Making the possession of data this either illegal or too horribly cumbersome.
Flock is just an iteration, and getting rid of that brand won't fix it. And camera tracking of normal citizens is just an iteration -- not the underlying systemic issue that isn't being addressed.
The EU has GDPR. At this point, I want something stronger than that.
Still not enough. What you suggest does not prevent the government of possessing the data. Technical means of collection needs to be preemptively banned.
The Pixel line is, from what I can see, a tiny part of the smart phone market share.
So, yes, I can buy a phone that I can mostly control (at the risk of losing access to some draconian apps). But most devices being sold don't allow consumer control.
You can't really spit in the hobby 3d printing world without hitting the community. I have coworkers who talk about their printers, filament choice, what they've printed recently, etc etc. I've been around hackerspaces with that behavior for over a decade, but it spontaneously showed up at work from a shared interest.
That community is where open source tech tends to come from.
I know the community well, I was challenging the assertion this hurts the community. On the contrary, better and cheaper printers help the community way more than the worries over software licensing. The average person doesn't care, they want a printer that works and doesn't cost much.
Its not only a licensing issue, but they abuse this closed source binary to lock away major features from other slicers (DRM, signature checks), hinder development, include anti-debugging, telemetry, encrypt logs and configs, etc.
And the stock plugin ships an unaligned atomic that triggers the kernel's split_lock detector on every modern Intel CPU. Startup stalls for 25-60 seconds while the kernel walks each trap; every Device-tab click hits it again. The workaround (sysctl kernel.split_lock_mitigate=0) degrades system-wide performance and still misbehaves in LAN-only mode. Reported to Bambu over a year ago and still open: bambulab/BambuStudio#8605.
Again, the average person does not care about any of that. They will use the Bambu slicer (if even, I bet many only print from their phones with the app). They aren't aware of, nor do they care about, anti-debugging, telemetry, encrypted logs, or anything of that nature. Most who do use the slicer will probably be on Windows, not Linux, and on an x86_64 machine. Why is any of this a surprise? It's an appliance, not something to hack on. It would be one thing if it was presented that way, like the Prusas, but it is explicitly sold as a turnkey machine. If you don't like that, you can buy a printer from one of their many competitors, or build a printer yourself, Bambu is not stopping you.
My point is even if it hadn't blown up you would've committed a crime anyway, whereas if you rig a phone to erase its own data upon entering a PIN and the PIN is not entered, you haven't committed a crime. The two situations are different enough not to be analogous.
We need PII to be so toxic that companies run screaming from the liability unless they have explicit consent[1] and a legit reason to house it.
A company selling me widgets wouldn't store or let another company store extra information about me if it subjected them the widget seller to HIPAA. Or better yet, something more stringent.
We don't need the government to be antagonistic toward corporations; we just need a government that makes the corporations internalize the risk they're making us take.
[1] The fact that ToS are enforceable when every court in the country knows that only a vanishly small percentage of people ever read them, much less understand them, means that they're not doing their job.
> We need PII to be so toxic that companies run screaming from the liability
This is how healthcare workers used to treat health information protected by HIPAA, but it seems like the big corporations don't really even care about it. Nothing ever comes from violations besides slap on the wrist/cost of doing business penalties. You can't do anything without waiving all your rights, granting permission to be recorded, granting permission to use your photograph for anything they want, allowing your recorded audio to run through AI for transcription (and whatever else they want to do), granting permission to share your data with their partners, associates, and some vague description of "anyone we decide at a later date". That's before you can even sign-up, receive care, have a service rendered, enter into a business establishment.
There's pages of fine print documenting it all in vague terms that ambiguously safe guard the provider from any liability, but half the time, you don't even get to opportunity to (not) read it. It's just a link to go elsewhere and (not) read it. They add as many steps between you even reading what rights you're giving away, so that even the people who had a mind to do so would get fatigued, and they make you do it while there are people queuing up behind you, or you're almost done with your purchase/subscription, etc.
Everything is so consumer hostile (and expensive in America), but no "better" service can swoop in, because the established Big corps get to break all the rules or can afford the token penalties to give them an unstoppable market share no honest disruptor/competition could ever overcome. On even ground, no competent person would choose to be abused by our resident monopolies vs a reasonably similar priced local upstart, and a lot people would even pay (a little) more for a better experience/product/service.
I just stopped writing my social down on doctor intake forms years ago after numerous "whoopsie we were hacked" letters, that almost seemed like a scam themselves(always nearly identical).
No doctor ever complained. You don't need to enter most of that info.
Explicit consent will be everywhere, like you won't be admitted to a grocery store without it. Take any modern TV -- there's a privacy policy you have to accept the first time you turn it on. Or California Prop 65 notice on every product.
So no, requiring explicit consent won't fix anything.
The government needs regulation to allow access without granting consent in certain cases. Not quite as far as declaring something a utility, but better than almost completely unregulated.
Most of the videos talk about reducing burden on clinicians. Specifically: sharing, accessing, updating patient history. Providing clinicians and patients guidance through the medical process through AI agents (that have access to your PII). the kaiser permanente guy highlighted ai's use in guiding billing codes. Dr. Oz spoke about getting pre-authorizations near instantaneously
I'm not sure how that gets accomplished without reducing liability or loosing restrictions. I wouldnt be surprised to see a continued attack on our healthcare privacy
Weren’t electronic health records supposed to solve this problem almost 20 years ago?
I would have figured there would have been a massive financial interest in providers not having to waste time dealing with tedious Q&A and data entry with new patients…
> I think the distinction between political appointee and scientist/researcher stands.
I agree with this.
I'm a civil servant and I know (personally; my work is nowhere near the labs) a number of people who work or have worked in that weird contracting DOE/DOD structure that includes the labs.
The difference I've seen is far more from the nature of work rather than the employment details.
Europe is implementing a law that requires software made for profit to hit at least industry security standards. Punishments include the purchaser being able to sue the seller as well as jail time for execs.
At some point, we need to push back against the reality in the US that we have effectively no way to stop mass harvesting (and then breaching) of our PII -- and there's basically zero downside to companies when it happens.
Oh yeah I support gun control too, obviously. But more like a total ban (I don't even support sports shooting since many of the massacres we have seen were perpetrated with guns from that community).
In America the problem is really more that people can just buy guns, not the printers.
Flock is just an iteration, and getting rid of that brand won't fix it. And camera tracking of normal citizens is just an iteration -- not the underlying systemic issue that isn't being addressed.
The EU has GDPR. At this point, I want something stronger than that.
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