Google Stasi
Anyone else regularly get emails from people they barely know containing confidential info and documents 'ABOUT-YOU' - from a * Gmail * email address..... WTF low-hanging-fruit internet-users, who said this was ok???
It might be just a sports club you half-signed-up to years ago and forgot about, or a property management company in the apartment complex where you live that never sent anything before except paper flyers etc...
Either way, this is all great news to the ** Google Stasi ** who want to know everything about you, so they can sell it on! People think they're comfortable with that, that they know what it means. Yet every year, tech sociopaths cross the creepy line even further. US elections Cambridge Analytics, hello!
Google isn't satisfied with web ads. They want to know every last data-perv detail about you, your personal and work-life, your family's, including kids. so that they can crunch it all into a behavioral super-profile and sell this to every corporation you will ever cross paths with in physical or digital life!
The article below tries to capture it, but misses. Google-Facebook et al know more than our families and friends do about us. That's Stasi-esque!
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Opening our digital door to welcome in tech-Stasi police - “Our blind acceptance and compliance with technologies means that the people who know us best – what we like, want, prefer, aspire to be – are not our governments but Google and Facebook.” - Solutionism is the now rampant belief that all “problems” have technological solutions. Google glasses, self-driving cars, smartphone apps that monitor the efficiency of our exercise, the calories in our food and the quality of our REM sleep – all smilingly assure us that they will make our lives frictionless and trouble-free in this algorithm-driven new world order. Welcome to Stepfordia. - - Famine, poverty and disease? We have an app for that. - And just when did giant tech companies, themselves masters in cutting their tax bill to a bare minimum, get to lecture us about behavioural correction? -
There is though a substantially bigger issue at play here – a political dimension to Solutionism. Many of the “problems” being sold to us by digital technologies aren’t really problems at all – unless you count the burning need to know how many steps you take each day a problem. - Our blind acceptance and compliance with technologies means that the people who know us best – what we like, want, prefer, aspire to be – are not our governments but Google and Facebook. And it is here that Solutionism becomes the neo-liberals’ wet dream by offloading the concerns of government (our welfare and well-being) to individuals and their private means.
As Morozov says: “I have no problem with technological solutions to social problems. The key question for me is, who gets to implement them and what kinds of politics of reform do technological solutions smuggle through the backdoor”.
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https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/opening-our-digital-door-to-welcome-in-tech-stasi-police-1.3155208