Nope. There's been abuse in text-only environments online since forever. And lots of people have left (or rarely post on) HN because of complaints about the enviroment here.
7,710 karma · joined June 4, 2010
@jdp23 and http://facebook.com/jdp23 are the best ways to get in touch with me, or leave a comment somewhere on http://talesfromthe.net/jon
What Microsoft, IBM and others won as the privacy bill evolved - https://www.protocol.com/newsletters/policy/cloud-enterprise...
Privacy bill triggers lobbying surge by data brokers - Privacy bill triggers lobbying surge by data brokers
And, here's EFF's position: " Americans Deserve More Than The Current American Data Privacy Protection Act" https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/07/americans-deserve-more...
The Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act, sponsored by Senators Wyden and Paul, has a hearing tomorrow morning -- and may actually have decent chance to pass Congress this session.
If you're in the US, EFF's "Tell Congress: The Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale" page has a web form to encourage your representatives to support the bill. https://act.eff.org/action/tell-congress-the-fourth-amendmen...
So, an Amazon lobbyist gave the version they were trying to get passed in Washington to a Virgnia state legislator who introduced it there and (since Amazon had just invested a zillion dollars in Virgina) they whisked it through. Then they used that as the basis for Colorado's law. This year when they tried to pass it again in Washington one of the arguments was "it aligns with other states". Sigh.
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/amazon-p...
OK, enough unity, now let's get back to partisan mud-slinging :)
Of course, we still haven't passed strong privacy legislation yet. In the 2021 session Amazon and Microsoft's lobbying was enough to prevent the bill we brought from even getting a hearing. So, we'll see what happens in 2022. But it feels like momentum is on our side.
How to Think About the Right to Privacy and Using Location Data to Fight COVID-19 (by Jay Stanley of the ACLU) : https://www.justsecurity.org/69444/how-to-think-about-the-ri...
Apple and Google Announced a Coronavirus Tracking System. How Worried Should We Be?: https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/apple-and-googl...
ACLU sues federal agencies seeking records of facial-recognition use at airports and U.S. border: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/03/12/aclu-su...
* professional security is needed, and this is what it costs
* the cost is more of a barrier to smaller companies (and hence provides an advantage to larger companies)
It seems like an inherent tension; I'm not sure how to get around it.
Before Snowden, civil liberties activists (including me!) used to say "If people knew the extent of mass surveillance, they'd be up in arms - and we'd see some real changes." But no.
https://www.recode.net/2018/11/26/18111859/maria-ressa-rappl...
> until we minimize our personal and systemic biases and disparities, we can't hope to use our fancy mathematical models to minimize them for us.
And as long as technologists are in denial about the extent to which personal and systemic biases influence reality (as we're seeing in this thread), tech will continue to reinforce and magnify these biases.
There's plenty of evidence that medicine today has deeply embedded biases. Disparities in Black maternal health outcomes have been thoroughly covered in the literature and even mainstream media.
On the other hand there's plenty of evidence that ML and AI magnify inequality in other areas.
So relying on technology as a magic bullet to solve these societal problems seems ... naive.
* With respect to this API, apps that requested permission to view profile information that a user had added to their Google+ profile—like their name, email address, occupation, age (full list here)—were granted permission to view profile information about that user even when set to not-public.
* In addition, apps with access to a user's Google+ profile data also had access to the profile data that had been shared with the consenting user by another Google+ user but that was not shared publicly.