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Comment by StephenMelon | Hacker News Reader

With up to 2 billion people already profiled by unethical 3rd parties using big data to spot the correlations between likes and behavioural patterns, the privacy ship has in effect already sailed unless all those users delete all the post likes, pages they follow etc. Facebook can’t fix this without throwing the advertising revenue baby out with the micro-targetting bathwater.

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There's some irony in the current situation. FB created the Skinner box that harvested the information, then essentially gave it all away to anyone who could write a "viral" app, from Cambridge Analytica to Zynga. The data's out there, and if FB makes changes to let users actually delete their copies, it doesn't matter for anything harvested before 2015 or so.

To use a wildly over-dramatic metaphor: this is what nuclear winter for data looks like. Sure, all the explosions are done, but the fallout will continue for quite some time.

I think your wildly over dramatic metaphor is still wildly optimistic in assuming that the explosions are already done. I agree the fallout will continue, but I seriously doubt we have seen the worst of how bad this can get.

Sadly you may be right, but quite a few of the major surveillance companies have already been looted: Yahoo, then Equifax, then Facebook. Maybe Google hasn't (yet, that we know of), but it's probably just a matter of time. Fortunately, other than the "psychographic" woo-woo promoted by various organizations, that stuff has a relatively short half-life, and it seems like quite a few people are aware of the problem.

Think of it like nuclear power: it has both advantages and problems, and it seemed inevitable until Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima killed it. What if we're watching the general public become aware of the downsides of the surveillance economy?

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