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Comment by crispyambulance | Hacker News Reader

I don't think that enough people are aware of the fact that even when their data is anonymized and neither google nor its customers can extract an individual's identity, that that STILL represents serious problems.

We (the public) just don't have the vocabulary and historical experience to draw from that gives us enough perspective. There really was only one super high-profile instance of what this actually means with Cambridge Analytical and Facebook. Even that, however, is brushed off by many people.

There will have to be more examples of things going horribly wrong before people wise up and are able to understand and think through the implications of surveillance capitalism.

It's all just too abstract right now, I expect that will change in the not-too-distant future.

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It's sort of an open secret that google's data is not nearly as anonymized as they would like you to believe. I'm only familiar with how advertising data works, and I can tell you that many of their large customers know exactly who they are targeting. It's not anonymous at all.

They are combining google tools and data along with their own in ways that often violate the TOS, but everyone does it anyway. I think some companies have backtracked on this in the past few months, but it is still quite widespread.

Google knows how the person is because there is a high probability that person is logged in to the Google account (which is why GDPR and such legislation do nothing but entrench these companies further).

Advertisers can't use this and don't have any way to extract identity. User ids have always been anonymous and are now completely removed from any data shared by Google's marketing software. The most an advertiser can do is target a list of users but there are limits on the minimum size and scope of these lists. It's incredibly hard to know a person's identity on the web unless they are logged into your service and it's only gotten harder.

OK, but what I am saying is that even if individual identities _remain_ anonymous, there's still a serious problem with the acquisition of aggregate information about a population.

Users are pumping out their data en-masse and entities are buying it from the surveillance capitalism "apparatus" provided by Google and the like.

That might be just fine if these entities are just companies that want to sell us soap and pop-tarts, but now we're seeing that there are other not-so-agreeable entities who want this data and are able to use in ways that the populace would find repulsive, including being incompatible with what they think is democracy.

In other words, the scary part of surveillance capitalism is that we "lose as a whole", not as individuals.

How did Cambridge Analytical impact people? People didn’t feel the pain so they do not care. Pain was felt in the Ashley Maddison leak — Google and Facebook has a lot more info than AM ever did, if it’s ever leaked it will be world ending for many.

Cambridge Analytica arguably had a major impact on the trajectory of the American political system. I’m sure you can come up with some people feeling real pain as a result if you think about it a little.

I think what the parent you are responding to is saying that there was no direct correlation between the action and the feeling of loss for most people. It is all abstract and there are plenty others to blame.

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