I guess there are two issues here: lack of consent, and lack of trust.
Each of them is important for me separately. But together, it’s like, I say “no”, you say “but trust me, you are going to like it, it will be good for you”, and I say “first, I don’t trust you, and second, I already said no”.
To explain the problem with trust, let’s use some outside view here. I don’t want to read hundred pages of the latest specification written by Google, because I am not a security expert, I cannot verify that the functionality will actually be implemented 100% according to the specification and without bugs, and most importantly the specification can be updated in the future after people get used to it.
The historical experience is that first you have a TV, then you have a TV full of ads, then you agree to pay for cable TV because you acknowledge that they need money and you want to get rid of the ads, and then you find yourself paying for a cable TV which is full of ads anyway. (And the story doesn’t really end here. Then you find out that your TV is collecting data about your watching habits and sending it god knows where. And maybe there is a hidden camera in the TV that looks at your face and analyzes whether you are smiling or bored, and how much attention you are paying. And I am pretty sure the story doesn’t end here either, and I wonder what my children and grandchildren will consider “normal” when they are at my age.) So the outside view says that whevener you give up some X in return for a promise of getting some Y back, in long term you are going to lose both X and Y and also some unexpected Z.
Whatever value you are promising me to get back after accepting your proposal, I expect to lose it at the very next update. (That is, if the first version is implemented flawlessly, and if it truly contains no security holes. Otherwise, I expect to lose the value again five seconds after we shake hands.)
From the perspective of consent, I am not really free to say “no” here, am I? The corporations want my private data, and given the difference in power, they will get them. The bottom line is already written, and the only thing this debate could achieve is to make me feel less bad about having my preferences violated. My opinion about differential privacy or anything else makes zero difference, it’s just shouting in the wind.
The description of differential privacy on Wikipedia sounds interesting, and I don’t for a moment assume that it will be implemented correctly. The idea, if I understand it correctly, is that whenever someone makes a query, you add a certain (mathematically determined) amount of noise to the results. Which means the data in the database itself are without the noise. Which means we just have to trust that no one implements an extra button that would return the data without the added noise. Not even if their boss, or the government tells them to. I don’t believe this for a moment.
This viewpoint on how media has changed over time seems really strange to me. My history would have been almost the reverse—a history of going from everything being expensive (pay per view TV?) and usually low quality as well to almost everything being cheap and many things being literally free, including a lot of high-quality things.
Viliam’s description matches my understanding of the history. TV started out with free over-the-air broadcasting, with admittedly just a few offerings (only three channels originally). They were ad supported, but generally had much fewer ads than today. Between the 1960s and 1980s cable was introduced, and initially was ad-free but paid. Then they gradually introduced ads to the format once people were locked in and hooked to the shows available. Now the quantity of ads is greater than ever, plus it costs money. Today a few channels still offer that free over-the-air broadcasting, but it’s much fewer than there used to be at the peak. So now we’re in a state where you both need to pay and get a large quantity of ads.
Of course, streaming services have somewhat disrupted that model, but many streaming services both cost money and have ads. Plus to get all the same shows as on cable you need a large number of streaming services and they all add up to cost more than the cable package would!
You might say that the quality of the television shows has gone up, and you can definitely say that it’s worth the tradeoff, but it’s not obviously worth it to everyone.
Do you think that people ‘deserve’ free television (i.e. the content, e.g. shows, movies, etc.)? Do you think that ideally it would be publicly financed, e.g. via government taxation?
Personally – and, I think, charitably – all of this looks like a lot of different entities trying to solve an extremely complex set of economic problems, i.e. funding (and ideally profiting-from) the production of ‘television’ content. And I suspect a lot of the particular features, both now and in the recent path, are due to path dependence, e.g. because of the initial medium (radio) by which this kind of content was distributed.
I guess there are two issues here: lack of consent, and lack of trust.
Each of them is important for me separately. But together, it’s like, I say “no”, you say “but trust me, you are going to like it, it will be good for you”, and I say “first, I don’t trust you, and second, I already said no”.
To explain the problem with trust, let’s use some outside view here. I don’t want to read hundred pages of the latest specification written by Google, because I am not a security expert, I cannot verify that the functionality will actually be implemented 100% according to the specification and without bugs, and most importantly the specification can be updated in the future after people get used to it.
The historical experience is that first you have a TV, then you have a TV full of ads, then you agree to pay for cable TV because you acknowledge that they need money and you want to get rid of the ads, and then you find yourself paying for a cable TV which is full of ads anyway. (And the story doesn’t really end here. Then you find out that your TV is collecting data about your watching habits and sending it god knows where. And maybe there is a hidden camera in the TV that looks at your face and analyzes whether you are smiling or bored, and how much attention you are paying. And I am pretty sure the story doesn’t end here either, and I wonder what my children and grandchildren will consider “normal” when they are at my age.) So the outside view says that whevener you give up some X in return for a promise of getting some Y back, in long term you are going to lose both X and Y and also some unexpected Z.
Whatever value you are promising me to get back after accepting your proposal, I expect to lose it at the very next update. (That is, if the first version is implemented flawlessly, and if it truly contains no security holes. Otherwise, I expect to lose the value again five seconds after we shake hands.)
From the perspective of consent, I am not really free to say “no” here, am I? The corporations want my private data, and given the difference in power, they will get them. The bottom line is already written, and the only thing this debate could achieve is to make me feel less bad about having my preferences violated. My opinion about differential privacy or anything else makes zero difference, it’s just shouting in the wind.
The description of differential privacy on Wikipedia sounds interesting, and I don’t for a moment assume that it will be implemented correctly. The idea, if I understand it correctly, is that whenever someone makes a query, you add a certain (mathematically determined) amount of noise to the results. Which means the data in the database itself are without the noise. Which means we just have to trust that no one implements an extra button that would return the data without the added noise. Not even if their boss, or the government tells them to. I don’t believe this for a moment.
This viewpoint on how media has changed over time seems really strange to me. My history would have been almost the reverse—a history of going from everything being expensive (pay per view TV?) and usually low quality as well to almost everything being cheap and many things being literally free, including a lot of high-quality things.
Viliam’s description matches my understanding of the history. TV started out with free over-the-air broadcasting, with admittedly just a few offerings (only three channels originally). They were ad supported, but generally had much fewer ads than today. Between the 1960s and 1980s cable was introduced, and initially was ad-free but paid. Then they gradually introduced ads to the format once people were locked in and hooked to the shows available. Now the quantity of ads is greater than ever, plus it costs money. Today a few channels still offer that free over-the-air broadcasting, but it’s much fewer than there used to be at the peak. So now we’re in a state where you both need to pay and get a large quantity of ads.
Of course, streaming services have somewhat disrupted that model, but many streaming services both cost money and have ads. Plus to get all the same shows as on cable you need a large number of streaming services and they all add up to cost more than the cable package would!
You might say that the quality of the television shows has gone up, and you can definitely say that it’s worth the tradeoff, but it’s not obviously worth it to everyone.
This is a strange discussion – to me!
Do you think that people ‘deserve’ free television (i.e. the content, e.g. shows, movies, etc.)? Do you think that ideally it would be publicly financed, e.g. via government taxation?
Personally – and, I think, charitably – all of this looks like a lot of different entities trying to solve an extremely complex set of economic problems, i.e. funding (and ideally profiting-from) the production of ‘television’ content. And I suspect a lot of the particular features, both now and in the recent path, are due to path dependence, e.g. because of the initial medium (radio) by which this kind of content was distributed.