[Frieren]

> The solution must be legislation that limits all of: data collected

Let's finish the sentence there. Being spied by corporations 24/7 while we game, watch entertainment, drive, talk with friends, work... it's fucked up.

We live in a hell of our own creation and only new legislation and regulations can get us out of here.

[noir_lord]

It's also akin to Roko's basilisk's - the people who don't realise how pervasive and invasive it has become seem the happiest while the ones like us who've often been around computers since the 80's and just watched our society sleep walk into it feel the worst.

That many of us then end up working for the companies doing it makes for a bad feeling across the industry.

[Henchman21]

You’re sort of describing the central problem of my existence: the skills I have to offer in the marketplace of work are only skills utilized by people whose goals I abhor.

I got into this because I loved solving problems. Now my problem is that the problems at hand are mostly dehumanizing and further the goals of people intent on dehumanizing everyone but them.

I leaned my ladder against the wrong wall and started climbing. It took a lifetime to realize it was the wrong wall.

[thfuran]

There's certainly a lot of money in ad tech and surveillance, but there's a lot of other software out there too.

[oarla]

Now you have a different problem to solve!

[kibwen]

Except unlike Roko's basilisk, this is not absurd pseudo-game-theory extrapolation based on the hypothetical existence of a supreme superintelligence that is simultaneously infinitely vengeful, infinitely omniscient, and infintely omnimpotent; instead it's just the same authoritarian corporate-backed police-state privacy encroachment that has been tightening around our throats for years.

[PNewling]

This is a very pithy comment so I apologize in advance, and I agree with you completely, but all I can think at this moment is:

"The real Roko's Basilisk is the corporate surveillance state we made along the way"

[verisimi]

Let's finish that thought too.

You're asking for new legislation written by governments that a/ want that data to spy on you too and b/ are lobbied by corporations to write the legislation corps want.

It's a closed loop of crap, that goes in one direction only.

[kakacik]

No worries, next generation won't even understand what we are blabbing about. Look at that cute cat video! Privacy what? Oh that puppy is rolling on his back!

[bflesch]

Once your intergenerational wealth is offshore you can pick any of your nepo offspring and make them a hollywood star or unicorn startup CEO with a clean wikipedia page. Their wealth is also tied to national security jobs, because those make you immune in front of the law plus you have the benefit of constructing identities (and death certificates) out of thin air.

For example very rich people in the US receive vanity SSNs. Ghislaine Maxwell has one that spells out "Leet Babe". It's like number plates to show off.

[cogogo]

“Leet Babe” is not even the right number of letters. Doesn’t seem like “leet” would even be in her generation’s vocabulary. Are you trolling? Very rich get vanity numbers? Where is there evidence of that?

[coldtea]

Bothered to check it? It's not literally the letters "leet babe", it's in "leetspeak" as the parent said:

"Ghislaine Maxwell's Social Security Number (133-78-4883) is recorded in U.S. law enforcement documents, such as historical NYPD files, as part of her official identification and background records".

1337 84883 --> LEET BABBE in leetspeak.

It's a stretch, but to be fair, apparently they already had no problem getting visas and other documents with 3-4 variations of their names (to make database lookup more difficult)

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

[cogogo]

I did check but did not find the reference. What exactly are you quoting? I do not see that in any of the parent comments. I also doubt Maxwell was well versed in leetspeak. She was a career socialite.

Getting visas and documents under different names is not anything other than garden variety use of aliases. All kinds of people who are not mega-wealthy do this, legally and illegally. I am specifically questioning the ability of ultra-wealthy choosing SSNs. I had never previously seen this assertion.

[bflesch]

That's exactly it. There was a time before widespread fingerprint checks and facial recognition where they'd all been swapping their first/middle/lastnames around like crazy between passports, and for GM we have the actual immigration documents she filled out with the clear intention to fool the government - for each government entity she sent the form to, she used a different name. She was working in NY without a visa, and after Bush was voted out there was a sudden scrambling to get her an H1B and it was done via one of Epstein's companies.

The vanity SSN thing looks even weirder because someone who I assume was Epstein's great-grandfather was head of US social security administration in the 1920s, a crazy coincidence [Trump family was more department of agriculture]. The 133784883 SSN is clearly a five-eyes meme and one day FOIAs will show what other interesting VIPs have a 1337-range SSN.

Even Donald Trump's officially-curated Wikipedia lists some of his fake identities, and he has some Epstein-related pseudonyms which are not widely known yet which are miraculously also associated with the Kashoggi family name.

[coldtea]

Next generations (plural) already doesn't.

The last generation that cared about this in any big way were the Xers (and close to X-er boomers) circa 1990s.

And even them, not enough, and not as a majority. But at least many techies back then did.

[amelius]

What did you expect with such asymmetry of power?

[coldtea]

>only new legislation and regulations can get us out of here.

From the same goverments that want more state surveillance and even buy the private profile data from data brokers?

Only a new ...revolution would get us out of here...

[embedding-shape]

> From the same goverments

As alluded to, it doesn't have to :) The French are currently on their fifth iteration of "the government", and we're bound to get a new iteration hopefully soon! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Fifth_Republic

[bluGill]

Most of the governments you are talking about are voted on by the people. And when the people care, the governments change. When the people don't care, yes, the government does want lots of data. However, people do often care about such things and that limits the government.

[cute_boi]

> And when the people care, the governments change.

When half of American lives paycheck to paycheck they care about putting food in table instead of petty politics or data collections.

[bluGill]

The vast majority of Americans are not working 100 hours a week just trying to get enough for the basics (goodwill clothing, food, and a shelter...). They might be living paycheck to paycheck, but it is with 40-60 hour per week job, and the are living paycheck to paycheck because they spend money when they make it (this is a sensible thing to do with most of your money - though having some emergency and retirement savings is a good idea, for most people the risk of death before they get old is too high to make saving much more sensible.).

Which is to say the vast majority have plenty of time to think about politics. They don't but that is because they choose to do other things, not because they lack time. (even those who do take the time often only think about it superficially)

[cwmoore]

Not sure how your comment relates to the one it is replying to except to appear to reject its argument in favor of another train of thought. Politics is playdoh. Tax the bots for UBI.

[bluGill]

There are many Americans who care about politics. They vote despite not needing to. They often discuss it.

[coldtea]

>Most of the governments you are talking about are voted on by the people. And when the people care, the governments change.

People have been getting the opposite of what they explicitly vote for, for ages...

Just some recent examples:

In Europe an example is the popular sentiment against further unckecked immigration for example, and people voting politicians promising against that, and getting more.

Or how in the US how people voted someone promising no new wars, talking against foreign interventionist policy and so on, and see what they got.

[tinfoilhatter]

Voted on by the people, and yet in 2026 we have no way to actually confirm our votes are counted or factored into who gets elected. Every single US president is related, sans Van Buren, but there's no way our elections are rigged! Not sure how many corrupt politicians have to take office before people will start questioning the legitimacy of elections.

[Henchman21]

I suspect the next one will do it.

[cwmoore]

Unemployed revolutionaries are a lot cheaper than responsible senators, and as history shows, selling claims to territories that belong to others is exactly what makes state violence so profitable. The descendants of someone in Africa are glad their photographs and souls weren’t taken a century ago.

[bflesch]

Those few decades where the normal person thought that they are not a servant to a feudalistic lord are over, the aristocrats don't need to hide any more. The old money is out in the open, because the populace has lost all their leverage.

They still lie to us about the true source of their wealth, but if you dig in the few archives that we can actually access it is clear that the same family names pop up over and over again.

If your family wealth came from feudalism/colonialism and was already safely stored in offshore accounts 100 years ago, you can send your nepo child to silicon valley or Hollywood, have your connections invest into them and tell the whole world what amazing self-made person they are. Some years down the line they go meet the King to get their hereditary Lordship title back for the whole world to know.

All of this is in the national security interest, so your kids are above the law even though they might only be a Hollywood talent scout, CEO of some startup or a real estate mogul focused on black neighborhoods.

For several hundred years being aristocrat was really unpopular, but ultimately they got a grip on it by owning all means of mass propaganda plus building a file on everyone.

[tinfoilhatter]

I wish people would stop saying we created this hell, as if everyone had a choice as to whether or not they grew up in this increasingly dystopian reality. Blame the people that are actually to blame, not everyone else. It's a tired tactic to shift blame from those who are actually accountable for these systems and technologies.

[jjav]

> We live in a hell of our own creation

Well not "our" creation since only a few oligarchs control most of the companies that engage in this.

> and only new legislation and regulations can get us out of here.

The same oligarchs control nearly all the legislators, so no way out.

[cucumber3732842]

>Well not "our" creation since only a few oligarchs control most of the companies that engage in this

Do not excuse the millions upon millions of useful idiots who lent credence to the "rulers" stupid projects at every step of the way. A lot of this problem is in the mirror. Those oligarchs would have infinity less power if a whole bunch of people din't agree with them.

I mean hell, go look at HN comments from before Flock was helping ICE and every idiot in the comments cooing about how to optimize the ALPR dragnet to fine speeders, flag drug dealers and apply jackboot to every other class of petty deviant they thought they could tease out and everyone pushing back was being shat on for not being "pro social" enough or whatever.

A meaningful amount of the problem is viewable in the goddamn mirror.

[tinfoilhatter]

Now that we know how positive reinforcement works, and why negative doesn’t, we can be more deliberate and hence more successful, in our cultural design. We can achieve a sort of control under which the controlled… nevertheless feel free. They are doing what they want to do, not what they are forced to do. That’s the source of the tremendous power of positive reinforcement—there’s no restraint and no revolt. By a careful design, we control not the final behavior, but the inclination to behave—the motives, the desires, the wishes. The curious thing is that in that case the question of freedom never arises.

- B.F. Skinner

[bluGill]

I constantly learn the hard way in politics that unintended consequences dominate long term. Often they are things that seem obvious in hindsight but nobody reasonable thought of in advance (the people that did are unreasonable in other ways and generally right to ignore even though they were right this time)

[hnlmorg]

Yup. This has been my experience when campaigning for change too.

[coldtea]

>Well not "our" creation since only a few oligarchs control most of the companies that engage in this.

They're just looking after their interests and kinks. It's the suckers that accept it, which are hundreds of millions, that allow this hell to be created, and continue to not do anything about it, when they're not even supporting and voting for them.

[tinfoilhatter]

What would you suggest people do about it?

[coldtea]

What did they do in 1789?

[tinfoilhatter]

I guess my point was - you're one of the people you're complaining about if you're not revolting yourself. I also am not of the opinion that violent revolution would fix anything for the better, but that's not really relevant.