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Comment by Barrin92 | Hacker News Reader

I listened to the Econtalk episode with Zuboff and Roberts a while ago and I wasn't really sold on her arguments despite actually being personally quite to the left on economic issues usually.

The problem I had with the critique is that the answer to surveillance capitalism always seems to be a return to privacy. Big Business is to big, we need to claim data autonomy,be democratic, and so on.

I think the reason why surveillance capitalism is so successful is because people actually like the automation and transparency. There's always this "wake up sheeple" element to the critique that in my opinion just doesn't address the fact that people simply value the utility they gain out of these tools higher than privacy. I think the better way forward is to align the interests of end consumers and business rather than attempting to retreat back into private spaces.

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> people simply value the utility they gain out of these tools higher than privacy.

Exactly. I bet if Facebook offered a paid, ad-free version of their service, 99.9% of people would not use it. The monetary value of Facebook is $0 for most people.

> I think the reason why surveillance capitalism is so successful is because people actually like the automation and transparency.

(I still have to read her book.)

They pay with their privacy, but the payment is not at all transparent. In a way, it already happened: if you upgraded to Windows 10 for free back in the days (before GDPR), you paid with your privacy. If you use Android instead of iOS, you have a cheaper device, but you pay with your privacy. The Apple tax is high in a lot of countries. Too high for the masses. In essence, an iOS device is a status symbol that you paid with money instead of your privacy.

>but you pay with your privacy

And I think that's a perfectly okay choice to make. I don't know why I shouldn't pay with my information, given that I'm aware of it. I'm fine with having an android phone and using the few hundred bucks I save on something else.

My information has some value, and by trading that information to a company that provides me with a service I get something out of it. If I keep data private that I don't mind sharing and instead would say, pay with cash, I'd lose out on getting some value out of my data.

Now I think there is an interesting discussion to be had if users could organise to leverage the value they get out of their data, people have talked about a sort of 'data union' to collectively bargain for a higher return, but in principle I don't mind using my data as a currency.

> despite actually being personally quite to the left on economic issues usually.

in my experience with internet comments people often say this to pander. so: could you elaborate?

In my opinion it's coming from the other side - people have no idea what can be assumed from their data, that they can be manipulated

Manipulated in what ways? Advertisement is manipulation when it's successful. Asking users for a monthly subscription is manipulation when successful. Do we create a pop-up banner for each site and app listing out how data is used, so people can click X on those?

Transparency of data use is important, but simply saying people don't know isn't going to help. It seems like people want to shove transparency of data use in everyone's face until no one uses that software anymore. What is the win in this situation?

why does there need to be a winning situation? I think the entire point when taking the position of privacy is that you should not be using this software because the down stream effect is more damaging than the potential gains from the software.

All that being said if we’ve learned anything from software messages is that no one will ever read them. We trained ourselves 25 years ago blindly dismissing nonsense error messages on windows.

A strawman argument.

Some of us insist you can have these "services" without sacrificing privacy.

You can have these services without sacrificing privacy, but you have to pay a monthly subscription fee. Here's one example:

https://mewe.com/

In addition to that, a further problem is the assumption that "privacy" is somehow inherently what we all want. No one wants to be "spied on" (which is how privacy-advocates portray this isse), but they're somehow OK with all this data being collected about them. Privacy-proponents seem to equate the two and use the former as a scare-tactic; but a lot of people just don't buy it. I don't buy it, and frankly, I'm quite disappointed at the lengths with which we are actively manipulated under the guise of "privacy". E.g. HTTPs-everywhere, DNS over HTTPs, PII protection laws, etc.

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