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by scyzoryk_xyz
1834 days ago
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I’m with you all the way there. One big thing has changed in the last ten years though - smartphones. Literal sponges for data that all non-technical people just trust with everything. Could you imagine something like this 15 years ago? With computers? No way - I still remember my boomer parents being afraid to even pull out a credit card in front of a computer. I think a lot of people around here know how the sausage is made. But when you’re designing meat grinders you’re not gonna call attention to where the meat is coming from. I think the way the wind is blowing is slowly changing direction though. |
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Fundamentally though, I think that there will have to be a bigger catalyst for that change to happen and while I think people are slowly becoming more aware of how bullshit the "consent" argument for data gathering is, I don't think a general "uneasy feeling about doing things online" will actually be enough to push for useful regulatory fixes when it would require going against the incredibly large resources of the various data-mining (credit & insurance industries, etc.) and tech lobbies.
One thing I would say about smartphones is that I think that humanity would probably be in a far better place (in terms of individual privacy) if mobile networks were about 10 years behind where they are now in terms of spectral efficiency and per-bit energy requirements.
That would mean that you would have fairly ubiquitous powerful mobile hardware where there was a serious performance/battery penalty to just transmitting data up to some cloud service at all times of the day but you'd still have enough local compute and storage to do just about everything that people use their phone for today (with the exception of mobile video streaming).
It makes me think that one of the sparks for a more privacy-respecting system could be if mobile data became very unreliable/expensive but phone/OS/app developers knew that they had to actually deal with this and couldn't just ignore the lack of connectivity. Unfortunately, I can't think of any situations where that could be the case which wouldn't involve some sort of massive social upheaval (like a war or significant and widespread infrastructure damage) so I certainly wouldn't be hoping for such an event to be the catalyst.