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Comment by schleck8 | Hacker News Reader

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schleck8

Some highlights from the Wired cookie popup:

Audience Measurement

Targeting Cookies

Social Media Cookies

Store and/or access information on a device

Create a personalised ads profile

Select personalised ads

Create a personalised content profile

Select personalised content

Measure ad performance

Measure content performance

Apply market research to generate audience insights

Use precise geolocation data

Actively scan device characteristics for identification

Link different devices

Receive and use automatically-sent device characteristics for identification

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Yes, Wired is bad too. That doesn't mean Apple is somehow good.

I agree, I just thought it was funny to get this popup before reading the article.

But it's weird to say Apple normalized surveillance when websites did it long before.

Tracking you online, while an invasion of privacy, is not the same as tracking you in real life.

I don't believe this is Apple's fault alone (not mentioning google would be a massive omission and everyone else would like to track you too but just doesn't have the scale). But what is being done with phone tracking is much more than just cookies

> Tracking you online, while an invasion of privacy, is not the same as tracking you in real life.

That was true a decade ago, but time flies.

Websites can and many do gather various types of location data to have an idea you’ve moved around.

Don’t try to equivocate this away. The technology to enable it is software; software is everywhere. We can use WiFi to echo locate people in buildings. We know what we’re doing in technology.

HUMANS are paranoid by default in order to survive. We’ve seen again and again in history; new technology goes straight into agency control militarization. Don’t be naive.

We’re all doing it because we all watch each other normalize it. Mirror neurons and social obligations; sign up, sign in, consume and let us collect your metrics.

> Tracking you online, while an invasion of privacy, is not the same as tracking you in real life.

With the vast majority of our data tied to our IRL identity (thanks Facebook) with the express goal of causing us to do things IRL (consume product) with a very easy path to abuse (are you an activist, LE just needs to compel data from advertisers) - this seems like a very naive view in current year.

Your internet browsing is real life.

Where you browse from, what you look at, who you talk to.

All collated, filtered and condensed into a picture of you. All websites using a unique identifier to trace _you_ the individual across all visited sites.

Web tracking is much more pervasive than just knowing what you've read. It's a huge picture of you and it does follow your location, habits, impressions and other things in the real.

I think it's unfortunate that commenters so often conflate authors with publishing platforms. Presumably, Wired, like just about any reputable media outlet, gives some amount of editorial independence to the writing staff to isolate them from the business side.

In fact, the author in this case isn't even employed by Wired. She's a professor of Ethics at Oxford.

This raises the obvious question: do people with opinions need to agree with all the practices of a publishing platform to submit their opinion to it? I doubt I agree with all of Hacker News' business practices, let alone Y Combinator's, yet here I am allowing my words to be forever served by them.

Wired has nowhere near the power of Apple to change the behavior of people wrt spying

This seems like a deflection - every media platform on the internet relies on the advertising platforms of BigTech in some way. Ultimately, all your data end up there somehow.

Yes, it's not very relevant for an opinion piece how and where it's published. I could make a video that criticises YouTube and it still makes sense to put it on YouTube.

It seems relevant to me.

Wired is trying to redefine “surveillance” to mean people collecting and sharing their own information, while at the same time conducting real, detailed surveillance on anyone reading this article.

You might wonder if they being completely disingenuous.

Has Wired, like Apple, claimed at any time that it won't do so? Can't you read the article for free on Wired, unlike with Apple products that you have to pay for and still are subject to excessive data collections that you often have no control over?

(And it's the ad platforms that are doing the detailed surveillance - similar to the one Apple is working on again to serve better" personalised ads").

Even if some of you do believe this is hypocrisy, does it in anyway change the facts highlighted in the article?

Apple asks you if you want personalized ads in the app store and news app: https://www.theverge.com/2021/9/2/22654121/apple-personalize...

> Has Wired, like Apple, claimed at any time that it won't do so?

Do the stalkers ever defend themselves by claiming they never said they wouldn't stalk people? No, that's an utterly ridicuous notion. Stalking is illegal, nobody likes being surveilled by some stranger at all times. Whether they warned the victim of their intent is completely irrelevant.

If that same analogy were applied to Apple, it would be the manipulative and abusive boyfriend in this context.

This is fatalistic and wrong. There are plenty of platforms that do not sell you out in this manner (personal blogs run by ethical people exist, for one) and the platforms that do not deserve to be called out for their bad behaviour.

Ok, I get that some of you think it is hypocritical. Now that has been exposed - Does that mean the article is irrelevant? Do the facts change that Apple has been shifting and redefining its stance on user privacy and data collection to suit its business at the expense of its users privacy?

Apple has always been evil and buying it's goods has never been a good idea. I have not disputed that.

great, and which altruistic companies should we buy from instead?

Purism.

The pinephone seems like a pretty good option.

Super off topic but does anyone go through these with a fine comb and pick the ones you want?

Link different devices? No way. Select personalized ads? Sure!!

In top of that this is a WiredUK article. Of all the existing pervasive normalized surveillance in the UK why are they targeting Apple for “normalizing surveillance”?

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