
The case for cities where you’re a sensor, not a thing to be sensed - raleighm
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2020/jan/17/the-case-for-cities-where-youre-the-sensor-not-the-thing-being-sensed
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kristianc
> It’s not hard to see why: “smart” has become code for “terrible”. A “smart
> speaker” is a speaker that eavesdrops on you and leaks all your
> conversations to distant subcontractors for giant tech companies. “Smart
> watches” spy on your movements and sell them to data-brokers for ad-
> targeting. “Smart TVs” watch you as you watch them and sell your viewing
> habits to brokers.

I guess that would make the Guardian a “smart website”.

> The problem is that the smart city, as presently conceived, is a largely
> privatised affair designed as a public-private partnership to extract as
> much value as possible from its residents

I looked quite hard for any evidence in the article that this was the case
other than ‘I don’t know, it feels kind of icky’ but couldn’t find any.

> If you want to page a minibus – something like an Uber Pool, but run by the
> city, licensed, safe, paying a living wage and not mining your data – you
> can summon one, and yes, this exposes your identity so that the driver can
> find you.

Ah, and there’s the nub of it. It’s fine for a responsible (read public-
sector) technocrat to mine and process your data, but it’s evil when a company
does it.

~~~
SQueeeeeL
It's evil if both/either were to collect more information then is necessary
and sell it to 3rd parties for analytics.

The DMV in some states have started to sell people's data, that's fucked.

~~~
luckylion
Selling data is a problem, I'm with you so far.

Having the government (that also controls the police, the military etc)
collect & analyze large amounts of data on citizens is a recipe for disaster
even if they never sell that data to a third party. I hear people say "but we
can write laws that they cannot use that data for anything nefarious" and I'm
amazed that there are still people alive that believe that laws have ever
stopped a government.

I'm fine with "let's limit the amount of data corporations can collect on
citizens", but I'm really not fine with "let's allow the state to collect any
data on citizens other than absolutely necessary to provide basic services, at
least they don't sell it".

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kijin
> _In the "internet of things," we’re promised technology that will allow us
> to project our will on to our surroundings ... But ..._

This is spot on. Technology has always been, and will always be, a means to
project our will onto our surroundings, nothing less, nothing more. The only
question to be asked is, whose will is being projected onto whose
surroundings? Do those surroundings include other people?

To me, all this talk of "smart" household devices is just marketing bullshit
designed to mask the fact that the manufacturer is imposing their will onto
users. The devices are dumb as fuck. They have no capacity to make any kind of
judgment call. The manufacturer does, as they have the source code. Calling
the devices "smart" makes it look like they're learning and making decisions
for the owner's benefit when they really aren't.

My fridge and air purifier wants internet access for some reason but I'm not
giving it to them. I'm not buying a smart TV and probably never will. I prefer
my appliances dumb and simple. After all, uneducated and isolated slaves are
far less likely to revolt. As soon as they are given a voice of their own,
they'll begin to speak for someone else's interests! (Who knew that 19th
century slave owners' arguments would turn out to be surprisingly convincing
when the slaves aren't humans?)

------
alexfromapex
I like this idea. It could be called privacy first mesh architecture or
something like that.

~~~
sroussey
I bought privacymesh.com a while back for this purpose!

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tarr11
Is it really true that collecting only anonymous, stateless data has the same
value as stateful, identifiable data?

What kind of insights do we lose? Is it simply just advertisers who lose, or
will we also lose other things?

For example, if I can track your path around a city, wouldn’t I be able to
make better predictions about traffic then if I could only track the
aggregated count of locations that had been visited over the course of a time
period?

~~~
ryukafalz
>Is it really true that collecting only anonymous, stateless data has the same
value as stateful, identifiable data?

Value to whom?

>What kind of insights do we lose? Is it simply just advertisers who lose, or
will we also lose other things?

Who is "we"? Who gets to collect that data, control access to it, etc? How do
they get it? Who would lose other things in the absence of that data
collection?

>For example, if I can track your path around a city, wouldn’t I be able to
make better predictions about traffic then if I could only track the
aggregated count of locations that had been visited over the course of a time
period?

Maybe, but that doesn't mean I want you tracking me.

------
mirimir
A perfect example is community-sourced apps that warn about police and speed
traps.

I also recall reading about apps that warn about video surveillance. But
that's a difficult thing to search for.

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lifeisstillgood
I have a phrase "topless computing" which for me is allowing the data to be
accessible in an onwardly usable fashion. Not assuming the use case you have
in mind is the final one - someone will always have a better more specific use
case

It does mean we all need to become proficient at using those data flows - to
become coders as we are all readers and writers today.

~~~
justinclift
> It does mean we all need to become proficient at using those data flows ...

Pretty sure that's extremely unlikely to (ever) happen for even a majority of
the population.

a) People have their own interests and goals. They generally aren't going to
put time into anything like this unless it seems like it'll help them achieve
one of their interests/goals

b) Not everyone is "switched on" technologically. Kids, elderly, even just
some people with non-technical personality types. :/

~~~
lopmotr
b) is education. Literacy is terrible without school too. But now nearly
everyone spends years learning that skill and can use it throughout life. Not
to say coding is necessarily as useful as reading and writing though.

~~~
justinclift
Education _definitely_ won't work for many elderly people who are 1. Not
Interested, and 2. May no longer be capable of picking up (or retaining) the
skill. :(

~~~
lopmotr
I'm not talking about re-educating adults. Just that we could teach nearly
everyone to program if it were important, in the same way we teach nearly
everyone to read and write. Kids already learn long division at school, which
is an algorithm. Programming is kind of easier in a way because if you have a
goal, you can fumble you way towards it until it works, but you can't really
fumble your way through long division if you don't know how to do it.

~~~
justinclift
Hmmm. Not sure you really understand what elderly people are like. :/

For example, my father - who used to be able to do at least basic programming
in C and Python - is no longer able to grasp the concepts for any length of
time.

eg teach him, verify he's gotten it... and the next day it's a blank.
Repeatedly. :/

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mzakefnazkmen
I'd argue what is being done with smart cities could be done with smart code
bases. For instance: any language's core library has functions that almost
nobody uses. That would change if we had a measure of how frequently these
functions are used, starting with why we write these functions in the first
place: as I see it, this would lead to a more experiment-driven fashion of
writing code, instead of idealising the use of these functions as we do
nowadays.

~~~
IfOnlyYouKnew
That does happen. Ruby 2.7 was going to remove something called the swip-swap
operator (or similar), which was thought to be essentially unused.

That plan was shelved after a search of GitHub turned a few examples of usage
in the wild.

~~~
Twisol
The flip-flop operator, I think: [https://nithinbekal.com/posts/ruby-flip-
flop/](https://nithinbekal.com/posts/ruby-flip-flop/)

------
lopmotr
But what about crime? Surveillance really does stop crime. America has parts
of cities that are too dangerous to walk alone in at night, and it's so well
known that if somebody is murdered doing that, people blame the victim for
being too stupid. That's how ingrained the acceptance of crime is. Being able
to safely leave your house whenever you want should be a pretty high priority
for a good city. What's the alternative to surveillance? Lots of police
patrolling everywhere? Isn't that equally creepy but also much more expensive?

~~~
titzer
It used to be that people thought about deep societal issues that might
underlie the causes for crime, like joblessness, drug addiction, poor
education, lack of job opportunities, gangs, being poor. Apparently today
we've lost the imagination for this and the only choices left are more police
or more cameras.

~~~
lopmotr
They're the only choices that have any chance of happening. I absolutely agree
we should solve not crime specifically, but the terrible lifelong personal
suffering that causes it. For every violent criminal, there must be a lot of
harmless damaged people. We need to fix parenting to prevent neglect, abuse
and incompetence. But how can you do that without being even more
authoritarian than surveillance?

~~~
titzer
Like I said, we've lost the imagination to think about investing in society.
It's gonna cost money, time and effort, none of which people want to spend
these days. You gotta stop treating people like criminals. You gotta invest in
education, healthcare, addiction programs. You gotta hire people--
sociologists, psychologists, educators, and yes some policemen. You gotta set
up government departments that are dedicated to studying people's well being
and tracking long term trends. You gotta have effective social programs. You
gotta stop the propaganda lies that socialism is the same is communism or is
some kind of authoritarian nightmare--it isn't. Socialism is high taxes to pay
for effective government services run by well-paid professional bureaucrats
who know what the heck they are doing. Period. And _for fuck 's sake_, you
gotta stop spending trillions on pointless wars, hyper-advanced killing
technology, and tax cuts for the rich. In short, do everything the opposite of
what America is doing.

