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Comment by okintheory | Hacker News Reader

What a strange and bad way to "reflect" on the 2010s. This was not the decade that tech lost its way. It was the decade that more of mainstream media woke up to some of the issues with tech. NYTimes seems intent to prove they don't understand. Why else would you report rosy talking points from Thrun about self-driving without any countering viewpoints? Or include a long quote from the CEO of the company that developed Pokemon Go, without any talk of the issues surrounding the game?

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I agree. Nobody cared that tech was collecting tons of data in the 00s, or that they had military contracts with some very questionable regimes. Then, traditional media realized that tech was their number one adversary. Tech was revealed as the number one threat to the media's ad revenue and premium content distribution. They were not the allies the publishers thought they were. And, with all this user data and cheap hosting, tech enabled niche groups to completely bypass traditional media in getting massive influence (some of these groups were really good, some of them were terrorist and/or nazi organizations).

Tech poses one of the most existential challenges to publishers, maybe ever. That's one of the reasons the media championed regulations on big tech in the final years of this decade; "So, you want to make money that used to be guaranteed for us big publishers? Enjoy being the editor in chief, bearing the brunt of the responsibility for what your users read. Don't expect the 'just an ad platform' argument to hold water, we found that out ourselves the hard way".

(Disclaimer; I'm a developer working for one of the Nordic countries largest publishers, so I sympathize a bit with the publisher's reasoning, even though I think eg. the upload filter laws passed in the EU and other stupid laws lobbied by big publishers is enough reason to be furious for years straight)

Yes we were. We just did not all have handheld computers and widespread social media 'addiction' in that decade. Here are quite a few articles detailing privacy and data protection from the prior decade.

https://iapp.org/news/a/2008-04-data-protection-and-outsourc... https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2008/09/secur... https://www.geek.com/news/data-protection-authority-in-greec... https://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/30/business/30privacy.html https://www.wired.com/2007/12/why-anonymous-data-sometimes-i... https://www.economist.com/international/2007/09/27/learning-...

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