Everything you do is being recorded
theatlantic.com165 points by ike_usawa 11 hours ago
165 points by ike_usawa 11 hours ago
https://archive.is/JxaZ7
we desperately need a separation of corporations and state the same way we have a separation of church and state. we need a government that is antagonistic towards corporations that are abusing us. it’s wild how much influence they have and how little pushback the government ever gives them when they clearly abuse us from every direction. We need PII to be so toxic that companies run screaming from the liability unless they have explicit consent[1] and a legit reason to house it. A company selling me widgets wouldn't store or let another company store extra information about me if it subjected them the widget seller to HIPAA. Or better yet, something more stringent. We don't need the government to be antagonistic toward corporations; we just need a government that makes the corporations internalize the risk they're making us take. [1] The fact that ToS are enforceable when every court in the country knows that only a vanishly small percentage of people ever read them, much less understand them, means that they're not doing their job. > We need PII to be so toxic that companies run screaming from the liability This is how healthcare workers used to treat health information protected by HIPAA, but it seems like the big corporations don't really even care about it. Nothing ever comes from violations besides slap on the wrist/cost of doing business penalties. You can't do anything without waiving all your rights, granting permission to be recorded, granting permission to use your photograph for anything they want, allowing your recorded audio to run through AI for transcription (and whatever else they want to do), granting permission to share your data with their partners, associates, and some vague description of "anyone we decide at a later date". That's before you can even sign-up, receive care, have a service rendered, enter into a business establishment. There's pages of fine print documenting it all in vague terms that ambiguously safe guard the provider from any liability, but half the time, you don't even get to opportunity to (not) read it. It's just a link to go elsewhere and (not) read it. They add as many steps between you even reading what rights you're giving away, so that even the people who had a mind to do so would get fatigued, and they make you do it while there are people queuing up behind you, or you're almost done with your purchase/subscription, etc. Everything is so consumer hostile (and expensive in America), but no "better" service can swoop in, because the established Big corps get to break all the rules or can afford the token penalties to give them an unstoppable market share no honest disruptor/competition could ever overcome. On even ground, no competent person would choose to be abused by our resident monopolies vs a reasonably similar priced local upstart, and a lot people would even pay (a little) more for a better experience/product/service. > we need a government that is antagonistic towards corporations that are abusing us Please don't. The entire civilized world for all of history and before has been built on the uncomfortable alliance between power/capability and governance/legitimacy. Protection-seeking is the primary support system for tyranny which is happy to induce the chaos they protect you from. We just need enough negative feedback for any kind of abuse that it stops, because regulations have to be slow to be accurate and thus invite abuse innovation. The main part of that negative feedback is effective competition so people can vote with their feet. So, ask not for antagonism but for real alternatives. Considering the state of the federal government under the current regime it's a challenge to identify safe government and business relationships. The second paragraph by itself is enough, the first is a tad hubristic and vague. The good things that got us here are not necessarily the things that will get us there, there being wherever we ideally want to end up... >The main part of that negative feedback is effective competition The comment you responded to allows for "corporations that abuse us" to include those that actively try to prevent effective competition. You don't really explain why being antagonistic to those corporations would be a problem. but you don't have separation of church and state... thats a poor comparison. religious dogma eats into nearly all public discourse. I was watching a documentary about the first food regulations in the US today, lobbyists are as old as the state here, good luck getting them out, the entire system was designed by and for them The original research project this company looks based on was very cool and way early: https://sandlab.cs.uchicago.edu/jammer/ There's gotta be a record of you someplace You gotta be on somebody's books The lowdown a picture of your face Your injured looks
The sacred and profane The pleasure and the pain Somewhere your fingerprints remain concrete Honestly I can live with it because I know that my country will never turn into a theocracy or a dictatorship. That would require people to bow to a higher power than themselves and develop actual beliefs lol. I do believe people still vote for dictatorship if they think it will fuck over others much harder, then themselves, and "they deserve it". Obama was promoting The Age of Surveillance Capitalism over seven years ago now. Industry insiders have known all this since 1999. Yet almost every single person I know carries a cellphone and drives a car with telemetry, things that are entirely optional. Most humans use Meta products regularly; also optional. For all the feigned outrage, people want this, and will work hard every day to pay for the next iteration of the surveillance apparatus. PS: Something in this vein that many people are unaware of is that the 6G standard for cell towers is planned to include ISAC (Integrated Sensing and Communication). I haven’t heard a single AFK person talk about this. I don't think people want this. I think people want the other benefits that those things bring, and increasingly feel that it's impossible to escape being surveilled anyway so do their best to ignore the whole issue. Being resigned to something is not the same as wanting that thing. Sometimes it’s also a pain to opt out. The outrageous prices of used (low telemetry) cars make them a poor value proposition, for example. Depending on the model, a used car can be a decade old with half of its lifetime miles on it already and the seller will still want $14k or something crazy like that. When you factor in the parts of its history that carfax doesn’t cover and the stream of repairs you’re likely to be saddled with, finding a 0%-2% financing deal on something new at ~$20-24k begins to look a lot more attractive. > I don't think people want this There was a comment made here a month or two ago, about someone from a SE Asia country (I forget which; maybe Bangladesh?) talking about how their government installed AI traffic enforcement cameras all over, and they went from one of the deadliest, most chaotic road systems in the world to Singapore-level rule-following in the space of just a couple months. As a result, the cameras have become quite popular because there's less traffic, travelling is easier and more predictable, and road deaths have plummeted. I imagine there are a number of similar situations in every country, where the deployment of AI surveillance has a sufficiently measurably positive impact that it becomes popular. > their government installed AI traffic enforcement cameras all over What does the AI actually do? Identify specific cars and their drivers, or something? What actual enforcement actions were taken as a result, and against how many drivers before it stopped? One might wonder how much of the effect was placebo (i.e., people conforming simply due to the belief of being surveilled). > What does the AI actually do? Identify specific cars and their drivers, or something? Yes, exactly. It identifies cars and drivers who are committing traffic violations, and issues citations. I don't have the specific numbers you ask for, seeing as I can't even remember the country, but it's not difficult to imagine that if sufficiently many such cameras are installed that most moving violations on major roadways are caught and punished, then yes, people will come to (reasonably) believe that the cost of committing the violation is close to the price of the fine, rather than close to zero. It's one thing to blow by a pedestrian crossing the street, it's another to do so knowing you'll probably be charged $150 (or whatever) for having done it. Agree, you’re either a digital hermit or you’re part of the problem / system It’s enticing to believe we coulda gone another way. Such as having a paid versions of these services. But free is just Soooo enticing. It hacks peoples brains. That cellphone and car and television and most other things that spy on you were most certainly not free. The really obnoxious part is that with the possible exception of maps all of the other "services" touted as vital parts of a digitally connected existence are so enshittified at this point that the original value proposition for all of them is absent. So we're left with this zombie rhetoric around being disconnected while "connecting" means you spend hours every day staring at bot content and ads. You really spend hours a day staring at bots and ads? Fuck no, I stopped using my phone for anything besides maps and phone stuff before the pandemic. You peddling the idea that that isn't what all of the social platforms are these days? By leveraging mobile network infrastructure – towers, spectrum, antennas, and some hardware – ISAC can detect, locate, and track objects (including passive ones with no electronics). This will enable a wide range of use cases such as UAV airspace monitoring, autonomous vehicle safety, industrial automation, and immersive AR experiences. Commercial deployment is expected alongside 6G rollouts in the 2030 timeframe I wonder how precise this will be? A flying object sounds reasonable but could it actually track say individual people walking on a street further down the line? Traversing life without a cell phone is a fun experiment. Here and there I forget mine and spend a day without the distraction - glorious way to spend time. The outrage isn't feigned; it just comes from a minority of people. The masses aren't established to "want this"; they may just not care. There are multiple things we need to acknowledge: - Consumers largely do not know these things. They are either not disclosed, or buried within a TOS that they cannot read. This is all done on purpose. The reason the TOS is obtuse, long, inaccurate, and updated weekly is so you won't read or understand it. - In most markets there is no choice. For smartphones you do not have a choice, both Apple and Google do extensive surveillance. If you want to bank, get a job, and all around be successful, you have to swallow the surveillance cost. If you want a new car, again, no choice. If you work a job, again, no choice on the computer or software. - It is not reasonable to expect consumers to do extensive research on everything they buy. Consumers have lives, children, jobs. They're not going to sit and spend 10+ hours researching every thing they buy, especially when most of that research is fruitless. - There are tradeoffs with everything. Yes we can use Linux, I sure do. But for other consumers, now they need to spend a lot of time understanding that. Yes we can use Graphene OS, but certain apps won't work. the main solution is the same as with many other problems - education on what's wrong + making the right way as easy as possible it's easy to fall into complain hole, as that seems to fulfill the 1st part but 2nd part is as much or even more valuable > making the right way as easy as possible I wish I knew what you were talking about here. It seems like the easy way would be to forbid the collection of this data… but that is obviously not happening, so I need a different part 2. consider what GP complained about - everyone carrying phones that data is collected from/by, and useing Meta products making easier the alternatives to phone tracking means promoting life outside phones, promoting cellphones/OSes that don't spy on you and explaining ways to minimize tracking (like disabling apps' access to the internet) making easier the alternatives to Meta means promoting competitors, promoting communication/image/information channels outside Meta, promoting life outside Meta products defeatism is even worse than grumbles - it fulfills neither of the goals Offering ‘just don’t use modern communication’ as a solution when ‘ban data collection and retention’ is right there feels like a way to derail the conversation rather than an honest proposal. > Most humans use Meta products regularly; also optional. For all the feigned outrage, people want this, and will work hard every day to pay for the next iteration of the surveillance apparatus. This is a perfect example of the revealed-preference fallacy. The use of providers like Meta does not reflect a well-informed, freely chosen preference. Meta spends a ton of money to squash competition, remove viable alternatives, and to make their products addictive. > This is a perfect example of the revealed-preference fallacy. The fallacy here is that you think people should have difference preferences than they actually do. "People disagree with me? They must be ill-informed." It is sometimes true that a large group of people hold a preference due to being misinformed, though. I don’t think a kneejerk assertion that GP is assuming their opinion is true and anyone who disagrees is an idiot is merited here. Meta has done a lot of shitty things to acquire and addict users, and is analogous to a massive regional monopoly in the U.S. Both of those indicate that users of Facebook might be less than rational (in the economic sense) about their choice of social media product. People wouldn't want this if they were adequately educated. So much this. When my son turned 12, I told him how some of the various social media sites and smart technologies work, and he’s avoided social media altogether ever since (he’s now an adult). He always uses ad blockers and content filters, and he generally made good decisions around phone use, and other tech use from a privacy respecting perspective. Prior to this discussion, he was eager to be on social media apps because other kids his age were on them. People respond to knowledge about these topics, but there isn’t a mainstream popular individual talking about it. Everyone is so silo’d, it would be quite difficult to reach people, and depending upon the political leanings of such a person, half the population would reactively go the opposite direction… on what really shouldn’t be partisan. No, this is not the way to go. Consumers cannot possibly understand all potential ways in which they can be screwed over, and even if they could, it is entirely likely that there are no good choices because consumers will have to choose between e.g privacy violation or environmental destruction, or privacy violation of some degree vs another degree. This is why governments exist. Now with super sized data centers (touted as primarily for 'AI'), you don't even need to choose between privacy violation and environmental destruction!!! So efficient! > Consumers cannot possibly understand all potential ways in which they can be screwed over In a democracy, consumers and the government are the exact same thing. Since they ostensibly do not understand all of the potential ways in which they can be screwed over, how is calling themselves government going to magically change that? Maybe you are imagining a dictatorship instead, where the government is only a subset of all consumers, but even then the dictators are still just feeble consumers themselves remaining within the subset of all consumers. Being a dictator doesn't make you omniscient; still only human like all the others. Government exists to clean up the outliers who are not behaving in line with the wishes of the consumers, but that cleanup can only occur when their undesirable behaviour is out there for all to plainly see. You cannot enforce what you don't recognize. > consumers will have to choose between e.g privacy violation or environmental destruction, or privacy violation of some degree vs another degree. Temporarily, perhaps, but in a functioning market one of those consumers feeling underserved will rise up to offer what's missing, eventually satisfying consumers again. However, ironically, consumers often consider that undesirable behaviour and use government to block that rising from occurring. For some reason consumers prefer to protect the market incumbents even when they claim to not like what the incumbents are doing. > In a democracy, consumers and the government are the exact same thing. This is a straw man. Consumers are represented by representatives who should have their interests in mind, e.g the consumer votes for someone who in turn votes for outcomes. This means that there can absolutely be a difference in knowledge between the government and its citizens, and so no, they are not the exact same thing. One group is trying to do their job of being a citizen, while the other group should be doing their job of representing the interests of the citizens that voted on them in whatever is relevant. One job clearly should not involve making sure your privacy isn't constantly and covertly violated by foreign nationals, and one job clearly should. Which is which is an exercise for the reader. > but in a functioning market Great! Where can I find me one of those? 5G edge devices already have support for mmWave and beamforming. The ability to track the micromovements of a person’s trachea as they think in words (”internal monologue”) and reconstruct their thoughts from movement data reduces to a software problem: the hardware is there and the algorithms have been established in literature. That is very interesting. I wasn’t aware of their ability to act as acoustic sensors. It makes sense, but it’s not my field so I hadn’t thought about it. Any link to the trachea vibrations to reproduce inner monologue source? I think the major shift with the 6g standard is that general purpose sensing is now explicit to the design and intended use of the system. It's hard for me to take this perspective seriously when you describe a cellphone as "entirely optional". Our society is structured around the assumption that you'll have not just a cellphone, but a smartphone. Without acknowledging that, how can we have a realistic discussion? Many businesses require you to use a smartphone in some way. Some government services also require one. Before cellphones, there were payphones everywhere for people to use when they needed to get into contact. Now there are hardly any left in most countries, so your ability to communicate would actually be worse than in the pre-cellphone era. Sure you could ask someone to use their phone, but if a stranger asked me that these days I would likely refuse. The only reason I take my cell phone with me is in the event my truck breaks down. I have lost count of how many times I forgot it at home. I've had business tell me to install some app but I just tell them no or make them do the work for me. If they want money they will fill in the information. Over the years I have been parting ways from businesses that I can not walk in and talk face-to-face with someone and for good reason as it is getting harder and harder to reach a real person in customer support for online businesses. People are getting accounts disabled or deleted with no recourse. I don’t carry a cell phone, although I technically own one (it usually stays at home). For a while I had to tell a cashier that I don’t have a phone on occasion, but I’ve noticed that many places seem to be backing off on pushing their apps or requiring a phone for some part of the transaction. I used to carry a legit dumbphone (not one of the new Android/AOSP “dumbphones”) and that worked just as well. It’s even trendy now! I do not carry a cellphone. I am employed and live in a major city. I never think about not having one. I know multiple other people, also employed, living both rurally and in cities, who do not carry cellphones. It is entirely optional. Less and less though and you need to go through quite a bit of trouble sometimes already. Banking, gov apps, I know more and more companies you cannot enter nor clock in without smartphone etc. Sure, you can just resign, move country, try to find another bank; in the end you will run out of options as they are all moving there. > I am employed and live in a major city. ... . I know multiple other people, also employed, living both rurally and in cities, who do not carry cellphones. This doesn't mean much. I know multiple people who fit this description, live in the US, and can't speak or read English. However, speaking English isn't meaningfully optional. You will face constant limitations and problems in every aspect of life. There are people who don't use electricity, so I guess by your definition that's optional too? > I never think about not having one. Sure you don't. Genuinely. Thinking back on it now, the only times I notice it is in some restaurants that don’t have paper menus out by default. I need to ask for one, which feels very odd and kind of awkward. This is the only instance I can think of. What happens when you're meeting up with someone? With the folks I know who don't have a phone, this is always a real pain point because they don't have a way to communicate or receive changes of plans, "I'm going to be late", etc... We agree on when to meet and where, and then we both actually show up. The whole last-minute plan changing thing is a pretty recent phenomenon, I believe. Do you never have problems with transportation like breakdowns or accidents stopping the traffic for a while or having some sort of emergency where you need to drop everything an take care of it? So many stores and (all?) banks require two-factor login now, where an SMS sent to a phone is the second factor. How do you cope with this? I do not carry a cellphone, but I own an old one with no data plan that remains off and in a drawer except for when used for things like this. I am not sure I have run into any stores that require 2 factor. Mostly just official stuff like banks. My work has multiple systems that require 2fa on a regular basis. It's actually quite annoying, and the alternative options to 2fa don't work for every system. The glorious day in the future when Oauth is confined to the dust bin of history and logging in to anything doesn't require a web browser redirecting 10 times. Counterpoint: I could not do my job without one. Clients expect support over WhatsApp. For sure, but you still do retain the option to leave it at work, unless you have some kind of 24/7 sales job. I do think privacy at work is not an option for most people. "Our society is structured around the assumption that you'll have not just a cellphone, but a smartphone." Except it really isn't, it just seems that way when you spend a bunch of time on your phone. As part of an utterly graceless transition to middle age I bailed on social media and have aggressively refused to engage with service-related apps of any kind (fuck mychart, drive-thru mobile apps, and the horse they rode in on). To the extent that I use my phone at all these days it's to check text messages, field calls, and (rarely) navigate via maps. I've reverted to the Old Ways (mailing paper checks, calling ahead to get live humans to explain shit, etc) and it's been pretty frictionless. I've yet to encounter a situation where I was prevented from doing anything because I didn't phone. I have seen enough instances of government authorities abusing their power (or even civilians using the courts against another civilian) to know that the best defense you have in a situation where you are the victim is to have your own recording. Easiest example is having your own dash cam (don’t know why all auto manufacturers don’t have Tesla style camera recordings, especially given that all new cars come with cameras anyway). Of course, now that video editing is cheap and difficult to spot, who knows if your evidence will make much of a difference. > Of course, now that video editing is cheap and difficult to spot, who knows if your evidence will make much of a difference. Maybe you could use a trusted timestamping service to stamp keyframes or stills from your video while you're recording? If the time of the recording is not in question, it would bound the kind of video editing people could plausibly claim that you could've done. It's not foolproof - if you have enough face data of the person you want to frame and you've been to the room where the conversation takes place, you could have made a fake video beforehand and spliced it into the conversation at the time of the recording. But that would at least take a lot of preparation and quite a bit of luck and timing to find a place in the conversation that's just long enough to copy your edited version in without arousing suspicion. For dashcam videos it would be difficult to merge your edit with existing traffic, etc... > Of course, now that video editing is cheap and difficult to spot, who knows if your evidence will make much of a difference There's a pretty substantial legal difference between the contested opinion of two people in court versus deliberately fabricating evidence to try and deceive a judge. Suddenly your civil matter is now a criminal one. What a wild, victim blaming take. Zero people want to be surveilled. They want the other benefits that come with technology and reluctantly accept, as a cost, some lower of privacy. > For all the feigned outrage, people want this, and will work hard every day to pay for the next iteration of the surveillance apparatus. My sad realization is that the Buddhists were right all along. The primary drivers of human mind, before self-purification, are greed, anger, and ignorance. What you are describing here is greed. People want to get useful things for free. This is the core of the problem. If people were, by default, expecting to pay for everything they use, spying on them would not be accepted. Instead, they want stuff for free and they choose to be willfully blind to the spying. so obama was doing what in 2019? are you an LLM trained in 2023? I see no 2019. They changed it to 1999. So, six years before he was a senator. Could be, but seems implausible. Almost every person installs security cameras hoping that one day they will "catch the criminal" unaware that the footage probably is used in all possible ways all the time, yet in case when the crime against them finally happens the footage might not be admitted as a proof. No I install security cameras as a deterrent measure to keep people at my door front measured in their interactions, particularly when it may just be my wife at home alone. They are mounted extremely obviously for this purpose. I greatly hope they never catch anyone doing anything. It's delightful to have paranoid neighbours who install cameras to enforce appropriate behavior in the neighbourhood. They always assure the camera doesn't record anything outside of their property and that they never check the recordings. Given the reason why they installed camera one can absolutely believe them. It's very calming. > yet in case when the crime against them finally happens the footage might not be admitted as a proof. Or there is simply not enough staff available to carry out the procedures needed to apprehend and charge the individual. Or a myriad of other things. People think law enforcement is easy. If a right or affluent person is a victim of crime the resources will be available, funny is that people who think they are outsmarting someone with their security cameras are rarely among them. The EFF or some other watchdog should put out some public ads that depict corporations as a creepy person stalking someone: It's a lot more disgusting and universally hated when you hear about a peeping tom, or a pervert, or a jealous ex hounding someone, but when faceless corporations and governments do it to EVERYBODY 24/7, everyone's like, ehh. I mean, right now, just think about me, clicking on your HN profile, googling your name, going through all your public photos.. Don't you find me repulsive just talking about that? This puts me in mind of the infamous GMail Man commercial that Microsoft put out: It's about intention. I don't want someone threatening or evil going through my info but don't mind stuff being public in general, like this comment for example. Yes, but when the surveillance is sweeping, global and total, you can’t really be sure about “intent”, current or future. i get a little thrill knowing im that important to someone :) Right? There are 8 billion humans on those planet. You are 0.0000000125% of humanity. No one outside your family and friends even knows you, nevermind gives a shit about you, unless you stick out in some way. If GP wants to take a tour of my GitHub or my blog and send me a thoughtful email, I'd be delighted! How about when that thoughtful email becomes a visit from law enforcement because your projects don’t align with the current administration’s views? When something you said offers support for anyone other than The Party’s chosen ethnic group? How about it? I am not that interesting or powerful at all. Yes, there's a worst case scenario where the government raids my house and I get shot, and I wouldn't like that, but I refuse to live in fear of the bogeyman. "what if the government becomes a dictatorship" is a stupid question: you either stood up and opposed it, or you let it happen. My privacy is important as a matter of consent. But I should not have to hide my sexuality or identity, nor my politics and if my support of a marginalized group exists then what is the point of hiding it while they are oppressed? What benefit does that bring? Encouraging people to be private in their views and anymore and anonymous in their "support" is exactly how fascists crush their opposition. No. Why should I find you repulsive? You might find something I wrote interesting. Then whatever public info there is on me helps you to get to know me a bit better. You may stop there and forget about me, or you may try to reach out. There is nothing wrong about that. >Why should I find you repulsive? There could be a number of reasons. Am I not trying hard enough? > Why should I find you repulsive? Me googling your shit might lead to your real name, your family photos etc Just because it's all public doesn't mean you want the cashier from the supermarket following you around to your family picnic or just because you like to let the sunlight in doesn't mean you want random pedestrians peering in through your windows.. I can't believe this needs to be spelled out here: "Public" life is compartmentalized. > Just because it's all public doesn't mean you want the cashier from the supermarket following you around to your family picnic. This has never happened to me. Out of the space of “bad things that can happen to me” I don’t have time to worry about things with such a small probability of occurring. I think if you're a fat middle aged man, it's not likely to happen to you personally. But you must have daughters, nieces, a mother, or some sort of female presence in your life. It happens to people like them. Don't put on the Internet what you don't want found as it's always and forever public, I thought everyone knew the first rule. Oh boy. It's NOT about whether something's "public" or not: It's about someone "connecting the dots" between ALL your public activities. Someone following you OUTSIDE their "space" that you visited and then invading your other spaces. People don't usually want to mix their social circles. e.g. nobody likes a snoopy overprotective parent following their [teen] kids around wherever the children go with their friends. Nobody likes their spouse coming uninvited on a night out with the guys/gals. Or, when you reply to someone on HN or Reddit, and they don't like what you say about 1 specific topic, then they go and downvote ALL your comments about everything else you said! That's perfectly legal. It's allowed. Nothing's stopping it. And hey, you commented publicly so you were "asking for it", right? BUT IT'S A FUCKING DICK MOVE You can easily find my home address by starting with my HN profile. I do understand what you are getting at. I just don’t find people repulsive by being curious of me; even if they find materials I myself did not make public. As an aside, I sometimes stumble upon websites of people who write and show pictures of themselves and their family. I find them beautiful[0] to visit and hope more people would do that, as was more common 20 years ago. > I just don’t find people repulsive by being curious of me; even if they find materials I myself did not make public. If they do it just to reach out to you with good intentions then it's fine. But if they do it to dox you or harm you in any other way, then it's not fine. Someone would only be able to connect the dots based on what you publicly put out there. If you don't put anything out, there's nothing to connect the dots, unless you buy some sort of dark web leaked dataset. None of your analogies are comparable to online public information because you decide what to put out online, and I never said anything about legality so not sure why you bring that up. You don’t necessarily decide what to put online. Friends may upload photos of you, data brokers make your information available to “people search” websites, if you buy a house your information is available unless you put it in a blind trust, etc. If you go beyond the web to private services then you have companies like Flock and retailers who use facial recognition, who make their data available to subscribers and partners. Disturbed people with access to this data can use it to harm people, like the Ebay exec who stalked a critic or the occasional police officer who stalks a romantic interest. > unless you buy some sort of dark web leaked dataset Customers of such datasets: banks, insurance companies, HR companies, marketing firms, governments, etc. I think people's idea of privacy is very simplistic and personal and relies on the disgust of a human peering over your files. Most laypeople don't have the same disgust of machines peering over their personal files that is why the weirdo video recording elicits a negative response but Meta or Alphabet doing it doesn't. Plus the fact that they "depend" on Meta and Alphabet tech makes it easier to give them a pass not unlike fans of [insert your favourite celebrity] who happily look away or justify the celebrity's bad actions. I think people would find it disgusting, it's just very hard to know what data is being used and how and sold to whom by these companies. It's a very opaque by design. You've tripped right over the difference though. Corporations aren't people. They do not and cannot present a personal threat to you. Even your trailing example falls flat on this: for the activity to be distressing you had to recontextualize it back to the individual level. > Corporations ... do not and cannot present a personal threat to you. ...is this for real Holy fucking hell. Someone please, I can't How about Archive Buttons? [0] I don't know what's going on behind those 5 buttons, but this was the first, and who knows? [0] https://www.archivebuttons.com/articles?article=https://www.... Don’t click that link. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Archive.today_guidan... They recommend archive.org instead but archive.org's version of that article gets masked by an error page preventing you from reading it where the archive.is link works fine. So there isn't a choice here if you actually want to see the article (without subscribing to the atlantic). I clicked that link and I don't see anything wrong with that. It's not like I donate money by doing that. And they still are very useful resource, even if they're not good enough for Wikipedia (if they indeed tampered with some old archives, it's pretty obvious why) Thank you for the heads up! DDOS attacks are pretty concerning, but even more concerning is the potential alteration of content. Diabolical. That said, journalism needs funding more than ever, please if you can, try your best to pay for it. I think that archive links should be made to include a cryptographic hash of the file; this can prevent alteration of content (including of the original file that it is copied from) but also can allow alternative sources of the file to be found (or verified to be correct) according to the hash. (If someone is concerned they want their username removed, they could perhaps edit their copy of the file first and then archive it, although they should have someone to trust if it matches the original one or not, if it has been modified in this way (or any other way, e.g. removing some scripts and CSS etc).) Why is it obvious why they tampered with old archives? Why did they tamper with old archives? > Why is it obvious why they tampered with old archives? Why did they tamper with old archives? See section "Blog capture tampered with": * https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/02/wikipedia-bans-a... Also: > On 20 February 2026, the English Wikipedia banned all links to archive.today, citing the DDoS attack and evidence that archived content was tampered with: Discussion had discovered that instances of Nora's name were replaced with Patokallio's and that "Nora" was likely an appropriated identity—the name belonged to a real person, whose only connection to archive.today had been a prior content takedown request.[18][17][19] The community's decision was made despite concerns over maintaining content verifiability—partly undermined by the discovery of the alterations— while removing and replacing the second-largest archiving service used across the Wikimedia Foundation's projects. The Wikimedia Foundation had stated its readiness to take action regardless of the community verdict.[18][20] Patokallio expressed his satisfaction with the outcome.[3] * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archive.today#Attack_on_Gyrova... > Specifically, AT's maintainers reportedly tweaked snapshots of a third-party blog post that Patokallio referred to in his February 2026 article about the DDoS attack. AT changed the name of a "Nora" person in said post to Jani Patokallio, making it look as if he had written some comments there. Eagle-eyed Wikipedia editors spotted the alterations, which have since then been reverted, but the action made it easy for them reach a final decision. * https://www.tomshardware.com/software/search-engines/wikiped... "it's pretty obvious why" here refers to why Wikipedia would reject them as a source. Maybe not, but it could be using your browser as a part of a DDoS network. The admins have also been tampering with archived articles. A DDoS against a blog that iirc was attempting to dox the archive.today maintainer. The bit about tampering with archived pages is news to me though. Wish the wiki discussion included receipts. Is "two users report they were redirected to tehrantimes.com" what is being referred to when they say archived pages are being tampered with? It looks like the "tampering" was mostly just removing the username of the person submitting the links, so they wouldn't get banned by paywall sites, and archive.today has always done this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment... And it looks like in some instances they changed their own alias to the name of the blogger they're in dispute with, in a fit of pique. You have to scroll down to get hints because the conversation has been redacted, and the evidence is not provided with side-by-side comparisons. I understand the ethical concerns about linking to the site but the blanket accusations of "tampering" seem a bit disingenuous, since no article content was ever changed afaik. In addition to that kind of “benign” tampering, there was also tampering other webpages to insert the name of the person who was doing the exposé on archive.is. Either to slander that person further (in addition to the DDOS archive.is was already attempting) or to dox the person. Thanks I had edited my post once I saw that - buried deep in the discussion. I don't get why they couldn't just say what they did instead of disingenuously implying that article content had been "tampered". Given the breadth of misinformation out there today, shoddy evidence and misleading language makes people give archive.today the benefit of the doubt, and actually hurts the case against them. Nobody really knows who runs the site. One concern I have after reading this thread is that they start pulling a 1984 at some point. DDoSing who? Doesn't CORS help here? cors stops the browser from reading the response but the request still gets processed by the server If you would open the second link provided you would get an answer. >This decision was agreed on after a request for comment with more than 200 participants concluded in February 2026, and is due to multiple concerns, including the site using editors' and readers' computers to run a denial-of-service attack and evidence that the website has tampered with some archived pages Alternate take: you can click that link. We are not on Wikipedia and the OP isn't a link to Wikipedia. where's archive link when it's needed the most... copy the original link then go to archive .is then paste the link into the second field than choose any result. not a rocket science. the article is not interesting tbh. Everything you think will be recorded via neural decoding from your meta smart glasses and apple neural headsets in the near future. I’d imagine some people would actually find that useful if they offered a backup and restore feature. No more “why did I come in this room again?” moments. Don't fucking encourage this lol Don’t look at me. I won’t even put a TV online because they want to watch me back. What I do know, however, is that most people seem to be willing to give up everything for a little convenience.
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