41–50 of 54 posts
For FB to stop being the devil/cancer they are now, they have to drop all the current practices and burn many bridges/income with any outsider, and make a living with "just advertisments".
They will still make a good living from that, but greed is in human nature.
The fundamental issue is that the average person in the United States and Austrailia simply don't really care for their online privacy. Offer something free and people will happily sign up and give all sorts of personal information without any hesitation. Offer a loyalty card at a store with discounts, and people will happily sign up for it. Even after the Snowden revelations, not much really happened to the governme…
The average european does not pay attention to his/her data. Facebook & al might be seen as "bad" by a small minority but google the name of the next person you'll meet and you'll get everything from the name of their kindergarten to the name of their current & past love interests.
Experian is one the largest marketing email provider in Europe and next to no one, even in the marketing space, has heard about the extent of the breach they suffered on their credit rating operations in the US (arguably more sensitive than a mere list of emails: if they fail on credit rating god knows what their marketing operation looks like...).
The only one big difference between Europe & the rest of the world is the GDPR but, again, only professional have heard about it. Many companies are finally addressing their shortcomings thanks to the impeding doom they perceive the GDPR to be.
It's a lot of trust to place in one company, whose motives inevitably won't align with your own, and who realistically you can't hold to account.
The fundamental issue is that the average person in the United States and Austrailia simply don't really care for their online privacy. Offer something free and people will happily sign up and give all sorts of personal information without any hesitation. Offer a loyalty card at a store with discounts, and people will happily sign up for it. Even after the Snowden revelations, not much really happened to the governme…
This cigarette will feel great I'll smoke it, I might get cancer in 40 years
I need this cupcake now, I might be diabetic in 10 years
I want the app now, so I'm going to accept all those spurious data access requests that might be used to con/trick/rob/profile me later.
If it would hit you straight away, light the cigarette BOOM dead, eat the cupcake BOOM gained 40 pounds, install the app BOOM 10K gone from you bankaccount, people would understand the trade-off.
As it stands, most humans are by themselves not equipped to deal with fuzzy delayed negative feedback.
The third-party brokers aren't the root problem. The problem is that Facebook themselves have unfettered access to all of this data. It's a lot of trust to place in one company, whose motives inevitably won't align with your own, and who realistically you can't hold to account.
Maybe the problem is that nowadays alter egos and nicknames are seen as edgy stuff and not as the true joy of living on the Internet.
The third-party brokers aren't the root problem. The problem is that Facebook themselves have unfettered access to all of this data. It's a lot of trust to place in one company, whose motives inevitably won't align with your own, and who realistically you can't hold to account.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most people in the US may not care, but that's because they simply do not understand how it will (or already is) affect them. The average person thinks that, at worst, they'll just see ads that are more intelligent or targeted. Who cares, right? The do NOT realize that these troves of data are going to be used to someday deny them health insurance, get them fired or not hired for some job, get screwed in job pay and…
Perhaps Americans are just confident that if these things start happening there will be ample opportunity to implement legislative fixes. I mean c'mon...."Refused entry into establishments"? Unless the Civil Rights Act of 1964 somehow gets repealed I don't see this as very likely.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "Even after the Snowden revelations, not much really happened to the government or the NSA." True. But that says far more about the Mainstream Media than anything else. Most people dismissed the issue because it was never really made an issue. We can debate / discuss why that was some other time. But, as we now see, the MSM drives public option.
I think one of the premises of this thread is that online social media, rather than MSM, appears to hold the best cards at this point.
Are SM the ripples in the societal water? Absolutely.
But who / what is the rock that generates and maintains the narative of those ripples?
The MSM is like Top 40 radio. That is, the public wants what the public gets. No one changes the station. They just keep whistling along to the tunes being played - regardless of how bad and mindless. Most people are simply regurgitating brain-worms. They do that on SM.
p.s. The fact that SM was relatively silent (compared to say Stormy Daniels) is a great example. Which did the MSM "play"? And which was ignored?
There are no ripples without a rock hitting the water.
I would like to see a network graph of the gathering and exchange of people's information between these data brokers. It would simultaneously be really interesting and really shocking. I can't imagine how many thousands of DBs out there are with a smorgasbord of personal data.
On the other hand, it's exactly the kind of research I expect from privacy protection institutions.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I respectfully disagree with you. Most people (in the US) do not care. I used to work for an adtech company which engaged with all sorts of third party vendors (like Axciom, BlueKai, etc) and every time I would explain my job to most friends or strangers, people often rightly assumed that shady data dealing is what was going on behind ads and services like Facebook and seemed not to care. There has been little appeti…
Most people in the US may not care, but that's because they simply do not understand how it will (or already is) affect them. The average person thinks that, at worst, they'll just see ads that are more intelligent or targeted. Who cares, right? The do NOT realize that these troves of data are going to be used to someday deny them health insurance, get them fired or not hired for some job, get screwed in job pay and…
Wouldn't it be great if all this data aggregation/privacy invasion business reaches a point of diminishing returns just because the subject of the manipulation has developed an immunity to all of it?
We need an online behavior randomization gadget that turns our valued personal data trail into garbage, obfuscation to the rescue.
On the other hand the only thing that counts is the credit card purchase history of a person - and it is impossible to randomize that one (short of sharing the card with your kids)