In theory you’re already paying the merchant fee in the “price”. So merchant found a way to improve margins and credit card companies found a new revenue source
Or phrased less inflammatory manner: "Corporations can enter into contracts and engage in legal action just like people can". Even the much maligned Citizens United v. FEC basically boils down to "groups of people (corporations or labor unions) don't lose first amendment protections just because they decided to group up".
Except not everyone in a corporation has the right to speech. I'm prohibited by my employer to say anything on the company's behalf, but the C-suite and board are able to speak on my behalf. So, the company's leadership has a right to free speech, I don't.
You still have that right; you simply entered into a voluntary agreement with your employer not to exercise it in exchange for money. Happens all the time.
Let's bring back indentured servitude, you have a right to not be a slave but you should still be able to enter into a voluntary agreement not to exercise that right.
That’s a facetious reply and you know it. Agreeing not to say certain things is practically a universal requirement of employment, for example, to preserve trade secrets. And indentured servitude is illegal.
That's just life. Modern society obligates us to do things like feed, clothe, and house ourselves; they aren't just going to result because you exist. Getting a job is an sacrifice we make to fulfill those other basic obligations.
To discuss further would require us to go into the rabbit hole to debate whether capitalism is the right structure for society, but so far, everything else that's been tried has been worse.
>Except not everyone in a corporation has the right to speech. I'm prohibited by my employer to say anything on the company's behalf,
Yeah, that's how organizations typically work? You might have "freedom of movement", but that doesn't mean you can work in your CEO's office. Organizations also limit who has access to its bank accounts, but that doesn't mean it's suddenly illegitimate for companies to engage in transactions.
It makes me wonder, if everyone 'owned' their own data, I wonder if it could be used as a form of UBI. Everyone has data from using services, everyone owns it, everyone can sell it to make a living just doing whatever they are doing everyday.
This is only just a shower thought I had the other day though, there are probably many pitfalls when it comes to such an idea.
Unlikely. I'd think the most valuable data is generally the type that can be used to extract money from you. Targeted ads and such. So, your data's value would increase in proportion with your spending power.
I don't support UBI but that's a fascinating idea. Unfortunately the data is worth micropennies in the individual, so only worth something in aggregate, like a class action settlement where you end up with a cheque for $0.34 for damages which makes it not even worth your time, it'd only be good as the backdrop for a science fiction novel or as an experiment by a YouTube video by a well known creator to see how little money it would make. I would read the hell out of that book and watch that video tho!
Connecting information to that kind of personal gains sounds dangerous. There is probably non-negligible abuse potential, like college kids legally printing money at weird scale.
You will never generate enough money from information about your consumption to fund your consumption. Obviously there's other data, but you get the point.
UBI isn’t meant to fully fund consumption. It’s “basic” income such as rent or groceries. I will accept that consumption data doesn’t cover consumption and that the value is already priced in but I don’t accept that it has no value or that UBI is meant as complete income replacement.
Honestly the path to "UBI" is probably just socialized/subsidized basic needs.
Build masses of government housing, make a healthcare public option with sliding-scale costs, and you're 90% of the way there - food and decent low-end broadband are frankly already cheap enough for the government to cover with maybe some "Don't gouge Uncle Sam or else" clauses and that's about everything.
IDK, I think almost all interesting data has no obvious single owner, because it gets created as a side effect of an interaction between two or more parties.
Take the transaction information from example above. The record of you buying products X, Y, Z for total t=x+y+z at time T, with card C - both you and the store could argue they're entitled to it. It's about you and money you spent and products you received, but it's also about them and the money they received and the products that were taken off their inventory. Then the card issuer will interject saying, "hey, the customer uses a card we provide as a service, so we're at least entitled to know which card was use to pay, to whom, when, an what the total amount was!". Then both yours and stores' banks will chime in, and behind them, also the POS terminal provider.
Truth is, they all have a point. We like to think that paying for groceries with our watch is like a medieval peasant paying for fruit with metal coins at a town market. It's not. Electronic payments always involve multiple steps handled automatically, in the background, by half a dozen service providers linked by their own contracts and with their own legal reporting requirements, and each of them really do need to know at least some details about the payment they're participating in.
A simpler example: this comment. It's obviously mine. It's also a response to you, and it only makes sense in context of the whole subthread. Should anyone reply to it, they'll gain a stake in it, too - and then, arguably, everyone following this discussion have a right to read it, now and in the future. After I hit the "Reply" button, I can't in good conscience claim this comment is mine and only mine. This is why I'm personally against the practice of unilaterally mass-deleting of comments on open discussion boards, like e.g. plenty of people do on Reddit, forever ruining useful discussions for the public.
(It's also why I like HN's approach to GDPR, which is, you can get your account disassociated from your comments, and you can request potentially identifying content be removed, but the site won't just mass-delete your comments automatically.)
This is fairly easily answered through legislation like the GDPR which classes this data as personal data if it’s associated with an identified or identifiable person.
A legislative body writing something down doesn’t mean society has agreed to it.
If someone journals and writes down everyone they met with locations and dates, they will laugh you out of the room if you tell them they are violating GDPR.
This also leads to stupid shit like people not being sure if they can point a camera at their driveway to catch vehicle break-ins.
Finally, classifying something as “personal data” because it’s about me still doesn’t make it “my data”.
Health data in the US is strictly regulated, very personal, but is definitely not mine. I cannot remove things from it or prevent it from being shared between healthcare institutions.
Is there any documentation on this to read further? I.e. what the different levels contain and how much on average is the cost reduction for the merchant.
The cost reduction is very small, it’s applied to interchange fees. I’ve been directly responsible for implementing this functionality on payment gateways for multiple processors because it helps reduce fraud holds as well.
Separate question, what are your ethics around the surveillance of Americans' economic activities by private actors? What "rights" are relevant in this space and which do you subscribe to?
I'm not going to debate you about anything, I just don't get the chance to ask insiders any of these questions.
My ethics are “this is unequivocally wrong without consent”.
Thankfully my work was on payment products that serviced businesses and government entities, so I did not really have to deal with that moral quandary.
However it gets muddier in other spaces as well. There are types of cards, like HSA/FSA that require something similar to level 3 data called IIAS that is used to determine what parts of your purchase are eligible. In the parts of the systems I have worked with, this is covered by HIPAA, but I have no idea if there are “clever” methods to sneak that data out of the chain elsewhere.
Someone on the inside being obsessed with the product. As a user.
There's a night and day difference between products that get used by the people who make it and those who ship it off to the user and wait for the response.
This is primarily aimed at B2C but there's plenty of cases where it applies in B2B as well (if you can somehow use your own product).
Dogfooding is one attempt to mimic this, and it can work. But what I really mean is someone inside the company actually cares enough, is interested enough, to use the product for themselves. Without being told to.
I work on software to assist public transit. The fact that my own city uses this software, and that I use public transit all the time, is as close as I can get to this. Even that amount of interaction helps drive better UI/UX decisions quite a bit.
I wish I was joking but take the current usage of the internet, and scale up each part. 1TB/s might enable new things, but it's more likely to enable more of old things.
Is the problem with video streaming really bandwidth? I thought storage was the bigger problem, so before storage doesn’t come down in price, it won’t change much, right?
A high quality 4k stream is about 20mbit/sec. 16k resolution would only have 16x the amount of pixels. Assuming bitrates scale proportionally to resolution, that would only be 320mbit/sec.
So if you want to max out a 1tbit connection, you would need something closer to 900k resolution.
Traditionally we think of the information collected as:
8/11/2024 | Amazon.com | $50
But Level 3 data includes each individual line item:
8/11/2024 | Amazon.com | $50 | 1 Very Embarrassing item | some additional fields
This appears in all sorts of interesting ways, and is not restricted to B2B/B2G transactions as they state so prominently. Anyone can sign up if they have a certain number of transactions per year and save quite a bit on credit card processing fees for providing the data.
I can't find the article but there was a tire company that provided a branded credit card, and they had risk profiles for their customers. The riskiest went to some specific bar, and the least risky were buying snow removal tools. (Please forgive my memory if I have the details incorrect).
"Martin’s measurements were so precise that he could tell you the “riskiest” drinking establishment in Canada — Sharx Pool Bar in Montreal, where 47 percent of the patrons who used their Canadian Tire card missed four payments over 12 months. He could also tell you the “safest” products — premium birdseed and a device called a “snow roof rake” that homeowners use to remove high-up snowdrifts so they don’t fall on pedestrians."
Additionally if you try to buy large amounts of visa gift cards it can be problematic. This is one way they catch manufactured spend.
At the end of the day, some merchants are providing every single detail of your transactions down to the line item and all that information is being tagged to you.
Thank you. One note about the «Very Embarrassing item»: all purchases (in context) are private.
But: if the "purchased item" column is filled in the database of the credit card expenses, it means that the shop receiving the payment has transmitted the information. This is an unrequired deliberate action... The credit card company could just receive "Card ...1234 to pay 20u to Acme Inc. shop". That the shop transmit further information to the credit card company is a further action that should be made transparent to the card owner.
AFAIK level 3 data is essentially receipt line item level data.
I'd actually find it pretty cool to get access to my own level 3 data for smarter budgeting/analysis (eg: automatic tracking of food stocks, separation of spend on luxury foods from basics etc), but I've not found a way to get access as an individual yet
Merchants seldom submit L3 data with transactions for stupid legacy tech reasons. The card schemes encourage them to do so with bips off scheme fees for doing so, but it’s a minority of transactions I think with even L2 data.
Yes, it was learning about this level of data collection that made me stop using my credit card for routine purchases and go back to using cash instead.
This is actually a great use case for something like Windows Recall. Ingestion of data after the fact requires the data to be discoverable.
If there was a way to add a meta-prompt to Windows Recall like "Create a log entry every time I watch something with its title and URL" it could serve as a history whether things were watched on YouTube, Vimeo, or any other site, without requiring plugging into each service individually. Repeat ad nauseum for each thing to be logged, or perhaps someone can come up with a more clever query than I that catches everything sufficiently.
The level of granularity on many services might be surprisingly large, preventing introspection of the data at a useful level.
This is a horrible use case for Windows Recall. Even if we ignore all the privacy implications of having a third party screenshot you every 30 seconds and making the files world readable, it's a bad idea.
Recall has lost a ton of useful metadata you already have - both URL visits and streaming are clearly discernible actions, both at the network stack level, and from your browser history. Throwing that away to trust an LLM to re-infer the same data is both reducing data fidelity and significantly increasing processing cost.
If you want to see this done reasonably well, I'd suggest looking at e.g https://beepb00p.xyz/promnesia.html (which not surprisingly bears a strong similarity to what the article discusses)
LLMs don't add much value here, outside of tightly locked down systems where screenshots are the only way of exporting.
Sorry when I said something like Windows Recall, I didn't mean Windows Recall but software with similar capabilities. I think in my mind I was imagining some sort of ongoing screen capture along with a meta prompt or prompts, and some sort of output.
The value the LLM adds is interpreting/processing data without having to tailor input streams. Imagine if formats change, fields get renamed, and so on. The maintenance would be a headache if this was done on a per-service level. I think the reduction in fidelity seems like a reasonable tradeoff, but that's for the user to decide of course along with local/cloud processing and proprietary/open source software.
Even things like invoices from the same service change format over time.
I've been using https://www.manictime.com for maybe close to 20 years now, although not the pro version that offers screenshot recording (curiously the website doesn't mention the existence of a free "standard" license). It records window titles and presence/away times.
A prompt every few minutes that would ask "What are you doing now?" would be interesting to me, as a professional procrastinator. Maybe an even better one would be one that says something like "In the last 10 minutes, you spent 90% of it on Hacker News".
The (non-privacy related) issue is the same - if you resort to screen shots, you've thrown away tons of valuable metadata.
And, as long as there's an API, I am fairly certain that maintaining a compat layer is a lot less work than retuning the LLM when the images change. (And you'll want to adjust your tuning, at least with current SOTA, or your error rate will reach Unpleasantville fairly quickly)
Yes, it seems easier on the face of it - but the reality of building an LLM pipeline will quickly point out a lot of edge cases.
I've been talking about this with a friend/colleague of mine. Some of the greatest sources of data are "recorders" that are running in the background. Oura or any other activity tracker, Google Maps with location history turned on, browser history. Data privacy concerns aside, those sources can really help tie things together.
Personally, I stopped using my Oura ring and don't have location history collected anywhere (that I control or know of). One of my big ideas for this is a native application for your phone and laptop that collects everything it can in the background and surfaces it somewhere you control (synced via a service you choose, lands on a machine you own). Maybe overkill for many people but being able to access that without giving it to another service would be something I'd use.
I have to agree with lazide here. One poignant example is a man who accepts the fatherly role of a child can become legally liable for that child's wellbeing, support payments etc., whether or not the child is actually his biologically.
Therefore it is not _the action_ of having a child that exposes the man to legal liability, it is verbally accepting and or acting as if the child is his (cases and situations vary greatly).
This is part of why saying "Sorry" is so heavily avoided in certain subcultures, because it accepts culpability.
My understanding is this is why it's a "Jury of your peers".
Someone from outside the community is an alien and would convict differently than someone who is more integrated with the scenario. Not only is the understanding of the situation different, but the incentives are different.
The scale of society has changed, but imagine what this was like when communities were smaller.
People with substance abuse disorders are not binarily excluded or included from adherence to taking a daily regimen. However, it is not an unreasonable expectation that someone shooting heroin every week in a flop house is less likely to take a daily medicine than the average population.
The belief that drug addicts can't be expected to take a daily pill is not grounded in stereotype and bias, it's a realistic and down to earth perspective that for some of them, their addiction is crippling their ability to function.
Imagine New York vs Dallas for example. I think it is fair to say that some cities are more spread out and low density, making them feel like a suburban sprawl.
Here's a small comment thread from a few months back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41213632