people died in fires. Limits on working age exists because there would be child labor without it. Limits on working agreements exist because there would be indentured servitude without it. Limits on government power, exemplified by the first 10 amendments to the US constitution, exist because without them the government would do anything to you that it wanted. And even then there are those who find those regulations limited, who want government with unlimited power over them, thinking that would make them safer, or that it's coercive to government workers to abide by them. Society is not a game of absolutes - it's a game of compromises that can only function if people are generally acting in good faith.
You're trying to make moral comments on labor laws or something. I'm not really sure the point. Regulations to run a business can be deemed as protecting what's "right". While we can commonly agree that it's "right" to provide accessibility access to your establishment, we can hopefully also agree that if it wasn't legislated to be, then more than a few retailers would not provide them.
However, none of this has anything to do with a retailer's decision to accept cash and all of the risks associated with that.
On the other hand we (from London) were visiting Santa Barbara and had to use an app to park, and I was amazed that the app (ISTR it was PayByPhone) let me use the rental car with my UK login and billed me the right amount with no hassle.
I’m surprised this is legal for a municipality. There are people with cars but no smartphone (elderly folks). It seems ageist.
You and I seem to be in a very small minority though
Then supermarkets discovered bar codes. If you can convince people to carry around a barcode, suddenly you can track their usage patterns in exchange for a small discount.
Okay fine, but at least it's anonymous, right?
Then supermarkets realized they could get you to "activate" your barcode by going to a website. Hey, this way not only do we get their usage patterns, but we get data about them too! Demographics, etc. And people do it! Because of discounts.
Sure, some of us give fake info, but plenty of people just give their real names, addresses, and emails. Fantastic.
Well, lately I accidentally broke my barcode keychain thingy while locking up my bike (don't ask) and so next time I was in the supermarket I picked up a new one. Tried to activate it on my phone at the automatic cash but couldn't figure out how to log in to the site. Saw a link to the app but figured I'd look more into it later.
So later, I did that.. and discovered you can't log in to the site, because you can only activate the barcode by installing the app!
So, anyway, that's the story about when I gave up getting discounts at the supermarket.
huh? at least in my supermarket it doesn't work, unless you activate it, the new thing being that you can't do that anymore without installing the app. Not sure if that was unclear in my story.
Put together an oral argument and rehearse it to fit whatever is the time limit for speakers from the public, and sign up to speak at the next meeting. Angles to consider: ageism, economic justice, equal protection under the law, identity theft, vetting of software vendors.
For added force, get in touch with neighbors, try to stir up a bit of indignation from them as well, and channel it into showing up at the meeting with you for visible support. Better yet, urge them to take a speaking slot themselves. Coordinate content of your respective presentations, and help tune each others, at least at the level of reviewing speaking notes, ideally with a standup practice run-through.
If there's a local paper that covers council meetings, write a "letter to the editor". And try to get their attention onto your talk with a heads-up to them just before the meeting at which you will speak.
As an anti-tracking measure, Firefox could put them into a global pool (shared with all other users), then randomly sample from the pool whenever making a request to the offending site.
The effect would be severe breakage for any sites that set unauthorized cookies.
That doesn't say much. Even the GDPR allows for some cookies to be stored without consent.
>Strictly necessary cookies — These cookies are essential for you to browse the website and use its features, such as accessing secure areas of the site. Cookies that allow web shops to hold your items in your cart while you are shopping online are an example of strictly necessary cookies. These cookies will generally be first-party session cookies. While it is not required to obtain consent for these cookies, what they do and why they are necessary should be explained to the user.
I have recently had to implement some of these banners. Here’s what I learned: click reject.
The way America’s version of the cookie banner law (not sure about EU) works is that cookies are default allowed. They are set before the banner even shows. Rejecting the cookies then sets a cookie that you’d like cookies rejected. The cookies remain, but the banner’s scripts block tracking requests based on those cookies on subsequent requests.
So if a site uses GA and you reject cookies, you still get and keep a GA cookie. But the cookie banner later turns GA’s javascript into “text/plain” so your browser doesn’t execute it. This is what [at least some of] the banners mean by “reject cookies”.
Yes it’s stupid and confusing. Possibly on purpose.
But there is not such thing as a "cookie banner law".
A law that leads to cookie banners -> cookie banner law. We all know exactly what I meant.
But yes on my personal site I solved the problem by not tracking visitors because there’s no need. General traffic numbers are good enough for me.
If this data is so important it should be treated with the same care & auditing that their income stream gets.
1. Removal of all crowd-sourced data from their systems. Let's see if users will want to come back if there are zero network effects. Maybe sad for the users, but I'd feel safer if data-leak==data-removal.
2. Forced modification of their trademarked logos for some period of time. This will warn people to stay away from the company and their products. (Trademarks are all about trust, so this seems fair).
They're also licensing it and selling it to third parties, which in turn will sell it to government(s) or other third-parties; the data ramifies and spreads throughout the digital panopticon.
There is very little you can do as an individual to escape this. The privacy settings on your phone, in your apps, on your laptop, your router – they are the illusion of control. Heavy top-down regulation won't work, never has.
All you can do is attempt to limit what you share. The work required to do it well is astronomical, high-friction, and essentially can exclude you from much of society and the economy.
That's utter nonsense. There will never be perfect compliance, but regulations absolutely can curb undesired behavior.
GDPR and the cookie banners are the perfect example. GDPR never says you need the gigantic banner, just that you cannot track without consent and it must be as easy to retract consent as it is to give it. somehow, this devolved into the cookie banners/walls, which are not required and in fact likely not compliant as very often there is no way to reject everything. i travel a lot in europe and asia and google is a clear example of a sort of malicious compliance. some countries in eu they show the reject all option easily. for others you have to log in and go through many settings pages. most other big companies are not much better or even worse.
that is the issue in my opinion. the goal of the privacy laws is very clear but the companies just do not care usually. i am very happy when a site truly respects my choice on their cookie/tracking consent banner, and even more so if they just don’t collect anything in the first place or ask for telemetry data instead of assuming it’s their right.
that is why i personally am not happy with the regulations from the US so far as they’re anaemic; the companies still treat your privacy and personal life’s details as if it’s their right to mine for data. until there is effectual law stopping all this and making such broad data collection something extremely rare and limited, nothing will change. and with how much of this data governments are buying, i’m not holding my breath that it’s going to get better.
until then i guess we need to continue to teach people that the technology they buy and use often is actively hostile towards the users in favor of giving the companies more personal data.
That's totally why the ozone layer is entirely gone now.
Oh wait.
Basically nothing can be done other than strict legislation. Claiming that top down regulation won't work is not based on evidence and is needlessly fatalistic. If anything, history shows that the thing big corporations fear most is having their profits regulated away. Of course they like regulation when it allows them to build a "regulatory moat" around their business, but when the regulations actually come for their own profit margins, they comply.
The "Copy-paste panopticon"
We can’t get laws banning this soon enough.
One can only imagine what is hiding behind these regulations.
This is why I do not, and never will, own a car with telemetry capabilities. I'm happy with my old dumb car. No smart crap for me.
Yeah, my ancient 4 cylinder hybrid Prius absolutely rips, sounds like a total monster /s
The things that actually make people bad drivers are things like driving unpredictability, failing to signal, driving under the influence of drugs or alcohol, and not paying attention / distracted driving. These are the things that cause most crashes. They also can’t be directly measured with telematics and none of the measurements we have is a good proxy.
So most folks would agree that bad drivers should pay more for insurance, but it doesn’t follow that sending telematics to insurance companies is a useful or accurate way to do that. It’s certainly not worth the privacy trade off.
The sensors themselves are imperfect, the thing you actually measure is probably the thing easiest to measure rather than actually pushing the tire grip toward its limits, even if you actually measure the right thing (hard acceleration/deceleration) you miss the fact that even an ordinary trip around town is often safer with more acceleration than a naive model would predict (e.g., short on ramps, or just that your speed when close to merging should probably be a bit higher than your intended merge speed in most cars), and actions like hard braking can rightly indicate appropriately slowing down for unexpected construction.
Misaligned incentives aren't something to be trifled with (something something Goodhart's Law). Maybe cutting all the hard-braking at every stop sign would be worth it, but if even a few people chose to merge more slowly onto the freeway that would greatly increase accidents and have ripple effects in rush hours and traffic patterns.
On what basis? You probably have something different in your mind than what I am actually referring to. I'm not talking about people skidding to a stop or laying a stripe of rubber when they take off, and short of that, there is basically no increase in risk from accelerating or decelerating more rapidly than a grandmother hypermiling a prius, which is how the insurance companies want you to drive.
Regarding speeding, in most cases speeding is required to /not/ cause accidents. The correct and safest behavior is to observe the road conditions and your surroundings and drive predictably within the limits of those conditions. That means driving the speed of traffic, not what it says on the sign. Sometimes that speed is lower, sometimes that speed is higher. Sometimes the speed is different in different parts of the country or city. What's most important is that other drivers can understand and predict your behavior on the roadway, and that you can do the same for others. It's /far/ more dangerous to do 65 in a 65 when the prevailing speed is 80 than it is to do 80, but combining speed data with GPS data will still get you penalized by the insurance company for doing 80.
Higher speed generally means less margin for error in unexpected circumstances and more serious consequences when an accident does happen.
And if you frequently have to brake hard that's a pretty good indication that you're driving recklessly - following too close, driving too fast, not being ready for predictable events such as a pedestrian crossing the road etc.
Some times it's necessary. But if it's necessary every time you get in your car you're not a safe driver - practically every one of those hard decelerations occur because you are trying to avoid an accident. It follows that if you were to have a small lapse of attention or judgement, you wouldn't have been able to avoid the accident.
If you give yourself more margin for error you rarely have to brake hard. Keep a good distance to cars in front, slow down in unpredictable situations, respect the speed limit because it was set for a reason.
This could only be said by someone that isn’t experienced driving on US Interstates.
If what you say is true, why don’t we do 20mph everywhere? Could it be that the safe speed to drive is conditional, like I stated? Could it be that what I wrote is no bullshit after all?
Here in Norway most roads are max 80 kph which I think is roughly 45mph. Many roads have been downgraded from 80kph to 70kph because accidents at 70kph are significantly less fatal than at 80. They have also added separators between oncoming lanes in highways to minimize head on collisions.
Some year recently we had 0 fatalities in children. This is because we have improved problematic road segments and improved road safety.
I have had some discussions with US citizens presenting the same viewpoints you are. Generally on videos on Reddit showing exactly why they are wrong. My experience watching a lot of traffic accidents in reddit subs like r/idiotsincars is that the vast majority of accidents are because both parties made a mistake. One party may have been more at fault, but both were indisputably at fault.
In these comment threads I've seen a lot of comments presenting that American viewpoint that you have to break the law to be safe. I just don't buy it. I've driven for a lot of years, following the law and driving defensively has kept me safe.
I'm 100% convinced they have both the math skills and the greed to know this is profitable for them.
I'm less sure it's actually happening. Only proof I've seen is the internet comment a few levels up claiming it.
It's also definitely happening, not only do insurance companies buy telematics data from automotive companies, they also provide discounts (sometimes) for customers that voluntarily provide telematics data using devices which connect to the vehicle OBD2 port. One example: https://www.progressive.com/auto/discounts/snapshot/
To me those are functionally the same thing.
This stuff isn’t exactly peer reviewed data, and insurance companies don’t publish the telematics data they produce or how they make decisions.
They are funny with how they evaluate certain things. If you have 3 accidents in a certain period, they’ll drop you regardless of fault because you’re unlucky. But they’ll also penalize you if brake heavily and avoid accidents.
I'm half serious. All else equal, if you drive less you'll have fewer problems that lead to insurance penalties.
I'm kind of on your side. Not being a dope decreases the crash rate by 90% or so per mile last I checked ("crashes caused by driver error"). Drive enough and you'll still become a statistic though.
But, for sure, my prior is that someone who frequently brakes hard on the road is someone who gets themselves into jams they shouldn't have been in in the first place. Maybe it's a matter of failing to anticipate what's coming up ahead. Maybe it's a matter of where, when, and how often they drive.
Both indicate risk that, arguably, should be priced appropriately. Same for health behaviors.
Dropping you is a thing that happens when the expected value of your insurance payouts exceed the expected value of the premiums collected. With granular data from telematics, an insurer [*] could notify you to change your game long before they end up concluding, "Well, none of the data we have on this person differentiates them from the last 3 guys to cost us a million plus in settlements and claims, so sayonara"
[*] thinking of TFA here I mean a suitably regulated insurer, not one that is somehow sneakily accessing telematics data without any transparency
But what happens when your daily commute takes you through a former construction where the computer thinks the speed limit is still 45?
Amazon thinks I’m a woman despite buying men’s products.
Google is convinced I’m a fan of a rival sports team despite obvious information otherwise. I have even told them I don’t want stories about the other team, but they keep popping up.
I feel like most places are gathering information enough to somewhat fulfill their goal of getting a profile for advertising or something like that. But it doesn’t seem to be very accurate.
For an ad campaign to succeed, it's allocated budget _has_ to be spent. Targeted advertising gives a higher value to certain eyeballs but if the selected set isn't big enough to spend all the money on, other people will see the ad whether it concerns them or not. And that's actually what happens most of the time.
Apparently they don't have women as friends.
Of course the real issue is that everything sold via ads must be crap, or overpriced. Frequently both.
There's the (now) old saying, "if the product is free, then you are the product" but that's not entirely accurate. You are the source of raw materials. These materials can then be fed into a model which will predict your behavior. Right now this can be seen simply in the space of funneling content to you, in order to get you to buy things. But companies are not governments and can sell their product to anybody (including governments) in order to predict or direct your behavior.
Yup. You're one of suppliers, $freemiumco are middle men, and consumer product companies are consumers. Which means you can raise prices and dilute contents, currently without even issuing a Product Change Notification. That isn't a bad position other than there are quite a few alternative suppliers, only slightly less than everyone thinks there are.
Understandably, people will object to this - after all what have corporations got to do with the governance system?
I would say however, that we already live in a fascist governance system. No democracies exist. At best, we only have 'representative democracy' - not the same thing!
This is as per Mussolini's definition of fascism:
> "Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power."
I argue that corporations and states are 2 wings of the same bird.
Not trying to be contrarian here, genuinely curious and wondering if I should install it on my phone.
It does this by acting as a VPN last I checked, so it wasn't useful in my case because it couldn't run at the same time as my other VPN.
Otherwise, my girlfriend, parents, and likely 90% of the people you know all use photo backup. Whether it's iCloud, Google Photos, or a NAS, we all want the option to use mobile data, and likely want it to simply run in the background.
No one seems to like it or want it, but every company engages in it, because it's lucrative. Companies that don't do it are missing out on financial opportunity, and we know what happens to such companies in our market system...
I'm of the opinion that only policy/regulation can fix this issue (the playing field needs to be leveled across the board). I'm not sure what that looks like. Does anyone know of proposals/individuals that are being made in this area?
That's the problem though. History on every continent is filled with normal people who were suddenly targeted as the slaves/villains/cause-of-the-recent-issue based on their language/skin/background/etc...
Less reputable businesses will simply do whatever they like, but claiming “legitimate interest” means something specific: <https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/uk-gdpr-guidance-and-re...>
That doc starts with the line "Legitimate interests is the most flexible lawful basis for processing" and that's the truth.
Much stronger cases than auditing vague “legitimate interest” have been stuck in legal limbo for years.
UK since Brexit is outright hostile to GDPR - not that they’ve enforced it in the past, but now they want to (and maybe already did) relax their regulation even further.
“We see your preference, but fuck you and your preference we want to anyway.”
For example: The Dutch used to collect a church tax that was used to support your church, or temple. When the Nazis invaded, church tax records were used to track down and exterminate Jewish people.
The promise of data as the next source of easy money is too hard to pass up. And because life is hard enough, a lot of customers are willing to give it up for free to save a few bucks.