SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Richard Stallman writes in the Guardian:
Journalists have been asking me whether the revulsion against the abuse of Facebook data could be a turning point for the campaign to recover privacy. That could happen, if the public makes its campaign broader and deeper.
Broader, meaning extending to all surveillance systems, not just Facebook. Deeper, meaning to advance from regulating the use of data to regulating the accumulation of data. Because surveillance is so pervasive, restoring privacy is necessarily a big change, and requires powerful measures.
The surveillance imposed on us today far exceeds that of the Soviet Union. For freedom and democracy's sake, we need to eliminate most of it. There are so many ways to use data to hurt people that the only safe database is the one that was never collected. Thus, instead of the EU's approach of mainly regulating how personal data may be used (in its General Data Protection Regulation or GDPR), I propose a law to stop systems from collecting personal data.
The robust way to do that, the way that can't be set aside at the whim of a government, is to require systems to be built so as not to collect data about a person. The basic principle is that a system must be designed not to collect certain data, if its basic function can be carried out without that data.
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Thursday April 05 2018, @04:49AM (18 children)
Good ideas, non-starter unless we are willing to pay. First Law of the Internet, if you aren't paying for the service it is because you are the product. If Facebook and the others can't monitize the users and ads are becoming outright hostile and unprofitable, we would have to be willing to pay for the services we use. Nobody seems to be willing to do that.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday April 05 2018, @05:03AM
For me it would be sufficient if I could use bitcoin and a one-time-use email address.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 05 2018, @05:09AM
New business model? Not at all. We already cripple technology to protect special interests... This is just another example. And it is absurd. Besides, what could be better than drowning the opposition in endless paperwork? Let's not just record all the data. Let's bury 'em in it. Clog the pipes!
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday April 05 2018, @05:20AM (7 children)
You mean... like the Soylentnews business model?
I have a hunch that's not quite new.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 3, Insightful) by jmorris on Thursday April 05 2018, @06:03AM (6 children)
Compare the revenue streams per user. Big tech wants to waste Sagans on huge server farms to make up for the inefficiency of the code produced by their overpaid, incompetent but oh so "diverse" freak show workforce in some of the most expensive zip codes outside of Capital City itself. Then all the management types must be billionaires. Ads, data farming and bilking pension funds and such pay that kind of money, subscriptions? Not so much.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by c0lo on Thursday April 05 2018, @06:10AM
I thought we where discussing business models (and perhaps their novelty), not the wants of big tech.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 5, Interesting) by meustrus on Thursday April 05 2018, @01:47PM (3 children)
It's the free market, jmorris. "Big tech" is not going to become competent and efficient until and unless the market requires it.
Right now, the market is basically a gamble. 1% of software products or some other stupidly small number reach millions of users. The rest don't. Nobody really understands why enough to replicate it consistently. So every venture is a crap shoot.
As long as that's how the market works, there is no pressure for anybody to be more "competent". We don't even know how to define competence in terms of market viability right now.
Not that this stops you from defining competence as "not involving the people I don't like".
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 05 2018, @04:24PM (1 child)
Enough said.
(Score: 2) by meustrus on Friday April 06 2018, @08:57PM
Actually, tech is perhaps the most under-regulated industry in America right now. Mostly because we have only come to understand tech enough to regulate it in the post-Reagan deregulation era. There is a notable exception however for the telecoms, who still contend with (and benefit from) regulation aimed at telephone and broadcast TV communication.
But in virtually any other industry - agriculture, medicine, finance, manufacturing, entertainment, retail, and logistics all come immediately to mind - you would be absolutely correct.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 05 2018, @04:41PM
That post describes exactly what happened to musicians and music since the Internet got going.
ie. a couple of dozen "stars" now command and dominate what would have been spread out over tens of thousands of artists only 25 years ago, everyone is at a loss for how to manage the situation; fast-forward to now and it is pretty much a "rich man's sport" instead of a discipline you get paid for. I haven't seen a promising young musician in the studio for years, as the computer revolution means not having to be competent at much more than asking the engineer to cut-n-paste.
- AC (who really should sign up...)
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 05 2018, @02:53PM
Blah, blah, blah. Sounds like sour grapes to me.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 05 2018, @06:32AM
Maybe that is because it is not actually a service, much like jmorris posts. What corporations are doing is shorting their customer base, speculating on future purchases and future profits, which they then bundle as sell as derivatives. Of course, at some point, someone, not jumorris, will realize that the entire business model is based on lies, and the whole thing will come tumbling down. It will make Pets.com look like child's play. The Republican deregulation crash of 2008 will seem like paradise. The Great Depression itself will seem insignificant, because this time we gots our Hitler (Trump) before the crash, so as to avoid the rush.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 05 2018, @06:37AM
Outside of free sites, I accept this model. I want the web site owners to exchange their pearls of wisdom for hard cold cash (well, in this case more like electrons.) The free sites are very numerous. Every manufacturer has a free web site. Every sufficiently large group has a web site. They carry 10^10 more information than the infotainment sites.
The flaw of the current system is in fact that most visitors are not aware what information they reveal to the server. Each web site takes a small drop of blood from you, but when done browsing you feel tired. On the other hand, everyone recognizes the value of money, and most people are wise enough to not pay for nothing. A subscription to a site means that the site is interesting, useful - not a a clickbait collection that is filled with "10 easy ways to do %x%" that are scraped from other sites. With the current system junk sites flourish because each clickbait loads 30 ads.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 05 2018, @02:47PM
Wrong. Plenty of people would pay and it would be pretty damn cheap. No one wants to pay these days because there simply are so many "free" services.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 05 2018, @04:32PM (1 child)
While the current flap is about FB and personal data, if you read through the RMS article, he uses transit for an example. We are already paying to use the London Tube and there is no good reason that the electronic payment system has to know personal ID for all the users. RMS proposes rules that only allow personal data collection when it is necessary to the function of the system. For the Tube, anonymous cash payments to get the ticket should be available.
(Score: 2) by Osamabobama on Thursday April 05 2018, @05:14PM
But, there might be terrorists! How will we find them if we don't keep track of every person? Because, statistically, only people become terrorists; we should track them all, just in case.
(Except for you and me, of course; we're fine. But definitely other people...)
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 05 2018, @11:31PM
The idea that you pay and are not tracked will not happen.
Remember cable TV was sold to us originally because it had no advertisements. Yet many still pay for it. You are literally paying to be advertised to.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 06 2018, @01:35AM
"Good ideas, non-starter unless we are willing to pay. First Law of the Internet, if you aren't paying for the service it is because you are the product. [...]"
Good ideas, non-starter unless we are willing to pay. First Law of the Internet, if you aren't paying for the service it is because you are the target.
There, FTFY,
(Score: 2) by cykros on Tuesday April 10 2018, @09:15PM
RMS has always been big on a gift-based software economy, either in the form of donations to developers, or the act of developing for free in the first place, or the act of providing the server to host it from in the first place.
The strangest thing about this model though is just how much of it works, and works well. The Linux and BSD ecosystems, IRC networks, Mastodon, Wikipedia, etc, are all proof that this CAN result in some very usable products that people benefit from.
RMS's "business" model tends to be "who said anything about business? I was talking about technology."
This isn't something many professionals in the technology sector really want to hear, however. And while selling support can work for some things (see Redhat), there's not really an analogous way to apply that to something like Wikipedia, or a social media network. Self hosted federating software is PROBABLY the way to do away with much of the surveillance without incurring massive costs and maintaining most of the functionality, but frankly, for now, the software just isn't there. Mastodon federates, but the amount that may be available to your instance's sysadmin (and potentially others in the Fediverse due to a lack of encryption at every turn) might be more than many are comfortable with...and while it might be seen to compete well with the functionality of Twitter, it's certainly not a Facebook killer.