If this succeeds, it will be a data collection tool the likes of which the world has never seen, which is why so many companies are willing to put their name on it. The data, along with ML/AI, and our contemporary understanding of the human mind, means that this is a major step towards control that we can't understand.
Dr. Harari explains it better than I do in "21 Lessons for the 21st Century", but this tool is part of a suite of data collection utilities that will be dissected and used in order to further subjugate our mental energies to the will of the tech giants running our phones. If you don't believe that this is already happening, hang out with some teenagers. I would say that there is a large contingent of people for whom this is already true, and once that group is large enough, then how can you assert yourself against that pipeline of information?
Every bit of data we give away for free is a massive mistake. I hope that Europe figures out a regulatory framework that works.
> I hope that Europe figures out a regulatory framework that works.
Is this even possible with complex fast-changing software? They always seem to be busy figuring out last decades issues. Or when they do respond to new things it's usually a FUD-riddled overreaction that just straight up cripples the new things so we're only left with the options that the ordained organizations like Visa and Mastercard come up with. Which is usually a worse outcome than before.
If anything we need some simple core digital privacy rights ala the constitution or charters of rights. Not some thousand page mess like GDPR that was intended to curtail the big guys but ends up giving small Austrian retail businesses $4000 fines for installing a simple surveillance camera, which happened to be too broadly pointed outside.
> If anything we need some simple core digital privacy rights ala the constitution or charters of rights.
Exactly. That's the core of it. We certain do have a lot of laws that apply online already. Harassment, for example, applies just as much online as in person. Medical records are still protected, regardless of how they're stored.
What we lack is much of anything relating to scale. Some behaviors are just a completely different beast at scale. The first thing that comes to mind is election interference. I don't think highly-targeted ads/content should be permitted in politics. Selling personal data without permission should also be illegal. Right now it's ad companies selling ad campaigns which isn't a big deal. But how long before it's so easy to run facial recognition, etc that you'll be able to buy bits of location history, etc on people, license plates, etc for a few dollars?
Europe sure managed to slay the dragon of those evil cookies what with the banners plastered all over every site forcing you to click a button to close them.
Cookies have been around for 25 years and are dead simple, and Brussels failed spectacularly to understand, let alone sensibly regulate, them. Colour me skeptical they'll manage to wrangle something that even the people working on it barely understand, and that's changing on a yearly basis.
Has anyone in EU asked themselves if those banners have accomplished anything besides being a giant waste of time and space having hundreds of millions of people not read the text and automatically clicking x?
I’m not even from EU and I’ve had to click them countless times. And I don’t think I’ve read a single one, even though I’m pretty hardcore when it comes to privacy.
It greatly saddens me that companies will go to great lengths to geofence content but not annoying popovers. The US or someone needs to get a clause into their next EU trade agreement to make it illegal to serve those outside the EU :)
Possible? No, not really, assuming they have "right intentions", the EU laws rarely turn out to be good for the population(link tax & copyright law for ex.). Even GDPR has some flaws that can be used to target the same people it claims to protect.
The main reason for this is simple,most of the bureaucrats making these laws have little to no "internet-sphere" literacy(or even technology as a whole to be quite honest).While they tackle the problems from a legal perspective,this same legal perspective is de facto putting handcuffs in the freedoms of the people, no matter the "intentions" the law-makers initially have.
And i agree, the best-case solution is to spread the idea of an internet bill of rights, specially in Europe.US is still one step ahead, their own constitution would be the thing this bill would be based on.Their smaller problem is that (few)corporations enjoy the benefits of both state incentives (see twitter,google,etc. through taxes) while also being a "publisher"(not being responsable for the content the users post).
> I'm pretty sure that this type of data collection tool is in use today by the Chinese government.
Yeah US is a bit slow to that party. Alipay and Wechat-pay has roughly a billion users (conservative estimate) in China. It's widely socially accepted.
Makes more sense in the case of China, which never had wide adoption of credit cards. In Libra's case...why should I ever use it instead of sticking with credit cards?
Rather than straight cash, using it as a more-secure credit card would be enough to sign me up. It would prevent card skimmers, people copying numbers, etc. They could generate one-time card numbers for online purchases at existing merchants. Despite lots of mitigations, VISA/MC still have huge fraud problems. This would give them a new tool to lock things down.
VISA's transaction data is not the same as Facebook's social data. Combining the two is the point of concern. We have financial regulatory laws for this reason
There is at least this from Zuckerberg's announcement : "Calibra will be regulated like other payment service providers. Any information you share with Calibra will be kept separate from information you share on Facebook."
I suspect they are using different definitions of "information", "share", "separate", "Calibra", and "Facebook" than a naive person reading that sentence might expect.
I don't mean that as pure snark; I'm dead serious. The legal definition of all those things, the definitions they can get away with using, and the definitions that a normal person would expect from reading that sentence are probably three very different things.
Plus, along with general lack of confidence in Facebook keeping its mitts off of juicy data given their checkered history, I have even less confidence that the promised wall will be there going forward, and that there won't be an excited, breathless announcement in a year or two about how ecstatic they are to bring you awesome new services powered by the data they're going to get from tearing down that wall and isn't it all just so wonderful.
BTW, I read your link and it was the founder of WhatsApp that 'promised' it. While I wouldn't be surprised if FB made the promise and then broke it, that doesn't seem to be what happened here.
Well, if I sold a chat application that was loosing hundreds of millions of dollars, for $19 billion dollars to FB.. I'd be wondering how they're ever going to recover the money. Its easy to paint one side as the villain in this.
The legal definition of all those things, the definitions they can get away with using, and the definitions that a normal person would expect from reading that sentence are probably three very different things.
This has applied to a bunch of things for years now. Have you flown on an airline? You might well have flown on an airplane operated by a different company, with that airline's branding. Who makes your car and your electronics? The details of all that have been a complex maze since the 1980's. Who makes your toothpaste, and where are all the ingredients really from?
(Note, this comment is written mainly with 3rd party readers in mind.)
I know at some point I heard of a group that wasn't selling data about particular users but they were selling aggregated data about the users. In typical fashion they had convinced themselves that they were the good guys.
I'd be shocked if Facebook weren't planning the same thing.
I wonder if "kept separate from" is meaningfully differently than "unable to be linked to". Ie, if Facebook can figure out how to link their data to your LibraCoin data then this statement is moot.
Keeping data separate is not interesting wording by itself, imo.
Typical comments from them. It also says they will comply with all AML and KYC requirements and will work directly with governments as required. In other words, to get this crypto you must give them your government ID. The fact that the complete Calibra profile of you will be in a different database than your complete FB profile is meaningless.
This statement does not include ads. Which is the real use case in my opinion. Facebook will link shown ads to purchases made with Calibra. This will allow them to target users even more and generate more revenue per ad.
They're not exclusive anymore. The credit card is largely just a physical application that the phone can do anyways. Every modern phone can be a credit card. Besides, when leaving your home you likely take the big 3 collectively: cell, wallet, keys.
Credit cards have NFC now. It wouldn't be hard to fathom that this data might be paired with other surveillance data.
Everywhere we look, someone is trying to create a new method of tracking. ISPs are high-jacking sessions, 3rd party apps on your phone are taking everything they can get their hands on, "smart-home" products that are always listening, shopper club cards, toll-transponders tracked silently by municipalities (off of toll roads!), license plate scanners, CCTV with facial recognition.
Everything is being collected. To what end? At some point, we have to hit peak-marketing where this data becomes mostly useless as our behavior will be perfectly predictable at some point in the future.
> toll-transponders tracked silently by municipalities (off of toll roads!)
Hadn't heard of that before. Gross. Although I can see it being helpful in answering some planning questions. Take Seattle with two competing bridges, 520 (toll) and I-90 (no toll). How do rates/congestion effect which bridge commuters take?
I wish this stuff was made more clear. Unfortunately, with license plate readers everywhere, it's just becoming more and more a given that your car gets tracked through major intersections/choke points. While it's going to vary what people do with that data, it's pretty safe to say someone is holding onto their share of it long-term.
Police drive around neighborhoods with the ALPRs and keep that database. WIFI and bluetooth beacons are setup at major events and along interstates. SF Bay area tracked their Fastrack for years.
Big Brother is here and has matured into Big Daddy ;)
There's an entire industry dedicated to traffic analysis and selling government these services. Some places are even privatizing toll-roads. The state is using eminent domain to take land, taking out loans and issuing bonds to build the roads, and letting private contractors 'operate' the roads perpetually. If that wasn't bad enough, the state guarantees the private operators a minimum amount of revenue in case there isn't enough traffic to meet some minimum threshold. Essentially, all the same problems as privatized prisons.
Yes, and Facebook already has agreements in place with CC companies to get that data. They’ve had access to that data for a while. This isn’t a new data source, this is horizontal integration.
This will go beyond that by including information typically because of the event of the ledger. Currently, I give my children cash. What happens when that's a ledger entry as well?
So when Target says to Facebook I have this list of email addresses hashed with this algorithm can you match them to this $PRODUCT you know why when you buy some tide you get a FB ad for tide before you leave the store.
> If you don't believe that this is already happening, hang out with some teenagers.
Ever since I moved away for college (2009) I had started becoming curious how the lives of today's American youth were interacting, and how that was different from my own experience.
Unfortunately it's not easy getting close to that age group without raising flags for being creepy.
Didn't Google buy tons of Mastercard transaction data to JOIN against their ad profiles? How does the scale of this (and other purchasing datasets they can bring in) compare to the theoretical powers of what Facebook has? I guess one difference might be that it will be able to capture way more outside the US.
Dr. Harari explains it better than I do in "21 Lessons for the 21st Century", but this tool is part of a suite of data collection utilities that will be dissected and used in order to further subjugate our mental energies to the will of the tech giants running our phones. If you don't believe that this is already happening, hang out with some teenagers. I would say that there is a large contingent of people for whom this is already true, and once that group is large enough, then how can you assert yourself against that pipeline of information?
Every bit of data we give away for free is a massive mistake. I hope that Europe figures out a regulatory framework that works.