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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   6687 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 2, 2026

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The surveillance imposed on us today far exceeds that of the Soviet Union. For freedom and democracy’s sake, we need to eliminate most of it. There are so many ways to use data to hurt people that the only safe database is the one that was never collected. Thus, instead of the EU’s approach of mainly regulating how personal data may be used (in its General Data Protection Regulation or GDPR), I propose a law to stop systems from collecting personal data.

[...]

The EU’s GDPR regulations are well-meaning, but do not go very far. It will not deliver much privacy, because its rules are too lax. They permit collecting any data if it is somehow useful to the system, and it is easy to come up with a way to make any particular data useful for something.

The GDPR makes much of requiring users (in some cases) to give consent for the collection of their data, but that doesn’t do much good. System designers have become expert at manufacturing consent (to repurpose Noam Chomsky’s phrase). Most users consent to a site’s terms without reading them; a company that required users to trade their first-born child got consent from plenty of users. Then again, when a system is crucial for modern life, like buses and trains, users ignore the terms because refusal of consent is too painful to consider.

To restore privacy, we must stop surveillance before it even asks for consent.

Richard Stallman (you may have heard of him)

That's not Stallman explaining, that's Stallman pontificating. There are certainly modern problems with surveillance, but I think few of them have anything to do with data collection by companies on the Internet. Constant tracking of my physical location directly by the government (e.g. EZ-Pass, street cameras, license plate cameras, tire RFID readers if they're real, etc) or proxies (cell phone, private CCTV, etc) seems a lot more dangerous.

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