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Comment by quotemstr | Hacker News Reader

> The more information about more people with more depth to the graph is amassed by Big Tech and 3-letter agencies, the more soft power is accrued over large groups of people, economies, processes and even nations.

Is there any evidence that Big Tech and Big Government are actually controlling people by tagging them in some database (which no human actually inspects) as being interested in hiking gear and cookie recipes? Give me a break.

What you've described isn't a concrete harm, but an emotion --- specifically, fear. Lots of fears are baseless. So is this one. We shouldn't organize society around the baseless fears of tiny vocal minorities.

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We call it stalking when an individual does it.

It should be, flatly, illegal to collect that sort of data about people without a business need to do so, and illegal to use it for any other purpose, transfer it to any other entity without the same restrictions on its use, et c., when it's needed (like: credit card companies and banks obviously need to know where & when you spend money, but they shouldn't be able to use those data for anything else at all—no aggregating and re-selling to others, no mining spending trends for investment intelligence, no targeting ads at you based on it, none of that).

Companies who track your information, including FAANG get regularly investigated and often fined for violating antitrust laws when they use the data they've gathered to limit or outright kill competition. I find it disingenuous to ask for evidence of some kind of vague "companies controlling people" when it's obvious that they do it on a larger scale all the time.

No, companies do not mind control people on an individual level, but what they do has all the traditional effects of monopolies/oligopolies that are not democratically controlled by the people affected but a handful of rich executives.

I'm not even going to go to the "advertising controls people" dialog tree. If it's not obvious why having the power of putting anything you want in front of billions of people is powerful, then I don't think there's a discussion worth having.

> it's not obvious why having the power of putting anything you want in front of billions of people is powerful, then I don't think there's a discussion worth having

There it is. It's not about tracking per se. It's really about control over advertising and information dissemination more broadly.

Motte: preserving user privacy by blocking cookies

Bailey: let's tightly control who can put messages in front of the general public

Is putting barriers into how huge multinational companies can exploit their data farming to cement an unchallengeable position in the market and kill off competition or dissent within the system "tight control into who can put messages in front of the general public"?

You are framing this as if I am somehow advocating censorship towards people, yet I am advocating the opposite position. Executives shouldn't be given a such huge powers of data mining and information distribution and ability shut powerless opposition and competition out. This is about preserving equal voice to all people, and preventing juggernauts from squashing it.

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