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We don't talk anywhere near enough about how the tech industry is fucking with the general public's understanding of consent.
Fairly often I will opt out of something that would have been obviously reasonable a few years ago, and people will look at me like I drove a truck through the room.
Things like:
- I won't be appearing on camera today
- I don't wish to speak on a recording to be published on the University website
- I won't be giving my personal details to an overseas third party just to use a notepad tool in one meeting
I see this seeping through into attitudes about consent in other everyday life contexts. People are so used to being walked all over by their tech that they're increasingly shocked by boundaries.
I reckon this is intentional. By placing massive friction around exercising consent, you make any worker who understands consent seem like a source of friction in the workplace.
It takes a worker who understands consent 10x as long to do anything in tech compared with a worker who simply taps [ALLOW] every time.
This effectively purges workplaces of any workers who assert their own right to privacy, have any boundaries or are generally in the habit of standing up for themselves.
@coolandnormal time sheet app on my personal phone was a low point
@liamvhogan working for the most recent census, they made us put an app on our personal phones which apparently did some kind of partition to keep the census data safe... Bricked people's personal phones, then census management ghosted us all. A lot of us lost more in the value of the phone than we made for the work.
I have a Huawei phone that I went great lengths to get and absolutely love, so I spent months working to save it. It works again now.
@coolandnormal @liamvhogan And related to this: Being under constant surveillance is normal.
And not just normal. The default.
It's now the default for every organisation and business you interact with to collect and store as much personally identifiable information as they can on you.
Whether or not you open their emails. Which email links you click on. When you look at their website. Where you click on the website. What you looked at. Every email, phone call, text message. Every time you visit their store. What you buy. What you asked their staff about.
Every business. Every government agency.
Your local shoe store has a dossier on you that Erich Honecker would've been impressed by.
Even if you donate to a charity, that animal shelter you donated to will begin logging and storing your details.
Thanks to Silicon Valley, every business is by default a surveillance business.
@aj @coolandnormal @liamvhogan It's not that bad if you put a little effort. Just use cash money. I am very confused why everybody pretends that it doesn't exist. That solves the financial surveillance issues at scale. Things like email trackers are pretty trivial to avoid with thunderbird, phone trackers with grafeneos and foss software, PC trackers with Linux desktop.
Last time I literally donated to the animal shelter as in your example with cash money, they don't even know my name.
@dmantis @aj @liamvhogan I find the biggest issue isn't spending money, it's gaining education. It seems impossible to find a university these days that doesn't expect to record your voice and face constantly.
@dmantis I also need to address "pretty trivial to avoid with thunderbird, phone trackers with grafeneos and foss software, PC trackers with Linux desktop."
Can you imagine how much yak shaving there is between the knowledge set of the general public* and implementing that?
That's a bit like me saying shearing the neck of a sheep is trivial (once you have it upside down on the stand in a well designed shed with the rousabouts you trust, the shears you sharpened and you've communicated with the handlers and the classer, but of course we've all already done all that, if we've put in a little effort)
*[tradies, nurses, farmers, infrastructure workers, child care workers, food workers, financial services workers, retail workers, full time in home carers, artists, musicians, all other non-computer-toucher roles]
@coolandnormal @dmantis @aj @liamvhogan true. I set linux for my sister, she use it only for After that initial setup machine is basically maintenance free.
Anyway - she cannot install linux or do some postinstall tricks.
Just what you said 
@dmantis @aj @liamvhogan the other issue with "just use cash", as well as only working for purchases not for any other interaction, is it only works if you live in a city.
My town has a couple of shops. You can put on your face mask and akubra and put cash directly into the hand of another human being if you want the things in those few shops. If you need anything else (medication, PPE, footwear, education, anything vehicle related, veterinary care, anything for a baby, anything elder care related) there's just no human in this town to give cash directly to.
@coolandnormal @dmantis @aj @liamvhogan it also often doesn't work in cities 
a not insignificant share of businesses don't accept cash
@jedsetter @dmantis @aj @liamvhogan this is a good point.
I reckon 80% of the financial interactions I have day to day cannot happen purely in cash:
-mortgage
-insurances
-dental/medical (goes through medicare, requires ID)
-medications/prescriptions (goes through pbs)
-vet/veterinary medicines (requires ID because controlled substances)
This essentially just leaves food, petrol and any luxuries. We always buy our food and petrol from the same people and they know our names, so that train has sailed. There's nowhere around here to buy anything that could be considered a luxury.
Plus of course getting paid is a financial interaction. People tend to want to know identity details for the person they are paying, even if they pay cash. It's hard to get paid privately.
@dmantis I'm very curious as to how you get around the making money end of things. Your methods could be useful for me.
Do you work for an employer who is comfortable with not knowing who and where you are? Are you a freelancer who is paid anonymously?
@coolandnormal @aj @liamvhogan @jedsetter ofc I don't receive money anonymously. But I withdraw them to cash and spend mostly in cash instead of spending from bank accounts. The state will know your income in most cases anyway. Hiding income is a completely different topic.
Here I'm mostly talking about the spending habits/privacy so other people can't say what you enjoy, spend money on, when and in which amounts.
@dmantis I'm talking about all aspects of life. Consent doesn't end at your spending habits.
If you are interested in being paid anonymously, I highly recommend sex work.
@dmantis art modelling and garden maintenance are two more great anonymous cash income streams, if you're looking to move to being paid privately. I assumed you had your own going, given you were so cocky in your opener.
@dmantis being a restaurant fresh produce supplier turns out to be another anonymous cash income steam actually. I didn't really expect it to be when I started, but not one has asked me any questions.
@dmantis art sales is another great one. No one cares what my legal name is when they buy a painting.
@dmantis it's pretty wild that you came in to a thread about people being forced to use invasive tech in the workplace with "why do people pretend anonymous cash doesn't exist??" then went on to clarify that you actually weren't talking about anonymous cash as a solution to invasive tech in the workplace, you just wanted to have a chat about using cash to buy things.
Truly bizarre life choice.
@dmantis @aj @liamvhogan the other main issue people seem to have is work.
I'm a farmer most of the time, so not much opportunity for surveillance over me in a paddock, but anyone who has meetings remotely for work is essentially fucked re privacy.
@dmantis So true cash is best,keeps the barsteds in the dark
@coolandnormal @liamvhogan “I have a Huawei phone …” wait, what? Huawei don’t even ask for consent 
@liamvhogan @coolandnormal a previous uni wanted remote wipe permissions for my phone before I could access my uni email using an app
@coolandnormal Hegelian leader follower dialectic strikes again! :)
@coolandnormal The training starts young. When my kids were in daycare, they'd send home consent forms for taking pictures of them and using those pictures in their marketing. They clearly assumed that everyone would just say yes, but come on, any parent who thinks about it for two seconds should be denying them from posting pictures of their children on the public internet.
@coolandnormal I mean, 100%, but it's important to point out that it is *not* "just" the workplace, but the general pattern that the commercialized tech world follows.
"Yes", "Remind me later" ...
HOA, GPN @coolandnormal i'm far more concerned about how we humans interact day to day instead of weather a worker leaks company details due to being conditioned into carelessness
@coolandnormal
I think there is a parallel in clinical services. Rapid "diagnosis" using standardised instruments, followed by standardised "intervention", versus getting to know someone, what their values are, hopes and fears, explaining stuff, think it over, you can always come back, try this and let me know etc.
It's generally not popular, getting to know your patient.
Dagnabbit, Pascaline! @afwesty
Yes. I think the 'next' mentality is taking over rapidly. Quick assessment > move on.
The worst are those who don't listen or pay attention to what someone is saying. I notice a lot of arrogance, too.
Patient was taken into hospital in pain, colleague nurse yelling for not looking at them. They tried to explain, but yelling nurse overruled, kept yelling LOOK AT ME, patient visibly kept trying to explain, finally there was a silence and they said they were autistic.
@coolandnormal
@pascaline @coolandnormal
"One size fits all" breeds a culture of intolerance.
Thank you for this. I get tired of feeling like a freak when I object to something like this that everyone else in the group just accepted, whether it's giving away personal info to register for something a boss orders you to use, or using software that you can't opt out of surveillance features, and on and on.
@cazabon If you're a freak for that, then we can be freaks together.
If it's not meaningfully possible to say no, then it's coercion, not consent. And if someone is going to coerce a person into doing something, the least you should be able to expect of that person is that they are honest about it.
@coolandnormal true anywhere there's more than one person in a workplace. Imagine being a nurse if you felt obliged to get explicit consent every time you did something to a patient.
The NSW 'affirmative consent' laws are explicitly restricted to sexual interactions because otherwise they'd be completely unworkable.
@moz @coolandnormal I'm not sure that's entirely correct. In this context consent is about ethics and respecting people's choices rather than about laws or social norms. Maybe in some workplaces people don't ask for permission before doing non-routine things, but maybe that isn't always good.
With the nurse example, a nurse is ideally going to checking that patients are fine with what's going on, not always verbally which, as you point out, would be inconvenient.
The gold standard for sexual consent is "an enthusiastic yes" specifically because its something that's easy to get wrong but with serious consequences, but for technology, a bare minimum of not hiding the "no" button and adding ten pop-up menus in-between would an improvement
@cxxvii @coolandnormal I deliberately used the legal minimum requirement because that's more relevant.
The jump from what tech companies do now to any kind of consent at all is huge. Tech is generally built on the assumption that by consenting to use the software anything and everything on the device is available to it (sometimes effectively excusively in the case of particularly rude software, like games with demanding anti-piracy measures)
@moz @coolandnormal uk here, nurse asks me for consent every time she draws blood, even when I've specifically come in for bloods. takes two seconds.
This is new behaviour, not sure if it's just her.
@fishidwardrobe we train people to do exactly this: gain affirmative informed consent even if the patient came in asking for that specific thing.
Not only does it reduce mistakes, it also confirms people are ready to go ahead *now*. If they only just found out in the informed consent process that they can't drive/walk/see for a period after the procedure, they often say no: I have to SMS someone first, then yes, I consent after that.
@moz as it turns out, I train med students on informed consent. That's my job. What you just described is exactly that ethical standard: you must gain explicit consent before ANY intervention with any patient who is conscious and not actively dying.
Asking consent is always more practical than trying to reinsert testicles you didn't have a right to remove.
@coolandnormal there's a difference between intervention and interaction, at least in my experience. Medical staff are normally fairly good at "so we're chopping off your right leg" stuff, but often not good at "I'd just like to push you and your wheelchair over there", let alone "please come this way" rather than just grab and pull.
I've lived with consent-based parents and it made me quite sensitive to some of the fine print (it's hard to live this way!)
@coolandnormal @moz My degrees in bioethics were in the Stone Age, and even then medical consent was taught as an explicit requirement for autonomous people.
@coolandnormal I talk about this sometimes in talks I give about the digital divide. If your only options for buttons to get to the next step of any software interaction are "Yes" or "Maybe later" you're dealing with a creep and giving people only those options is a way of eroding the idea of consent (a little lateral to the point you were making, but I think complementary)
@jessamyn @coolandnormal #hostileDesign or #hostileUx
But honestly, how many years ago? Yes the enshittification has gotten worse, but I've *never* experienced support for my choice to consent.
@coolandnormal @eo @jessamyn I move in a lot of environmentalist spaces and find that about half the time that mildly stating that using video actually produces more pollution can be effective. I too hate this "obligation"
Yes, and when I opt out it feels like *I’m* taking something away from *thrm*
@coolandnormal We somehow landed in a place where lots of people think it's just fine that meetings (with video and audio) are fine to record. I'm not talking about things like all hands company meetings. Collaborative meetings, where you need people to speak up and take chances. And meetings with people outside the org.
I've noticed quite a few vendors and service providers defaulting to this when having calls with us. Some even claim they can't turn meeting recording off. I respectfully tell them, "We are unable to continue this meeting then."
@Megawatt I keep coming back to my example: imagine in, say, 2017 or 2018, *the norm* (to not say expectation or demand) being putting a video camera in front of every participant in a meeting around a table, recording everything everyone says or does, and then shipping those recordings to a third-party multinational multibilliondollar company, because "it might be useful" or "it helps in writing meeting notes".
*Who* would have accepted that?
*Why* should we accept it *now*?
@coolandnormal Aaaand since I posted this I've been in 2 more online meetings where the call was being recorded by the vendor. For the first call I needed to speak up and have them turn that off. For the second meeting, another attendee spoke up and they stopped recording.
Vendors, STOP DOING THIS! This isn't a customer service call that you have to record for quality control and training purposes. You do not have my permission to use calls with me for #whatever_the_hell_you_might_want_to_do_with_them
@Megawatt @coolandnormal I've given up on that one after the last few years because it's basically impossible otherwise, but yeah I really wish all meetings didn't go into recordings that will somehow eventually make their way into feeding AI models on my voice and face one way or another
@Megawatt @coolandnormal The silly thing is, it's not even hard to do "properly". Say you really need a recording - well, you could have a self-hosted version of Zoom with local data. Or you could prompt everyone whether they agree to have their voices and faces be left in the video (currently, the prompt is "accept or gtfo", btw).
We all know why this isn't an option they give you.
