No way? Big Tech's 'lucrative surveillance' of everyone is terrible for privacy, freedom Buried beneath the endless feeds and attention-grabbing videos of the modern internet is a network of data harvesting and sale that's perhaps far more vast than most people realize, and it desperately needs regulation. That's the conclusion the FTC made after spending nearly four years poring over internal data from nine …
So I guess the nugget of news is that after four years of hand-wringing, butt-polishing, and bending over, the FTC managed to regurgitate a report that says what everyone knew long before the report was even commissioned: American big tech is out of hand and we are headed straight for the worst of 1984 and Brave New World combined... heavy on the paranoia, drugs, perpetual war, and surveillance.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_says_no
They don't just sell you stuff. They also sell you, to anyone who's willing to fork over a couple of bucks, because that's how cheap you are.
In almost all of the cases where you're the thing that's being sold, it's not to grant you things. It's to deprive you of things: your money, your opportunity, your future. This sold data is treated as the Truth, and so when a system makes a determination about you (say, your mortgage rate [or even whether or not you get a mortgage for the place you want to live in], or how much you'll pay for insurance, or how much that flight will cost you, whether you get health insurance, etc), based on this data which is almost always incorrect, incomplete, wrong, irrelevant, ... then you will be told "NO", and also that "there is no appeal, but we have a bag of sand for you which you can go and punch".
You may not have been murdered (which I recognize is pretty bad and terminal), but your future will have been solidly and negatively impacted by it. So congratulations, you get to live a long life as a won't-have.
About this was "we have a privacy policy".
If your privacy policy is basically "we can do anything we want with everything we collect on you", which I'm sure it is after you go through the endless pages of legalese with all the exceptions for what I'm sure is a promising first page or so, that's a pretty weak defense.
If your privacy policy is basically "we can do anything we want with everything we collect on you"
It's like ISO9001 - you are *required* to have policies about how you make stuff, but none of those policies have to be about doing it properly. You could have a policy of "final stage is to bathe it in virgins' blood" and, as long as you do, and document that you do, ISO 9001 is satisfied.
You are *supposed* to do process improvement but that's not something you can fail on (or it didn't used to be).
To administer even a slap on the wrist, first you need to point to a law or at least a rule that's been broken.
The whole problem in America is, there are no rules against this stuff. (There is, of a sort, in the EU, but it's inadequate - the companies involved have long since figured out how to work around it, and it hasn't been updated.)
The whole problem in America is, there are no rules against this stuff.
And it seems likely there won't ever be, because "Freedom".
America has always leaned towards "Anything and everything must be allowed. It's up to individuals to protect themselves. It's not for government to interfere".
Europeans on the other hand lean into "Governments are there to protect the people, and especially so where it is not practical for people to protect themselves".
America views Europe as a collective of evil communists and they won't tolerate "that kind of sick nonsense". They would rather have the Wild West where it's every man for themselves.
Same reason they'd rather have endless mass shooting sprees than gun control. It's why they appear to be a truly fucked-up nation from a European perspective.
Business as usual then.
The situation has been going on for so long and the amount of data already collected so vast that we are way beyond the point of closing the stable door after the horse has bolted.
The horse has been gone so long it has died of old age. This is exactly what these corporations wanted and equally what millions have been happy to just give their data to without a thought. It is two sided but as usual the naivety, ignorance, stupidity (there are subtle differences) of those who have supplied that pool of data allows the corporations collecting the data an unending source of material.
I often hear a (rational / cynical?) defeatist response to privacy concerns: "they already know everything..." But if the data didn't have value; if the profiles weren't useful for something to somebody, why keep amassing the bytes?
I think most people evolve; they change. Ideally, they grow. And unless corporate surveillance continues its intrusions, it can't keep up. So I take the approach that it's never, ever too late to invite the intruders to fuck right off.
Further note: To the best of my understanding, the _last_ think I want to do is _correct_ any data anybody has stored about me. I want to poison it all to the point where separating truth from fiction simply isn't worth the effort.
Slightly echoing the article.
I actually use Discord (unlike a lot of "social media", which I avoid as much as possible) for chats on a couple of gaming channels relating to online games I play.
There are no ads (a reason I can tolerate using it - it's all based on enough people paying for certain things (all optional, it is totally possible to use Discord without ever paying anything, which is the case for most users))
So would definitely be interested to know what data harvesting / abuse they are doing*
On the balance, when it comes to intrusive surveillance, I rather favour Big Tech than government. Big Tech has some incentive to keep your information under their control. Government? Not so much. If memory serves, the biggest exposures of private data have come from government databases being pilfered.
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