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How to fight the surveillance economy

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21–30 of 71 posts

Re: How to fight the surveillance economy

#21
post #16

Poison the well - generate noise. By generating false signals you will devalue the harvested data hopefully to a point it is not worth harvesting.

Speaking of which, AdNauseum is a useful extension for Firefox for devaluing the ad economy. Google of course banned it from the chrome store.

Re: How to fight the surveillance economy

#22
post #11

The surveillance economy is a direct result of advertising becoming the default business model for Internet companies. At its root, advertising is attempting to predict an individual's preferences and subtlety nudge their preferences toward specific buying behaviors. With more granular and pervasive data inputs, you can arguably do better predictions and thus better targeting. The only counter to this is either: 1: p…

It’s much worse than that. Companies you pay significant amounts of money to like ISP’s also reolized selling your data made them just slightly more money so now all large companies do so.

Right, except they are selling it to ad networks/companies, so it all comes back to the Ad market being the end consumer.

Re: How to fight the surveillance economy

#23
post #5

If you're a software developer the way to fight this is financial. Make a ton of money then pay journalists to write about it and pay other software developers to build the tools to evade it.[0] Regarding VPNs: What I want is a very small, open source program that I can give my credit card. It will light up little DigitalOcean droplets (and other VPSes to stop potential monitoring from them) and create VPNs here and…

>I also want to build my own browser that will be capable of making the rendering happen on these rented-for-a-minute servers then pipe back just the PNG.

I think you want a browser running on a servet you access over a VNC, which will pipe back just the parts of the screen that have updated.

Re: How to fight the surveillance economy

#24

The surveillance economy is a direct result of advertising becoming the default business model for Internet companies. At its root, advertising is attempting to predict an individual's preferences and subtlety nudge their preferences toward specific buying behaviors. With more granular and pervasive data inputs, you can arguably do better predictions and thus better targeting. The only counter to this is either: 1: p…

You forgot: 3. Legislation that enforces some notion of privacy rights. Similar arguments of economic necessity can be made for alcohol, tobacco, and gambling providers. All of these products are regulated in terms of how they can be manufactured, marketed, and sold because they have large negative externalities that impact their users. I don't see why surveillance for the purposes of advertising is any different.

In which case it should be regulation on the Ad industry, not necessarily regulation of data - because that's not getting at the core incentives. The data gathering is a symptom of the Ad market.

If you don't address the Ad market incentives, they will simply find another vector to getting to you. Noam Chomsky has been very loud about this for a long time, well before data gathering was a thing. So it's a long term persistent virus, of which the internet is currently the vector.

Re: How to fight the surveillance economy

#25
post #6

Or instead make the information public/transparent as possible. To level the playing field. Yes there are going to be many issue arise from this, so it's these issue that need to be fixed instead of trying to fight to make information private. >They know more about us than we know about ourselves or than we know about them Right so we need to fight for knowing more information about them as much as they know about us…

[deleted]

Re: How to fight the surveillance economy

#26

The surveillance economy is a direct result of advertising becoming the default business model for Internet companies. At its root, advertising is attempting to predict an individual's preferences and subtlety nudge their preferences toward specific buying behaviors. With more granular and pervasive data inputs, you can arguably do better predictions and thus better targeting. The only counter to this is either: 1: p…

[deleted]

Re: How to fight the surveillance economy

#27
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From TFA: Install Privacy Badger by EFF that uncovers and blocks scripts on websites that track you; this Medium page has 2 active trackers that would have been blocked if you did - Google Analytics and Parse.ly

That is the wrong attitude. Yes, I know how to shield myself; nobody else in my family does. There's nothing wrong pushing links to the article to platforms like HN, Reddit, etc, but the source shouldn't be medium. If you write a piece like this, it deserves to go on a platform without trackers; otherwise it's a bit hard to take it seriously. I'm aware that medium.com might bring in a broader audience and that it's s…

> otherwise it's a bit hard to take it seriously.

This is the wrong attitude. You should realize that you may not be able to do all possible or necessary measures to protections all at once. That doesn't mean you should avoid doing some of them, and the article talks about that.

So, in other words, if you didn't do step 0, let it not stop you from doing other steps.

Re: How to fight the surveillance economy

#28
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From TFA: Install Privacy Badger by EFF that uncovers and blocks scripts on websites that track you; this Medium page has 2 active trackers that would have been blocked if you did - Google Analytics and Parse.ly

That is the wrong attitude. Yes, I know how to shield myself; nobody else in my family does. There's nothing wrong pushing links to the article to platforms like HN, Reddit, etc, but the source shouldn't be medium. If you write a piece like this, it deserves to go on a platform without trackers; otherwise it's a bit hard to take it seriously. I'm aware that medium.com might bring in a broader audience and that it's s…

> Yes, I know how to shield myself; nobody else in my family does.

Another thing is that we should both educate those who don't know how to shield themselves - and make it easier to be protected. The latter is related to network protocols and processes and to client (and server) software.

Can we simplify Internet?

Re: How to fight the surveillance economy

#29
post #12

The surveillance economy is a direct result of advertising becoming the default business model for Internet companies. At its root, advertising is attempting to predict an individual's preferences and subtlety nudge their preferences toward specific buying behaviors. With more granular and pervasive data inputs, you can arguably do better predictions and thus better targeting. The only counter to this is either: 1: p…

> The surveillance economy is a direct result of advertising becoming the default business model for Internet companies. This is sad because advertising is a poor monetization scheme. For instance, let's say you make $0.10 per user through ads. Now let's say you want to increase the price to $2.00 per user. Then oops, you can't, because ads don't allow you to make that much for any given user. So depending on your pr…

Are you sure? An ad impression for an insurance contract could have a higher expected value than an impression for, say, a brand of protein bars.

Re: How to fight the surveillance economy

#30

Some valid points. At the end of the day, until the governments around the world reign in the offenders with regulations and potential jail time (GDRP and such), nothing is going to change for the masses. Just like every other cycle in the human history - abuse until a breaking point is reached, regulations come in, find some other niche ripe for "disruption", repeat the cycle. Unrelated to the main topic - writing a…

Judging by how fast advertisers left some political outlets, it could be possible to discourage cooperation with aforementioned corporations. For software engineers to work in those may become career-limiting.
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