It directly mirrors the feudal system with a tiny portion of the population living in unimaginable luxury and employing another much larger but still small portion overall to keep the hierarchy running. In other words, billionaires supported by well-compensated SWE vassals who devise ever more sophisticated tools to extract value and data-powered obedience through surveillance from regular workers.
I began life as a NOC operator at a regional ISP, when ISPs were merely an on-ramp to Al Gore's Paradise in the Cloud.
I helped many employers and clients connect to the Internet somewhat securely. If the Internet is evil then so am I. I've never worked for FAANGs or adtech or data-gatherers.
Late in my career I came around to academia. Worked for a NASA-JPL project at a university. Now I work for an online program manager.
The data we collect from students is protected by FERPA, and I'd say we make an effort to collect as little as possible, and the students offer it all voluntarily. Win/win.
I think attributing features of the community as a whole to individuals within that community like this leads to incorrect assumptions. The HN community is varied. I suspect if you were to put an HN reader who strongly values user freedom and privacy and an HN reader working on adtech in the same room, we would not agree on many of these topics.
That seems quite a strong statement. Has there been some sort of survey that motivated it?
(Full disclosure: I've been here a long time. I make my living from building tech. I have no interest in doing that kind of work for any employer at any price, nor in running my own business interests that way. I'm well aware that this probably leaves lots of money on the table in both cases and I have absolutely no problem with that. And my cognitive dissonance can look at itself in the mirror just fine when it wakes up in the morning before browsing an adblocked version of the web over breakfast.)
- All the FAANG/FAANG suppliers
- All startups or established projects that involve data gathering, advertising, SEO, skinner boxes, dopamine response, parasocial relationship manipulation, optimizing time spent on controlled platforms and products
- All projects that facilitate the above as suppliers or second-order businesses
- All gig economy/surveilled/taylorized work facilitators
- All coding work that involves ranking and surveilling people for life altering services such as loans, insurance, healthcare
- All coding work done to optimize the wealth of the noble class (themselves the main beneficiaries of surveillance)
...there's probably not much left. Even if you maintain a strict definition and include only direct adtech shenanigans I wouldn't be surprised if that were a huge number in and of itself.
Adtech doesn't have to be surveillance capitalism
If we're talking about personalized adtech, sure. But if we're talking about just adtech in general, not necessarily
There is zero hyperbole in this. I've worked on digital identity solutions, and fundamentally, they are not a consumer product anybody actually wants because their use cases are all about enforcing rules against the identity subject. The only way the tech survives is it must be mandated, and then it's a question of whose problem does it solve?
The only people that a global digital identity solves a problem for are the people administering it, literally against the whole world. The survivors will ask, "how did it all happen so fast, what were the warnings?" and this obscure comment will be the hunger stone and harbinger. I'm literally saying millions of people will die, partially because of my inability to be persuasive, but mostly because of your misunderstanding of what this technology does and of what it is the effect.
Doesn't the CLEAR example in the article's opening paragraph contradict your claim?
And not just the state, and it's enlisting the help of private companies.
From the article:
> The privacy risks, including the possibility for constant surveillance and data harvesting, will fade into the background when you are about to miss your flight if you can’t skip to the front of the line
Personally, when going to Mexico, I was asked to submit to a photo verification to board the plane. I asked to opt out. I was told it was impossible.
Later, after verification, I realized I was lied to and manipulated: data was obtained under false pretense, under threat of being unable to board, and to top it out, with a lie!
Next time in the airport, I will only unmask to TSA agents, and only those who require I do, never to the gate because as said in the article all it takes is one leak and then it's impossible to undo:
> But as Nick Corbishley, author of a recent book on digital IDs, points out, decisions made in the moment may carry long-term negative consequences: “If biometric data is hacked, there is no way of undoing the damage. You cannot change or cancel your iris, fingerprint, or DNA like you can change a password or cancel your credit card.” Unless we collectively decline to participate in this new social experiment, digital IDs—tied to private demographic, financial, location, movement, and biometric data—will become mechanisms for bulk data harvesting and tracking of populations around the globe. Welcome to the new abnormal.
it's supposed to be illegal for the feds to use private companies to do what they can't but for some reason this hasn't gotten killed in court. literally the agency shouldn't exist nor should airport security like it does now.
It’s important to send the message now that these programs/services are not wanted and should be shut down immediately.
Inside the EU's Schengen area, the ID is only needed at borders.
Again, once inside another Schengen country, you do not need to carry it around.
I'm not sure if the same rules apply for foreigners though, once they are inside the EU.
From trial and error over the last five years I'd say three out of five airlines will let you board flights using your driver's license as ID. They always complain but they let you through anyway.
ID checks at Schengen to Schengen borders are absent anyway since many years so this isn't a big surprise.
That said: I'm a white man.
These rules apply to everyone by law.
Sadly, the less 'Caucasian' your phenotype is, the more likely your experience with EU security forces will be for them to expect you to carry ID -- despite the above rules.
And boarding a flight with your driver's license if you are not white -- forget it.
Racism is everywhere though. It is just especially painful to see in this context.
Additionally citizen IDs are nothing new, at least in Eastern Europe, where you will get one when you reach 15 years of age.
Sigh.
Of course there is the case of a rogue terminal surreptitiously saving your fingerprint or photo, but even before we had automated facial recognition at border crossings, you'd still have to hand in your passport to be scanned (to read the MRZ) and stamped, so a rogue terminal could have been saving photos all along.
Although the crackdown on illegal immigration means that I now need to prove my right to work in the UK whenever I take a new job. I'm not sure how I'd do this if I didn't have a passport.
I've reacted by becoming much more conservative, voting for deep state supporting candidates because at least they're the devil we know. I guess I'll just keep my head down politically and keep working on communications technology that might extricate us from the state gradually. Because replacing the state top-down with fascist madmen certainly isn't going to lead anywhere good.
Without the constitution, would you be holding all the cards or would the Army?
The armed services, being part of the old government would lose their authority along with the rest.
This assumes a peaceful transition of power, if violence is used instead all bets are off.
Author is making quite a leap that the _only_ way to receive a digital ID is to get vaccinated. If a program like this ever does take off you will see alternative methods of identification acquisition. Case in point: I don't need a driver's license to get a state issued ID. Functionally they are the same in terms of proving I am who I say I am, but one affords additional benefits of stating I can drive.
There are exceptions for kids that cannot be vaccinated because of medical reasons which is argument for those parents who does not want to vaccine their kids and still want get them to kindergarten regardless their health condition.
Social Credit Systems are just lakes of aggregated data accessible by a government. From your health to how you choose you will end up a model in a prediction system.
System detected you bought yellow paint
System predicts you will spend 1 year in prison
I'm guessing the stated mission has been changed once or twice since it was founded.
It's a username, not a password. Because it's public, shared (you leave bits of bioinformation everywhere you go) and not deliberately changeable.
A password is none of those things.
