It's not unreasonable for us to limit their access
Are you somehow of the belief that the only group harmed by these reporting requirements are "intergenerational" child rapists?
Do you think that someone that's on this registry that decides to seduce or rape a child is going to register the account they plan to use for that purpose with the police?
or create more laws that they can be found in violation of
Will we ever reach a point where we have enough laws or enough punishment for this class of criminal? If, every year, we enacted new, harsher punishments, and new laws that we can find these individuals in violation of, would we ever hit a point where you might decide it's time to stop? That's really the larger problem with propositions like this: who can come out against it without sounding like you're pro-child rape? Sometimes I hate how easy it is for people to get propositions on the California ballot.
I am all for increased punishments for those caught dealing with human trafficking
Out of curiosity, why? Do you have some reason to believe the existing punishments are too lax? Were the changes enacted by the legislature recently insufficient?
I'm usually deeply disgusted by every CA proposition that seeks to increase punishments for some group, using an appeal to emotion to justify it. Are the existing punishments really not enough? Why hasn't the legislature done anything about it? Is this actually a rational approach to solve a real problem, or is it just a political move that's expected to be a slam dunk, because hey, who wants to come out in favor of sex traffickers?
I get the value of referenda and sometimes I'm proud that it works to accomplish something that the legislature can't or won't, but the tyranny of the majority is a very real threat, as is constitutional amendment via popularity contest, and sometimes I wonder if it shouldn't be harder for people to get their pet issues on the ballot like this.
We're talking trillions of dollars potentially lost without even going near the rich just their corporations.
Let's say that we have an industry producing widgets at $100 apiece. A competitor appears and starts selling widgets for $50 apiece. Assuming demand is fixed, that's $50 less revenue for the industry, with a corresponding drop in tax revenues levied on the corporations in that industry. Do you think we need a law that fixes prices at $100? Do we need one that requires me to pay more on top of that $50 to cover the lost corporate income tax revenue that my decision caused? After all, I'm no longer "paying my fair share".
Countries, states, and localities are in competition with each other over where corporations choose to set up shop (and thus create jobs). If it costs a corporation $10M a year to operate in locality A, and locality B offers to let them operate at $5M/year, why is it wrong that the corporation chooses locality B? Do we need a law that fixes corporate tax rates at locality A's rate? Do we need one that requires the corporation to pay more taxes to penalize them for moving their operations to a locality that was explicitly trying to get them to move there?
Localities like Dublin are outcompeting us. They're able to offer a place where a corporation can operate for a fraction of the cost that anywhere in the US can give them. Rather than reducing our own prices (corporate tax rates), we're more interested in creating new laws that distort the market and artificially keep prices high. If this were any other Big Business, relying on the law rather than adapting to competition (think newspapers, telephone, music), we would be on the side of the other guy.
There is a conflict of interest when you make the entity responsible for collecting your taxes also responsible for deciding how much of your money deserves to be collected. Private accountants have an incentive to ensure you pay the minimum that you need to pay. The IRS has an incentive to make you pay as much as they can get away with. Even if we assume that everyone's trying to be fair, mistakes seem to, on average, align with those incentives.
What we need is better, cheaper tax accountants that, as part of the service they offer, make all of this "go away".
Let's turn this around: why do you think corporate income taxes should in any way resemble personal income taxes? There are lots of good arguments why you might want them different. If you're just responding to the "corporations aren't paying their fair share" appeal to emotion, I invite you to spend some time thinking about why these need to be the same. Corporations are inherently different and you can achieve different social goals by taxing corporations more or less than normal people.
For starters, consider the case of the "loopholes" discussed in stories like this: if a locality has a low personal income tax rate, people tend to move there (and now need jobs). If a locality has a low corporate income tax rate, corporations tend to move there (and now need employees). Consider that places like Dublin might have low corporate tax rates so as to intentionally create this situation?
The man on the street wants his taxes at 2%.
The government needs tax revenue to function. If it gets all of its tax revenue from its citizens, the people have less money to spend on things. If it gets all of its tax revenue from its corporations, the corporations have to raise prices if they are to continue to exist, and so the people may have more money, but it takes more money to buy anything. Income taxes are essentially a tax on GDP, regardless of what entities in your economy you levy the tax against, and by taxing the GDP you reduce the ability of your people to buy things. Reducing taxes for the "man on the street" and raising them for corporations won't have any effect, in the long run, on your ability to buy goods, which is really what you want, right?
They bargain with local governments for tax breaks in exchange for locating there. Is that unfair? Maybe, maybe not. Is it against the public interest? Absolutely!
Wait, why? The interest of which public? If my locality bargains with a large employer to locate a new office, factory or data center in my community, and gets 1000 jobs created for local residents at a cost of some corporate tax revenue, presumably creating a net positive income flow for my community, why is that against public interest? My community gets more jobs and incomes go up. Seems like money well spent? That's the problem with calling these things loopholes: they're not loopholes; they were intentionally created to have precisely the effect they have.
The judge here is just applying that precedent to this case, and if you accept the precedent, it seems entirely appropriate and reasonable that it be applied this way here. If you don't like the outcome, don't piss on the judge for being reasonable. Talk to your legislature and get them to change the law.
You know, if we had a reasonable legislature who actually listened to their constituency, that would be a damn fine suggestion. In lieu of such an idealistic system, and assuming "just deal with it" is not a viable option, what would you recommend?
So let me see if I understand what you're saying: the branch of government that makes laws doesn't appear to listen to its constituency, and therefore, you figure it's futile to try and ask them to change anything. So, instead, you vent at the branch of government whose job it is to interpret, not create, legislation. Why do you think this is appropriate or more likely to get anything resolved?
The way I see it, the US constitution only gives you one path to changing legislation (two, really, if it's proposed legislation). If you've given up on that one path, sorry, I have no recommendations for you. Replace your legislature? Overthrow your government? Elect an executive that pays more attention and vetoes the bill before it becomes law? Pretty much anything except tell judges that their judgments need to better align with your opinions. Judges need to be objective and limit their actions to interpreting what the legislature wrote down. "This seems like a bad idea, so ima vote 'unconstitutional'". It doesn't work like that.
(FWIW, before someone with actual law experience says anything, I'm pretty sure I'm abusing the term "qualified immunity", but the point still stands.)
Why do you assume the summary has any basis whatsoever in reality? If your opinion is just parroting the summary, please take a moment to actually read the article (or, better yet, the judgement itself). Slashdot summaries are the worst possible place to get your information.
Courts have ruled forever that just because you own land, doesn't mean the cops aren't allowed to go onto it. Private land ownership has no special protections at all. You can put up "no trespassing" signs, but this thing called "qualified immunity" means you can't actually prosecute or sue cops if they need to trespass in order to do their jobs.
What does have special protection is your house, and the area of land immediately adjacent. You have a right to be secure in your home, and that implies you have a right to privacy when it comes to people (including cops) on your land near your home.
As I understand it: 1. The camera was not pointed at their house 2. The camera was not installed on the land immediately adjacent to their house
Two things are different about your hypothetical situation:
1. This video surveillance was of the area OUTSIDE the home, where you have less of an expectation of privacy, and less protection against searches. Your hypothetical example would involve surveillance of the area INSIDE a private space, which would require a warrant no matter how you look at it.
2. This video surveillance in this case occurred FROM an area outside the home, and (AIUI), outside the area of curtilage. It was argued that the police had to trespass in order to set up the surveillance, but your land has no Fourth Amendment protection, so it doesn't matter that they had to trespass to do it. In your example, your camera would have to be flown INTO the house, which DOES have Fourth Amendment protection.
I don't really see any mention of land/fields in that description at all. What part of "persons, houses, papers and effects" leads you to think that it's talking about land?
Your suggestion that privately-owned land "is now public" is a bit ridiculous. This isn't about opening up your property to the public, it's about protecting open fields from searches without a warrant. You still own the land and you can still prosecute people that trespass on it (qualified immunity notwithstanding).
Please keep in mind that this judge isn't the one ruling that fields are exempt from 4th Amendment protection. This was settled nearly a hundred years ago, but was the legal standard long before that:
The only shadow of a ground for bringing up the case is drawn from the hypothesis that the examination of the vessels took place upon Hester's father's land. As to that, it is enough to say that, apart from the justification, the special protection accorded by the Fourth Amendment to the people in their 'persons, houses, papers and effects,' is not extended to the open fields. The distinction between the latter and the house is as old as the common law. 4 Bl. Comm. 223, 225, 226.
The judge here is just applying that precedent to this case, and if you accept the precedent, it seems entirely appropriate and reasonable that it be applied this way here. If you don't like the outcome, don't piss on the judge for being reasonable. Talk to your legislature and get them to change the law.
If I hear about a news event and want to read something about it on the web, I will do a regular vanilla Google search (from my browser's search bar). Don't assume that because you don't do something, nobody else does it either.
I think they're talking about normal search results. Many people type something about a current event or a news topic and expect to see news stories and the like in the results. Ads get displayed near those.
I haven't seen anyone do a search and just browse the results listing and be satisfied.
For several years now the trend has been toward providing answers instead of 10 simple result links. There are many queries that are simply factual and can be easily answered on the results screen. For others, Google is doing an increasingly better job at surfacing the answer to your question in the snippets. For instance, [the actor from home alone] and [average lifespan of a fruit fly] yields several direct answers right in the snippets.
Newspapers already cannot make enough money off of online advertising to pay for the creation of their content.
We're in the middle of a revolution in the news industry. Local news outlets could produce stories both of local scope and global scope, and people would happily pay to consume that content. Gradually global news organizations took over much of the content for the global stories, and local news outlets would just outsource the production of that content to those organizations. People still happily consumed the content from their local source, so little changed. With the introduction of the Internet, these news organizations are largely in direct competition with each other for the first time, and discovering that they can't just republish identical stories. Their readership is crashing as consumers move to global news sites, which usually offer a superior user experience.
This is "working as intended" as far as the market goes. Newspapers are doing what every business does when their industry is revolutionized: they either adapt, or turn to FUD and lobbying to hang on as long as they possibly can, so that they can squeeze out the last penny until they fold, and a lot of them will fold.
Seriously, why can't I get a Slashdot or Google subscription for $50 a year to read all these articles without ads and with the ability to retrieve them infinitely?
Great idea. But it doesn't really solve the problem: there are still too many news outlets producing essentially the same product, and there's still a lot more consumers that have yet to move to the Internet. The decline of Old Media is still in progress and we won't see these types of challenges stop until these companies have stopped functioning in fight-or-flight mode by failing or adapting.
I also rather suspect Google employees carry some sort of card that identifies them as a Google employee. Easy to forge? Perhaps, but probably sufficient for this purpose.
The status quo today is that information is collected and used as you browse sites that participate in the same ad network. If you wish to opt out, you don't have an easy way to say that without digging through preferences, assuming the ad network even lets you (some, like Google, let you).
The DNT standard introduces a mechanism for you to state that you are unhappy with the status quo. Consequently, the DNT signal is only useful if the default is equivalent to the status quo. If you make the default something other than the status quo, you can't differentiate between those that are OK with the status quo, and those that are not.
If I want you to know what I'm doing Ill tell you otherwise mind your own fucking business.
Is that what you tell the clerk at the grocery store? You just expect everyone you meet to become an amnesiac after you're done talking to them?
Don't mistake my post as an argument in favor of tracking everything you do. I'm just pointing out that this is the world we live in: things get logged. Governments can compel people to produce logs. Ergo, online activities are discoverable by governments and if you don't want that, you must avoid using online services.
This shouldn't be surprising. If someone is in a position to collect data, and they do so, governments can get that data. Pretty much everyone collects data when you interact with their services. To paraphrase Eric Schmidt, If you don't want anyone to know what you're doing online, don't do things online.
So it's not as high as 90%. But still, what's best? Respecting DNT for IE 10 users and thus doing what 70%(*) of users want or ignoring it and only satisfying the wishes of 28%(**) of the users?
I'd like to see a similar poll asking if people would prefer to pay for things, or get more things for free. Because I sort of see a similarity, what with the trading one thing of value in exchange for something else of value. I'm betting those 68% still participate in this exchange, DNT or no.
If you tell users, "click this checkbox to prevent people from tracking your behavior online!", yes, most users would click that checkbox. Unfortunately that promise would be a lie
Nobody said anything about wording it that way and that not how it's worded in IE's dialogs. So I'm not sure where you're getting at with you 'lying' insinuations.
Sorry, you're right. The actual text, according to your link, is:
Send a Do Not Track request to websites you visit in Internet Explorer
While this is strictly technically accurate, it does imply that this actually does something, that web sites will honor it, and makes no statements about the costs (in terms of ad relevancy). That was the point I was making: it's kind of misleading, and those that do get value out of advertising will get less value out of it without realizing it, while believing that their privacy has improved despite the fact that it probably hasn't.
Bullshit! I'm on a national Do-Not-Call phone registry. You cannot get on the list without explicitly asking for it. Does it mean I never get telemarketing calls? No. Does it mean telemarketers remove me from their list when I tell them not to call me again? No. Instead they hang up in my face and call again a few days later!
I completely agree. DNT, even assuming it were widely honored, doesn't prevent people or governments from doing the "tracking" that people clicking the checkbox don't want. But DNT is going to be less widely honored if advertisers don't feel that the choice is fair to them (fully informed, etc). So if you set DNT on by default, and advertisers decide they're not going to honor it that way, it gets honored for no one. I.e., net privacy loss.
How does DNT secure your right to privacy? It's a request that advertisers not target ads at you. What about DNT requires that advertisers not collect this information and just not target ads? What about it requires that all advertisers respect it? What about it requires that non-advertisers respect it? For someone keen on comparing targeted advertising to murder, you sure have a lot of faith that advertisers are going to see things your way.
But I also think you misinterpreted my post: I'm not saying that users must make a fully informed choice in order to opt out, just that advertisers, when presented with a system that purportedly indicates user preference, have to choose to honor it, and if you effectively flip it from an opt-out to an opt-in system by changing the default, advertisers are probably less interested in respecting it. So, in that sense, if the choice isn't fully informed, it's probably less likely to be respected, and so why would you do it that way?
though that's really what 90% of the users want anyway.
Citation needed?
If you tell users, "click this checkbox to prevent people from tracking your behavior online!", yes, most users would click that checkbox. Unfortunately that promise would be a lie, because this standard doesn't prevent anything of the sort. It may affect the behavior of some advertisers (not everyone that "tracks" behavior online), at the expense of ad relevancy. (Yes, some people do click on advertisements because they actually find the ads useful.)
Make it an informed choice, and the number of users that enable it will be less than 90%, and advertisers would have an unambiguous signal about the user's intent and no reason to not honor it.
You ignore the fact that revenues go down because users click on fewer ads. They click on fewer ads because they find them less relevant and useful. You may not be the type of person to click on ads, but these people do exist (to the tune of billions and billions of dollars worth of these clicks), and this effectively makes the Internet a less relevant and useful place for them.
This may completely be the right trade-off, but that's a trade-off that each user should make for themselves, in an informed manner. Flipping this flag on by default does not make for an informed choice, and so advertisers are far less likely to respect it, which makes for a net privacy loss for the consumer, AIUI, IMO.
Are you really equating rape to targeted advertising?
If a user makes a fully informed choice to request that advertisers not target their ads to them, it's hard for an advertiser to make a case for ignoring that preference. If the user makes no choice (it's on by default), or makes an uninformed choice ("click this checkbox to prevent you from being tracked all over the internet!"), I suspect advertisers are going to have a harder time with that. That's essentially what's happening with IE. If you don't have the advertisers on board willing to support this, then the standard is dead.
This has nothing to do with privacy, and everything to do with Microsoft trying to stick it to Google, without caring that it effectively makes the standard impotent, and therefore harms the privacy of those that would have liked to take advantage of it.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not unreasonable for us to limit their access
Are you somehow of the belief that the only group harmed by these reporting requirements are "intergenerational" child rapists?
Do you think that someone that's on this registry that decides to seduce or rape a child is going to register the account they plan to use for that purpose with the police?
or create more laws that they can be found in violation of
Will we ever reach a point where we have enough laws or enough punishment for this class of criminal? If, every year, we enacted new, harsher punishments, and new laws that we can find these individuals in violation of, would we ever hit a point where you might decide it's time to stop? That's really the larger problem with propositions like this: who can come out against it without sounding like you're pro-child rape? Sometimes I hate how easy it is for people to get propositions on the California ballot.
I am all for increased punishments for those caught dealing with human trafficking
Out of curiosity, why? Do you have some reason to believe the existing punishments are too lax? Were the changes enacted by the legislature recently insufficient?
I'm usually deeply disgusted by every CA proposition that seeks to increase punishments for some group, using an appeal to emotion to justify it. Are the existing punishments really not enough? Why hasn't the legislature done anything about it? Is this actually a rational approach to solve a real problem, or is it just a political move that's expected to be a slam dunk, because hey, who wants to come out in favor of sex traffickers?
I get the value of referenda and sometimes I'm proud that it works to accomplish something that the legislature can't or won't, but the tyranny of the majority is a very real threat, as is constitutional amendment via popularity contest, and sometimes I wonder if it shouldn't be harder for people to get their pet issues on the ballot like this.
We're talking trillions of dollars potentially lost without even going near the rich just their corporations.
Let's say that we have an industry producing widgets at $100 apiece. A competitor appears and starts selling widgets for $50 apiece. Assuming demand is fixed, that's $50 less revenue for the industry, with a corresponding drop in tax revenues levied on the corporations in that industry. Do you think we need a law that fixes prices at $100? Do we need one that requires me to pay more on top of that $50 to cover the lost corporate income tax revenue that my decision caused? After all, I'm no longer "paying my fair share".
Countries, states, and localities are in competition with each other over where corporations choose to set up shop (and thus create jobs). If it costs a corporation $10M a year to operate in locality A, and locality B offers to let them operate at $5M/year, why is it wrong that the corporation chooses locality B? Do we need a law that fixes corporate tax rates at locality A's rate? Do we need one that requires the corporation to pay more taxes to penalize them for moving their operations to a locality that was explicitly trying to get them to move there?
Localities like Dublin are outcompeting us. They're able to offer a place where a corporation can operate for a fraction of the cost that anywhere in the US can give them. Rather than reducing our own prices (corporate tax rates), we're more interested in creating new laws that distort the market and artificially keep prices high. If this were any other Big Business, relying on the law rather than adapting to competition (think newspapers, telephone, music), we would be on the side of the other guy.
There is a conflict of interest when you make the entity responsible for collecting your taxes also responsible for deciding how much of your money deserves to be collected. Private accountants have an incentive to ensure you pay the minimum that you need to pay. The IRS has an incentive to make you pay as much as they can get away with. Even if we assume that everyone's trying to be fair, mistakes seem to, on average, align with those incentives.
What we need is better, cheaper tax accountants that, as part of the service they offer, make all of this "go away".
Let's turn this around: why do you think corporate income taxes should in any way resemble personal income taxes? There are lots of good arguments why you might want them different. If you're just responding to the "corporations aren't paying their fair share" appeal to emotion, I invite you to spend some time thinking about why these need to be the same. Corporations are inherently different and you can achieve different social goals by taxing corporations more or less than normal people.
For starters, consider the case of the "loopholes" discussed in stories like this: if a locality has a low personal income tax rate, people tend to move there (and now need jobs). If a locality has a low corporate income tax rate, corporations tend to move there (and now need employees). Consider that places like Dublin might have low corporate tax rates so as to intentionally create this situation?
The man on the street wants his taxes at 2%.
The government needs tax revenue to function. If it gets all of its tax revenue from its citizens, the people have less money to spend on things. If it gets all of its tax revenue from its corporations, the corporations have to raise prices if they are to continue to exist, and so the people may have more money, but it takes more money to buy anything. Income taxes are essentially a tax on GDP, regardless of what entities in your economy you levy the tax against, and by taxing the GDP you reduce the ability of your people to buy things. Reducing taxes for the "man on the street" and raising them for corporations won't have any effect, in the long run, on your ability to buy goods, which is really what you want, right?
They bargain with local governments for tax breaks in exchange for locating there. Is that unfair? Maybe, maybe not. Is it against the public interest? Absolutely!
Wait, why? The interest of which public? If my locality bargains with a large employer to locate a new office, factory or data center in my community, and gets 1000 jobs created for local residents at a cost of some corporate tax revenue, presumably creating a net positive income flow for my community, why is that against public interest? My community gets more jobs and incomes go up. Seems like money well spent? That's the problem with calling these things loopholes: they're not loopholes; they were intentionally created to have precisely the effect they have.
The judge here is just applying that precedent to this case, and if you accept the precedent, it seems entirely appropriate and reasonable that it be applied this way here. If you don't like the outcome, don't piss on the judge for being reasonable. Talk to your legislature and get them to change the law.
You know, if we had a reasonable legislature who actually listened to their constituency, that would be a damn fine suggestion. In lieu of such an idealistic system, and assuming "just deal with it" is not a viable option, what would you recommend?
So let me see if I understand what you're saying: the branch of government that makes laws doesn't appear to listen to its constituency, and therefore, you figure it's futile to try and ask them to change anything. So, instead, you vent at the branch of government whose job it is to interpret, not create, legislation. Why do you think this is appropriate or more likely to get anything resolved?
The way I see it, the US constitution only gives you one path to changing legislation (two, really, if it's proposed legislation). If you've given up on that one path, sorry, I have no recommendations for you. Replace your legislature? Overthrow your government? Elect an executive that pays more attention and vetoes the bill before it becomes law? Pretty much anything except tell judges that their judgments need to better align with your opinions. Judges need to be objective and limit their actions to interpreting what the legislature wrote down. "This seems like a bad idea, so ima vote 'unconstitutional'". It doesn't work like that.
(FWIW, before someone with actual law experience says anything, I'm pretty sure I'm abusing the term "qualified immunity", but the point still stands.)
Why do you assume the summary has any basis whatsoever in reality? If your opinion is just parroting the summary, please take a moment to actually read the article (or, better yet, the judgement itself). Slashdot summaries are the worst possible place to get your information.
Courts have ruled forever that just because you own land, doesn't mean the cops aren't allowed to go onto it. Private land ownership has no special protections at all. You can put up "no trespassing" signs, but this thing called "qualified immunity" means you can't actually prosecute or sue cops if they need to trespass in order to do their jobs.
What does have special protection is your house, and the area of land immediately adjacent. You have a right to be secure in your home, and that implies you have a right to privacy when it comes to people (including cops) on your land near your home.
As I understand it:
1. The camera was not pointed at their house
2. The camera was not installed on the land immediately adjacent to their house
Two things are different about your hypothetical situation:
1. This video surveillance was of the area OUTSIDE the home, where you have less of an expectation of privacy, and less protection against searches. Your hypothetical example would involve surveillance of the area INSIDE a private space, which would require a warrant no matter how you look at it.
2. This video surveillance in this case occurred FROM an area outside the home, and (AIUI), outside the area of curtilage. It was argued that the police had to trespass in order to set up the surveillance, but your land has no Fourth Amendment protection, so it doesn't matter that they had to trespass to do it. In your example, your camera would have to be flown INTO the house, which DOES have Fourth Amendment protection.
I don't really see any mention of land/fields in that description at all. What part of "persons, houses, papers and effects" leads you to think that it's talking about land?
Your suggestion that privately-owned land "is now public" is a bit ridiculous. This isn't about opening up your property to the public, it's about protecting open fields from searches without a warrant. You still own the land and you can still prosecute people that trespass on it (qualified immunity notwithstanding).
Please keep in mind that this judge isn't the one ruling that fields are exempt from 4th Amendment protection. This was settled nearly a hundred years ago, but was the legal standard long before that:
HESTER v. U S, 265 U.S. 57 (1924)
The only shadow of a ground for bringing up the case is drawn from the hypothesis that the examination of the vessels took place upon Hester's father's land. As to that, it is enough to say that, apart from the justification, the special protection accorded by the Fourth Amendment to the people in their 'persons, houses, papers and effects,' is not extended to the open fields. The distinction between the latter and the house is as old as the common law. 4 Bl. Comm. 223, 225, 226.
The judge here is just applying that precedent to this case, and if you accept the precedent, it seems entirely appropriate and reasonable that it be applied this way here. If you don't like the outcome, don't piss on the judge for being reasonable. Talk to your legislature and get them to change the law.
If I hear about a news event and want to read something about it on the web, I will do a regular vanilla Google search (from my browser's search bar). Don't assume that because you don't do something, nobody else does it either.
First, there are no ads on Google news
I think they're talking about normal search results. Many people type something about a current event or a news topic and expect to see news stories and the like in the results. Ads get displayed near those.
I haven't seen anyone do a search and just browse the results listing and be satisfied.
For several years now the trend has been toward providing answers instead of 10 simple result links. There are many queries that are simply factual and can be easily answered on the results screen. For others, Google is doing an increasingly better job at surfacing the answer to your question in the snippets. For instance, [the actor from home alone] and [average lifespan of a fruit fly] yields several direct answers right in the snippets.
Newspapers already cannot make enough money off of online advertising to pay for the creation of their content.
We're in the middle of a revolution in the news industry. Local news outlets could produce stories both of local scope and global scope, and people would happily pay to consume that content. Gradually global news organizations took over much of the content for the global stories, and local news outlets would just outsource the production of that content to those organizations. People still happily consumed the content from their local source, so little changed. With the introduction of the Internet, these news organizations are largely in direct competition with each other for the first time, and discovering that they can't just republish identical stories. Their readership is crashing as consumers move to global news sites, which usually offer a superior user experience.
This is "working as intended" as far as the market goes. Newspapers are doing what every business does when their industry is revolutionized: they either adapt, or turn to FUD and lobbying to hang on as long as they possibly can, so that they can squeeze out the last penny until they fold, and a lot of them will fold.
Seriously, why can't I get a Slashdot or Google subscription for $50 a year to read all these articles without ads and with the ability to retrieve them infinitely?
Great idea. But it doesn't really solve the problem: there are still too many news outlets producing essentially the same product, and there's still a lot more consumers that have yet to move to the Internet. The decline of Old Media is still in progress and we won't see these types of challenges stop until these companies have stopped functioning in fight-or-flight mode by failing or adapting.
I also rather suspect Google employees carry some sort of card that identifies them as a Google employee. Easy to forge? Perhaps, but probably sufficient for this purpose.
I think his post made perfect sense.
The status quo today is that information is collected and used as you browse sites that participate in the same ad network. If you wish to opt out, you don't have an easy way to say that without digging through preferences, assuming the ad network even lets you (some, like Google, let you).
The DNT standard introduces a mechanism for you to state that you are unhappy with the status quo. Consequently, the DNT signal is only useful if the default is equivalent to the status quo. If you make the default something other than the status quo, you can't differentiate between those that are OK with the status quo, and those that are not.
Would you care to enlighten me?
If I want you to know what I'm doing Ill tell you otherwise mind your own fucking business.
Is that what you tell the clerk at the grocery store? You just expect everyone you meet to become an amnesiac after you're done talking to them?
Don't mistake my post as an argument in favor of tracking everything you do. I'm just pointing out that this is the world we live in: things get logged. Governments can compel people to produce logs. Ergo, online activities are discoverable by governments and if you don't want that, you must avoid using online services.
This shouldn't be surprising. If someone is in a position to collect data, and they do so, governments can get that data. Pretty much everyone collects data when you interact with their services. To paraphrase Eric Schmidt, If you don't want anyone to know what you're doing online, don't do things online.
So it's not as high as 90%. But still, what's best? Respecting DNT for IE 10 users and thus doing what 70%(*) of users want or ignoring it and only satisfying the wishes of 28%(**) of the users?
I'd like to see a similar poll asking if people would prefer to pay for things, or get more things for free. Because I sort of see a similarity, what with the trading one thing of value in exchange for something else of value. I'm betting those 68% still participate in this exchange, DNT or no.
If you tell users, "click this checkbox to prevent people from tracking your behavior online!", yes, most users would click that checkbox. Unfortunately that promise would be a lie
Nobody said anything about wording it that way and that not how it's worded in IE's dialogs. So I'm not sure where you're getting at with you 'lying' insinuations.
Sorry, you're right. The actual text, according to your link, is:
Send a Do Not Track request to websites you visit in Internet Explorer
While this is strictly technically accurate, it does imply that this actually does something, that web sites will honor it, and makes no statements about the costs (in terms of ad relevancy). That was the point I was making: it's kind of misleading, and those that do get value out of advertising will get less value out of it without realizing it, while believing that their privacy has improved despite the fact that it probably hasn't.
Bullshit! I'm on a national Do-Not-Call phone registry. You cannot get on the list without explicitly asking for it. Does it mean I never get telemarketing calls? No. Does it mean telemarketers remove me from their list when I tell them not to call me again? No. Instead they hang up in my face and call again a few days later!
I completely agree. DNT, even assuming it were widely honored, doesn't prevent people or governments from doing the "tracking" that people clicking the checkbox don't want. But DNT is going to be less widely honored if advertisers don't feel that the choice is fair to them (fully informed, etc). So if you set DNT on by default, and advertisers decide they're not going to honor it that way, it gets honored for no one. I.e., net privacy loss.
How does DNT secure your right to privacy? It's a request that advertisers not target ads at you. What about DNT requires that advertisers not collect this information and just not target ads? What about it requires that all advertisers respect it? What about it requires that non-advertisers respect it? For someone keen on comparing targeted advertising to murder, you sure have a lot of faith that advertisers are going to see things your way.
But I also think you misinterpreted my post: I'm not saying that users must make a fully informed choice in order to opt out, just that advertisers, when presented with a system that purportedly indicates user preference, have to choose to honor it, and if you effectively flip it from an opt-out to an opt-in system by changing the default, advertisers are probably less interested in respecting it. So, in that sense, if the choice isn't fully informed, it's probably less likely to be respected, and so why would you do it that way?
though that's really what 90% of the users want anyway.
Citation needed?
If you tell users, "click this checkbox to prevent people from tracking your behavior online!", yes, most users would click that checkbox. Unfortunately that promise would be a lie, because this standard doesn't prevent anything of the sort. It may affect the behavior of some advertisers (not everyone that "tracks" behavior online), at the expense of ad relevancy. (Yes, some people do click on advertisements because they actually find the ads useful.)
Make it an informed choice, and the number of users that enable it will be less than 90%, and advertisers would have an unambiguous signal about the user's intent and no reason to not honor it.
You ignore the fact that revenues go down because users click on fewer ads. They click on fewer ads because they find them less relevant and useful. You may not be the type of person to click on ads, but these people do exist (to the tune of billions and billions of dollars worth of these clicks), and this effectively makes the Internet a less relevant and useful place for them.
This may completely be the right trade-off, but that's a trade-off that each user should make for themselves, in an informed manner. Flipping this flag on by default does not make for an informed choice, and so advertisers are far less likely to respect it, which makes for a net privacy loss for the consumer, AIUI, IMO.
Are you really equating rape to targeted advertising?
If a user makes a fully informed choice to request that advertisers not target their ads to them, it's hard for an advertiser to make a case for ignoring that preference. If the user makes no choice (it's on by default), or makes an uninformed choice ("click this checkbox to prevent you from being tracked all over the internet!"), I suspect advertisers are going to have a harder time with that. That's essentially what's happening with IE. If you don't have the advertisers on board willing to support this, then the standard is dead.
This has nothing to do with privacy, and everything to do with Microsoft trying to stick it to Google, without caring that it effectively makes the standard impotent, and therefore harms the privacy of those that would have liked to take advantage of it.