* Negative information about you floating free (mugshots websites, revenge porn, news articles about past behaviour) * Health and other behavioural information (e.g. used by health, life and auto insurance. These days your medical info might be used to sue you in another state even!) * Privacy in semi-public places (ring cameras, uber dashcams) * Financial information being used against you (credit ratings obviously, but also being deemed a fraud risk makes a lot of transactions difficult) * Criminal history is commonly used in job applications.
I'm not saying we need to go to one extreme - how would loans work without credit ratings, and CCTV definitly improves safety in some situations - but I just want to point out the range of issues at play. Most of these already have some kind of legal compromise.
Also beyond practical concerns there is a principal at stake too. We fundamentally deserve some degree of privacy just for it's own good.
I know that is embarrassing and subject to abuse, but making all arrests public is an important human right. The British used secret arrests against the 1770s rebellion in north america (and not to mention long before then and pretty continually since) which is why it's important in American law, though the British are hardly the only ones to use this tactic. Even the USA has done so too, most notably in the early 2000s, though not within US territory as far as I know.
The big companies don't want you to think about this because they benefit from being able to hoover up everything with a couple of clicks. There's nothing wrong with having to show up in person at a courthouse to see arrest records.
Making a human have to physically show up to make a request for a record does a nice job of adding just enough friction that you can't create these abusable repositories quite so easily.
Arrest records are a bit different as you need to balance the rights of a person against the benefits to society.
A person should not be punished simply by having an arrest record--that violates "presumption of innocence". Blind promulgation and aggregation of such records violates lots of people's rights. The police arrest people for shitty reasons all the time and then never press charges.
If you want to promulgate an individual's arrest record, you should have to have some reason that overrides the right to "presumption of innocence" if you want to promulgate or aggregate that record. And you should have to show up with a piece of paper in person to get that record.
If the point is to let everybody know so the arrestee’s friends can know and possibly help, making the records harder to find doesn’t help.
That doesn’t mean mugshots need be online, but in today’s photo-centric world it’s not clear a textual posting would be adequate for the problem.
So no, I don't think that is the point, per se. But I think they do make it more likely that someone will say, "hey, DiggyJohnson, isn't that your uncle Fred?" If you're in a revolutionary or criminal group you might scan the arrest records in text, but if you don't have a specific reason, you're unlikely to but might recognise a photo.
Trying to control the information by saying it's freely redistributable but you have to go down to the courthouse doesn't work - the surveillance industry just pays someone to go to the courthouse and retrieve the records however often is necessary. In fact putting up such a barrier actually helps them, as now other people looking for that data are inclined to just pay a surveillance company.
What's needed is regulations preventing companies from amassing and trading in personal information, regardless of how and where it is available. There still may be lone individuals who create their own repositories of records (ala free speech), but stomping out the commercial motive for surveillance would eliminate the sheer majority of the activity and preclude it from being a cornerstone of societal control.
Probably because they think that would cost the economy billions of dollars overnight. Very few politicians would want that on their resume.
That’s because personalized ads are hostile in the extreme and shouldn’t have been allowed in the first place. It pits millions of dollars of psychological manipulation against our “self control”.
I’d rather the economy burn than continue this unethical practice.
For that matter conversion metrics are not useful because the real high value purchase are not see ad buy thing. They are more of see many ads for SUV, when current car gets 'old' buy SUV. Many years of advertising are used in that targeting, and you cannot easily measure conversion.
Easily, no. But you can, at least in theory. With enough data, you can essentially tell if a customer has seen your ads, plus when and where (and not just your online ads - billboards and dealerships could be identified by using the customer's car to track their location). If they buy your car, and you see that they viewed your ads, maybe they even clicked one or otherwise browsed your site at some point, you can get some data from that. With enough aggregate data, you can begin to see correlations between certain ad viewing behavior and certain purchases.
Do they actually do this? Probably not, due to incompetence. But they could and eventually will if they aren't already.
I guess we'll get a ban on personally targeted advertising when Chinese companies start buying data brokerage firms in the U.S.
That aside, the current copyright approach does not prohibit P2P publishing (publish with a CC0 license and you're about as disclaimed of copyright as you can be).
This would do nothing to change advertising.
The US (and California) profits substantially from maintaining control of and allowing its citizens and companies to likewise maintain control of the IP that they create.
Lets go back to the original part of this thread.
California can't get rid of copyright. Suggesting it as a way of eliminating targeting advertising is a substantial leap of argumentation without any supporting material.
For copyright to be gotten rid of, this would take a concerted effort from congress to withdraw from those treaties (and you can be sure that every company in California that creates copyrighted or patented works (e.g. Silicon Valley and Hollywood) would pack up their bags from what would be the the 5th largest economy in the world if California was a state and move to the other CA a few hundred miles north. Those treaties include Berne, UCC Geneva, UCC Paris, TRIPS as part of the WTO, and WCT.
Meanwhile, how does copyright prevent P2P publishing?
How would enabling P2P publishing (which isn't prohibited now) get rid of targeted advertising?
Yes, P2P is prohibited now. I found this out when I was a broke college student targeted by the RIAA in 2004.
If P2P publishing were legalized, I'd have a better Netflix out in a week, with no ads.
Be the change that you want to see.
If the US was to hypothetically back out of the copyright treaties, all the other countries would still be there to enforce it.
If you want a better Netflix without the ads make that content yourself and publish it.
If you attempt to take away the ability for Netflix (and others) to be able to charge for it - you're going to be seeing material that you make yourself because no one else will.
Start this by going and making a movie and publishing it yourself - not by proposing that everyone else lose the ability to make a living off of content that they have created.
I am. Everything I build is public domain. It's cost me a lot of money but I can look myself in the mirror and see an honest man.
> not by proposing that everyone else lose the ability to make a living off of content that they have created.
Copyright is sleazy. Plain and simple. It's indefensible. It is Intellectual Slavery. I'm just saying the truth that people don't want to hear. Stephan Kinsella is the one to read/watch/listen to for all the extended and comprehensive rebuttals.
Figure out how to fund research that doesn't need to rely upon licensing of patents.
The bold statements of "eliminate copyright and it will solve {problem}" without the corresponding steps that you would need to get there are intellectually dishonest and ignore the current economic system and wellbeing of the authors and artists who produce work.
I would also note that I do value the software freedoms and without copyright there would be no way to enforce the redistribution of the source and the improvements that a company makes on it. "Here's the binary, but good luck trying to back port the bug fixes we did" is something that the licensing that copyleft provides.
The approach of "burn down copyright and something wonderful will emerge from its ashes" is not a convincing argument.
> ignore the current economic system and wellbeing of the authors and artists who produce work.
I'm not ignoring it, I will freely admit that I do not care about preserving the wealth of Atherton and Beverly Hills at the expense of poor children having second rate information. If they can figure out a way to make money in a world with actual property rights, great for them.
I also don't think Oxcontin or mRNA vaccines or Fox News or CNN, etc, make a good case for having patents and copyrights.
The market is distorted by copyright law.
Take Facebook, for example. Even without copyright, the only way you could offer Facebook's content is to completely scrape Facebook, because (at least currently) that's where people post their stuff, because that's where everybody who they want to reach is. Even if you consider that an ethical thing to do (I don't), you're still going to have to have servers (plural) running all the time. That's going to take a fair amount of money, and you aren't going to have the revenue, because you aren't going to be selling ads. So I don't think that your approach will actually work economically.
Or take Netflix, as you mentioned in replies to other people. If copyright doesn't protect the movies, then you're left with love-of-the-art movies. And that's OK for those who like that kind of thing, but you're not going to get Star Wars or Marvel movies that way. You may consider that no loss, but the vast majority of movie watchers want to watch that kind of stuff, and don't want to watch unpaid passion projects. So your approach leaves consumers strictly worse off in terms of their preferences. (With one possible other option - that Marvel sticks enough product placement in their movies to pay for their creation.)
Alternatively, imagine this: you could opt-in to targeted ads if you really like them. (I find it hard to wrap my head around this as a person who avoids almost all ads, but you do you.)
I run stylometrics on your HN posts, then on every document archived by a data broker, including highschool/college papers. I identify you. I can then use that information to extort, harass, or rob you. At scale, anyone who buys this data can do this to tens of thousands of people with scripting. DefCon has had some nice presentations in the past about software that takes this data as input, and generates harassment scripts -- practically as SCRUM tickets -- to do this at scale.
Still think privacy / private data doesn't matter?
Sites can just go back to content-based targeting for ads.