Strategems in which individuals are denied the very fundamentals of life, food, shelter, work, engagement in civic, social, commercial, or cultural practices, access to courts, institutions, and the like, without overt threats of violence, are far more effective than guns.

to fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting

https://suntzusaid.com/book/3

I would expect that the greater debate on privacy will, over time, hopefully lead to some changes in how we are able to control the data generated by our bodies. Until that happens, I’m going to take the thing that saves my wife’s life with the potential for some shadiness or simple distaste at what may happen to her data, or, I might look at it as her voluntary consent which was fully given with her and my knowledge well ahead of time — helps to save others lives, and some loss of control of that data is actually quite noble.

As you might guess, I started at the abstract, but ended up at the concrete, and my wife really does have such a device, similar to your example. And I also work in big data analytics industry, and get involved in these sorts of discussions pretty often.

Let us agree that I can indeed avoid having a Gmail account. Can I realistically avoid sending email to a Gmail user?

Nope.

There are just too many users. Maybe I can avoid sending mail to <anything>@gmail.com (though not responding to one will invariably be perceived as incredibly rude), but I cannot avoid having Gmail users send email to me. I cannot realistically notice ahead of time that [email protected] is actually using a Gmail server under the hood, and not send the email. I cannot prevent Gmail users from talking about me.

I can reduce my exposure, but there are limits to what I can reasonably do. Your usage of Gmail is hurting my privacy. Okay, not yours, but definitely half of my friend's. I can't realistically ask them to either stop using Gmail, or stop interacting with me, now can I?

Let us agree that individual choices and individual actions don't work.

While I agree with your larger point, I don't agree with this subjective value judgement and am not sure why it's necessary to lump it in with the rest of your (valid) points. Why do I want to see ads for things I'm not interested in? How is that in any way "better?"

What I definitely don't want is unauthorized humans reading my email. (Even so, I have to assume that is exactly what will happen whenever I type or dictate anything into a computer. I've operated on that basis since before GMail, Google, or even the civilian Internet existed.)

And now they have a mighty powerful pattern matching machine, they can easily ask more than where I could possibly spend money. They could ask for my political affiliations, or my sexual orientation, my social network (who knows, I may be related to the second or third degree to some nefarious terrorist?).

That last one is very worrying. Especially since recently, my country (France) is being eerily harsh with political opponents. I've just read a story about a journalist (whose income happens to come from YouTube & donations), who is being judged for… gang theft (the pun also works in French), risking up to 75.000€ in fines and 5 years of imprisonment, just because he covered the unhooking of a 8€ portrait of our current president in a Town Office (which usually have president's portraits, but this is not mandatory). Unhooking, they reportedly did not even take the portrait.

So yeah, I'm more and more worried about giving our governments the means to apply their increasing insanity. Sure, having an individual reading my private email is unacceptable, but that risk is getting smaller and smaller, in comparison, to the mass surveillance that automation enables.

You'll have to detail this particular implication.

I for one would think the opposite.

* also FWIW, IIRC, they don't read email for ads any more.

Karen's and my 2019 FOSDEM keynote (and accompanying podcasts) discuss her struggles with the medical device industry and how those struggles relate to the larger set of choices related to technology that we make. This isn't an issue that lends itself well to short-form discussion. The issues are quite complex:

https://archive.fosdem.org/2019/schedule/event/full_software...

https://archive.fosdem.org/2019/interviews/bradley-m-kuhn-ka...

http://faif.us/cast/2019/jan/13/0x60/

http://faif.us/cast/2019/feb/19/0x61/

http://faif.us/cast/2019/mar/12/0x62/

http://faif.us/cast/2019/mar/20/0x63/

But it was far too specific (and frankly too obscure) to serve as a general basis for argument. Pacemakers used to run on plutonium. Should that influence the larger debate over nuclear power versus fossil fuels?

If someone has to use a pacemaker or insulin pump that runs proprietary software, that's unfortunate as far as it goes, but the patient himself/herself is fundamentally fortunate to have that option. It would perhaps be better to focus on developing open-source alternatives than to rail against a particular manufacturer's policy... except the (captive) regulators will have something to say about that, won't they? Specifically, what they will have to say about the idea of an open-source pacemaker is "No."

What you are complaining about in this specific instance isn't corporate policy, but government policy. I'm actually very sympathetic to your argument, personally. I've made the point many times that any sufficiently-dominant corporation is indistinguishable from a government. But you need to be careful to identify the party who is actually forcing or denying choice.

Not specific enough. What they would most likely object to is code you can modify. Code you can inspect on the other hand is a whole 'nother business. And one could easily guarante their pacemaker runs the code the manufacturer says it runs, by having reproducible builds, signing the source & binary, and have the device itself communicate (at least) a version number.

Being able to modify the source would be potentially even better, but if we could at least inspect it, then we would know of bugs & vulnerabilities (some of which have affected Karen Sandler in the past), and the manufacturer would have no choice but be shamed and correct the error.

If you require home internet access to do your 30k salary job, you move into an apartment, and they tell you you have one option for internet access, you have literally been restricted to a single corporate product and subject to surveillance.