HN Books @HNBooksMonth

> That add-on works great. On firefox. On a desktop. Of a computer I own. That's not exactly covering a significant portion of my use cases.

That is why you should be happy about GDPR as it covers all your use-cases.

GDPR is actually great but no one reads it and only listens some scaremongering by companies that are hurt by it. The problem of mass surveillance and abuse of personal data is also huge. But again no one thinks about it outside some cookies and ads.

Enjoy watching about GDPR: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-stjktAu-7k (best done presentation that I was able to find on internet, you might notice in first few minutes that is not about you having access to PII but about using PII - or: I have access to a gun. But I wont use or abuse it. As I might end in jail.)

And reading about privacy and business abuse of it: https://www.amazon.com/Age-Surveillance-Capitalism-Future-Fr... (you will love Pokemon part).

There are more, but those two are best sources I am aware of to get you up to speed.

Then we can talk again.

⬐ scarface74

> GDPR is actually great but no one reads it

Have you read the entire 11 chapter 99 section GDPR.

⬐ stiray

You mean article? + recitals. It is nice to know what are your rights and since when :)

Anyway, check this beauty of simplicity: https://youtu.be/-stjktAu-7k?t=402

"Be nice and you wont go far wrong"

Or maybe this one, also very nice: https://youtu.be/-stjktAu-7k?t=1464

I consider GDPR very fair. The only "issue" (only for corrupt companies) with it is that it takes 'Wild' out of the Wild West of Internet.

Just remember, Google is the company that has surveillance on people more than the others. And they use what the capture.

https://www.amazon.com/Age-Surveillance-Capitalism-Future-Fr...

Reading the book is definitely recommended. A lot of people have an intuitive feeling of how things have gotten out of control but she places the developments in context [0]. She is quite clear that "breaking up" is not a solution as it will merely create a cluster of replicas. She is basically arguing for banning the business model underpinning surveillance capitalism. There are many reviews out there, find one from a source you trust. This Harvard Business Review podcast has a summary interview ~30 min [1]

I don't think the issue of controlling information flow (which is a political hot potato) has much to do with the legitimacy or not of this business model. E.g., Newspapers are obviously controlling flow, may have biases from sponsors, advertisers etc but they do not create user profiles by collecting all the private data they can get access to, they do not modify news shown based on profiles and (in any democracy) there is a wide variety of them and you can always choose which one to read.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Age-Surveillance-Capitalism-Future-Fr...

[1] https://hbr.org/podcast/2019/06/surveillance-capitalism

⬐ devchix

You've persuaded me to get the book, I haven't read it yet but I listened to the podcast. I have a few errant thoughts, not exhaustive, it's what I remember.

1. She described the first diagram of a home-automation device with 2 nodes, the device and the device owner. She made the case that in that schematic, the owner's privacy, autonomy, agency is respected. She made the contrast that Nest requires thousands of agreements w/r/t data collected.

I understood this to mean she prefers something like this model, no 3rd party interaction. This is impossible if the vast majority of Nest users (as an example) cannot program Nest to deliver temperature, on/off switches to their phone. You can see the problem, the world is increasingly software driven and despite the "everyone should learn to code" homily, this is not so and doesn't look like it's going to be so in our future.

As a corollary to (1), I wonder if this is an inherent attribute of the software which we write to day. If we are to write software for a device which we will never interact with again, or have very few opportunity to interact with it for repair purposes (eg, software sent to the moon or Mars), it would be a different kind of software written with a different maintenance model. We build remote capabilities into devices (eg Nest) because we ship an MVP, first to market, and we build the reach-back into it to fix it afterward. Its first purpose is not to collect data, I don't think. The data collection mechanisms and purposes accreted over time.

2. She segued into the creation of the mobile phone as the next step in creating the predictive product, after the click-through ads. "Let us give you this device, maybe a smartphone ..." Who is this "us"? The smartphone was an iterative product with an inflection point. Personal organizers, navigation systems, existed before the smartphone and did not find market viability (Newton, Palm, Garmin), not the way the smartphone did. The smartphone is what it is because it fulfilled consumers' needs and customers demanded it. This line of deduction seems backward.

3. She said "predictive products" (I forget the exact words she used, things that predicts human actions) should not exist. Even the interviewer said that's a radical prescription! Humans have been doing this, wanted to do this forever. We want to use what we know to "nudge" behaviors in a certain direction, there's actually a thing in behavioral economic called "nudging", nudge people to invest in 401K, eat their veg, not fall into addiction and crime. I'm not sure how she proposes to do away with this. She will say I'm committing a category error, by conflating the predictive nudge with capitalism. I'm not sure how that can be decoupled, because as a society, capitalism is how we allocate values, and money is a proxy for value. I'm not saying the allocation is always correctly coupled or aligned but if a behavior is valuable, then the nudge toward that behavior is valuable and the information that enables the delivery of the nudge is valuable.

That's my immediate reaction as I listened, the book will have a more nuanced discussion I'm sure. I am willing to be persuaded but I'm forever skeptical of social scientists' conclusions about the workings, intents, and outcomes of tech decisions.

⬐ streamofdigits

"Predictive products" exist in many sectors (and have been for quite some time, all well within the capitalist system :-) The medical, insurance, finance sector etc. all collect data and predict specific outcomes with significant impact on people's lives.

In each of these instances there are fairly draconian regulations about what is allowed, both in terms of 1) data collection protocols 2) admissible predictive models 3) application scope - what can one do with the outcomes and 4) accountability / disclosure to the impacted individuals.

When she says "predictive products" (meaning behavioral based targeted advertising) should not exist (I think) she essentially says that the collateral damage of the practice far exceeds any benefits generated. Obviously not in monetary terms in the current market context, but in broader welfare terms.

⬐ quotemstr

Sorry, I don't have time right now to listen to a half hour podcast. What specific conduct does the author propose making illegal? "Surveillance capitalism" is incisive rhetoric, but it's not specific enough to serve as the basis for law.

⬐ streamofdigits

Sorry I don't have time for people who only react to punchlines with their own punchlines.

This is a defining issue for how digital society is going to be organized and you obviously don't care to inform yourself sufficiently about what is happening (=hence cannot parse what the policy recommendation "ban this business model" means)

⬐ quotemstr

"Educate yourself" is not an argument. If you can't briefly summarize an argument in your own words, you don't really understand it.

What I'm gathering from this conversation is that you have an emotional reaction to Facebook but haven't done the mental homework necessary to identify what specifically Facebook is doing wrong and what specific rules you would impose on social media platforms going forward.

Facebook and Google. Money. No way.

Those two companies are having absolutely no trust from my side, they have abused the trust so often, that they no loger know what the term means. I dont care what they do, I dont care how usefull their "gifts" are. Just NO.

They have seriously flawed internet and human society as it was (is) and there is just no way I will let them into my finance. One is goverment, something completely different is survailance capitalism (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIXhnWUmMvw and there is a book that I would put in schools for mandatory reading: https://www.amazon.com/Age-Surveillance-Capitalism-Future-Fr...)

"Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes." ("Beware of Danaans bringing the gift", reference to Trojan horse, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeo_Danaos_et_dona_ferentes)

p.s.: people downvoting, you just dont understand what you are against with. Educate yourself, please, this is no longer the time of cheering for your favorite coorporation, the things have gone over the edge.

⬐ henriquez

Zuckerberg’s original aspiration with Libra before he had to walk it back was enough for any reasonable person to nope out: a world currency controlled by a cartel of multinational corporations accountable not to the citizens of their constituent countries, but to shareholders and capital owners.

If anyone seriously thinks this sounds like a good idea I’m truly curious to hear your reasoning.

In my view this was always a cynical ploy by Zuckerberg. He would love to control a huge piece of the world economy, but I believe he knows that the outcry from real governments would never allow that - so he could hedge by trying to have his project regulated out of existence and taking decentralized tech with it. Decentralized tech is the greatest long term competitive threat to Facebook. Zuckerberg knows it and would love to see it incidentally banned as a casualty of taking down Libra, but his mistake was overplaying his hand too early.

⬐ Barrin92

>If anyone seriously thinks this sounds like a good idea I’m truly curious to hear your reasoning.

I generally feel positive about something like Libra and I'm not in favour of decentralised currency. Decentralised currency is hard to tax, threatens the sovereignty of nation states, the ability to enact sanctions, enables crime and I'm not really on board with that.

Libra (or something like it) looks like a way to built a cheap, frictionless payment that in any practical sense mostly seems to illemininate costs of transaction if it scales up well enough, and I think that's where most utility comes from in a currency. I don't see the value in some slow network that changes its value twenty times per month for the average person just so that you can stick it to the man or whatever.

As to 'controlling the world economy'. I've never really understood how this is supposed to be the result of Libra. At the end of the day it's basically a Paypal without the middleman. The Libra owners will at some point earn some money on interest but otherwise I don't really see how this confers any monstrous powers to them. As far as that goes I'm more concerned about the Facebook platform itself.

⬐ uHuge

The precaution for control seems the custodial operations, where currency cummulates under the operators' trust, ie. in FB&col. The little step for keeping what you obtain in the platform inside it for further use within it is what agregates significant risk.

⬐ pedro_hab

"If anyone seriously thinks this sounds like a good idea I’m truly curious to hear your reasoning."

I don't know if it is a good idea, but I don not share the view that being a private entity makes it lesser than government entities.

I see governments and private entities as being built by people, and those are flawed just the same, governments even more so, since they are the perpetrators of the greatest evils of modern times.

⬐ charlesju

I think the thought process is that paper money is already controlled by world governments, so this isn't meant to be a replacement for paper money, but rather just an intermediary so the transfer of money can be done more easily and cheaper.

I think another point is that if you want a truly decentralized, no government involved, cryptocurrency, those still exist, go buy and use some bitcoin.

Mass surveillance (legal and illegal) already exists in many western democracies. They are just done for purposes other than healthcare.

https://www.amazon.com/Age-Surveillance-Capitalism-Future-Fr...

Or some of us have obsession about unhealthy distopia that is at the end of facebook road.

May I recomend you a book? https://www.amazon.com/Age-Surveillance-Capitalism-Future-Fr...

Or, if books are not your thing, maybe watch Black Mirror - Nosedive (S03E01).

You need to understand that some people are older than facebook and have seen the tranformation of human society since the Facebook came.

⬐ rsa4046

Zuboff's book is excellent

The competition was what made those services better. Now there is situation where is almost no competition. Which is killing the possibility to get even better services.

Google has gone its way to the mega corporation where nothing else matters but money. And they are moving into direction where this money is comming from worse possible sources.

Regarding "true evil", to some people google IS true evil. And based of their conduct in last 5 years it is hard to argue.

If you want some insight, read: https://www.amazon.com/Age-Surveillance-Capitalism-Future-Fr...

> Do you remember how terrible email was before Gmail? How awful MapQuest was before Google maps?

No? There was nothing wrong with email without g. I am still using it and having my own mail server. And now you have OpenStreetMaps, I don't use Google Maps, when I want map, I want MAP, not map&ads&suggestions&search&reviews,..

⬐ joelx

True evil is MBS ordering the murder of journalist Khasshogi. True evil is invading and conquering Crimea. True evil is murdering your generals with anti-aircraft guns or watching dogs tear them apart while still alive.

Serving banner ads across sites does not even remotely compare.

⬐ imihai1988

So, what you are saying is it's fine because russians and north koreans ?! do way worse things... did I get that right ? How is that even contributing to the discussion ?

Worth reading in this regard: Shoshana Zubhoff's The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. https://www.amazon.com/Age-Surveillance-Capitalism-Future-Fr...

This is an important, carefully researched book, one which everyone who is working with the Internet should read. The portrait of today's reality (and our future reality) is disquieting. https://www.amazon.com/Age-Surveillance-Capitalism-Future-Fr...

This article reviews Shoshana Zuboff's The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (https://www.amazon.com/Age-Surveillance-Capitalism-Future-Fr...). A worthwhile and detailed analysis of modern social computer systems and the issues associated with survveillance. The question is, do the benefits justify the costs.

The author of the paper, Shoshana Zuboff, is also coming out with a book soon:

"The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power"

https://www.amazon.com/Age-Surveillance-Capitalism-Future-Fr...