How Big Tech Built the Iron Cage
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
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.
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".
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.
The problem is a lot deeper: https://qbix.com/blog
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.