Why metadata is bad – 3 minute video your Mom will understand
privacyinternational.org
privacyinternational.org
Change it to Dad then. I'm someone's Dad, have a Dad, and none of us feel excluded or insulted. It's a figure of speech.
So, saying you're a Mom and offended is a valid argument, but that you're a Dad and not offended isn't?
Yep, that sounds about right for one of these arguments.
Sounds right for any rational argument.
Of course, having established that offence is occurring, it still leaves open what the appropriate response is.
Singling out some group as symbolic of something negative (in this case, ignorance about technical matters), is unnecessary and likely to offend.
Ask a simple question, get a simple answer.
Whether the implication was intended to be negative... I dunno.
Sorry about my sub-par manners today.
I was pleased when I opened the comment section to see this as the top comment.
I want to live in a world where being kind, respectful, understanding, and caring are the highest of virtues. In that world, hopefully all people will work toward working together to understand others and appreciate our many wonderful differences instead of insulting them, even in a micro-aggression, this might be funny, yet deprecating sort of way.
Although I personally don't often spend much time being offended by these culturally accepted deprecating statements, I have recently started to wonder if it is contributing toward the public policies that attempt to marginalize and discriminate against any group of people.
Moms build things. Girls build things. Women build things. I build things.
That's cool and stuff, but the humankind as a huge organism doesn't work like this and will never as long as we don't start genetically modify humans at scale to be engineered that way when hatched. We're still just "animals" or low-power carbon based computers if you prefer that phrasing.
Also, I perceived the joke to be making fun of the elderly, not women. Honestly, you post seems like you were primed & ready to be offended by the slightest thing, which has more negative social impact than the light-hearted title of the linked article.
If it wasn't historically pervasive, yet false to declare that women are not tech savvy, I likely would not have said anything, however, this is a technology focused community and thus it seems relevant to not promote that unfortunate typecast.
I was unaware that Moms were considered elderly - I had my first child at 25, is that old? I guess that's another case in point why not to use 'Mom' in this sense, it comes off insulting to some and also is perceived to mean multiple, possibly unintended things.
Look for ways to be offended, or look for ways to understand. You seem to be doing the former, which is wasteful.
I fear we are entering the spiral of pointing fingers at one another.
As a mother and thoughtful human being, this is when I would suggest to my children they walk away from the situation at hand and I will thus follow my own advice.
Also, the person to whom you're responding had, when you wrote this, one carefully worded comment on the thread. "Primed and ready"? Clearly, the person on the thread most fitting that description is you. Please stop doing this.
Any jokes about my particular demographic will be allowed without criticism and I may even laugh at the joke myself.
It's a reason tech was/is a boys' club for men and has kept talented people from contributing to the field.
I only see ageism.
Many vital, important moms were pioneers in computing. My mom taught me how to use a computer and write code, and she was self-taught.
Part of the implication here is that the people who are more likely to handle domestic work are likely less intelligent. That's bullshit.
Can I get your permission to laugh at the link's title or do I need to be wildly offended?
Someone took a moment to explain --- very correctly --- that using "mom" as a metonym for "technically naive" is inaccurate, dismissive, and exclusionary. That comment didn't accuse anyone of intending to do any of that. It simply pointed out the outcome of the wording. The very same comment could have been written about "grandfather" and ageism.
Nobody asked you to be offended, or to take offense.
Now pay attention to the timestamps and see who's introducing it. The only person to use the word before you was carefully explaining that they were not taking offense. You responded to them by accusing them of being "primed and ready".
Please, please stop doing this to HN threads. What you're doing on this one is poisonous.
I am not ranting & raving. I am having a logical conversation. Stop treating me like I am out of control. I am happy to have a logical conversation, but your numerous "please, please stop" replies are non-contributory and demeaning, so... please stop. :)
Just because I disagree with you, you think you can bully me with nonsense rather than having a conversation? Whatever. You win.
If we take a sample of N>1000 mothers, I bet my money more then 50% would fall under this "stereotype". Is this democratic enough to suit as an argument ?
So typical of an Aries to say that.
Not true. Stereotypes are usually based on assumptions. The "grain of truth hypothesis" is used to enhance the stereotype, most often by people that prefer to believe in the assumption rather than facts.
The use of "metadata" word is designed to make it sound less scary - it's a word that politicians use when they want to reassure people.
"We don't want the content! We just want the metadata - how long a call lasted for, for example".
It's a good thing that people are a bit scared about metadata. It's the metadata attacks that make tor hard. It's the metadata attacks that make end-to-end encryption weakers.
Companies collect a lot of data. They should be thinking carefully about how much they actually need, and how harmful it is to their users if it gets slurped.
Also, did they really mistake the chrome logo for the google logo?
The voice feels patronising, perhaps even scary, and towards the end it suddenly turns into a description of a dystopia. If this were an advert I think it'd have most reaching for the remote control fairly rapidly.
It's a real challenge to describe these issues without looking unhinged.
Indeed, the times when I used Tor I felt curious about the technology and how it achieved anonymous traffic. But when people asked me why I was using it I didn't know what to answer.
"You know, those poor people under dictatorships..."
To my understanding, we miss a big public case where metadata and information collected are used against western people.
I fear we won't see any, before it'll be too late.
I have no problem with dystopian unrealistic scenarios -- and have no problem accepting it could happen, under the ghost of terrorism.
But the majority of people feel this is all too much "cyber-punk" or, worse, that "you have something to hide".
A great pop-movie about that would be great!
The thing that's bad here is:
1) Lack of personal control over your own meta data. You can' go to Google and say "Erase everything you know about me." easily. Some Google services allow you to do something like this, others don't, it's purposely a big pain in the ass. That goes for all these big companies.
2) Most (all?) governments have too much easy access to this data, and no public disclosure or oversight about what/who they are looking at and for what reasons.
Either it's close to useless to the point where we have to question why they bother gathering so much in the first place and adding to the noise, or it's so valuable that we assign assassination targets based on it.
Which is it, world governments? You can only choose one. You can't choose the middle, because that would be admitting to "assassinating people based on mostly useless information" (and therefore likely killing many innocent people because of that).
So who's the sexist one?
You made it about gender.
Again, the only sexist thus far, is you.
My mom has a STEM degree, and her mom had a bleeding edge Thinkpad when the rest of my family was married to a beige box. My dad is a system administrator, and his dad is a chemical engineer. I have a postgraduate degree in software engineering. To assume any of us are technically incompetent because of our age or gender is insulting, and exclusionary.
Thanks for pointing that out.
It would be quite different (and have a totally different effect) if the title said "3 minute video even a girl will understand"
We all agree sexism is bad, and there are real issues to overcome in all countries, but sometimes I would feel more supportive of the case if it focused on what really is unfair, and a hindrance to a gender.
Thank you.
This is so indicative of the internet generation, where talking about something ridiculous and missing the point is seen as actually doing something.
Look where the downvotes are occurring; every comment that doesn't think the title is a big deal. God forbid someone's opinion is different. Remember that when this crowd expresses how great and open to debate HackerNews is as a community.
No, the long history of the phrase used to stereotype someone who knows nothing about technology made it about gender.
EDIT: pointing out that the phrase is sexist and unwelcome is a good thing.
No, it was age ageism. But the STEM field has an enormous gender gap so now we're actively looking for every single sentence that might be gender-biased and pretending that our feelings are facts.
This is just another example of having a hammer makes everything look like a nail. The title was very clearly biased... that "older" generation can't understand modern technologies. But we had plenty of people here to defend women, even when they don't need it.
Also, it's not a common turn of phrase in my world because I don't spend time with assholes stuck in 1950.
Funny that the US is on the verge of electing Trump, because there are a lot of people who are tired of this tripe.
Perpetuating stereotypes does harm people, because it degrades people based on the way that they were born (or, in this case, also based on the fact that they decided to have a child).
No one is on the verge of electing Trump, by the way. More than 70% of women dislike him. More than 60% of the country actively dislikes him[1].
1. http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/other/trump_favorabl...