I don't have a problem with them actively choosing to break laws to protest the laws themselves; to try to get them changed. Civil disobedience is a long standing practice. However, part of doing that is facing the consequences of breaking those laws; being arrested, etc. Just because _you_ think the law isn't just doesn't mean it's not a law - it just means you think it should be changed.
And the companies in question break the law and then whine and complain like they shouldn't need to face the consequences; like the law shouldn't apply to them because they don't think it's fair.
> However, part of doing that is facing the consequences of breaking those laws; being arrested, etc.
This form of civil disobedience is effective against bad laws that nevertheless assign punishments proportional to the nominal offense. If "demonstrations without a permit" is punished by a week in jail and they won't give you a permit then you do the demonstration and spend the week in jail. A week later you're back out there demonstrating again. MLK Jr. was arrested 29 times in a span of 11 years.
It doesn't really work in the modern system which is tuned for coercing plea bargains and full of three strikes laws, because then "pissing off the government" is an aggravating factor that causes them to stack more charges until you're facing years instead of days. Then you're not making a point through a willingness to spend a few nights in a cell before your next press conference, you're getting taken off the board.
It also never really worked against bad economic rules because the nature of bad economic rules is to make good economic behavior uneconomical, like converting units to types in higher demand or funding new construction. The deleterious effect of the rule is that instead of it costing $50,000 to add a housing unit, it costs $500,000. But doing civil disobedience by building it anyway would catch you >$500,000 in fines and penalties, or carries penalties like demolition of the structure. So the bad law acts as an extremely effective deterrent against doing the good thing by making it uneconomical regardless of whether you follow the law or you don't. A bankrupt company can't continue to advocate for change or serve as an example of doing something good.
And if they actually did pay the fines then instead of people saying "that's not real civil disobedience" they would be saying "look at these lawless corporations paying token fines as a cost of doing business" and arguing for the penalties to be increased to a level that would bankrupt them wherever that isn't already the case.
So the remaining option is to break the law and then argue that the law is harmful and shouldn't be enforced.
Meh. What they are doing is NOT civil disobedience and protest. What they are doing is just normal breaking the law for profit thing.
That being said, I also dont think that civil disobedience means you have to accept whatever harsh punishment whatever authoritarian is using. It is actually ok to avoid those.
>I don't have a problem with them actively choosing to break laws to protest the laws themselves
Do you truly believe this is some protest action by Airbnb? Because I think most of us rightly characterize it as "intentionally breaking the law for profit" and little more than that.
I'm not sure I like seeing their behavior compared to legitimate protests and activist work. That seems rather insulting to the people and organizations who actually take real risks for the public good. This is a silicon valley startup, a VC-funded profit machine disrupting communities around the world by breaking the law. To paint this as somehow altruistic is a novel take to say the least.
It's just a preference thing. They taste bad _to you_, not to everyone.
Even among people that like artificial sweeteners, people have preferences. I prefer pink and my wife prefers yellow. When I'm forced to use yellow, I just can't enjoy the drink as much.
And, yes, it's a totally different kind of "sweet" for each of them. So if you're expecting "sugar sweet", it won't be that for the others.
Cilantro really tastes different from one person to another (relative to the aldéhyde content of cilantro and genetic variations). I don't know about sugar and aspartame but saying that it is purely a "preference" looks a little bit presomptuous to me.
To the previous poster: do other intense sweeteners (stevia, saccharin, sucralose) taste sweet to you?
They all have variations of a bitter aftertaste to me. It’s not sweet or pleasant at all.
And it’s a different form of bitterness than the one you get from kale/collared greens, brussel sprouts, etc., whichi quite enjoy. I _almost_ want to drink a diet drink along with one of the “bitter” vegetable or even a crème brûlée to quantify the difference.
I don't think you understand. That's like saying mud is a preference over sugar. It's not sweet to me. It's not even in the same ballpark. I'd have to completely re-orient my taste buds because it literally tastes like dirt or dust without a hint of the same flavour.
You're conflating two different things. Unless you have some very weird genetic condition, it does taste sweet to you. That is, it activates the same sweet receptors on your tongue and in other parts of your mouth that sugar activates - and more or less to the same extent (relative to concentration).
However, sugar isn't simply a sweet taste. It also has some amount of flavor, and so do the artificial sweeteners, and it is these flavor differences that you (and many others) dislike. Flavor is something that happens in the air tract, and is far more complex than taste.
It absolutely does not. The places on my tongue that taste sweet and the places that taste aspartame are completely different (the latter strongly at back of my throat, sugar strongly on my tongue).
No, this is pretty common in folks who don't drown their taste buds and systems in tons of it every day. Then you feel it anytime its there, since its pretty rare and its disgusting chemical bleh, one feels it fully.
Its a bit like smoking cigarettes - to many non-smokers, its disgusting beyond description, smearing face with old feces wouldn't be worse. To many smokers its mild, pleasant, they enjoy it with lunch etc.
Most soft drinks are not made with artificial sweeteners.
Where are you that the only available soft drinks are artificially sweetened? Never been to a restaurant or fast food place or grocery store that only carried the diet/zero and didn't carry the standard coke or pepsi.
At this point I think it almost definitely is "most" in USA at least, going by volume/count/shelf-space.
Like >90% of energy drinks use at least one (normal red bull is a rare exception), and diet sodas typically have more shelf space than regular from what I see, often by a huge margin.
Almost all gatorade-likes have it now too (I typically can't find even a single counter-example in a store, unless they're one of the oddballs carrying regular gatorade (most do not)), often also including regular sugars. Even stuff you'd hope would be maximally-simple like pedialyte has it in almost every variety.
Almost literally every single water-flavoring in stores uses them, I go years without seeing unsweetened or sugar only. skratchlabs.com is sometimes in expensive bike or running stores though, yay.
Stuff like Liquid Death used to be just low amounts of sugar, but now has stevia in it too. The same happened with Bragg's drinking vinegar(???!).
It's wild to be someone who dislikes the flavor of these things and read labels, and watch the massive rise in use in despair. They're in lots of candy bars now too! That was a rather nasty discovery.
Aspartame has a pretty strong, weird metallic flavor to it, and a lot of the sugar alcohols taste... idk, like a belch after a slightly sweet chemical cocktail? Some taste... airy, or dusty, like an absence of flavor, like there's a gap where you'd usually taste something. Hard to describe but very unpleasant. And the flavor lingers for quite a while. Xylitol is mostly alright tho, sadly it's usually blended with other stuff nowadays.
Personally though I think stevia might be the worst, and it's getting added to everything lately, even stuff with more than enough regular sugar.
Honestly I'd prefer to not taste that, since I think most probably are pretty safe and fine (though I would be glad to see a reduction in sweetness in general). But it's really not a choice, nor have I "gotten used to it" in 40 years, despite it being extremely common.
This summarizes pretty well the three main problems I have. Most things are already way too sweetened, the trend of adding artificial sweeteners to something already naturally sweet ruins something that could be good, and many artificial sweeteners taste metallic and have weird aftertaste.
Its one thing for soda or other sweet items, I get the reduction in sugars there. Its just boggling how many foods people, particularly americans cant eat unless its sweet enough to be dessert
You know what, it's exactly what everything tasted like the week that I discovered that grown-ups could catch hand, foot and mouth from their children and also what my toddler was so upset about.
When I drink a non-diet cola, it tastes awful to me; sickeningly sweet. I don't have any problem with diet colas (though I don't like Diet Pepsi, it's slimy to me).
The main point is that it's not that X has an awful taste. It's that different people have different reactions to different Xs. It's not that X tastes bad unless you happen to get used to it.
I also found it super gross but after a few weeks of tough endurance, the chemical taste subsided and disappeared. It comes back after a week or so without Diet Coke.
But yeah I could hardly swallow it in the beginning.
They're also one and the same generally-- at least if the stalker has money or the right friends most kinds of law enforcement access means stalker access. It's not unheard of for an officer themselves to be the stalker, and there are so many people that work in law enforcement that bribing, impersonating, or persuading your way to access is not that big a deal. Not to mention that enabled stalkers can just file a federal lawsuit and issue subpoena for records.
The only safe thing is for the records to never exist in the first place.
> It's not unheard of for an officer themselves to be the stalker
This was one of the motivations for passage of the Driver's Privacy Protection Act of 1994. Nowadays, officers need a legitimate reason to run a plate - unless the patrol car is fitted with automatic cameras[1] that look up every plate of every car they drive past.
> The Virginia state police used license plate readers to track people’s attendance at political events;
> The New York Police Department used license plate readers to keep track of who visited certain places of worship, and how often;
> Despite all this surveillance, ALPR technology has been repeatedly shown to be unreliable; like other police technologies, ALPRs can and do make mistakes.[2]
Generally, court decisions have held that you have zero expectation of privacy when you are in public spaces. Current license plate standards[3] aim for plates that are not cluttered and are easily read by the human eyeball, despite being wrapped with license plate frames (which usually make the state hard/impossible to read which is the most common failure mode for ANLR[4]). If the reflectivity material (traditionally called "ScotchLite"[5]) is worn out (or defaced), most states require the plate to be replaced.
How is that achievable? PIs can legally do it. Random people can keep tabs on you and exchange gossip. It's the sudden scale and low cost that doesn't sit well with freedom to not be tracked in public 24/7 we took for granted.
The core ill is aggregated data, because that's what allows the mass in surveillance, data mining, etc.
The collection actions are almost immaterial. Without persistence they must be re-performed for each request, which naturally provides a throughput bottleneck and makes "for everyone" untenable.
If we agree the aggregated data at rest is the problem, then addressing it would look like this:
1. Classify all data holders at scale into a regulated group
2. Apply initial regulations
- To respond to queries for copies of personal data held
- To update data or be liable in court for failing to do so
- To validate counterparties apply basic security due diligence before transferring data (or the transferer also faces liability)
- To maintain a *full* chain of custody of data (from originator through every intermediate party to holder) so that leaks / misuse can be traced
- To file yearly update on the types, amount of data, and counterparties it was transferred to with the federal government that are made public
The initial impediment to regulatory action is Google, Meta, Equifax, etc. saying "This problem is too complex and you don't understand it."
It's not. But the first step is classifying and documenting the problem.
The only way is through - everybody should get into the practice of stalking and gossiping about each other in a Molochian environment, where the people who do not do so suffer from the losing side of an information asymmetry.
Expect AI, especially post-Mythos, to just enable this at even further scale. Consumer grade wireless networking gear as a whole is a very wide attack surface and is basically never updated.
It is not realistic to say that no person is allowed to keep track of another person; watch where they go, when, with who, etc.
It should not be acceptable for a company to gather information on "everyone"; where they have been going, when, with who, how often, etc. And it should not be acceptable for them to sell that information (to government agencies OR private citizens).
It's a matter of scale.
- Making the first one illegal/impossible would be difficult/costly; and not doing so has a limited impact (to society, not to the single person affected).
- Making the second one illegal is much easier, and it's much easier to shut down a large company doing it than it is 1,000 individual stalkers. The impact of making it illegal is much wider and better for society as a whole.
We don't want anyone being stalked. But in a cost/benefit analysis, we can do something about one of them but not the other.
If PIs can "legally" do it then it sounds like there is a law which allows them to do it. That law can be revoked (unless the power comes from Constitution which would make it effectively impossible to revoke).
Note that PIs are effectively illegal under GDPR by default. They would generally need to provide Article 13 notice, i.e. you would become aware of them unless they were just asking around without actually following you. Member states can make them legal though (via Article 23) and likely in many cases they have done so.
In the US, PI licensing is only about PIing for hire. The actual act of going through public records, following cars and whatnot do not require a license, you can spy on anyone without a license as long as you don't get paid for it.
EU is more complicated, but Article 14.5.b allows withholding notice if it would impair/defeat the purpose of processing. The PI must however apply "safeguards", whatever it could mean.
Article 14(5)(b) does, but that only applies for Article 14 notice (personal data not directly obtained from data subject). Article 13 (personal data obtained directly from data subject) does not have such exception in GDPR itself.
This becomes extremely relevant when you read it in the light of the C-422/24 decision. In that personal data collected via body worn cameras was determined to be "directly obtained". Paragraph 41 from the judgement:
> If it were accepted that Article 14 of the GDPR applies where personal data are collected by means of a body camera, the data subject would not receive any information at the time of collection, even though he or she is the source of those data, which would allow the controller not to provide information to that data subject immediately. Therefore, such an interpretation would carry the risk of the collection of personal data escaping the knowledge of the data subject and giving rise to hidden surveillance practices. Such a consequence would be incompatible with the objective, referred to in the preceding paragraph, of ensuring a high level of protection of the fundamental rights and freedoms of natural persons.
Given this it's very unlikely that PI observing (especially if they record) could be considered to be Article 14 instead of Article 13 type of collection as it's exactly "hidden surveillance practice" that the Court warned about.
Member states do have a right to restrict the Article 13 disclosure obligations via Article 23 restriction, but that requires specific law in the member state & the law itself must fulfill the obligations that Article 23 requires. Article 23(2) essentially forbids leaving everything up to the controller.
And as far as PI in the US goes, actions between stalking and PI "for self" tend to be so similar that I wouldn't necessarily recommend anyone to try it.
I unsubscribe, and immediately set up a filter to mark any email from their (sub)domain as spam. Too many sites keep spamming for a week or two after unsubscribing, that behavior deserves a reputation drop.
I don't mind if a company sends me emails if I gave them my email address. As long as, when I click "unsubscribe" to the email, they stop. I don't want to have to go log back into their system and unsubscribe. I just want to click the unsubscribe button and have it be done - forever, not just until they add a new category for email.
I have a fair number of companies that send me emails (because I signed up for their service) on a "slow" basis (ie, when they have something interesting.. not just "every week, so you don't forget us). I don't mind those. Sometimes I read them, sometimes I don't. I don't unsubscribe and I don't mark them as spam.
I'm not saying you should be the same as me. I _am_ saying that, just because _you_ don't like it, doesn't make them "clearly in the wrong". Because there are people that feel like the way they are acting is reasonable.
FYI, requiring logging in to unsubscribe is a violation of the CAN-SPAM Act in the U.S., I just mark those as spam if they don't allow one-click unsubscribes.
> There are unsubscribe buttons with laws that enforce that they work.
They don't. Period. Full Stop. There are tons of companies that I have told to stop sending me emails that just... continue to do so. And some that won't _allow_ me to tell them to stop (I need to create an account to tell them not to email me... but they shouldn't be emailing me if I don't have an account).
But that same exact logic applies to "it's really hard to succeed, so I'm going to just mug some people to get the money I need". I'm sorry, but "its hard to succeed, so I'm justified in being unethical" is _not_ a valid excuse.
> They send "transactional" emails every month that can't be opted out of when they notice changes in my credit file
And you can't even try to unsubscribe without creating an account. And, if I don't _have_ an account, it is (pretty much by definition) NOT transactional.
Yes. 100%. And the fact that you're not seeing why it does is confounding to me.
This person has shown that they are willing to harm society (for their own benefit, presumably); by active choice. And, as such, anything they say needs to be viewed through the lens of "is this person lying for their own benefit".
1. Their previous actions do mean that we should not trust what they are saying outright, we should do (more) work verifying the information they provide.
2. Their previous actions to _not_ mean we should avoid holding other accountable when the information provided turns out to be true.
You're asking your question like someone is arguing that this person's information doesn't matter (2); but the point being made is that we should (1).
And the companies in question break the law and then whine and complain like they shouldn't need to face the consequences; like the law shouldn't apply to them because they don't think it's fair.
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