If I get a random email from a company with a tracking pixel, am I ‘doing business’ with them?
If a friend shares my name and number with an app, am I doing business with them?
If a friend posts a photo of me on a social media service I don’t use, do they send out a PI to track me down and let me know they’re going to be running facial recognition tech on the photo which could build an album of me?
This is more the Wild West than a free market.
For emails, you can’t drop tracking inside that can follow you around, at best you can determine an email was opened (think certified mail, for an IRL analog)
If you don’t want your friends sharing your contact info that seems like a problem between you and your friends. Sharing contact info without direct consent is not a new problem in the internet age. That’s been happening forever.
That's like complaining that they are making you pay the balance when you didn't consent to paying off the charges you made.
When you get a credit card you agree to the credit card agreement. I just picked a random credit card agreement I found online (Chase Amazon Visa) and it says:
>We may obtain and review your credit history from credit reporting agencies and others. We may, from time to time, obtain employment and income data from third parties to assist us in the ongoing administration of your account. We may also provide information about you and your account to credit reporting agencies and others. We may provide information to credit reporting agencies about this account in the name of an authorized user. If you think we provided incorrect information, write to us and we will investigate.
That right there, in my opinion, is beyond wrong.
Aside from growth consultants, importance of privacy will be lost on a large and critical subset of engineers. This is why a huge blame goes on academics who train wave upon wave of new engineers with pathetic levels of ethical training.
Theoretically true, but what happens when all sites engage in spying? We're nearly there right now.
You could argue that I still have the choice to avoid using online services entirely. Which is what I do (outside of a small handful of exceptions, such as HN -- and even then, I have to actively put a lot of effort into defending myself).
But, this strikes me as being wrong on so many levels, starting with the fact that it seriously reduces the utility of the web and certain swaths of the internet.
Same here. Outside of HN, very few sites I will actually visit making use of outline dot com or internet archive when needed
As is always the case, rights are there to protect the weak from the powerful.
My choices are to simply completely disregard a huge chunk of the market, like messengers, I would have to communicate with my family on the other side of the world through some app that my parents or older family members would not use, I would have to train them because the massive corporations bought out all the competition, so I either suffer a massive pain in the ass on every corner of my life or I have to surrender my data. Because I have no other choice: it's my data or death through a thousand cuts over my life due to all the inconveniences when these corps sprawl over more and more markets with their unlimited cash machine coming from the crops of data from all people they sell profiles about.
Either give me regulations to never allow monopolies to ever hint at appearing in a free market or give me regulations about how well my personal data, something that tells a lot about me as a living person, will be treated, marketed, etc. It's a resource being extracted from me, so why the fuck can the free market bleed me out if they are also going to inconvenience my life by taking more and more market share?
The free market is an illusion, it's just an ideology. Not too dissimilar from believing in real communism.
It certainly makes sense in a space that is one - if you don't want to be tracked by e.g. an online newspaper, there are certainly plenty of alternative offerings on the market. But what if Comcast wanted to track you? Depending on where you live you may not have the choice not to do business with them, which means your desire not to be tracked gets steamrolled by your only available option - you're forced to accept tracking or be denied access to the internet.
Said free market tends to create weird customs that are not necessarily good for the most of us.
Someone once said radiation has healing properties and last radioactive items for healing appeared, oh well, on Amazon.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7TwBUxxIC0
and before that, there's a museum of the same stuff
https://www.orau.org/health-physics-museum/collection/radioa...
Note that I am not saying the regulator can not or will not abuse their rights. This is a big issue and I'm not competent enough to say where I'm leaning there.
I only disagree with "free market will lead to the best solution by itself".
> right to know if you are going to block/evade tracking
I don't get how looking at this as rights and intent does any good.
- Getting legalistic about intent immediately makes for more arguing.
- Asking for a right to know about someone's "intent to block" is... odd, and seems to set the stage for all sorts of messy shenanigans. How is that supposed to work, exactly? If you want to go this way, contracts seem so much more straightforward.
- If you're concerned with a "free market", trying to layer on all sorts of external rules about 'rights to know' just doesn't work. Asymmetric information is the nature of the market, and here we are, right now. If you want "freedom" in that sense of the word, be happy, you've arrived.
- users should know of they are going to be tracked (part of the value exchange)
- companies should know if ads/tracking are going to be blocked (part of the value exchange)
Both parties should then be able to decide how to proceed accordingly.
You're just repeating that you think some things "should" be the case. If they were, how would that work, how could it go wrong, what are the costs and benefits relative to other ways of achieving the same goals?
Policy is more than random assertions that feel right.
Who is responsible for telling users they are going to be tracked? Further more, whose responsibility is it to ensure the user understands the implications of that tracking? Whose responsibility is it to ensure that tracking is not abused?
Secondly, who is responsible for telling companies that their ads/tracking are going to be blocked? The user? If so, why? I don’t care one bit about the business model of the websites I visit. As a user, my attention has been manipulated for years, my behavioral data has been harvested, resold, abused… to be totally blunt, I don’t trust a single one of you any further than I can throw you. If you go under, I’ll find something else that meets my needs. I’ve already had to do that dozens of times in my life because it’s not like companies have any commitment to me as a customer in the first place. I’m just a big ol’ bag of potential sales determined through my data.
You’ll excuse me if I’m skeptical of these simplified terms, wherein you appear to propose me and giant mega corporations, who I can’t see, can’t sue, and don’t even know I’m doing business with, are on a level playing field. The information asymmetry is and lack of equal recourse are a bit hard to overcome in your simplified world.
As a notion user I’m now concerned with the data that application is harvesting from me, given the stance on privacy you gave here.