Comment by toofy
20 hours ago
we desperately need a separation of corporations and state the same way we have a separation of church and state.
we need a government that is antagonistic towards corporations that are abusing us.
it’s wild how much influence they have and how little pushback the government ever gives them when they clearly abuse us from every direction.
We need PII to be so toxic that companies run screaming from the liability unless they have explicit consent[1] and a legit reason to house it.
A company selling me widgets wouldn't store or let another company store extra information about me if it subjected them the widget seller to HIPAA. Or better yet, something more stringent.
We don't need the government to be antagonistic toward corporations; we just need a government that makes the corporations internalize the risk they're making us take.
[1] The fact that ToS are enforceable when every court in the country knows that only a vanishly small percentage of people ever read them, much less understand them, means that they're not doing their job.
> We need PII to be so toxic that companies run screaming from the liability
This is how healthcare workers used to treat health information protected by HIPAA, but it seems like the big corporations don't really even care about it. Nothing ever comes from violations besides slap on the wrist/cost of doing business penalties. You can't do anything without waiving all your rights, granting permission to be recorded, granting permission to use your photograph for anything they want, allowing your recorded audio to run through AI for transcription (and whatever else they want to do), granting permission to share your data with their partners, associates, and some vague description of "anyone we decide at a later date". That's before you can even sign-up, receive care, have a service rendered, enter into a business establishment.
There's pages of fine print documenting it all in vague terms that ambiguously safe guard the provider from any liability, but half the time, you don't even get to opportunity to (not) read it. It's just a link to go elsewhere and (not) read it. They add as many steps between you even reading what rights you're giving away, so that even the people who had a mind to do so would get fatigued, and they make you do it while there are people queuing up behind you, or you're almost done with your purchase/subscription, etc.
Everything is so consumer hostile (and expensive in America), but no "better" service can swoop in, because the established Big corps get to break all the rules or can afford the token penalties to give them an unstoppable market share no honest disruptor/competition could ever overcome. On even ground, no competent person would choose to be abused by our resident monopolies vs a reasonably similar priced local upstart, and a lot people would even pay (a little) more for a better experience/product/service.
I avoid all that by avoiding the corporate health care system.
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Explicit consent will be everywhere, like you won't be admitted to a grocery store without it. Take any modern TV -- there's a privacy policy you have to accept the first time you turn it on. Or California Prop 65 notice on every product.
So no, requiring explicit consent won't fix anything.
The government needs regulation to allow access without granting consent in certain cases. Not quite as far as declaring something a utility, but better than almost completely unregulated.
so I've been watching the CMS symposium about "Burden Reduction". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYyK0Hc43UE&list=PLaV7m2-zFK...
Most of the videos talk about reducing burden on clinicians. Specifically: sharing, accessing, updating patient history. Providing clinicians and patients guidance through the medical process through AI agents (that have access to your PII). the kaiser permanente guy highlighted ai's use in guiding billing codes. Dr. Oz spoke about getting pre-authorizations near instantaneously
I'm not sure how that gets accomplished without reducing liability or loosing restrictions. I wouldnt be surprised to see a continued attack on our healthcare privacy
Weren’t electronic health records supposed to solve this problem almost 20 years ago?
I would have figured there would have been a massive financial interest in providers not having to waste time dealing with tedious Q&A and data entry with new patients…
Pretty difficult when a lot of government people are in it looking for any opportunity to get into bed with private sector for their own individual gain, and when corporations have far more spending power and far less bureaucratic lag than governments. Governments are also just as hungry for data as corporations are.
And if you think a government has any interest in protecting their people, well, that is simply inaccurate in practice.
The government exists to organise and pacify its people, to prevent unpredictable or counter-productive behaviour. Primarily to protect the government from its people.
Regulation doesn't protect people, it protects the government, corporations, or both, in the same way HR protects the company from its employees. The people benefit coincidentally, if at all.
> we need a government that is antagonistic towards corporations that are abusing us
Please don't. The entire civilized world for all of history and before has been built on the uncomfortable alliance between power/capability and governance/legitimacy. Protection-seeking is the primary support system for tyranny which is happy to induce the chaos they protect you from.
We just need enough negative feedback for any kind of abuse that it stops, because regulations have to be slow to be accurate and thus invite abuse innovation. The main part of that negative feedback is effective competition so people can vote with their feet.
So, ask not for antagonism but for real alternatives.
The second paragraph by itself is enough, the first is a tad hubristic and vague. The good things that got us here are not necessarily the things that will get us there, there being wherever we ideally want to end up...
>The main part of that negative feedback is effective competition
The comment you responded to allows for "corporations that abuse us" to include those that actively try to prevent effective competition. You don't really explain why being antagonistic to those corporations would be a problem.
> You don't really explain why being antagonistic to those corporations would be a problem
Yeah, sorry. Yes, corporate activities that reduce competition or corrupt regulators should have their agents and causes ripped out branch to root; they're like diseases which attack the immune system, doubly bad.
But the premise that a corporation or a country that does bad things means you are justified in antagonizing or destroying the entire company or the people is typically enlistment and leverage for protection rackets.
Warring with others is a cycle that doesn't end, and mainly elevates military resource providers. Warring with yourself - attacking your own organs - is self-destructive (which is why enemies stimulate it).
As for here vs there, 20th-century totalitarian systems all stemmed from people wanting to believe promises of a better world, and the promotors being unbound by facts of the present. "Here" is a much more tractable problem, where our medicine (or immune systems) could get better at stemming the diseases we have, like the lack of negative feedback for abusing people (more generally for exporting costs, esp. to the future), or the corruption of discourse that mediates agreements about governance. My goal would be to leave the world more free, peaceful, nature-healthy than I found it. Antagonism doesn't help for that, and side-tracks people into regressive emotions.
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Considering the state of the federal government under the current regime it's a challenge to identify safe government and business relationships.
your inventing a concept of universal power dynamics and history with no basis. Humans have created a myriad of sociatal structures, and with the current luxury of our post scarcity techno industrial manufacturing capabilities there is no reason to have all of the forever wars and suffering from lack. What you describe is slavery, not civilisation.
Weellll...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kpRIRxwmrU
That would be child abuse, as corporations are born out of the state as statutory entities. Corporations used to be chartered to do specific jobs like build a bridge or whatever. Charter max was 20 years. This is why the first and second national banks ran for only 20 years each.
"The bourgeoisie has at last, since the establishment of modern industry and of the world market, conquered for itself, in the modern representative State, exclusive political sway.
The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie. "
"The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine, the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital."
but you don't have separation of church and state... thats a poor comparison. religious dogma eats into nearly all public discourse.
The separation is not total but its more than used to exist.
It’s not that wild: governments are made of self-serving people, and money from the industry finds its way into their pockets.
I would be fine with the NSA recording everything I do, if I had access to it as a backup. I think it would be a valuable service a government could perform for me - assuming there were a way to make sure the data was not accessed without my side of the key. I would also think it pretty neat, were I able to use it as a backup over my life, for my own purposes - if I could do it without involving the spooks. Like, let me use the technological spy infrastructure, and if I happen to commit a crime, well then - come on in, inspect my data by all means.
This, I think, is the only circumstance where it is justifiable - but of course, it is not reality. We have absolutely no agency over the activities of Pine Gap, etc.
However, corporations - for some reason - are given a pass.
What the world really needs, is for hackers to get user-facing operating systems which just really do, backup everything. It's okay, you can choose not to use it.
I'd love to have every single phone call I've ever made available, at this point in my life.
I wish that I could upvote this twice.
Huh, almost as if the governments get something out of allowing the companies to abuse us...
I was watching a documentary about the first food regulations in the US today, lobbyists are as old as the state here, good luck getting them out, the entire system was designed by and for them
I would be fine with the NSA[1] recording everything I do, if I had access to it as a backup.
I think it would be a valuable service a government could perform for me - assuming there were a way to make sure the data was not accessed without my side of the key. Like, it is only after I have been arrested that the data is accessible to the court in which I will have been presented to face accusations of a crime.
I would also think it pretty neat, were I able to use it as a backup over my life, for my own purposes - if I could do it without involving the spooks. Like, let me use the technological spy infrastructure, and if I happen to commit a crime, well then - come on in, inspect my data by all means.
This, I think, is the only circumstance where it is justifiable - but of course, it is not reality. We have absolutely no agency over the activities of Pine Gap, etc.
And there's the corporations who - for some reason - are given a pass. If governments can steal your data, so can Mr. FatCat and his team of merry department heads.
What the world really needs, is for hackers to get user-facing operating systems which just really do, backup everything. It's okay, you can choose not to use it.
I'd love to have every single phone call I've ever made available, at this point in my life, for review. This kind of super-wide view of things would be quite enlightening, I'm pretty sure.
[1] - just for the record, I think the problems that the NSA are trying to solve are obsolete; that there are far greater solutions to fallacies which support the utility of it as an organ of government; I am in the camp that this is a massive human rights issue, also.