A software developer and Linux nerd, living in Germany. I’m usually a chill dude but my online persona doesn’t always reflect my true personality. Take what I say with a grain of salt, I usually try to be nice and give good advice, though.

I’m into Free Software, selfhosting, microcontrollers and electronics, freedom, privacy and the usual stuff. And a few select other random things, too.

  • 3 Posts
  • 381 Comments
Joined 5 months ago
cake
Cake day: June 25th, 2024









  • That’s a good question. I’d say be aware what you’re ignorant about. Most people are ignorant. They have strong opinions about one conflict in the Middle East while they simultaneously ignore ongoing genocides in Africa. And my question is, does it help anyone if we argue with relatives or on the internet? I’d say it’s alright to say I don’t take sides, it’s a shitty situation but not my field of expertise, so I don’t have an opinion.

    It’s rarely a bad thing to be informed about things. And you always need information/education to make good decisions. Especially as a citizen in a democracy, it’s your duty to elect your leaders, so you better have some idea about who’s going to ruin the country and who’s going to make it better. But that doesn’t mean you have to know everything. And it also doesn’t mean you need to blast your opinion out there.

    And it’s okay to be tired of US politics. Due to current circumstances. However, it shouldn’t be that way. We learn about history and politics (in school) for a good reason. We’re a part of the world and a part of what’s going on.


  • I think that’s overestimating the complexity. In my example you can just delete all data from people who cross the border regularly. I heard like >80% of Americans don’t travel that much. So you’d still catch the vast majority. And there are additional giveaways. Visiting relatives will follow a pattern or coincide with holidays like every other thanksgiving. Weekend trips will start at the end of a week while work will be during the week and often someone would visit a worksite multiple times.

    And correlating data and having multiple datapoints helps immensely. For example if you want to correlate license plates with cell tower data: One measurement will only narrow it down to a few hundreds or thousands of people who passed the highway at that point. But, a single additional datapoint will immediately give an exact answer. Because it’s very unlikely that multiple of the people also return at the same time. Same applies to other statistics.

    And you don’t even need to figure out the patterns. It’s a classification problem. And that’s a well understood problem in machine learning. You need a labeled dataset with examples and ML will figure out the rest. No matter if it’s deciphering hand writing, figuring out shopping behaviour to advertise, or something like this. We figured out the maths a long time ago. Nowadays it’s in the textbooks and online courses and you just need some pre-existing data to start with. Maybe you’re right and compiling a dataset will take more than 3 weeks. But it’s certainly doable and not that complicated. And menstrual cycles follow patterns. That makes machine learning a precise approach. It’ll home in on the ~4weeks cycle, find outliers and data that never followed a realistic cycle.

    I agree, there are complications. People need to be incentivised to pay attention. Government agencies regularly fail at complex tasks. Due to various reasons. But it’s probably enough to make peoples’ lives miserable if they have to live in constant fear. So there is an additional psychological factor, even if they don’t succed with total surveillance.

    And this approach is a bit unlikely anyways. It’s far easier to pass a law to force clinics to rat out people or something like that.

    But my guess is that [predictive policing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictive_policing might become an issue. Currently we seem to stick to intelligence agencies and advertising with that technology (and Black mirror episodes and China). But that’s mainly a political choice.


  • For using or not using loaded words? Generally, It’s easier to criticize some words than to write down a long and nuanced opinion. You literally don’t even need to read the attached article. And it’s emotionally more rewarding to pick on things than write a comment that you agree. Also politics is an easy target for arguments and strong opinions. Try the same with gardening or the life of Johan Sebastian Bach and you’ll see the same dynamics don’t apply to some other topics. Unless someone writes something obviously wrong facts, that’s going to be pointed out immediately.



  • I wouldn’t know, I have a lot of adblockers etc. But it gets to me via word of mouth. And it’s been in the media a lot this year. Due to their business decisions, new approach, novelty… That’s something they did very well. They also took care building some hype and anticipation with their invite-only period. Mastodon has also been in the news. But that was yesterday’s news and I suppose everyone forgets yesterday’s news.




  • We’d need to identify some threat model to continue the discussion. I don’t know what people are afraid of. I’d say the other way round is more likely. For example a state decides to pursue people terminating a pregnancy. They can use data from telecommunications providers to find out which phones cross the border to the neighboring state and return the same or the next day. Disregard people who do it regularly, and then correlate that data to other factors. Like pull up the menstrual tracker account that was accessed by that specific IP address.

    We know since Snowden that some agencies do similar things (supposedly for terrorism) and generally a lot of logs are kept. Also we have lots of automatic license plate readers and additional surveillance available.

    Aside from that, it is spread that Amazon knows if you’re pregnant before you do. They could also buy the data who is interested in romper suits, supplements or other specific things and then isn’t. I suppose it’s not exactly about that… More that Amazon have some good heuristics and algorithms to predict things from general shopping behaviour. And you could also do the same thing to menstrual tracking. The cycle is pretty regular. And then it usually stops once someone gets pregnant. And I believe after that it takes some time to settle down to a very regular pattern again. You could easily detect that with an algorithm. And simultaneously get rid of artificial (spammed) data that doesn’t follow what is possible. Probably takes a skilled programmer like 3 weeks and then you can tell if an account owner is real, and probably even if they take some contraceptive or not, due to the slight variations. And if an app has some recommendations features, they’re likely to already include the groundworks for data analyzing.

    Ultimately, the government already analyzes and stores the data from telco providers. And it’s always easier to combine several factors to make good predictions, than to rely on a single source. And I’d say this kind of surveillance has to be done automatically, anyways. It’s almost never feasible to sift through databases manually.