What I wish people understood about privacy is that the less tech adjacent a company is, the worse their privacy record.
Meta and Google will never sell your data. They will collect it and use it for targeted advertising for sure, but they consider it far too valuable and useful to sell. This is because they have the tech and expertise to use their data well.
A grocery store or a gas station chain, though? They're clueless about tech, don't know what to do with the data, and have to aggressively compete on prices. If some savvy data broker comes to them, offering them a way to essentially gain market share by pushing prices lower than the competition and selling your data to make up the loss? That's an offer they can't refuse.
Hardware manufacturers are largely on the grocery store side; they're not data-savvy and they want to make things cheaper than the competition, so they're almost forced to do these shenanigans to win the competitive rat race.
If you want to meaningfully increase privacy, don't quit Meta, quit Target, Visa and LG.
> the less tech adjacent a company is, the worse their privacy record
How does this apply to the topic of this thread? Samsung is, if anything, much more tech-savvy (tech-adjacent?) than Meta. Meta just does some high-level software and runs a few servers to host it. Samsung, across the company, builds every level of the hardware and software stack from silicon to services.
I think another, clearer way to state this hypothesis is that "the fewer business models a company has other than making money directly off your data, the more they're going to jealously hoard your data to themselves and leverage it in ways that don't involve letting any other middle-man capture it."
Meta and Google are both founded on the premise of capturing and using your data, with everything else being a loss-leader.
Samsung, meanwhile, makes the majority of its money making and selling physical "things", whether for B2B2C (SSDs, display panels), B2B (construction cranes, cargo ships, oil refineries, grid-storage EV batteries), or B2C (phones, TVs, smart fridges, etc.)
However, things aren't black and white here. As you say, Samsung is more software/data-oriented than the other phone OEMs / smart TV manufacturers, when it comes to how they handle the data coming from Automated Content Recognition.
While other providers rely on third-party ACR data brokers (the rent-capturing middlemen here), Samsung has a vertically-integrated ACR-to-ad pipeline, where (AFAICT) their ACR data feeds into their own ad-tech-bidding infrastructure for placement on Samsung-operated properties (the aforementioned phones, TVs, smart fridges, etc.)
The claim would be that the decisionmakers at Samsung are general industrialists and not people who understand the tech industry.
If you (an external entity in the example upthread, or just a random middle manager) walk up to Zuckerberg or Jassy with a proposal to tap their data for some comparatively small payment, they'd laugh in your face because they know how valuable what you're doing is and what the long term impact on their business will be. Samsung is far more likely to view that as "free money" and green light something awful.
It is weird what people think "tech" is these days. It increasingly seems to mean "anything having to do with computers".
Like yea in the 1930s, the dishwasher was "technology". Now it's just a consumer product. Many former tech companies have long ceased to be tech companies, but we forgot to stop calling them that.
This is a fallacy. Sure, Google doesn't sell your data. Instead, it has created the largest advertisers walled garden by which it sells downstream clients access to that data with which they can use for marketing. Meta comes in second. Samsung doesn't have such a market.
The only effective difference between them and that gas station is that the data is less likely (but not guaranteed) to end up on gray and black markets for exploitation. Regardless, that accounts for a very small percentage of sales anyway and misses the fact that most people don't want there to be a data silo that their government can tap into and utilize for surveillance. For example(s):
Not by selling downstream clients access to my browsing data. Like, seriously: who do I call at Google and how much do I have to pay to get your browsing data? They don't sell that.
It's fair to allege all kinds of externalities and privacy impacts and such around the advertiser-driven content economy. And HN is 100% here for that.
But this is stepping across the line into a simple lie. They don't sell data.
This is a distinction without a difference to me and many others. I'm sure the adtech industry like to believe it because it lets them cope that they're the good guys, unlike those sneaky data brokers.
As a deliberately hyperbolic example: "We're not selling child slaves, we only offer a marketplace where clients can bid for the use of the labor of the child slaves."
The problem is the intrusive violation of privacy involved in building giant databases of personal information on every person on earth, not that someone-other-than-Google is doing it.
> As a deliberately hyperbolic example: "We're not selling child slaves, we only offer a marketplace where clients can bid for the use of the labor of the child slaves."
Then have that argument, please. If your argument is that "privacy impacts of advertising are bad and here's why Google's business model doesn't improve that" then that is one thing. Telling people that Google is selling your data is a lie.
It’s mind boggling that in the UK there’s a law that says:
> “A plank of wood must not be carried along a pavement. It can only be moved if it is being unloaded from a vehicle or taken into a building.”
But big tech cannot be regulated at all.
We used to regulate any minor thing that was annoying enough, but a whole industry spying and prying on the whole population is fine.
I don't know that this is a discovery issue. It has been widely publicised that all your devices are spying on you for at least a decade now - hard proof was previously somewhat hard to come by, but a suitable regulatory agency could have gone digging at any point.
>It has been widely publicised that all your devices are spying on you for at least a decade now
This sort of equivocation, where any privacy invasion gets rounded off to "spying on you" doesn't help either. Clickbait headlines over android making 100 requests to google gets lumped together with more serious privacy violations like random SDKs selling your location data, causing a learned helplessness where people think "spying on you" is normal and can't be avoided.
> where people think "spying on you" is normal and can't be avoided
Normal people, yes, but this is exactly what tech regulators ought to be gunning for. Even post GDPR, we just don't seem to have enough bulldogs in enforcement...
Journalism is almost dead. And if where it’s not it’s more of a summary of what happened rather than deep investigations. But only a small percentage of the population care about deep investigations anyway.
The main issue is that the attention economy and social pressure are so hard to break. People keep using WhatsApp because it is convenient and everyone is there. There are no other reasons.
The major other reason is that it is free, and most people are money-constrained.
Personalized advertising is a progressive tax. Because the rich spend more and the poor spend less, Meta et al makes more money from the rich than it makes from the poor, while offering the same service to everybody else. As a result, we get the educated rich upper-middle class complaining about advertising, while everybody else is happy about not having to pay their long-distance charges any more.
Awareness and care is one thing. A unanimous action plan is another. Violation of privacy is not viewed through similar lens as say theft or other forms of crimes.
journalistic media resolve this by having independent editorials. There's of course still structural issues, especially if those media outlets are traded or seen as investment targets, but the general structure has worked for 50-60 years.
This is one of the problems with the neo-journalistic outlets and "citizen journalism". They don't have the staffing or discipline to run that sort of operation.
> Nothing and nobody rises above the authority in a dictatorship, that's kind of the point
Until they do. That’s the problem with dictatorship. If you can kill and swiftly replace the dictator, you become the dictator. What the masses believe is irrelevant.
Despite really kicking our asses on their approach to an AI ecosystem, China has problems of its own. Too bad we can't just copy the parts that work but those are the rules I guess.
Someone else making the decision for you is a good description for laws, which we decided a long time ago we would in fact have. It's weird how people come out of the woodwork like this when those laws start to point at rich people.
Stupid obsolete laws that stay on the books forever is seemingly the American way and occasionally we refresh them with new even stupider laws that were obsolete before they were even proposed.
Sure, why not? I'd like to live in a system where the interest of the nation and the people are above your or someone else's ROI. I'd like to live in a system where if you try, like Elon Musk, to amass so much influence on the nation for your own benefits - you're gonna be Jack Ma'd.
> I'd like to live in a system where the interest of the nation and the people are above your or someone else's ROI.
Democracies are much closer to that than dictatorships as they don't need to care about the people and never did.
Crazy that you like a system where somebody can just get kidnapped. It never just affects the "right" people, but also a lot of other people. China is jailing and kidnapping a lot - easily tens of thousands of more - of their citizen to sustain control.
Big tech isn't being regulated? There's increasingly privacy related laws, both in the US and abroad, that directly affect them. How many times a year do we read about Big Tech being issued 9-10 figure fines? One could state that they're not regulated enough, but to say they're unregulated is just false.
> We used to regulate any minor thing that was annoying enough
Your example is a good reason why that approach was foolish.
Regulation is only as good as enforcement of it is. And it seems 9-10 figure fines are still in the realm of 'we'll deal with the fallout later'.
So no, it's not literally unregulated, but if it was regulated effectively Samsung would be scared shitless to pull stuff like this. They clearly aren't.
Actually it is. Around 2005 I was stopped by police at 2am in Hackney and told in no uncertain terms that it was illegal for me to be walking with a 2x4 in my hand
It was added as context for why someone might be carrying a wooden plank at 2 in the morning and why police might be concerned. It is my understanding that Hackney has changed dramatically in the intervening years
Yeah, today you would stopped and frisked, detained, photographed, fingerprinted, interrogated, and finally jailed… for speaking out against the asshats who the think this is a good law.
People carrying planks of wood on the sidewalk is obvious to everyone and clear inconvenience. What tech companies do in software is not, and has no physical immediately tangible effect on the world. These things should be regulated, but they're so opaque and disconnected from the eventual negative externalities that it's hard to get legislators to see it.
If a human cannot immediately see a negative outcome on their visual or mental horizon based on the knowledge they have at that moment most of their insights or feelings about what problems will occur will be incorrect.
Talking about AI and data is a good example of this. A bit of data here and there seems useless, but the moment you get enough the pattern of your life can emerge from it and suddenly you can be tracked and manipulated with an amazingly high probability. And it's not a one time thing either. Anything mispredicted gets put back in your profile as another data point.
Is that a thing? I ask because I and my best friend have vivid memories of my step dad, who used to be a postman, cycling home from town with 4 - 5m timbers under one arm. This would have been late 80s/early 90s. He’d call out and wave to people he knew with his “free” hand as he passed as well.
If even moving a plank of wood is illegal I can’t imagine how he got away with that, unmolested by plod, for so many years.
It's heavily paraphrased, but close enough I'd say.
> Every person who shall roll or carry any cask, tub, hoop, or wheel, or any ladder, plank, pole, showboard, or placard, upon any footway, except for the purpose of loading or unloading any cart or carriage, or of crossing the footway:
If your building or other construction is unsafe for the public, the local authority has the right to make it safe, if necessary by demolishing it; if you are insufficiently responsive to a notice that you must make it safe. Maybe tech companies need that kind of incentive before they will care enough not to subject their customers to this kind of abuse.
> There is a counter incentive, the money the companies pay the politicians.
That's disingenuous. The public has been told a beautiful fairy tale about technology for years. There are huge outcries every single time any politician tries to regulate big tech.
Now I know that this isn't because the public is somehow ideologically opposed to regulation. We have been paid off, just as much as the politicians have. When they increase the prices of televisions and say it's because they this new regulation, we show up to support them.
> The public has been told a beautiful fairy tale about technology
He typed, from a tiny device in his hand, from a bed in an air-conditioned apartment millions of miles away. Or perhaps from a jet sailing through the sky, via a satellite in space
It is not plausible that a company would raise prices as some kind of revenge or play to overturn a regulation. That is not how prices are set in a free market because any company that did that would immediately lose to their competition. Unless we have a cartel of television manufacturers, which would be news to me.
In the interests of accuracy, the law (the Metropolitan Police Act 1839) actually states
"""
54 Prohibition of nuisances by persons in the thoroughfares.
Every person shall be liable to a penalty not more than level 2 on the standard scale, who, within the limits of the metropolitan police district, shall in any thoroughfare or public place, commit any of the following offences; (that is to say,)
...
8. Every person who shall roll or carry any cask, tub, hoop, or wheel, or any ladder, plank, pole, showboard, or placard, upon any footway, except for the purpose of loading or unloading any cart or carriage, or of crossing the footway:
The plank of wood is one element in a much broader statute, rather than an example of hyper-specificity. And it might have been strictly applied at the time, but that doesn't mean you're definitely going to get into trouble nowadays.
In a similar vein, the UK *does* have laws that affect big tech. UK GDPR places requirements on processing of personal data:
Whether that's properly enforced is (as with the plank) a completely different matter.
In the UK, at least, we don't need new regulations, we need to more effectively apply the regulations we already have in place. But there is also a balance to be made between enforcement through fines and enforcement through changing behaviour: it's much better to work with companies to bring them into compliance than it is to just fine them and without actually changing anything.
> within the limits of the metropolitan police district
It's a local London law. In England such laws are passed by parliament because there is no other mechanism, but in countries with devolved lawmaking states and cities have much crazier laws.
We see see two failure modes in the US, and I assume they are universal. On the small scale, enforcers don't enforce, because of resource constraints, and higher up the food chain, the enforcers are the ones breaking the law.
People understand what a plank of wood is and how it works.
People, including the vast majority of politicians, don’t understand our technology at all. It’s magic. Why does a light come on when they flip the switch? Magic. Computers are deep black magic.
How can they write effective regulation? Or tell the difference between proposals that are good or bad written by others?
If politicians regulated big tech more we’d probably end up with a ton of regulatory capture that legislated monopolies for big tech and shut out open source and startups, because who has the money to influence the ignorant lawmakers at scale?
We are now in a world where small groups of high priests understand certain things, and few others. We’ve been there for a while but it’s gotten far more opaque in the last 25 years or so.
Even something like a nuclear reactor or an aircraft is much easier to explain. The last episode of the Chernobyl series did a great job explaining what was wrong with that reactor design to a layperson. But computing… and networks… people who do understand it have forgotten just how ludicrously arcane and inscrutable it is to most.
A big difference too is that by the Church-Turing theorem there is (as a side effect of it) a provably infinite number of ways to perform any computation. Which means you can’t just legislate “don’t do that.” Physical machines are not like that.
We used to solve this problem by embedding experts in government bodies.
We can't do that any more; the people who support tech regulation are so cartoonishly anti-corporate that any suggestion of embedding somebody who understands tech will be met with accusations of lobbying and a careful review of that person's employment history.
It's obvious to pretty much everybody that regulating banks, railroads or phone companies requires people who have previously worked for banks, railroads and phone companies, and have a good understanding of how such organizations work on the inside. We, generally, don't do that with tech.
The point of having advisors was supposed to be that they would help the elected person make up for lack of knowledge, but it doesn't seem like that pans out in reality. Either the advisors are just as lost, or they are largely ignored.
The need for good advisors is a major point in Sun-Tzu's Art of War.
Surround yourself with good advisors and the surrounding kingdoms will notice and be less inclined to attack. If you have bad advisors, your enemies will perceive that as their opening
The problem with regulating big tech is the unplacable internet. Who can regulate the internet? Who gets to make rules for the global network?
Politicians are keenly aware that regulation has to be administered, and administration costs money. The internet subsists on low overhead, and per jurisdiction administration would significantly change almost everything about the current internet. The public wont allow that.
If the public actually starts demanding regulation, we will see a fracturing of the internet into national networks. It will become impossible (or at least uneconomical) to run reddit, youtube, or facebook as global networks. They might continue to exists, but they will be sectioned off.
In that scheme, would regulation be based on where the servers are located? What's to stop me from routing American traffic to Armenia, where the laws don't exist? What's to stop me routing it to Russia, where the general legal principle is that illegality won't be pursued if it's no against Russian citizens?
Samsung is starting to be a little too much creepy.
I don't know if it's just greed or.
I refused to create an account on their galaxy phone because of the mandatory phone number needed. Yes, I know they can harvest it in other ways, it's just a stand.
Without an account, they don't even allow installs from galaxy store. So their default apps and their security updates are probably contingent on having an account now.
Not much different from playstore but that is also a problem.
Pretty sure my Samsung plasma TV from 2011 is safe. It was all downhill from there, just competing over which display looks better with its saturation and brightness boosted all the way up with the floor models all next to each other.
I'm not the only one who made note of that behavior, but if i recall sometime before breaking my phone in the last couple months the behaviour ceased. probably after a factory rom update, but at this point i can no longer confirm or deny. but! i did and do have a backup of the potentially offending apk.
Ironically phones are more transparent than TVs (because there's a rooting scene as well as adb access) so I wouldn't immediately extrapolate that they're doing this but even harder on phones.
i wonder if the Samsung / LG stuff is how the stock market seemed so "predictable" to some people in early morning trading for a while... imagine having the keys to buckets containing all the plaintext gathered from all the tvs listening in conference rooms on earnings days...
> confirmation bias, eg. "facebook is secretly listening to you"
Agreeing with your general point - don't jump to conclusions without evidence - but I don't like it if we're now establishing the "Facebook/Google/Apple/etc is secretly listening to you" rumors as the canonical example of that behavior, and thereby exempting companies from further scrutiny in this.
We've seen that by now there exists both the will and the technical means to pull off stuff like this. So even if it used to be a baseless rumor and urban legend, it deserves to be re-checked periodically, because companies might start to do it for real at some point. Samsung here actually did.
(Google also comes awfully close with its "song detector" which is now a stock Android feature I think)
Oh man, I wonder if there is some weird self-selection bias when it comes to HN audience. It is a little like my dad telling me repairing cars is easy: you only have to do x,y and z without considering that I don't have years of experience of doing just that.
But my point is imagine if the person that did that simple TD lite model pre-training did something less... ad-related in his life.
ML when connected to business applications is one of those things that sound complicated but is in practice just a few lines of code usually. I'd argue that anything frontend is way harder to code up than a pretrained TF lite model, despite the general idea being the opposite.
You are ignoring the point I am making so I will make it a little more explicit for the sake of ensuring that it is not just my inability to make my point across:
What is the societal opportunity cost of a person not doing $this_thing_you_mentioned and applying it just about anything else.
It's beyond me why people are still buying smart TVs.
I've juist looked on a large EU webshop (bol.com).
You can buy a non-smart, full-HD, 40 inch TV for less than $200.
All the ad tracking in smart TVs has driven prices down. Tracking and ad data has turned a customer from a one time purchaser to a revenue stream for as long as the device is in use.
If you want a high quality TV for the best price your best bet is either disable/opt out of all the tracking data, or even better just never hook it up to the internet at all and plug an AppleTV or Chromecast on it.
If you look for a Samsung TV without “smart” features you pretty much have to find them under “commercial displays” and you’ll pay a premium for it.
Why in this world of yours is the only option Android TV?
Even with that, there are plenty of safer distros, or you can even get a cheap mini pc and throw one of the many awesome Linux distros on that have zero tracking and are far more capable/performant.
>All the popular streaming services throttle or block open devices.
This just isn't true. Have never encountered this.
So... Wiretapping is pretty clear violation. And it's punished severely in most jurisdictions (eg: OpenAI engineer installing wiretaps).
So, this is wiretapping at a mass scale. Just how many crimes do the executive class occur before they get turned into the past-tense... The executed class?
I am for a corporate death penalty. Companies that engage in such mass criminal activities do not deserve to exist.
Samsung what? Fridge? Air conditioning? Dishwasher? Excavator? A single more word of explanation would make it crystal clear, whereas now I need to wonder whether it is about TV, computer monitor, smartphone or who knows what.
This is the answer. Lots of people (myself included) are happy to buy a big, cheap TV, but it's cheap because the manufacturer gets money by paid app placement, ads (sometimes), and selling information about you.
A senior friend has bad vision, so I recommended an inexpensive but enormous TV that they can use as a display, and never let it connect to the network. Unfortunately, every few months the display tries to coax them into connecting to WiFi, and it confuses the heck out of them. But, that's the game.
People still bought TV's when they were comparatively more expensive (hell we rented them here in the UK). I don't buy this line that "oh if you want a cheap TV...". No, it's an underhand tactic to try and justify adtech's creepy outreach.
This is the point everyone misses. It's not just that they are subsidizing the price of the TV. Whenever there is an opportunity to extract more profit, eventually they will do it. The rich are not immune from being targeted by this but they sure like to think that they are when they support this behavior in the companies they control.
Maybe it's time for something like that, a shared baseline standard of "this thing won't spy on you", with massive financial penalties for companies caught lying about it. Prime adoption by making it a requirement for anything bought by the government.
Then consumers can reliably comparison-shop for a "TV" that doesn't turn into a traitorous 1984 telescreen the moment it breaks out of the LAN or you fail to click "maybe later" on its incessant dark pattern pop-ups.
There was just a post yesterday about how to root your samsung. I rooted my samsung and removed ads, mics, and my agent is looking into this one as we speak [codex].
Do a search on X on the topic, the news about Samsung was broken on there by a guy who had rooted his Samsung TV using AI tools and he and others created guides for neutering the stuff out of it
The mechanism you are thinking of - optimizing brightness and dynamic contrast, happens in TCON in low level hardware at fraction of a fraction of power
But the next generation of everything will be so much less efficient as the new generation of developers has forgotten how to do anything with low level methods.
Just yesterday I hacked my Samsung Frame tv. The AI (codex) used an off-the-shelf root with Developer Console access (built in). Though root doesn't give you the signing keys to blow everything away and still boot (is my best understanding), but as a workaround you can still change anything you want after boot automatically.
I had it do:
- Stripping ads
- Disabling mics
- Turning off updates
- Leaving root SSH in place (protected) for future access
The key to getting codex to do this was that this is legal under DMCA, but after a certain point I had to get a new session to change all the "hacking" words into synonyms to not trigger false security alarms. Wouldn't be surprised or bothered if my chatgpt account gets banned though.
I can write a blog post and publish the repo if you want
I think in this case, the Tizen OS (by Samsung) on these TVs has a developer mode where you can use their Samsung Debug Bridge CLI tool on another computer to connect to the TV and get a regular Linux user shell. From there, they found a local privilege escalation bug to get root. I don’t know the exact details but a lot of smart devices get poor security support, so you can just shotgun different known vulnerabilities and get lucky with one pretty often rather than needing to develop a novel one.
I believe Mistral models are fairly capable at cybersecurity tasks, but I don’t think you could get anything useful out of anything smaller than Mistral Large 4.
I agree with this. At this point, AI has gotten smart enough that most smart TVs can be hacked (I just did it with my LG), and TV manufacturers haven't caught up yet.
Gotta love how the phone runs the expensive spying model regardless of consent, purely so that people who withhold consent aren't rewarded with better battery life. As if some % of the battery was still Samsung's property for their own marketing purposes. Stay classy!
Meta and Google will never sell your data. They will collect it and use it for targeted advertising for sure, but they consider it far too valuable and useful to sell. This is because they have the tech and expertise to use their data well.
A grocery store or a gas station chain, though? They're clueless about tech, don't know what to do with the data, and have to aggressively compete on prices. If some savvy data broker comes to them, offering them a way to essentially gain market share by pushing prices lower than the competition and selling your data to make up the loss? That's an offer they can't refuse.
Hardware manufacturers are largely on the grocery store side; they're not data-savvy and they want to make things cheaper than the competition, so they're almost forced to do these shenanigans to win the competitive rat race.
If you want to meaningfully increase privacy, don't quit Meta, quit Target, Visa and LG.
How does this apply to the topic of this thread? Samsung is, if anything, much more tech-savvy (tech-adjacent?) than Meta. Meta just does some high-level software and runs a few servers to host it. Samsung, across the company, builds every level of the hardware and software stack from silicon to services.
Meta and Google are both founded on the premise of capturing and using your data, with everything else being a loss-leader.
Samsung, meanwhile, makes the majority of its money making and selling physical "things", whether for B2B2C (SSDs, display panels), B2B (construction cranes, cargo ships, oil refineries, grid-storage EV batteries), or B2C (phones, TVs, smart fridges, etc.)
However, things aren't black and white here. As you say, Samsung is more software/data-oriented than the other phone OEMs / smart TV manufacturers, when it comes to how they handle the data coming from Automated Content Recognition.
While other providers rely on third-party ACR data brokers (the rent-capturing middlemen here), Samsung has a vertically-integrated ACR-to-ad pipeline, where (AFAICT) their ACR data feeds into their own ad-tech-bidding infrastructure for placement on Samsung-operated properties (the aforementioned phones, TVs, smart fridges, etc.)
If you (an external entity in the example upthread, or just a random middle manager) walk up to Zuckerberg or Jassy with a proposal to tap their data for some comparatively small payment, they'd laugh in your face because they know how valuable what you're doing is and what the long term impact on their business will be. Samsung is far more likely to view that as "free money" and green light something awful.
Like yea in the 1930s, the dishwasher was "technology". Now it's just a consumer product. Many former tech companies have long ceased to be tech companies, but we forgot to stop calling them that.
It's effectively the Southern Strategy but for data sale: https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/exclusive-lee-atwa...
The only effective difference between them and that gas station is that the data is less likely (but not guaranteed) to end up on gray and black markets for exploitation. Regardless, that accounts for a very small percentage of sales anyway and misses the fact that most people don't want there to be a data silo that their government can tap into and utilize for surveillance. For example(s):
https://www.eff.org/press/releases/eff-state-ags-investigate...
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/04/google-broke-its-promi...
https://www.eff.org/press/releases/google-deceptively-tracks...
This is categorically false. I don't know what you're trying to allege here, but it's not that.
It's fair to allege all kinds of externalities and privacy impacts and such around the advertiser-driven content economy. And HN is 100% here for that.
But this is stepping across the line into a simple lie. They don't sell data.
As a deliberately hyperbolic example: "We're not selling child slaves, we only offer a marketplace where clients can bid for the use of the labor of the child slaves."
The problem is the intrusive violation of privacy involved in building giant databases of personal information on every person on earth, not that someone-other-than-Google is doing it.
Then have that argument, please. If your argument is that "privacy impacts of advertising are bad and here's why Google's business model doesn't improve that" then that is one thing. Telling people that Google is selling your data is a lie.
> “A plank of wood must not be carried along a pavement. It can only be moved if it is being unloaded from a vehicle or taken into a building.”
But big tech cannot be regulated at all. We used to regulate any minor thing that was annoying enough, but a whole industry spying and prying on the whole population is fine.
It cannot be regulated because we let dollar/capital rise above political authority.
Public awareness is step one.
This sort of equivocation, where any privacy invasion gets rounded off to "spying on you" doesn't help either. Clickbait headlines over android making 100 requests to google gets lumped together with more serious privacy violations like random SDKs selling your location data, causing a learned helplessness where people think "spying on you" is normal and can't be avoided.
Normal people, yes, but this is exactly what tech regulators ought to be gunning for. Even post GDPR, we just don't seem to have enough bulldogs in enforcement...
Personalized advertising is a progressive tax. Because the rich spend more and the poor spend less, Meta et al makes more money from the rich than it makes from the poor, while offering the same service to everybody else. As a result, we get the educated rich upper-middle class complaining about advertising, while everybody else is happy about not having to pay their long-distance charges any more.
There's gigantic conflict of interest there.
This is one of the problems with the neo-journalistic outlets and "citizen journalism". They don't have the staffing or discipline to run that sort of operation.
The CEO of Alibaba was kidnapped after he publicly criticized the government.
It's generally no surprise that there are not that many critical voices in a dictatorship.
Until they do. That’s the problem with dictatorship. If you can kill and swiftly replace the dictator, you become the dictator. What the masses believe is irrelevant.
https://www.wsj.com/world/china-economy-gen-z-f9058941
I feel sorry that democracies are failing their citizenry like this.
The way a farmer decides what their pigs eat is far from the way a caring lover chooses their partner's dinner.
This is generally not possible to do consistently, as if A prefers option 1 and B prefers option 2, you're at an impass...
And I'd take the inefficiencies of democracies over dictatorships any day...
Democracies are much closer to that than dictatorships as they don't need to care about the people and never did.
Crazy that you like a system where somebody can just get kidnapped. It never just affects the "right" people, but also a lot of other people. China is jailing and kidnapping a lot - easily tens of thousands of more - of their citizen to sustain control.
How do you think Xi Jinping’s family became billionaires?
> We used to regulate any minor thing that was annoying enough
Your example is a good reason why that approach was foolish.
Are these fines ever paid? Or is it appeal upon appeal and 10 years later they pay a tenth of the fine?
So no, it's not literally unregulated, but if it was regulated effectively Samsung would be scared shitless to pull stuff like this. They clearly aren't.
Is that a good law or is it a barnacle? Is it enforced in the UK?
Although it does appear to be true in London https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Vict/2-3/47/section/54
If a human cannot immediately see a negative outcome on their visual or mental horizon based on the knowledge they have at that moment most of their insights or feelings about what problems will occur will be incorrect.
Talking about AI and data is a good example of this. A bit of data here and there seems useless, but the moment you get enough the pattern of your life can emerge from it and suddenly you can be tracked and manipulated with an amazingly high probability. And it's not a one time thing either. Anything mispredicted gets put back in your profile as another data point.
If even moving a plank of wood is illegal I can’t imagine how he got away with that, unmolested by plod, for so many years.
Bicycles are ridden on the road, not the pavement.
Sometimes people ride bicycles on the pavement, but doing so with a long piece of wood would be very dangerous indeed.
> Every person who shall roll or carry any cask, tub, hoop, or wheel, or any ladder, plank, pole, showboard, or placard, upon any footway, except for the purpose of loading or unloading any cart or carriage, or of crossing the footway:
- https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Vict/2-3/47/section/54
That's disingenuous. The public has been told a beautiful fairy tale about technology for years. There are huge outcries every single time any politician tries to regulate big tech.
Now I know that this isn't because the public is somehow ideologically opposed to regulation. We have been paid off, just as much as the politicians have. When they increase the prices of televisions and say it's because they this new regulation, we show up to support them.
He typed, from a tiny device in his hand, from a bed in an air-conditioned apartment millions of miles away. Or perhaps from a jet sailing through the sky, via a satellite in space
Wi-Fi on planes is truly astounding when you think for even a moment.
As far as the censorship goes UK is trying hard. So follow the money?
""" 54 Prohibition of nuisances by persons in the thoroughfares.
Every person shall be liable to a penalty not more than level 2 on the standard scale, who, within the limits of the metropolitan police district, shall in any thoroughfare or public place, commit any of the following offences; (that is to say,)
...
8. Every person who shall roll or carry any cask, tub, hoop, or wheel, or any ladder, plank, pole, showboard, or placard, upon any footway, except for the purpose of loading or unloading any cart or carriage, or of crossing the footway:
... """ https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Vict/2-3/47/section/54
The plank of wood is one element in a much broader statute, rather than an example of hyper-specificity. And it might have been strictly applied at the time, but that doesn't mean you're definitely going to get into trouble nowadays.
In a similar vein, the UK *does* have laws that affect big tech. UK GDPR places requirements on processing of personal data:
""" Personal data shall be:
(a)processed lawfully, fairly and in a transparent manner in relation to the data subject (‘lawfulness, fairness and transparency’); """ https://www.legislation.gov.uk/eur/2016/679/article/5
Whether that's properly enforced is (as with the plank) a completely different matter.
In the UK, at least, we don't need new regulations, we need to more effectively apply the regulations we already have in place. But there is also a balance to be made between enforcement through fines and enforcement through changing behaviour: it's much better to work with companies to bring them into compliance than it is to just fine them and without actually changing anything.
> within the limits of the metropolitan police district
It's a local London law. In England such laws are passed by parliament because there is no other mechanism, but in countries with devolved lawmaking states and cities have much crazier laws.
This isn't a real thing. It's like the thing about it being legal to shoot Welshmen if they're in York after nightfall, and other such shit.
The plank rule just exists, not enforced, so nobody observes it.
Same will happen with the high-tech regulation. In fact, it is already happening left and right where it does exist.
People understand what a plank of wood is and how it works.
People, including the vast majority of politicians, don’t understand our technology at all. It’s magic. Why does a light come on when they flip the switch? Magic. Computers are deep black magic.
How can they write effective regulation? Or tell the difference between proposals that are good or bad written by others?
If politicians regulated big tech more we’d probably end up with a ton of regulatory capture that legislated monopolies for big tech and shut out open source and startups, because who has the money to influence the ignorant lawmakers at scale?
We are now in a world where small groups of high priests understand certain things, and few others. We’ve been there for a while but it’s gotten far more opaque in the last 25 years or so.
Even something like a nuclear reactor or an aircraft is much easier to explain. The last episode of the Chernobyl series did a great job explaining what was wrong with that reactor design to a layperson. But computing… and networks… people who do understand it have forgotten just how ludicrously arcane and inscrutable it is to most.
A big difference too is that by the Church-Turing theorem there is (as a side effect of it) a provably infinite number of ways to perform any computation. Which means you can’t just legislate “don’t do that.” Physical machines are not like that.
We can't do that any more; the people who support tech regulation are so cartoonishly anti-corporate that any suggestion of embedding somebody who understands tech will be met with accusations of lobbying and a careful review of that person's employment history.
It's obvious to pretty much everybody that regulating banks, railroads or phone companies requires people who have previously worked for banks, railroads and phone companies, and have a good understanding of how such organizations work on the inside. We, generally, don't do that with tech.
Surround yourself with good advisors and the surrounding kingdoms will notice and be less inclined to attack. If you have bad advisors, your enemies will perceive that as their opening
Politicians are keenly aware that regulation has to be administered, and administration costs money. The internet subsists on low overhead, and per jurisdiction administration would significantly change almost everything about the current internet. The public wont allow that.
If the public actually starts demanding regulation, we will see a fracturing of the internet into national networks. It will become impossible (or at least uneconomical) to run reddit, youtube, or facebook as global networks. They might continue to exists, but they will be sectioned off.
I don't know if it's just greed or.
I refused to create an account on their galaxy phone because of the mandatory phone number needed. Yes, I know they can harvest it in other ways, it's just a stand.
Corporations are considered persons and they need to pay shareholders.
Seriously, it’s pure greed and people who love money enable this, because they think they are immune to this, or harmless.
Not much different from playstore but that is also a problem.
I'm not the only one who made note of that behavior, but if i recall sometime before breaking my phone in the last couple months the behaviour ceased. probably after a factory rom update, but at this point i can no longer confirm or deny. but! i did and do have a backup of the potentially offending apk.
Has this been quantified? Otherwise it's easy to fall for confirmation bias, eg. "facebook is secretly listening to you"
Agreeing with your general point - don't jump to conclusions without evidence - but I don't like it if we're now establishing the "Facebook/Google/Apple/etc is secretly listening to you" rumors as the canonical example of that behavior, and thereby exempting companies from further scrutiny in this.
We've seen that by now there exists both the will and the technical means to pull off stuff like this. So even if it used to be a baseless rumor and urban legend, it deserves to be re-checked periodically, because companies might start to do it for real at some point. Samsung here actually did.
(Google also comes awfully close with its "song detector" which is now a stock Android feature I think)
But my point is imagine if the person that did that simple TD lite model pre-training did something less... ad-related in his life.
What is the societal opportunity cost of a person not doing $this_thing_you_mentioned and applying it just about anything else.
If you want a high quality TV for the best price your best bet is either disable/opt out of all the tracking data, or even better just never hook it up to the internet at all and plug an AppleTV or Chromecast on it.
If you look for a Samsung TV without “smart” features you pretty much have to find them under “commercial displays” and you’ll pay a premium for it.
are we living in 2010 or something?
It doesn't matter whether you run android TV from the TV itself or an external device.
All the popular streaming services throttle or block open devices.
There's no regulation on it, because regulators want locked-down hardware that can only take actions approved by them.
Even with that, there are plenty of safer distros, or you can even get a cheap mini pc and throw one of the many awesome Linux distros on that have zero tracking and are far more capable/performant.
>All the popular streaming services throttle or block open devices.
This just isn't true. Have never encountered this.
https://www.bol.com/nl/nl/l/42-inch-tv-s-zonder-smart-functi...
This Sony might be an option: https://www.bol.com/nl/nl/p/sony-bravia-professional-fw-55bz...
So, this is wiretapping at a mass scale. Just how many crimes do the executive class occur before they get turned into the past-tense... The executed class?
I am for a corporate death penalty. Companies that engage in such mass criminal activities do not deserve to exist.
A senior friend has bad vision, so I recommended an inexpensive but enormous TV that they can use as a display, and never let it connect to the network. Unfortunately, every few months the display tries to coax them into connecting to WiFi, and it confuses the heck out of them. But, that's the game.
It would be tricky to implement, but a network tarpit that responds on TCP as if outgoing packets are being accepted and routed might be useful.
I'm assuming, perhaps incorrectly, that if the TV had a crap connection it would stop nagging.
Maybe it's time for something like that, a shared baseline standard of "this thing won't spy on you", with massive financial penalties for companies caught lying about it. Prime adoption by making it a requirement for anything bought by the government.
Then consumers can reliably comparison-shop for a "TV" that doesn't turn into a traitorous 1984 telescreen the moment it breaks out of the LAN or you fail to click "maybe later" on its incessant dark pattern pop-ups.
Happy to post to github if you'd like.
How many years is it for 10 million devices?
From what I heard these are especially awful, even by low IoT standards.
I'm not sure it's literal enough.
...... or do you???
I mean it is probably also used to collect data, but this sounds like it might be more than just that. Maybe?
I had it do:
- Stripping ads
- Disabling mics
- Turning off updates
- Leaving root SSH in place (protected) for future access
The key to getting codex to do this was that this is legal under DMCA, but after a certain point I had to get a new session to change all the "hacking" words into synonyms to not trigger false security alarms. Wouldn't be surprised or bothered if my chatgpt account gets banned though. I can write a blog post and publish the repo if you want
But also if you're working on a local device, any Chinese model will agree to it most of the time.
I can imagine working on the dumped firmware or update package.
But against the TV over the network without closed loop or access to RAM how could the model find and develop exploits?
Basically all Qwen models got un-neuthered.
Even the big ones (Deepseek, etc.) got their protection layer ablated.
just hack it right after purchase and own the glass