Seriously, why can't we just have a law that makes entirely illegal the retention of any personally identifiable information in any way that is legible to the retainer.

You can store my data for me, but only encrypted, and it can be decrypted only in a sandbox. And the output of the sandbox can be sent only back to me, the user. Decrypting the personal data for any other use is illegal. If an audit shows a failure here, the company loses 1% of revenue the first time, then 2%, then 4, etc.

And companies must offer to let you store all of your own data on your own cloud machine. You just have to open a port to them with some minimum guarantees of uptime, etc. They can read/write a subset of data. The schema must be open to the user.

Any systems that have been developed from personal user data (i.e. recommendation engines, trained models) must be destroyed. Same applies: if you're caught using a system that was trained in the past on aggregated data across multiple users, you face the same percentage fines.

The only folks who maybe get a pass are public healthcare companies for medical studies.

Fixed.

(But yeah it'll never happen because most of the techies are eager to screw over everyone else for their own gain. And they'll of course tell you it's to make the services better for you.)

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itopaloglu83 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I want my TVs to track me as much as a 1970s toaster. They have no business knowing who I am or anything about my life, yet alone twice a second capturing what I watch.

Once a generation starts to accept that everything they do is getting tracked, things may never go back, it may even lead autocracy.

	▲	andrepd 3 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		It's exhausting getting "normies" to care about that. Frankly that ship has sailed, on a cultural level. Things that were unthinkable 20 years ago are just... yeah that's normal whatever.
	▲	hopelite an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Arguably we already have autocracy (call it emergent, if you like) in both the EU and America due to a combination of abdication and subversions of democratic will, self-governance, and sovereign nationhood over the last many decades, which is really starting to show its ugly nature just recently. People forget, autocracies don’t just show up one day and announce “ok, we’re going to do autocracy now and I’m your dictator. Ok? Good?” They are conditions that have a long tail setup and preparation and then an accelerating escalation (where it seems we are now) and then, if not adequately countered, it bursts into place almost overnight. That has resulted in the state of, in the EU, unelected (popularly) Commission Presidents dictating and dominating all of Europe, and the Presidency using powers it wasn’t supposed to have to tariff and threaten countries with destruction, conferred upon the office by a Congress that has also failed its core function. Shallow thinkers tend to think in terms of the past archetypes, but it is unlikely that we will ever see anything like one of the middle eastern or Latin American autocrats with a clownish amount of metals on their chests ruling the West. It is a small cabal of people that manage a new kind of patronage system where everyone gets a piece of the plunder of the peasants. Call it neo-aristocracy if you like, until a better term emerges. Remember, the new tricks and lies tend to not be the same as the old tricks and lies.

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forgotusername6 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Sending packages in the mail would be interesting. Though I suppose the only person that really needs to know your exact address is the delivery company, so maybe you could mail things with the address encrypted with the delivery company's public key..

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hopelite 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Not enough people care…ironically, largely because they’re in the modern opium den … watching and playing things on their screens.

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tekawade 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Agree. Also they say it’s not personally identifiable if they know everything about you but associates it as anonymously. Basically renaming you to random artifact. Fees La like major loophole. That’s why I don’t like chrome.

Saying that I think I am already hooked on free and/or easy to search etc etc BS. Basically take my data for convenience and some advanced tech. Honestly feels like addiction.

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RataNova 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The hard part isn't the crypto or the sandboxing, it's enforcement and incentives

	▲	cassonmars 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The hard part _includes_ the crypto and the sandboxing. Short of playing security theater games like "chuck it in a TEE", the moment your data needs any kind of processing, or possesses relationships with other users data (or their ability to view your data, like a social media feed), the complexity increases exponentially.

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leogiertz 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

You mean like GDPR but stronger?

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NooneAtAll3 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

like GDPR, but cookie banners are by law preemptively answered with no

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danielscrubs 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Its not just cookies. If you tell an LG TV that you live in Europe it will ask you if you want to turn of these “intelligent features“(ACR)

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jsrozner 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

in fact, cookies legible to anything except the single sandboxed webpage running on your local browser would be illegal and thus never exist to begin with

	▲	mrkeen 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I like it, but we'd need to find a new way to do auth (and then prevent that from being used for non-auth-related tracking)

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jsrozner 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

i mean that the business models of google and facebook would go poooof

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rightbyte 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Sadly not. Context based ads is a thing.

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amelius 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Context based ads also give away information about the user. Because if you buy the goods that were advertised the vendor knows which contexts apply to you. It is not very precise information and it may involve probabilities, but it is still information.

	▲	rightbyte 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah and like coupon codes for discounts etc.