Home owner’s association; when you buy a house and it is part of a HOA, you have to sign a contract to join the HOA as a requirement of buying, which means you have to pay dues and abide by the rules of the organization, and you have to require the next buyer to also join in order to sell your house.
IMO for some people arguing is a form of intimacy
I wonder if part of the reason for supporting this is that they like the secondary effect that all this information is now also available to governments
The profit they get from the sale of the television should be enough that they don’t have to make the television shit to get slightly more profit, why do people even buy these
But televisions cost hundreds of dollars at least
“each new connected TV platform user generates around $5 per quarter in data and advertising revenue.”
Sounds like a pathetic amount of money for betraying your customers with a shitty ad infested smart tv
I bet you could do it with ring signatures
a message signed with a ring signature is endorsed by someone in a particular set of people. One of the security properties of a ring signature is that it should be computationally infeasible to determine which of the set’s members’ keys was used to produce the signature
I agree that it’s bad that there’s a false impression of privacy, but I think it would be better to allow this as an extension or something and not include it as a feature in the UI, or at least not on by default. That way people who otherwise wouldn’t bother won’t be tempted to drive themselves crazy looking for imaginary enemies.
it may be moral in some extreme examples
Are they extreme? Is bad censorship genuinely rare?
but there are means of doing that completely removed from the scope of microblogging on a corporate behemoth’s web platform. For example, there is an international organization who’s sole purpose is perusing human rights violations.
I think it’s relevant that tech platforms, and software more generally, has a sort of reach and influence that international organizations do not, especially when it comes to the flow of information. What is the limit you’re suggesting here on what may be done to oppose harmful censorship? That it be legitimized by some official consensus? That a “right to censor” exist and be enforced but be subject to some form of formalized regulation? That would exempt any tyranny of the most influential states.
I’m going to challenge your assertion that you’re not talking about
You can interpret my words how you want and I can’t stop you willfully misinterpreting me, but I am telling you explicitly about what I am saying and what I am not saying because I have something specific I want to communicate. When you argue that
I believe each country should get to have a say in what is permissible, and content deemed unacceptable should be blockable by region
In the given context, you are asserting that states have an apparently unconditional moral right to censor, and that this right means third parties have a duty to go along with it and not interfere. I think this is wrong as a general principle, independent of the specific example of Twitter vs Brazil. If the censorship is wrong, then it is ok to fight it.
Now you can argue that some censorship may be harmful because of its impact on society, such as the removal of books from school hampering fair and complete education or banning research texts that expose inconvenient truths.
Ok, but the question is, what can be done about it? Say a country is doing that. A web service defies that government by providing downloads of those books to its citizens. Are they morally bound to not do that? Should international regulations prevent what they are doing? I think no, it is ok and good to do, if the censorship is harmful.
Since my argument isn’t about what should be censored, I’m intentionally leaving the boundaries of “harmful censorship” open to interpretation, save the assertion that it exists and is widely practiced.
I also think that any service (twitter) refusing to abide by the laws of a country (Brazil) has no place in that country.
That could be true in a literal sense (the country successfully bans the use of the service), or not (the country isn’t willing or able to prevent its use). Morally though, I’d say you have a place wherever people need your help, whether or not their government wants them to be helped.
If a government is imposing harmful censorship I think supporting resistance of that censorship is the right thing to do. A company that isn’t located in that country, ethically shouldn’t be complying with such orders. Make them burn political capital taking extreme and implausible measures.
Well, partly. For instance you might be able to approach the problem of gun violence with a culture of responsible gun use. But it could also reduce violence if you got rid of the guns. The problem happens when multiple conditions are satisfied; both that the tool is available and that people are going to misuse it.
To quote an excerpt from the book I mentioned:
I shall argue that the most tragic episodes of state-initiated social engineering originate in a pernicious combination of four elements. All four are necessary for a full-fledged disaster. The first element is the administrative ordering of nature and society—the transformative state simplifications described above. By themselves, they are the unremarkable tools of modern statecraft; they are as vital to the maintenance of our welfare and freedom as they are to the designs of a would-be modern despot. They undergird the concept of citizenship and the provision of social welfare just as they might undergird a policy of rounding up undesirable minorities.
The other elements being “high-modernist ideology”, an authoritarian state, and “a prostrate civil society that lacks the capacity to resist these plans”.
The problem is that, like with the guns example, “regulating how it’s used” and avoiding all that stuff is a really precarious and difficult problem, and failure seems very likely, especially given the state of the US right now. For dangerous tools like effective identification schemes, I think favoring the added safety of resisting them is a legitimate choice when you can’t really trust the people who would be able to use them.
It’s unfortunate that SSN has come to be used as a form of proof of existence as a person, but I’m glad at least that more effective means of formally tracking and quantifying us have been successfully fought back. Banks, governments, service providers and employers having some friction and uncertainty in whether their database entry accurately corresponds to you is itself a valuable form of privacy.
I’ve been reading the book Seeing Like A State and I think it has some pretty good points about how civic legibility and record keeping is established as a tool of centralized control and can be a dangerous double edged sword.
Can anyone recommend any cool mods/projects built on top of Minetest?
tbf the article only assumes he told them no because of how implausible it seems the task would be, the actual details of what if anything was discussed and what happened are unknown.
Implying that it was worse and has gotten better, or will get better to the point where data hoarding is unnecessary. I guess it would be nice if things turned out that well.
Privacy means personal agency and freedom from people, whether individuals, companies, or the government, controlling you with direct or implied threats, or more subtle manipulation, which they can do because they have your dox and because information is power.
A lack of privacy adds fuel to the polycrisis because if we can’t act in relative secrecy that basically means we can’t act freely at all, and nothing can challenge whoever runs the panopticon.
It’s important though because if that’s the real reason Google pays them, they could come up with some other excuse to give them the money.
Could you elaborate? Does HOA mean something different in other countries?