I completely understand the fear about government regulation with respect to how we compute. For example Section 1201 of the DMCA, the CFAA both scare me, as do periodical “nerd harder” debates about backdoored encryption.

But what is it that you’d like to do with people’s private data that you’re worried will be prevented?

There are loads of apps right now that exfiltrate your address book, for example, to gather what you know about private individuals, without their knowledge or consent, to be exploited in an unregulated marketplace of personal data.

Is that good? Do you think he EFF think it is, or the FSF?

Furthermore, I believe in a consumers right to sue if they are harmed by a companies misuse of data (Equifax).

Note these policies are very consumer oriented (i.e. it's illegal to put Google Analytics on your site without notifying your users.)

What I'm very worried about is when a policy ends inadvertently fostering centralization. For example, the government might require you to store private user information with one of a set of vetted companies to prevent another Equifax situation.

A better policy might be to allow consumers to sue firms for damages resulting from negligence and prevent firms from forcing consumers into binding arbitration.

> But what is it that you’d like to do with people’s private data that you’re worried will be prevented?

In my experience, medical innovation has stagnated because of unreasonable data protection on the part of firms in reaction to government policy. For example, I've had execs get cold feet on a project that would clearly save lives and improve the bottom-line because there's a perceived security loss.

While there are good arguments for these protections, my only point is that regulation never comes for free: efficiency is inevitably lost somewhere, and you need to be comfortable with the trade-off.

this part also is a problem - almost none of service providers EXPLICITLY informs user about data collection. there are some obscure/abstract phrases (if there are any) about increased quality of service and that’s it. For example linkedin is collecting my contact information harvested via native app without clear information where it will be used, so how I can make informed decision whether I want to use this service or not?

government regulation could at least enforce some rules for clear communication of infor collecting process or something like that.

But massive centralization in the private sector (Google, Amazon, Facebook) doesn't concern you? Or you don't think it's the purpose of government to regulate that?

It's having serious consequences in so many aspects of life and society.

I have been working with journos and they are getting overwhelmed trying to counter/verify/investigate the tsunami of bullshit they wake up too every morning.

People are living in a dreamland. This stuff is increasing exponentially across the world and the only solution is to control the flows. Delay the misguided validation people get out of their likes/upvotes/retweet counts.

There is a whole professional class of people now, that spend their entire day promoting an "us vs them" mentality cause it's highly lucrative. It does not matter if they are on the left or on the right. They are causing serious irreversible damage and their influence must be checked.

Probably the nightmare authoritarian governments had to deal with, at the advent of the internet brought them to that same conclusion.

And since they realized that, from their perspective, the "information" they were receiving was suspect, all they needed to do was just seed information that was also suspect - just in their favor.

(thats a confusing sentence - from the perspective of a Machiavelli, the naive belief that information is freedom is broken down into a more fine tuned model of information, delivery, reception, uptake and understanding. Their realization is that you can use the internet to hack people, instead of having the internet just hack their regime)

It's a fools game. When everyone does it, and everyone is doing it, no one wins. One day Obama thinks he has mastered the hack. Another day Trump does. End of the day, there are no great outcomes. Just herds of "hacked minds" stampeding and crashing into one another.

What we will get, if this keeps on is more Vegas type shootouts as more people loose their minds.

Have you ever called your Congressperson or U.S. Senator about your views on this? I have, and I'm usually the only one in my Manhattan Congressional district talking about tech issues.

Advanced robots will likely be in the same situation. The trend for drones has been foreshadowing this with more and more locking down of who is allowed to program them and what they are allowed to do.

Also many providers still avoid the cloud (despite proven PHI compliance) and run their own inefficient, in-house server farms with thousands of tech staff because of this irrational fear. This causes a number of problems:

- It assumes a hospital system is better at infrastructure security and maintenance than Amazon or Microsoft

- Server costs per project are stupidly expensive. A VM that goes for $10/mo in the cloud ends up costing $200/mo to whatever department that foots the bill.

- You can't deploy a VM or app with a click. Instead you need to file a demand, then someone needs to make sure they have the resources available, then someone needs to manually spin up a VM for you...

- You can't build services that dynamically scale: this ends up being a problem for computationally expensive ML work - Tech spending on a hospital is overwhelmingly spend on maintenance and uptime rather than innovation or purchasing solutions

I could go on forever.

* This is also complicated by the fact that the industry isn't really incentivized to improve your health. Why run a predictive model and intervene to reduce your need for a stent when I make money from that operation?

The healthcare industry has two sides: the providers and the insurers. A hospital may not have the incentive to steer you away from unnecessary surgery, but your insurance company definitely does, since they'll be the ones paying for it. And your insurance company may have even more information to base its models on, since it knows about all the procedures you've had at any provider. So I'd expect insurance companies to be pioneering this kind of health-improvement software, not hospitals.

Your health provider has zero financial incentive to improve your health, and your employer or insurer will get more ROI from nitpick things like delaying claims or pushing out prescription fulfillment to reduce the spend this quarter.

Over the long run, it would seem to be in the insurer's best interest to keep everyone healthy for as long as possible.