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The case for cities where you’re a sensor, not a thing to be sensed (theguardian.com)
184 points by raleighm on Jan 18, 2020 | hide | past | favorite | 44 comments



> It’s not hard to see why: “smart” has become code for “terrible”. A “smart speaker” is a speaker that eavesdrops on you and leaks all your conversations to distant subcontractors for giant tech companies. “Smart watches” spy on your movements and sell them to data-brokers for ad-targeting. “Smart TVs” watch you as you watch them and sell your viewing habits to brokers.

I guess that would make the Guardian a “smart website”.

> The problem is that the smart city, as presently conceived, is a largely privatised affair designed as a public-private partnership to extract as much value as possible from its residents

I looked quite hard for any evidence in the article that this was the case other than ‘I don’t know, it feels kind of icky’ but couldn’t find any.

> If you want to page a minibus – something like an Uber Pool, but run by the city, licensed, safe, paying a living wage and not mining your data – you can summon one, and yes, this exposes your identity so that the driver can find you.

Ah, and there’s the nub of it. It’s fine for a responsible (read public-sector) technocrat to mine and process your data, but it’s evil when a company does it.


You don't seem to have noticed that in concluding "It’s fine for a responsible (read public-sector) technocrat to mine and process your data" you're replying to a quote that explicitly states "and not mining your data".

It's perfectly possible to deliver services using only the data necessary to deliver the service. Selling none of it to advertisers or other third parties, gathering nothing other than that necessary to make the service the best you can provide. Not only would it feel a much more equitable exchange for the customers providing the data, it would no doubt end up with a better service. Adding data mining for sale corrupts every service, as they twist to gather ever more for less, or poorer and poorer results. You become a data cow for the milking.


It's evil if both/either were to collect more information then is necessary and sell it to 3rd parties for analytics.

The DMV in some states have started to sell people's data, that's fucked.


Selling data is a problem, I'm with you so far.

Having the government (that also controls the police, the military etc) collect & analyze large amounts of data on citizens is a recipe for disaster even if they never sell that data to a third party. I hear people say "but we can write laws that they cannot use that data for anything nefarious" and I'm amazed that there are still people alive that believe that laws have ever stopped a government.

I'm fine with "let's limit the amount of data corporations can collect on citizens", but I'm really not fine with "let's allow the state to collect any data on citizens other than absolutely necessary to provide basic services, at least they don't sell it".


The DMV is less selling it, than people are requesting the DMV records as part of a Government transparency program, and the DMV is applying a service charge to it. They have made this service available for decades.

It’s good in that it’s the government providing transparency into the records they hold, and allowing them to be corrected. It’s bad in that it’s a big treasure trove of data for companies or individuals who want to mis-use it.


The "service charges" came to $42M over 3 years in one state:

https://www.wyff4.com/article/the-dmv-sells-your-information...


Is that a lot, or a little, when compared to the cost of providing the service? Without context, this number is meaningless.


It doesn't cost $42M to make a CSV file available.


Is your argument that a CSV file of everyone's data should be publicly accessible? Because that's not what I understand the fee to cover; it covers extra personnel to field and review the requests, computer systems to process it, paper to print it out. It probably also covers supervisors time, office space, printers.

Like most government spending, I'm sure it's excessive. However, I'm not clear what your counter-point was. Yes, producing a CSV costs less than $42M. No, producing a CSV file is not what this service entails.


No, I was being a bit facetious. My counterpoint was simply that as you just stated it's clearly excessive and that you know it is a lot even without additional context and so by extension it's not accurate to say that the number is "meaningless".


Ah, I understand what you're saying. You are right - meaningless is too strong of a statement.

If I could edit my comment, I might say something more accurate, like "trying to evaluate this number without more context is not useful."


  I guess that would make the Guardian a “smart website”.
And what an excellent excuse for dismissing all critisism.


Surveillance Mechanisms Abusing Repugnant Technology


[flagged]


I guess Cory Doctorow got no input in what his article said?


> In the "internet of things," we’re promised technology that will allow us to project our will on to our surroundings ... But ...

This is spot on. Technology has always been, and will always be, a means to project our will onto our surroundings, nothing less, nothing more. The only question to be asked is, whose will is being projected onto whose surroundings? Do those surroundings include other people?

To me, all this talk of "smart" household devices is just marketing bullshit designed to mask the fact that the manufacturer is imposing their will onto users. The devices are dumb as fuck. They have no capacity to make any kind of judgment call. The manufacturer does, as they have the source code. Calling the devices "smart" makes it look like they're learning and making decisions for the owner's benefit when they really aren't.

My fridge and air purifier wants internet access for some reason but I'm not giving it to them. I'm not buying a smart TV and probably never will. I prefer my appliances dumb and simple. After all, uneducated and isolated slaves are far less likely to revolt. As soon as they are given a voice of their own, they'll begin to speak for someone else's interests! (Who knew that 19th century slave owners' arguments would turn out to be surprisingly convincing when the slaves aren't humans?)


I like this idea. It could be called privacy first mesh architecture or something like that.


I bought privacymesh.com a while back for this purpose!


Is it really true that collecting only anonymous, stateless data has the same value as stateful, identifiable data?

What kind of insights do we lose? Is it simply just advertisers who lose, or will we also lose other things?

For example, if I can track your path around a city, wouldn’t I be able to make better predictions about traffic then if I could only track the aggregated count of locations that had been visited over the course of a time period?


>Is it really true that collecting only anonymous, stateless data has the same value as stateful, identifiable data?

Value to whom?

>What kind of insights do we lose? Is it simply just advertisers who lose, or will we also lose other things?

Who is "we"? Who gets to collect that data, control access to it, etc? How do they get it? Who would lose other things in the absence of that data collection?

>For example, if I can track your path around a city, wouldn’t I be able to make better predictions about traffic then if I could only track the aggregated count of locations that had been visited over the course of a time period?

Maybe, but that doesn't mean I want you tracking me.


> is it really true that collecting only anonymous, stateless data has the same value as stateful, identifiable data

If you place more value on knowledge of the collective rather than the specifics of the individual (which is arguably a good way for governance and stewardship bodies to operate) then I feel like it might be true.

to me, the perk of this totally non-specific data is that it can theoretically be public, and so there's less incentive to advocate for scary information asymmetry in private hands (neither corp nor gov). Yes, there's asymmetry in who can derive insight from public aggregate data, but in theory access can be ubiquitous, and that's less than the towering asymmetry (of access) that currently exists with our understandable lip service to personal privacy


> if I could only track the aggregated count of locations that had been visited over the course of a time period?

Buy you can't. Metadata.

And then they is the Google problem. If other are collecting everything they may have a competitive advantage in the future. To the poit your business will most certainly die.


A perfect example is community-sourced apps that warn about police and speed traps.

I also recall reading about apps that warn about video surveillance. But that's a difficult thing to search for.


I have a phrase "topless computing" which for me is allowing the data to be accessible in an onwardly usable fashion. Not assuming the use case you have in mind is the final one - someone will always have a better more specific use case

It does mean we all need to become proficient at using those data flows - to become coders as we are all readers and writers today.


> It does mean we all need to become proficient at using those data flows ...

Pretty sure that's extremely unlikely to (ever) happen for even a majority of the population.

a) People have their own interests and goals. They generally aren't going to put time into anything like this unless it seems like it'll help them achieve one of their interests/goals

b) Not everyone is "switched on" technologically. Kids, elderly, even just some people with non-technical personality types. :/


b) is education. Literacy is terrible without school too. But now nearly everyone spends years learning that skill and can use it throughout life. Not to say coding is necessarily as useful as reading and writing though.


Education definitely won't work for many elderly people who are 1. Not Interested, and 2. May no longer be capable of picking up (or retaining) the skill. :(


I'm not talking about re-educating adults. Just that we could teach nearly everyone to program if it were important, in the same way we teach nearly everyone to read and write. Kids already learn long division at school, which is an algorithm. Programming is kind of easier in a way because if you have a goal, you can fumble you way towards it until it works, but you can't really fumble your way through long division if you don't know how to do it.


Hmmm. Not sure you really understand what elderly people are like. :/

For example, my father - who used to be able to do at least basic programming in C and Python - is no longer able to grasp the concepts for any length of time.

eg teach him, verify he's gotten it... and the next day it's a blank. Repeatedly. :/


Absolutely- I am about 30,000 words into a book on Software Literacy and it's good to hear I am not the only fool thinking along these lines :-)

Edit ... not that you are a fool :-)


I think Excel proves this is a lot more possible than often thought.


I like the concept of individuals being proficient at understanding data the same way they understand language today. Am less sure that this is possible, because each brain has specialized areas (Broca's and Wernicke's) for processing language; we all have pattern recognition built in too; but abstracting the meaning and impact of data is a lot less intuitive.

That said, I don't think "topless computing" is an ideal phrase, because the image many people will get is a woman typing while topless.


I think the answer is finding a way to transform data into a format that takes advantage of those brain centers. Visualization is a great example of this, but has a long way to go.


How would you suggest visualizing it?


Depends on the data


I’m really interested though. Obviously location data on a map. What about interests?


I'd argue what is being done with smart cities could be done with smart code bases. For instance: any language's core library has functions that almost nobody uses. That would change if we had a measure of how frequently these functions are used, starting with why we write these functions in the first place: as I see it, this would lead to a more experiment-driven fashion of writing code, instead of idealising the use of these functions as we do nowadays.


That does happen. Ruby 2.7 was going to remove something called the swip-swap operator (or similar), which was thought to be essentially unused.

That plan was shelved after a search of GitHub turned a few examples of usage in the wild.


The flip-flop operator, I think: https://nithinbekal.com/posts/ruby-flip-flop/


Teams use tracing for that now. I imagine that some of that data could be extracted and made more generally available, even shared among users of oss libraries.


But what about crime? Surveillance really does stop crime. America has parts of cities that are too dangerous to walk alone in at night, and it's so well known that if somebody is murdered doing that, people blame the victim for being too stupid. That's how ingrained the acceptance of crime is. Being able to safely leave your house whenever you want should be a pretty high priority for a good city. What's the alternative to surveillance? Lots of police patrolling everywhere? Isn't that equally creepy but also much more expensive?


London, the most famous example of a surveillance city, sees far more crime than similar, privacy-conscious cities such as Berlin or Vancouver or Paris.

So surveillance is certainly no silver bullet. If you check the literature, you'll find that it tends to have modest benefits mostly on property crime, but some of that is simply moved to other areas.

Violent crime is decidedly rare these days. I guarantee you there is no city or town in the US today that is not far safer now than the US average in the 70s.

Of the remaining violence, murders are rarely committed by strangers. Just 11% in the US in 2016, for example. And those tend to be either mass shootings or otherwise psychologically disturbed individuals, who rarely care about capture.

0: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/18/nyregion/killed-by-a-stra...


It used to be that people thought about deep societal issues that might underlie the causes for crime, like joblessness, drug addiction, poor education, lack of job opportunities, gangs, being poor. Apparently today we've lost the imagination for this and the only choices left are more police or more cameras.


They're the only choices that have any chance of happening. I absolutely agree we should solve not crime specifically, but the terrible lifelong personal suffering that causes it. For every violent criminal, there must be a lot of harmless damaged people. We need to fix parenting to prevent neglect, abuse and incompetence. But how can you do that without being even more authoritarian than surveillance?


Like I said, we've lost the imagination to think about investing in society. It's gonna cost money, time and effort, none of which people want to spend these days. You gotta stop treating people like criminals. You gotta invest in education, healthcare, addiction programs. You gotta hire people--sociologists, psychologists, educators, and yes some policemen. You gotta set up government departments that are dedicated to studying people's well being and tracking long term trends. You gotta have effective social programs. You gotta stop the propaganda lies that socialism is the same is communism or is some kind of authoritarian nightmare--it isn't. Socialism is high taxes to pay for effective government services run by well-paid professional bureaucrats who know what the heck they are doing. Period. And for fuck's sake, you gotta stop spending trillions on pointless wars, hyper-advanced killing technology, and tax cuts for the rich. In short, do everything the opposite of what America is doing.




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