https://wydaily.com/latest/regional-national/2025/05/08/23an...
I hope given the recent events of having some hired thugs rifle through government databases (including the OPM, which supposedly has very sensitive data from security clearance applications), that maybe letting people collect and store data on you should be avoided at all cost.
The older I get, the more I understand the stereotype of the eccentric former techie who no longer wants anything to do with modern technology or society
I like to go with the simpler "I hold lots of sensitive data for people who trust me: my family, my friends, my employer. One would have to be a sociopath to disclose other people's secrets without their consent."
Oh, that's a good one. I'ma totally steal that...
Even then, if the government is weak than the ‘more power over you’ is simply false. Maybe the magnitude of the power is more for a government, but companies apply their power with much more frequency.
I see your history teachers did a poor job. My condolences.
> the ostensible motive of the government is to serve its people
But also, there are plenty of governments that do not even pretend to serve its people. They are completely self-serving and transparent about that fact. You never know when one is going to turn into the other but often going from ostensibly benevolent to explicitly malevolent is relatively mild, but gaining back freedom usually requires a lot of bloodshed. There's always exceptions, but this is common. The wort part is that people frequently vote in the malevolent leaders. Democracies can turn into autocracies without spilling a single drop of blood. I'm unaware of the reverse ever happening.
That's a very load-bearing word there.
Mostly the police and military, not the companies.
Exhibit A: freedom of speech. Public institutions have a very high bar they have to meet to ensure freedom of speech. The private sector has nothing of the sort.
You can be banned or censored for just about anything in the private sector. So when we move really important stuff to the private sector, that can be a problem.
In action: payment processors, which provide essentially public infrastructure, censoring immoral or profane content, such as pornography.
From one day to the next they sold to the Italian "developer company" Bending Spoons.
That company acquired Brightcove a few months earlier and several other services like Evernote, Meetup, companies which have nothing to do with "outdooring".
From one day to the next they got access to my 13.000 tracked km, 800 hours of data. My profile is set to private, but now I have to assume that all this data will be sold to advertisers. "Anonymized".
this comes across as if you are attempting to downplay the importance of this biometric data which is weird considering Altman is paying to get access to just a photo of your eyes.
The first wants one data breach anywhere to last a lifetime and the second is a bigger media story because people believe what we can do with the dna 23andme collects is more than reality.
And on the other hand, I do wish there was a way to distinguish real humans from bots on the Internet. I think it’s only a matter of time until the web becomes useless thanks to AI. What’s a better solution?