Comment by Frieren
9 hours ago
> The solution must be legislation that limits all of: data collected
Let's finish the sentence there. Being spied by corporations 24/7 while we game, watch entertainment, drive, talk with friends, work... it's fucked up.
We live in a hell of our own creation and only new legislation and regulations can get us out of here.
It's also akin to Roko's basilisk's - the people who don't realise how pervasive and invasive it has become seem the happiest while the ones like us who've often been around computers since the 80's and just watched our society sleep walk into it feel the worst.
That many of us then end up working for the companies doing it makes for a bad feeling across the industry.
Except unlike Roko's basilisk, this is not absurd pseudo-game-theory extrapolation based on the hypothetical existence of a supreme superintelligence that is simultaneously infinitely vengeful, infinitely omniscient, and infintely omnimpotent; instead it's just the same authoritarian corporate-backed police-state privacy encroachment that has been tightening around our throats for years.
>only new legislation and regulations can get us out of here.
From the same goverments that want more state surveillance and even buy the private profile data from data brokers?
Only a new ...revolution would get us out of here...
Most of the governments you are talking about are voted on by the people. And when the people care, the governments change. When the people don't care, yes, the government does want lots of data. However, people do often care about such things and that limits the government.
> And when the people care, the governments change.
When half of American lives paycheck to paycheck they care about putting food in table instead of petty politics or data collections.
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Voted on by the people, and yet in 2026 we have no way to actually confirm our votes are counted or factored into who gets elected. Every single US president is related, sans Van Buren, but there's no way our elections are rigged! Not sure how many corrupt politicians have to take office before people will start questioning the legitimacy of elections.
Unemployed revolutionaries are a lot cheaper than responsible senators, and as history shows, selling claims to territories that belong to others is exactly what makes state violence so profitable. The descendants of someone in Africa are glad their photographs and souls weren’t taken a century ago.
> From the same goverments
As alluded to, it doesn't have to :) The French are currently on their fifth iteration of "the government", and we're bound to get a new iteration hopefully soon! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Fifth_Republic
Let's finish that thought too.
You're asking for new legislation written by governments that a/ want that data to spy on you too and b/ are lobbied by corporations to write the legislation corps want.
It's a closed loop of crap, that goes in one direction only.
What did you expect with such asymmetry of power?
No worries, next generation won't even understand what we are blabbing about. Look at that cute cat video! Privacy what? Oh that puppy is rolling on his back!
Next generations (plural) already doesn't.
The last generation that cared about this in any big way were the Xers (and close to X-er boomers) circa 1990s.
And even them, not enough, and not as a majority. But at least many techies back then did.
Once your intergenerational wealth is offshore you can pick any of your nepo offspring and make them a hollywood star or unicorn startup CEO with a clean wikipedia page. Their wealth is also tied to national security jobs, because those make you immune in front of the law plus you have the benefit of constructing identities (and death certificates) out of thin air.
For example very rich people in the US receive vanity SSNs. Ghislaine Maxwell has one that spells out "Leet Babe". It's like number plates to show off.
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> We live in a hell of our own creation
Well not "our" creation since only a few oligarchs control most of the companies that engage in this.
> and only new legislation and regulations can get us out of here.
The same oligarchs control nearly all the legislators, so no way out.
Yup. This has been my experience when campaigning for change too.
>Well not "our" creation since only a few oligarchs control most of the companies that engage in this.
They're just looking after their interests and kinks. It's the suckers that accept it, which are hundreds of millions, that allow this hell to be created, and continue to not do anything about it, when they're not even supporting and voting for them.
>Well not "our" creation since only a few oligarchs control most of the companies that engage in this
Do not excuse the millions upon millions of useful idiots who lent credence to the "rulers" stupid projects at every step of the way. A lot of this problem is in the mirror. Those oligarchs would have infinity less power if a whole bunch of people din't agree with them.
I mean hell, go look at HN comments from before Flock was helping ICE and every idiot in the comments cooing about how to optimize the ALPR dragnet to fine speeders, flag drug dealers and apply jackboot to every other class of petty deviant they thought they could tease out and everyone pushing back was being shat on for not being "pro social" enough or whatever.
A meaningful amount of the problem is viewable in the goddamn mirror.
I constantly learn the hard way in politics that unintended consequences dominate long term. Often they are things that seem obvious in hindsight but nobody reasonable thought of in advance (the people that did are unreasonable in other ways and generally right to ignore even though they were right this time)
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I wish people would stop saying we created this hell, as if everyone had a choice as to whether or not they grew up in this increasingly dystopian reality. Blame the people that are actually to blame, not everyone else. It's a tired tactic to shift blame from those who are actually accountable for these systems and technologies.
Those few decades where the normal person thought that they are not a servant to a feudalistic lord are over, the aristocrats don't need to hide any more. The old money is out in the open, because the populace has lost all their leverage.
They still lie to us about the true source of their wealth, but if you dig in the few archives that we can actually access it is clear that the same family names pop up over and over again.
If your family wealth came from feudalism/colonialism and was already safely stored in offshore accounts 100 years ago, you can send your nepo child to silicon valley or Hollywood, have your connections invest into them and tell the whole world what amazing self-made person they are. Some years down the line they go meet the King to get their hereditary Lordship title back for the whole world to know.
All of this is in the national security interest, so your kids are above the law even though they might only be a Hollywood talent scout, CEO of some startup or a real estate mogul focused on black neighborhoods.
For several hundred years being aristocrat was really unpopular, but ultimately they got a grip on it by owning all means of mass propaganda plus building a file on everyone.