do they need to? I don’t think so.

Why not? How can you be sure that all these laws are going to be about all the same things and not have many tricky edge cases? What would keep them from being like that? Again, these laws give unique rights to residents of their respective states to make particular demands of websites, and they aren’t copy pastes of each other. There’s no documented ‘best practices’ that is guaranteed to encompass all of them.

they don’t want this solution, however, but in my understanding instead to force every state to have weaker privacy laws

I can’t speak to what they really want privately, but in the industry letter linked in the article, it seems that the explicit request is something like a US equivalent of the GDPR:

A national privacy law that is clear and fair to business and empowering to consumers will foster the digital ecosystem necessary for America to compete.

To me that seems like a pretty sensible thing to be asking for; a centrally codified set of practices to avoid confusion and complexity.

In 2022, industry front groups co-signed a letter to Congress arguing that “[a] growing patchwork of state laws are emerging which threaten innovation and create consumer and business confusion.” In 2024, they were at it again this Congress, using the term four times in five paragraphs.

Big Tobacco did the same thing.

Is this really a fair comparison though? A variety of local laws about smoking in restaurants makes sense because restaurants are inherently tied to their physical location. A restaurant would only have to know and follow the rules of their town, state and country, and the town can take the time to ensure that its laws are compatible with the state and country laws.

A website is global. Every local law that can be enforced must be followed, and the burden isn’t on legislators to make sure their rules are compatible with all the other rules. Needing to make a subtly different version of a website to serve to every state and country to be in full compliance with all their different rules, and needing to have lawyers check over all of them would create a situation where the difficulty and expense of making and maintaining a website or other online service is prohibitive. That seems like a legitimate reason to want unified standards.

To be fair there are plenty of privacy regulations that this wouldn’t apply to, like the example the article gives of San Francisco banning the use of facial recognition tech by police. But the industry complaint linked in the article references laws like https://www.oag.ca.gov/privacy/ccpa and https://leg.colorado.gov/bills/sb21-190 that obligate websites to fulfill particular demands made by residents of those states respectively. Subtle differences in those sorts of laws seems like something that could cause actual problems, unlike differences in smoking laws.

I really wish it existed under its own category somehow

Softcore porn? I think it already exists within this category

If you are at the point where you are having to worry about government or corporate entities setting traps at the local library? You… kind of already lost.

What about just a blackmailer assuming anyone booting an OS from a public computer has something to hide? And then they have write access and there’s no defense, and it doesn’t have to be everywhere because people seeking privacy this way will have to be picking new locations each time. An attack like that wouldn’t have to be targeted at a particular person.

Isn’t it risky plugging usb drives into untrusted machines?

I bet it was something like the hardware id instead but she misspoke

If she grabbed that thing out of the air and smashed it anon couldn’t really call the cops on her for it

If they had an in with Blizzard though shouldn’t it be anon getting banned not the Chinese people seeing his message

So how would this work, the Chinese ISP is inspecting unencrypted packets from videogames for banned text and shutting down the connection on seeing any? Wouldn’t most relevant text be on https websites anyway, why even implement something that way when the text isn’t guaranteed to be in a clear standard format and it’s just game chats?

Maybe people just started typing it that way instead to begin with, you can’t know

I figured, but seems relevant that what they’re buying is bullshit no matter what

Conversion therapy isn’t real though; you can’t make someone not be gay. From the parent’s perspective, their problem is likely that they think they have a religious obligation to not accept homosexuality (perhaps their place in their community depends on this), but also want a relationship with their son, and don’t want to have to choose between these. So probably what they really want is for their son to go back in the closet in a way that is plausible, and the service they are paying for offers that plausibility and creates the greatest possible chance of it happening (being nice to anon and letting him know he has an undo button without feeding him bullshit or being pushy).

So on second thought, maybe it’s not unambiguously wholesome, because it is lies and could be enabling a homophobic culture. But on the other hand it’s probably for the best that this sort of conflict be put off until anon is no longer a teenager who is totally dependent on their parents. Whether the money was earned honestly I think is less of a big deal here ethically, it’s basically in the same category as paying for a consultation with a psychic, the sort of thing where they are all but explicitly paying for the fiction.

What a wholesome story

I wonder if part of the reason for supporting this is that they like the secondary effect that all this information is now also available to governments

The profit they get from the sale of the television should be enough that they don’t have to make the television shit to get slightly more profit, why do people even buy these

But televisions cost hundreds of dollars at least

“each new connected TV platform user generates around $5 per quarter in data and advertising revenue.”

Sounds like a pathetic amount of money for betraying your customers with a shitty ad infested smart tv

Can anyone recommend any cool mods/projects built on top of Minetest?

tbf the article only assumes he told them no because of how implausible it seems the task would be, the actual details of what if anything was discussed and what happened are unknown.

Probably what businesses really want is unethical people who are competent at lying about it, and the professor was giving anon practical career advice if not actually ethical advice.