Completely absent from this narrative is a discussion about the immense value people get out of these technologies and what people like the author propose as a replacement.
The internet and "tech giants" have given us the ability to put our thoughts out to a global audience, stay in touch with friends and family around the globe (for free). Take and store a near infinite number of photographs. Order a car to your front door and have the destination chosen before hand without having to negotiate with your driver...
Tech is awesome, life is good. Yes the East Coast old media companies hate that they've lost their gatekeeping power but plenty of us would see that as yet another benefit of tech empowerment.
The cost? You give up some privacy. Only no one cares about that. Most people don't have anything to hide from advertisers. Most of this personalization tech doesn't even work. I've literally never seen an ad so enticing that I've clicked on it.
Normal people love their technology and the "issues" outlined in this piece and the book it's discussing are those of the old money elite and their loss of power, not those of the masses who are more empowered by tech than ever before.
I really wish people would stop saying this. It is a completely idiotic statement. There are hundreds of people throughout history that quite literally gave their lives for privacy, as recent as one generation ago. Complacency and the silent majority does not equate to "no one cares about that" otherwise, you wouldn't have so many privacy centers and advocacy groups throughout the country.
> Most people don't have anything to hide from advertisers.
"'I've Got Nothing to Hide' and Other Misunderstandings Of Privacy" https://scholarship.law.gwu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=... It's a good read, and I hope it convinces you otherwise that privacy is as important as ever, even in lieu of fallacious "nothing to hide" arguments.
From the paper, the easiest way to debunk the "nothing to hide" argument is to ask easy questions.
"I've got nothing to hide."
"OK, so why do you have curtains or blinds in your home?"
"OK you have nothing to hide, so can I see your past credit card statements?"
If we all have nothing to hide, why don't those interested in our private lives show us theirs? It's the ole "Show me yours and I’ll show you mine" adage.
My point is that there is no proposed alternative. Why is there no privacy focused Facebook or Google? The answer is that privacy is not valuable enough to most people to endure the switching costs and alternative solutions don't even exist.
So the discussion then comes down to going offline all together (which no one will do) or as this OP asks for: more regulation. Only that further slows down the pace of innovation and further entrenches the large players due to regulatory capture.
The article you post is a perfect example of why privacy doesn't matter. Do you think the average FB user will wade through that then erase their account? No. They want the value they get out of FB and nowhere in the counter argument is any suggestion of alternatives.
> Why is there no privacy focused Facebook or Google?
The tongue-in-cheek answer to this is that they all eventually get bought by Facebook or Google. Anything that poses a threat to Facebook or Google will fold for the right price, as a simple matter of serving the fiduciary interest of the investors.
The only platforms which can hold out are the ones explicitly designed to resist centralization. They have no pitch to make to investors, no funds for promotion, but the technology is there. Mastodon and Matrix are proof.
The technology is dead simple. Facebook, Reddit and Twitter are nothing but glorified shiny message boards. WhatsApp, Discord, and Skype are nothing but glorified shiny VoIP apps. The only thing that makes them special is the branding
I'd go even further and say that the larger platforms are anti-privacy by design, because their core purpose has always been concerned with data collection. I think the large online social networks are in the same vein fundamentally rightwing, because profiting from the efforts of others has nothing whatsoever to do with leftism.
IRL, if you want privacy, you avoid groups. I don't see why the digital realm should be viewed any differently. So there's a duality with social networkers, in that they may want privacy for themselves, yet a large reason for being on those platforms is to learn about everyone else. From a safe distance.
> The only platforms which can hold out are the ones explicitly designed to resist centralization.
They don't make money, tempt investors, or entice advertisers, for shit. You might not want that to be what defines a successful business right now, but it is.
> The technology is dead simple.
Not simple enough (IRC/Mastodon/dex-$x). People vote with their feet.
When something decentralized provides a better user experience than one of the behemoths, and figures out a way to market itself into network-effect prosperity, then things will improve. Until then, don't bother.
I think it's very fair to say that your average user absolutely does not care about privacy past catastrophic and specific leaks or revelations based on their own private data.
Wether that's wise or not is definitely up for debate. I think we'd be much better off instilling a higher value for privacy than we'd be trying to legislate and regulate the problem away. Companies will find ways to skirt legal measures, but an evaporating user base cannot be ignored.
> I think it's very fair to say that your average user absolutely does not care about privacy past catastrophic and specific leaks or revelations based on their own private data.
I don't think that is "very fair to say." For instance, you might also claim that "you average citizen" does not care about having a right to a fair trail and a whole host of other good things. If you have any evidence to back up your assertion, it's probably confounded by interference from people's other priorities and problems.
To get a truly accurate sense of how much "your average user" cares about privacy, you need to control for both the ignorance of some users and the likely sense of helplessness of others. It's weaselly to say that someone with undiagnosed cancer doesn't care about having cancer, just because they don't know they have it, for instance. To truly understand how they feel, you have to tell them their diagnosis, and maybe even explain cancer and its implications to them.
> I think we'd be much better off instilling a higher value for privacy than we'd be trying to legislate and regulate the problem away. Companies will find ways to skirt legal measures, but an evaporating user base cannot be ignored.
You could make the same case against antipollution regulation, and it would be just as weak as you argument against privacy regulation. Your proposed solution is fatally undermined by a collective action problem [1]. The solution to the problem of companies skirting legal measures is to either amend the measures or sanction the skirting of them -- both things that are often done in functioning governments.
The reason they care about "catastrophic and specific leaks or revelations based on their own private data" is because that is the only time the average user notices how much information they cede to these platforms.
If the general public truly understood how much information they give up and how valuable that information is, people would begin to take these things more seriously.
Users are conditioned to allow access to GPS and Camera without thinking for the sake of using specific features of an app. Combine that with maliciously impenetrable ToS and its hardly surprising that people give away their information so freely.
>The reason they care about "catastrophic and specific leaks or revelations based on their own private data" is because that is the only time the average user notices how much information they cede to these platforms.
Because the instances of tangible harm coming to someone from data leaked by Facebook et. al. are few and far between.
>If the general public truly understood how much information they give up and how valuable that information is, people would begin to take these things more seriously.
I think it's intellectually lazy to think that people disagree with you because they don't have all the facts. Most people are aware with the amount of data collected on them. They are somewhat bothered by it, but not bothered enough to make a lot of changes.
>Because the instances of tangible harm coming to someone from data leaked by Facebook et. al. are few and far between.
Not sure what makes you think this considering the fact that lately there has been at least one data leak outrage story every week from Facebook alone.
>I think it's intellectually lazy to think that people disagree with you because they don't have all the facts. Most people are aware with the amount of data collected on them. They are somewhat bothered by it, but not bothered enough to make a lot of changes.
I appreciate you calling out my platitude but it is funny that you decided to answer with one equally lazy. How do you know?
In my experience most younger people are aware, but for people of my parents generation this stuff is a complete mystery.
> If the general public truly understood how much information they give up and how valuable that information is, people would begin to take these things more seriously.
No, we would not. We would keep skimming over the terms, keep ignoring the connotations. Just like we do now.
That's not great, but it's the userbase you (we) have to live with.
Thats exactly my point though - no one will ever read the terms. You shouldn't have to dig through x pages of legalese to know what you are agreeing to within an app.
All i'm saying is that if what you were agreeing to was made to be as apparent as it is easy to confirm we might see a shift in user behaviour.
It was a claim by extension I must admit: You could technically say each American that dies, dies for our freedoms, one of which is our constitutional right to privacy. A specific example I had in mind was those who lost their lives fleeing East Germany and the Stasi: deciding to cross the wall or even talking about it often time resulted in your untimely death. Many people were gunned down trying to climb over. A general "people who died for privacy" netted some decent results as well.
There is a difference between social privacy and data privacy. I close the curtains and cover my credit card statements because I want social privacy. I don't care if Google's machines have the same information on me.
I care about privacy very deeply. I care more about privacy than the 'immense value' that garbage like facebook provides the world. The 'anything to hide' argument is an authoritarian call, and a way to devalue personal agency wrt privacy. No, I have nothing to share.
Your attitude disgusts me. Wake up and see what damage you and your employers are thrusting upon humanity!
> I care more about privacy than the 'immense value' that garbage like facebook provides the world
Then you are in the minority. If there was a mass of people like you then someone could build an alternative and you could use it. That mass doesn't exist though. Most people don't see FB as "garbage" and until you recognize that, then you have a minority opinion (totally ok!) just don't expect billion dollar products to cater to your view.
Of course I am in the minority. The majority of people on this planet have neither the education, interest or intelligence to understand the cage that is being constructed around them. Are you in the blissful, ignorant majority that cannot see what is actually going on here?
Well if we go by your narrative then the world is anyways doomed. Since majority of the planet has no education, interest, or intelligence to understand anything complicated, their votes are not going to vote for solving problems which are important, but irrelevant to them. IMHO, unless your cause is important to the masses, it is doomed. You should probably think how can you help the blissful, ignorant majority to understand your perspective from their point of view to achieve your cause.
I agree -- we are doomed. I have no cause. I stopped believing in democracy a long time ago. I have zero interest in helping others to understand my perspective, best we can hope for is to slow down the tech parasites from harvesting their digital souls.
I propose the systemic dismantling of the Zuckerberg empire, hard prison time for the execs, and industry banishment for its employees and collaborators. HN is just a news aggregator with social-media like comments section. Its not social media.
If the unwashed masses (instead of whatever Technorati that hangs out here) decided to call this home, im out! ;-)
Curiously, what governance system do you believe in. Philosopher Kings like Plato suggested? Doesn't history show us that all government systems are flawed. Do you think there is any hope for humanity in some alternative system?
What I see is going on is a billion people getting value out of products that a small minority of people aren't happy with yet propose no alternative to.
and what i see is a billion serf's getting exploited by a small minority of tech feudal lords. There is no alternative, except opting out of the game entirely. That is the point I wish to make here. There is no making a safe social media. Facebook is irredeemable. Social media is destructive to society by design.
Well, I'm sure people will not listen to someone who calls them serfs so I think you should ask yourself what your goal is. If it's to convince people to drop social media altogether you'll have to give them a plausible replacement for the very real value they're being asked to walk away from (and treat them with more respect). If your point is just to vent, then cool. I understand your position, I just think it's a dead end and not actionable.
In addition to avoiding personal attacks a la https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19560477, could you please not post wake-up-sheeple rants? We're hoping for comments that are more substantive than that. Indignation is noise, so high-indignation comments almost always have a low signal/noise ratio.
How is this helping to move the conversation forward?
> Wake up and see what damage you and your employers are thrusting upon humanity!
Privacy is important to me too; extremely important. Going further, I have deep concerns about the way modern social media manipulates billions of people.
At the same time, technology in general and social media in particular has brought tremendous value to the same billions of people's lives.
It's natural for us, by default, to most clearly remember the bad and reflect deeply on it. That has been a spectacularly successful survival characteristic through almost all of our history.
As to the good: I'm not going to spend time citing any number of positive things that would have only been possible with social media. Anybody who cares to have a balanced view of things can easily find such a list.
I will say simply this: what little valuable social contact my autistic son has been able to partake in has only been possible because of social media.
Does that single fact balance out all of the bad that's come from social media? All of the dangers and challenges? Certainly not.
But it's one good thing, among uncounted others.
tl;dr: Only a Sith deals in absolutes. Don't be a Sith!
>Completely absent from this narrative is a discussion about the immense value people get out of these technologies and what people like the author propose as a replacement.
Because today on HN were two postings about Sci-Hub and Elbakian, why not compare Sci-Hub and Google Scholar (or Google Books). Both of immense value for many many people.
A. I've literally never seen an
ad so enticing that I've
clicked on it.
Q. Then why are they among the
most successful business
models in the world?
Perception management. It's a big lie that takes the dare to seem so big it obviously must be true.
So, think about it another way. Think about how large of an industry pornography is.
But, is pornography really a form of "entertainment" and more importantly, is it one that people actually spend disposable income on?
No one, and I mean NO ONE, pays for pornography on the internet. People barely pay for music, and they had to be chased to the ends of the earth before that tide hinted at changing.
So then, what is the pornography "industry" reeeealllly?
The largest, legalized cluster of elite prostitution rings in the world, operating in plain sight.
As a corollary, if advertising only moves the revenue needle to the tune of roughly 10% or less of the normal operations for any given business, what must advertising really be?
A means to rationalize operating costs as business expenses, when you're trying to cook the books and hide money for tax purposes, and feed into a corrupt system of payola and favors.
A way to conceal exorbitant spending, such that it doesn't appear as part of income or profits. A way to burn cash the way you want, before the government knows it exists, and keep it behind the corporate veil, distributed in the business world for as long as possible, so that someone else takes the tax hit instead of you.
I agree. At the very least, there should be some dialogue on whether the trade off is worth it. I lean towards yes, most people think we can get the privacy back without giving up the advantages. I'm not sure how, but I'd be interested.
>> The internet and "tech giants" have given us the ability to put our thoughts out to a global audience, stay in touch with friends and family around the globe (for free). Take and store a near infinite number of photographs. Order a car to your front door and have the destination chosen before hand without having to negotiate with your driver...
I realize that I'm an outlier here, but after each and every one of these examples, I thought - so what?!
There's value, but we need to discuss marginal value and cost.
We shouldn't be asking "is Facebook as a whole worth its creepiness" in a vaccuum, it's "is the difference between Facebook and other platforms worth the difference in creepiness?"
Everything most consumers use Facebook for (photo/video sharing, chat/messaging, micro-blogging, discussion groups, event management) can be done by other services as well if not better. These days, they might be under different umbrellas, but it's basically the side features of a Yahoo-style portal circa 2002. Features they had no trouble delivering without making undeletable shadow profiles of your garage bandmates, snarfling every bit of data off your Nokia 3310, and selling your political leanings to the Yeltsin administration.
The quality of the services aren't the draw. It sure as hell isn't the convoluted user interface and the constant rearranging of things designed to undermine any sense of control you had. The appeal is mostly "but all my friends are there and I can't convince Aunt Bobette to change to Mastodon." And that problem can be solved with federation and SSO initiatives.
The most shocking of this all is that these big tech companies are communicating in a way you see in dictorial countries.
There is hardly any dialog possible. Disputes are ignored. the right to a fair dialog and the principle of an adversarial process is completely ignored by these giants.
And that is quite a bad thing. We see it now happening quite often with smaller but also bigger companies.
Sooner or later even individuals will get to face the strong negative influence these companies can give.
For many centuries we killed each other to fight for proper humane rights. Individuals but also companies. And now some kind of new virtual world is created where local laws are completely ignored. Not good!!!
Nonsense. In many cases, vendor lock-in and the network effect present a substantial hurtle to living free of these companies. Sure you can quit Facebook, but they'll still build an internal profile about you. You can also tell your mobile carrier to go f* themselves and get a ham radio - but unless all of your friends and colleagues do the same thing you'll just be talking to Major Tom up in his tin can.
Freeing yourself from the grasp of these companies is hard enough for the tech savvy. For laymen it is virtually impossible.
I suppose the general fear is that we are the product and we don’t know what we are being sold for or to whom. If they are so sophisticated they can infer behavioral patterns after you quit by using your still existing network of friends who didn’t quit then it’s a pretty useful bit of profiling technology with buyers. The only part that ever really mattered is how they monetize the product, us. It’s an unspoken agreement for using a service which has no transparent monetary cost.
So it’s fear of the unknown? I’m genuinely curious why people are so bothered by this. I don’t use Facebook, and use privacy extensions to prevent my agents from using Facebook. It’s like they’re a non existent entity in my world.
I simply can’t prioritize caring about something that doesn’t appear to impact my life in any way. But I’m admittedly not much of a principalled-living person. Too much internal hypocrisy for me to pretend to be principled.
Comcast was always terrible, but at least I could call up their support desk and make someone answer for their bad service. Sometimes they even fix the problem!
As an S3 customer for web hosting, I couldn’t understand why I was paying 10 cents a month for EC2 charges since I don’t use it. They just refunded me an entire month, but I really wanted to know what was happening!
As a product buyer. I complained and they gave me a refund without any hassle.
It's not that I think Amazon is wonderful, I just don't think they're worse than any other giant corporation I've dealt with. Which is why I don't understand jdsully's comment.
I suspect that on Amazon's scale, it's probably cheaper for them to toss refunds at customers than to actually fix problems.
Having a first-tier CSR click a dashboard button costs them the 10 cents per month plus 25 cents of labour to pay the guy to read the complaint, find the button, and press it.
Opening a ticket for a well-paid engineer to actually dissect the billing system and figure out where the 10 cent charge comes from, develop a fix, push it through validation and deploy it, probably costs $300.
Someone once tried to steal my account and they would not help me unless I gave them the attackers email (they changed it on the account). This despite using the same email for 10 years with them. Luckily amazon auto-filled it on one of their sign in forms so I was able to repeat it back to the customer service agent.
Even then they were non-committal about fixing it despite the person making multiple fraudulent purchases.
They are making it harder and harder to find their support page though, and as stellar as customer support is once I get hold of them... everything else about Amazon is going customer-hostile.
Google’s Fiber support line is great! Knowledgeable technical reps and I’ve never had a hold time. Unfortunately it’s only in a few cities and they’ve largely abandoned the effort.
With AT&T I tried for over a month to get internet installed and after hours of phone calls and them telling me a technician was coming they eventually revealed the billing department had flagged us and wanted a larger deposit for some reason. The two systems seemed totally separate.
Or it could be that private companies are more likely to care more about profit for shareholders than the health of the market and their own workers, so they deploy unfair employment practices and anticompetitive market behavior to cut corners, destroy the competition, and monopolize for even more profit.
A corporation is just a group that's recognized as a separate entity by the government. There's nothing that says the governance of a corporation has to be dictatorial. Many cooperatives are corporations.
Yeah - I'm with you. This is alarming. I've been reading and thinking about it for months. Some of the books and thinkers mentioned (especially Nicholas Carr) have really changed the way I see our current situation. It's quite dire, I'm afraid!!
I really appreciate my medium sized ISP, which actually answers support emails in a timely, competent and helpful manner.
I don't even bother with bigger tech companies, including Valve. Getting completely senseless automated and canned responses just makes my blood boil and certainly doesn't resolve anything.
Another pet peevee are automated A (not very) I chat bots.
If you want to have a truly horrendous experience try Air Asia's automated customer "support".
Zuboff theory that Google and alike live from the metadata exhaust, not from the data itself, explains the lack of respect for the valuable data contributed by the users.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/jit.2015.5
I've always found that the key realization is that on the whole things aren't "valuable data". Very few data points are actually valuable.
We call it valuable data to feel good about it and indignant about howe we're treated. Coming face-to-face with the possibility that our individual data is worth essentially nothing is uncomfortable.
Individually, mostly valueless. But in aggregate, the emergent patterns are hugely valuable. Just as a litterer is fractionally culpable for worsening the earth, our data is fractionally responsible for the wealth of these companies, and for the same reason shouldn't be dismissed as worthless.
The flaw in the analogy being that litter builds up additively. User data is more like a square law effect.
You're completely right, of course. One user's data isn't worthless and should never be dismissed. Yet in financial and practical terms its value far closer to zero than to any useful unit of account.
Curiously, I don't remember Google or Facebook ads saying: "join us! we shall delete or hide your data. remember we are a private company, not a public forum" back then when they were not rich.
The core issue with governance that arises regardless of paradigm, in my opinion, is over-centralization.
Now it seems that we have technology behemoths superceding government and centralizing control of our economies.
I like to call them "technopolies". They are successful largely because they are so all-encompassing over particular areas. The problem is that they are private profit driven entities and so the playing field, though large, is not fair, and core functions lack competition.
Eventually all-encompassing decentralized public technology platforms should be able to supercede the technopolies. This way we can have systems that operate holistically in a way with majority networks but without the private centralization of control.
That is not to say that it is going to be easy. But it's the only viable paradigm that could replace the Iron Cage.
So do you think it's more about breaking down the (centralized) big dogs or supporting the (decentralized) smaller startups. This Iron Cage is full-on dystopia. I really can't believe we're letting it happen!
I think we need to promote startups and companies in general that are built on public decentralized protocols. Breaking up monopolies without having the public platforms available could just lead to other technopolies popping up to replace the old ones.
These tongue-lashings of big tech are getting a tad ridiculous. Yes, how could we possibly have known that they were doing the things they said they were doing? How shocking, this surveillance regime, that took all the data we gave them, and then blatantly invaded our privacy, by reading it!
This is like an oil company spilling billions of barrels of oil into a sensitive habitat, and then the predictably excoriating hyperbolic complaints and disclaims of surprise. Oh, how could they extract that oil from the ocean floor, from the thousands of oil platforms that we've known have existed for decades! But in fact, we know they're there, and we know what the consequences are. So we go on social media and read these posts about how terrible the spill is, and cry-emoji over the birds covered in oil. And then we go fill up with 87 octane.
Did you read the article? No judgment if you didn't - just genuinely curious.
Over the course of the last decade (I got a flip phone in high school, smartphone in college, facebook my freshman year, instagram right after college) I feel pretty confident saying, "I didn't know." I don't think it's embarrassing and I don't think I'm alone. It's a big, complicated problem. BTW I went to Stanford and worked in startups. I think I'm a bright, open-minded, curious person.
To your second point: How do you recommend that we respond to environmental degradation? Or should we all look away?
I'm fully off social media and smartphones. On a day to day basis, I'm not being listened to and watched, at least as far as I know. I try to "vote with my behavior" so to speak, but it's tough. I'm concerned, for example, that not having a LinkedIn account is slowing down my career.
I wish that these critiques grappled with the ways that so many of the services that we now resent were truly embraced by many because they seemed magical when they appeared.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 151 ms ] threadThe internet and "tech giants" have given us the ability to put our thoughts out to a global audience, stay in touch with friends and family around the globe (for free). Take and store a near infinite number of photographs. Order a car to your front door and have the destination chosen before hand without having to negotiate with your driver...
Tech is awesome, life is good. Yes the East Coast old media companies hate that they've lost their gatekeeping power but plenty of us would see that as yet another benefit of tech empowerment.
The cost? You give up some privacy. Only no one cares about that. Most people don't have anything to hide from advertisers. Most of this personalization tech doesn't even work. I've literally never seen an ad so enticing that I've clicked on it.
Normal people love their technology and the "issues" outlined in this piece and the book it's discussing are those of the old money elite and their loss of power, not those of the masses who are more empowered by tech than ever before.
I really wish people would stop saying this. It is a completely idiotic statement. There are hundreds of people throughout history that quite literally gave their lives for privacy, as recent as one generation ago. Complacency and the silent majority does not equate to "no one cares about that" otherwise, you wouldn't have so many privacy centers and advocacy groups throughout the country.
> Most people don't have anything to hide from advertisers.
"'I've Got Nothing to Hide' and Other Misunderstandings Of Privacy" https://scholarship.law.gwu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=... It's a good read, and I hope it convinces you otherwise that privacy is as important as ever, even in lieu of fallacious "nothing to hide" arguments.
From the paper, the easiest way to debunk the "nothing to hide" argument is to ask easy questions.
"I've got nothing to hide." "OK, so why do you have curtains or blinds in your home?" "OK you have nothing to hide, so can I see your past credit card statements?"
If we all have nothing to hide, why don't those interested in our private lives show us theirs? It's the ole "Show me yours and I’ll show you mine" adage.
So the discussion then comes down to going offline all together (which no one will do) or as this OP asks for: more regulation. Only that further slows down the pace of innovation and further entrenches the large players due to regulatory capture.
The article you post is a perfect example of why privacy doesn't matter. Do you think the average FB user will wade through that then erase their account? No. They want the value they get out of FB and nowhere in the counter argument is any suggestion of alternatives.
The tongue-in-cheek answer to this is that they all eventually get bought by Facebook or Google. Anything that poses a threat to Facebook or Google will fold for the right price, as a simple matter of serving the fiduciary interest of the investors.
The only platforms which can hold out are the ones explicitly designed to resist centralization. They have no pitch to make to investors, no funds for promotion, but the technology is there. Mastodon and Matrix are proof.
The technology is dead simple. Facebook, Reddit and Twitter are nothing but glorified shiny message boards. WhatsApp, Discord, and Skype are nothing but glorified shiny VoIP apps. The only thing that makes them special is the branding
IRL, if you want privacy, you avoid groups. I don't see why the digital realm should be viewed any differently. So there's a duality with social networkers, in that they may want privacy for themselves, yet a large reason for being on those platforms is to learn about everyone else. From a safe distance.
They don't make money, tempt investors, or entice advertisers, for shit. You might not want that to be what defines a successful business right now, but it is.
> The technology is dead simple.
Not simple enough (IRC/Mastodon/dex-$x). People vote with their feet.
When something decentralized provides a better user experience than one of the behemoths, and figures out a way to market itself into network-effect prosperity, then things will improve. Until then, don't bother.
Wether that's wise or not is definitely up for debate. I think we'd be much better off instilling a higher value for privacy than we'd be trying to legislate and regulate the problem away. Companies will find ways to skirt legal measures, but an evaporating user base cannot be ignored.
I don't think that is "very fair to say." For instance, you might also claim that "you average citizen" does not care about having a right to a fair trail and a whole host of other good things. If you have any evidence to back up your assertion, it's probably confounded by interference from people's other priorities and problems.
To get a truly accurate sense of how much "your average user" cares about privacy, you need to control for both the ignorance of some users and the likely sense of helplessness of others. It's weaselly to say that someone with undiagnosed cancer doesn't care about having cancer, just because they don't know they have it, for instance. To truly understand how they feel, you have to tell them their diagnosis, and maybe even explain cancer and its implications to them.
> I think we'd be much better off instilling a higher value for privacy than we'd be trying to legislate and regulate the problem away. Companies will find ways to skirt legal measures, but an evaporating user base cannot be ignored.
You could make the same case against antipollution regulation, and it would be just as weak as you argument against privacy regulation. Your proposed solution is fatally undermined by a collective action problem [1]. The solution to the problem of companies skirting legal measures is to either amend the measures or sanction the skirting of them -- both things that are often done in functioning governments.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_action_problem
How? How would you control for that without powerfully suggesting potentially desirable outcomes in any sort of interview/survey?
If the general public truly understood how much information they give up and how valuable that information is, people would begin to take these things more seriously.
Users are conditioned to allow access to GPS and Camera without thinking for the sake of using specific features of an app. Combine that with maliciously impenetrable ToS and its hardly surprising that people give away their information so freely.
Because the instances of tangible harm coming to someone from data leaked by Facebook et. al. are few and far between.
>If the general public truly understood how much information they give up and how valuable that information is, people would begin to take these things more seriously.
I think it's intellectually lazy to think that people disagree with you because they don't have all the facts. Most people are aware with the amount of data collected on them. They are somewhat bothered by it, but not bothered enough to make a lot of changes.
Not sure what makes you think this considering the fact that lately there has been at least one data leak outrage story every week from Facebook alone.
>I think it's intellectually lazy to think that people disagree with you because they don't have all the facts. Most people are aware with the amount of data collected on them. They are somewhat bothered by it, but not bothered enough to make a lot of changes.
I appreciate you calling out my platitude but it is funny that you decided to answer with one equally lazy. How do you know? In my experience most younger people are aware, but for people of my parents generation this stuff is a complete mystery.
No, we would not. We would keep skimming over the terms, keep ignoring the connotations. Just like we do now.
That's not great, but it's the userbase you (we) have to live with.
All i'm saying is that if what you were agreeing to was made to be as apparent as it is easy to confirm we might see a shift in user behaviour.
No trolling at all; can you give me a few pointers about how to research this? Thanks.
Your attitude disgusts me. Wake up and see what damage you and your employers are thrusting upon humanity!
Then you are in the minority. If there was a mass of people like you then someone could build an alternative and you could use it. That mass doesn't exist though. Most people don't see FB as "garbage" and until you recognize that, then you have a minority opinion (totally ok!) just don't expect billion dollar products to cater to your view.
If the unwashed masses (instead of whatever Technorati that hangs out here) decided to call this home, im out! ;-)
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/social%20media
How is this helping to move the conversation forward?
> Wake up and see what damage you and your employers are thrusting upon humanity!
Privacy is important to me too; extremely important. Going further, I have deep concerns about the way modern social media manipulates billions of people.
At the same time, technology in general and social media in particular has brought tremendous value to the same billions of people's lives.
It's natural for us, by default, to most clearly remember the bad and reflect deeply on it. That has been a spectacularly successful survival characteristic through almost all of our history.
As to the good: I'm not going to spend time citing any number of positive things that would have only been possible with social media. Anybody who cares to have a balanced view of things can easily find such a list.
I will say simply this: what little valuable social contact my autistic son has been able to partake in has only been possible because of social media.
Does that single fact balance out all of the bad that's come from social media? All of the dangers and challenges? Certainly not.
But it's one good thing, among uncounted others.
tl;dr: Only a Sith deals in absolutes. Don't be a Sith!
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Until they want to bring to light government or employer abuses, or organize a union.
Because today on HN were two postings about Sci-Hub and Elbakian, why not compare Sci-Hub and Google Scholar (or Google Books). Both of immense value for many many people.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19558118
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19550282
SSN, PII/PCI, medical history, personal secrets, naked photos etc...? Identity theft is at an all time high, and it's only getting easier.
>Most of this personalization tech doesn't even work. I've literally never seen an ad so enticing that I've clicked on it.
Then why are they among the most successful business models in the world?
So, think about it another way. Think about how large of an industry pornography is.
But, is pornography really a form of "entertainment" and more importantly, is it one that people actually spend disposable income on?
No one, and I mean NO ONE, pays for pornography on the internet. People barely pay for music, and they had to be chased to the ends of the earth before that tide hinted at changing.
So then, what is the pornography "industry" reeeealllly?
The largest, legalized cluster of elite prostitution rings in the world, operating in plain sight.
As a corollary, if advertising only moves the revenue needle to the tune of roughly 10% or less of the normal operations for any given business, what must advertising really be?
A means to rationalize operating costs as business expenses, when you're trying to cook the books and hide money for tax purposes, and feed into a corrupt system of payola and favors.
A way to conceal exorbitant spending, such that it doesn't appear as part of income or profits. A way to burn cash the way you want, before the government knows it exists, and keep it behind the corporate veil, distributed in the business world for as long as possible, so that someone else takes the tax hit instead of you.
I realize that I'm an outlier here, but after each and every one of these examples, I thought - so what?!
We shouldn't be asking "is Facebook as a whole worth its creepiness" in a vaccuum, it's "is the difference between Facebook and other platforms worth the difference in creepiness?"
Everything most consumers use Facebook for (photo/video sharing, chat/messaging, micro-blogging, discussion groups, event management) can be done by other services as well if not better. These days, they might be under different umbrellas, but it's basically the side features of a Yahoo-style portal circa 2002. Features they had no trouble delivering without making undeletable shadow profiles of your garage bandmates, snarfling every bit of data off your Nokia 3310, and selling your political leanings to the Yeltsin administration.
The quality of the services aren't the draw. It sure as hell isn't the convoluted user interface and the constant rearranging of things designed to undermine any sense of control you had. The appeal is mostly "but all my friends are there and I can't convince Aunt Bobette to change to Mastodon." And that problem can be solved with federation and SSO initiatives.
It's not easy to relocate to another country. It's trivial to switch to using some other tech product.
and corporations don't pretend or even have to pretend they are some sort of republics.
Freeing yourself from the grasp of these companies is hard enough for the tech savvy. For laymen it is virtually impossible.
I simply can’t prioritize caring about something that doesn’t appear to impact my life in any way. But I’m admittedly not much of a principalled-living person. Too much internal hypocrisy for me to pretend to be principled.
Nevertheless there's absolutely nothing I can do about it.
Your question reminds me of the "If you have nothing to hide " fallacy
They nevertheless maintain a shadow profile of mine.
Would you care to elaborate how I can "trivially switch off" that they abuse my data?
There's not even a need for me to switch to another provider.
You can't call anyone at these new companies.
As an S3 customer for web hosting, I couldn’t understand why I was paying 10 cents a month for EC2 charges since I don’t use it. They just refunded me an entire month, but I really wanted to know what was happening!
It's not that I think Amazon is wonderful, I just don't think they're worse than any other giant corporation I've dealt with. Which is why I don't understand jdsully's comment.
Having a first-tier CSR click a dashboard button costs them the 10 cents per month plus 25 cents of labour to pay the guy to read the complaint, find the button, and press it.
Opening a ticket for a well-paid engineer to actually dissect the billing system and figure out where the 10 cent charge comes from, develop a fix, push it through validation and deploy it, probably costs $300.
Though i’d Estimate a fix costs at least 10x $300, if not 100-1000x.
Even then they were non-committal about fixing it despite the person making multiple fraudulent purchases.
With AT&T I tried for over a month to get internet installed and after hours of phone calls and them telling me a technician was coming they eventually revealed the billing department had flagged us and wanted a larger deposit for some reason. The two systems seemed totally separate.
Companies don't have to be feudalism in microcosm by definition, it just so happens that aristocratic ownership tends towards oligarchic governance.
I don't even bother with bigger tech companies, including Valve. Getting completely senseless automated and canned responses just makes my blood boil and certainly doesn't resolve anything.
Another pet peevee are automated A (not very) I chat bots.
If you want to have a truly horrendous experience try Air Asia's automated customer "support".
We call it valuable data to feel good about it and indignant about howe we're treated. Coming face-to-face with the possibility that our individual data is worth essentially nothing is uncomfortable.
You're completely right, of course. One user's data isn't worthless and should never be dismissed. Yet in financial and practical terms its value far closer to zero than to any useful unit of account.
The problem is a lot deeper: https://qbix.com/blog
Now it seems that we have technology behemoths superceding government and centralizing control of our economies.
I like to call them "technopolies". They are successful largely because they are so all-encompassing over particular areas. The problem is that they are private profit driven entities and so the playing field, though large, is not fair, and core functions lack competition.
Eventually all-encompassing decentralized public technology platforms should be able to supercede the technopolies. This way we can have systems that operate holistically in a way with majority networks but without the private centralization of control.
That is not to say that it is going to be easy. But it's the only viable paradigm that could replace the Iron Cage.
This is like an oil company spilling billions of barrels of oil into a sensitive habitat, and then the predictably excoriating hyperbolic complaints and disclaims of surprise. Oh, how could they extract that oil from the ocean floor, from the thousands of oil platforms that we've known have existed for decades! But in fact, we know they're there, and we know what the consequences are. So we go on social media and read these posts about how terrible the spill is, and cry-emoji over the birds covered in oil. And then we go fill up with 87 octane.
Over the course of the last decade (I got a flip phone in high school, smartphone in college, facebook my freshman year, instagram right after college) I feel pretty confident saying, "I didn't know." I don't think it's embarrassing and I don't think I'm alone. It's a big, complicated problem. BTW I went to Stanford and worked in startups. I think I'm a bright, open-minded, curious person.
To your second point: How do you recommend that we respond to environmental degradation? Or should we all look away?
I'm fully off social media and smartphones. On a day to day basis, I'm not being listened to and watched, at least as far as I know. I try to "vote with my behavior" so to speak, but it's tough. I'm concerned, for example, that not having a LinkedIn account is slowing down my career.