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Comment by noreddit323 | Hacker News Reader

Why the sudden concern over tech companies mining our habits?

Advertisers have been doing it for years, using government funded research in military propaganda that made it's way into universities after WW2 as marketing and journalism programs.

This rhetoric is something like "Kill this particular witch!" without questioning whether the belief we hold on how the world works is rational.

EDIT: let me re-state:

Why is the public conversation around data mining limited to west coast tech?

Media be capitalizing on the public mistrust in the air after the election, and government is leaning in.

Why should any big brand or corporate master be enabled to collect and analyze my behavior in an effort to get me to buy more of their widgets without my explicit approval?

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> Why the sudden concern over tech companies mining our habits?

Oh enough. There's been concern since the beginning, it's just getting more press right this minute.

One step at a time.

> Why the sudden concern over tech companies mining our habits?

Because tech companies have broad, detailed, individual-level visibility into our habits. Neither traditional advertisers nor the government have ever had data that detailed.

Having extensive experience in adtech - besides reading your emails I can assure you they have the same level of sofistication and tracking. Major brands know more about you than your spouse.

Adtech is still tech, and some of the biggest tech companies, Google and Facebook, are adtech companies. When I said "traditional advertisers" I meant old-school advertisers that were used old-school techniques like consumer surveys, etc.

Two reasons:

1) The misperception that everyone in Silicon Valley is wealthy beyond their wildest dreams while the rest of the country is struggling.

2) Trump was elected instead of Hillary

A very small minority have valid concerns over privacy and the reach of the tech giants, for everyone else, it's simple politics.

I think after the last election, the moral panic du jour was aimed at tech companies. Russian hackers on Facebook, clickbait...it's all lead to this. And the dialog is manufactured to make Google a villain.

I'm not sure who the bigger villain is here: Google, or whoever wants to cut them down.

More specifically, the political pundits latched onto a thing that has been around for over a decade. Tor has been around since 2006, and mixmaster is even older than that.

The anti-adtech privacy movement is not new, but the interest coming from mainstream political talking heads is.

The difference is that after the Russian interference thing, politicians realized all of this Internet stuff they didn't understand can cost them re-election.

> realized

Or, in a continued fit of misunderstanding, they came to that assumption and are shaping their narrative/attacks around it.

Well of course. The old school business class is being outdone by them.

The east coast media elites are now focusing on west coast rabble rousers.

I'm not saying it isn't entirely deserved. But they're not doing anything catalogs, grocery stores, and others haven't been doing for years.

West coast tech has the visiblity, the public is growing mistrustful, and are easier to vilify to people that don't realize the cell phone providers have been tracking their locations for decades (used to work for one of the top 3 in network ops, oh yeah, they could find you within a block back in the 90s). Or that Sears has profiles on their customers dating back quite a while.

You can see very clearly what's happening here. The evidence is out in the open. There's a strong desire by the media and the government to control the tech companies because they all understand very clearly that they absolutely need Big Tech to survive.

On the media side we have an aggressive campaign by all the major media outlets against the tech company. Look at how many hit pieces about Facebook the NY Times have written in the last six months. I've noted this before [1] but in just this year the New York Times has written a constant stream of articles in which they accuse Facebook of destroying democracy, working with the Chinese, and collecting lots of "creepy" patents . This sort of targeted reporting against a single company that has, in fact, broken no actual laws is without precedent.

And absolutely none of these articles mention the extraordinary conflict of interest wherein Facebook is the primary driver of NYTimes readers and advertising.

And this is just one particular case. I don't think anybody has done the quantitative analysis yet but I suspect if you did gather the numbers the last two years would reveal an exponential increase of anti-Facebook/Google/Twitter/etc articles. It's a propaganda campaign that I think rivals the full-court press the media ran to push the Iraq War.

And now we have these endless meetings and threats of anti-trust investigations from the government. Every week brings a new meeting or some new initiative or a draft executive order. It's all bluster; nothing will come of it because the threats are the point.

The end game here is not to actually cut anybody down. The point here is to send a message. This is no different than what happens in China. The government doesn't need to use violence. Intimidate and threaten companies like Google and Facebook enough and they will fall in line. They will play ball.

And so the entire point of this exercise is the Media and the Government taking the gloves off and sending a clear message to certain Tech companies: WE CAN HURT YOU BACK.

* I say certain because this is not about money. Apple has all the money in the world. You don't see them being attacked though because Apple has little power. They make shiny widgets at the end of the day. Companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter are extremely powerful. They shape reality. It's a power which was previously only held by the Media and the Government and they really resent having these new Tech-Media fusions step on their turf.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17387438

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