Hacker News

We're all terrorists here.

Own a general purpose computer you can run arbitrary software on, not just corporation and government approved software? You're clearly a money laundering drug trafficking child molesting terrorist.

As someone frequently annoyed by those stupid bird/deer/insect ultrasound emitters I hope this doesn't become common, with my luck I'll be able to hear them.

> We need PII to be so toxic that companies run screaming from the liability

This is how healthcare workers used to treat health information protected by HIPAA, but it seems like the big corporations don't really even care about it. Nothing ever comes from violations besides slap on the wrist/cost of doing business penalties. You can't do anything without waiving all your rights, granting permission to be recorded, granting permission to use your photograph for anything they want, allowing your recorded audio to run through AI for transcription (and whatever else they want to do), granting permission to share your data with their partners, associates, and some vague description of "anyone we decide at a later date". That's before you can even sign-up, receive care, have a service rendered, enter into a business establishment.

There's pages of fine print documenting it all in vague terms that ambiguously safe guard the provider from any liability, but half the time, you don't even get to opportunity to (not) read it. It's just a link to go elsewhere and (not) read it. They add as many steps between you even reading what rights you're giving away, so that even the people who had a mind to do so would get fatigued, and they make you do it while there are people queuing up behind you, or you're almost done with your purchase/subscription, etc.

Everything is so consumer hostile (and expensive in America), but no "better" service can swoop in, because the established Big corps get to break all the rules or can afford the token penalties to give them an unstoppable market share no honest disruptor/competition could ever overcome. On even ground, no competent person would choose to be abused by our resident monopolies vs a reasonably similar priced local upstart, and a lot people would even pay (a little) more for a better experience/product/service.

Explicit consent will be everywhere, like you won't be admitted to a grocery store without it. Take any modern TV -- there's a privacy policy you have to accept the first time you turn it on. Or California Prop 65 notice on every product.

So no, requiring explicit consent won't fix anything.

so I've been watching the CMS symposium about "Burden Reduction". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYyK0Hc43UE&list=PLaV7m2-zFK...

Most of the videos talk about reducing burden on clinicians. Specifically: sharing, accessing, updating patient history. Providing clinicians and patients guidance through the medical process through AI agents (that have access to your PII). the kaiser permanente guy highlighted ai's use in guiding billing codes. Dr. Oz spoke about getting pre-authorizations near instantaneously

I'm not sure how that gets accomplished without reducing liability or loosing restrictions. I wouldnt be surprised to see a continued attack on our healthcare privacy

The second paragraph by itself is enough, the first is a tad hubristic and vague. The good things that got us here are not necessarily the things that will get us there, there being wherever we ideally want to end up...

>The main part of that negative feedback is effective competition

The comment you responded to allows for "corporations that abuse us" to include those that actively try to prevent effective competition. You don't really explain why being antagonistic to those corporations would be a problem.

Considering the state of the federal government under the current regime it's a challenge to identify safe government and business relationships.

your inventing a concept of universal power dynamics and history with no basis. Humans have created a myriad of sociatal structures, and with the current luxury of our post scarcity techno industrial manufacturing capabilities there is no reason to have all of the forever wars and suffering from lack. What you describe is slavery, not civilisation.

The separation is not total but its more than used to exist.

> I don't think people want this

There was a comment made here a month or two ago, about someone from a SE Asia country (I forget which; maybe Bangladesh?) talking about how their government installed AI traffic enforcement cameras all over, and they went from one of the deadliest, most chaotic road systems in the world to Singapore-level rule-following in the space of just a couple months.

As a result, the cameras have become quite popular because there's less traffic, travelling is easier and more predictable, and road deaths have plummeted.

I imagine there are a number of similar situations in every country, where the deployment of AI surveillance has a sufficiently measurably positive impact that it becomes popular.

Sometimes it’s also a pain to opt out.

The outrageous prices of used (low telemetry) cars make them a poor value proposition, for example. Depending on the model, a used car can be a decade old with half of its lifetime miles on it already and the seller will still want $14k or something crazy like that. When you factor in the parts of its history that carfax doesn’t cover and the stream of repairs you’re likely to be saddled with, finding a 0%-2% financing deal on something new at ~$20-24k begins to look a lot more attractive.

All successful negative things have a claim to virtue that they hide behind.

Agree, you’re either a digital hermit or you’re part of the problem / system

I wonder how precise this will be? A flying object sounds reasonable but could it actually track say individual people walking on a street further down the line?

Thank you, this deserved a link. I was being lazy.

They care to the degree they become aware of it and it's potential misuses.

> This is a perfect example of the revealed-preference fallacy.

The fallacy here is that you think people should have difference preferences than they actually do. "People disagree with me? They must be ill-informed."

> making the right way as easy as possible

I wish I knew what you were talking about here.

It seems like the easy way would be to forbid the collection of this data… but that is obviously not happening, so I need a different part 2.

So much this. When my son turned 12, I told him how some of the various social media sites and smart technologies work, and he’s avoided social media altogether ever since (he’s now an adult). He always uses ad blockers and content filters, and he generally made good decisions around phone use, and other tech use from a privacy respecting perspective.

Prior to this discussion, he was eager to be on social media apps because other kids his age were on them. People respond to knowledge about these topics, but there isn’t a mainstream popular individual talking about it. Everyone is so silo’d, it would be quite difficult to reach people, and depending upon the political leanings of such a person, half the population would reactively go the opposite direction… on what really shouldn’t be partisan.

No, this is not the way to go. Consumers cannot possibly understand all potential ways in which they can be screwed over, and even if they could, it is entirely likely that there are no good choices because consumers will have to choose between e.g privacy violation or environmental destruction, or privacy violation of some degree vs another degree.

This is why governments exist.

That is very interesting. I wasn’t aware of their ability to act as acoustic sensors. It makes sense, but it’s not my field so I hadn’t thought about it.

Any link to the trachea vibrations to reproduce inner monologue source?

I think the major shift with the 6g standard is that general purpose sensing is now explicit to the design and intended use of the system.

The only reason I take my cell phone with me is in the event my truck breaks down. I have lost count of how many times I forgot it at home. I've had business tell me to install some app but I just tell them no or make them do the work for me. If they want money they will fill in the information. Over the years I have been parting ways from businesses that I can not walk in and talk face-to-face with someone and for good reason as it is getting harder and harder to reach a real person in customer support for online businesses. People are getting accounts disabled or deleted with no recourse.

I don’t carry a cell phone, although I technically own one (it usually stays at home). For a while I had to tell a cashier that I don’t have a phone on occasion, but I’ve noticed that many places seem to be backing off on pushing their apps or requiring a phone for some part of the transaction.

I used to carry a legit dumbphone (not one of the new Android/AOSP “dumbphones”) and that worked just as well. It’s even trendy now!

I do not carry a cellphone. I am employed and live in a major city. I never think about not having one. I know multiple other people, also employed, living both rurally and in cities, who do not carry cellphones.

It is entirely optional.

"Our society is structured around the assumption that you'll have not just a cellphone, but a smartphone."

Except it really isn't, it just seems that way when you spend a bunch of time on your phone. As part of an utterly graceless transition to middle age I bailed on social media and have aggressively refused to engage with service-related apps of any kind (fuck mychart, drive-thru mobile apps, and the horse they rode in on). To the extent that I use my phone at all these days it's to check text messages, field calls, and (rarely) navigate via maps. I've reverted to the Old Ways (mailing paper checks, calling ahead to get live humans to explain shit, etc) and it's been pretty frictionless. I've yet to encounter a situation where I was prevented from doing anything because I didn't phone.

> Of course, now that video editing is cheap and difficult to spot, who knows if your evidence will make much of a difference.

Maybe you could use a trusted timestamping service to stamp keyframes or stills from your video while you're recording? If the time of the recording is not in question, it would bound the kind of video editing people could plausibly claim that you could've done.

It's not foolproof - if you have enough face data of the person you want to frame and you've been to the room where the conversation takes place, you could have made a fake video beforehand and spliced it into the conversation at the time of the recording. But that would at least take a lot of preparation and quite a bit of luck and timing to find a place in the conversation that's just long enough to copy your edited version in without arousing suspicion. For dashcam videos it would be difficult to merge your edit with existing traffic, etc...

> Of course, now that video editing is cheap and difficult to spot, who knows if your evidence will make much of a difference

There's a pretty substantial legal difference between the contested opinion of two people in court versus deliberately fabricating evidence to try and deceive a judge.

Suddenly your civil matter is now a criminal one.

Funnily enough I've found for the most part the counter to all this spying also tends to be free products. Signal, pi-hole, ublock origin, graphene OS, Opnsense, Linux, etc. I have yet to find paid-for apps that are superior to the free ones in this regard. If I want an image editor I'm using Gimp, not Photoshop. Libreoffice is better than Microsoft Office if you don't want to be spied on. Most of the cost is learning about the alternatives and how to use them.

> If people were, by default, expecting to pay for everything they use, spying on them would not be accepted.

The spying may have started with free products, but it has metastasized into every aspect of life, free or not. It always does.

> choose to be willfully blind to the spying

Many don't. They also, by and large, don't have a choice. Data brokers, Flock cameras, WiFi-based radar[1]. You really can only do so much as an individual before the only escape is being a hermit in a cave.

> The primary drivers of human mind, before self-purification, are greed, anger, and ignorance

Which then gets distilled into the only drivers of corporations. Corporations that then destroy all moral options for individuals.

[1]https://theweek.com/tech/wifi-signals-now-tracking-users-at-...

I see no 2019. They changed it to 1999. So, six years before he was a senator. Could be, but seems implausible.

> yet in case when the crime against them finally happens the footage might not be admitted as a proof.

Or there is simply not enough staff available to carry out the procedures needed to apprehend and charge the individual. Or a myriad of other things. People think law enforcement is easy.

No I install security cameras as a deterrent measure to keep people at my door front measured in their interactions, particularly when it may just be my wife at home alone.

They are mounted extremely obviously for this purpose.

I greatly hope they never catch anyone doing anything.

The German CDU (basically their Republican party) is currently campaigning with the slogan "More mass surveillance!"

Yes, but when the surveillance is sweeping, global and total, you can’t really be sure about “intent”, current or future.

Right? There are 8 billion humans on those planet. You are 0.0000000125% of humanity. No one outside your family and friends even knows you, nevermind gives a shit about you, unless you stick out in some way. If GP wants to take a tour of my GitHub or my blog and send me a thoughtful email, I'd be delighted!

>Why should I find you repulsive?

There could be a number of reasons. Am I not trying hard enough?

> Why should I find you repulsive?

Me googling your shit might lead to your real name, your family photos etc

Just because it's all public doesn't mean you want the cashier from the supermarket following you around to your family picnic

or just because you like to let the sunlight in doesn't mean you want random pedestrians peering in through your windows..

I can't believe this needs to be spelled out here: "Public" life is compartmentalized.

Or people naively assume that the machine is wayyyy more impartial and privacy-isolated than it really is.

I think people would find it disgusting, it's just very hard to know what data is being used and how and sold to whom by these companies. It's a very opaque by design.

There were literal wars started and people murdered over corporate interests.

> Corporations ... do not and cannot present a personal threat to you.

...is this for real

Holy fucking hell. Someone please, I can't

It's not shade the article is just paywalled

The Germans voted for Hitler because the economy was shit and Hitler was the only one daring to say he'd fix it.

Don't fucking encourage this lol