I believe we should push for legislation that prohibits the sale of customer data to third parties. Websites can use the data on their customers but they cannot share it with anyone else. Because aggregators are selling it cross-border after which you lose track and all control over it.
They shouldn't be able to collect it in the first place. The big companies have 10 page agreements that say they "value" your privacy and that they don't sell your data to third parties. They do value it, highly. And they don't sell it--they just hoard it, mine it, and sell increasingly accurate targeting. Why would they give it up? I mean, besides coughing it up with little objection to national security letters.
The problem is that this includes literally everything on a cloud service. My emails and documents on Gmail/Google Drive is my personal data. My email on Fastmail is my personal data, even if they’re privacy friendly. So that service would be illegal.
Even having an account at all, and being able to see that I have a subscription, or that I previously watched that video, is personal data they collected.
So the Privacy Policy is what you “agree” to let the company do with that data. How do you even begin to differentiate the superfluous stuff they track just for ads, on a technical level without workarounds?
And then think about banning “transferring personal data to a 3rd party.” Does that mean I can’t host account data on AWS, or use a hosted database, be causing I’m transferring data to a different company which can presumably also access it? That’s what the privacy policy has to allow, and why sites have so many “partner services”
The service wouldn't be illegal because companies can store customer data and even use that information for marketing and advertising purposes. They just can't sell or share it with anyone else.
There was an American presidential candidate who ran on the platform of Americans getting to own their data and privacy like property in... 2016? I think? Agree with it or not, he was pretty forward-thinking at least.
It also implies that Google,Meta and others can't put trackers on other people's websites. That kills about 99% of all tracking on the internet. Foreign companies would also be banned from placing trackers to close any loopholes.
Oh they can. They can offer profiling local servers/software for most important websites which, after profiling will request from google the specific ad category
Look at the outrage from US tech bros when the EU passed a law saying that you only had to tell people you were going to do this. Imagine how preventing it would be received.
100% agree. There are a million reasons people come up with for why this will never happen, but pardon me if I want to see us try first and then fix the mistakes we made after. Right now we're living in one big dystopian mistake that needs immediate pushback.
Which is published on a video streaming website run by one of the biggest tracking and data collection companies, which is used to pay for the creation of the video (in addition to ads embedded in the video itself).
Not a valid critique when dealing with an oligopoly (YT, Tik Tok, Insta, etc.). You use the platform or you get ignored. Using the platform to criticize the platform or other platforms like it is possibly the best use of the platform.
The point is: which brands still respect user privacy? If I were to buy a new TV today, which brands-models should I prioritize?
Also, are there brands-models that in which it is possible to sideload a different OS like with mobile phones (LineageOS, GrapheneOS, etc.)
Our Android TV (Sony) has an option to basically make it a dumb TV. Not sure whether that still exists. We use that + simply don't plug a network cable or set up WiFi. As long as they don't add cellular modems, this works.
An Apple TV would be the best for privacy you can easily use but not perfect. Don't use streaming services. Torrenting with a VPN would share the least data but Nuvio/Stremio wouldn't share much with adtech. Can't use those on an Apple TV without sideloading :(
We're in a recession, in all but official numbers (which are decreasingly credible by the day). Big companies weather a recession and use it to ransack countries, becsuse smaller/mid-size companies are struggling to do the bare minimum, outright shut down, or cannot start up to begin with.
There's a lot of moving parts that makes it really hard for ethical newcomers to disrupt in these current times. And that's just one angle.
The bottom of the line TVs are basically commoditized and are sold at a loss. There's few tv manufacturers and they mostly compete on price, only the top of the line models have pricing power and only for 6-24 months for new models. A supermajority of consumers don't care if they're tracked all the time and a large fraction don't mind ads everywhere either (they're used to it).
To be fair, most TVs on the market are buying panels from the same few manufacturers. For example, Hisense sources panels from part of LG. I think Samsung is another manufacturer.
So a new company could theoretically access these panels to make a privacy friendly TV without as much capital.
But like you say, it wouldn’t be able to compete on price, because the ad tech lets other companies sell at a loss.
Well you can say this about dozens of products. People basically only care about price and perceived status for some products. Repairability, privacy, sustainability ... are not important for 90% of people, when government tries to they get pissed annoyed having to pay more.
A consumer respecting brand sells products. A Consumer selling brand sells consumers so they can be profiled, analysed for weaknesses and exploited economically in the name of Surveillance Capitalism
I suspect because it's hard to differentiate between ones that actually respect the consumer vs ones that only say so, but are actually lying to your face.
That and not respecting the consumer is more profitable in the short term (only!), which means more marketing money, buying out other brands, lobbying to increase the barrier for entry, et cetera.
Machiavelli's flexibility: evil has more options to achieve its goals than good, and therefore it always wins. (The invisible hand of the market is a myth - people don't choose things on principles unless they have money to burn).
There is a very I-am-very-smart aspect to these predictable sorts of comments. And weirdly they always seem oddly intended to diminish the core concern being addressed.
"Oh your TV is listening to you and mapping your network and exfiltrating your data? Yeah, well, look at that website that has some ads on it! Boom!
Give up. The future is lost. Don't sweat the wiretapping TV."
It is 100% diminishing the concern. If someone were paid by LG to try to manage this revelation, they would post exactly what touwer posted. Like, there isn't a better way to try to normalize and excuse bad behaviour than doing the incredibly boorish tactic seen above. The "everyone is doing it" excuse is a go to.
I mean, LG would probably also pay someone to run around going "it's just funny, is all" in support if anyone noticed this pathetic astroturfing.
No I disagree here. I would argue that a TV doing this 30 years ago would find themselves in court, whereas now they are all skirting the edge of the law and we accept it because that frog has been boiling for decades.
The idea that logging audio is bad, but cars logging your weight, tvs logging your watch history, scales sending your wifi details, android and apple both mapping your access point to create a pseudo-location tracker without GPS, my mobile network sending me location-based adverts based on tower proximity via sms to a dumbphone are all very very bad.
LG have slightly overstepped the line here, legally, but in my opinion they've overstepped what is OK by a long long way. A website reporting on this while sending your details to hundreds of tracking sites are doing the same thing - abusing what is allowed and I assume only printing the report for more engagement and not because they actually care.
LG need to go a lifetime shit list for this behaviour - there should be outrage like there was about Sony's root kit. But websites like this also need to find out that this behaviour is not ok
I can’t imagine what the Netherlands would look like if desertification would occur. It seems implausible that those flat, flat lands would ever turn brown and grey and dusty - but I won’t be surprised if things turn that way in a few years. I hope the Dutch have a solution, they always seem to when it comes to water control ..
I think currently one of the biggest risks for The Netherlands is salinization. If there is not enough river water and the groundwater level is too low, sea water will push upward, contaminating the river beds and increasingly much soil around it. This summer they had to close locks to block seawater and to increase the fresh water level. Of course, this has a considerable economic damage, since it blocks inland shipping.
Netherlands is also in a much worse position due to being downstream of literally everyone.
It's going to be a huge future fight in the EU because all countries upstream will want to retain 'all' the water and the remaining low flow will still have all those countries their industries dumping toxic waste, meaning the ratio of water-waste will get ridiculous.
The Rhine, which becomes the Waal in the Netherlands, has been exceptionally low now for most of the summer and caused major issues for shipping.
It has only a single waterlock and so there is no retention of the water in it when a period of draughts like the ones this summer happen.
Germany has had a project for adding water locks to the Rhine ongoing in burocracy purgatory for the last 26 years now, and if this situation doesn't shake things up I don't think anything ever will.
There is still enough water, it is just unevenly distributed over the year. Previously winter snow was retained in the Alps and released as it melted during the summer, nowadays winter rain immediately comes downstream as giant floods.
If upstream countries were able to retain a significant portion of those floods and release it as a trickle during the summer, The Netherlands wouldn't have any problems. It is literally impossible for it to be worse than it currently is.
Besides, most of the water used in The Netherlands does not come from the large rivers, but from local rainfall. The drought is due to sticking to the historical policy of trying to immediately get rid of any excess water, rather than retaining it locally. No need to do anything EU-wide to solve that, just get the farmers to accept that the land will be a bit soggy in the winter.
Drought in The Netherlands is artificial though. Millionaire farmers are pumping up water to water their crops during the day. Due to the heat most of the spray evaporates before it touches the plants. During the winter they artificially lower the ground water level for personal benefit.
Also of this so they can gain even more millions by exporting all the food across the border. Time to block some more highways, destroy some more property and kill some more people in order to secure those sweet EU subsidies.
Not saying that Dutch farmers don't use a lot of water overall, but they have some of the most effective farming practices on the planet when it comes to water usage.
Correct, but those very same practices are causing huge damages to the local environment and economy, while the farming relies on foreign imports to function and the majority of its production is exported.
Rather than exporting farming products, The Netherlands should focus on exporting farming practices.
That doesn’t change the fact that the millionaire megafarmers completely screwed over Dutch water management for personal gains. Did you know that farmers are basically completely in control of waterschappen despite only bringing in a couple percent of the GDP.
In the Netherlands it was surely a wasted opportunity. They used the money mostly to prop up some services and fill short-term gaps in the budget. Should have saved it like Norwy. It's awful
Both the UK and the Netherlands budgets relied heavily on wealth extraction from India and Indonesia respectively during the colonial era (~$50 trillion over 200 years for the UK and around $34T for the Netherlands). That kind of money spigot is hard to wean a country off from, and tends to mask all sorts of governance failures, so it was inevitable the oil windfall would be used to plug the imperial shortfall. The difference with Norway is it was never a colonial power.
Woah, that is pretty wild claim between Netherlands and Indonesia. I tried to Google for more info. It seems like this claim can be attributed to the current president of Indonesia, Prabowo Subianto. He said 31T USD in a recent speech. I follow Indo news a little bit. This guy makes some pretty wild claims. I doubt the previous president Joko Widodo (who is much more reliable) would make such a claim. It does not seem that Prabowo has offered any serious evidence to defend this claim.
> That kind of money spigot is hard to wean a country off from, and tends to mask all sorts of governance failures, so it was inevitable the oil windfall would be used to plug the imperial shortfall.
Again, I can speak more for the Netherlands here. Indonesia became independent in 1949. The Groningen gas field was discovered in north Netherlands in 1959, and full scale extraction started in 1963. So what did Netherlands do between 1949 and 1963 to "plug the imperial shortfall"? (No trolling: That is a lovely turn of phrase. Is it your own?)
> The difference with Norway is it was never a colonial power.
As understand, Norway alternated between a colony of Sweden or Denmark. (Please correct if I have that wrong.)
The immediate after-war years were quite grim, even after £1B Marshall plan ($13B in 2026 dollars) reconstruction aid, almost as much as Germany got. In 1850 the colonial income represented half of all government revenues, but in 1870 that was dismantled and privatized to benefit the elite. Most of the UK’s imperial looting went to the elite from the very beginning, of course.
Norway was in personal union with the kings of either Sweden or Denmark, so not quite the same as being a colony, but they themselves were not colonizers (unlike Denmark in Greenland).
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