Once the majority of people realize that all their behavior is turned into these scores, and that these scores have increasing influence over their lives, you will start to see serious chilling effects.
- They both track you all over the web, so they know which websites you visit. - They both get fed with data from mobile apps your use. - They both have access to text you write and photos you upload, which are a feeding ground for algorithms that analyze your interests, intelligence, psychological profile and much more. - They both have access to your (social) calendar to some degree. - They both buy data from data brokers to 'improve' the profile they've built about you.
The blockchain exudes technological determinism. It's built on the assumption that changing society is done by changing its technologies.
We've been here before. The distributed nature of the internet was meant to create a more egalitarian society, in its image. The project failed, and birthed surveillance capitalism. Do you think the technologists learned their lesson? No, they double down and created a new technology that's even more distributed. Surely this time it will work!
All this neo-liberal American nonsense about needing a blockchain because institutions can't be trusted, people can't be trusted.. It's built on such a negative world view. The truth is it's just as important to be engaged in creating better democratic institutions.
We lost our faith in god in the enlightenment, we lost our faith in politics last century, and we lost our faith in the invisible hand of the economy in 2008. I understand technology may feel like the best place to place your hope for a better future. But in the long run, the only thing that ever truly creates a better society is investing in the people, and shared ideas that slosh around its cultural playground. What we need now from Silicon Valley is critical thinking and self reflection.
Unfortunately, if the blockchain shows us anything, it's that the Califonian Ideology has become Californian Fundamentalism.
"Connectivity permissions, privacy, and security: For Bluetooth, cellular, and Wi-Fi, the FINE location permission will be required. Wi-Fi standard support, WP3 and OWE, will also be included to improve security for home and work networks as well as open/public networks."
So does that mean that if an app needs Wi-Fi, then I will now have to give it fine location permissions? So any app that requires Wi-Fi can now also access GPS?
Almost all responses here are along the lines of "what did you expect". But it's not that simple.
If I go up to a window in your house and photograph the inside, you don't say "well, I have no problem with that, the windows are transparent after all".
Saying "it's technically possible, so of course someone did it" makes you no better than databrokers like Cambridge Analytica who create psychological profiles based on your Facebook likes and then sell them to, well, anyone really.
Is it technically possible? Yes. Was it something the average user could have anticipated when they pressed the "I agree" button? No.
This is about norms and values. Privacy is a form of "contextual integrity". We have expectation of how much we will get for different situations. People have similar expectations online.
Facebook itself pointed out they could adopt a subscription businessmodel:
“We certainly thought about lots of other forms of monetization including subscriptions, and we’ll always continue to consider everything,” - Sheryl Sandberg https://www.sfgate.com/busines...
What your (troll) comment shows is that Silicon Valley is so used to the current businessmodel that they can't envision something else.
If you ask me, we need HTML6 to have a built-in micro payments system, where I can top-up my browser's credit and pay for search/content/etc the old fashioned way. The only way I would use Google is if I could pay-per-search, and would be assured my queries would then not be stored.
I tried to switch, but there's simply nothing as good as Keynote on Windows or Linux.
I looked at all the options: - Hackintoshes are too much work and unstable with upgrades. - Fulltime virtual machines.. not really an option either.
After Apple released the new Macbook Air.. I decided to buy the 2017 Macbook Air, precisely for its keyboard. Not so much for reliability, but because I wanted to have some key travel.
What I find most troubling about this is how it shows Musk does not get enough push back and/or there are not enough critically thinking people from academia allied with Tesla to even raise the issue.
Because this was completely predictable.
We've known about the complexity or reality since the 80's, with people like Lucy Suchman pointing out how we underestimate the complexity of the world (in books like Situated Actions). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
We've know about the limits to AI since then too. The famous quote is "the hard things turned out to be easy, and the easy things turned out to be hard".
Machine learning, as one Slashdot commenter once said, is basically "statistics on steroids". It you say "we're going to build self-driving cars that can handle the complexity of the life world with statistics", well... then you will fall into the same trap that technologists have been falling into for the past 30 years.
The problem with Silicon Valley is that it started to believe the stories that were originally designed to separate investors from their money. The Californian Ideology slowly became an unspoken faith, and anyone who questioned it was branded a 'pessimist'.
Musk is a clever man, but he is clearly from Silicon Valley. His fear of AI taking over is another example of this, as anyone who has studied the digital humanities can explain. It's only a valid fear if you have a simplified view on the world, a view where everything can, in the end, be modeled in a system.
The truth is it can't. Society is amazing at producing never before seen situations. The long tail of edge cases is unending, and the degree to which society demands that you cover them is greater than any non-intelligent/non-sentient system ever can.
Don't get me wrong - having a simplified view of the world is what makes people like Musk such powerful forces. But as we've seen here it has its limitations too.
A. Technology is the dominant force that 'impacts' society, and society has to respond to it. The printing press created a new type of society. In philosophy this is called the "technological determinist" perspective. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
B. Social forces are the dominant force in society, and the technologies we invent and embrace (or reject) are an expression of these. For example, even though video calling was the more advanced technology, people preferred SMS instead. This is called the Social Constructivist perspective. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
These are extremes on an axis.
In Silicon Valley technological determinism is rampant. It's the simpler of the two stories, the more attractive one. If technology is the dominant influencer, then there's no need to understand the complexities and ethics of the situations you're 'disrupting'. Narratives around blockchain/VR/singularity/etc also happily align with the "new tech is inevitable" part, because it implies any attempt to regulate it is wasted effort.
The FTC has been 'woke' on this issue since 2014 when they released a pretty good report on the goings on in the data broker market: https://www.ftc.gov/system/fil...
They requested information from 9 databrokers, and explained things most of society still doesn't grasp like: - It's not about 'your data'. Your raw data is turned into scores, and those scores are what is being sold. This 'derived' or 'inferred' data is what we should be talking about. - Most of the money made from profiling is not made from advertising, but from selling 'risk management' products. The hundreds of scores the databrokers developed are sold to banks, insurers, employers. Cambridge Analytica's psychological profiles were once example of this algorithmically derived data. - Databrokers sell a lot of data to each other too. This means you get scores.. which are sold and then aggregated into new scores.. which are then aggregated into new scores. Basically, there is no end to how long you can store data on people as long as you keep regurgitating and transforming it. Think of it like data whitewashing.
Because databrokers sell the derived data, and not the original data, there is little keeping them from scooping up data from leaks and feeding that to the algorithm too.
What Cambridge Analytica was, was the first glimmer of awareness with the larger public that the narrative of 'we create profiles to show you more relevant adds' is a only half the story, and it's diverting from what's really going on.
Is this even legal I wonder. The GDPR requires there to be a 'human in the loop' when automated decisions have a serious impact on someone's life. For big youtubers this could qualify?
Choosing to install an app like this doesn't just affect you, it affects us all.
Take Cambridge Analytica:
Step 1. Know a lot about a relatively small amount of people. In their case, people filled in questionaires using an app.
Step 2. Use machine learning algorithms to find common patterns in the Facebook likes of people who are neurotic (or gullible, have experienced childhood trauma, etc). For example, you might discover that they are more likely to like both christian rock and lobster restaurants. Or some other non-common-sense pattern.
Step 3. Once you find the indicators that predict the traits you are looking for, you start looking for similar patterns in the larger populace. Anyone who displays the same patterns is branded as being "above average likely to be neurotic". (And they dare to call this 'data science'..)
Step 4. Sell your new list of 'all neurotic people in the country' to banks, insurers, employers and political parties. (If you think profiling is about 'better personalised advertising', then you should wake up quick).
So, the "nothing to hide" transparant people make it easier to profile those who do value their privacy. And that's why the government stepping in isn't as crazy as you think.
By the way, Google actually works with a lot of companies all over the globe that do similar things. For example, a company I know asks people to install a special browser plugin, which then tracks every site they visit, in return for about $3 a month. I know this because a friend of mine works there. Who also told me Google doesn't want this to be public knowledge..
Give it time. Over the years people will start to understand how the data driven business model really works. That profiling is not just about personalised ads, but equally about handling you as a risk, which often means denying you opportunities such as jobs or cheap insurance. The real businessmodel of these companies is the continuous background check.
In a few years the 'data is the new oil' narative will backfire on Silicon Valley, as the 'data as a pollutant' metaphor will become all to apt. This comparison will then lead us to ask: what is the data version of global warming?
Local governments should also move slowly. The amount of money thrown away on hype is incredible. Just the number of blockchain things being developed right now is insane.
When too many people in management are incapable of analyzing true potential of new technologies, the rule should be to just wait three years or until the first hype cycle has passed.
Removing the ability to control a smart home device form the local network might have gone against the GDPR's "privacy by design" principle. Perhaps their legal team pointed this out?
I suspect/hope that in the future we will see more smart devices that go beyond the "cloud-first" or "cloud-only" control schemes. It should be possible to have a smart home that never connects to the internet. Open Source home automation software like Home Assistant makes this possible.
The privacy issue is not about unwarranted recording. It's about how most people (including most people on Slashdot apparently) don't understand that the recordings they do have are valuable enough. From your voice data all kinds of new data can be derived.
- Your mood
- How your relationship is going (google it)
- Certain illnesses
Then the questions themselves can reveal a lot.
- Intelligence level (do you use complex words? Do you ask a lot of 'dumb' question?
- Life phase / unwanted pregnancy / money problems.
That second part is also quite valuable, as the questions you ask in the home might be more flippant and thus more revealing.
Thirdly, we know Amazon and other companies fingerprint your voice (in order to discern you from other householder members, for example). This means that if your voice is recorded in another location you will be recognized as having been there.
That last thing is important too as Amazon et al are slowly moving to always-listening devices. Again, this has been on Slashdot, and would be a logical progression we can all see coming.
All this is used to profile you. The profiles databrokers make are routinely used against your interests, such as when banks, insurers and employers access those profiles via hip software packages. Welcome to the age of the continuous background check.
The reason I will never use a bluetooth headphone is that I don't want to be emanating a wireless signal as I move around town. Bluetooth and wireless tracking is everywhere now.
It's weird how Apple champions privacy, yet decided everyone should send out a wireless signal if they want to listen to music.
And yes, Apple's implementation rotates the bluetooth mac to different mac-addresses. Still, that doesn't make me feel comfortable. Perhaps Apple realised that after the GDPR went into effect they might become vulnerable to lawsuits for not applying Privacy By Design principles, so they rushed it through before then.
Samsung has never implemented that MAC address randomization feature. Bluetooth 4 and above actually supports this as a privacy feature, but last time I checked Samsung hasn't implemented it.
If the Samsung A8 doesn't support mac randomization someone in Europe should sue Samsung using the GDPR.
Facebook is neither an advertising company or a tech company. It's a databroker. Their true power lies in getting data about user behaviour into the hands of banks, insurers, governments, etc. That can be used to inform ads. Or it can be used to inform hiring decisions, manipulate elections, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Once the majority of people realize that all their behavior is turned into these scores, and that these scores have increasing influence over their lives, you will start to see serious chilling effects.
Heck, we are already seeing those.
In the long run this could lead to social cooling, where society becomes more rigid, less able to change.
They both know that.
- They both track you all over the web, so they know which websites you visit.
- They both get fed with data from mobile apps your use.
- They both have access to text you write and photos you upload, which are a feeding ground for algorithms that analyze your interests, intelligence, psychological profile and much more.
- They both have access to your (social) calendar to some degree.
- They both buy data from data brokers to 'improve' the profile they've built about you.
The blockchain exudes technological determinism. It's built on the assumption that changing society is done by changing its technologies.
We've been here before. The distributed nature of the internet was meant to create a more egalitarian society, in its image. The project failed, and birthed surveillance capitalism. Do you think the technologists learned their lesson? No, they double down and created a new technology that's even more distributed. Surely this time it will work!
All this neo-liberal American nonsense about needing a blockchain because institutions can't be trusted, people can't be trusted.. It's built on such a negative world view. The truth is it's just as important to be engaged in creating better democratic institutions.
We lost our faith in god in the enlightenment, we lost our faith in politics last century, and we lost our faith in the invisible hand of the economy in 2008. I understand technology may feel like the best place to place your hope for a better future. But in the long run, the only thing that ever truly creates a better society is investing in the people, and shared ideas that slosh around its cultural playground. What we need now from Silicon Valley is critical thinking and self reflection.
Unfortunately, if the blockchain shows us anything, it's that the Califonian Ideology has become Californian Fundamentalism.
Very recently emulators have gotten good enough to play precisely these games.
https://xenia.jp/
Coincidence?
From the article:
"Connectivity permissions, privacy, and security: For Bluetooth, cellular, and Wi-Fi, the FINE location permission will be required. Wi-Fi standard support, WP3 and OWE, will also be included to improve security for home and work networks as well as open/public networks."
So does that mean that if an app needs Wi-Fi, then I will now have to give it fine location permissions? So any app that requires Wi-Fi can now also access GPS?
Almost all responses here are along the lines of "what did you expect". But it's not that simple.
If I go up to a window in your house and photograph the inside, you don't say "well, I have no problem with that, the windows are transparent after all".
Saying "it's technically possible, so of course someone did it" makes you no better than databrokers like Cambridge Analytica who create psychological profiles based on your Facebook likes and then sell them to, well, anyone really.
Is it technically possible? Yes. Was it something the average user could have anticipated when they pressed the "I agree" button? No.
This is about norms and values. Privacy is a form of "contextual integrity". We have expectation of how much we will get for different situations. People have similar expectations online.
It's all a big "what if".
The reality is there's very little motive for wide-spread abuse. People just don't do it.
The few that do operate outside the allow frequency, well there are already laws to deal with that.
Look at the downside though: suddenly vast amounts of citizen/civic-born innovation are hindered.
It's the RF equivalent of "think of the children".
The Night King will break free some day, and then we'll see spiders big as hounds!
Facebook itself pointed out they could adopt a subscription businessmodel:
“We certainly thought about lots of other forms of monetization including subscriptions, and we’ll always continue to consider everything,” - Sheryl Sandberg
https://www.sfgate.com/busines...
What your (troll) comment shows is that Silicon Valley is so used to the current businessmodel that they can't envision something else.
If you ask me, we need HTML6 to have a built-in micro payments system, where I can top-up my browser's credit and pay for search/content/etc the old fashioned way. The only way I would use Google is if I could pay-per-search, and would be assured my queries would then not be stored.
I tried to switch, but there's simply nothing as good as Keynote on Windows or Linux.
I looked at all the options:
- Hackintoshes are too much work and unstable with upgrades.
- Fulltime virtual machines.. not really an option either.
After Apple released the new Macbook Air.. I decided to buy the 2017 Macbook Air, precisely for its keyboard. Not so much for reliability, but because I wanted to have some key travel.
What I find most troubling about this is how it shows Musk does not get enough push back and/or there are not enough critically thinking people from academia allied with Tesla to even raise the issue.
Because this was completely predictable.
We've known about the complexity or reality since the 80's, with people like Lucy Suchman pointing out how we underestimate the complexity of the world (in books like Situated Actions). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
We've know about the limits to AI since then too. The famous quote is "the hard things turned out to be easy, and the easy things turned out to be hard".
Machine learning, as one Slashdot commenter once said, is basically "statistics on steroids". It you say "we're going to build self-driving cars that can handle the complexity of the life world with statistics", well... then you will fall into the same trap that technologists have been falling into for the past 30 years.
The problem with Silicon Valley is that it started to believe the stories that were originally designed to separate investors from their money. The Californian Ideology slowly became an unspoken faith, and anyone who questioned it was branded a 'pessimist'.
Musk is a clever man, but he is clearly from Silicon Valley. His fear of AI taking over is another example of this, as anyone who has studied the digital humanities can explain. It's only a valid fear if you have a simplified view on the world, a view where everything can, in the end, be modeled in a system.
The truth is it can't. Society is amazing at producing never before seen situations. The long tail of edge cases is unending, and the degree to which society demands that you cover them is greater than any non-intelligent/non-sentient system ever can.
Don't get me wrong - having a simplified view of the world is what makes people like Musk such powerful forces. But as we've seen here it has its limitations too.
Tesla is more than Musk.
Congratulations to the engineers working on this stuff. It sounds great!
So we're training machine learning algorithms with data that was generated by machine learning algorithms?
And we're using those algorithms in situations where we didn't have much data, which may often mean they are complex situations?
This sounds like a bias-factory, breaking some kind of law of entropy.
A. Technology is the dominant force that 'impacts' society, and society has to respond to it. The printing press created a new type of society. In philosophy this is called the "technological determinist" perspective.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
B. Social forces are the dominant force in society, and the technologies we invent and embrace (or reject) are an expression of these. For example, even though video calling was the more advanced technology, people preferred SMS instead. This is called the Social Constructivist perspective.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
These are extremes on an axis.
In Silicon Valley technological determinism is rampant. It's the simpler of the two stories, the more attractive one. If technology is the dominant influencer, then there's no need to understand the complexities and ethics of the situations you're 'disrupting'. Narratives around blockchain/VR/singularity/etc also happily align with the "new tech is inevitable" part, because it implies any attempt to regulate it is wasted effort.
The FTC has been 'woke' on this issue since 2014 when they released a pretty good report on the goings on in the data broker market:
https://www.ftc.gov/system/fil...
They requested information from 9 databrokers, and explained things most of society still doesn't grasp like:
- It's not about 'your data'. Your raw data is turned into scores, and those scores are what is being sold. This 'derived' or 'inferred' data is what we should be talking about.
- Most of the money made from profiling is not made from advertising, but from selling 'risk management' products. The hundreds of scores the databrokers developed are sold to banks, insurers, employers. Cambridge Analytica's psychological profiles were once example of this algorithmically derived data.
- Databrokers sell a lot of data to each other too. This means you get scores.. which are sold and then aggregated into new scores.. which are then aggregated into new scores. Basically, there is no end to how long you can store data on people as long as you keep regurgitating and transforming it. Think of it like data whitewashing.
Because databrokers sell the derived data, and not the original data, there is little keeping them from scooping up data from leaks and feeding that to the algorithm too.
What Cambridge Analytica was, was the first glimmer of awareness with the larger public that the narrative of 'we create profiles to show you more relevant adds' is a only half the story, and it's diverting from what's really going on.
This is only the tip of the ice berg.
Is this even legal I wonder. The GDPR requires there to be a 'human in the loop' when automated decisions have a serious impact on someone's life. For big youtubers this could qualify?
Choosing to install an app like this doesn't just affect you, it affects us all.
Take Cambridge Analytica:
Step 1.
Know a lot about a relatively small amount of people. In their case, people filled in questionaires using an app.
Step 2.
Use machine learning algorithms to find common patterns in the Facebook likes of people who are neurotic (or gullible, have experienced childhood trauma, etc). For example, you might discover that they are more likely to like both christian rock and lobster restaurants. Or some other non-common-sense pattern.
Step 3.
Once you find the indicators that predict the traits you are looking for, you start looking for similar patterns in the larger populace. Anyone who displays the same patterns is branded as being "above average likely to be neurotic". (And they dare to call this 'data science'..)
Step 4.
Sell your new list of 'all neurotic people in the country' to banks, insurers, employers and political parties. (If you think profiling is about 'better personalised advertising', then you should wake up quick).
So, the "nothing to hide" transparant people make it easier to profile those who do value their privacy. And that's why the government stepping in isn't as crazy as you think.
By the way, Google actually works with a lot of companies all over the globe that do similar things. For example, a company I know asks people to install a special browser plugin, which then tracks every site they visit, in return for about $3 a month. I know this because a friend of mine works there. Who also told me Google doesn't want this to be public knowledge..
Give it time. Over the years people will start to understand how the data driven business model really works. That profiling is not just about personalised ads, but equally about handling you as a risk, which often means denying you opportunities such as jobs or cheap insurance. The real businessmodel of these companies is the continuous background check.
In a few years the 'data is the new oil' narative will backfire on Silicon Valley, as the 'data as a pollutant' metaphor will become all to apt. This comparison will then lead us to ask: what is the data version of global warming?
It's Social Cooling.
Local governments should also move slowly. The amount of money thrown away on hype is incredible. Just the number of blockchain things being developed right now is insane.
When too many people in management are incapable of analyzing true potential of new technologies, the rule should be to just wait three years or until the first hype cycle has passed.
Removing the ability to control a smart home device form the local network might have gone against the GDPR's "privacy by design" principle. Perhaps their legal team pointed this out?
I suspect/hope that in the future we will see more smart devices that go beyond the "cloud-first" or "cloud-only" control schemes. It should be possible to have a smart home that never connects to the internet. Open Source home automation software like Home Assistant makes this possible.
The privacy issue is not about unwarranted recording. It's about how most people (including most people on Slashdot apparently) don't understand that the recordings they do have are valuable enough. From your voice data all kinds of new data can be derived.
- Your mood
- How your relationship is going (google it)
- Certain illnesses
Then the questions themselves can reveal a lot.
- Intelligence level (do you use complex words? Do you ask a lot of 'dumb' question?
- Life phase / unwanted pregnancy / money problems.
That second part is also quite valuable, as the questions you ask in the home might be more flippant and thus more revealing.
Thirdly, we know Amazon and other companies fingerprint your voice (in order to discern you from other householder members, for example). This means that if your voice is recorded in another location you will be recognized as having been there.
That last thing is important too as Amazon et al are slowly moving to always-listening devices. Again, this has been on Slashdot, and would be a logical progression we can all see coming.
All this is used to profile you. The profiles databrokers make are routinely used against your interests, such as when banks, insurers and employers access those profiles via hip software packages. Welcome to the age of the continuous background check.
This still holds true for most people in Silicon Valley today.
The reason I will never use a bluetooth headphone is that I don't want to be emanating a wireless signal as I move around town. Bluetooth and wireless tracking is everywhere now.
It's weird how Apple champions privacy, yet decided everyone should send out a wireless signal if they want to listen to music.
And yes, Apple's implementation rotates the bluetooth mac to different mac-addresses. Still, that doesn't make me feel comfortable. Perhaps Apple realised that after the GDPR went into effect they might become vulnerable to lawsuits for not applying Privacy By Design principles, so they rushed it through before then.
Samsung has never implemented that MAC address randomization feature. Bluetooth 4 and above actually supports this as a privacy feature, but last time I checked Samsung hasn't implemented it.
If the Samsung A8 doesn't support mac randomization someone in Europe should sue Samsung using the GDPR.
Facebook is neither an advertising company or a tech company. It's a databroker. Their true power lies in getting data about user behaviour into the hands of banks, insurers, governments, etc. That can be used to inform ads. Or it can be used to inform hiring decisions, manipulate elections, etc.
"Facebook, longtime friend of data brokers, becomes their stiffest competition"
https://www.washingtonpost.com...
"Facebook, the new king of databrokers?"
https://www.wired.com/insights...
I really like this article by Martin Abrams which tries to explain all the different data types and how strong public awareness is about each type.
Core types he recognises are:
- Provided
- Observed
- Derived
- Inferred
When most people think about 'their data', they don't think beyond the 'provided' type.
http://informationaccountabili...