As is usual for the Guardianista, the evil big tech (they do have a point here) behaving badly means it is okay for the state to do it.
The government will need to intrude into people’s lives more than ever to cope with spiralling demands on the state’s finances. In the transition to greener technologies, the need to track who is emitting carbon and where they are doing it will only intensify.
Fuck off. My life is my business. The less the government knows about it, the better and I fully intend to keep it that way. The government is my enemy and I treat it and its tentacles accordingly.
When electric cars dominate…
Bwahahahahaha. Clearly this cretin hasn’t been paying attention. The market for these abominations is falling apart. No one wants the damned things.
Health secretary Wes Streeting needs everyone to have a smartphone and the NHS app to streamline services that are costly when provided in the analogue world.
Again, fuck off. I use a smartphone because it is convenient for me, not for the convenience of Wes Streeting and his cult members.
What would help would be a government that made more of an attempt to both promote the state as a worthy and safe recipient of individuals’ digital information, and mounted a defence against data intrusion by the private sector.
This lunatic actually believes this shit despite decades of state incompetence – of whatever political variety. The state cannot be trusted with our information. Therefore, the less you let it have, the less it can lose, leave on a train, abuse or misuse.
As my colleague Martha Gill wrote last week, the main aim of companies, from the newest startups to major multinationals, is to get us all addicted to their products. It is the private sector that wants to use and manipulate digital information much more than the state could ever conceive of doing.
So? No one is forced to buy. The state, however is nothing more than a criminal gang that has legislated itself a veneer of respectability and legality. I trust the worst of the private sector before I trust the state.
They are developing the most sophisticated ways to entice us and keep us buying again and again, soaking up our disposable income and all too often making us either physically or mentally ill.
Bollocks.
Dr Chris van Tulleken, the author of the bestselling book Ultra-Processed People, is among an increasing number of experts with lots of evidence to show that a growing number of sophisticated marketers, using all the digital leverage available, can to get us hooked in a way that is bad for the individual and the economy.
Bollocks
At the moment we are drifting into an era when we allow private sector control while shunning government attempts to navigate a digital future.
Yes, absolutely. I don’t like Google and I am doing what I can to deGoogle wherever I can. I have limited options when it comes to ridding myself of an overarching, greedy, avaricious, malignant state. The state is the last entity that should be anywhere near managing a digital future. It simply cannot be trusted to be benevolent or competent.
Sadiq Khan’s Ulez experiment is a halfway house. The government should sell the idea of going all the way. It’s all coming down the track – cybercurrencies and artificial intelligence. We need to allow governments, and not Google, to control it.
Fuck off. I despise Google, but I’d trust them more than I trust Wes Streeting or any of the other narcissistic arseholes in government. I will do whatever I can to foil any attempts to drag me into their net. I, not they, am the owner of myself and my data. At every turn I will put down obstacles and refuse to comply. We’ve been here before – twenty years ago, in fact. Nothing changes. Different faces, but the same lurking evil.
Don’t know how my Dad would do with a smartphone. He asked me what ‘the Internet’ was recently. Besides, his fingers would be too big for the screen anyway.
Why do you think they want to kill off the pensioners?
Indeed regarding the oldies, but the most scary thing as far as I am concerned is the youngsters. They do not have a clue about all this technology.
They obviously know how to use it and get up and running in seconds, but trust it implicitly and have no idea about what is really happening with it.
Wifi not working they will try the obvious and give up as soon as that doesn’t work. Try to educate them on a structured approach to debugging the problem and
their eyes glaze over.
Attempt to discuss what is happening with the phone/internet and they are similarly disinterested. Furthermore they have no clue how to proceed if THE INTERNET
is down. Add on their indoctrination to leftie causes via education and it’s difficult to say that they will stand up to the gov Gauleiters. Embracing them is far more likely
I’m 75. How much longer do I have before I will be considered to old and decrepit to have or use a smart phone?
So… entrust an intrusive collection of individuals’ data to an organisation that can’t even complete a computerization project?
I expect that they will want people to print off a weeks’ readings and send them in by post.[sarcasm]
“Sadiq Khan’s Ulez experiment is a halfway house. The government should sell the idea of going all the way. ”
The infrastructure is already being put/is in place:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mto5sXFQ744
The comments are worth a read and several commentators have identified the cameras as LEZ type cameras with ANPR. Pay by the mile? Of course! And this month you have exceeded your permitted mileage so your electronic funds are frozen.
Have a nice rest of your month, peasant.
So Wes Streeting is going to force me to run his app on my phone? If anyone else did that it would be a crime under the Computer Misuse Act, wouldn’t it?
They are not ‘smartphones’, they are ‘spyphones’. Mine are owned by a dummy corporation with non existent shareholders.
And I am not paranoid enough.
Once that sort of control exists, it becomes an irresistable prize, a MacGuffin to outshine all MacGuffins, for the burgeoning state.
It is absurdly optimistic to suppose that the state will not attempt to possess it. The way out is to promote tech that undermines the states control; cryptography, VPNs, offshore hosting, open source, etc.
That is the only hope of maintaining some sort of individual digital identity in the face of the states lust for power and control.
I do not have a “smart phone” only “dumb phones” so the un-lovely Mr Streeting is more than welcome to give me a phone that his “Emperor’s New Clothes” app will work on. I’ll take a top of the range I-phone please!
Longrider is my spirit animal 😀
“The government will need to intrude into people’s lives more than ever to cope with spiralling demands on the state’s finances.”
There’s a contradiction right off the bat. The government needs to save money and the answer is to have it doing even more pointless stuff.
Sorry to be OT again but, while visiting my daughter over the weekend I was exposed to a music video of a song called Taste by Sabrina Carpenter. It comes with a warning about graphic violence and features two girls who are love rivals repeatedly murdering each other in really gory ways. I’m wondering how long it will be before an outraged parent goes to the press after their sprogs have been exposed to it. In this particular case I think that they might have a point.
You’re quite right, Mr L. The state cannot be trusted here. And this piece is hopelessly naïve. The title of the piece is “If you let Google have your data, why not the NHS?” We don’t give Google our entire medical history, you dick. This kind of thing will be vulnerable to hackers, and potentially anyone working in the NHS could have access to your medical records.
What’s wrong with the current system? You go to see someone in an NHS service, and your records are brought up on that person’s computer. No need for an NHS ‘patient passport’ app on our phones. If Streeting is expecting me to install such an app on my phone he can go and copulate with himself.
Not so much naïve as objectively evil. This is the Guardian – there isn’t a nasty authoritarian anti-English policy that they won’t act as cheerleaders for.
They think as cheerleaders they will exempted from complying. It’s a foolish view.
Like Boxer, they will go cheerfully to the abattoir, for they are good comrades.
Stop whining and eat your bugs!
It would be nice if the NHS actually had records and the consultant could access them. I recently saw a consultant, problem ongoing since before covid. The consultant asked me what I was doing there as only had latest test result, and couldn’t find details of an operation I had at the hospital a few years ago. He didn’t get what the problem was, just sent me away feeling dejected with some tablets.
It will be just more info to get lost in cyber space.
I’m waiting for our employers to make us wear smart phones that record if we sleep when working nights. They keep coming up with different ideas.