Protip: if user privacy is a concern to you, then not supporting these companies (by handing them your data) is a good place to start.
Neither of these companies will create a shell profile if you never visit them.
If they are criminal why would you use them?
People don’t give money to scammers because they know their scammers.
It’s the same with privacy issues, people who don’t know what’s happening can’t make informed choices.
it's really distasteful how privacy advocates always assume that everybody who doesn't feel the same way they do is uninformed. the average person has a basic understanding that companies keep track of them online. everybody who's spent more than five minutes online without an adblocker understands retargeting.
it's not that people don't understand, it's that they don't care. telling people they're not informed enough to make their own decisions isn't going to convince them to start caring about the issue you care about.
Even people like my parents - who have been using computers in some capacity since the late 90s but don’t work in anything related to computing - had no idea that Verizon was selling their browsing data despite being account holders who ‘agreed’ to the T&C and received e-mails warning them that it was going to start doing so.
Surely then, the average person is much more informed!
most people i've discussed the topic with misunderstand how much they're being tracked, but assume that they are being tracked more than they actually are, not less. and they're totally okay with that.
> and they're totally okay with that
No. In my experience they are very much not ok with it at all but have absolutely no idea what to do about it. I know what I'm doing with computers and I have difficulty figuring out all the different ways info can leak and how to plug those holes. In many cases you can't plug those holes without opting out of various services entirely. We badly need regulation preventing this stuff because in practice you can't vote with your feet or your wallet.
"Facebook listening to people" wouldn't be noteworthy if people weren't creeped out by it.
These consent banners are a false sense of privacy. People who “dont know” are most likely just going to give consent anyway. It’s the same thing as TOS consent.
Then you would only see those popups if either your browser or the website didn't support or wasn't sending those headers for whatever reason.
We have and had a standardized way of indicating consent. They just decided to ignore it.
They are also a set of dark patterns. They annoy you so you just click OK, they make it sound like if you want to opt out you're the unreasonable one, and they hide the options as best they can. Sometimes they hide them entirely.
If they weren't intent on tracking and reselling that data, they wouldn't need to ask. They don't need to have these dialogues, that is their choice.
Which aren't compliant with the GDPR, the regulation they're pretending to comply with. The problem is enforcement has been severely lacking and the regulators are useless at handling complaints even when you do waste hours submitting one.
The problem with pervasive user tracking and surveillance capitalism is that is impossible to be informed. No user has any idea what happens to their data once it gets collected by a 3rd party, and there is zero way for them to know who has it now, how accurate that data is, or how it will be leveraged against them.
Increasingly the data being taken from us in secret is used in far reaching ways. It's not just about what ad gets pushed at us, but it's how much we pay for things, how long you wait on hold, what a company will tell you their policies are, what jobs you are offered, etc.
While you might find it distasteful, I can tell you that you yourself don't understand what data has been collected about you, who has it now, or what impacts it will have on your life and your future. You can't make an informed choice about what services to use because you aren't even allowed to know what the costs are, or will be. Jjust like how nobody who uses ubereats had any idea that data was being secretly collected by tiktoc or what it will be used for.
Citation? I bet TikTok will create shadow profiles for anyone who browses the web (and sure, somewhere in the 89 zillion line small print for whatever tools they offer to small time webmasters will be a carefully phrased line about how it might occasionally send small amounts of visitor information to them) just like Google does.
False. It's a pixel. It's not visible to the user from whom its existence and purpose is being deliberately concealed.
You want to be able to see that you are actually getting a positive return from the money you are spending on ads.
Literally criminalised? As in you’ll throw people in jail for putting up a pixel? Made illegal, sure.
Then again we as an industry and/or community don't seem to be doing too well either.
Not a trivial problem or policy space, sadly.
If they're acting so antagonistically against GDPR maybe , for some of the most egregious cases, throwing some people in jail will do the trick
I mean, whoever does the whole song and dance for rejecting cookies that shows a loading gif and takes a while does deserve it
And if you think I'm exaggerating, guess who has the best info now on the Ukraine war? Tiktok.
This is how you get a legal code like America's, where a cop and prosecutor can put almost anyone in jail with the flimsiest excuse.
I understand the impulse. But the solution to bad enforcement isn't ratcheting up penalties. It's increasing enforcement.
Then how come America, with its strict procedural safeguards, has that legal environment where people now feel unsafe even talking to cops, whereas many European countries with a more common-sense, less rules-lawyery approach (like the big fines handed out to a lot of privacy-violating tech companies lately) have a much friendlier culture with fewer obvious abuses?
Usually what I find is that the American companies/people usually try to follow the "bare" letter of the law, where Europeans need to follow the spirit, as this is how it is "usually" enforced.
And while the former might let you get away with "one weird trick" the latter usually leaves more margin to interpretation which can be both a blessing and a curse.
TikTok, Facebook, Google, etc following me around provides me no value on the other hand - in fact, I have no account with any and would not see their ads even if I wanted to, so it's technically in their best interest to not waste processing power on stalking me.
What's super idiotic in all this is that the "data companies bad" is often spread by the very companies which would rather have data themselves than their competitors.