Losing the war against surveillance capitalism letting Big Tech frame the debate

More importantly though, less technological tracking of customers in the past totally does not matter at all.

What matters is if your competitors have access to these tools. This is a reality of modern business so unless a data law perfectly eliminates this possible data capture for all businesses, any business that does capture that data will have huge advantages over competitors.

It seems like a particularly difficult law to enforce, and the unusually high penalties give these companies an unusually strong motivation to be as aggressively unaccommodating as possible, since every enforcement action is an existential threat.

These companies are already big enough that normal legal proceedings against them are difficult... GDPR proceedings are going to be impossible.

2. The Fed gov’t has ~20,000 laws, it has more than it can count, can you tell me that you haven’t broken a single one? Could a creative prosecutor find something you’re guilty of if they had enough information on you?

3. In 2012 (edit: 2010) target sent ads to a teen girl for baby supplies, the father angrily talked to the store manager asking why they were sending baby supply ads to his daughter. When he found out his daughter was pregnant, he apologized to the store manager. Target had a good idea the girl was pregnant because of the items she bought in their store. How would you like it if corporations know details about your family before you do? (Pro tip: they already know things you don’t know)

4. Organizations are not monolithic, they’re full of people who are constantly moving around and organizational priorities change. Any restrictions on use and protections will be ignored eventually and changed in privacy policies, which they have complete discretion to change.

5. The world is filled with clever and unscrupulous people, they will never stop finding ways to use your data in ways we can’t imagine, not all of them will be in your favor.

Let's take a concrete example : the cambridge analytica case ... Let's say for the sake of argument I've determined that blue collar workers between the age of 30 and 40 that are in major cities have a 40 to 60 percent chance of voting Republican now if take all of those that have been to a church once or have a close relative that have and bombard them with ads showing how the democrat candidate is supporting abortion for example (wether that's true or not) now the Republican vote have a much better odds. Of course I'm oversimplifying but this is not science fiction this was done with a very good efficiency in different countries and it's just one example ...

Let me tell you a story. During communism, my grandmother openly disparaged our great and beloved leader Janos Kadar (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%A1nos_K%C3%A1d%C3%A1r) in our town. She was called in to Budapest, to a police station where it was known that tortures as punishments to political enemies happen. She was asked if she really said X/Y/Z about Kadar. She went on a loud rant about how Kadar is [insert disparaging comments here]. The policeman went pale and ordered the crazy women to be taken away and sent back to her town before anyone even hears such heresy - to their judgement, the woman was obviously crazy to show such defiance in that political climate.

If you think that kind of society won't ever happen during the next X thousand years while the elite have unlimited power to surveil, and if it does we will ever have any chance of breaking out of it - well, I would like to advise you to never go near casinos.

Edit: corrected genders, no genders in my language.

... Google knows."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_data_breaches

1. (Some) people will act against your best interest for their own gain (most often to get money, but, sometimes, to undermine people or ideas they do not like)

2. There are always things that you believe/stand for (pro-abortion, pro-BLM, anti-vaccine, anti-pesticide, pro-house garden, etc.) that someone somewhere disagrees with. These are increasingly identifiable and actionable on.

3. There are always traits (skin color, medical disposition, height, IQ, etc.) that are identifiable and therefore actionable on.

4. Modern data collection is much less visible and obvious than it's ever been. This means the people doing this collection and the people acting on this data are subject to less societal and legal pushback than before, and receive this pushback much later along the line (meaning they can build more momentum behind whatever they're doing before getting called out, if they ever are)

5. Data is never secure indefinitely. Eventually, there's a good chance it's sold to the highest bidder, regardless of who that bidder is or what their intentions are.

With the above assumptions, we can see people are more empowered to discriminate against and take advantage of others. They are also more easily able to remove civil liberties without getting called out.

I think some people believe that the people who would do this kind of thing are few and far between, but it only takes one person with weird ideas and some clout getting this kind of capability to make life miserable for a group of people. And people probably underestimate the number of people with low empathy in the population.

Here is an extreme but real world example of what can happen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dehomag

Data harvesting and processing technologies were what enabled the efficiency of the holocaust.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust

1. There is symmetry of information in the economy (users will know when their data is being monetized)

2. There are many providers of a service with different offerings

3. The services are commoditized (there is nothing keeping me from interchanging one for the other)

None of those assumptions are true for all services and only a few services may meet all 3. #1 is the least true IMO and if you want it, it’s something you’ll have to pass legislation and regulate for. There’s not much you can do for #2 except make it easier for people to make services, sometimes economies of scale and network effects mean that it will only make economic sense for there to be 1 player in a market, in that case there should be heavy oversight on that player, such is the case with public utilities. #3 would require standardization, this can be done by industry, but they have every incentive at this point to silo their users. Public and Gov’t pressure could make this happen similar to the formation of the MPAA as a hedge the movie industry made against gov’t regulation.

https://youtu.be/5pFX2P7JLwA

I understand your concern and don't know how to fix it. Click to consent does not distinguish terms. Would it help if there was a requirement to display rating like "PG-13" or Energy Star?

that's not immediately obvious. power is divided in government, and ultimately rests collectively in the people. you'd expect the power expressed is exactly the accumulation of the tiny amounts each of us delegate to government. it's not perfect, but all the little divisions and mechanisms of check and balance are there specifically to prevent undue amplification.

certainly the government has coercive power and we must be vigilant, but make no mistake, corporations are power structures that collaborate with and coerce the government into offense against the less powerful (minorities, women, etc.). who but the moneyed owners do you think try to distort and amplify their voice through government? it's not the average person that citizen's united benefits.

the indirection of the corporate form is designed specifically to make it difficult to parse out their influence (and mistakenly place trust in them). they're designed specifically to insulate owners, to the benefit of no one else (governments be damned where they can get away with it).

that there are assholes everywhere, including every corporation, who would discriminate against trivial shit is exactly why you want dispersed power across any structure or institution.

During the lockdown, schools decided to force kids to install spyware and malware on their own devices. Literal hijacking of everything you do on the device and then pushed a COC on what you can and cannot do on that device.

In developed countries or rich places, you might afford privacy but free services or traps offered by big companies see widespread use in developing countries. Schooling situation is worse and they are profit seekers who will sacrifice privacy for saving up few $$$.

Privacy is not something to be bought, it's a right.

To give you one example, google analytics and ads. An average person might be able to block that on desktop by simply installing a plugin but on phone, there is no way to install a plugin for your browser. Solutions like [0] blokada are not well known. Most people don't know how to configure a proxy, change dns and they won't install a different browser. And then there are apps which are way worse than websites. There is a reason why companies push you so hard to use the app. Reddit, Imgur, twitter, instagram, facebook etc. Why app?

Also, windows, google captcha, amp, search, youtube etc. You can't escape them.

0] https://blokada.org/index.html

Yes. That is literally what I said. That applies to millions of people.