131–140 of 172 posts
Who else feels a sense of horrible dread and frustration that every minutiae of my (and your) online activity is recorded for eternity and exploited to the fullest extent? What are you going to do about it?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You do know that the ad won't necessarily be relevant to you , right? The ads will be "relevant" according to the advertisers who think you're the kind of target they want to trick into buying their product. Regarding that "minor event": it is minor in isolation, but the point is that you are generating a large amount of those events that are being aggregated into databases where they are unlikely to be deleted. The…
>You do know that the ad won't necessarily be relevant to you, right? Perhaps, but I don't really see the difference in the end. Anecdotally, I see ads for IntelliJ IDEA because I look up a lot of coding-related things. So does it matter that I'm getting this ad because Google's ad network has decided I like coding, or because IntelliJ selected some parameters and said "send this ad to coders"? The goal of either ope…
I find surveillance economy to be worrying, because while it makes the market efficient, it makes government too efficient and allows for bad behaviors on the part of marketers (eg, targeting addiction susceptible people via "machine learning" for deniability).
Leaking my personal information to pay for websites isn't economics I like.
1/2
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There is a difference though. I can selectively turn things on / off. If I have to turn on >5 websites to see the content it suddenly has less value and I shrug and close
I really can't understand the people that browse the internet without JS. Like what's the point? JS is part of the web, deal with it.
Who else feels a sense of horrible dread and frustration that every minutiae of my (and your) online activity is recorded for eternity and exploited to the fullest extent? What are you going to do about it?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Honest question. I think, historically, most people have lived in very tight quarters, quite close to a lot of other people. Indeed, that's still true for many of us! Some of these very 'always nearby' people would be family members and/or greatly trusted, but even one layer beyond that would be a lot of people who we would consider acquaintances today. My question: isn't it possible that the amount of privacy some p…
There is an important difference. This transparency applied to the most of the people - everyone was transparent, except some exceptional people. In many parts of the world we have lived already about two hundred years with expectation to high level privacy.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You do know that the ad won't necessarily be relevant to you , right? The ads will be "relevant" according to the advertisers who think you're the kind of target they want to trick into buying their product. Regarding that "minor event": it is minor in isolation, but the point is that you are generating a large amount of those events that are being aggregated into databases where they are unlikely to be deleted. The…
>You do know that the ad won't necessarily be relevant to you, right? Perhaps, but I don't really see the difference in the end. Anecdotally, I see ads for IntelliJ IDEA because I look up a lot of coding-related things. So does it matter that I'm getting this ad because Google's ad network has decided I like coding, or because IntelliJ selected some parameters and said "send this ad to coders"? The goal of either ope…
> technology improves my life in many ways
First of all, it might not be about you. If you are privileged enough to not have to worry about being the target of prejudices, hatred, or the occasional witch hunt, then you might not see the necessity of keeping secrets. Some people are not that lucky.
> making my life worse
It probably isn't making your life worse at the moment. Right now we have barely scratched the surface of what is possible. Most of the current uses are fairly benign (such as ads). The concern isn't about current uses. The problem is the open-ended risk of anyone abusing that data in the future.
You are essentially making the bet that either 1) nobody will ever invent a use of your data that is harmful to you, or 2) nobody will ever abuse your data, or 3) that your data won't actually live forever. Clause 1 is already broken in some areas, clause 2 denies human nature, and clause 3 has a lot of evidence suggesting data rarely disappears.
> something tangible
Ok, lets consider insurance companies and/or banks. These businesses would really like more to get their hands on data that could give them excuses to raise your rates, deny your loan or insurance coverage. Sure, we have laws and regulations that theoretically prevent some types of data from being used. The legal situation becomes less clear when none of the prohibited data is used directly but it can be inferred from other types of data that is.
If you think this is a theoretical concern, then you need to read about the deplorable practice known as "redlining"[1], where data was used as a cover for racial hatred and forced segregation. We already see problems with various types of data being used in police work and judicial situations where certain combinations of "unrelated" data is actually a reasonable proxy for race.
Can you say with certainty that a future insurance company won't be able to take all of the data points you've been generating in ad networks - with absolutely no "PII" - and find some pattern in your history that can be used as a reason to raise your rates? Or deny coverage? This is only one stupid example; it will be a lot more subtle as we learn new analysis methods and creative data manipulation methods.
However, you asked for something tangible, so you should look at this[2] map of Amsterdam. Each black dot on the map represents 10 Jews. The Nazis commissioned this map from the local civil servants that managed the census data. I doubt they thought that their recent change to the census to include a question asking for religious affiliation could ever be dangerous. 3/4 of the dots on that map were murdered in the camps. Yes, this is an extreme example. I hope ad tracing data won't end up being used for that level of evil. Unfortunately, there are a lot of possibilities between "serving an ad" and "genocide", even though they are both data problems.
> Why would an ad company sell user data when that's their entire competitive advantage?
Selling data can become another source of revenue if the company has significant financial problems. Given the recent-ish trend of companies to agglutinate into a single power (or small group of powers), the transfer of data might be "internal" instead of a sale. Also, you're assuming it would be the ad companies choice; bankruptcy courts may see it as a valuable asset to be liquidated, and governments may simply take the data using various methods.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining
[2] https://www.verzetsmuseum.org/uploads/archive/museum/topstuk...
What's the difference to the browser between "tripleclicking" the button and "clicking the button >X times in one second"? ie: why did it respond that I "clicked the button seven times within one second" before it responded that I "tripleclicked the button for the first time"? See this screenshot for reference: http://imgur.com/xhWHPQa
* Single click - nothing
* Double click - highlight word
* Triple click - highlight paragraph
I got "Subject has run script to click on the button 10 times in one second" by using xdotool click --delay 10 --repeat 100 1, wonder whether that's checking timing or just assuming nobody clicks that fast.
for (var i = 0; i button.click(), Math.random()*1500) }
I wish bundle.js weren't minified, it could be fun to read.
Who else feels a sense of horrible dread and frustration that every minutiae of my (and your) online activity is recorded for eternity and exploited to the fullest extent? What are you going to do about it?
