That is most definitely not what Iām advocating.
What Iām saying is this: in a fictitious land where the elected critters strive to serve their constituents, theyād look at Googleās, Facebookās, Amazonās, Akamaiās, CloudFlareās shenanigans and they would say:
āOkay, enough is enough. This doesnāt serve the people. From now on, the only cookies allowed without opt-in are session cookies. Period. The rest (āadvanced preferencesā aka tracking, advertising, profiling) is strictly opt-in, people have to opt-in again after 3 months, and companies have maintain clear records that the users have agreed to being dataraped. And itās strictly audited, and hefty fines ensue if the books donāt square up.ā
Of course, it aināt what happened. What you have now is an option to opt-out of dataraping thatās so annoying and so obnoxious that no-one uses it, and nobody to ensure the companies actually respect the choices of the suckers who go through the opt-out rigmarole. Itās a fucking joke.
With that in mind, it was better before the GDPR: you got shafted too but it was seamless.
The problem is, if you clear your cookies, each time you come back, youāre greeted by the obnoxious fake privacy-friendly GDPR-compliant popup in which - if youāre mad I guess - you have to spend another 2 minutes manually opting out of all the things you donāt want. If you clear your cookies every hour like I do, or at each browser close, thatās a lot of 2 minutes youāll never get back.
Nope
Actually, one of my addons (not sure if uBlock or Noscript) does most of it for me - I click on āonly selected cookiesā or the like, a window pops up, and all cookies except for the necessary ones are already opted-out. So yep, itās two clicks more. The time I get too lazy for thatā¦ well. I am used to dialing in via modem, so Iām not too impatient
Iād love that to happen. I highly doubt it ever will, but again - if nobody speaks up against it, what reason should governments have to change something? Like, if everyoneās okay with being dataraped, they would be stupid to stand up against the big companies. But if enough people say they are not okay with such practices, maybe they, at some point, have to act.
I guess what Iām trying to say is that the government doesnāt give a flying fuckaroonie about your opinion because they serve corporate interests first and foremost. Less in Europe - as in, much less - Iāll agree. But even in Europe, legislators are very, very careful not to annoy certain select interest groups.
Thatās totally true, and Iām aware of that. But parties are also scared of losing votes, not as much, but still. And especially in Germany, public pressure can actually change some things. Not always, maybe not even often, but the chance is there, and I think if you are not okay with something, itās always a good idea to state that. Otherwise, nothing would ever change at allā¦
Interesting. Iāll have to look into that. Iām still dubious about GDPR enforcement being based on anything but self-reporting by the companies concerned though. I mean I very much doubt GDPR officials show up unannounced at datacenters across Europe, flash their badge and demand total access to the facilities for the purpose of auditing. And if they do, itās probably 15 guys for the whole of Europe, meaning offending companies have a very low probability of getting caught.
I have a bit to do with the DSGVO (German variant of the GDPR), and I know they actually do that. They take a look at how you store the data you collect, digital and analogue as well, and the fines are heftyā¦
Accepted!
Though we might have to agree on something less alcoholicā¦ might sound boring, but I donāt drink. I mean, alcohol
We are way past the point of no return thereā¦ but I would say there are a few optimal paths ahead:
A whole nation/world wide mindset change (talk Pollyanna on steroids here). Although any bit of improvement towards this path is already a good improvement. Hence why I said I like the initiative anyway, even if only because it helps more people grow aware of it
Cold turkey no-surveilance. be it through guerrilla tactics, mindset, revolution, etcā¦ whatever the means, we might achieve a no-surveilance state. Not to believe there will actually be zero surveillance. People of interest will still be tracked. Yet there wonāt be mass surveilance anymore. Even though I hate to admit, but panopticism has been proven to work as a deterrent for minor criminal activity over and over. So the price to pay to make it harder for āthe big manā to track you, is to make it less safe for the small shop ownerā¦ Not judging what is worth here, just pointing out that there would be a shift in balance between both those poles.
Acceptance of Full surveillance.
This last one is a bit more controversial and complex, so Iāll expand it here:
The most obvious benefit here comes in boosting up the good uses of surveillance (such as in criminal investigations and increased passive safety).
The ābad effectsā of mass surveillance would not be anything new. They already exist. So increasing surveilance all around would not be so much of a factor, since it will grow anyway no matter what we want.
So there would also be an advantage here where people would be aware that there is constant surveillance, so they would be able to identify and react against misuse of such.
Also another advantage is data pollution. If everywhere is monitored all the time, apart from persons-of-interest, our individual data would become anonymised by the sheer volume of data.
This anonymisation happens because ultimately misuse of this type of data boils down to a simple question: āis the cost of sorting all this data less than the profit we make from the results?ā. Then the larger the data that needs to be sorted, the higher the cost. The more data that exists out there, the lesser itās profits are. So āflooding the marketā could actually reduce the misuse as well.
I am aware this is counter-intuitive, but as I said, we are already past a point of no return.
No matter what actions we take to stop data collection or mass surveillance, malicious actors will always still be able to track you or your data if they want to.
So I believe that by shattering the illusion that we can live āuntrackedā would actually allow people to push back against misuse.
Immagine this scenario:
Today. someone comes to you stating that āI know they are tracking me. I pissed off an important person and they tracked me through traffic cameras and used the fact that I went to a gay bar to get me fired off my jobā.
Most people would just disregard that person as paranoid.
Now imagine the same discourse, 5 years from now, in a society where everyone is aware that there are resources in place to enable such tracking.
That person might then be taken seriously, instead of treated as a paranoid. an Investigation would have to be launched, and they could find out that it was indeed misuse of power at play, so that person could have itās justice.
The example I took is very possible to happen today. You donāt need to change anything on current state of monitoring to make that be plausible.
Alsoā¦
We already live in a world where itās easier to escape monitoring by overfeeding it than by hiding from it.
For exampleā¦ If I make myself appear in a camera in 2 different places at the same time, while my cellphone is pinging a transmission tower 3 miles away from bothā¦ I just rendered all the monitoring anyone would have on me useless.
If I attempt to hide from every monitoring, throw away all my electronics, live off grid, have no bank accountsā¦ then you might take a selfie while on a bus and I show up on the backgroundā¦ bingo! Iām back on being trackable!
Just as a first little statement - I obviously disagree on this point, otherwise I wouldnāt sign such petitions
You know all those videos showing crimes? Shoplifting, people attacking others, all this stuff? The fact that you can see them proves that the cameras obivously didnāt prevent them
I work in a shop. We had cameras. We ācaughtā criminals on them. Yeahā¦ but we didnāt catch any of them āin real lifeā. People who know of cameras and want to commit crimes usually know very well how to avoid themā¦
Iām pretty sure there is no way that surveillance might lead to the tiniest bit of more safety at all.
I think, since technology is constantly advancing, it will be very easy to process a lot of data with very little effortā¦ most probably, it already is. Flooding it might help in the beginning or with rather special cases (like my often-mentionend TOR browserā¦), but ultimately, technology will keep up with that - and if we decided to just go for mass surveillance at that point, we might be in real trouble.
edit: oh, I know we are trackable already, by several means. Iām just totally against adding more methods to thatā¦^^
There is a third way - one that Iāve been practising for decades: itās called poisoning the well. You feed false information right and left to confuse the system. The nice thing with that one is, you can test if it works for yourself. For instance, when I create an account somewhere, I use a fake name. If I have to use my real name, I feed it an incorrect middle initial, and/or I tack on II, III or IV. Or I use an incorrect date of birth. Most importantly, I log which creds I plugged where. That way, when I get spam, birthday specials or junk mail in my mailbox, I know which sumbitch sold my data to whom.
And then thereās a fourth way, which I use a lot also: pattern grooming. I have an āofficialā life that has very repeating, very boring patterns. I always use a certain card to pay for groceries, always at the same places, always roughly at the same times of the day. I go to and from work with the same cellphone in my pocket using the same routes. All very boring. For anything else, I use wads of cash and a burner phone (harder these days) or bum someone elseās phone, and I wear different clothes / glasses, or I shave. AIs (and before that, people) are trained to spot things that are out of the ordinary. All it takes is feeding them a lot of ordinary and do the extraordinary another way.
I count that as what I called āoverfeeding itā.
And you are correct. it works wonders!!
I do a very similar thing using a catch-all on an e-mail address I own and host. Each place I register I use a slightly different e-mail. So whenever I get spam there I know exactly who sold my data to whom.
I love me some burner SIMs. Each service that requires a phone number to be entered gets a new SIM. some I wait to register to when I go to another city.
There is just so much you can do to pollute the data and render your tracking data āriddled with doubtāā¦
Then I ask you, mostly driven by the hopes of being persuaded into your point of view, how you think we can actually get rid of monitoring?
When I state that we are past the point of no return itās based on the following points:
We already gather so much data that Machine-learning algorythms are nescessary for making sense of most of it. Thus we already have leads of research going into that field.
Even if we shut down any funding for monitoring this will not stop. We can assume that by watching whatās going on with the analogous ādataā industry. Even in the midst of the GDPR crisis, and with the data industry at itās most shameful moment, I can see that there are every day more job offers requiring those specific skills.
assuming then that there will be a massive increase on the involvement of AI on sorting data (and that will happen regardless of laws, as we see happening already), then all that I would need to be able to track you is ādataā.
even if you remove cameras from the streets, we still have all the cameras people carry around. We have all the photos people post on social media. We have people carrying their own tracking devices (phones) with them. We have proven apps that listen to the audio around them. We have cameras on secure points, such as ATMs, which you wonāt convince the banks to removeā¦
The data I need to track and monitor you is already available, even if you remove all the street cameras. The only thing is that you make it āharder to come byā with that tracking.
Yet at the same time, making it harder to come by, and reducing the amount of data available, we are lowering the costs of sorting it and raising the final priceā¦ Thus acting as an incentive for malicious actors.
And the way technology and social media are evolving, I see only more and more channels of ātrackable dataā emerging.
Hence why I still believe we are past the point of no return.
Unless we can get rid of all the social media and portable electronics as well.
I once saw a demo of an algorythm able to track all the activities of a test subject during a day in LA utilising only open public instagram & Tiktok data from random accounts.
This is tech from couple years ago already.
There is a fallacy there!
The fact that cameras do not prevent all the crimes is not a statement that they do not prevent any crimes.
Itās better if you look into petty crime reports in areas before and after cameras are installed.
It does not stop crime. but does reduce a number of minor offences.
Yes, but at the same time we grow the number of inlets of data at a much faster rate.
letās use random numbers just for an example.
Letās say that now we have 1GB of data easily available, but we can only sort through 100Mb in a timely efficient manner.
Give it a couple more years and we will advance enough those AIs to sort 1Gb of data just as efficiently.
Thing is that if left unchecked, we would then be producing 1TB of data. because more and more data inlets will be created.
So the only way I see data processing catching up is either if we achieve quantum computing, or if we halt the creation of data inlets.
(Even if we achieve quantum computingā¦ so much more would change, so much faster than anyone would be able to develop an algorythm to make use of thatā¦)
I do get your point!
And I am aware that what Iām stating is very counter-intuitiveā¦
But ultimately I believe that the only way to disrupt tracking is by actually adding more methods to it.
Hard to tell, Iām honest. But I still hope if we can raise awareness for this topic, people would at least start to careā¦
Funny thing - Whatsapp recently had a cute little popup that informed the users about āchangesā to the privacy. And all of a sudden (though nothing really changed at all), people where abandoning Whatsapp and switching to (sometimes) safer alternatives, just because it was all out in the media. Not the perfect example, considering lots of people went to Telegram instead, but still - with the right publicity, suddenly things can change. And thatās the thing I hope for. That people become a bit more aware, and finally decide that some things going on are simply not okay. Thatās a very optimistic thought, I am totally aware of that, but it still feels a lot better than resignatingā¦ yep, hedonistic reasons again
Sure, but saying āwe already have some cameras, so letās add tons moreā doesnāt feel like the right way to deal with it. It would be near impossible to remove all cameras, so maybe just remove all those that are not necessary?
There is a club in Berlin with strict no-photo-agenda - if you want to enter, they put little stickers on your smartphone cams. And people happily obeyā¦ (yeah I get it, you could take the stickers off again once youāre in the club, but you would get kicked out immediately)
Okay, I agree that they might prevent some crimes, but at what cost? Like, if someone really wants to do ābad stuffā, they wonāt keep him from doing it. Like door locks - they keep people out, but if someone really wants to get in, they just kick in the window. I still vote for door locks, donāt get me wrong, but unlike cameras, those little guys donāt pose a thread to anyone
On the other hand, cameras might very well prevent people from going out and partaking in demonstrations or such, so more surveillance might lead to less democracy. And I still like that old saying that you should never sacrifice freedom to gain security, or you might lose bothā¦
Actually Whatsapp had that same popup showing up quite a few times recently, and in none of those times it made any difference.
What initiated this massive migration away from Whatsapp was not itās data warning, but rather Elon Muskās tween about Telegram being better.
But then, this is still another topic in favour of my pointL: now people believe they are safer. believe that they ādid their partā, thus we have less leverage to make things actually better than before the change.
Itās āPanis et Circiā all over again:
If nothing gets done, things become so shitty that we explode, revolt, and some things get fixed.
If some radical action is taken against the ones questioning current state, you have a Martir.
If we put on a show and let people think they got what they wanted, then the pressure vents off, nothing changes, but people are happily believing it did.
I agree with you there!
Main point where I think we differ is that I donāt see āembracing full surveilanceā as āresignatingā. I see that as a conscious move to take back control.
That would be a smokescreen.
And then, who is to say that a camera is necessary or not?
Going on that direction would cause people to squabble over trivial matters and shift the focus away from the real matter at hand.
Immagine I then want a camera pointing at my door, but you are my neighbour and donāt want a camera at your door. we would start arguing about that, instead of uniting to act against actual misuse of surveilance.
Here is a great point about the counter intuitiveness of my arguments.
Iām not stating that surveilance is a good thing.
If weāre talking about a place where there is zero surveillance, then we would add a camera to prevent some petty theftsā¦ then the cost is a massive breach of privacy for everyone else! It is a huge cost which makes it not worth it.
But once we realize that the absence of a camera does not imply in absence of tracking. And that peopleās habits in that shop are already being tracked, regardless of there being a camera there or notā¦
Then that new camera will prevent some pet theft, at zero cost.
Agree that this is something we must avoid.
And that is where I believe that if we are awere that there is surveillance, we might better react to it than if we illude ourselves that the problem āis goneā because we can see less cameras.
Well, I have had a question all day, so get ready.
In America, if you are arrested for something, they can seize your assets.
If I have an Apex implanted and that is where I store my crypto (through fismodo if I understand right) and I get arrested, they want to seize all my assets.
Letās assume, They know that is where I keep my bitcoin and stuff, prosecution has great evidence gathering. Iāve been ordered to give all my crypto to them/ordered to give them the right to scan it/etc.
That would be a historic court case for sure. Theyād probably force you to scan it or even cut it out?
Iām predestined to wonder if theyād remove implants period before sending you to jail.
Like say you had your implants listed on your medical record, could they force you to remove them before locking you up?
Or if you had enough implants to set off a medical detector, could that be problematic?
Touche, but I feel like something installed surgically to increase quality of life might differ from our use case slightly. Iād also argue our implants wouldnāt really have much malicious use in prison anyway. But I have no clue
Titanium hip=RFID implant=glowing silicone=hearing implant
All are installed surgically also in my book, just different levels of it.
Quality of life increasing is subjective I feel.
Just a malicious example of an implant. Not the main point. Well, here I am playing devils advocate. Say they decide you canāt remove an implant. So person A. Intentionally goes to jail with stuff implanted, and once in, cuts it out to sell or w/e.
