Delicieuxz
[H]ard|Gawd
- Joined
- May 11, 2016
- Messages
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Tim Berners-Lee’s plan to save the internet: give us back control of our data
World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee takes on Google, Facebook, Amazon to fix the internet
That sounds like a silly conclusion, to me. Yes, personal data shouldn't be looked-at firstly as monetary value, because it isn't firstly a monetary thing and it has no monetary value if it isn't for sale per the will of the person who owns it. But no, personal data isn't owned by society, each individual person's personal data is owned by them. Suggesting it is owned by society sounds like a way to concede that it doesn't belong to corporations while rationalizing that industries should have some means of access to it all the same.
In general, I think that Tim Berners-Lee's plan is a positive idea, compared to where things are. But I think that most of that data should be prohibited by law from being collected and stored in the first place. And what happens if Inrupt's data-stores are hacked? There goes the privacy the privacy and personal control of one's data that the idea was meant to protect.
I think the issue needs to be addressed at its source rather than with a coping mechanism which I think would be destined to fail. At some point, likely even from the outset, governments would have gained access to that vault of information and the public likely won't know about it when it happens.
The business of harvesting data is a dirty, illegitimate, predatory, and hypocritical one. It is making money through the exploitation and manipulation of people and is a crime - and not just a moral one (though, it is definitely a moral one):
What do you think would happen if you were to hook a Bitcoin mining operation up to the electricity supply of some business you don't own, without their permission and without compensating them? If they found out, they would have you arrested and if the operation was significant, they'd sue you, and would probably get to seize any profits you'd made while using their electricity.
There's not really even a need to frame things in cryptocoin-mining terms. Imagine that you decided to start using various businesses computers, electricity, employee activities, software, housing, as data farms for your own project, just like they're doing with our PCs. Same thing's going to happen: You'll be arrested and charged, probably sued, and any profits you made will probably be seized and given to the corporation.
But tech companies are doing the same thing to us and they're not being punished for it in any way. In generating and harvesting data from our particular usage and via interaction with our devices, tech companies are using our electricity, our hardware, our storage and management of our hardware, our software, our time, our personal activity, for their own commercial purposes, and all without a commercial license. They're stealing. And it's crazy that it's been allowed to progress this far, that the public is in a stupor and doesn't understand that this isn't right.
Somehow, the public, governments, and regulators have been lured into a stupor and coma regarding the topic just because tech companies started doing these things before there was any understanding of them, and so now people feel like it's just the way things are. But that's like thinking that stealing what isn't yours and slavery are just the way things are.
Tech companies whose business is mining and selling data are stealing from us in the same way that a politician who steals millions of dollars out of the treasury is stealing from their constituents. Even though the millions of dollars they stole amounts to a few dollars, or even less than a dollar per person, the smallness of the stealing from each individual doesn't make it not stealing.
Some methods to reduce the amount of data being stolen from you and used for commercial and manipulative purposes include:
- Using DuckDuckGo for web searches. They don't store or collect any personal data.
- Using only an Enterprise or LTSC edition of Windows 10 as they afford for lowering the amount of data Microsoft takes from you beyond what Home and Pro allow. And Microsoft is tracking every mouse-click you make in Windows 10.
- Using ProtonMail for you email. It has end-to-end encryption and your inbox is encrypted with a user encryption key so that ProtonMail can't view it, either.
- Installing Electronic Frontier Foundation's browser plugin Privacy Badger [2] [3], which blocks a lot of tracking scripts.
- Possibly using an ad-blocker to reduce the amount of tracking and advertisement scripts websites can run when you browse their website.
- Making use of FireFox browser's built-in Facebook-tracking-blocking feature.
- Using your iPhones built-in option to block all tracking by apps.
- Setting your DNS resolver to Cloudflare's free 1.1.1.1 service. This prevents your ISP from recording your activity and searches and selling it. Cloudflare doesn't collect or sell any of your data and doesn't record any IPs. Cloudflare also has a mobile app that sets your mobile internet usage to its 1.1.1.1 service. Cloudflare say of their 1.1.1.1 service:
If you know of additional methods to secure your data and privacy, please share them.
Releasing his creation for free 30 years ago, the inventor of the world wide web, Tim Berners-Lee, famously declared: “this is for everyone”. Today, his invention is used by billions – but it also hosts the authoritarian crackdowns of antidemocratic governments, and supports the infrastructure of the most wealthy and powerful companies on Earth.
Now, in an effort to return the internet to the golden age that existed before its current incarnation as Web 2.0 – characterised by invasive data harvesting by governments and corporations – Berners-Lee has devised a plan to save his invention.
This involves his brand of “data sovereignty” – which means giving users power over their data – and it means wrestling back control of the personal information we surrendered to big tech many years ago.
Berners-Lee’s latest intervention comes as increasing numbers of people regard the online world as a landscape dominated by a few tech giants, thriving on a system of “surveillance capitalism” – which sees our personal data extracted and harvested by online giants before being used to target advertisements at us as we browse the web.
World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee takes on Google, Facebook, Amazon to fix the internet
"The next wave is about artificial intelligence," Verdegem said. "Companies and governments will use all that data to train algorithms to come up with better deep learning models. And as (Russian President) Vladimir Putin once said, the person who is in charge of artificial intelligence will dominate the world."
But Berners-Lee and his business partner, John Bruce, have come up with an alternative to fight back against this consolidation of power.
They have launched a startup company, Inrupt.com, that allows consumers, rather than companies, to control their own data, to store it in pods and to move it wherever they please.
That means Facebook, Google or any other Big Tech company will no longer be able to extract an individual's photos, comments or purchase history without asking. All of that will be stored on a pod, and the individual can share the information with the company if he or she chooses.
"We are on a mission to change the way the web works, to make it a better place for all of us," said Berners-Lee in a November YouTube video with Technology Intelligence Live. "It's a mid-course correction to restore the values of individual and group empowerment that the internet used to have and seems to have lost."
Verdegem, who recently wrote about Inrupt in The Conversation, said his main criticism of the company is that an individual's data isn't worth that much. It's only in the aggregate that data is really valuable to a company like Google or Facebook.
But maybe that's not the way data should be looked at anyway, Verdegem said. It should be looked at as something that's not owned by individuals or companies, but by society.
That sounds like a silly conclusion, to me. Yes, personal data shouldn't be looked-at firstly as monetary value, because it isn't firstly a monetary thing and it has no monetary value if it isn't for sale per the will of the person who owns it. But no, personal data isn't owned by society, each individual person's personal data is owned by them. Suggesting it is owned by society sounds like a way to concede that it doesn't belong to corporations while rationalizing that industries should have some means of access to it all the same.
In general, I think that Tim Berners-Lee's plan is a positive idea, compared to where things are. But I think that most of that data should be prohibited by law from being collected and stored in the first place. And what happens if Inrupt's data-stores are hacked? There goes the privacy the privacy and personal control of one's data that the idea was meant to protect.
I think the issue needs to be addressed at its source rather than with a coping mechanism which I think would be destined to fail. At some point, likely even from the outset, governments would have gained access to that vault of information and the public likely won't know about it when it happens.
The business of harvesting data is a dirty, illegitimate, predatory, and hypocritical one. It is making money through the exploitation and manipulation of people and is a crime - and not just a moral one (though, it is definitely a moral one):
What do you think would happen if you were to hook a Bitcoin mining operation up to the electricity supply of some business you don't own, without their permission and without compensating them? If they found out, they would have you arrested and if the operation was significant, they'd sue you, and would probably get to seize any profits you'd made while using their electricity.
There's not really even a need to frame things in cryptocoin-mining terms. Imagine that you decided to start using various businesses computers, electricity, employee activities, software, housing, as data farms for your own project, just like they're doing with our PCs. Same thing's going to happen: You'll be arrested and charged, probably sued, and any profits you made will probably be seized and given to the corporation.
But tech companies are doing the same thing to us and they're not being punished for it in any way. In generating and harvesting data from our particular usage and via interaction with our devices, tech companies are using our electricity, our hardware, our storage and management of our hardware, our software, our time, our personal activity, for their own commercial purposes, and all without a commercial license. They're stealing. And it's crazy that it's been allowed to progress this far, that the public is in a stupor and doesn't understand that this isn't right.
Somehow, the public, governments, and regulators have been lured into a stupor and coma regarding the topic just because tech companies started doing these things before there was any understanding of them, and so now people feel like it's just the way things are. But that's like thinking that stealing what isn't yours and slavery are just the way things are.
Tech companies whose business is mining and selling data are stealing from us in the same way that a politician who steals millions of dollars out of the treasury is stealing from their constituents. Even though the millions of dollars they stole amounts to a few dollars, or even less than a dollar per person, the smallness of the stealing from each individual doesn't make it not stealing.
Some methods to reduce the amount of data being stolen from you and used for commercial and manipulative purposes include:
- Using DuckDuckGo for web searches. They don't store or collect any personal data.
- Using only an Enterprise or LTSC edition of Windows 10 as they afford for lowering the amount of data Microsoft takes from you beyond what Home and Pro allow. And Microsoft is tracking every mouse-click you make in Windows 10.
- Using ProtonMail for you email. It has end-to-end encryption and your inbox is encrypted with a user encryption key so that ProtonMail can't view it, either.
- Installing Electronic Frontier Foundation's browser plugin Privacy Badger [2] [3], which blocks a lot of tracking scripts.
- Possibly using an ad-blocker to reduce the amount of tracking and advertisement scripts websites can run when you browse their website.
- Making use of FireFox browser's built-in Facebook-tracking-blocking feature.
- Using your iPhones built-in option to block all tracking by apps.
- Setting your DNS resolver to Cloudflare's free 1.1.1.1 service. This prevents your ISP from recording your activity and searches and selling it. Cloudflare doesn't collect or sell any of your data and doesn't record any IPs. Cloudflare also has a mobile app that sets your mobile internet usage to its 1.1.1.1 service. Cloudflare say of their 1.1.1.1 service:
Here’s the deal - we don’t store client IP addresses never, ever, and we only use query names for things that improve DNS resolver performance (such as prefill all caches based on popular domains in a region and/or after obfuscation, APNIC research).
Cloudflare will never store any information in our logs that identifies an end user, and all logs collected by our public resolver will be deleted within 24 hours. We will continue to abide by our privacy policy and ensure that no user data is sold to advertisers or used to target consumers.
If you know of additional methods to secure your data and privacy, please share them.
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