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.

Open on Hacker News to reply ↗

Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.