Comment by ryanisnan
Comment by ryanisnan 9 hours ago
I love the cognitive dissonance on display within the federal government.
One arm: "everyone is a criminal; spy on everyone"
Other arm: "hey you shouldn't really harvest all of that data"
Comment by ryanisnan 9 hours ago
I love the cognitive dissonance on display within the federal government.
One arm: "everyone is a criminal; spy on everyone"
Other arm: "hey you shouldn't really harvest all of that data"
HN is filled with folks that wrote the code in question, or want to create similar products. And they hate to have it pointed out that these tools may cause harm so they thrash around and make excuses and point fingers. A tale as old as this site.
I often have to remind myself who hosts this board and that I am hanging out on a site for successful and aspiring techno-robber-barons.
> I am hanging out on a site for successful and aspiring techno-robber-barons.
that’s how we first arrive here (all of us). Time pass tho and most around fail then we become proper people capable of reasoning
Explaining that modern technology is user-hostile and destructive to the society is nowhere else more on-topic than Paul Graham’s ego blog. While it might be true to say the site is “for” robber barons, There are a lot more users here than the ones you described.
Complete with egotistical and ironic appropriation of the word hacker.
>The cognitive dissonance is in the voters and users.
People really need to learn to say “NO” even if that means an inconvenience “Your personal information might be shared with our business partners for metrics and a customer tailored experience” no thanks, “what is your phone number? so I can give you 10% discount” no thanks, “cash or credit?” Cash, thanks, “login with google/ apple/ blood sample” no thanks
There isn’t a single intellectually honest harm associated with the majority of app telemetry and for almost all ad data collection. Like go ahead and name one.
Once you say some vague demographic and bodily autonomy stuff: you know, if you’re going to invoke “voters,” I’ve got bad news for you. Some kinds of hate are popular. So you can’t pick and choose what popular stuff is good or what popular stuff is bad. It has to be by some objective criteria.
Anyway, I disagree with your assessment of the popular position anyway. I don’t think there is really that much cognitive dissonance among voters at all. People are sort of right to not care. The FTC’s position is really unpopular, when framed in the intellectually honest way as it is in the EU, “here is the price of the web service if you opt out of ads and targeting.”
You also have to decide if ad prices should go up or down, and think deeply: do you want a world where ad inventory is expensive? It is an escape valve for very powerful networks. Your favorite political causes like reducing fossil fuel use and bodily autonomy benefit from paid traffic all the same as selling junk. The young beloved members of Congress innovate in paid Meta campaign traffic. And maybe you run a startup or work for one, and you want to compete against the vast portfolio of products the network owners now sell. There’s a little bit of a chance with paid traffic but none if you expect to play by organic content creation rules: it’s the same thing, but you are transferring money via meaningless labor of making viral content instead of focusing on your cause or business. And anyway, TikTok could always choose to not show your video for any reason.
The intellectual framework against ad telemetry is really, really weak. The FTC saying it doesn’t change that.
> There isn’t a single intellectually honest harm associated with the majority of app telemetry and for almost all ad data collection. Like go ahead and name one.
You’ve already signaled that you’re ready and willing to dismiss any of the many obvious reasons why this is bad. But let’s flip it. What intellectually honest reason do you have for why it would be wrong if I’m watching you while you sleep? If I inventory your house while you’re away, and sell this information to the highest bidder? No bad intentions of course on my part, these things are just my harmless hobby and how I put bread on the table.
In my experience literally everyone who argues that we don’t really have a need for privacy, or that concerns about it are paranoid or that there’s no “real” threat.. well those people still want their own privacy, they just don’t respect anyone else’s.
More to the point though, no one needs to give you an “intellectually honest” reason that they don’t want to be spied on, and they don’t need to demonstrate bad intentions or realistic capabilities of the adversary, etc. If someone threatens to shoot you, charges won’t be dropped because the person doesn’t have a gun. The threat is extremely problematic and damaging in itself, regardless of how we rank that persons ability to follow through with their stated intent.
The intelligence agencies literally use ad data to do "targeted killing" what are you even talking about?
Ex-NSA Chief: 'We Kill People Based on Metadata'...
Can you define a harm suffered by the people that the FTC represents? What about the EU beneficiaries of the GDPR? This is sincere, it is meant to advance to a real and interesting conversation.
Anti-disclaimer: I'm not one of those folks.
However, that's not at all a cognitive dissonance. Fundamentally, there's a difference between governments and private companies, and it is fairly basic to have different rules for them. The government cannot impinge on free speech, but almost all companies do. The government cannot restrict religion, but to some extent, companies can. Etc.
Of course, in this case, it's understandable to argue that neither side should have that much data without consent. But it's also totally understandable to allow only the private company to do so.
There is fundamentally a difference between corporations and the government, but it's still a cognitive dissonance. These aren't the laws of physics - we chose to have different rules for the government and corporations in this case.
There are plenty of cases where the same rules apply to both the government and corporations.
It isn’t cognitive dissonance, the state does lots of things we’re not supposed to do. Like we’re not supposed to kill people, but they have whole departments built around the task.
Should the state do surveillance? Maybe some? Probably less? But the hypocrisy isn’t the problem, the overreach is.
The FTC is under the president's authority. This is election pandering, same as Zuckerberg's backpedaling on government censorship.
This is for getting votes from the undecided.
Everything will be back to normal (surveillance, data collection and censorship) after the election.
Begs the question of agency authority which is manifestly not resolved. You will find that the elections’ results will effect the eventual resolution of the question of the unitary executive quite dramatically.
I don't know if you've been watching but the FTC has actually been extremely proactive during this cycle. Lina Khan is an excellent steward and has pushed for a lot of policy improvements that have been sorely needed - including the ban (currently suspended by a few judges) on non-competes.
It is disingenuous to accuse the FTC of election pandering when they've been doing stuff like this for the past four years consistently.
It seems entirely reasonable/consistent that we would allow some capabilities among publicly sanctioned, democratically legitimate actors while prohibiting private actors from doing the same.
In fact, many such things fall into that category.
The problem seems deeply fundamental to what it means to be a human.
On one hand, there's a lack of clear leadership, unifying the societal approach, on top of inherently different value systems held by those individuals.
It seems like increasingly, it's up to technologists, like ones who author our anti-surveillance tools, to create a free way forward.
this view presupposes the state as “just another actor” as opposed to a privileged one that can take actions that private actors can’t
In the matter of corporations vs governments, if you tally up number of people shot it's clear which of the two is more dangerous. You would think Europe of all regions would be quick to recognize this.
I don't like corporations spying on me, but it doesn't scare me nearly as much as the government doing it. In fact the principle risk from corporations keeping databases is giving the government something to snatch.
because the government has a monopoly on violence. i would much prefer that to corporations being able to wage war themselves
Who is arguing for corporations to wage war? What an absolutely insane strawman. What I am arguing against is letting governments grant themselves the ability to spy on their own populations on an unprecedented scale, because governments "waging war" (mass murder) against their own people is a historically common occurrence.
The cognitive dissonance is in the voters and users.
Even right here on HN, where most people understand the issue, you'll see conversations and arguments in favor of letting companies vacuum up as much data and user info as they want (without consent or opt-in), while also saying it should be illegal for the government to collect the same data without a warrant.
In practice, the corporations and government have found the best of both worlds: https://www.wired.com/story/fbi-purchase-location-data-wray-... Profit for the corporation, legal user data for the government.