Spymark or even just "tracker" would better at conveying the purpose. I think the goal is to find a single word that means "tracking watermark" or "a watermark that tracks you" because right now companies are pushing the term "watermark" to obscure what the marks are actually for.
> spymark to my ears sounds designed to be sound very negative when invisible watermarks are not always negative, e.g. the counterfeit bank note example.
The article calls out watermarks intended to deter counterfeiting as explicitly being not spymarks. Watermarks can tell you about the items marked, not about the person using/creating it.
That % should increase substantially with each violation too. It's hard to make fines hurt when the corporation you want to punish has more money than most countries.
This works best when you've got the ability to opt out of using those companies. If there's no meaningful replacement for a company's services or the entire internet is infested by it to the point where it's unavoidable a ban isn't going to do much good.
What would a ban on Google look like if people still want to email others using gmail accounts, watch youtube, or use android devices? What would a ban on cloudflare look like when all of your nation's traffic passes through them? One way or another these companies will end up with vast amounts of your people's data and the EU should be able to hold them accountable somehow for holding, selling, or using it in ways that violate their laws. Fines are pretty much the only lever they have to pull.
They should multiply by 100 and then by another 100 with each violation. That'd help prevent companies from racking up fine after fine after fine. The real solution is to lock executives behind bars, but if the CEO is a citizen of another country you're kind of stuck with fines and bans
> They can’t fine enough to actually change the behavior of big companies
Of course they can fine enough. They just don't, which is why you see companies get fined again and again profiting from each violation.
The real issue is that fines are hard to set against companies with more money than they could ever need. What we need is for more CEOs to go to prison, but that's hard to do when the company's CEO is a citizen of another country.
If you want masses of people to be unable to think for themselves, be dependent on you for answers, and be unable to tell when you lie to them it's a very good idea to prioritize having an answer over understanding the steps needed to arrive at it.
The death of critical thinking. There are days when my sons have a hard time in school just because they ask questions, want explanations and to be given background. It turns out the current generation of teachers may already not be able to supply any of those.
> I'm skeptical that space exploration in particular was meaningfully responsible for the list of consumer-facing technologies Tyson mentioned in his speech.
It clearly was, at least in several examples. It looks like he's getting it right from NASA:
negligence and incompetence can act as very good cover for malice. The same reporter that leaked Reality Winner's identity, Matthew Cole, has also been suspected by multiple other whistleblowers of exposing them as well.
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