I'd recommend reading more about the 'information fiduciary' approach[1] promoted by Prof Jonathan Zittrain (and others) which I find to be among the most realistic steps in a better direction, as it offers a 'grand bargain' in the spirit of DCMA's 'safe harbor' for companies that choose to commit to putting consumers and their rights above maximizing profit.

[1] https://hbr.org/2018/09/how-to-exercise-the-power-you-didnt-...

I don't want a bargain. I want those companies to stop tracking, and actually respect privacy.

I think each person should be given a clear choice.

I should be allowed to give up my privacy for convenience, I just want to know exactly how much privacy I'm giving up before I make that call. I don't think that's unreasonable, and I think we can pass legislation that puts something like that into effect without harming the economic viability of current companies or future startups.

I don't want to bog down startups with regulations that force a "you must be this tall to ride" situation, but it's getting out of hand, how exposed I am without being told about it.

I just want to know, is all.

Or don't use your winnings for lobbying for new laws heaped on everyone. Instead, use them to build what you consider the ideal, give grants to promote your principles, finance populace-educating groups, fund pro-privacy thinktanks/projects/foundations, etc. Please don't waste money or time on heavy-handed government internet intervention.

Are you sure you aren't missing the bigger picture here?

All while you "give grants to promote your principles, finance populace-educating groups, fund pro-privacy thinktanks/projects/foundations, etc." there will be other corporations and interest groups who spend time and money on "heavy-handed government internet intervention" that will ultimately affect you.

At the end of the day, what you can do or not revolves around politics and policy; not economic markets. This includes, in case this needs reminding, property rights that make market dynamics possible to begin with.

In truth, .gov >> .com, and by pretending it is otherwise - and acting like it is - you let yourself and your country (which I presume is the US) be manipulated by those who know better and put their $$$ towards whatever their goals are.

https://www.ted.com/talks/lawrence_lessig_we_the_people_and_...

There are fifty million reasons for why 'Just build a better competing product' may be a less successful solution to this problem.

And hundreds of millions of reasons why government-led heavy-handed internet oversight is worse. I also included other options such as education. But I'll take any option, including the status quo, over what I consider the nuclear option that often has unintended consequences regardless of original intent.

Government-led heavy-handed oversight is so terrible that it also gave us rivers free of coal sludge, products that work as advertised, drugs that have to be tested before they are sold, airplanes that usually don't crash, and cars that are safer, more fuel efficient, and cleaner then they were before mandated seat belts, air bags, emission limits, and mileage gains.

At this point, the nuclear option, like the GDPR, is the only way to align the interests of large data firms with the public.

If you think otherwise, consider how the market punished Equifax for their data breaches. Or Kaiser. Or Target. Or Facebook.

When given the choice between doing the right thing, and the expedient thing, this industry has a long, and shitty track record of always choosing the expedient thing.

And the patriot act, and prohibition, and on and on. Not sure why pointing out unrelated positive or negative legislation affects the issue at hand. It's disingenuous to debate that way. Back to the issue at hand, I am specifically talking about heavy-handed oversight of the internet. The not-as-heavy-handed internet oversight we either already have or has been attempted is problematic and we should not double down on it. In the absence of a good solution to a problem that exists, we should not make a second problem. We might want it to work, but existing examples have shown us that what we want to work is not enough to make it so.

What are your views on net neutrality?

A bit unrelated as it's more of a physical issue than a digital one, but I'll answer anyways. In general my position on digital public policy is to promote competition and transparency and I'm usually against restrictions and punitive-only measures. Wrt net neutrality, I'd support transparency requirements to increase awareness. With that step in place, if the monopolization of the physical space for wires is not overcome by a now-more-informed citizenry, other steps can be taken. Granted, I find forced monopolization vs monopolization by citizen choice to be very different. I always want citizen choice on digital services, even if that means consciously choosing one others might not like. I could write about this forever, I'll stop here.

Government also gave us concentration camps, Communist blacklists, famines, and a bunch of other “good” stuff. Government gave us Venezuela starvation.

My point is that governments have a “long and shitty track record” too.

Not saying that government is bad, but it’s clear that governments, when given the power, can be far more dangerous than any company. They can do a lot of good as well, but they have a pretty bad track record.

Ironically, in a way similar to most legislation, GDPR will mostly benefit the largest tech companies at the expense of small startups that may eventually compete with them. Google, FB, et al have endless amounts of resources to comply with and litigate legislation like GDPR, whereas it's a substantial cost to smaller companies to do the same.

The point of the law is to protect EU citizens, not support business.

Lamenting about the fate of small businesses is getting tiresome, especially when said businesses are one dime a dozen startups whose ultimate goal on their wonderful journey is to get sold and make the founders rich.

The problem with this thought is that small businesses help EU citizens, and making it harder for the businesses to do that means the EU citizens are indeed being harmed.

All that assuming GDPR actually does harm businesses, which is definitely debatable. I just don't think "fuck businesses" is the right stance to take, because it doesn't account for the benefits businesses provide to their customers.

Na, it was meant to reign in a group of companies the European establishment doesn't like under the guise of "EU citizens privacy".

It's as transparent as Republicans wanting to speak to Google about "bias".

Which is why the GDPR has a reduced level of obligations for companies under 250 employees (see article 30).

Not really. You're talking about an exception to only one obligation (record-keeping). And even that is relevant only where the processing is "not occasional".

A small company is also less likely to need a DPO.

When Instagram was bought by Facebook I think it had 13 employees. Would they not of had to comply with GDPR then?

Everyone has to comply with the GDPR, it's just that bigger companies have extra requirements to fulfill.

Similarly, Whatsapp had 55 at the time of the purchase.

Ironically, the only companies who talk about how GDPR will help big companies and hurt small ones is... big companies. (It was uttered by a Googler in Congress today!) Of course, this makes no sense, why would all these big tech companies be campaigning against a law that would allegedly help them.

It's because it's a lie.

The article is abouta proposal that the US reglate how Google operates in China, quite different from the EU GDPR, which only applies to companies' treatment of EU residents.

No, for EU companies, the GDPR applies to all their users worldwide, not just EU residents.

Why the sudden concern over tech companies mining our habits?

Advertisers have been doing it for years, using government funded research in military propaganda that made it's way into universities after WW2 as marketing and journalism programs.

This rhetoric is something like "Kill this particular witch!" without questioning whether the belief we hold on how the world works is rational.

EDIT: let me re-state:

Why is the public conversation around data mining limited to west coast tech?

Media be capitalizing on the public mistrust in the air after the election, and government is leaning in.

Why should any big brand or corporate master be enabled to collect and analyze my behavior in an effort to get me to buy more of their widgets without my explicit approval?

> Why the sudden concern over tech companies mining our habits?

Oh enough. There's been concern since the beginning, it's just getting more press right this minute.

One step at a time.

Not so much "easy" as "obvious".

> Why the sudden concern over tech companies mining our habits?

Because tech companies have broad, detailed, individual-level visibility into our habits. Neither traditional advertisers nor the government have ever had data that detailed.

Having extensive experience in adtech - besides reading your emails I can assure you they have the same level of sofistication and tracking. Major brands know more about you than your spouse.

Adtech is still tech, and some of the biggest tech companies, Google and Facebook, are adtech companies. When I said "traditional advertisers" I meant old-school advertisers that were used old-school techniques like consumer surveys, etc.

Two reasons:

1) The misperception that everyone in Silicon Valley is wealthy beyond their wildest dreams while the rest of the country is struggling.

2) Trump was elected instead of Hillary

A very small minority have valid concerns over privacy and the reach of the tech giants, for everyone else, it's simple politics.

I think after the last election, the moral panic du jour was aimed at tech companies. Russian hackers on Facebook, clickbait...it's all lead to this. And the dialog is manufactured to make Google a villain.

I'm not sure who the bigger villain is here: Google, or whoever wants to cut them down.

Well of course. The old school business class is being outdone by them.

The east coast media elites are now focusing on west coast rabble rousers.

I'm not saying it isn't entirely deserved. But they're not doing anything catalogs, grocery stores, and others haven't been doing for years.

West coast tech has the visiblity, the public is growing mistrustful, and are easier to vilify to people that don't realize the cell phone providers have been tracking their locations for decades (used to work for one of the top 3 in network ops, oh yeah, they could find you within a block back in the 90s). Or that Sears has profiles on their customers dating back quite a while.

More specifically, the political pundits latched onto a thing that has been around for over a decade. Tor has been around since 2006, and mixmaster is even older than that.

The anti-adtech privacy movement is not new, but the interest coming from mainstream political talking heads is.

The difference is that after the Russian interference thing, politicians realized all of this Internet stuff they didn't understand can cost them re-election.

> realized

Or, in a continued fit of misunderstanding, they came to that assumption and are shaping their narrative/attacks around it.

You can see very clearly what's happening here. The evidence is out in the open. There's a strong desire by the media and the government to control the tech companies because they all understand very clearly that they absolutely need Big Tech to survive.

On the media side we have an aggressive campaign by all the major media outlets against the tech company. Look at how many hit pieces about Facebook the NY Times have written in the last six months. I've noted this before [1] but in just this year the New York Times has written a constant stream of articles in which they accuse Facebook of destroying democracy, working with the Chinese, and collecting lots of "creepy" patents . This sort of targeted reporting against a single company that has, in fact, broken no actual laws is without precedent.

And absolutely none of these articles mention the extraordinary conflict of interest wherein Facebook is the primary driver of NYTimes readers and advertising.

And this is just one particular case. I don't think anybody has done the quantitative analysis yet but I suspect if you did gather the numbers the last two years would reveal an exponential increase of anti-Facebook/Google/Twitter/etc articles. It's a propaganda campaign that I think rivals the full-court press the media ran to push the Iraq War.

And now we have these endless meetings and threats of anti-trust investigations from the government. Every week brings a new meeting or some new initiative or a draft executive order. It's all bluster; nothing will come of it because the threats are the point.

The end game here is not to actually cut anybody down. The point here is to send a message. This is no different than what happens in China. The government doesn't need to use violence. Intimidate and threaten companies like Google and Facebook enough and they will fall in line. They will play ball.

And so the entire point of this exercise is the Media and the Government taking the gloves off and sending a clear message to certain Tech companies: WE CAN HURT YOU BACK.

* I say certain because this is not about money. Apple has all the money in the world. You don't see them being attacked though because Apple has little power. They make shiny widgets at the end of the day. Companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter are extremely powerful. They shape reality. It's a power which was previously only held by the Media and the Government and they really resent having these new Tech-Media fusions step on their turf.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17387438

Or how about users take some ownership of their actions and educate themselves on how "free" services are making their money.

If you don't like Google's tracking practices: don't use Google products. If you're okay with them, then keep using Google products. Free minds; free people; associating with each other freely.

Washington should be weary of regulations like GDPR on principle. Plus I doubt GDPR would have passed if Google, Facebook, and Twitter were, say, French. GDPR was only passed because the companies they were "targeting" (and they were targeting a specific set of companies let's please be real) were foreign.

> GDPR was only passed because the companies they were "targeting" (and they were targeting a specific set of companies let's please be real) were foreign.

This is complete and utter nonsense and only shows that you know nothing about EU policy making. The EU regulates the shit out of EU-based businesses. That's very well-known and quite controversial. And by the way, GDPR affects a ton (!) of EU businesses, basically every company that has some kind of web page. Do you really think there are no internet businesses beyond Silicon Valley?

It's well known the EU doesn't like Google and Facebook because of how disruptive they are; culturally and economically. Please don't insult my intelligence and say that France would have voted to hurt some of the most innovative (and financially successful) companies in the world if they were French. Be real.

Macron went all "Start up France" and was trying to attract some talent that would have been in the United States but can't due to Trump's habits. Every European country would vote another EU country out of the EU if it meant gaining Facebook, Google, and Twitter.

And Europe is irrelevant when it comes to consumer internet companies. That's just calling a spade a spade.

> It's well known the EU doesn't like Google and Facebook because of how disruptive they are

Um, what? No?

> Please don't insult my intelligence and say that France would have voted to hurt some of the most innovativ...

Luckily the EU does not consist of just one single country.

> Every single European country would vote another EU country out of the EU if it meant gaining Facebook, Google and Twitter

This is honestly so ridiculous, I am starting to wonder if you even know what the EU is. You are aware that it is a large union of countries that keep each other accountable and help each other, right? No single country could ever get rid of another country.

> And Europe is irrelevant when it comes to consumer internet companies. That's just calling a spade a spade.

Wow...just wow...

> Or how about users take some ownership of their actions and educate themselves on how "free" services are making their money.

They know. There’s nothing they can do about it. Even as someone who wants to protect their own privacy it’s impossible without being in a cave or updating your habits every week. Use Linux and duck duck go and don’t use any social media and don’t have a phone and only buy 15 year old TVs and late model cars, don’t use credit cards.

Blaming internet users for not protecting their privacy indicates that one has no idea how anything works, or they make their money off of ads.

If you succeed in eradicating Facebook, Google, and credit cards, you will not be able to use them anymore. Why is it unreasonable to stop using them a little early?

No I'm not blaming internet users for not "protecting their privacy", I'm saying people who care about their "privacy" shouldn't be so presumptuous about the rest of us.

Plenty of people on Hacker News dislike data collection companies, that doesn't mean everyone else agrees with you. I'm plenty happy with Google collecting stuff about me. In fact, if they could use their algorithms to help me stay fit, and all they needed was me to ingest some pill every month or so while they collected information about me and gave me a readout, I'd do it in a heartbeat. Sign me up!

Not everybody cares about some "privacy" crusade. Don't ruin business models that the rest of us are okay with. If you want to use Google over DuckDuckGo, and can't get away from Twitter or Facebook, dude, that's your fault. Stop speaking for the rest of us just because you can't get your life in order.

I'm not sure that would have any impact on censorship in China, which seems to be what this person is really upset about here.