The Lounge - CodeProject

ZurdoDev wrote:
Why such a juvenile response?

I wasn't trying to be juvenile at all. If you're willing to trade your privacy for a miserable coupon, you clearly put as much value on it as those willing to trade a password for a chocolate bar. I was merely illustrating a point. The way you're describing your position, I'm not sure where you draw the distinction.

ZurdoDev wrote:
Are you suggesting you'd rather see ads that are meaningless to you rather than ones that might actually be good for you?

Oh, abso-f***ing-lutely. Advertisers don't care whether you need a product or not, they only want you to buy it, so what you want is ultimately irrelevant to them (ever heard of the idea of "creating the need"?). I'd rather get lost in a sea of anonymity, so they can't focus on me. I see no reason to try to make their lives easier. If I need a product, I'll seek it out--y'know...research...as opposed to believing what an ad is going to try to tell me. Given the lies advertisers tell you - I don't know where you get the idea that any ad may be "good for me". Ads exist only to sell you things. Ever heard of "a fool and his money..."? If that's not holding you (as a consumer) in contempt, I don't know what it.

Have you ever worked with someone who does advertising for a living? What a glorious bunch of people. My experience has never been a positive one. It seems like their lives revolve around manipulating people and controlling their thought process, and they take pleasure in it. The more egregious they get, the prouder they are of themselves. I find that repugnant.

ZurdoDev wrote:
When girl scouts knock on your door are you afraid someone is coming to take your guns away?

I'm not sure why you're bringing this into this discussion. Canadian here. I don't have/need/want guns. Smile | :)

And no ad will change that.

dandy72 wrote:
If you're willing to trade your privacy for a miserable coupon, you clearly put as much value on it as those willing to trade a password for a chocolate bar.

I believe that it is clear to you. D'Oh! | :doh:

dandy72 wrote:
I'm not sure where you draw the distinction.

You don't know the difference between handing over your password and a targeted ad? OMG | :OMG:

A password actually protects important information. What I buy at the grocery store does not need to be protected. I would think anyone could understand that. And it is impossible to protect what I do out in public so why even bother trying.

dandy72 wrote:
I'm not sure why you're bringing this into this discussion. Canadian here. I don't have/need/want guns.

First, I bring it in because you seem very paranoid. No one can do anything harmful by knowing that you bought lettuce on Thursday for $3.45. It's paranoid to think that problems can arise from that.

Secondly, I find it hilariously ironic that you care if someone watches what brand of toiler paper you buy because of what slippery slope it could lead to an over tyrannical government, yet you see no need for guns. I'm not laughing at you but that is so outlandishly hilarious. Laugh | :laugh:

Social Media - A platform that makes it easier for the crazies to find each other.

Everyone is born right handed. Only the strongest overcome it.
Fight for left-handed rights and hand equality.

ZurdoDev wrote:
You don't know the difference between handing over your password and a targeted ad?

Both are matters of not caring about the consequences of not safeguarding what is nobody else's business but your own.

ZurdoDev wrote:
I bring it in because you seem very paranoid.

It's not about paranoia, it's about telling others to f*** off and stop rummaging through my trash.

ZurdoDev wrote:
yet you see no need for guns

It's those who allow things to go too far and will then overreact that will suddenly feel the need for guns, not me. Makes sense?

Surely you realize it's not about collecting the petty details you keep bringing up. It's all about things to come. It starts here, and grows from there. Once society finds something to be benign and acceptable, the goalposts move, and the data collection moves on to the next bigger, juicier targets. I don't think that's paranoia.

"First they came for [xxx], and I did not speak out, because I was not a [xxx]". But you don't see the link, because it's all inconsequential, right?

dandy72 wrote:
Both are matters of not caring about the consequences of not safeguarding what is nobody else's business but your own.

They do share that one single thing in common. But nothing else.

dandy72 wrote:
It's all about things to come.

Yes, I understand you think it is a slippery slope.

Social Media - A platform that makes it easier for the crazies to find each other.

Everyone is born right handed. Only the strongest overcome it.
Fight for left-handed rights and hand equality.

ZurdoDev wrote:
They do share that one single thing in common. But nothing else.

Bingo. I just believe if I'm not okay with allowing one thing to happen, then why allow the other. Nip it in the bud, so to speak. Don't allow precedents to be established.

ZurdoDev wrote:
Yes, I understand you think it is a slippery slope.

Yes. It's all about recognizing where things start. That's it.

dandy72 wrote:
It's all about recognizing where things start. That's it.

Indeed. And we have different opinions on where that is.

Social Media - A platform that makes it easier for the crazies to find each other.

Everyone is born right handed. Only the strongest overcome it.
Fight for left-handed rights and hand equality.

Agreed. I hope you didn't take any of this as a personal attack, as that was not my intent, despite some words I may have used. I rather enjoyed this discussion.

ZurdoDev wrote:
Why are you annoyed that people track you?

There are fundamentalist Christians in this country that won't pull the window curtains (or have any curtains at all), because they try to live a life so moral that they have nothing to hide. Nevertheless, their bedroom windows do have curtains.

As the song goes: "Ain't nobody's business". No matter how moral the bedroom activities of these fundamentalists are, it is nobody's business how they do it. They don't want to be continously monitored in their bedroom. I extend that to my living room. And to my selection of dishes in the canteen. And my comments to the waitress. Of course you see and hear it then and there, but when you start to log it systematically, for correcting my actions or statements many years later, then you interfere with my life in ways I do not appreciate.

Maybe you have been living your entire life in on of the upper floors of a tall apartment building, so that noone can look in your window (both in the direct and the allegorical sense). You do your shopping where noone recognizes you. You go to the other side of the town for a night out, so none of your neighbours will talk about how drunk you get. Maybe you live your physical life more or less in loneliness. Noone talking behind your back, because they don't relate to you. Noone at work trying to correct your lifestyle to fit their ideals, because you are nothing but a humanoid coworker machine. Maybe noone cares about you enough to relate to you in neither positive or negative ways.

In smaller places you may not be able to hide in the crowd. Maybe you think it is OK being tagged as the village drunkard, or he who watches dubious movies, or he who mistreats his kids. You may be socially frozen out. People may avoid doing business with you. You may be hearing rumours that other kids are told not to play with your kids.

Yes, you can say "I do not care". What if you get in trouble with the police, say that you are suscpected of drunk driving? Surveillance cameras prove that you bought two sixpacks the day before. You claim that they are still in your fridge. But the cameras showed that you have bought twelve sixpacks the last two week, where did they go? That might be the wrong time to say: I don't care!

I would not care.

Maybe you don't realize the seriousness. What we are talking about, is that you may be breaking the laws, whether by a new interpretation or new laws. You may be thrown in jail for an extended period of time. Is that what you refer to as "I don't care"?

Or maybe you would like to help your son's soccer team who needs a standin coach, and you are qualified. But you are locked out: You have been watching movies that proves you to be unfit for any activity with kids. Maybe you become a world famous movie director, but then when you win a prize for one of your movies, a great movement protests against you earning the prize: Everybody says that your movies are worth the prize, but almost fifty years ago you had a love affair, one that would have been perfectly legal in lots of countries around the world, but not in yours. That love affair prevents your internationally acclaimed artistic work from receiving the prize it deserves from an art viewpoint. Still "I don't care"?

Your arguments are fine as long as all the authorities line up with you, fight for your interests. As long as all of your neighbours condone all sides of your lifestyle (or at least all of the influential ones). You may fight for the world to forever stay exactly as you like it best,

Member 7989122 wrote:
Morals change rapidly
That IS the problem.

- but I am afraid that you will be disappointed. Your morals is a very special case. There are millions of morals out there; the chance that yours will be the one to survive forever is epsilon squared. (I would guess that epsilon sqared in this case is negative.)

Maybe you are old enough to say "I'll be dead before anyone could possibly take over this country, so I don't care about the possibility of someone unfriendly to me being in charge. I am totally convinced that it couldn't possibly happen before my death." OK, you have the right to think that way. Younger people may want to consider changes in power structures as a possibilty.

I don't care what people say about me or think about me. Why would I?

You have a lot of "what ifs" but I refuse to live my life that paranoid.

Social Media - A platform that makes it easier for the crazies to find each other.

Everyone is born right handed. Only the strongest overcome it.
Fight for left-handed rights and hand equality.

Because you might be thrown in jail.
You might loose your job.
You might loose your friends.
You might loose your business.
Your neighbours might frown at you and tell their own kids not to play with yours.
You may be unable finding a plumber who wants to come to your house to fix that leak.
And so on.

You are free not to care about such consequences.

Member 7989122 wrote:
You are free not to care about such consequences.

Exactly.

All of those "mights" you listed have always been mights. Nothing new.

Social Media - A platform that makes it easier for the crazies to find each other.

Everyone is born right handed. Only the strongest overcome it.
Fight for left-handed rights and hand equality.

Google tracked his bike ride past a burglarized home. That made him a suspect.[^]

So? So did the old lady watching out her window that said she saw a guy.

And this guy can go sue the heck out of the company and make a fortune.

Social Media - A platform that makes it easier for the crazies to find each other.

Everyone is born right handed. Only the strongest overcome it.
Fight for left-handed rights and hand equality.

The same argument holds for any totalitarian dictatorship tracking every one of the 24/7: For each individual case, it is nothing different from a neighbour (or whoever) watching your moves from the window. Whether it is just an old lady or a STASI agent, it is just watching you. Nothing to worry about.

Member 7989122 wrote:
for any totalitarian dictatorship

Not the same as an old woman. And the US is not a dictatorship, unless the idiots vote for Bernie. And if we ever get to the point where there is an actual threat from the government, tracking will be the least of our worries.

Social Media - A platform that makes it easier for the crazies to find each other.

Everyone is born right handed. Only the strongest overcome it.
Fight for left-handed rights and hand equality.

ZurdoDev wrote:
I appreciate tracking. What good is a coupon for something I don't ever buy? Give me targeted ads instead of random ones.

he he... I had one funny experience with Amazon ...

I have bought a number of DVD/BDs from Amazon. For a period, Amazon insisted heavily on suggesting to me "You might want to buy this movie" - gay porn movies. I fully accept homosexuals, and have a couple homosexual friends/coworkers, but I am definitely not gay myself. And I do not waste money on porn movies. So where did Amazon get this notion that I would like gay porn?

Sometimes, I collect a list of movies I would like to buy, and order them all in one batch. I had done that, receiving a dozen of movies from Amazon in a single batch. Obviously, I didn't play them all the night they arrived. In fact, one of them stayed on my shelf for about half a year before I found a good time to watch it. Then it dawned upon me why Amazon had labeled me as a watcher of gay porn: This movie was an Italian black-and-white "artsy" movie from the early 1960s, a story with mythological roots involving a couple demigods visiting humanity. As demigods rather than humans, they certainly was not fully dressed. They were male. Anyone who buys a 50+ year old b/w Italian art movie where you in some scenes can se an unclothed male demigod must be eager to buy gay porn movies, right?

So much for targeted ads. It took Amazon a couple of years to realize that in spite of their intense marketing, I had no interest in that sort of movies, so they quieted down.

Here in Norway, my friends laughed at Amazon's proposals when it was ongoing. In some social environments in the US, it could have caused me trouble, if some moralists had looked over my shoulder when I turned on the PC and connected to Amazon, noticing that "Based on your previous purchases, we think that this gay porn would also be in your taste". If I had been living in USAs bible belt when this was going on, I would have been careful that no super-moralistic bystander was watching when I opened the Amazon web site.

The problem with targeted ads is that they don't show me relevant ads until AFTER I bought the product. Laugh | :laugh:

Social Media - A platform that makes it easier for the crazies to find each other.

Everyone is born right handed. Only the strongest overcome it.
Fight for left-handed rights and hand equality.

ZurdoDev wrote:
dandy72 wrote:
Personally it's the things I have no control over I object to.
Which is most everything in life.

I have endless empirical evidence that proves that my wife disagrees with both of those statements.

I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!

Even a rookie policeman has a far lower mis-identification rate than the best face recognition system.
Yes,the system should be used as you suggest - it raises a flag, and the officer on the spot decides whether the match is correct. In practice, what happens is that officers have an unwarranted faith in the system's infallibility, and will simply arrest anyone the system indicates may be a criminal.
If I happened to look similar to a wanted criminal, I might be arrested multiple times for no good reason. Can anyone spell "malicious arrest" and "defamation of character"?
Given certain countries' admission policies (I'm looking at you, USA!), I would not want even a mistaken arrest on my record. The additional hassle when travelling there would be extremely annoying.

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.

What Mark says.

The problem starts when the systems get so good that they only fail once every 10000 positive identifications. That's when the users learn to trust the tool

Wrong is evil and must be defeated. - Jeff Ello

Nothing wrong with it - makes it that much easier for me to hunt you down.

Ravings en masse^
"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein
"If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010

The tech in itself doesn't worry me. Viewed in isolation it's great, identify murders rapist, thieves drug traffickers etc and get them off the streets. Yah!

But when you look inconjuction with other technologies and at the laws that have been passed in the last twenty years, in which our rights have been slowly eroded (& will continue to erode). Who will they target once you get all the "bad" people off the streets, they are not going to dismantle the infrastructure, it'll be to much of an invested interest and so much power.

Sorry don't mean to sound like a conspiracist.

It all depends on who is using the technology.

If the Chinese are using it, it most certainly is totalitarian abuse of power to monitor the enitre population.
If the US is doing exactly the same, it is for asserting the safety of the population.

If you had pointed out any such discrpancy in 1984, it would be newspeak.
If you point it out today, the respones is something like "Yeah, that is exactly the difference between totalitarianism and Freedom".

The issue with all of this stuff isn't about now, it's about the future. These types of technologies are going to get better and better, and they'll be incrementally implemented more and more and more over time. Eventually, it's going to get misused and misused badly by someone in power, and of course many, many times over in smaller ways along the way.

And there are always people in every country who believe that any measure is justified to achieve whatever goal they have. And that goal may be as laudable as protecting our security. But ultimately the systems they put into place to achieve that goal can become as dangerous as the thing they seek to protect us against when the folks in power start using it against us. The scarier part is when their interest is in protecting themselves. Consider a Nixon administration with the level of surveillance we have now, or what will likely be possible 50 years from now.

And by 'us' that means us collectively, or those questioning the government right to do this or that, or those opposing the party in power, or a company or organization that someone is power feels is not in the best interests of the country (which often translates to the interests of their political party or social view or themselves.)

And of course it really will hit the fan with something bad happens. Then those folks who have the 'by any means necessary' view of the world are often let off the leash (in a plausible deniability sort of way of course.) And the gains in latitude that they make in those situations are seldom pushed back all the way or even much at all after the crisis is over.

Everything is hunky dory until it's not. And ultimately, freedom is not free. That saying often means one particular thing, but it also means that, if you want to be free you cannot be perfectly safe.

Explorans limites defectum

Dean Roddey wrote:
And of course it really will hit the fan with something bad happens.

I am afraid not. That is an essential part of the problem. We might conmdemn "totalitarian" practices with great intensity, but when we introduce very similar practices ourselves, it is far from "the sh*t hitting the fan", but to "secure the safety of the people of our nation".

Or something like that. In other cases it may be to secure the pureness of the souls of our children, or something else which is extremely tied to our morals or our culture as of this year. In any case: We are extremely good at finding reasons/excuses/explanations for our use of the same practices that we not along ago condemned in other cultures. Quite often, it should have been "the sh*t hitting the fan", but history tells ut that it just doesn't happpen in cases where our "free, democratic" socieety adopts pratices from totalitarian societies. We change a tiny little detail, claiming that this detail makes all the difference: It really is just a minor thing that we never would have considered as significant if it was presented by that totalitarian regime, but as long as we were the ones coming up with this detail, we can use that minor difference to distinguish what we do, which is perfectly acceptable, from what those others do, which is totally condemnable.

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