| I basically agree with "...fewer concerns about programs to monitor public content on the Internet, than programs that seek to access, monitor, and store content that people intended to be privately communicated to other people. " a few caveats though Scraping public data to see if some person / group / whatever is doing something the week of 4-20 is one thing, it's another to scrape the data and hold it for years or forever. How long should something be held on to after a poster has deleted it? I think transparency about data retention is very important - as this data can also become a tool used by others outside the scope of the original intention / need. What is private and what is thought to be private by the majority of Americans today? Most on HN may see differently and have a better understanding - but aside from the obvious "it's in the cloud is not your data, your data is their product to sell.. only self hosted, encrypted, one-time pad notes shared in person with no electronics around to listen in on is private" - sure.. But even beyond what many around this forum may think is common sense - I can think of many things where lines are blurred not just by ignorance but by design, and lack of awareness - a fbook pm / chat - is that private? what if I have posts set to friends only - and someone uses a cambridge alanytica type thing where friends who do something exposes what I thought of as private to third party scrapers?
Is that scraping illegal if scraping public posts is? What about browser extensions? My private friends only photos - are they being used to train AI for fbook, clearview? are they being shared by some poll software a friend is using? an invite only group, is that data private? does text in a description create a type of protection? What about data that is hacked and published - it's become public data - how about an ex lover who publishes what was thought to be private DMs? I'm sure there are many more situations in which people think they are doing things privately that others could finger a reason why it's not. stories? disappearing snaps? If fbook keeps a log of things you've typed but then backspaced over - is that data public? is it yours? How many people think that data even exists? So in general I kind of agree - but I think we should include things people assume are private as off limits without warrants, while specifying what data is probed, what the retention is, and what the scope of sharing could be. |