I enjoyed reaching the gist of your meaning: Legislation needs to be written.
So let’s hope that can happen.
Agreed. The first step I think is education, letting people know the value, pointing out that it is a pandemic problem that affects everyone, then convincing politicians that they are being robbed too. If a lawmaker thinks they’re a victim, then they might actually pull their finger out.
And on a personal level, what have you heard about people who intentionally make their data useless?
This has been my strategy.
I do that to some degree, with some things. Like with captcha, I play a game of getting things wrong, but just enough to get through. Not every attempt though, I want it to still think I’m a human that’s smarter than the machine, then when I think it’s giving me a genuine training screen I spoil it.
I don’t use cash as much as I maybe should, I prefer it in some regards, but contactless card purchases are just so easy. I’ve never used Google or Apple Pay, though, but that’s more because I run custom firmware. Also, I’ve since learned that when you use your phone to pay it’s the equivalent to chip and PIN. You are authorising the transaction and taking responsibility for it, whereas if you use a contactless debit/credit card it is processed as “cardholder not present”, whereby the seller assumes more responsibility if you dispute it. This method of transaction isn’t new, it’s how catalogue or telephone purchases were always done, as well as online purchases. But if you use your card with chip and PIN, or if you use your phone, you will have a much harder time disputing any transaction.
Have you heard much about this strategy? How might it work if everyone used it? Generally thoughts for how we can defy their machine and protect ourselves?
In terms of user data protection, really I think the cat is long since out of the bag. There’s no putting it back in - and in many ways we shouldn’t, as data is useful and has benefits to society. I think it should go either one of two ways:
Allow businesses to continue their free data collection, but force them to make the raw data public. Any processing they do can be private, but the raw data doesn’t belong to them.
Have businesses start paying the data subject for their data.
In the meantime, one way a user can limit their data collection using restrictive privacy browsing settings. For my personal PC’s, I not only run uBlock Origin but also uMatrix - a deprecated extension made by the same author. This has similar funcionality to uBlock Origin when you set it to author mode, where it can selectively block different domains, but uMatrix presents it as a matrix which also allows you to select the type of content as well as domains. By default, it blocks all 3rd party frames, audio/video media, scripts, XHR, and “other”, so quite often it leaves websites broken on first load, but then I pick through and enable the bare minimum of content to get it working. This isn’t for everyone, of course, as it can be a hassle sometimes - particularly with payment processors which are all done on multiple 3rd party servers. However, it does highlight to me how endemic Google are with captcha, even when it doesn’t give you a captcha prompt. I can’t log into some of my online banking without enabling connections to Google, which is sickening. This is an example of what uMatrix looks like:
The extension doesn’t get updates anymore, so my lists are out of date compared to uBlock Origin. I’m pretty sure I could update them manually, but since I run uBO as well I don’t really feel the need. I’ve tried running just uMatrix, but uBO has its own array of special lists and without those YouTube ad blocking doesn’t work.
Yeah I really hate that kind of thing. I went into a gas station once, and at the registers it had a tiny little label saying they had CCTV with facial recognition, for crime prevention and “legitimate interest” - the GDPR term that websites always hide and sneak in pre-ticked, even when you think the main points are completely unchecked. There wasn’t even a clear way to opt out either, just a QR code you could scan. I didn’t scan, I’ve avoided that place since.
I also vote for finding a new weed shop, but ideally do tell them your reason why.
Damn lmao did we kill my first source? It won’t load anymore for me to double check what is included.
With regards to consumer data being aggregated insights, rather than personal info or targeted ads, that still doesn’t mean they should get it for free, though. Furthermore, I’d argue that all info is personal info, given that it is so easy to identify a person with very few data points.
Edit: You’re right, it includes business data. However I’d expect much of that data is paid for down to the data subject, excluding the stuff that’s public domain.
It’s not reasonable that business data should be fairly paid for, while consumer data isn’t.
Yes I’ve noticed that as well, the links have always been borked. Doubt it’ll get fixed any time soon, but at least the ground work is there and it makes it ever so slightly easier to make the formatting.
That’s very interesting! I’d also read somewhere that data collection was a trillion dollar industry, however the figure I found here is purely data brokerage so does not include Google per se - Google sell advertising, the data they collect is kept to themselves, so it’s much harder to pin down a value.
It also stands to reason that an American’s data is worth more on the market than, say, a North Korean’s - users who use the internet more will have more data being traded.
I’ve finally run some actual numbers, after finding a source for the data brokerage industry value (much lower, $319 billion in 2021). The link to your instance’s version is here: lemmy.world/post/10892972
TL;DR my conservative estimate is that every user is owed roughly $40 per year - but this doesn’t include Google or other businesses who keep and exploit proprietary datasets, rather than selling the raw data.
Sure, it’s not the hundreds of dollars I’d estimated previously. In the past I’ve said “the data brokerage industry is a multi-trillion dollar industry” and come up with figures ranging from $100-$700 per year owed to the user.
However, it should be said that this is just data brokerage. Not all businesses sell the data they collect, instead they keep it proprietary and use it themselves. Google, for example, sells advertising, not user data.
So I think my estimations here have been very conservative overall, and the real value may well be much higher.
Also, it’s not just about it being a small amount from an individual, it’s the fact that they’re robbing everyone blind that really gets my wick. No one really understands the value of user data, not intuitively, and the whole transaction is done in a deceptive manner to abuse this fact.
It’s a bigger problem in the States than elsewhere. In the US, awarding legal costs is the exception, not the norm, so someone with a lot of money and access to lawyers can basically intimidate a defendent into avoiding court. In the rest of the world, courts are much more likely to award costs to a defendent who has done nothing wrong - if you file a frivilous lawsuit and lose, you’ll probably have to pay the costs of the person you tried to sue.
This guy’s in Germany, so I think he’d be alright if he clearly won. The issue, however, is that courts aren’t really equipped for handling highly technical cases and often get things wrong.
Reddit, which filed confidentially for its IPO in December 2021, is planning to make its public filing in late February, launch its roadshow in early March, and complete the IPO by the end of March, two of the sources said.
Should be interesting to see people pick apart the filing. I think it’s obvious why they left such a narrow window from reading the filing (which was 2 years ago, before the API change and all the backlash) to the actually offering. However, I don’t think it will be short enough for them to not be held over the fire.
Just wait, they will be heavily moderating the discussion about the filing on their platform.
I think possession of any drug should be legal. However, the intent behind its use can still be illegal. If you have fentanyl and can demonstrate you only have it for some genuine use, and aren’t looking to cause harm with it, then that shouldn’t be a problem. Supplying fentanyl is much more likely to be a harmful circumstance, and its supply should be controlled.
I dunno, I think it’s more complicated than that. First off, there are some things that should be prohibited - it’s illegal to privately own nuclear weapons, for the most extreme example. Second, many of these truly harmful drugs have tiny markets, and these markets are in fact propped up by other, more conventional drugs being illegal. If heroin were legal, very few if any people would even consider fentanyl, such that fentanyl could be prohibited entirely without having an out of control illegal market.
In some sense, though, we do already have a controlled legitimate market for these prohibited things. Even cannabis, even during the prohibition, had some legal purchase avenues for the purpose of research. Even nuclear, that’s manufactured by private businesses with permission from the government. That works for the vast majority of drugs, it only fails with popular, relatively low harm recreational drugs where the law just isn’t reasonable against the potential harm.