How long until YCombinator stops listing Flock "Safety" on their website as one of their proud VC success stories?

[1] https://www.ycombinator.com

Flock was valued at $7.5 billion last year, and it's probably worth more now. It's absolutely one of YCombinator's success stories.

YCombinator's goal is to make a lot of money by causing there to be more startups, and therefore more successor startups. "Make the world a better place" is not one of their success metrics. They're investors, not altruists.

It's only a success if all you care about is money.

This is YC we're talking about. They'd fund payday loans with organs as collateral for African orphans if they could. Seriously, they have NO scruples.

(And yes, I know where I am.)

Yes. Therefore, for Y Combinator, this is a success story.

They could also care about mass surveillance.

They do. The political and economic environment (edit: in the US) is currently supporting the idea that mass surveillance is an extremely lucrative investment opportunity.

Which is all a great deal of people in America care about, yes.

never, it is a shining success when viewed through the eyes of venture capital

Never.

We should not expect any VC no matter how big or small to care.

It prints money and harvest data, the holy grail basically, why would they remove it

The new leadership (Tan) is utterly shameless and free of moral constraints. I wouldn't count on it.

Yeah, the idea that YC will disown unfettered capitalism seems dreamy.

Why would they? There’s no “pro-social” enforcement in their funding terms, so they’re just as “morals aren’t applicable to profit” as any off-the-shelf C-corp is. If they required their startups to found B-corps then I’d understand trying to apply human ethical concerns to them, but they don’t, so human morals simply don't apply.

I'll name a specific highly developed country in the western hemisphere: The United States. There's no need to bend over backward trying to blame some perceived degradation in quality of discussion on international adoption of the internet.

According to the Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy [1] 130 million Americans — 54% of adults between the ages of 16 and 74 years old—lack proficiency in literacy, essentially reading below the equivalent of a sixth-grade level.

[1]https://map.barbarabush.org

What's more, the United States has some of the highest reading test scores in the world: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/academic-performance?subj...

This entire planet is full of idiots

Perhaps, but it also, by default, excludes that entire class of authentication problems that are only manifested in a non-local network.

I love the idea.

It's also interesting in that a local mesh doesn't necessarily need to operate using the TCP/IP/HTTP stack that has been compromised at every layer by advertising and privacy intrusions.

You’re probably getting downvoted because what you said about TCP/IP/HTTP doesn’t make sense.

You're right. I didn't think that through. The stack doesn't imply that a local network is somehow exposed to those concerns.

Non-privacy of this person is currently sleeping data is very bad as well, for different reasons.

You know, now that I'm thinking about it, I'm beginning to wonder if poor data privacy could have some negative effects.

It sounds like there was "presence in room" data as well, which could be very bad

This is the easiest signal though, on basically any account. You can see the time that communication happens, and the times when it doesn't.

For example a while back I wanted to map out my sleep cycle and I found a tool that charts your browser history over a 24 hour period, and it mapped almost perfectly to my sleep / wake periods.

Unsecured fitness monitor data revealed military guard post (IIRC) activity a while back.

Yawp. T’was Strava. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/28/fitness-tracki...

not because you knew how much someone worked out. But because it had GPS.

True.

But keep in mind that other less obvious data sources can often lead to similar issues. For example phone accelerometer data can be used to precisely locate someone driving in a car in a city by comparing it with a street map.

In the context of the military even just inferring a comprehensive map of which people are on which shift and when they change might be considered a threat.

Word of mouth, independent websites, newsletters, blogs, community organizations, religious organizations, political organizations, amateur radio broadcasts/transmissions, neighborhood meetings, festivals, conferences, meetups, cultural traditions, leaflets, town criers.

Many of these (word of mouth, community organizations, religious organizations, meetups, neighborhood meetings) don't work beyond the local area.

Many of these (radio broadcast, independent websites) aren't accessible to non-technical people.

Many of these (cultural traditions, town criers) are obviously unserious.

Every single one of these has been effectively used to organize at geographic scale within this most recent century before "non-technical" even existed as a possible descriptor of a human being.

Many of them necessitate going outside, which may present an imaginative hurdle.

Imagine electicity in the home is made availiable but the deal is you can have it only if you don't use said electricity to exercise freedom of speech against the government, e.g. use a lamp to help you write the speech. And they have a way to track you if you do. And the alternative is no electrcity.

Online services like email and social media even are utilities.

I would argue that simple acts of authenticity - writing a poem, growing a vegetable, creating art, walking in nature, meaningfully interacting with one's community - represent exactly the sort of trajectory required to address those crises generated by an overzealous adherence to technological advancement at any societal cost.

The homeland? Yikes.

The last time there was an attack within the United States’ borders it notably ended with a self-owning combination of perhaps the largest bureaucratic waste of time and money in human history (DHS/TSA) and the systematic erosion of enumerated rights.

The bargain? A bargain implies agreement. A one sided forced hegemony is not a bargain.

Yeah, but besides not having the physical amount of material available in the solar system, or the availability of any technology to transfer power generated to a destination where it can serve a meaningful purpose in the foreseeable future, or having the political climate or capital necessary for even initiating such an effort, or not being able to do so without severely kneecapping the habitability of our planet, there are aren't really any meaningful barriers that I can see.

Are you suggesting that beggars would ride, if only wishes were horses!?

You can request a downloadable a copy of any/all of the data that Apple has associated with your account at https://privacy.apple.com.

This apparently includes retrieving all photos from iCloud in chunks of specified size, which seems an infinitely better option than attempting to download them through the iCloud web interface which caps downloads to 1000 photos at a time at less than impressive download speeds.