The throwaway line in TFA about village life and the section about common law recognizing no right to privacy both highlight my thoughts on this. In prior years we didn't have cameras preserving all our moments in 4K for all time, but as humans we had so little happening in our hamlets/villages, that most of our neighbors knew everything about us and all of our individual actions were never forgotten. Just like how you still remember all the embarrassing things different kids at your high school did (for me, 20+ years later). Life in a village was likely that same dynamic but for a person's whole life, not just high school
Another critical shift in the last ~120 years is the ease with which private information can be productized.
I say 120 years because I believe the Kodak Brownie No. 2 was the inflection point. Other film cameras existed before that point, but did not have user-replaceable film - you would return the whole camera to Kodak and they'd send you back prints and a new camera.
Thus, before the Brownie No. 2, the camera's owner had never posessed the negative itself. For the first time, an indisputably real account of an event could be reproduced over and over, on demand, with a low financial barrier to entry, and in any shape or size the negative's owner could imagine.
Obviously, the internet age has come with its own staggering paradigm shifts. Sure, private information may not be more sensitive than it ever was. But, it is easier than ever before to distribute it for profit.
My issue is this. Or, more specifically, I think the actual privacy invasion doesn't come from the use of cameras, it comes from the use of databases.
I honestly don't care even a little if I happen to appear in (or even are the subject of) a random photo taken by a regular person. I care a lot if I appear in a commercially-operated snapshot/video.
The difference is that a regular person probably isn't going to include that photo/video and related metadata in a database where it will be combined with the contents of other databases and weaponized against me.
Yes, I know they may upload it to Facebook and such, where it is weaponized. That does bother me, but I choose to ignore that part except to make sure that my friends and family don't do it.
> combined with the contents of other databases and weaponized against me.
what does weaponizing mean here? Because i do believe it is a hypothetical threat that most don't actually see as a real threat. The only scenario is that it acts as evidence for you being in a specific location/time, when it is inconvenient for you to admit to being there.
"Because i do believe it is a hypothetical threat that most don't actually see as a real threat."
In another of today's HN stories, 'For advertising: Firefox now collects user data by default', I made almost the same point. If a majority of the citizenry is indifferent and or sees no threat then the politics will not change, no new laws or regulations will be introduced.
Moreover, with no concerted opposition or action the status quo will only be reinforced—thus, by default, those who've vested interests gain additional political power to further ensure there's no change.
What I mean by weaponizing is that it's used to do things like target me for advertising, adjust credit ratings, set insurance rates, and even get a job with certain companies.
imagine if you're a closeted homosexual caught in a photo kissing another member of the same sex, and you live in a locality where that puts your life in danger. imagine you live in a theocracy and someone catches you without your head scarf.
THAT is weaponization.
Your examples aren't wrong but the stakes of losing control of our data are so much higher than you're imagining.
I saw a post on Reddit how someone in Kenya took a still image of 2 men kissing from an elevator camera video file and posted on social media for it to go viral
Seems dangerous
"I have nothing to hide" makes sense to me - except sometimes you don't know what you have to hide, or it can change after the fact
Absolutely, but I've learned from experience that the more extreme examples tend to get dismissed pretty quickly for various reasons.
The examples I used are ones that affect pretty much everybody and, more importantly, are directly relevant to me. Since I was commenting about my own personal situation, I thought it prudent to limit my response to that subset.
But you're right -- there are many layers to this onion, and some are far worse than others.
It amazes me that people think of adverts as benign. They are one of the largest industries on the planet whose entire purpose is to brainwash you into buying something you wouldn't
There's a reason they spend so much on things like facial recognition, they will take more money from you than they spend.
> I care a lot if I appear in a commercially-operated snapshot/video.
This is where likeness rights come into place. A commercial entity can't use your image as an endorsement of their product or in marketing materials without your consent, which is why many production companies err on the side of making sure they vet every face in every image of their marketing material.
> The difference is that a regular person probably isn't going to include that photo/video and related metadata in a database where it will be combined with the contents of other databases and weaponized against me.
As you said in the next paragraph, this is impossible to prevent without stripping people of their copyrights to use their work however they please, including by sharing on social media or uploading to a extremely value-oriented service (like Google Photos) that only provides their services for free/cheap because of the value they get from being able to "improve the product" using user content.
I don't see how likeness rights apply. I'm not talking about my image being used in marketing materials.
> this is impossible to prevent without stripping people of their copyrights to use their work
That's not a copyright issue. Copyright allows you to restrict how others use your works, it says nothing about how you use your works.
I think you're talking about free speech rights here, and free speech rights have never been, will never be, and shouldn't be, absolute. There are many cases where those rights (like all rights) need to be balanced against other contradictory rights.
And some countries at least pretend that privacy rights are stronger vs. the right to publish photos that are not marketing/advertising although I'm sure those rights are broken many thousands of times a day. The US does not except in very specific circumstances--including for said marketing/advertising or circumstances where you had a reasonable expectation of privacy (or misrepresentation).
That depends on what your concern is. A half-naked photo (which wouldn't bother me, but for the sake of argument...) might be more damaging short term, but the other, when combined with all the other data collection, is more damaging long term.
If you think of the processed film strip as a rudimentary database, a chronolgically organized record of images, you can see how it aided in productization. On the other hand, it's also clear that computers are eons ahead in that capacity.
Other than targeted advertising, how has private (I think you meant personally identifiable) information been productized?
The only examples I can think of is auto insurers buying your vehicle usage data, and creditors buying your borrowing data. I don’t know if cameras or the Internet has anything to do with either case.
Political parties buying your browsing/buying habits to hit you up with political ads. Police buying your location data to see whether your were near a crime. Insurance companies will soon be buying data about your exercise routines so they can adjust your rates accordingly.
And then there are the really creepy services. There was a service not long ago in Russia that would allow you to upload a picture of any woman you saw on the street. They would identify the face (via VK) and provide you with their contact and job information. Totally creepy. Totally abusive. But easily done with basic tech.
> There was a service not long ago in Russia that would allow you to upload a picture of any woman you saw on the street. They would identify the face (via VK) and provide you with their contact and job information
Seems like gender technically wouldnt be a blocker, was that a product choice, or a marketing choice?
The wiki doesn't say anything gender-specific, so I'm guessing that this is just the casual inevitability of any new tech than an official spin. Some will use it to enable harassment, and women are proportionately targets of harassment.
> Insurance companies will soon be buying data about your exercise routines so they can adjust your rates accordingly.
if this results in lower insurance for those who are deemed to be healthier due to exercises, then it's a good outcome. Pricing insurance more accurately is almost always a good outcome.
> if this results in lower insurance for those who are deemed to be healthier due to exercises, then it's a good outcome.
in reality, it'll result in higher insurance for those who are deemed unhealthy, or simply at risk. As someone said already, maybe joggers suddenly get lower premiums and bikers (especially in biker unfriendly cities) get higher ones. Maybe you end up paying even more if you bench more at a gym than the "recommended amount". Maybe they collaborate with certain fitness companies and will charge you less if you click an affiliate link to buy this health product.
The possibilities here are endless, and this is just for one aspect of life. This can in theory work with a benevolent leadership, but that ship sailed decades ago.
Insurance is about managing average risk for a population. The ones who end up not needing it necessarily paid more than they would have to, _in hindsight_.
Varying the premiums across the insured population adds some fairness to the equation, but the moment it starts actually culling members of said population through outrageous pricing, it is just plain cheating.
All insurance specialises in certain groups. Regular holiday insurance is cheaper than snowboarding holiday insurance (and regular holiday insurance doesn't cover snowboarding). Why would this be different?
Because if we nickel and dime people for ever decision we risk becoming a society adverse to risk. The safest holiday is the holiday not taken. The safest visit to a national park is the visit done online. If we want people to actually do things, participate in the economy and culture at large, we should not attach a usage tax for every little activity beyond sitting at home all day.
Because if you don't get snowboarding holiday insurance then you shouldn't be snowboarding but you can do anything else while you're on holiday.
Meanwhile in the US if you get kicked off your medical insurance with any kind of chronic illness then you either pay out the ass for basic treatment or die.
but you dont seem to care if house and contents insurance doesn't insure people whose house is currently burning.
The problem with medical insurance is that it's a flawed system in the US. Everybody gets sick, it's a near 100% chance guarantee, esp. as you age.
Therefore, medical "insurance" should not be insurance, but should be a fund. It should be paid into by all taxpayers at some rate proportional to their income (like VAT), and then the fund goes to fund _all_ non-elective medical procedures.
Insurance for medical should be for _premium_ facilities, like private rooms, private nurses etc. Not for the treatment.
> but you dont seem to care if house and contents insurance doesn't insure people whose house is currently burning.
That is the case. If your house is currently on fire, no one will insure you. What are you doing about this awful situation?
> Therefore, medical "insurance" should not be insurance, but should be a fund. It should be paid into by all taxpayers at some rate proportional to their income (like VAT), and then the fund goes to fund _all_ non-elective medical procedures.
You seem to be extremely US-centric. You can't differentiate between "how the US does insurance" and "fundamental truths about insurance". This discussion is not just a proxy for an incredibly well-worn, and separate, conversation on US healthcare.
That's the same as saying someone who's poor and low risk can't snowboard, because their premiums have gone up due to a richer high-risk snowboarder you're forced to sell subsidized insurance to.
No, it's saying someone who's poor should be allowed to snowboard just as much as someone rich, and currently they can't and that's a problem. You are advocating for poor people to not be allowed to snowboard, and if they do snowboard, for them to no longer be allowed to drive.
I suspect there are many activities that correlate to higher risk and many people would not like their insurance to come with a page of fine print of exclusions/fee adders associated with those activities even if it theoretically is more equitable.
As you say, while there's probably some correlation between cycling and healthy activity in general, it's probably also an activity--depending on local infrastructure and where you cycle--that by itself adds risk of injury.
Several car insurance companies in the United States (and perhaps elsewhere) have started pushing little devices that plug into your car's OBD2 port and narc on your for speeding, hard acceleration, etc. This is different from them buying vehicle data usage from third parties, because in this case they're "buying" it directly from the source, essentially for free.
The entire junk debt collection industry.
DeleteMe is a product that was made in response to the productization of PII, so that's an interesting footnote in this conversation as well.
Here is a good one. When one applies for a security clearance for a job in a large sector of the employment market or a gov job. All this data could be used.
Doctoring a photographic print is one thing. Doctoring a negative in convincing fashion is another. The only approach I can think of is a double exposure, but good luck pulling that off without it being obvious.
Photographic film is remarkable in that way - you can screw with the print, but the thing that's actually captured on the film isn't easy to manipulate once it's been developed.
Doctoring negatives used to be a very common way photographs were doctored. Think about it: you can iterate on the process and have a reproducible product at the end.
I can only imagine the trickery necessary to make this work but the historical record is clear that negatives were definitely altered.
We did not need a strict law about privacy when the only way to surveil and preserve information was to use your eyes and brain. And given that everyone tends to be their own main character, even that level of preservation was not terribly effective.
The rise of computers and the ability to record things in near perfect fidelity is a problem. I hope we can get a handle on it before it gets much worse.
I only remember the embarrassing things I did. And because I graduated in the pager era there are very few photographs to remind me of what I have forgotten.
And if you move away (to escape your past or for other reasons), any new village you move to will treat you as a tolerated outsider for 20+ years because you didn't go to the same kindergarten as them.
And, by and large, they were right to do so. In the absence of a very strong central government, the only way to protect yourself from criminals (or other social problems) is to assume all outsiders are problematic.
Allowing "escape your past" is generally not socially desirable.
There is a huge difference between people in your village, that you grew up with, knowing a lot about you, and strangers from halfway around the world knowing things about your personal life.
And more importantly the relationship was much more symmetrical - you know about as much about your neighbors as they know about you and for the most part neither has more power over the other. This is not true today where someone who you have never even heard of could be offended by something you said or did and choose to weaponize public knowledge against you.
> Life in a village was likely that same dynamic but for a person's whole life, not just high school
One BIG difference between high school and ordinary life is that high school is filled with a bunch of adolescents who are forced to be in a place where there isn't much to do for fun other than gossip about the other adolescents. Given that adolescence is a time when humans are maximally embarrassing and maximally interested in other adolescents' embarrassment, I don't think it's a good model for general life.
People in small towns and villages today do not act like high schoolers, and they are perfectly capable of keeping secrets from each other. You don't need a legally enshrined right to privacy when your most dangerous threat model is Fred down the street who is a nosy twerp.
Except you were always being watched by everyone, especially back then. If you did something the church didn't like, hoo boy would your friends and neighbors tell on you. Be gay, act like a "witch" etc...to the fire with you.
Yeah, the scale of things is different but the idea that everyone in your town (or your social circles) didn't know more or less everything about you is counterfactual.
I live in a mid/upper middle class ex-urb that is basically Mayberry - our police Facebook page literally has posts like "Angie your Lab got out again, she's at the station" with a picture of the dog sitting at the chief's desk. A big crime wave is when they randomly flush the high school kids from their yearly "fooling around" camp by the river because they got rowdy and mooned the families kayaking.
Yet somehow we now have about 100 flock cameras (and growing) recording every possible way in and out of town and at every subdivision entrance. It's crazy.
They are cameras installed by a private company - Flock Safety - but paid for by uni/gov. In theory they data warehouse the license plate numbers and "vehicle characteristics" of every vehicle that drives by each camera, but no one really knows the extent of the data they collect, how it is secured and stored, or what is required to access and use the information. As far as I can tell they are a favorite of communities that can afford them (which are already low-crime) and are never placed in low-income higher crime areas where they might actually be useful.
The pioneer of DeepFakes... "Anthony Comstock—the anti-obscenity crusader after whom the 1873 Comstock Act is named—had arrested an amateur photographer for selling manually photoshopped pictures that placed “the heads of innocent women on the undraped bodies of other females.” "
That's genuinely creative. I mean the execution, not the act itself. Imagine spending hours in a darkroom to create passable smut and knowing there's a market for that. I guess it's true that any new tech will have one of its first applications dedicated to tickling our monkey brains
The real non-story in the article is describing the downright awful behaviour of advertisers and marketers, and trying to say the problem is cameras.
> "By 1905, less than 20 years after the first Kodak camera debuted, Eastman’s company had sold 1.2 million devices"
Smartphones today sell that many roughly every 9 hours[1]. Add laptops, tablets, quadcopter drones, dashcams, doorbells, CCTV cameras, compact cameras, DSLRs, cars with builtin cameras. I think we're still at the early days of cameras changing the world. "The future is here but it's not evenly distributed yet"; twenty years ago, Flickr and YouTube were founded. There's almost nothing you can't see online or on TV now: any activity, any place, any thing, especially including the minutiae of other people's lives and inside their homes from the luxurious to the impoverished, ostentatious or humble, everyday or holiday, there's countless photos and videos of it.
Want to see a driver's view of a tram or truck or bus journey in a foreign city? A trip on a luxury train or a remote mountain top? A helicopter flight, a submarine trip, Australian outback or Thai food stalls? People sitting on their couch watching TV and chatting about it, someone angrily ranting from their kitchen, people cooking food and eating it, people at work or relaxing, the insides of factories offices public places or government buildings, rare equipment and devices, museums, you-seeums, no-seeums up close; do you want voyeurism, inspiration, exploration, drama, tranquility, nature, disaster, ingenuity, warzone or poorzone, languages, opinions, the mundane, or the joys of propane?
You can find it, you can see it - you can drown in endlessly scrolling it, it can be tuned to your interests or sought on a whim - but you can't have it through a screen.
it will take more than 20 years for the effects on society to fully happen.
I love articles that completely dispel the idea of singularity - that point out that the feeling of our age that things are changing too quickly has been around for a very long time.
It doesn't dispel the idea that things are changing too quickly. It reinforces that we are engaged in a never ending battle against exploitation and enslavement.
Yeah, I think with all major technological advancements we end up with logistic "S-curve" type growth, with a steep rise followed by an eventual plateau. At the start it can look like exponential growth heading toward a singularity, but that's just not realistic and growth always slows down and levels out eventually. Based on the degree and timescale though the two cases my feel pretty indistinguishable for individuals.
I think what has changed the most about our relationship with technology now a days compared to prehistory is the overall incentives for technology changing. It used to be technology had to actually improve something to be adopted. A bow and arrow was superior to throwing a stone, so it was adopted on merit. Sowing seed and animal husbandry was superior to migrating around seasonal harvest from uncultivated flora and game, so it was also adopted on merit. No one was marketing this shift.
Meanwhile we have a lot of technology where its only incentive is not to be thermodynamically easier to an alternative, but to make someone money. Sometimes the technology is even less efficient than the alternative, but its perpetuated and expanded and iterated upon because it is so lucrative. I think once we hit this point with technology is when the singularity really kicked off. Not recently or in the future but potentially in the time of Ea-Nasir and his ingots.
A multitude of successful cryptocurrency rugpulls has shown that technology can indeed be ouroboric, with no actual social benefit.
I do get GP's broader argument, that every generation shakes its fist at the cloud, and we're no different (though this time, we do have a "cloud" to shake our fists at!)
However, your argument resonated with me. Growing up, I observed that newer tech was often superior (e.g. DOS --> Windows) and competing by delivering superior value to the end-user. Of late, it feels like companies are reading the financial tea-leaves and competing by delivering increasing gains to Wall Street.
If a product isn't better for someone, people don't buy it. Marketing counts for something, but quality is still the most important factor in the success of a product. It just may not be the quality axis that's important to you, so it can seem arbitrary.
What would you call cost cutting then? Clearly we are talking about the same things if we are talking about optimizing for shareholder value. I think its not controversial to see how consumer value has plummeted on a lot of goods especially in light of the idea of planned obsolescence and having generally more disposable products to sustain a black hole of a business model.
I think of a passage in Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence:
"""
The idea of doing away with this awning, and revealing the bride to the mob of dressmakers and newspaper reporters who stood outside fighting to get near the joints of the canvas, exceeded even old Catherine's courage, though for a moment she had weighed the possibility. "Why, they might take a photograph of my child AND PUT IT IN THE PAPERS!" Mrs. Welland exclaimed when her mother's last plan was hinted to her; and from this unthinkable indecency the clan recoiled with a collective shudder.
"""
The lack of clear conclusion suggests a new likeness misuse wave is coming though I doubt it.
AI's super power is melding many styles to better effect. My scraped up social media artworks are being considered to such a minuscule degree by the LLM that my likeness is lost unless someone tries to hone in and pass it off as me by legacy means.
None of this is worth upsetting the delicate balance of public journalism vs privacy laws as the article alludes to.
The concern I have is less around using emulating a work and more around not compensating or crediting those whose work has been taken to enrich these companies.
How much work has been stolen and exploited by the more powerful for their own gain? Lots I'm sure. Justifying mistakes of the present by normalizing the sins of the past is a weak-willed argument.
"...arrested an amateur photographer for selling manually photoshopped pictures..."
Am I the only one who finds the phrase "manually photoshopped" in an article about the late 1800s to early 1900s amusingly anochronistic? How about "manually doctored" or even "altered"?
While "photoshop" may have entered the current vernacular, it's annoying (maybe even misleading?) in the context of this article because I doubt Comstock used "photoshopped" as a verb. More to the point, we still have verbs like "edited," "retouched," and "altered" that just as accurately describe the process, are more likely to have been used at the time, and are still understood by everybody today (believe it or not, there are people who don't know what Photoshop is, and wouldn't understand it as a verb).
I made the same comment but got flagged for my clumsy phrasing. I got a good laugh out of it. I couldn't tell if it was a subtle joke, or a confused young author + lapse in editing.
We do kinda take it for granted when old terms are re-adapted to the new technology - for instance "splicing" video clips in something like iMovie. It's rarer to see it the other way around but I'm not sure it's any worse. Today you probably are less likely to say "doctored" or "edited" for that kind of manipulation described than you are "photoshopped."
The idea of privacy has been thoroughly frustrated. Today, there's no expectation of privacy any more, let alone “reasonable expectation of privacy”. Expecting privacy has become unreasonable by definition.
It has not yet become unreasonable by definition. Certain powerful forces would like that to be the the case, and they have been successful at moving things in that direction so far, but they haven't succeeded yet.
> Expecting privacy has become unreasonable by definition.
*in the US that is. Basically everywhere else, esp. Europe, has been moving into the complete opposite direction here. There is _more_ privacy rights - and recourse, like the right to delete - then there has been at any point in the past.
Yeah, Europe has an interesting way of maintaining legal fictions.
The geographical naming rights is one such thing. Anybody anywhere can make any kind of cheese, but one cannot say the cheese is parmesian (or any other given example) cheese without being located in a certain region. There was a famouse case where a cheese maker in itally opened a new factory on the other sside of town which happened to be across the lambardi river, and suddenly they were no longer able to say that cheese was whatever kind of cheese...
That is just one example of many... why legal fictions are bad arguments in Europe, and don't work internationally. One cannot demand other people unsee things they have seen (wipe their brain memory), and so it goes it's equally unjust to demand other people delete photos of them they have seen and recorded in photos.
It's a lot more nuanced than that, and in some cases the privacy ideas are fully justified, but you get the idea.... there cannot be absolutism in either direction.
Just like anybody can make a disney princess movie, but can’t actually call it that? Or just like everybody uses post-its at work but not everyone can sell it that way?
There gets to be a certain point where we simply have to accept that while yes, technically one could simply not own a TV (increasingly difficult to find a DumbTV as opposed to a SmartTV with always-on microphone), any IOT things, a smartphone, etc etc, we cannot reasonably expect someone to not do this. Notably the smartphone, which of the entire list of probably the worst offender, second only to the TV perhaps because of the ick/literally-1984 factor of your TV listening to you.
We practically can't expect people to do without a smartphone. It's how people pay bills, bank, access weather information, etc. And since it's the most-used path, it's also the best-maintained path. Non-smartphone alternatives have already rotted. Have you tried calling into half of those bills you pay via QR code instead of just scanning the code? Try it sometime.
Instead of telling people to just go live on a mountain monastery in Tibet, we could instead simply eat our cake AND have it by just regulating this stuff. Pass privacy laws. Fine people who break them. Samsung, Google, etc will comply rather than not continue to bathe in our ad revenue.
It's not about telling people to live outside society but instead to be more mindful of how they engage with it. One can live in a city and not own a smart TV, nor a smartphone, nor any IOT devices, etc., but that's not the point I'm making. One can also just choose different devices. Once someone gets to the point that they refuse to buy the privacy-disrespecting device it's not much of a stretch to start looking for a privacy-respecting device.
> but instead to be more mindful of how they engage with it.
This is like the recycling debate all over again. Fundamentally we agree with you; littering is bad, the diminishing of privacy is bad, and none of us should feel hopeless about a situation we are capable of changing.
But consider the average person, not me or you or the hackers. Someone who opts for convenience, not "mindful engagement" for the slightest of interactions with the world. They do not care. Fundamentally they cannot be made to care, even if we show them posters of the Earth burning or make them hear about the Snowden leaks. They consider themselves to be powerless, and will not consider an alternative unless it is as convenient as what they're addicted to now. They're not going to buy respectful TVs because they're not the cheap ones. They're not going to buy respectful phones because it doesn't have the little Apple logo on the back that their friends love so much. The average person literally cannot be made to care unless we make privacy-respecting software easier to use than spyware.
> But consider the average person, not me or you or the hackers.
Forget the average person - even as a technically adept person who has tried to "mindfully engage" with technology and minimize his use of it as much as is reasonably possible, the way our societies in the west are structured are making it increasingly difficult to participate in the world without plugging yourself into the surveillance borg. Examples abound even in this thread - QR codes to order food; needing to ask concierge to call you a Lyft because taxis are nonexistent in the neighbourhood and you aren't carrying a smartphone.
There is so much friction involved in living life with minimal technology that you are placing yourself at a significant disadvantage and living your life less efficiently than others by needing to make compromises or forego certain amenities entirely. While it is possible to live life like this and eschew such creature comforts, it becomes exhausting after several years of doing so, and there is no indication that the tides will turn or the winds will begin blowing in the other direction. You can continue swimming upstream for naught and at great disadvantage to yourself, but it will not change the direction of the current. If anything, the pandemic and work-from-home has only accelerated the trend, with the invasion of Internet-connected surveillance devices into one's private quarters now made mandatory in order to participate in the workforce.
> the way our societies in the west are structured are making it increasingly difficult to participate in the world without plugging yourself into the surveillance borg. Examples abound even in this thread -
> needing to ask concierge to call you a Lyft
Considering this was also necessary before smartphones existed, I'm not sure why it's supposed to be a problem now.
Because there often isn't a concierge any longer and there may not be a reliable local taxi company. Without disagreeing that you can work around the lack of a smartphone, it's increasingly difficult in a lot of circumstances.
> unless we make privacy-respecting software easier to use than spyware
This point is key.
I don't use an Android instead of a Pinephone because I don't care. I use an Android because Pinephone sucks right now, and I can't be hacking on the device I need to rely on to schedule my bank payments and call the emergency services if I fall in a ravine. That device has to be five-nines trustworthy.
The solution is going to have to be make Pinephone suck less. That's the only way to mass adoption and actually changing the landscape.
Music piracy didn't get its back broken by a sudden global attack of conscience. It got its back broken by iTunes making it more convenient to get music-to-portable-device than running a torrent server.
> Music piracy didn't get its back broken by a sudden global attack of conscience. It got its back broken by iTunes making it more convenient to get music-to-portable-device than running a torrent server.
Huh? Music piracy is easier and better now than it ever has been. Every music label releases all their music, officially and for free, on YouTube. You can just download it directly from the official source.
It's like Napster, if every music publisher had maintained an official account offering every song they owned, and paid commercial services to ensure that their Napster presence was up to date.
Most people just subscribe to a music streaming service because... convenience. An analyst friend of mine argued that Napster succeeded because convenience rather than free. I disagreed at the time. I think I was mostly wrong.
The streaming service still doesn't have a convenience advantage. It has a discovery advantage. Listening to your own local music can never show you a song you weren't previously familiar with.
Mostly it does for me. I can put on some playlist that is generally satisfying enough. If I cared to put the effort into curating more playlists and spending the money on songs that I like that I'm missing I'd probably actually save money. I'm mostly not looking to discover hot new artists. Honestly, I wouldn't miss the lack of streaming much if it went away.
> One can live in a city and not own a smart TV, nor a smartphone
I believe parent's point is: no, one cannot. One cannot live in a (modern Western urban) society and not have a smartphone.
The people who do are now living in a different society, where, among other things:
- they have to plan to stop at a bank to take out physical cash
- they have to schedule their days in an entirely different method from their peers with smartphones
- they are less connected to opportunities and access to government and private services because those services come via smart devices and assume smart device ownership
Not to put too fine a point on it: there are restaurants that give you a QR code instead of a paper menu now. Are you and I living in the same society if I can order food there and you can't?
Perhaps we are just quibbling on definitions if we're arguing about whether being homeless counts as living in the same society as those with a permanent address.
The meta point is: government regulates housing because it's something "everybody" (modulo outliers) does: live in a house. If "everybody" (modulo outliers) owns a smartphone and smartphone ownership is assumed for full societal participation... We probably need to regulate it.
It's really not that hard to have a smart TV and simply not connect it to your network. They'll beg to connect, but I haven't seen one that will refuse to function without an internet connection.
Our brand-new LG OLED doesn’t even beg. It asked at setup time, I selected “not in your marketing drone’s wildest dreams”, it said “cool, bro”, and hasn’t bothered us in the last two weeks.
We don’t even see the TV’s home screen. Just power on the Xbox/Apple TV/whatever and HDMI CEC turns everything on and sets inputs.
I see nothing in that article that supports your claim, other than LG will sniff your network if you explicitly give it a network connection. Additionally, the LG TV has to go through an AV receiver and the Apple TV before it finds an Ethernet port. There is no doing it “sneakily” if the other devices don’t cooperate, and they don’t. On top of everything else, there is no traffic on my network that gives me cause for concern, I looked. On top of all that, think about the cost of implementing this versus the odds of there being a device on the other end of that HDMI cable that supports such functionality (very low).
In the end, it would appear that you are mixing a little bit of truth with a whole lot of urban legend.
I don’t think it’s reasonable to say “just don’t have internet connected devices at all” in 2024. This falls too far into “caveat emptor” territory for my tastes. We all need to be informed and responsible but the burden of creating a totally disconnected-from-the-internet house (except for your core devices like phones/laptops) is actually pretty substantial and gets harder every year. Hell it’s becoming a problem with cars.
I worry the normalization of Internet-connectedness in "smart devices" in the eyes of the public will lead to regulation of these devices for "privacy reasons" while offering no real privacy guarantees.
I think the drive for "privacy respect" in devices should really be an effort to push manufacturers toward making devices that work without Internet-connectivity. I think everybody technical who cares about privacy should beat this drum to all their friends, family, etc, to vote with their wallets.
Standalone devices make a stronger privacy guarantee than the alternative.
"Connected" devices that offer "privacy" rely on the compliance of the companies who run the servers for the devices. It also means they can't get breached, either.
It time we revisit "basic human rights" and emphasize privacy as part of those, and revamp laws to reflect that. Companies can still have ads and send out fliers in the mail. They don't need to know every move we make, website we visit, what we buy, etc. They have no right to that and it causes a lot of damage to society and mental health while only rewarding the company and no one else.
There is a reasonable expectation of privacy. But we should distinguish between "privacy" with no qualifiers, and "digital privacy" which is a whole other thing. Some people see an equivalence. Others do not.
The blurring of the line between "in your own home" and "on the Internet" is the crux of the issue. The average person doesn't understand that bringing Internet-connected devices into their home makes some quantity of "behavior in their home" into "behavior on the Internet".
Application developers are deliberately trying to blur the line, too, in their user interface. How many users really grok that when they use iCloud syncing with their photos, they are uploading their photos to the Internet?
Since many of us grew up before and then after the Internet, we kind of instinctively get what application functionality needs the Internet, what functionality doesn't, what gets written to the Internet, what gets read from the Internet and so on. Younger computer/phone users don't get this at all. My 11 year old has no mental picture of why X requires Internet and Y doesn't require Internet. She doesn't understand the concept of Data A is stored on-device, and Data B is stored on the Internet. And honestly, I'm even having a harder and harder time explaining it. Tech applications have totally blurred and grayed the previously black-and-white line.
as the article shows, according to the law of the time there was no right to privacy, and photos were not protected until the public protested and the laws were changed.
likewise today any expectation of privacy is a matter of opinion. just because laws do not sufficiently protect our privacy, does not mean that we should give up any expectation of privacy. on the contrary, we need to demand better protection from out lawmakers. vote accordingly
> Expecting privacy has become unreasonable by definition.
Hard disagree. The only unreasonable expectation is that you could go out in public and not be seen at all. It is entirely reasonable to expect not to be tracked, doxxed, etc.
I would like to put the brakes on the idea that just because we can do something, it is okay to do it. The law was written when computers, networking, smartphones, and high resolution digital cameras did not exist. We could easily conclude that every bit of surveillance technology that did not exist in e.g. 1950 is illegal until explicitly permitted by law. Certain organizations would like to gaslight us into thinking that is impossible, that the cat is out of the bag so to speak. I do not agree. We can do it.
