this post was submitted on 10 Oct 2024
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Privacy
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No, you can address this through laws and legislation. You literally just ban people from amassing personal information on other people like Europe is doing.
Banning things doesnt stop people from doing those things. You dont stop locking your bike/car just because theft is illegal. Other countries governments could still use it, criminals could use it, your own countries agencies could use it because they might be exempt from certain laws.
True, but corporations are the most clear and immediate threat and making it sufficiently (!) expensive for them does discourage bad behaviour.
it does not discourage anything. illegally designed cookie notices? the dozen tracking providers on all the websites? digital public passport passes that track your habits, but never told you about it, not even at purchase?
the law wont save you. laws will prevent no one from doing this, just like outlawing encryption couldn't prevent decentralized encrypted messengers from being used.
as a European, I don't think EU laws have helped anything in this. if anything they have only helped to make websites a little more honest in what they do. but even their cookie notices and tracking agreement questions are most often illegal, filled with dark patterns prohibited by GDPR. and who the fuck cares?
An illegal actor could still comb the internet and create a private face recognition db, but they would be taking on risk, paying substantial infratstructure costs, would not be able to make it widely available for fear of being caught, and would have limited options for actually making any real money from it.
It would completely prevent say, your average stalker, or jilted ex, or non techy weirdo from.being able to access it, and it would prevent corporations from spending all their time building business around privacy invasion.
and that's all legality on the internet can achieve: calling these illegal actors. just like if I would be called an illegal actor if I kept using Matrix and Signal after (and if) chat control has passed.
have you seen this article by Proton, showing how much big tech pays in penalties for their illegal acts?
it does not matter.
piece of cake for those who already have it. I'm but only talking about traditional big tech, but also other large companies like clearview ai.
Except if they are
only if it gets found out, and if the person doing it does nothing to hide itself. I don't think this would be effective.
what I think though that this could be used as another reason to support chat control, and automated surveillance with it, but maybe not even at the chat system, but at the camera software or operating system level