Trading privacy for survival is another tax on the poor

This is like offering a discount on car insurance if you consent to having a GPS tracker installed.[1]<p>It&#x27;s voluntary for now, but the industry is hoping people get used to it so it can be made effectively[2] mandatory.<p>And because people seem caught in race to the bottom competition to give up the most privacy they can, stuff like this may regrettably catch on.<p>[1]<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pewinternet.org&#x2F;2016&#x2F;01&#x2F;14&#x2F;scenario-auto-insurance-discounts-and-monitoring&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pewinternet.org&#x2F;2016&#x2F;01&#x2F;14&#x2F;scenario-auto-insuranc...</a><p>[2] Effectively mandatory meaning that insurance without a tracker will be like 10x the price.

This seemed like a grab bag of &quot;Here are some bad things about being poor that are vaguely related to privacy&quot; with the only common thread being Professor Gilman&#x27;s willingness to speak about them. Poverty is brutal, but I&#x27;m not convinced that the privacy lens really adds a lot.<p>I&#x27;m also not convinced that privacy problems truly affect the poor more. The government surveillance mentioned here is a big problem. But on the commercial side, companies are a lot more interested in acquiring the personal, financial, and medical data of the rich. And as the article admits, people making higher incomes are more likely to have their information stolen.<p>A lot of the evidence in this piece amounts to &quot;surveys show that people earning under $40k worry about X more than people earning over $40k.&quot; That&#x27;s a very weak form of evidence.

Imagine surveillance being turned upside-down. Imagine a company unable to hire workers, because a union demands they first fire the CEO&#x2F;management that looted company pensions at their previous company, or ran a predatory loan business, or tried to extort others through bogus patents.<p>The world would be a much different place if corporate was held <i>personally</i> responsible for their actions the same way labor is.

The ad-based content economy is beyond parody: the first thing I saw when I opened this article about poverty and privacy rights was a full-page, autoplay video ad for Lincoln cars. The whiplash between the content and the presentation was so severe I&#x27;m going to have to wear a neck brace.

First thing that comes to mind is the new wave of fintech apps for pay&#x2F;bill management (like Earnin) that take in your entire bank feed in exchange for spotting you before your next payday...

I was thinking about this recently — the path to owning a small business in the 2020s goes through social media. Which means that the founder has to put an uncomfortable amount of their personal life on display in order to “sell” their brand. Anyone “hustling” at 2 or 3 gig jobs has to self-promote via those same platforms.<p>Basically, the only workers who are allowed total privacy anymore are white-collar middle managers. We don’t trust low-level workers and feel the need to keep tabs on them, while executives have been expected to carefully cultivate a squeaky-clean public image for the last 30-ish years.<p>But it basically comes down to “how much of my privacy to I have to trade for a paycheck?” The answer varies based on income level...

If you haven&#x27;t worked low-end jobs it may be a surprise, but if you are a clerk in certain chain stores, you are searched by a supervisor every time you leave the building (to make sure you aren&#x27;t stealing anything).

You ever watch those HD antenna television shows? We spam the poorest people with some of the nastiest propaganda that exists. Even the shows they frequently play are legitimizing and glamorizing crime.

This is a little off topic w.r.t. the article, but to some extent I like privacy as a currency. Despite the fact that you might make minimum wage and can’t realistically afford to pay for most services, Google gives you access to the majority of human knowledge, for free. Nobody forces you to use Google - if you can afford it, you can pay for it with time (i.e. worse results from places like DDG).<p>Redistributing wealth to ensure fairness is hard, but at least when we use privacy as the currency we all start with some, almost equal, amounts. The downside is that realistically this approach only works when everyone participates - I don’t think hybrid “pay or we track you” would work out to be efficient at large scales.

“I get valuable government benefits in my mortgage home deduction, childcare tax credits, my employer health benefits aren’t taxed,” says Gilman. “Those are income transfers just as much as food stamps or welfare but I am not put through intrusive questioning, verification requirements, home visits, or anything like that to get those benefits.” This is disingenuous if not flat out fallacious. They certainly are not the same and I continue seeing this type of rhetoric repeated more and more lately.

This is probably not something a lot of people will agree with, but my two cents. The issue is autonomy and consent. If people are really owner of their own data they should be able to do whatever they want with it. They should be able to sell it. They should be able to exchange it for services.<p>You can use WiFi for free. Why should that be frowned upon? It&#x27;s your choice. We do not live in a nanny state. What should be clear is what kind of transaction you&#x27;re in. What kind of data is collected. The deal should be transparent.<p>You can&#x27;t say that this data is valuable on one hand but forbid people to trade it on the other hand. Definitely not just with an argument based on autonomy.

In my opinion (a bit tangential to the article I know)<p>The privacy thing is a symptom to the massive marketing budgets companies have available to them today. We&#x27;re covering up the cost of living by redirecting them via advertising agencies who then get to direct the money however they want. I say, block ads. Steal from advertising companies, falsify data as much as possible. This is not the way people should be being paid. While this is a viable mechanism of subsiding the cost of living, no change will occur.

This article is very lengthy and detailed, so eventually I gave up on trying to find in it any evidence (in the form of e.g. actual quotes from the SCOTUS decision -- which undoubtedly exist in detail and are publically available) that it isn&#x27;t a one sided, alarmist emotional appeal. But perhaps I myself am letting emotions get the better of me by assuming the SCOTUS documents all their decisions, when in reality they (more) typically don&#x27;t(?).

I predict that the next hit in the poverty industry will be the gambling businesses and loan sharks getting banking licenses. <i>...aaand it&#x27;s gone!</i>

&gt; “I can’t cross-examine an algorithm.”<p>You should be able to!

Meanwhile, Surveillance Valley CEOs like Zuckerberg continue to spin their privacy invasions as altruistic moves to help the poor.