While I agree the articles are click bait since this as not been confirmed, it's not far fetched to assume that a giant corporation with a terrible track record and a big legal department worded their TOS like this because they intend to use that capability.
Given Facebook is about as voracious an actor of surveillance as has ever existed, their track record of respecting few red lines until they have been caught crossing them egregiously, and the bright spotlight Zuckerberg is currently shining on their AI ambitions, it defies reality to imagine them forgoing any data they can get there hands on.
You just know there is a dashboard that summarizes all potential data sources, and engineers wake up with the shakes and sweats, after dreaming that Zuck was standing behind them, with furrowed brow, and pointing to a stat that shows 2% of someone’s most private information still hasn’t been plundered.
Ok, a little hyperbolic. But he & Meta are relentless.
You could roll a new id to replace the previous one. Each user would still have only one at a time. If this isn't acceptable a service may ask to have the feature disabled for clear mission critical reasons and/or a fee.
I get it. And also, I know that Apple and Google would abuse that, and destroy lives and businesses as casually as I eat my breakfast. Then 1000's of disposable companies would pop up with valid id, and abuse some system (like terrible DMCA) and make it worse.
If you think people self-censoring themselves on social media is now a problem (the "unlive" novlang is always such a dystopic hint to me), you have seen nothing.
Businesses should not be forced to serve abusive users. They should have the choice to refuse to serve somebody permanently. You do not have the right to use somebody else’s service without their permission. If they want you off their platform, they should be able to do so.
The whole point of having trusted issuers is that there aren’t any “disposable companies” who hand out many identities in an uncontrolled manner. If there were, they would quickly become untrusted, making the IDs worthless.
Why is it the responsibility of the customer and the government to enable a business model someone wants that doesn't work well otherwise? Like I agree with some of your sentiment but where does this end? Anyone can come up with any untenable business model and then the government should intervene to make it work the way they want, at the citizens expense? I doubt that's your point and I'm not trying to put words in your mouth but what's the difference here? "I should be able to control people on the internet better" doesn't feel like a thing we should all collectively bend over to enable.
> Anyone can come up with any untenable business model and then the government should intervene to make it work the way they want, at the citizens expense?
> I should be able to control people on the internet better
This is so twisted out of all proportion I find it difficult to believe you are being genuine.
A government giving an ID to somebody is not propping up “an untenable business model”.
Saying “I don’t want you to access my service” is not “controlling people on the Internet”.
If you are a monopoly like youtube or the apple store, with a "winner take all" market, and your conditions are abusive, I hope you can see this is a problem.
E.G: youtube has a disproportionate share of the attention market, therefore can control what people think, and they are heavily influenced by big companies that will tell users what they can say or not on the platforms.
Your account on youtube is linked to your phone, emails, photos, calendar... So do something that one of those companies don't want you to do because it's not profitable for them,
And of course, they change the rules of the time.
That's why I don't have a google account. But most people are not capable of such insights, they don't have the knowledge to realize how much they can be screwed.
> If you are a monopoly like youtube or the apple store
What happened to this being a case of the government propping up an untenable business model?
You don’t have a solid view point, you’re just saying whatever springs to mind that disagrees with what I say. This isn’t a genuine conversation, you’re just arguing for entertainment. I’m out.
Pro tips: type long content unformatted, or barely formatted, then ask an LLM to format it using your markup of choice, then clean up the thing it got wrong.
They are very decent at inferring the context of stuff and will mark code, maths, titles so on farely decently. This lets you focus on the work of making it looks nice.
I'm always worried about LLMs unintentionally affecting the actual content, so the extra effort of carefully reviewing the diff just isn't worth it. Markdown + PanDoc is more sensible to me if your document is simple enough.
I successfully converted a typst report to md/mdx last week using this technique. For complex layout primitives I just told the llm to write a comment with a warning todo of the missing part it wasn't able to convert
The LLM are already good enough to not do that anymore. Worst case scenario, you get wrong formatting, but not wrong content.
Markdown + pandoc is not the same: you need already basic formatting. You have to think about the formatting. For example, math formulas and code are gnarly to type, so I have snippets for them to avoid getting out of the flow.
But LLM don't need that, you can just dump your thoughts, and they format it.
Well you can always diff the document. If it's not too large, then manually inspect it. If too long, then pipe the diff into the clipboard and send it to another LLM to summarise the changes.
It's not a replacement, since it doesn't have the same feature sets or ergonomics.
Don't get me wrong, I use signal a lot and I love it, but presenting signals as an alternative to whatsapp is only going to disappoint people.
Telegram is closer, but neither e2e encrypted nor open source.
Still, I would say if you are in America and not dealing with state or industrial secrets, getting spied on by russians is better than by meta.
Basically, I use both: signals for my privacy oriented friends that will go through the ordeal of using signal, and telegram with the normies so that at least they get of the zuck train.
This is one more good reason to never sign in on your android phone.
It's not as good as using graphene, but it's easier, less work, and you can't brick your phone.
The drawback, of course, is that you can't use your map, youtube or gmail account since signing in in any of those logs in the entire device.
But with microg, fdroid and aurora, it's very practical.