This a huge step back for transparency with Meta (shocker). Access to this data is important for a variety of reasons, and using the recent EU laws as an excuse is deplorable (again, shocker from Meta).
It's clear the data companies were left alone for too long to rule the schoolyard. It's going to take some time to treat them and others what decorum looks like without throwing an absolute hissy fit.
Here's hoping the EU, which seems to be the only teacher on the playground willing to discipline anyone, will set them straight.
They are among the top five richest corporations in the world and the leading employer in the world, last I checked. You going to dissolve that power? No? They have money and power, they will make the rules. You have to either find a way to dissolve them (good luck with that!), or you have to have another big power structure to keep them in check. That's how it works.
Looked it up, it relates to the behavior after a natural disaster. I think that's quite a specific situation that gives everyone a common goal to work on for a relatively short period. I also think it suddenly interrupts a situation where there was a government, so people are still acting as citizens. Outside of such event, I am not sure people would work together as much. I can think of many examples where the weakening or absence of government leaves room for religious extremist organization (Irak under ISIS) or criminal organizations (Haiti currently) which are pretty much "might is right".
No, but claiming you understand the idea well enough to argue it because you read the back cover is some "imagine a perfectly spherical organism... ...and now ive solved it, why do you even have a whole department?" first year physics student walking into a bio lab level arrogance.
I don't even think you understand the principles and ideas that would make your idea of optimal social structure even remotely plausible, much less what I'm talking about with mine (given your unwillingness to even acknowledge them), and you clearly don't want to. Its not like youre going to tell me anything I haven't heard before. I feel like it's a good time for this conversation to end.
I made the effort to look up your reference, so I could understand what you said. Did you ever make such effort with mines?
Now instead of using those few lines to explain to me what I may have missed, you wrote those lines to attack me. I think you could have ended it before falling to such a low quality argumentative level.
Point of mutual aid is bringing up and inclusion while getting necessary shit done, and yeah it does some smoothing on top, but other mechanisms can be helpful.
We should teach critical thinking and logic skill from month one. There will be so much propaganda and misinformation from this point on, being able to spot it, most of the time with common sense, would nip most of this crap in the butt.
And still it would not be enough. You need to trust some core institutions and delegate on some people who know more than you, you can't be an expert on everything. Even smart people can be deeply wrong if they trust the wrong people or if they think their expertise makes them an expert on everything. You also need a little intellectual humility.
This is why the position I take is that when there is any room for doubt, lean into whichever belief would lead to the most compassionate outcome.
There will always be uncertainty, always facts that you can't know, but the compassionate choice is pretty much never wrong, at worst it might be inefficient, but that's okay. Anyone who's trying to convince you that something that harms or dehumanizes anyone is necessary probably has an ulterior motive and is profiting somehow off of the harm and dehumanization.
Mommy, "because I say so" is an appeal to authority, I will not abide by such logical fallacy. Please provide me with a systematic review of relevant double blind studies to convince me that I should eat my greens."
I try to use "because I said so" as little as possible. It's a lot more work, but they know why they're doing most of what they need to do, and they know why they're avoiding what they should not do.
Edit: I've noticed that making an effort to avoid "because I said so" has built up a habit of thinking about why I'm telling them to do something before I say it out loud. Often times, this changes what I'm about to tell them to do.
That would be the ideal world. There is plentiful research to show that eating vegetables is good for you. If you can't figure that little out, why are you a parent?
I guess 99% of parents would not be able to look for this research and will rely on "common sense" instead (also a fallacy), it doesn't make them bad parents. I was not being serious anyways.
I think the issue is more that people like propaganda and misinformation as long as they agree with it.
There just seems to be something about seeing your own opinions coming out of a man in a tie or printed in a large serif font that gives people the same feeling as a cat having its neck scratched.
And of course, once you hear one of your opinions come out of them, it's easier to agree with the other ones as well.
im ok with propaganda as long as its clear that it's propaganda.
You know, much like how criminals understand that committing crime is bad, and yet they continue to commit crime. Seems like a rather apt solution IMO.
You do know that this comment could be posted word for word on a right wing post and everybody would agree with it just as well? The term "critical thinking" alone is so worthless, not to mention "common sense". Some people justify ancient aliens with that phrasing. I don't mean to criticize you, I just have this thought so often when scrolling through this polarized world... And I really don't know what to do about it. Everything feels so lost.
The term “critical thinking” alone is so worthless
No, it's not. There's a very specific definition - to think critically, i.e. to not accept any idea without first investigating it and analysing its merit. That's the absolute basis of all philosophy and science.
Critical thinking and common sense are not even close to being the same. Perhaps finding the definition of critical thinking would be a prudent thing before dismissing it as a buzz word.
Talking on the internet is such a weird thing. Where did I say that those two things are the same? Did you not hear my cry for help in the statement above? Instead of going for the attack?
I have this thought a lot too when people discuss things like teaching "media literacy". I dunno. I've seen enough people completely abuse logical fallacies that I really wonder whether or not we're all logically consistent conscious beings, or if we're all just kind of flying by the emotionally charged pants seats, and making shit up later to retroactively justify it. People cry strawman, red herring, goalpost moving, when realistically people are just changing the subject to something that they think they know more on, because things aren't formalized into a rigorous debate where everything is organized and structured and we all actually know what the definitions of things are supposed to be. It's hard enough to get people to even agree on a definition, because people are so insulated to their little bubbles. Getting past that semantic difference and into the actual debate seems more to me like a structural problem, where people are arguing with the wrong people, than like, a problem you could solve with just raw education. Seems like a structural problem related to the death of the monoculture, and the rapid propagation of regional cultures, even regional cultures online.
At least one person seems to get my dilemma. Thank you. I'm really looking for help on this one. Just to find a way to solve this riddle for better understanding.
Worse, they're incentivized not to get you matched with anyone because once you're paired up, you're going to delete your account.
So it's all this data collection and lack of privacy for all of it to be used against you actually finding a partner, instead dedicated to making you lonely so you keep spending money on the app.
And spending money only gives the illusion of making a difference, because now especially when you’ve proven you’re a money spending customer, they don’t want to lose you.
Totally anecdotal, but I met my current partner not long after subscribing to the paid tier of Tinder. Those super likes came in handy. This was like 5 years ago though not sure how different it is now. I have to imagine it’s worse just like everything else.
Honestly, dating apps are one of the cases for a federated system. Use whatever frontend you want, no one person owns the backend so they can’t sleazily monetize you. Probably would need to be a bit more cryptographic than something like lemmy or mastodon though.
With activityhub gaining traction, I actually think it's possible. You essentially self host your profile, which gets federated around. You swipe left/right, thereby accepting federation from a match of blocking.
Yuck with the penises and all that? How the hell you supposed to fuck a penis anyway? What're you supposed to do, dock em or something? I ain't going near no gross dick. I mean sure, if she looked hot and I went to pull up her skirt after I had a few drinks in the bar and suddenly there was a dick... Well I don't need to look at that when I'm tapping that ass from behind. It's not like I'm gay or anything though. Sheesh. Weirdos.
Depends on how it is used. But I don't think it should be used for the matching process itself though. Maybe to help match interest (tags) between each other, like giving a connection score between two of them, but other than that, I see no other privacy respecting way to use that.
Moreover, on which data would we train on? I don't think there is any anonymized dating app dataset around.
Not a single friend or family member gives two shits about privacy. When I tell them about what companies know about them and what they do with that information, it’s kind of like a vegan telling a meat eater where their meat comes from. Like “wow that sounds bad but I’m not willing to make any changes”. The only difference is that instead of animals being a product, this time they are the product.
same. Someone I know, this morning, said "oh I just got on threads", and "everyone is there", and worse "the only reason I know about it is because you told me." The thing is, 1. Threads is a Meta project, 2. I told them about it in the context of this huge discussion on the fediverse about defedding from corporate social media, in which the VAST MAJORITY agree that federating with corp social media is bad plan. sigh.
Threads is unfortunate proof that people aren't looking for a better solution outside of finding a different leader. Jack Dorsey is The Good One, Elon Musk is The Bad One.
For many of the same people, several years ago, Elon Musk was also The Good One.
The effective way to combat this is to pull their information from data brokers and tell them everything you know. Then they feel violated, as they should.
They’ll blame you and never put two and two together though.
The Architect lacks morals, but I will take an intelligent and not-specifically-malicious (nor greedy) being like that over Zuckerberg. Because of who he was and his aims, the Architect could be reasoned with.
We should outlaw political advertisement on social media? Kind of like how cigarette advertisement was eliminated from movie theater ads.
The fines should be stacked as factors - unmitigated offenses will build up and incur exponentially growing fines. Very large incentive to shut that shit down.
Politics should be advertised by performance review, not marketing.
The government may do something. It will just take them five years to do so.
Edit: In the meantime, buy yourself a bike or a golf cart or four wheeler or something. Though maybe not a four-wheeler or golf cart, since I don't think you can drive those on regular roads, but you can ride a bike on regular roads, so maybe that. Or a motorcycle. That's putting your money where your mouth is because a motorcycle is highly not likely to have spy equipment just because of lack of space.
Edit 2: Motorcycles do not burn fuel as cleanly so are more harmful to the environment though so trade-offs
Edit 3: open source cars I wonder if that's a thing
From a link someone provided above it seems legit.
the motorcycle used 28% less fuel than the comparable decade car and emitted 30% fewer carbon dioxide emissions, but it emitted 416% more hydrocarbons, 3,220% more oxides of nitrogen and 8,065% more carbon monoxide. The MythBusters’ conclusion: ‘At best, it’s a wash. Motorcycles are just as bad for the environment as cars,’ Savage said on the show. ‘At worst, they’re far worse.’
I recognize it's not an official study, but seems to be more concrete than anecdotal evidence and changed my perspective some. The article also quotes a researcher at UC Riverside which makes more sense on what's going on
‘We’ve been working to clean up passenger vehicles since the ‘70s,’ said Kent Johnson, who’s on the research faculty at UC Riverside and is director of its emissions lab, where the MythBusters’ numbers were analyzed. ‘We’ve been putting on catalytic converters and sensors to improve their ability to control emissions. We didn’t start doing that on motorcycles until the 2000s. It just shows you how far we’ve taken passenger vehicles and how difficult it is to do the same thing with motorcycles. First of all, there’s no room. And the incremental cost might double the price of a bike.’
This only works up to a point, and that's a little concerning IMO. It'll be true for longer than, say, cellphones, but no car lasts forever and at some point they could be prohibitively expensive.
The last car I bought is a 2014 model year. The one before that is a 2016. I'm not buying anything made after 2020, even if I have to squeeze gasoline from the rocks with my bare hands. Not because I don't like electric, but because I don't want a spy appliance to drive around in, even if it has emoji headlights.
And even before that, you have to worry about the dealership plugging one of those devices into your car and pulling the data from it, even if it's not uploaded remotely, it could still be grabbed. I think you may have to go back to about 2000 or before to see cars that don't have that or it's not common or does not collect very much data at all.
What about the device the dealership can plug into your car and pull the diagnostic data from it and upload it while you take your car in for maintenance or whatever.
That's a fair point, but as cars have gotten more and more complicated, it takes more than just your normal shade tree mechanic to fix them in a lot of cases.
It wasn’t until recently that that basically all cars came with tracking built in. Some not that old models (like my 2018 Outback) can easily be bypassed with a quick harness install. But others are integrated into the ECU AMD cannot be removed.
What about the dealership uploads? Where? They plug that device into your car to see if there's any errors or whatever and They can pull the data from it then and upload it I Want to say those go back as far as about 2000
That’s the same module. The dealer could add their own to the car, but those would be removable. Also on BHPH dealers add shit like that to make repoing the car easier.
maybe not a four-wheeler or golf cart, since I don’t think you can drive those on regular roads
Look up your local neighborhood / neighborhood electric vehicle / low-speed vehicle laws.
There are some places where they are allowed. There's also a lot of places where the cops just don't care enough to do anything about it, at least so long as you stay off arterial roads.
Though I cannot recommend a cargo ebike enough. Long-tail or bakfiets, though I personally prefer the long-tails as they ride more like bikes and the racks on the back tend to be extremely versatile for mounting weird stuff. The cheapest good ones are around $1,200 with near-0 cost of ownership. Incredibly useful vehicles.
That's cool. We definitely need open source car software But when I said that I was thinking more about hardware Because with open source hardware you couldn't sneak connectivity chips Etc. in without people knowing about it
It's not the gas mileage, that's the problem. It's the amount of CO2 and whatever it emits into the air is higher in particulate matter or whatever because there's not a catalytic converter and such like there is in cars. at least from what I understand.
Not cars per se, but with a few tools and a kit, you can convert a bicycle into a pretty great pedal-assist e-bike from the comfort of your own garage, cost-competitively with pre-built e-bikes, especially if you already own the bike you're converting. Everyone has their own preference for the ideal bicycle, and there are plenty of DIY e-bike build guides on the web, so that might as well be open source.
Or you could drive a older car. You will need to learn how to do at least of of the maintenance yourself but being able to do simple maintenance like a oil change is a good skill and isn't hard to learn.
Open source cars are kind of a thing, if you're doing an engine swap, or building from scratch or something, that will usually require you to remove all of the privacy violating parts as a side effect. You could probably achieve a similar result with slightly less effort by removing the infotainment and replacing the ECU with an aftermarket one...
Most of the privacy violation parts are just in the infotainment though, so if you manage to replace that you'll be pretty much there. Only issue is newer cars have all the hvac and things like reverse cameras controlled through it...
Another option would just be to make sure it has no network connections.
still trying to figure out why. Seems like the counter intuitive thing to happen. But what do i fucking, i'm just a citizen of the US, the US government is responsible to me, it's not like i have a say in this or anything.
Tbf if you actually look into Mozilla's "AI" plans, it's for stuff like better offline translation, better screen reader and image description functionality for disabled users, finding alternate sources for articles, and so on.
It all runs locally, is trained on open source models with ethically sourced training data, and doesn't send your personal information to Mozilla.
I don't think it should be treated in the same way as Google or Microsoft's AI implementations. People should actually look into things before they assume they know everything.
Yeah but they also use the word 'commercialize' which could very well mean that they're looking to get something out from this. How much and who's profiting is what we don't know yet but it is a concern.
He isn't great, but he has done some pretty good thing. (Lots of not good things too, obviously.) He's taken steps with student loan forgiveness, he's empowered the FTC and DOJ to enforce anti-trust regulations that haven't been used in far too long, and he's done a good number of other things too, but nothing else large is coming to mind at the moment.
They suck at communicating, but they have actually done some good. Biden is far from my choice of president, but it does seem like the progressive faction has at least moved him in the right direction. It's far from ideal, but he isn't that bad.
My hope is that the FBI asked them to shut this down on NSA's behalf, so threat actors feel more comfortable as they aren't being watched, studied, and analyzed by every OSINT collective in existence.
My fear is that they know what happened the previous 2 elections and this year will be the worst yet, and they don't want their users knowing how badly they got duped and feeling bad/dumb enough to leave the platform. Also advertising $$.
Dark money from other countries is a good boogeyman, but it's basically irrelevant. Biden and Trump are going to spend between 2 and 3 billion on the election collectively. The hundreds of thousands or millions a foreign government may spend is a rounding error.
It has nothing to do with money spent. One is active hatefully divisive propaganda infesting the minds of the country on a total scale. We have multiple US Senators and Congresspeople saying the eclipse and earthquakes are a sign from God ffs. Have you been on reddit in the last few months? If not, I urge you to take a peek. Even in small hobbyist subreddits now every other post is pure hate or FUD, and every other comment is someone taunting people to fight them with divisive and very obvious left/right comments, much worse than the typical "lol seems like a typical lib/cuckservative." It comes in waves, which I assume is reddit finding and banning them, making them rotate accounts and continue the karma generating process so they can post and comment in karma limit subs (the idiotic questions.)
Its the devil you know vs. the devil you don't. One is trying, at least in some part, to quell fears and stabilize the nation and economy. The other is actively creating division and fear at every turn. Or course project mockingbird, any Hollywood movies or shows featuring the military, etc.
Does Russian meme technology have a secret sauce?
I guess you could call it secret sauce. A department of the military for offensive informational warfare, with lots of training, tooling, time and resources. I'm sure we do the same thing but there's a reason our adversaries have heavily censored internet access and they can't freely go onto YouTube or Google and search for topics of interest, or use reddit or Facebook openly without a VPN. They know what their capabilities can do to cripple a nation from the inside and make everyone hate each other and the government. There's no way they'd let us do the same to them, but there is going to be a major revolt when the US decides to do it here.
I work in integrity at Meta. It's mostly about staying legally compliant with the countries we make $ in. You have to keep in mind we have like 4 billion users, and own 5 out of the top 10 most used apps (hello antitrust?), so it's a pretty big deal here.
Telegram, WhatsApp, and iMessage are all e2e encrypted but backups aren't. That's how your messages get read.
Messenger is actually the most secure platform out of the 4 because there's no unencrypted cloud backups. However, there's discussion on rolling back the encryption on Messenger because it's too good and causing UX pains.
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