The more energy you put into being anonymous, the more anonymous you are, but it's not an on or off switch. It's like something that can constantly be improved. You can even go as far as changing the way you speak to avoid stylometrics.
The question to ask yourself is 'what can reasonably be found out about me?' You can be found on the smallest trace of evidence, but is it reasonable to expect someone to do that? You're not exactly a government spy. Just take obvious steps like not using your real name and you should be fine.
We've entered an awkward twilight zone where companies can do what they want a la Laissez-faire capitalism, which means they can also do exactly the same thing a government would do at exactly the same scale and with similar levels of authority. It is a grey area that hasn't yet been stopped by laws because sometimes companies are so big they influence the laws themselves.
Everything you have said except for the last phrase “ sometimes companies are so big they influence the laws themselves“ is false. There are a fantastic amount of regulations in every western country today, many of which are applied arbitrarily or with enough discretion that they are essentially arbitrary. Even the most massive corporations market caps are dwarfed by the monthly spending of government. The only cases where corporations exert the powers if the state over detention and violence are occasions where they do so at the bidding of the state.
It is true that some corporations are so big that they influence lawmakers just as ultra wealthy people always have. Indeed, if corporations were able to do the same things governments did and with the same authority, this process of influencing the government would be unnecessary.
yes, and whether this reflects poorly on capitalism, democracy, regulations, the corporate structure in a given country, the people in a given corporation, or the system as a whole depends to a large extent on your priors.
You have to have the trademark approved, and they don't really care how big your company is, they will not approve a trademark for the word silicon. See: clothing brand Supreme's attempt to trademark their Supreme logo on a red background.
If apple combines the word with a unique logo or combines it with some other word, they can get the trademark, but you can't get it for the word silicon by itself.
I don't like this negativity. Pay and position doesn't necessarily reflect competence. I don't buy that the smartest engineers in the world are all working for big companies.
That's because people are obsessed with this idea of a one-size-fits-all great engineer.
A generally great engineer to a startup is somebody who can ship fast, make good enough decisions and trade offs, can think on their feet, and is a jack of all trades.
A generally great engineer to a big company is somebody who can work well with others, can follow process, can work within huge code bases and abstractions, and follow architectural best practices.
Google has brand recognition, and an enormous recruiting pipeline so they can hire one in 50 or 100 candidates.
They are better able to select for great candidates because they have more data and much more sophisticated system for identifying talent.
They pay very high salaries so they can retain top talent.
The average candidate that applies to Google is going to be a better than the average candidate that applies to a small/medium shop.
A small medium shop that tried this would be chronically and severely understaffed with a high turn over and would probably still fail at finding the best candidates.
If you are a small or medium sized shop and really need top level talent the best thing to do is probably just hire googlers and netflixers and pay them a market rate of 400-500k a year.
But for most products it's not worth it because the end product wouldn't be materially different enough from an average developer building it to justify the cost.
Also most small to medium shops could improve engineering quality by taking the Netflix approach which is getting better at firing people, and compensate them for the lack of job security with cash.
Optimizing for the rarest of scenarios - that you're going to hire the bestest engineers in all the worlds - is silly and foolish.
It's not negative. It's pragmatic. If you even happen to just encounter one of those people (they're rare by definition) then do what you can to hire them, but the truth is that the vast majority of companies producing software wouldn't even know what to do with them if they could attract them.
Stable, predictable, performance has a ton of value too - and you get a lot of that from 'regular' developers.
Does anyone else feel like it should be illegal to make someone go through 3 or 4 interview stages, essentially making them work for free, only to not give them the job?
On another note, if your code base uses very niche software and there aren't too many people out there who know it, what's the process for hiring an engineer that will be able to learn it? What do you look for?
I don't think you can sensibly say that most interviews are making people "work" for free- you're not going to get any productive work product out of an interview unless you're literally making someone do a trial shift in a coffee shop, which I think people would agree is scummy. That doesn't really happen in Tech. I can pay you to do our coding test, but I don't think anyone can reasonably argue that 350 different solutions to the exact same toy programming problem has any value to my company. Also, what am I going to pay you? Minimum wage? £20 or so? We could do that, but I'm not sure it would make any difference to anyone but the most marginal candidate.
In disbelief at this thread. People work because they WANT TO. Work is a natural human desire. It's easy to say we'd all just sit around playing games, but after a while you'd go insane. Work is never going to stop under UBI, or any sort of social welfare program.
I have a nuclear take, as someone who still uses TikTok: Your data and life are not special in any way. The government will never be interested in finding out about you, and if they really wanted to they could do it with ease, and definitely don't need an app to do it. This is serious in terms of larger scale surveillance implications, but then that's not really a reason to stop using TikTok for individual purposes is it? We've seen people become presidents even after their entire dirty past was revealed. I literally do not care if a random Chinese employee knows everything about my life.
You're welcome to feel differently, I never force these opinions on other people. Yet everyone seems to want to tell me I'm crazy. Yeah, I'm the crazy one, not the guy who thinks the government is interested in him as an individual rather than a collective for policing and advertising purposes, which by the way has already been going on for decades.
"I personally have nothing to hide so I don't have a problem with intrusive surveillance" is not a nuclear or even hot take, in fact it's about the lukewarmest take I can think of.
You missed all the nuance. I have heard that argument thousands of times and i disagree with it. What I'm saying here is that long term, wider surveillance implications are the threat and they're happening in all countries. A random Chinese data mining app is irrelevant and individuals are still safe to use it. Probably only matters to people here because of the country of origin, and not the broader implications, otherwise we'd have this discussion about Linkedin too.
> Your data and life are not special in any way. The government will never be interested in finding out about you, and if they really wanted to they could do it with ease, and definitely don't need an app to do it
And yet your data is valuable enough for multiple billion and trillion dollar companies to build massive infrastructure and markets to siphon your data away from you and sell it to the highest bidder.
We live in an unprecedented time where true mass surveillance is not only nearly free, it turns a profit. It costs a fraction of cent to record, transcribe and store the data you produce, so why not collect it? It's just a rounding error on some government agency's balance sheet.
The infrastructure is there. The data markets are there. The value of your data is there.
But most importantly, the evidence is there. In the last 20 years, governments have been caught using technology and private data to propagandize, suppress, persecute, blackmail, kill and even round people up into camps, like China does with its Uygher population[1].
Yes, you don't need an app to do this if you're a domestic government collecting your own citizens' data. But you might want an app if you're a government or business collecting data on foreign users.
Economic and military espionage and sabotage are incredibly valuable. If I was a nation-state, yes, I would like to have my app on foreign government workers' phones, the phones of foreign military members, the phones of professionals in competitive industries, the phones of family of friends of all of those people, and so on.
That is in aggregate. Your data alone is worth maybe 0.1 cents. I just want people to know that they don't have to feel forced to make any personal choices about the apps they use, because they will not come after an average individual. It is your government's responsibility to protect the country from mass surveillance, not silly individualistic boycotts (at least, it should be that way).
Data might be bought and sold in aggregate when it comes to advertisers, but the data itself is rarely anonymized. There is ample evidence of, and case law that points to, governments using personal data and technology to spy, gather evidence, entrap, blackmail, etc.
Also, "don't worry, your personal data is being mined among millions of others' data to destabilize your society" isn't exactly comforting, either.
It's less of a matter of "I don't want the government to spy on me, the individual with a banal life" than a matter of "I don't want the government to spy on us, a society".
For instance, having a FB account enables FB to spy on non-FB users via shadow account - they will create shadow accounts based on faces they don't recognize in photos, and shadow friend profiles based on numbers stored in my phone.
A more insidious situation is that TikTok enables Bytedance (read: the CCP) to monitor political dissent and potentially shape cultural zeitgeist via content recommendation [1]
Many content recommendation algorithms use some sort of collaborative filtering algorithm, where if the system lacks data on one user's preferences they can infer it given a sufficient number of users with overlapping preferences and attributes [2]. So even though my data and life are not special, it does enable the government to find out more about people they are interested in.
I agree this is a problem. I just don't think the app should be banned and I don't want people to tell me to stop using it (granted no one here did). At the end of the day a gigantic systemic failure in both countries is not going to be solved by one country banning one app, and one ceo of that one app trying to 'do the right thing'.
The problem is that, for the last few decades, all the information that could possibly be known about you is already known and your own country can and will use it against you. Why am I to be worried about a toy?
For me it’s less about privacy concerns and more about not wanting to support an oppressive regime. Whether that be through financial boycotts or in the case of TikTok, through my data, which will help them perfect their products and give them a competitive edge which ultimately gives them more leverage to enact more oppressive and anti-democratic campaigns.
Seems like you’re misunderstanding the threat. You hinted at it with the collective for policing and advertising purposes. Handing over a picture of American life down to the individuals to the CCP gives them enormous power to create tailored disinformation campaigns that sow dissent, in addition to being a kind of real time probe into the mindsets of a foreign population. The culture wars that Trump tripled down on have partially been a product of foreign interference to create the seeds which the domestic audience happily latches onto and grows to division and in-fighting. Then there the issue that while you personally may have a boring life doesn’t mean that everyone does, and being able to harvest location at minimum from a variety of targets arbitrarily is a big coup for a foreign intelligence agency. These are just some of the possibilities.
The question to ask yourself is 'what can reasonably be found out about me?' You can be found on the smallest trace of evidence, but is it reasonable to expect someone to do that? You're not exactly a government spy. Just take obvious steps like not using your real name and you should be fine.