Thread

Seattle City Council votes to ban surveillance pricing in sale of groceries

395 points · 229 comments · ortusdux

jsrozner · 1790181848 · focus · HN ↗
The best solution is a constitutional amendment that actually enshrines a right to privacy. Among other things, the retention, aggregation, correlation of any personal data should be illegal (including for commercial purposes). (Storage on behalf of users in encrypted form could be made OK. Could also be refined to support retention of data of the medical, legal, etc kind with the attendant non-admissibility protections.)
This would fix this issue, it would destroy the surveillance models of Google/Facebook, and it would fix the Flock issue, etc. It would also fix the Roe v Wade issue: women would be able to get abortions in the first couple months of pregnancy without the possibility of harassment, since law enforcement would have no capacity to detect pregnancy until then.
Also, tech won't save us had a podcast on the dynamic pricing topic: <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how-data-is-changing-air-travel-w-amanda-mull/id1507621076?i=1000680112948" rel="nofollow">https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how-data-is-changing-a...
1. twoodfin · 1790183497 · focus · HN ↗
  This is simply untenable. Institutions of all kinds have been keeping records connected to individuals for millennia.
  Try to run a school when you can’t maintain data on the students.
  1. cogman10 · 1790184001 · focus · HN ↗
    You can have privacy and an institution can collect data.
    HIPAA is an example of that.
    All personal data should be treated with at or near HIPAA levels of security. If I give my personal information to my bank, or google, that's fine for them to look at it, but it's not ok if that information magically lands in the hands of Coca Cola for marketing.
    jsrozner · 1790184566 · focus · HN ↗
    Yes, mostly, but google shouldn't be able to "look" at it either. No entity should be able to derive a commercial benefit from my data; any commercial value of my own data should accrue entirely to me.
    You could build a test: the company should not be able to derive any additional value from 100 fully anonymized interactions with the same person as from 100 interactions with a deanonymized individual. Google obviously fails this test since targeted advertising is much more valuable if you have non-anonymized entities.
    The doctor can store my data because it is necessary to provide me with the service, but the doctor shouldn't be able to sell my data, nor correlate it with their other patients' data.
    Of course, a doctor will learn from treating me and become a better doctor, so you can't actually enforce this totally in practice. But it's like porn - you know when you see the violation.
    mrngld · 1790185509 · focus · HN ↗
    Let me get it straight. You want to be able to engage with a commercial entity, but you don't want that commercial entity to be able to look at anything that results from you interacting with them? That doesn't even sound like a good user experience. I want the companies I engage in business with to be able to look at the data within the confines of our relationship and be able to do useful things with it.
    If you don't want Google to be able to do anything at all with information you put into their system, easy, don't open an account!
    I can agree with some of the other points, Google shouldn't be hoovering up mountains of data, etc. Just have to be careful of extremes. If you enshrine something bad in something as difficult to change as a constitution, you're stuck with it, and all your unintended consequences, potentially forever. You say "you can't actually enforce this totally in practice" but have you ever met a law firm? They would absolutely take the most extreme possible interpretation and milk all of society for billions a year if they can find an appropriate avenue.
    This kind of extremism is what derailed some constitutional reforms in South America over the past decade. It started with reasonable center-left people saying some reasonable things, the radical left seized the process and wrote the final draft and faced with a choice between insanity and an unsatisfactory status quo people made the only palatable choice.
    jsrozner · 1790186301 · focus · HN ↗
    Your argument applies to the grocery pricing situation: "if you don't want the grocery store to aggregate all of your interactions, don't shop there".
    All aspects of the commercial transaction should be clear and transparent: I give the grocery store cash, it gives me food. My data shouldn't be taken from me, and nor should I have to consent to my data to be taken from me in order to shop there.
    Google can store and serve me my data. It cannot use my data for commercial purposes that do not directly serve me. Nor should it be able to aggregate my interactions in a way that serves to increase its own profit, as this, over time, increases the relative power of the firm.
    consensus1 · 1790187848 · focus · HN ↗
    Does showing you less ads for things you actually want to buy instead of more random adds serve you directly? You could make a pretty solid argument that it does.
    ndriscoll · 1790190527 · focus · HN ↗
    No, ads are approximately never to your benefit, and if they are, it's entirely by accident. Their entire purpose is to corrupt your preferences or misinform you to the benefit of the advertiser. If you actually wanted to buy the thing, they wouldn't need to spend money on ads (and anyone competent would measure lift over a baseline, not just raw "did people buy the thing" for campaign effectiveness).
    If you're to see any ads at all, it is vastly preferable that you see random ads for things that you would never be interested in and that register as pure noise to you. Things you could be convinced to buy, or propaganda that elicits some response (positive or negative) are the worst case to encounter.
    consensus1 · 1790195028 · focus · HN ↗
    Maybe you think so, but if Youtube offered a choice between targeted ads or 5x more untargeted I bet that > 90% of people would take the former.
    AshleyGrant · 1790211561 · focus · HN ↗
    There is no reason we have to make the false choice you present. That is simply Google holding a gun to our heads to encourage us to choose something that is in Google's best interests rather than our own.
    The choice should be between X targeted ads or X non-targeted ads. They can still target ads based on the content of the page, no different from how television and print ads worked prior to all of this data collection.
    twoodfin · 1790270787 · focus · HN ↗
    “Holding a gun to our heads”?
    How is that metaphor apt?
    AshleyGrant · 1790288952 · focus · HN ↗
    Because in OP's hypothetical, it is the equivalent of a gangster saying "I can shoot you in the face or punch you in the face, which do you prefer?"
    They present a false choice where Google is saying "We can do this the easy way or the hard way" and we are forced to choose between bad and worse. There is no reason we should not have a less bad choice: the same amount of ads but non-targeted. We, as customers, should not be held hostage by the massive corporations.
    twoodfin · 1790297873 · focus · HN ↗
    Sorry, what?
    We’re talking about offering users a choice of ad options on a site they’re choosing to visit.
    That’s nothing at all like a gangster threatening physical harm.
    AshleyGrant · 1790801302 · focus · HN ↗
    And businesses that are offered the option of paying "protection money" can simply go out of business, right?
    Acting like YouTube is a service that is not functionally required to use in the modern world is a disingenuous argument at best and intellectually dishonest at worst.
    There is so much content that folks end up needing to access for so many valid reasons that is only available on YouTube. Plenty of companies only post troubleshooting explainers on YouTube, as one example. I am not "choosing to visit" YouTube in those cases, I am forced by a third party. And I'm being forced because YouTube has functionally built a monopoly on this type of content.
    You might as well be telling someone to "Just buy a helicopter and fly yourself" because they are unhappy with the quality of roads in their city.
    consensus1 · 1790304574 · focus · HN ↗
    This is Youtube. You can just not go there. You have no right to set the terms they offer their services by.
    AshleyGrant · 1790800848 · focus · HN ↗
    This is like saying "You can just sail to Europe for your week of meetings." While it may be pedantically true, it's absolutely false from a functional standpoint for most people.
    YouTube holds an absolutely dominant position in user created content. I have purchased products from many companies who post their troubleshooting video content on YouTube and only on YouTube. In many cases, those videos are literally the only content they provide. They do not provide any textual troubleshooting content.
    Telling people "Just don't use YouTube" is a functionally useless piece of advice as they cannot "just not go there."
    Also, I'm a paying customer of YouTube, why would I "have not right to set the terms they offer their services by?" Why is it that Google gets dictator-level control over the relationship, especially when they are operating as a monopoly?
    We the People absolutely have the power to dictate terms to Google or any other company.
    baggy_trough · 1790196844 · focus · HN ↗
    [dead]
    ndriscoll · 1790197779 · focus · HN ↗
    So delusional that targeted advertising (a massively expensive thing to build) makes more money than random advertising, and advertisers are willing to pay a premium, leading to some of the biggest companies on the planet being in the business of targeting advertising! Almost like it's effective at manipulating people into making decisions they wouldn't otherwise make.
    And then entirely unsurprisingly, professional propagandists also manage to convince people that the proper reaction to being manipulated is "thank you sir, may I have another?"
    baggy_trough · 1790199073 · focus · HN ↗
    It's not a mystery that targeted advertising works better than random advertising and therefore commands a premium. It's an unjustified leap from that to the scary sounding 'manipulation'.
    ndriscoll · 1790199717 · focus · HN ↗
    Taking wikipedia's definition:
    > In psychology, manipulation is defined as an deliberate action that aims to influence or control another person in an underhanded or subtle manner which facilitates one's personal motives.
    Does that not describe pretty much all advertising? It's not like advertisers are going out and researching all other deals that are out there and making sure that theirs really is the best, and then paying to put theirs in front of you because they're just so great and want to help you out.
    No, they're putting themselves in front of you and hoping you don't notice that they're just another white label of some Alibaba special that costs 10% more than the other Alibaba white label. Or trying to pound into your head through constant repeated messaging that you want their thing when you don't, actually (oh and ignore that it will make you fat, give you cancer, lead to your financial ruin, etc. It's fun. And cool people do it. In fact only uncool people don't). Playing happy music when it's them. Playing stern music when it's their opponents. Look, if you gamble with us, you can be a BIG WINNER! LOOK HOW HAPPY AND RICH YOU COULD BE! etc.
    Then to make it extra effective, they spy on you to learn everything about your life, and intentionally feed your insecurities to make you into a softer target. Some kids might end up killing themselves when they take that a bit too far, but hey, what can you do?
    There is no ethical low to which that segment of society will not sink.
    baggy_trough · 1790204604 · focus · HN ↗
    No, it does not. I would not describe most advertising as underhanded or subtle.
    tzs · 1790220792 · focus · HN ↗
    The ads I receive in the mail from local grocery stores serve to inform me when stores that I normally don't shop at have something I already want on sale at a better price than my usual stores.
    How is this corrupting my preferences or misinforming me?

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