Just because something is impractical or a solution is unknown doesn't make it valueless.

There are possible truths that exist in mainstream math formalisms[1]... for which the formalism says there may be no proof of. Just because the formalism can't explain everything doesn't mean we should throw it out!

I view communications like this as: a. making ppl aware (who may not be technical) b. doing the work that may not be worth $$$ c. avoiding future coordination failures of society

All of these in a hyper-optimized and hyper-educated societies may seem inefficient, but in a non-optimized and not highly educated world we live in they are the difference between chaos and not.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompleteness_...

we should end this category of journalism.

Ha, well played.

You can point out a problem without having a solution. Part of the reason why this issue feels unsolvable is that people don't really care enough to do anything. A piece of journalism that makes people care more is a step in the right direction.

In any form of communication, it's the worst.

Downvoted for clunky sentence construction.

There's a way to achieve the stated goals: have the government come down real hard both on the low-level data crime and the big players that are supposedly legit.

Burn it all down.

I sense this would have been in the Bill of Rights had the notion been around back then. They knew the government needed to protect property rights as a fundamental principle and that is written throughout the legal code and constitution. So endowing citizens with ownership of the date of where they are, what they’re doing, and how they use sites seem like extensions of the personal property right. In a sane universe, there might only need to be a Supreme Court judgement somehow establishing this from the current legalization, for that matter.

I doubt it. If you ask me "who lives next door" I'll tell you "Oh, the Smith's live next door, John, Jane, Jill, and Jacob. John's a blacksmith, Jane makes the best apple pie, Jill is studying to be a doctor and Jacob just turned 14"

I doubt the forefathers would have thought there needed to be a law against me passing on info.

The US Constitution is around a century too old to care about lists of people, but I think even they would react badly to some powerful organization going around classifying everybody by some random feature.

> The US Constitution is around a century too old to care about lists of people, but I think even they would react badly to some powerful organization going around classifying everybody by some random feature.

Probably not, since it created a new powerful orgabization (the federal government) and mandated it to go around classifying everybody by a particular set of feature (whether they were a “free person”, an “indian not taxed”, or an “other person”.)

Given that when the framers were scared of a powerful organization doing something, their first concern tended to be about government doing it, and their response tended to be to prohibit at least the federal government from doing it, I think the fact that they mandated the federal government to do it indicates that it was neither something they feared nor something they failed to fear out of lack of consideration.

Domesday Book commissioned in 1085, Constitution of USA 1787; I think you mean at least 700 years.

I mean the Bible tells us about censuses by the Romans ~5BC, so depending what's in your list ...

That actually makes it sound like unlawful search and seizure.

> Burn it all down

Easier said than done. What we're seeing is advertising as a business carried to its logical conclusion. If you "burn it all down", you have to end, in effect, all advertising. Advertisers try to target their budget as effectively as possible; the more they know about their target demographic, the better able they are to do that.

I'm sure we're going to "burn it all down" any day now.

Good luck. All those so-called hearings with social media companies? Excuses to get those CEO's into the back rooms, where the REAL discussions -- and graft -- sorry, campaign donations -- happened. Our government is completely captured by the organizations that are most-hostile to our long-term well-being.

That's how we got here. Revolution.

"Burn it all down" as a solution — inevitably applied to cultures, systems or industries viewed from the outside — is also a plague of laziness.

I've never heard "hey this isn't working, let's start over from scratch!" be called laziness before.

It's lazy when it doesn't come with a proposal to replace the stuff that you want to burn down.

It's like the US tax code... it is insanely complicated and in a lot of ways doesn't serve the public well (because rich folks can use the complexity of it to escape taxation), so it's easy and popular to say let's just get rid of it and start with a new, simple tax code.

The problem is it got to be the way it is for a reason. We want to incentivize people to own homes and buy electric cars and a thousand other things, and we use the tax code to do that. If you tear it down without a plan on how to keep incentivizing all the things you want, you're going to end up with some undesirable results that you then have to fix.

It's fine to say let's throw it out and start over, but if that's as far as your plan goes then it's pretty lazy.

> It's lazy when it doesn't come with a proposal to replace the stuff that you want to burn down.

And what do we want to replace targeted ads, surreptitious tracking, and a system that exploits its users for money while not being held accountable to its users with?

I'd say we're better off with nothing. So yes, in this instance, burn it all down actually is a solution.

I'm aware I'm ignoring the externalities, I'm aware it's complicated, and I'm aware what I'm proposing actually is lazy. I'm aware a bunch of people will lose their jobs (mostly in tech though so I really don't feel bad, having spent most of life in that industry). I'm saying in this instance it doesn't matter. We're still better off burning it all down.

Presumably we want companies to be able to use user data to improve their product, so that's one thing we'd have to legislate around.

Someone else proposed what I consider a very reasonable solution. Just make whatever data they have 100% transparent, and you as the user can choose to offer less (or more) at any point in time. This should be regulated similar to HIPAA with serious penalties for any violations, because it absolutely is about avoiding privacy violations.

And if you as the user want to share no data at all, you should have that option. This is the company's problem, not the customer's problem - or at least that's the world I want to live in.

And obviously don't hide anything behind dark patterns, and all the other common sense gotchas. Violations should be treated as criminal fraud with prison time (assuming they are found guilty in a court of law, and proving criminal fraud is notoriously difficult but the threat needs to be real).

>We want to incentivize people to own homes and buy electric cars and a thousand other things, and we use the tax code to do that.

[If we want] to incentivize...

While it's true that incentivization necessitates tax code complexity, we don't all agree on the necessity of incentivization in the first place.

Sure - that's absolutely fair. But with that said, I do think that a lot of people would agree that a lot of the incentives are good (I for one am glad that the government is trying to get people to move to electric cars) and would want to maintain something to keep promoting the same things even if the tax code were restarted from scratch.

I'm surprised you haven't heard it before. "As a matter of cosmic history, it has always been easier to destroy than to create," as one wise man put it.

"Burn it all down" is easy to say. You can apply it to anything, with no further thought. It's precisely what I'd call "lazy".

To avoid being lazy, you'd have to couple it with exactly what you intend to build from scratch, and ideally how you'd go about it. That's a ton of work, not just because you have to have a concrete idea, but because you have something that people can point out the flaws of. Many of whom will say, "It's terrible, burn it down."

I'm also surprised you haven't heard of this before. Every New Year millions make resolutions that are not kept because 'it is easier to start from scratch' or a clean slate, but it is very difficult to actually follow through.

People who diet non stop because they might get to day 20 and it isn't working and the solution is to start over in a week or so.

It is much easier to make yourself think that behavior will change if only one got a clean start. But inevitably you find yourself at a similar point, and a similar result.

In order to start from scratch and make it effective, you should have a reason why things will be different in the future.

I don't think the plan is to get rid of data collection and then allow it, we ban it moving forward

"It isn't working" is also lazy, when you're describing an industry that powers half the economy, and frankly, civilization is trucking along pretty OK with the data industry warts and all.

There are certainly problems, but you haven't put enough thought into what the statement even _means_ (Would this eliminate EMR systems? Bank transfers? Credit scores?) to consider what "burning it down" means, or "it's not working" means.

The urge to destroy is also a creative urge.

Uhhh, you can stop using said services and software that abuse privacy, e.g., Facebook, Google, Twitter, TicToc, etc.

Here's another industry that relies on aggregating your data: Credit reports.

Go ahead. Figure out how to opt out of Experian, Transunion, or Equifax collecting everything they can about you, including pretty much every piece of data needed for identity theft, possibly confusing it with someone with a similar name, and then putting it in a badly-secured database.

No, really, if you can figure it out I'd love to know. Every now and then I am reminded they exist and that they are silently creating these vast troves of data without anyone's consent, and all I can do is hope that if my identity information is included in a data breach, I am both small enough and lucky enough to not be impacted.

And they have an API to these data. Selling your data to data vendors. And now this: https://www.melissa.com/industries/healthcare

Health records used for AI machine learning training . Your health data are in the vendor database . What possibly could go wrong?

You can't opt out of cities' car culture by not driving: the rest of the city is all there all the time. You can't opt out of a data economy by your individual isolated action: the rest of the economy is vacuuming up similar people's data all the time.

facebook has a profile for you even if you don't have a facebook account

That doesn't end the data economy. It sort of ends part of your personal interaction with the data economy.

If enough people end their own interaction with it it ceases to exist, right?

If nobody gave their data to services that sell it on or use it for profit then there is no data economy.

A person would have to live a Kaczynski-like lifestyle to not interact with services that aggregate and sell data. No credit card, no cellphone, no internet. Cash only.

The point is that for each person that ends their interaction with these companies the less data they have on everyone. If only one tenth of my friends use facebook they will have less data on me than if 9 tenths do.

Convincing even one person to choose more privacy friendly choices helps a little.

'sort of' doing a great deal of work here.

But that doesn't stop their abuse.

Think about all the other websites out there using Google Analytics, FaceBook "Like" buttons, Twitter excerpts, etc.

You're ever getting away.

In theory. I've deleted my Facebook account. Few years later needed to create new one and used same e-mail address. Guess what welcomed me! My old account! Heck, even posts I had deleted and whole journal (or however its called) related to them, yes it was back again, waiting to be clicked "unhide".

Its heartbreaking that on HN, the one place that should be informed about this, you still see the ignorant commend "well you don't have to use facebook"

Even if you are homeless and living under a bridge, facebook will have photos of you, uploaded by others, they will know who you are and whwre you like will sell some data relating to you to someone

True, but there is no practical way to get through our work days without them using us anyway.

I certainly think there's ways to achieve this: Implement and enforce GDPR-like laws and fine spy corporations into oblivion.

Which is what the article implies with statements like "we should not allow X." There are several specific rules it suggests, which clearly would have to be laws.