> contract provisions that would require the company to
IANAL but I suspect bankruptcy law is a subtle and chronic bad influence here.
If a well-behaved company has financial trouble, formerly-binding promises around privacy or ethics may get voided in the name of somehow turning the whole mess into money for creditors. Then the new ownership may be able to do whatever they want with the data.
If the prior management deleted everything before the sale, they could get into legal trouble for destroying "valuable assets" and wrongly prioritizing customers over creditors.
Following the nested "go read this" links to the "The 49MB Web Page" page:
> Simplified versions like text.npr.org, lite.cnn.com and www.cbc.ca/lite still exist out there.
TIL, these are awesome. Not in the sense that they're a visual tour de force, obviously, but they make for an easy "hey, type this in for a second and tell me what you think" contrast, to help people realize how inconvenient the default experience has slowly become.
I think it becomes philosophically clearer if we view it as a fight between multiple minds--or contextual operating modes--in the same person. The practical and ethical question for outsiders is which one we want to favor in the fight with the other(s).
"I want to eat this bucket of ice cream... But I also really want to not want to."
I like it in principle, but the pathologically addicted already make additional accounts and pay other people to acquire them.
So it may help by stopping some people from getting to that point, but as a safety net, an important chunk of the victims will still punch right through it.
There's a certain poker quip which I like to use and apply to other contexts, such as active investing: "If you look around the table can't tell which player is the sucker, you're the sucker."
In other words, beware entering into a game where the rules ensure somebody will be victimized. This is especially true when many of the existing denizens spend much much more time and effort and finagling than you'll ever want to match.
"A strange game. The only winning move is not to play." -- W.O.P.R, War Games (1983)
I think there's a worse-step beyond passive surveillance, where ad-networks function as a channel for viruses that seek to change your computer, along with scams and phishing.
Ad-blocking--refusing to run their code--is a simply common sense when the networks are not liable for ensuring that the code they send is not malicious.
It's a little different with software since you don't usually have the code or silicon wearing out, but aging software does start to have a mismatch with the way people are trying to use it and the things it has to interact with, which leads to a similar rise of "failure" in the end.
Enough location data becomes effectively unique: There is likely only one phone in the world that averages over X nighttime hours in my apartment-complex and averages over Y workday-hours in the the same office block where I work.
That kind of pattern can be used to determine that two or more different app-identities are the same person, and anybody buying that data has a strong incentive to try it.
I don't think that difference matters to the comparison.
It's not an inherent feature to slot machines, it's something we enforce because people got angry about the outcomes (i.e. fraud) when they didn't operate that way.
It doesn't matter because a dodgy slot-machine is still a slot machine, and the person using it would still be a gambler.
IANAL but I suspect bankruptcy law is a subtle and chronic bad influence here.
If a well-behaved company has financial trouble, formerly-binding promises around privacy or ethics may get voided in the name of somehow turning the whole mess into money for creditors. Then the new ownership may be able to do whatever they want with the data.
If the prior management deleted everything before the sale, they could get into legal trouble for destroying "valuable assets" and wrongly prioritizing customers over creditors.
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