A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn’t great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don’t promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
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Wow. 1983 was the year they launched Bildschirmtext here. I remember my dad doing banking stuff with that in the 90s. What kind of services were available in Ottawa at that time? Telidon? Wikipedia says it closed in 1985.
It’s a bit like the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four which some people mistake for an instruction book 🤔
I mean it’s biased when we pick prophecies in hindsight. But she was definitely point on 40 years ago.
I stumbled on this accidentally when clicking through a Wikipedia source for a death caused by a giant “five-story robot”, and the link didn’t go to the right part of the page. What’s really striking is that the paranoia is not only justified today, but IMO they’re treating it more seriously than most people do these days.
Could just be the natural course of things.
I mean, that article is way ahead. I think it wasn’t for another 15 years or so until companies started to figure out collecting and selling data about people and using it for targeted advertising was THE best business model for the internet and network-connected devices in general.
And here we are. The internet is now dominated by a handful of big tech companies who do exactly that. And they provide us with nice and free services in exchange. I guess that’s been going on long enough and aligns well with how humans work, so that nowadays nobody questions this anymore. Obviously you would, if that’d be a daunting, new thing with unknown consequences.
But ‘they’ got to us.
Maybe we can compare that to the recent discussions regarding AI? Everyone is speaking of it, how it will steal their job or herald the end / doom. I guess in 10 years nobody questions ChatGPT choosing what recipe they cook for dinner, because it knows exactly what’s in the fridge and knows what you like better than yourself.
I suppose it’s kind of the government’s job to regulate things like privacy and taking advantage of normal people? The EU sometimes does that. But they also randomly mix in ‘we need total surveillance to fight child abuse’, as they tried recently.
I could have seen the article due to my own interests too, and it’s hard to miss a big bit of text that says “threat to privacy” for me.
We can’t predict the future of AI, but caution and care would be useful, and politicians in general are still less literate about today’s technology than the contents of this 40-year-old article. I don’t have a silver bullet solution for how the EU could adopt good regulations and shutter the bad ones, but listening to tech experts would be a good start. (Same with America, but with the added need to keep big tech goons away from politicians.)
Completely agree. Lobbyism isn’t a good thing. And we know who is going to win that battle if the one side rather sells their privacy than pay $5 a month for a service versus a multi billion dollar company that is happy to invest quite some money to get the politicians do what they like.
And I’m not a big fan of just letting capitalism do it’s thing in general. It will probably not end up with a solution that is fair and benefits everyone. In my opinion lawmakers should be more proactive and also learn about the technology they need to regulate. We need some answers anyways. Even the industry struggles with questions like: how does copyright go together with AI.
I also struggle with all the recommendation algorithms and filter bubbles. And I think that’s only getting worse and not healthy to society at all.