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Comment by dbrgn | Hacker News Reader

> These complaints are just the beginning: noyb is planning to file more complaints against mobile app companies in the future in order to stop the illegal sharing of user data.

Gotta love what noyb is doing. In case you want to support their work, there are links on their website to donate or to become a member. I'm not affiliated with them in any way, but their approach to privacy law enforcement is precisely what we need right now. Companies that mis-use personal data (often in violation of European law) must know that there can be consequences (reputational, financial and potentially legal).

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It's good work. Ultimately though we cannot base civic cybersecurity for the entire population on groups like NOYB or any number of vigilante policemen exposing malevolent companies one by one. It's neither scalable nor sustainable against a tide of technological abuse enabled by a culture of corporate entitlement and public apathy.

In addition to legislation the problem requires active programmes of public education and information as is the case for all other public health or security issues.

More lives are saved per dollar running a "Don't drink-drive" campaign than giving police money to arrest drunk drivers.

"Don't install that app" should be a tag-line every mother and child knows, like "See it. Say it. Sorted.", just to get people to pause and think... "would I share all my all my personal data and access to my life with a random total stranger?" Because that's what you're doing when you install some dodgy app at a restaurant.

Maybe groups like NOYB could do more work on sophisticated modern influential media to attack the root cause of the problem: a fundamentally flawed security model with a set of wholly inappropriate assumptions.

Change the assumptions.

Doctors and lawyers and possibly other schools have to take courses in ethics, and then can loose their license to practice for ethical violations. We should impose the same for software. Each company that produces software for public use should be issued a license to operate. If the company is found guilty of violating the ethics of that license, they lose the license. That means their software is now no longer legal to sell.

That is a wild overreaction! If there's a legal consensus nobody is going to violate that. Even the huge companies that get vilified on here spend millions trying to comply with all the various jurisdictions' rules. Different parts of the EU can't even agree on how to interpret their own laws yet.

Licensure tends to be a protective mechanism to keep salaries high. If that's your goal, great, but it's a weird hammer to apply to fix your subjective opinion of what's ethical.

>If there's a legal consensus nobody is going to violate that.

Talking about wild speculation! Shall we have a look at all of the laws and the companies that break them that have only received slap on the wrist level fines? So clearly, there are some sort of regulations, otherwise, how would these fines be imposed? If there were no violations of those regulations, why are fines being imposed. So, your "nobody going to violate that" is already starting the conversation on shaky ground

Yes there is a massive rule of law problem in our times. Big Tech literally laugh at governments and regulation.

This is analogous to solving murder by telling everyone to stay home since serial killers run free on the street instead of catching & jailing murderers.

Maybe we could enforce the (existing!) laws against malware, fraud, spam, etc so that people can continue to install apps & use them and be confident knowing that nothing bad will happen, and if it does happen then the offenders will be punished appropriately?

GDPR breaches aren't limited to apps btw, it happens on websites and even in real life (Tesco stores in the UK for example have a notice inside the store about data collection; presumably they're doing Bluetooth/Wi-Fi MAC address tracking - by the time you read the notice you're already being stalked, and there's no way to opt-out other than inconveniencing yourself by manually toggling the relevant radios before going to the store).

> analogous to solving murder by telling everyone to stay home since serial killers run free on the street.

You're advocating an extreme measure (locking yourself at home) in response to a practically non-existent threat ("serial killers" do not roam the streets looking for random victims except in Hollywood plots). OTOH the chance of an average person being scammed by corporate data thieves seems less than one in ten, as a total guess. So surely you see you're making a disingenuous analogy.

Education is a very powerful weapon against the criminality of Surveillance Capitalism. And it's flexible; people can choose a range of responses, from pausing before installing a new app, to getting rid of their smartphone and choosing a better lifestyle.

I meant this in a hypothetical world where we'd "solve" murder by letting murderers walk free and telling people to hide at home (your proposed approach to solving GDPR breaches) instead of applying the law and jailing them.

Informing people only helps if they have a choice whether or not to use the app/service.

In many cases, people are tracked by services they cannot really avoid. One example is the German "Deutsche Bahn" app, which is full of trackers. Some organizations are now trying to fight this using legal means. Another example was the Covid vaccine registration page in my canton in Switzerland, where Google Analytics was being used (right on the page with my sensitive medical information). It wasn't even being mentioned in the privacy policy.

We have laws that say what's legal and what's illegal. If something is illegal, those laws should be enforced. Especially when users have no choice.

> Informing people only helps if they have a choice whether or not to use the app/service.

People always have a choice. Blinded by comfort, convenience and other "first world problems" they may not immediately recognise it as a choice, but by historical standards they absolutely always have one.

Good grief. This is like saying driving to work is a choice because it takes only 45 minutes, but you could opt for a three hour walk instead.

Because a potential solution exists in which people can have the optimal solution with no drawbacks— why not have it.

It isn’t “convenience” and other “first world problems” to realise that you need to use certain software to function in society with few trade offs.

The privacy-invading nature of many pieces of software isn’t innate. It’s a choice, and it could easily be regulated.

People shouldn’t have to pay with their data.

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