Adtech is basically highly-paid people sniffing your underwear trying to figure out what you had for breakfast. And they get all indignant when you say "hey cut it out, that's kind of weird."
>"The (body image scanning) technology is sent to the airports without the ability to save, transmit or print the images," said Greg Soule, TSA spokesman, in an interview with CBSNews.com. "At airports, the images are examined by a security officer in a remote location, and, once the image is cleared, they're deleted."
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/naked-body-scan-images-never-sa...
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2010/11/100_images_from_the_...
And an alleged insider discussion of how those "remote" viewers respect passenger privacy:
"Personally, in the I.O. room, I witnessed light sexual play among officers, a lot of e-cigarette vaping, and a whole lot of officers laughing and clowning in regard to some of your nude images, dear passengers."
https://takingsenseaway.wordpress.com/2012/12/19/letter-from...
> the images are examined by a security officer in a remote location
oh dear.
More seriously, at least TSA can at least make a proportionality type of argument, along the lines of, this invasion of privacy is justified on the grounds that it might save lives.
Adtech is just going to use it to try and figure out how to convince me to buy a motorized turnip twaddler.
I have the right to simultaneously hate and be disgusted by the TSA yet hate and be disgusted by advertisers and ad tech even more.
https://www.latimes.com/nation/nationnow/la-na-tsa-screeners...
Versus, even if we give adtech a similar benefit of the doubt, and accept for the sake of argument that they really could more effectively convince me to buy the world's greatest fidget cube, there's still just no way that such an outcome is a great enough social good to justify the means they used to achieve it.
(Except perhaps from the perspective of the adtech and fidget cube people. And, even then, only if we assume that they have a slightly deranged opinion of the social utility of their fidget toy relative to all other fidget toys. Or that they're solipsists.)
In the above scenario, I'm not sure that I see a violation of privacy, but I suspect you would. If you could enlighten me as to why, that would be super helpful.
There's also the security question. Data breaches are real and happen all the time. I think that the crackers' perspective on this subject may be, if I may misappropriate the famous IRA statement, "remember we only have to be lucky once. You will have to be lucky always."
In short, the mere existence of these pools of data is a threat, not only to people's privacy, but to their personal security. Even when you can't demonstrate that a specific harm has occurred yet. It's like hazardous waste: given enough time, it will leak out and cause damage.
OTOH, ads pay for a lot of stuff, so if you could delete the raw data after some short time, and only retain the model which was used for serving/prediction, then I think a lot of those concerns go away, and the whole infrastructure around data is made an awful lot safer.
Lots of your other points only really apply to the US (the cavalier attitude towards data and privacy, especially), so I wonder if this is something that would work better in the EU, because you do have much stricter laws around the use of personal data.
Perhaps from the machine, but what prevents a TSA viewer in the remote location from snapping an image of the screen with their smartphone, or wearing an always-on logging camera to the workstation?
This has to be a GDPR violation, I certainly didn’t give consent for them to email me, but people are still doing this kind of thing apparently.
I have to say that whole outlook isn’t as good as gmail, all the things evolving spam is super easy to handle with policies. I still have my old gmail address forwarding things that google would sort into “this is the relevant mails” part of its new inbox system, and 90% of it goes directly into my “unwanted stuff” or clutter or whatever it’s called in outlook.
As a benefit it also gave me a TB of storage and in browser office, and while I don’t use the office stuff much, I do use one drive to backup my photos because iCloud storage frankly is almost as expensive as the entire office365 account.
There are providers that directly exploit their graph by selling the PII within it, such as GetEmails[2] (and the publishers they source data from). But Google isn't one of them.
[1] https://developers.google.com/ads-data-hub
[2] https://martech.zone/getemails-identify-anonymous-visitors/
Expect prices of apps to go up.
Expect more competition and higher standards as this artificial funding model is removed.
The systemic advantage is simple, it's having a good product, eg. Search for Google or a complete portal ( Amazon, Facebook).
What got easier?
You'll see who's a freeloader ;)
Sure, not as finely-tuned, but that's not the user's problem.
I'd be happy to pay a few pennies or dimes for every article I open to skim or read. But I cannot and will not pay the 2-3 figure subscriptions demanded by every publisher.
There is a range of choice, all too high to commit to one, so the only one that gets my money is the Guardian, with a donate-what-you can model. The rest I put up with generally avoiding them, and reading only a few per month before the paywall goes up.
If micropayments don't work, I'd also happily pay a single subscription in the $hundreds/year for access to around a dozen of the publications, but no one offers that to my knowledge (if anyone knows of such a service, please post!)
But to blame the users when they clearly state their preferences at the first opportunity, and the industry has failed for decades to provide such an opportunity.. nope.
Try Duckduckgo.com?