[tekni5]

I was thinking about this a while back, once AI is able to analyze video, images and text and do so cheap & efficiently. It's game over for privacy, like completely. Right now massive corps have tons of data on us, but they can't really piece it together and understand everything. With powerful AI every aspect of your digital life can be understood. The potential here is insane, it can be used for so many different things good and bad. But I bet it will be used to sell more targeted goods and services.

[worldsayshi]

Unless you live in the EU and have laws that should protect you from that.

[spacebanana7]

Public sector agencies and law enforcement are generally exempt (or have special carve outs) in European privacy regulations.

[tekni5]

What happens if it's a datamining third party bot? That can check your social media accounts, create an in-depth profile on you, every image, video, post you've made has been recorded and understood. It knows everything about you, every product you use, where you have been, what you like, what you hate, everything packaged and ready to be sold to an advertiser, or the government, etc.

[gnepon]

Setting our social media accounts to private should solve most of that. Otherwise we will have to put less of our lives on public platforms.

[seniorivn]

incentives cannot be fixed with just prohibitive laws, war on drags should've taught you something

[jpk]

Laws, and more specifically their penalties, are precisely for fixing incentives. It's just a matter of setting a penalty that outweighs the natural incentive you want to override. e.g., Is it more expensive to respect privacy, or pay the fine for not doing so? PII could, and should, be made radioactive by privacy regulations and their associated penalties.

[worldsayshi]

It's not a complete fix but I'm sure a law with teeth can make a big difference. There's a big difference in being data mined by a big corp with the law on its side and a criminal organisation or their customers that has to cover their tracks to not get multi million dollar fines.

[garbagewoman]

War on drags? I thought that was just in Florida

[ineedaj0b]

please consider commenting more thoughtfully. I understand this is a joke but we don't want this site to devolve into Reddit.

[riquisimo]

It is sad that we live in a world where this could be interpreted both ways.

[SV_BubbleTime]

Drugs… Oooohh. I get it now.

[YetAnotherNick]

Is it true or more of a myth? Based on my online read, Europe has "think of the children" narrative as common if not more than other parts of the world. They tried hard to ban encryption in apps many times.[1]

[1]: https://proton.me/blog/eu-council-encryption-vote-delayed

[smoldesu]

> They tried hard to ban encryption in apps many times.

That's true of most places. We should applaud the EU's human rights court for leading the way by banning this behavior: https://www.eureporter.co/world/human-rights-category/europe...

[devjab]

Democratic governance is complicated. It’s never black and white and it’s perfectly possible for parts of the EU to be working to end encryption while another part works toward enhancing citizen privacy rights. Often they’re not even supported by the same politicians, but since it’s not a winners takes all sort of thing, it can all happen simultaneously and sometimes they can even come up with some “interesting” proposals that directly interfere with each other.

That being said there is a difference between the US and the EU in regards to how these things are approached. Where the US is more likely to let private companies destroy privacy while keeping public agencies leashed it’s the opposite in Europe. Truth be told, it’s not like the US initiatives are really working since agencies like the NSA seem to blatantly ignore all laws anyway, which cause some scandals here in Europe as well. In Denmark our Secret Police isn’t allowed to spy on us without warrants, but our changing governments has had different secret agreements with the US to let the US monitor our internet traffic. Which is sort of how it is, and the scandal isn’t so much that, it’s how our Secret Police is allowed to get information about Danish citizens from the NSA without warrants, letting our secret police spy on us by getting the data they aren’t allowed to gather themselves from the NSA who are allowed to gather it.

Anyway, it’s a complicated mess, and you have so many branches of the bureaucracy and so many NGOs pulling in different directions that you can’t say that the EU is pro or anti privacy the way you want to. Because it’s both of those things and many more at the same time.

I think the only thing the EU unanimously agrees on (sort of) is to limit private companies access to citizen privacy data. Especially non-EU organisations. Which is very hard to enforce because most of the used platforms and even software isn’t European.

[YetAnotherNick]

I am fine with private company using my data for showing me better ads. They can't affect my life significantly.

I am not fine with government using the data to police me. Already in most countries, governments are putting people in jail because of things like hate speech where are the laws are really vague.

[vladms]

To me this sounds like an opinion that would be common in the US, mostly because of where the trust and fears seem to be (private companies versus government).

I think everybody (private companies, government, individuals) will try to influence and will affect your personal life. What I am worried about is who has the most efficient way to influence a lot the average person - because that entity can control on long term a lot more.

My impression is that in the European Union - due partially to a complex system - is harder for any particular actor to do much on its own (even the example with Denmark secret service asking NSA for data about citizens - I guess it is harder for them to do that rather than just get directly the data).

So what I am afraid is focused and efficient entities having the data, hence I am more afraid of private companies (which are focused and sometimes efficient) rather than governments.

[YetAnotherNick]

Can we please argue on the thing being discussed rather than where it is common?

Are you saying influencing life through ads and putting me in jail have similar effect on me? If you combine all laws of my country I am pretty sure I would have broken few unintentionally. If government wants to just put me in jail they could retroactively find any of my past instance if they have the data. This is not some theoretical thing, but something the thing that happens with political dissidents all the time.

[squigz]

"Most" countries? Can you provide some examples?

[YetAnotherNick]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incitement_to_ethnic_or_racial...

[RamblingCTO]

Not Europe, just Von der Leyen and the like. Germany put her down multiple times on this bullshit now because it violates our constitution. But she tries again and again and again.

[Nextgrid]

That's only on paper - in practice the GDPR has a major enforcement problem.

[prmoustache]

This + everything is about consent (cookie banner and all)

So if your job means you use a specific OS with a specific Office Suite in the cloud and that office suite in the cloud incorporate AI and you only get half the features available if you don't consent, you as an employee end up kind of forced to consent anyway, GPDR or not.

[londons_explore]

> I bet it will be used to sell more targeted goods and services.

Plenty of companies have been shoving all the unstructured data they have about you and your friends into a big neural net to predict which ad you're most likely to click for a decade now...

[tekni5]

Sure but not images and video. Now they can look at a picture of your room and label everything you own, etc.

[londons_explore]

yes including images and video. It's been basically standard practice to take each piece of user data and turn it into an embedding vector, then combine all the vectors with some time/relevancy weighting or neural net, then use the resulting vector to predict user click through rates for ads. (which effectively determines which ad the user will see).

[ryukoposting]

You nailed it on the head. People dismissing this because it isn't perfectly accurate are missing the point. For the purposes of analytics and surveillance, it doesn't need to be perfectly accurate as long as you have enough raw data to filter out the noise. The Four have already mastered the "collecting data" part, and nobody in North America with the power to rein in that situation seems interested in doing so (this isn't to say the GDPR is perfect, but at least Europe is trying).

It's depressing that the most extraordinary technologies of our age are used almost exclusively to make you buy shit.

[fragmede]

would it be more or less depressing if it came out that in addition to trying to get you to buy stuff, it was being used to, either make you dumber to make you easier to control, or get you to study harder and be a better worker?