How is anyone in SV going to eat if private corporations can't track our every move? I mean, not everyone takes cab rides or rents private homes when they travel, but almost everyone uses the internet for something. And those people need to be tracked, or there's no money to be made.
> How is anyone in SV going to eat if private corporations can't track our every move?
I work for an ISP and we do not track our customers. At all. We bill them and they receive a reliable service that performs as advertised. Maybe we could go back to the oldschool model of actually selling a product or service, delivering it to the customer, and keeping the customer happy?
I’m not walrus01 but I know of a few ISPs in the Bay Area that put an emphasis on net neutrality and users’ privacy, on top of running a good service: Wave on the SF/Daly City side, and Sonic’s running fiber in the East Bay. Both have impressed me, especially Sonic which provides their own VPN and runs a public wiki that rivals my company’s internal IT wiki. I’ve also heard good things about LMI but I have no personal experience with them.
I'd rather not mix my sometimes controversial comments on HN with work - everything I write here is very much not in my "official" capacity... But I can say it's west coast, small to medium sized, clueful, and doesn't suck.
I think it's because it's private property, so they can. I mean they can't just install scanners on a public (gov't) freeway, for example. Some jurisdictions, like Tiburon, in CA, scans every vehicle entering and exiting (only one way in and one way out of town.)
It won't solve the license plate issue, but wearing a burka in public is starting to sound like a sensible response to the modern world just so you don't end up with your face scanned and location logged 38 times on your way to work in the morning.
A niqab might do for now, but I'm guessing height, gate and precise location might provide too much fingerprinting information.
Many countries have anti-masking laws now, which make it illegal to cover your face, unless you have a "reasonable need".
Regrettably, the notoriously anti-immigration government here in Denmark has instituted just such a law, apparently because of a couple thousand women who wear niqabs and maybe 20 who wear burqas. They claim it's to "fight social control", which I find extremely ironic since it's the women who'll be getting fined!
And of course, the excuse the government uses is that it's for "public safety during demonstrations and for identification purposes in banks and similar situations".
I'm not actually sure whether it's actually meant to target the niqab/burqa-wearing women, or if it's because of the left-wing protests against the government, where some of the participants wear masks. Either way, banning specific types of clothes usually only happens in totalitation states.
What are you even talking about? They aren't tracking my car to make sure I don't run some one over, they are tracking it so that they can sell more stuff.
It's easy "you can't hire employees" and enforce it, it's a lot harder to go "you can't use the billions and billions of cameras in existence to record or track thing" and realistically hope to enforce it, especially when there is valid application.
I'm quite fine with the government knowing where my government registered, government licensed, government plated car is going. To legally drive a car you have to be licensed by the government, your car has to be registered with the government and you have to have a license plate issued by the government. You're going to be driving on public roads and private parking lots that have security cameras, ticketing cameras, news cameras, rear view cameras, autonomous car sensors, intersection monitoring cameras, internet streaming cameras and not to mention just about every human being you drive by will have at least one camera on their person.
This is a fact of life. Barring the discontinuation of using electricity this isn't going to change.
Do you have a phone? You're leaving records on every tower your phone connects to. Do you use WiFi? You're leaving records. Do you have a car with OnStar? You're leaving records. Do you use something like Automatic, you're giving a company all of your driving paths. Do you use Uber or Lyft, you're leaving a trail of where you go.
Are you an illegal immigrant or a human/drug/weapon trafficker that is under investigation using a specific vehicle to commit your crimes? Yes? Then don't go to the mall.
> It's easy "you can't hire employees" and enforce it
I wouldn't say that's "easy" by any measure. It requires(/d) a large shift of public opinion and awareness, enforcement is in many ways harder because there's less visibility.
> I'm quite fine with the government knowing where my government registered, government licensed, government plated car is going.
You're right. Most of us are. Are you ok with them implanting chips into you as a baby to track your every move? Assuming your response to that is "no" then you realize that the issue at hand is scope. There are limits to what we'll accept.
> Do you have a phone? You're leaving records on every tower your phone connects to. Do you use WiFi? You're leaving records.
Again you're confusing the principle at large and the scope at which it's applied.
> Are you an illegal immigrant or a human/drug/weapon trafficker that is under investigation using a specific vehicle to commit your crimes? Yes? Then don't go to the mall.
This is a reductive argument. When I talk about the scope above I'm talking about the impact it has on everyone.
