Agreed. Phone numbers are now people’s de-facto UIDs. And somehow we collectively decided that Big Tech should have free access to this information to construct giant social graphs and analyze as it sees fit. Crazy sh**.
So the decline of SMS definitely has a silver lining. If each siloed messaging app uses its own UIDs, and this data stays out of people’s d** contact lists*, then in theory this is a privacy win.
What I worry about is that the OS gatekeepers, i.e. Google and Apple, will contrive to get apps like Signal and Telegram to populate the mobile contact lists with these new IDs. “So you never lose your data”, etc. Then they can keep triangulating the information and we’re back to square one.
The only failsafe solution is to ban individual users from sharing their friends’ IDs without their consent. Just as the GDPR bans websites from doing exactly the same thing. For that the EU is our only hope as usual.
Ha! So people do audit the edit history! I agree but I also think people swear too much, including me apparently. It’s cheap, it adds nothing, it devalues the language, IMO to drop a fuck or shit or damn is mainly about making the speaker feel better, it does nothing for the reader except undermine the seriousness of whatever they’re reading.
So asterisks felt like a good compromise, d*** it.
I’m not sure another civizilation is possible on Earth within our lifetime. Look what we’re doing to the planet. Even if some species did evolve to become highly intelligent like our ancestors, humans would put them in a lab somewhere to study long before a civilization has a chance to develop.
I definitely understand this sentiment being expressed across the comments here, however the aim of the question is to try to encourage one to imagine a little more, try to go at the idea with a little more idealism.
That’s why I framed it as, how would you like, rather than how do you think a new civilization would be approached. A slight difference, and although both require thought, the latter grounds the question more than the former, at least to my mind.
I think something to consider is the sheer timescale that evolving civilization implies, evolution takes a very long time, and as far as we know nothing else on earth quite is as smart as humans. That means that another species on earth developing civilization implies one of three things:
That we will have been interacting in some form with their ancestors as they evolve intelligence for a very long time, and so their civilization will have evolved with and probably around ours, rather than completely separately, meaning that they probably won’t be a separate civilization so much as we’d have a shared one, or at least a loosely connected one. (Like if over the next several thousand years, some octopus was to slowly get smarter and eventually evolve to civilization, they’d do so in an ocean littered with human artifacts and shaped by human activity, and they might even need some of this stuff in some way, like maybe they develop metalworking by shaping bits of metal in shipwrecks and garbage rather than extracting it from rocks for example.)
That they already were intelligent in a way similar to humans, with language and other such things needed to develop civilization, without us knowing, but simply had not invented it yet (like humans were until around 10000 years or so ago, most of our history as a species). In this case, I don’t think just leaving them to their own devices without contact is a great idea, because they’ll probably have an extremely bad view of humans (we don’t tend to treat wild animals all that well, and especially the more intelligent ones, which we have often hunted for food or to remove competition, and they’re probably going to have a whole lot of stories and oral history about us as a result.) Since they haven’t been able to really do much in retaliation (to the point we didn’t even recognize them trying), they’ll probably think of us less as just rivals and more like unstoppable monsters to be avoided at all costs. This kind of view is basically setting us up for conflict with them later on, and will take a lot of work to address given how ingrained it probably is with their culture, so both communication and helping them out with early civilization problems that we’ve already solved is probably a good idea for peaceful relations later.
Finally, the third possibly is that they are able to suddenly become intelligent and develop civilization because we made them that way, ie, they’re either AIs of some sort, or an intelligent species we engineered, or an existing species like dolphins or such who’s intelligence we have artificially enhanced (in science fiction this is often called uplifting). In this case, their civilization is intrinsically linked with ours from the start, and if they happen to need some of our technology to exist (ie, like machines need manufacturing equipment to make more of themselves, or maybe an artificially enhanced creature needs some kind of drug to get the intelligence enhancing effect or something) then making their own civilization without help from ours in at least giving them that tech isn’t even possible. It’s possible they might still want to go out and found their own government or something, but such a thing is less like a wholely separate civilization and more like just a new country, at least at first, and so probably should be treated as such.
Actions:- Orchestrated a coo and stole military equipment. - Funded a terrorist organization that murdered billions. - Conquered a solar system. - Run experiments on his (detained) citizens. - Almost turned humanity into a hive mind. expanse.fandom.com/wiki/Winston_Duarte_(Books)
Ike - the shrink next door. I can’t remember a villin that made me so mad.
I’d like to see us study them from a distance, find out what’s different about them from us, and consider what could be improved about our civilization.
Quite the opposite. I am very worried I would lose contact with some people that I talk to but not all that often and never have contact with them again. I’m isolated enough as it is. I’m glad contacts can be backed up.
I did just that about 7 or so years ago. Only gave my number to family members and really close people (maybe 5 at most). Also deleted all my social media.
One of the best decisions of my life.
Unfortunately, I was just getting started on “the real world” and would get any job thrown my way. One of them required me to reply to my manager on WhatsApp so I ended having to create one and give them my number. I’ve since left that job and I’m now no longer a junior in my field, but still feels feels bad on my record :(
I recall setting up a Google Voice number for fielding calls from recruiters and the like, but that’s likely not the best method for privacy since it’s through Google.
I’m lucky there. I moved across the country and never changed my phone number, but the few people who would call me from where I used to live are already in my contacts, so I know that 99% of the time, if it’s a local or regional area code to where I live now, it’s not a spam call. It’s been true for 10 years now. I don’t know if there is a way to get a phone number from another area code where you don’t live, but it would be a good solution for some people.
It’s funny I just came from this post, which I suspect is this exact problem. Spammy apps collecting contact details and then tricking more people into signing up:
asklemmy
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