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Gemini has decided to invest in a "technical solution to a social problem". Usually a terrible idea, but having spent some time in Gemini they seem to be succeeding. There's more concentrated random, weird, interesting stuff there than you can find on the web.

Notice that there's more of that stuff on the web, but you can't find it because search engines don't lead you there, and link connectivity between the interesting parts of the web is low.

1 comments

I agree that technology shouldn't be used to solve social problems, but in some ways, the problem Gemini aims to solve is technical -- software and network protocols permit surveillance. We should be moving towards systems that have privacy-by-design rather than privacy-by-policy or privacy-by-convention.

I don't see how a social solution would work -- do we just make analytics, telemetry, etc... illegal? And then watch as people break the law or do what they did with GDPR: implement just enough to follow the letter of the law, but completely ignore the spirit of the law?

The sole case I can think of is GitHub removing cookies when you're not logged in so they never have to show a cookie banner. One exception among thousands of cookie banners and GDPR violations.

There is no social solution to surveillance.

> There is no social solution to surveillance.

I disagree. Legislation can be enacted that makes it a crime to use a person's online (or offline) activity as a basis for targeted advertising.

The NSA isn't allowed to spy on American citizens, so they get the GCHQ to spy on Americans and they exchange data on British citizens in return.

You literally have a government helping another government to break the fucking law. Not to mention it's illegal to not pay your taxes, and yet almost every big company does.

So I'm just not convinced the solution can be as simple as "just enact legislation".

We need a technical solution. Even if you want legislation, a technical solution is good to act as another layer of protection.

Technology can be checked -- by reading the source code or inspecting network traffic -- to make sure you're not being spied on. That's vastly superior to any solution that expects people to pinky promise to not do anything bad.