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.
    ikr678 · 1790209686 · focus · HN ↗
    If you pay a bank for use of a secure deposit box to store private documents, would you be upset if they started advertising services to you based on the contents of those documents?
    Or if your telephone service began messaging with offers for products on what you discussed in your phonecalls?
    Yet it's extremism to think Google etc shouldnt be able to do this.

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