They’re all awful.
Does anyone believe a single big tech company isn’t harvesting data en masse from everyone in duplicitous manners?
Like, the best case scenario is that they don’t just blatantly steal your data and instead use dark patterns or inference to take from you without your knowledge.
And then, thanks to the wonderful opinions of the court, the government has full access to said data since you apparently knowingly agreed to giving it to a third party by virtue of the fact that you engaged in any sort of commerce.
It’s why I’m for forcing content being posted on the internet to be non anonymous and tied to a real identity.
The corporations and government already have and abuse all this data. I want the benefit of knowing when someone says “As an American {incredibly divisive shit}” that it’s actually someone in a foreign country sowing chaos for money or political aims.
They won't actually show you who said what though. Twitter trialed that feature then they quickly turned it off after everyone realized half of the maga influencers were russians.
It also kind of stinks because not every mistake should be immortalized and recorded forever. Blackmail and all that. It kind of ruins the internet in a different way.
influencers were russians
... or just hiding behind a VPN that exits there?
Could be, but what terrible cover to use.
I want it enforced at a governmental level. I don’t think content consumed by people should be required to be public but if you want to post on a public square that the internet is, I should be able to recognize you as well I could in meatspace.
We get all the negatives of anonymity now with foreign actors, domestic actors, and bots flooding the zone with lies, and not of the benefits since all the corporations and governments can trivially pierce that veil.
I assure you they cannot pierce that veil if one has a modicum of competence.
One uni in my country has been getting bomb threats during the exam period every year for multiple years (a random article says 20 times at least). The whole place gets evacuated each time, nothing is found and nobody is caught.
But people who think they're anonymous because they used a different nick? Yeah, those are idiots, their ISP and the platform knows who they are and anybody can deanonymize them through stylometry.
I don't think surveillance is the solution though. I'd much rather see a network of trust or (second best) anonymous proof of identity.
Any place selling alcohol or cigarettes is able to check if you're 18. They could just as easily check your nationality by looking at your ID and give you a crypto key which can be used to prove that to online platforms without revealing who you are.
But there's no money for big corps in that and most people are not even smart enough to think of it.
Every single packet of information sent on the internet flows through NSA servers at some point. We've known this since Snowden. When I say the government has this information I do not mean that every single bureaucrat at any level of government can access this, but that the government as a whole has access to the information if they feel its worth using. We have limitations on how the government uses such powers but those are currently worth the paper they are written on and being ripped up left and right.
That's defeatist, although certainly what they'd like. The world is not the US.
Even if NSA captured and logged all internet traffic, they'd still only get a fraction of the information within without breaking all the encryption.
And even if they could break the crypto, the ability would only have any power if/when they acted on it. Which in turns reveals the capability to both normal people and other nation states.
The limitations aren't laws, it's the practical consequences.
Of course, having laws with actual teeth helps.
Ok?
So they use it when they feel like and not willy nilly? That doesnt change my perspective. They still have the ability to do it at will.
> when they feel like
No, when they can get away with it. When the pros for them outweigh the cons. And every person affects that calculation in some small way - by their tolerance to injustice, by their outspokenness, by their ability to detect it, by the probability of an employee becoming a whistleblower and even by people's willingness to punish bad actors extra-legally.
> They still have the ability to do it at will.
Yes and your neighbor has the ability to wait on your doorstep until you open and then slit your throat.
He generally doesn't because of internal safeguards (humans have evolved emotions like remorse, though not all of them feel it - see psychopathy/ASPD for details) and external safeguards (the state generally opposes people infringing its monopoly on violence but in the absence of a state, he would still risk being hunted down and tortured/killed as punishment by your relatives and friends).
---
I get what you're saying and I oppose dragnet surveillance but seeing things in pure black and white does not help.
> Does anyone believe a single big tech company isn’t harvesting data en masse from everyone in duplicitous manners?
TSMC, maybe?
They don't really count
When I said big tech I meant software, not primarily hardware companies. ASML is also not likely to be harvesting our data.
Beyond the easy quip, my point was that "big tech" has taken on a far-too-narrow meaning. I'd bet you didn't really mean "software" either - you were, in effect, referring to the whole amoral (at best) ecosystem of companies which run social media and related web sites and data infrastructure, making their money through addiction, exploitation, and extraction.
Perhaps Cory Doctorow will come up with a better term?