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> In a world where everyone uses computers and software, we need to exercise democratic control over that software.
Tighter control over targeted advertising by Facebook won't suddenly help with crappy zoning or infrastructure projects designed to maximize the extraction of wealth from taxpayers while minimizing the results.
However, their solution, putting tech companies under more democratic control, does not solve the problems specified.
Raytheon and Lockheed Martin's work is under democratic control. As are the zoning policies which keep out poor and middle class citizens from the few parts of the country which have benefited from our economic growth. The companies that charge our local state and federal governments 10x what Europeans to build roads, bridges, mass transit and build other projects are very tightly controlled by our democratic systems.
Facebook and Google are not preventing people from building housing. They are not building tools for the government to round up "undesirables", nor are they building drones that blow up civilians. They are building technology that allows advertisers to more accurately sell people stuff.
It should be obvious to anyone at this point that this could be used for nefarious purposes. But so can any number of other technologies developed over the past two centuries. The 20th century was a testament to how much murder humans can commit when given the opportunity, and we did not need machine learning to make it happen.
It's easy to point to those problems and say,"Yeah, but this is nowhere near what it used to be!". If a global, location and interests tracking system looks like a duck, then it's probably a duck.
Disclaimer: I work for an advertisement company. Opinions are my own.
The problems America faces are largely controlled by democratic systems.
Google, Facebook, et al are neither the cause nor the solution to the problems described by the author of the post.
If we decide to turn ad networks into surveillance systems used to commit crimes against humanity it will be because our democratically elected representatives were told to do something by voters and they did so.
The tools they're building and the data they're collecting could certainly be used for that purpose.