[api]

Imagine someone comes to you and says: "You must remove your door locks. Anyone can come into your house any time. You also need cameras across most of your house. But in exchange, magic elves will do all of your home chores: washing, dishes, folding laundry, cleaning, minor home repairs. All of this will be done for pennies on the dollar compared to any current option."

How many people would take it?

I know I'd actually be tempted. Con: total loss of privacy. Pro: it folds laundry, and I f'ing loathe laundry with the intensity of a billion suns.

Every business has similar trade-offs they'd be tempted to take.

[rightbyte]

Sounds like a children story about not making a deal with the Devil?

The implied part the children already know from other stories is:

The magic elves have a recorded history of laughing at their customers when they are on the toilette, hitting on their husbands/wifes and misleading their children into worshipping the elvendom and wander off into the forest.

The story ends in some sort of catharsis for the protagonist when the elves go one step too far. In the happy ending variant Disney makes a version off it is not too late.

[api]

I don't disagree, but history shows that people (and businesses!) can and will make such trades. Look at the privacy nightmare, and it's not just individuals. Large companies put all their Crown Jewels into things like Google Drive, gmail, Dropbox, OneDrive, etc. Even governments do this. The only payoff is convenience. That's how little people and even businesses value their privacy.

[TeMPOraL]

> The only payoff is convenience. That's how little people and even businesses value their privacy.

Well that, and after 2+ decades of this, we can pretty much conclusively tell it worked out great for them. They were - and are - absolutely right to "make such trades".

Yes, data leaks sometimes happen. Sometimes they even make noise in the news. And... that's about the end of it. There are no tomb raiders stealing "crown jewels" and "secret sauces" and outcompeting companies on their own turf[0] - instead, there are many success stories of systems, products and businesses that wouldn't be created if not for the ability to outsource data and document processing to cloud services.

--

[0] - Except the Chinese, but that's not really about stealing secrets or private data - just that owning the factories lets you iterate on hardware faster (+ it helps to have some healthy disregard for "intellectual property").

[em-bee]

i believe that in the future technology will be so advanced that protection of privacy is impossible. the only way to counter that is education to respect peoples privacy and very harsh punishments for violations.

i also believe that we will live in a post scarcity world, which means profit is no longer interesting, so any business case for invading your privacy will go away and therefore it will only happen for personal interest.

the key in any case will be education, because without it abuse will be rampant and progress will halt because everyone is going to be suspicious of everyone else.

[toofy]

> i believe that in the future technology will be so advanced that protection of privacy is impossible. the only way to counter that is…

i’m not sure why so many of us have fallen into this… “there is no other future” thing…

there are other options. plenty of them. there is no singular solution. we could always just say “no”. and that’s that. that would be one option.

why do we feel like there is no other way? why are we afraid to say “nah”?

[em-bee]

i didn't say that there is no other possible future. it's just that this is what i believe is the most likely. science fiction presents plenty of other ideas. if you believe any of those are more likely, please share.

here is my argument:

technology will not stop advancing. for good and for bad. we will not one day realize that we should stop progressing tech and switch to an amish approach to technology. highly unlikely.

other scifi futures involve end of the world scenarios. in my opinion those are not interesting, because if they happen even with survivors humanity is mostly over anyways, so i am not entertaining those. humanity will survive in large numbers.

another option is absolute corporate control. we are kind of heading towards that, but if things go really bad then people will revolt. and either the people win or we have another end of the world scenario. you only need to look at china. if they are to strict, people start protesting. so absolute corporate control is not going to happen.

the last one i can think of is a multi class society. that too is unlikely as we have been going away from that over the last century and i do not believe we'll ever go back.

as you can see from these options, education has the only good outcome. therefore it is the most likely one.

education IS the way of saying "no". it's teaching our children to not do that. saying no to certain tech development is unlikely because there is no tech that only has bad use. not even technology that enables weapons. education is the only way to stop people from abusing technology for bad things.

[skeledrew]

There is no saying "no" if you want to continue participating in modern society. But you can always try to find some place off the grid and live the rest of your days almost primitively.

[Calazon]

I suspect because some of these things would require us all to say no, which is difficult to coordinate and enforce.

It's not impossible, but it's not as easy as "just" saying no, as a society.

[em-bee]

right, and for all to be able to say no requires education.

[Calazon]

Sure, but arguably education is the easy part. The even harder problem is aligning incentives/values and avoiding a tragedy of the commons sort of situation.

[em-bee]

that's what education needs to do. school should not just be about STEM. it should teach values and virtues. that's even more important than STEM because the latter will follow once the kids learned good values

[api]

I'd say I generally agree that the privacy problem has no techno-fix and must be solved by regulation.

For example, we could extend HIPAA-style fines for leaked personal data to other forms of intimate data like location, biometrics, local documents, private chats, etc.

Leak someone's location history? That'll be one $$$ fine per incident where an incident is one person data point.

This at the very least converts this kind of data from an asset into a potential liability, incentivizing companies to not collect it, not hold it long, or thoroughly anonymize and aggregate it and then discard specifics.

[skeledrew]

I'm 100% taking it. I keep nothing with stealing in the house.