TikTok tracked users who watched gay content, prompting employee complaints
wsj.com
wsj.com
> Catholic group spent millions on app data that tracked gay priests. A group of philanthropists poured money into a Denver nonprofit that obtained dating and hookup app data and shared it with bishops around the country, a Post investigation has found
https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2023/03/09/catholics...
The ends don't justify the means. a private organization doesn't get to spy on its members. They can ask you to install MDM, they can't peek in your bedroom window. We live in a society.
Whether it’s right or wrong from the perspective of the church or followers of the religion should be separate from our rules about privacy.
> This is about your view of morals as they relate to religion though, right? Legally speaking priests are employees and the church is the employer.
Everyone involved in this discussion is positing moral views that are independent from the current law. It's apparently legal for companies to sell their users personal data, just as a priest may be legally considered an "employee" even though I don't think that is what a priest is.
> I think our government system should treat them as such.
> Whether it’s right or wrong from the perspective of the church or followers of the religion should be separate from our rules about privacy.
I would disagree that the government should treat priests as employees, but regrettably I think this won't be a fruitful venue for discussing this since it's likely that we have too many different priors in this area that would take too long to hash out.
In terms of how privacy rules should work, I am generally inclined to support generalized prohibitions on selling/distributing user data without an explicit voluntary opt-in. Where I likely differ is in that I don't believe that in principle it's wrong to use available data in ways that I see as being moral. If a company has data that would prove one of their users is a serial killer I'd say they'd have the obligation to use that to help the killer get caught, but I also think generally in order to prevent greater societal evils that user data should be protected.
I'll try an example, hopefully it's not too strained. I think spying on people in their homes would be bad, it would be detrimental to familial privacy and unity among other things. But if someone happens to see into someone's house and witness a crime I wouldn't have any issue with that crime being reported. So I can say we should have laws preventing peeping toms/protecting privacy in homes while also not seeing every instantiation of acquiring information as being immoral in and of itself. Hope that makes sense, I'm a bit scrambled right now regrettably.
Priests within a religion are something like government officials and something like members in a fraternal or sororal organization (such as the Masons or Elks). In another sense they're like "independent sales representatives" in a multi-level marketing scheme. In another sense they'd be like enlisted or officers in a military. In another sense they'd be like executives in a corporation (who have contractual fiduciary, and yes, moral obligations that regular employees don't have).
The duties and expectations are different from those of regular employees. In fact, I'm sure most religious institutions have many regular employees (such as janitors, some teachers for religious schools, etcetera), who are probably held to lesser standards.
> Whether it’s right or wrong from the perspective of the church or followers of the religion should be separate from our rules about privacy.
Yes. Unfortunately we don't have many such rules when it comes to data we've shared with third parties.
I think society is better off if nobody is allowed to purchase advertising data that identifies specific people and use it to uncover their activities.
Possibly with the exception of elected officials. :)
Specifics of the example aside, are people really defending organizations buying private user data for use in employment decisions?
Sure 99.999 of cases will never get there… Its that Pesky one or two people who were disappeared as a result
Most people chalk that up to “doing business” unfortunately instead of seeing it as inducing existential risk where unnecessary
Regardless, the original title is much shorter.
I’ve found myself completely avoiding any article for which the headline is some variation of “person/people complain about something”, e.g. “activist group slams company X decision”, “politician calls out other politician”, etc. It’s lazy and pointless faux-journalism, and usually deployed because the author or editor has something the themselves want to complain about and need an excuse to do so. So “people are talking” becomes the justification.
I doubt TikTok had any particularly sinister motivations here (or at least no more sinister than any other profile-building), but that is arguably not the _point_.
There don’t tend to be laws against liking kites or airplanes, nor violence against people who like them on the basis of that interest.
E.g. there’s a big trend of congratulating companies for allowing users to opt out of Mother’s Day / Father’s Day ads, which requires companies to keep list of sensitive data about user’s relationship to parents. Similarly, FB has the “interested in” field on profiles… maybe some platforms don’t expose this to advertisers, but they all collect that data.
> maybe some platforms don’t expose this to advertisers, but they all collect that data.
They all collect interest data, sure. They could be blocklisting advertisers from from seeing sensitive interests like LGBTQ. I don't know if they do, it certainly sounds like a responsible choice.
> So I'm wondering where this "industry practice" is actually implemented beyond virtue signaling to the media.
Old people, people from other places, religious people, disabled people, pregnant people and veterans.
It's disappointing that the full WSJ link was submitted instead of an archive.org link, outrage bait should not be rewarded with ad impressions.
Watching content doesn't mean anything other than that you are watching content.
Edit: Breaking: Water is wet, tonight at 11.
Do you think, say, Iran's religious police will see it that way?
I get your point however.
The article is counting on outrage from people who can't understand the term watching.
I watch the news without being a newscaster.
I watch NHL without being a pro athlete.
On the other hand I believe that you shouldn’t be traveling to places which regularly violate human rights at all.
I can also think of far superior methods of obtaining a list of gay or gay supporting people.
Like any number of data breaches would provide access to.
Hell, I can uncover that data on 90% of Canada using exclusively my own disclosures from the last ten years.
I don’t know what percentage, but likely more than you think. Look at someone like Chaya Raichik (creator of Libs of TikTok) - she’s not exactly supportive of LGBT rights, but she obviously spends a lot of time watching pro-LGBT content to try to find stuff to criticise about it. The same is true of many of her supporters who send her tips. And there are other conservatives who obviously do the same thing, e.g. Christopher Rufo or Rod Dreher
With an annual average sample size of roughly 35,600 videos consumed per user, I'll rankly speculate that it can be determined which users focus on either exclusive "L" or "G" content when the partner isn't around, with a very low error rate.
I will also speculate that the sets which result are not empty, and that we can sort each based on length/duration of such "L" or "G" videos viewed consecutively by the unaccompanied partner.
TikTok slurps up all kinds of data from users in addition to this, leading to more detailed sorted lists of these users.
In conclusion, I speculate that watching content means vastly more than watching content.
Folks in the LGBTQIA2S+ closet living in parts of the US that are not tolerant of any of these groups.
If push came to shove, the Chinese government has a significant ability to blackmail a substantial amount of Americans in the deep south.
Netflix and Hulu have LGBT categories that they show (and oddly seem to feature at login as top category a few times a year, in addition to pride month). I assume they are tailoring that to my viewing habits.
And I would be shocked if they don’t track users who spend more time browsing and watching that category just like every other category.
Know Netflix, they will ignore my preferences and show whatever thing they produced. But Hulu does seem to pay attention to what I watch and rate and shows me things that I mostly enjoy. Netflix is kind of surreal as they seem to ignore all my habits and ratings.