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Privacy Rights and Regulations

Privacy Rights and Regulations

by | Apr 29, 2019 |

I value my privacy. It is nearly always on my mind as I interact online, but also as I live in the so-called real world. In the evening, I pull the shades down. I just don’t like having people watch me, whether I am reading a book, enjoying a television show, or walking the baby down to sleep. Privacy is essential, in my book.

Unfortunately, there are many out there who make business out of invading my privacy. As I browse the web, sites are dropping cookies which are read across domains, mapping out my every move. Other sites, under the guise of analytics or social media integrations, do the same but in different ways. I didn’t ask for these. I didn’t agree to these. Yet, despite that many companies do their best to know more about my habits online than I even know.

People are rightly upset at this. Worldwide, it seems, people are coming out to say that they are tired of it. If they are going to be tracked, they want to know. If their private posts and details are going to be shared, they want to know. If they’re going to leave a site, they want to be able to delete their account and all of their data. The question then becomes, what should we do about it?

Unfortunately, many people are turning to government violence to solve these problems for them. Last year, California passed the California Consumer Privacy Act (or CCPA) which purportedly gave the people of California new privacy rights. According to Californians for Consumer Privacy, these include:

  • The right to know all data collected by a business on you, twice a year, free of charge.
  • The right to say no to the sale of your information.
  • The right to sue companies who collected your data, where that data was then stolen or disclosed because of carelessness or negligence on their part.
  • The right to delete data you have posted.
  • The right not to be discriminated against if you tell a company not to sell your personal information.
  • The right to be informed of what categories of data will be collected about you prior to its collection or at the point of collection, and to be informed of any changes to this collection.
  • The right to opt-in before sale of children’s information (under the age of 16).
  • The right to know the categories of third parties with whom your data is shared
  • The right to know the categories of sources of information from whom your data was acquired.
  • The right to know the business or commercial purpose of collecting your information.

That is quite a list! The European Union has their own list, similar to that. As a software developer who develops applications for both desktops and for the web, this kind of legislation affects me directly. When I see this list, I have to wonder who this legislation really hurts and who it really helps. First, let’s ask now, who does it hurt? I’m sure that it is onerous for Google and Facebook to comply with these rules, but are the rules going to put them out of business? Definitely not. These businesses are HUGE with enormous legal teams and everything else that they need to write up the necessary paperwork and check all their practices and such to make sure that they are compliant with the regulations.

Who these regulations really hurt are folks like me, small, self-funded shops who are trying to get off the ground. I don’t have a legal team. I don’t have the time to study up on regulations. I spend my days working so that I can make enough money to keep my family fed. I don’t have the time or resources to figure out how to comply if I needed to. Some startups can afford to comply with these, but they are the ones who receive gobs of venture capital from east and west coast elites. If I made a site which picked up steam, I could potentially reach the threshold of Californian users necessary that these regulations would kick in, and if I didn’t cross every “t” and dot every “i” I could be sued and it would only take one single lawsuit to destroy my entire business. You see, these regulations will ultimately not hurt Google or Facebook. They will settle the lawsuits, comply, and move on. These regulations will hurt folks like me who are just trying to make quality products and keep our clients happy.

On top of the compliance concerns, these regulations also raise new privacy concerns. How is a business going to know how many California users they have? To do that, companies must verify and store identities and locations for their users. Imagine that I start a privacy-minded site which I intentionally don’t store any personal data on. Imagine that I deliberately do not have them verify their identities and intentionally don’t store where they come from. Just by respecting their privacy in that way, I would potentially be non-compliant with these regulations. While these rules talk about security and privacy, they also force new privacy concerns. I would have to store personal information about my users that I don’t want to store, just so that I would be compliant.

You know, there is another option other than government violence to deal with these problems. Personal responsibility is the better route. There are tools out there to help secure our privacy. There are browsers like Brave which block ads and trackers. There are browser extensions like Privacy Badger which allow ads but block cross-domain tracking. There are VPNs like Private Internet Access which hide your real IP address from the sites that you visit. There is also Tor, which we talked about in an earlier post.

Sure, there will always be some out there like Facebook and Google who try and force you to use your real identity, but there are other like Minds which only ask for an email address to sign up. On Tor, you can find social media sites as well, like Galaxy3. I actually have a group on Galaxy3 specifically for my Techno-Agorist podcast and blog.

Ultimately, regulations like this help the elite, entrenched companies by squashing the small shops and entrepreneurs who would like to compete with them. The only right answer is personal responsibility. You take responsibility for your life, and I will take responsibility for mine. Facebook and Google might continue to be awful, and we will continue to hate them, even if we reluctantly use their services sometimes. Meanwhile, competitors will be free to build their own products without the burden of regulations which leave any small business at the mercy of a single lawsuit from an angry competitor.

Regulations are not the answer. Freedom is the answer. People are fleeing Facebook as we speak, and it isn’t because of regulations. People are speaking loud and clear that they do not like the practices of Google and Facebook and the field is ripe for competitors. Maybe one of my products will compete with theirs someday. Who knows, only time will tell.

Originally posted at: https://technoagorist.com/6

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Deep State? Why, That’s Just Crazy

by | Apr 29, 2019 |

Just a little old aside in a profile of John Bolton:

Mattis declined to comment for the record, but a former senior national-security official told me, without confirming any incidents, that a strategy had evolved. “The President thinks out loud,” he said. “Do you treat it like an order? Or do you treat it as part of a longer conversation? We treated it as part of a longer conversation.” By allowing Trump to talk without acting, he said, “we prevented a lot of bad things from happening.” In 2017, Mattis and his staff helped forestall a complete withdrawal of American forces from both Afghanistan and Syria.

War in Afghanistan?

by | Apr 29, 2019 |

Is that still going on? wonder the American people.

Man. How self-centered can the members of this society get?

Most of our ancestors fled from the Old World to come here to be free, to live life, to mind their own business. I get that. That’s what we’re all fighting for, right?

But it’s the USA government that’s the greatest purveyor of violence in the [old] world today.

And Americans don’t even have to know that it’s happening?

The Cancer of Absolutism

The Cancer of Absolutism

by | Apr 28, 2019 |

At its heart, Agorism is a pragmatic philosophy. It is about doing what is best for you and your family. It doesn’t waste time worrying about the silly people who try and hold us back. But, even though we try and live outside of the system, it is possible for even an agorist to get stuck. One cancer that pops up in agorism is the cancer of absolutism.

Agorists say that we are all about freedom and doing what we want, but then too many turn around and begin making absolute statements about what we can and cannot do. For example, they might say that agorists DON’T vote. Or, agorists ONLY buy locally sourced food. Some go so far as to say that agorists DON’T join religions or take part in anything that involves vertical hierarchies and power structures. You might agree with some or all of these, but the problem comes when we insist that these apply to ALL agorists. That just isn’t how agorism works. You don’t tell me what I can and cannot do, or what I must and must not do. Those are my decisions to make for me, and your decisions to make for you.

Unlike many other agorists, I sometimes vote. Does this make me a bad agorist? Some would say that this is anti-agorist, but to me, it is an expression of the pragmatic nature of agorism. I own my home, but unfortunately, my city insists that I pay a property tax which is essential feudal land rent. If I don’t pay, then the city will seize my home. As much as I hate paying it, I still do it because I don’t want to lose my home. I make a pragmatic value judgment. Is it worth more to me not to pay the tax and lose my home? Or, is it worth more to me to keep my home by paying taxes? As I said earlier, I do the latter. Despite hating taxation, I pay because the consequences are even more undesirable.

Now, if I see that there is a measure on the ballot to raise property taxes, I have a couple of options. First, I could thumb my nose at voting, sit on my moral high horse, and then feel good about myself as I pay higher property taxes. Or, I could make a pragmatic value judgment, hold my nose, and vote not to raise property taxes and then enjoy potentially not having to pay more property taxes… at least for that year.

If I were an absolutist on not voting, then I would be creating an artificial barrier between myself and potential benefits for my life. I don’t want to pay my city any more than I have to, and if I have to pull a lever to lessen the load, it is ultimately a small price to pay.

When we become absolutists, we put artificial limits on our lives. We essentially do the government’s job for them. Agorism has a lot more gray area than other ideologies, and I like that. Life is not black and white, and when we force life into those categories, we ultimately make life worse for ourselves.

So, embrace the gray. Don’t be afraid of pragmatism. Do what is best for you and your family. We can agree that you shouldn’t hurt people or take their stuff. Outside of that, anything goes. It’s your choice to make.

Originally posted at: https://technoagorist.com/5

Techno-Agorist on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCjWlrSuf4b4eApnFX9o82BA

Techno-Agorist on iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/techno-agorist/id1458773157

Techno-Agorist is a production of the MLGA Network. Find more great content at: https://mlganetwork.com

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Good Rand Paul: US Out of Afghanistan

by | Apr 28, 2019 |

A great answer from the senator to Matt Welch of Reason:

Welch: [A]lmost from the beginning [of your Senate career], you have used the formulation in speeches and also in bills of, “Hey, it’s time to declare victory in Afghanistan and bring our troops home.” Can you give a sense of how the progress of that concept…has evolved over time?

Paul: Well, you know, it’s too slow for my taste—I think we should have been gone years ago. And I think that there is some progress, but it’s very, very slow.

There are two important pieces to the puzzle that are improvements. We have a president—the first president, really—to say that the war has long been over, there is no military solution, he’s bringing the troops home. And President Trump has said that several times. The problem is that several of his advisors that he has appointed don’t necessarily agree with him. So they either countermand his sentiments or talk him into delaying actually ending the war.

The other thing that I think has happened over time—and this is sort of both positive but also sad at the same time—is that you can’t meet a general anywhere in the Pentagon who believes there is a military solution to the Afghan war. That’s the main question I harangue them with when they come up to Capitol Hill to testify before our committees: I say, “Is there a military solution?” And they all admit there is none. There’s been mission creep that’s now nation-building, but they all admit no military solution.

My follow-up question is, “Then I don’t want to send my kid, your kid, or my nephew to Afghanistan, because if there is no military solution, what is one more death going to do over there?” But there are still a number of people who are of what I call the Vietnam village strategy—take one more village and we’ll get a better negotiated settlement.

I’m of the belief we need to declare victory and come home, because…it’s a mess now, but it will be a mess when we come home, too. And we just need to acknowledge that our original mission was to go after those who plotted or attacked us on 9/11, and there’s frankly none of them left. I asked the secretary of state this not too long ago, “Tell me who’s left. Tell me their names, and then we’ll talk about whether you have permission to stay there to get a certain person.” There’s no name left….We’re talking about forces that are associated with forces that are associated with forces that are associated with somebody else. It’s so tangential to have any link to 9/11 that it really doesn’t exist.

More here.

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