Cool, cool cool cool. Nothing dystopian about that at all.

  • scathliath@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    5 hours ago

    Fuckers should help me restore my old academic portfolio then. Might as well put living in a dystopian surveillance state to helpful use.

    • EndlessNightmare@reddthat.com
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      5 hours ago

      It seems like these sorts of things can be used against you, but whenever it might actually benefit you they always come up short.

  • ɔiƚoxɘup@infosec.pub
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    6 hours ago

    Like, they’ve been able to do this for 25 odd years.

    There were gov data centers with thousands of petabytes when I was in college. Prism had the gov archiving every phone call and all internet traffic back in '08…

    This is not news.

    As soon as the quantum cryptography tech gets there, they’ll start decrypting the signal and matrix chats you had yesterday.

    Privacy is illusory and temporary.

    • DSN9@lemmy.ml
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      5 hours ago

      The stasi government would never use my data against me. I’ve got nothing to hide. Hey I think I’ll go buy this doadd for no reason at all no subliminal advertising

  • TheObviousSolution@lemmy.ca
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    10 hours ago

    Pretty sure they also have access to banned Reddit accounts whose users can no longer access their history to know what they will be judged and profiled for, too.

    Just assume every social network either allows this directly or enables a third party to do it, Lemmy specially.

  • NauticalNoodle@lemmy.ml
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    10 hours ago

    Remimds me of when everyone was deleting their posts around the API blackout and suddenly the next day it was like Reddit did a restore from checkpoint and all of the edited posts and deleted posts came right back. I for one had to run the script that replaced then delete my posts twice, but that’s besides the point.

    • dontpanic@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      10 hours ago

      Same, but then a bunch of mine popped up again sometime in the last few months. Not exactly sure when, and it wasn’t all of them.

      I didn’t run the replace script tho, I wish I would’ve.

      • PDFuego@lemmy.world
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        8 hours ago

        Did they actually come back or did a bunch of comments not show up in your profile because the subs were private so they didn’t get deleted, then they reappeared when the subs reopened? I thought some of mine were restored too, but it was a combination of that and the tool I used only hitting the most recent 1000.

        • dontpanic@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          7 hours ago

          Not a bad guess, and it’s always possible there may have been a handful for which that were true, but no. The bulk of them were from subs that have been public for years and continue to be. I’d been at zero comments for pert near 2 years? A bit more. I would check every now and again after they all came back early on. Then suddenly I noticed a few thousand were back, all from 2011-2014 or thereabouts.

  • douglasg14b@lemmy.world
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    8 hours ago

    Once you put anything on the public internet these days, it will be harvest by corporations and used against you eventually

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    13 hours ago

    As a software engineer I was a little shocked when I learned our company treats “Delete” buttons as a means to toggle Archived = 1 in the DB. Nothing is actually deleted. Sure we will anonymise the data after a certain time to be GDPR compliant but it would be trivial I guess to actually link that back to people.

    • ranzispa@mander.xyz
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      10 hours ago

      I’m pretty sure GDPR requires websites to abide to user requests to delete their data. You may wish to review that with your company.

      • Dr. Moose@lemmy.world
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        2 hours ago

        There’s no independent audit for GDPR compliance so the only way to know would be if someone whistleblows. There are also so many loopholes that allows to keep the data like “to prevent further abuse” or “some legal reason”.

        So if reddit bans your account they can keep all data and you can’t do anything about it even with GDPR.

      • manuallybreathing@lemmy.ml
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        5 hours ago

        The org i used to work for had to develop a special process to delete user data upon request, it was not an easy process in dynamics365

        if you want something deleted you best destroy the hard disk yourself lol

      • Armok_the_bunny@lemmy.world
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        11 hours ago

        Not quite, deletion from a hard drive also unflags the space the data was located at as being in use, so it will be overwritten eventually so long as the drive continues to have things written to it. Simply flagging something as being archived means that information will remain on the server indefinitely, the exact opposite of what is intended by a delete button.

          • YerbaYerba@lemmy.zip
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            7 hours ago

            Depending on your media that may not really destroy the data. SSDs do wear leveling and it might just write new blocks and reuse the old ones later.

    • beejboytyson@lemmy.world
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      13 hours ago

      Psh I’m surprised you’re surprised. The only way to really get rid of data is microwave or magnet, no?

  • moderatecentrist@feddit.uk
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    11 hours ago

    For some time now, I have written stuff on the internet under the assumption that one day, my identity will be publicly tied to everything I wrote. Surely in the future it will be easy to give an example of my writing to an AI bot, perhaps combined with some facts about my life, and the bot would be able to find anonymous posts that were likely written by me, across the internet.

  • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    15 hours ago

    People apparently don’t know about the NSA Utah Datacenter.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center

    Been a thing for over a decade, unimaginable total storage size, and they literally archive everything.

    This place had between 3 and 12 exabytes of storage capacity, in 2013.

    1 exabyte is 1 billion gigabytes.

    How big was your pc/laptop hard drive in 2013?

    Maybe… 250 gigs to 2 teras, something like that?

    This data center could now easily be in the yottabyte range ( millions of exabytes ), maybe even ronnabytes ( billions of exabytes ).

    https://www.rankred.com/largest-data-centers-in-the-world/

    6th largest data center in the world by physical size, and it is the only one on this list explictly designated for ‘national security’.

    The NSA has taps on every single major trunk line going in or out of the US, they coordinate with every major US-based ISP, every major software provider, data center operator.

    They have so much archived data that their actual problem is figuring out how to search through it efficiently… and that is a big thing that Palantir does, that was kinda their whole intitial… thing, as a company.

    • Dragonstaff@leminal.space
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      11 hours ago

      When people were up in arms about China getting data from TikTok, I wondered if they had any idea of what the NSA does.

      • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        10 hours ago

        When that was going on, the whole time I was saying that if we ban Tiktok for data security reasons, we should ban Facebook and Instagram for exactly the same reason, and yes, we should ban basically all social media at this point, its all a perfect spying machine, one you get addicted to, beyond hiding in plain sight…

        Of course, that’s extremely unlikely to happen… but it is an actually consistent position.

    • NewSocialWhoDis@lemmy.zip
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      15 hours ago

      I came here to make this comment less cogently. You have it exactly.

      Now, does it violate US law and multiple Executive Orders to search the database to get dirt on US Citizens and use it against their election campaign? Yes. Yes it does. But this administration thinks laws are for sissies.

      • socsa@piefed.social
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        10 hours ago

        I’m still a bit skeptical Palantir would expose this capability over a Senate race which hasn’t even gotten through primaries. I haven’t looked into it that much, but I think it’s far more likely there’s something on the accouny which makes it easy to identify, and someone this dude knows figured it out before he deleted that account.

      • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        15 hours ago

        And this was always the problem of building the panopticon, everyone justified doing it by saying ‘well, its fine so long as the good guys are in charge’, and ‘we have to stop the terrorists, 9/11 Never Again’.

        This is why the panopticon system is destroyed by Lucius Fox after using it to find the Joker in the Dark Knight.

        The system itself is too dangerous to be allowed to exist in a world of flawed humans, and it will eventually be wielded by those least morally qualified to wield it.

        Fuck, this is also basically analagous to the Lord of the Rings… Frodo is the hero for destroying the One Ring, not wielding it, because it literally corrupts you with its literally evil power.

        God damnit.

        • NewSocialWhoDis@lemmy.zip
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          13 hours ago

          This “too dangerous to exist” argument is seemingly more true for nuclear technology, but the world recognized the threat and came together to manage it.

          I will grant you that database and ability to search it lends itself easily to popular oppression, but it still requires thinking, breathing humans to do the oppressing.

          Most technology is not dangerous without psychopaths in power, and damn near everything is dangerous with psychopaths in power.

    • AnyOldName3@lemmy.world
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      7 hours ago

      The scary dystopian part is the ability to work out that the account belonged to someone who hadn’t used it for a decade rather than just that they could see what had been posted. The Internet Archive doesn’t let you ask it what someone’s Digg username was.

      • CovfefeKills@lemmy.world
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        7 hours ago

        So you acknowledge that the data exists, what you are scared of is being able to search it? Spooky stuffs.

        • mriormro@lemmy.zip
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          6 hours ago

          So you acknowledge that bullets exist, what you are scared of is being able to continuously fire them at an extremely high rpm? Spooky stuff.

          You fucking knuckle dragger.

          • CovfefeKills@lemmy.world
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            6 hours ago

            You never considered that bullets could be fired at a high rate until an article you saw on lemmy told you to be scared of it?

        • korazail@lemmy.myserv.one
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          6 hours ago

          I’m going to say that this is actually spooky.

          Not that it’s unreasonable, but that the scale of what AI can surveil is so vast that there’s no more personal security-via-obscurity.

          It used to be that unless someone had a reason to start looking at you, anything you did online or off was effectively impossible to search. You might be caught on some store’s CCTV, Or your cell provider might have location pings, but that wasn’t online for anyone and needed a warrant to have the police use it to track your activities. Now cities are using Flock and similar tools to enable tracking vehicles across the country without any reason, and stores are using cloud-service AI cameras to attempt to track your mood as you move through the store. These tools can and have been abused.

          Now, due to the harvesting of this data for AI, anything that’s ever been recorded (video footage, social media posts, etc) and used as training data can be correlated much more easily, long after it occurred, and without needing to be law enforcement with a warrant.

          I’d call that spooky.

          • CovfefeKills@lemmy.world
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            6 hours ago

            So you think private and opensource intelligence spontaneously came into existence in the last 5 years because of AI?

            • korazail@lemmy.myserv.one
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              5 hours ago

              No, that’s not what I said. Widespread data collection and searching used to be something only state actors could accomplish and there were at least theoretically guard rails. Now the barrier of entry has been seriously reduced, the data is owned by a corporation, and being fed to AI. That has a chilling effect as well as being ripe for abuse.

              I don’t see an upside.

              • CovfefeKills@lemmy.world
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                4 hours ago

                Widespread data collection and searching used to be something only state actors could accomplish and there were at least theoretically guard rails

                So you just make shit up as you go? You are projecting how you think things should work into reality as if it were fact. But now you are learning how it actually works and what really scares you is the shattering of the illusion you sold yourself. I mean it should be pretty apparent Google and Facebook are tools of the US government they always have been.