The article mentions of days when you were anonymous
It's funny how in the early days of the internet, everyone was so open and honest about who they are that it was very common for their e-mail messages, Usenet posts, finger plans, etc... to have their real names, home and/or work addresses, and home and/or work phone numbers.
Then the scammers discovered the internet, and everyone had to dummy up about who they are.
Then the corporations got involved, and decided to use "AI" unmask everyone and sell that information back to the scammers.
I wonder what the next move is. Maybe we should all go back to blatantly stating who we are to make the corporations' information gathering worthless.
The next move already happened which was the massive Equifax leak. The government has effectively sheltered them from liability, there was no penalty for their actions. So the next development is really having your life forcibly exposed to scammers and potentially having your identity stolen but you have no means to protect the data. In the past it was like if you were careless you could be violated. Now you're at the mercy of large careless corporations who collect all your most vital information without your permission and carelessly store it almost as if they want it stolen, but ultimately the government shields them from liability such that ultimately the government is using the web as a tool to expose you to scammers even if you don't use the web at all.
Absolutely and horrifyingly true. Let’s continue to bring up Equifax’s failure as much as possible because it seems like it’s not a big issue anymore Which is crazy.
Threaten equifax and you disrupt the business model of an entire industry, the same one that's responsible for the economic collapse.
Credit ratings from the 3 major providers are used by banks to assess credit worthlessness of personal loans. Naturally, the more data these firms have on people the better they can rate (perceived) risk. These 'data controllers' serve banks and corporations who make their billions on loans.
Disruption is not welcome. Anyone remember occupie wallst ?
It's funny how in the early days of the internet, everyone was so open and honest about who they are that it was very common for their e-mail messages, Usenet posts, finger plans, etc... to have their real names, home and/or work addresses, and home and/or work phone numbers.
It was a mixed bag then and a mixed bag now. In usenet, some people were very open and some were already anonymous. On webboards, anonymity was more common but plenty of folks still put out their real name.
One of Facebook's selling point, how it got a significant fraction of the US population online at all, was presenting the (false) impression that you could safely use your real ID online.
And talking about this stuff, it's important to realize that until say 2008-2010, you had a process of more of the population getting online, so those online in the 90s were by definition outliers and didn't have "typical for everyone" experiences.
>Maybe we should all go back to blatantly stating who we are to make the corporations' information gathering worthless.
Google doesn't stop at your name and address, in fact that's not even what they are mainly interested in. Revealing your identifying information would just open yourself up to harassment, especially when a tech company leaks the top 10,000 list of the most-likely-to-buy customers of some embarrassing product.
> Maybe we should all go back to blatantly stating who we are to make the corporations' information gathering worthless.
Well yes, that would devalue your name/address details, so they'd shift to more invasive approaches like reading your emails and messages, bugging your person and/or home, tracking your financial transactions, etc.
Not sure if that’s intended to be taken sarcastically or not but some of those things do already happen like reading your emails/instant messages and tracking your financial transactions.
I think it was sarcasm, since he described most free e-mail services, Facebook messenger, Google Home, and whatever the name is of Google's in-house org that thinks it's entitled to the records of 80% of the world's credit card transactions.
Unless you're also going to disclose all your cookie ids, mobile device ids, connected tv ids, transaction history, income/demographics/consumer preferences, etc. etc., there will still be a lot of room for adtech companies to gather information about you. And even if you do, there is still attribution of purchases to impressions or clicks, audience segmentation, ad retargeting, and many other lucrative areas for companies to trade your data.
> It's funny how in the early days of the internet, everyone was so open and honest about who they are that it was very common for their e-mail messages, Usenet posts, finger plans, etc... to have their real names, home and/or work addresses, and home and/or work phone numbers.
Not really. I mean, yes, on one hand, yes. On the other hand, places for open-topic discussions explicitly allowed fake names and nicknames.
The best timeframe on the internet I can remember was when everything you needed was a nickname of your choice and an email account somewhere.
If anything went wrong, you could just drop everything, get a new pair of nickname/address and start anew.
Oh man, email. Fun story - I started using the internet around 2000, maybe 2001 and to me email was always a website. Like hotmail etc. The first time I installed Linux I was very confused why it wanted my email address and most importantly why the basic default configuration installed an email server. I'm not setting up a hotmail competitor, why is there an email server installed? It took me almost a decade before I found out that email used to be on your machine and it would simply accept email from anywhere. You used to be able to just connect to any email server and go "here, have some mail" and it would accept it - no questions asked, no authentication needed. Even knowing it was meant for university-to-university mail exchange originally, it still sounds completely insane. Then again, unsecured ftp used to also be a thing. To this day I have no idea what to do when I log into a Linux machine and see "You have mail in /var/spool/mail/<you>". It probably doesn't matter anymore.
Just run pine/mail/mutt or whatever you’d like! You can also just go fumbling around with your text editor of choice. The primary reason would be to figure out what program is attempting to send mail to your username, and go log it properly instead.
It's funny how in the early days of the internet, everyone was so open and honest about who they are that it was very common for their e-mail messages, Usenet posts, finger plans, etc... to have their real names, home and/or work addresses, and home and/or work phone numbers.
Then the scammers discovered the internet, and everyone had to dummy up about who they are.
Then the corporations got involved, and decided to use "AI" unmask everyone and sell that information back to the scammers.
I wonder what the next move is. Maybe we should all go back to blatantly stating who we are to make the corporations' information gathering worthless.