Comment by quotemstr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by quotemstr | Hacker News Reader

Pick a technology --- AR, robotics, AVs, SMRs, the cookie header --- and you'll find a well-funded and sanctimonious ecosystem of NGOs, regulatory bodies, and compliance departments dedicated to ensuring nobody uses it.

The pretext for these bans is always that unassailable cluster of feel-good yet vague virtues like privacy or the environment that you can make mean anything you want, but the reality on the Continent is just a rotating series of excuses for the catechism of "no, non, nein".

And it's never enough to just regulate the EU. Oh, no. The EU is the world's moral guardian, a "regulatory superpower", humanity's conscience. Obviously EU regulation should apply worldwide. The rest of humanity can't be trusted to care about privacy and the environment enough, right?

Well, I'm sick of it. How about they start saying ja to something? How about they walk about HOW we incorporate fledging technological capabilities into society instead of trying to freeze our information environment in 2008 amber?

At this point, when thinking about how we deploy new technology, I'm inclined to just leave Europe behind. Seal it off from the world of innovation with firewall rules and geofencing. The alternative is to suspend technology, the only thing that's ever in all history improved the human condition, for the sake of small-minded, small-hearted people who like mankind less than they love nein.

Saying ja/oui to something, is saying nein/non to something else.

If all you have is taking sides with what ought to be dismissed, or rather, discussed and controlled, rather than let alone wild at the expense of most people, that's a choice that is yours.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana...

https://cybernews.com/privacy/meta-flo-period-data-privacy-l...

https://violationtracker.goodjobsfirst.org/mega_scandal/Onli...

https://apnews.com/article/google-smartphone-surveillance-ve...

https://www.security.org/identity-theft/breach/equifax/

4 major incidents and a site referring to dozens more, and that's just a few minutes of searching.

And that's only tech companies'(or tech related) misconducted. If we broaden the scope to corporations in general I'm pretty sure I would hit a post text limit before I even got through a quarter of them.

It's like the old saying goes "Every regulation is written in blood". Regs don't exist because someone doesn't want technology to progress. They exist because companies have shown time and again, as far back as you'd like to go, that they are not responsible members or society. They're willing to do anything in the name of profits, including mass privacy violations, abusing customers, and in extreme cases allowing people to die.

And who was harmed, precisely, and how? The EU sanctimony complex regularly cites these things as if each were an infosec Chernobyl, but I've yet to see a real-world harm come from these incidents. The advocates say they're harmful because they violate privacy rules, and we need the privacy rules lest companies cause harm by violating them. It's circular. The rules are made up. They do not correspond to the prevention of suffering on the part of real people in the real world.

Even if we were to grant that these alleged privacy disasters causes harm, we'd have to balance them against the lost advantages of refusal to deploy the enabling technologies. It's like banning telephones on the account of everything crime anyone's ever organized over a phone call.

Rules are all made up (as tech is) for the purpose of enabling society and lowering suffering. Who was harmed? Everyone whose private personal information have been leaked without consent. Who was harmed? Who have been manipulated into voting? How has the damage not been diffuse and probabilistically significant? (otherwise, why would Cambridge Analytica even funded and paid for? As well as the whole advertising industry?)

And, a fundamental right does not need an existing harm to be justified into existence: it is a right as first principle.

I personally know at least half a dozen people who were victims of identity theft thanks to data breaches. Costing them thousands of dollars and countless hours...

Regardless, your argument is predicated on the idea that violations of privacy and data collection is somehow fundamental to these services, in most cases it is not. Google and Facebook don't need to hoover up all your data to sell or use to advertise to you. They choose to, and the vast majority of users were/are unaware of it.

Beyond that, several of the articles I linked are for either negligence (failing to fix known issues) or collecting/using data without consent.

While I agree on some points - the sanctimonious regulatory-industrial complex feeding a large army of NGOs etc - I don't see this issue - always-on camera glasses feeding their data to the data parasites out to monetise every aspect of your life and death - as the best one to vent your frustrations. I shun these companies - from Google to the Fruit Factory, from TCFKAFacebook to the current crop of 'AI' incumbents - and I certainly don't want other with their always-on faceware to fill the void my absence in their registers has left. Yes, I know about 'shadow accounts' which these companies supposedly have on people like me but at least I can try to reduce their ability to build up a profile on me. I can not do that if the denizens of whatever locality I happen to show my face happily signal my presence to their digital overlords.

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