Re: [tlug] OT: Japans digitilization

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull.stephen.fw@example.com>]

Christian Horn writes:
 > On Mon, Sep 28, 2020 at 01:28:36PM +0900, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
 > > Christian Horn writes:
 > > 
 > >  > There is one good thing thou about it: if things are digitilized
 > >  > and go wrong, then not just money, but our data is at stakes here.
 > > 
 > > The data is *long* gone. [..]
 > 
 > Maybe.. the 'post privacy' fraction of people is big, but still I
 > oppose wherever I can (not that it would help much).

"Facts don't care about your [opposition]."

Or mine.  I'm a Facebook refusenik, on my phone my browser of choice
(except for a few government sites like JMA) is Firefox Focus, I use
lots of private windows (in Firefox), ....  But the reality is that in
my department alone, there are two-score MS students (some of them,
uh, Chinese) working with corporate databases containing PII, Yahoo! 
has already leaked a reasonable fraction of the world's address books,
Google has the rest and although Google systems get props from
security experts I respect, if Putin has something on Sergei Brin your
data could end up on Julian Assange's Wikipeetapes.ru tomorrow.

Yes, we should do something about this going forward, but I really
can't see the vast majority of people (and that includes a lot of
people smart/skilled/connected enough to be in high office in business
or government) giving up the convenience that Google and Facebook
provide.  A lot of your PII is in *other* people's data -- that's the
gold that Google and Facebook are mining.  I could probably switch to
DuckDuckGo, but I can't really live without Google Scholar, and my
nowhere near as bilingual as me students can't really live without
Google Translate.  It's just not an easy problem morally, let alone
technically.

Steve