Threads for joe8bit
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It’s going to be interesting to see how much this is going to affect the future of how the WWW functions. GDPR sure didn’t manage to be as severe of a measure as we’d hoped it be. Heck, I’m having troubles getting the relevant authorities to understand clear violations that I’ve forwarded to them, where they then end up just being dismissed.
But this law here is of course not for the people, no… This is here for the copyright holders, and they carry much more power. So will this actually result in the mess we expect it to be?
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You had this choice before though, it’s normal to make a cookies whitelist for example in firefox with no addons. The GDPR lets you trust the site that wants to track you to not give you the cookies instead of you having personal autonomy and choosing not to save the cookies with your own client.
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I think this attitude is a bit selfish since not every non-technical person wants to be tracked, and it’s also counter-productive, since even the way you block cookies is gonna be used to track you. The race between tracker and trackee can never be won by any of them if governments don’t make it illegal. I for one am very happy about the GDPR, and I’m glad we’re finally tackling privacy in scale.
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I admire your spirit, but I think it’s a bit naive to think that everyone has time for all kinds of empowerment. My friends and family want privacy without friction, without me around, and without becoming computers hackers themselves.
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Goes on to show how much information about us is being implicitly collected in my honest opinion, whether for advertisement or administration.
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That old canard is increasingly untrue as governments and supercorps like Google, Amazon, and Facebook seek to control as much of the Internet as they can by building walled gardens and exerting their influence on how the protocols that make up the internet are standardized.
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I believe John Gilmore was referring to old-fashioned direct government censorship, but I think his argument applies just as well to the soft corporate variety. Life goes on outside those garden walls. We have quite a Cambrian explosion of distributed protocols going on at the moment, and strong crypto. Supercorps rise and fall. I think we’ll be OK.
Anyway, I’m disappointed by the ruling as well; I just doubt that the sky is really falling.
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I agree that it is not the sky falling. It is a burden for startups and innovation in Europe though. We need new business ideas for the news business. Unfortunately, we now committed to life support for the big old publishers like Springer.
At least, we will probably have some startups applying fancy AI techniques to implement upload filters. If they become profitable enough then Google will start its own service which is for free (in exchange for sniffing all the data of course). Maybe some lucky ones get bought before they are bankrupt. I believe this decision is neutral or positive for Google.
The hope is that creatives earn more, but Germany already tried it with the ancillary copyright for press publishers (German: Leistungsschutzrecht für Presseverleger) in 2013. It did not work.
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Another idea for a nice AI startup I had: Summarizing of news with natural language processing. I do not see that writing news with an AI is illegal, only copying the words/sentences would be illegal.
Maybe however, you cannot make public from where you aggregated your original news that you feed into your AI :)
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Governments, corporations, and individual political activists are certainly trying to censor the internet, at least the most popularly-accessible portions of it. I think the slogan is better conceptualized as an aspiration for technologists interested in information freedom - we should interpret censorship as damage (rather than counting on the internet as it currently works to just automatically do it for us) and we should build technologies that make it possible for ordinary people to bypass it.
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I can see a really attitude shift coming when the EU finally gets around to imposing significant fines. I worked with quite a few organisations that’ve a taken ‘bare minimum and wait and see’ attitude who’d make big changes if the law was shown to have teeth. Obviously pure speculation though.
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Company: Permutive
Company site: http://permutive.com/
Position(s):
Location: London
Description: “We’re a B2B SaaS company building the data platform and tools for a world with a trillion edge devices. We have product–market fit and customers that love us, and we’re growing rapidly in Europe and the US. We raised a $10M Series A at the beginning of the year and have received funding from some of the world’s best investors, including Y Combinator. We’re currently >40 people based in our offices, close to Old Street/Clerkenwell in London.”
Tech: Scala, Haskell, Elm, TypeScript, WebAssembly, Swift, Kotlin, k8s, terraform, Google Cloud
Contact: Drop me an email at joe.pettersson at permutive.com
This reads as interesting, but you might want to be upfront about the fact that it’s adtech? Took me a uBlock-ed company site to notice.