Data privacy is one of the least important issues of our day. People (especially on HN) foam at the mouth about it but are unable to produce specific harms Google and Meta ad tracking creates.
Metadata analysis can deduce quite a lot about you. Your sexual predilections or your political or religious outlook, for instance. Who you spend time with and where you spend it and what you do when you are together, for another. Who you care about, who they care about, who they spend time together with...
Not only do you have to trust that the people who have access to this data about you will use it only to advertise to you, but you also have to trust everyone who will ever have access to this data in the future, too.
You might dismiss that there is any inherent risk to total strangers knowing intimate details about you, but I personally think the risk of this is a "specific harm".
I think your stance is a version of "I do nothing wrong, therefore I have nothing to hide, therefore surveillance is nothing to worry about". With respect, it's naive.
Of course you must. I don't like it when people fart near me, but I don't have a "right to not consent to farting near me". Some people "don't like it" when other people look at them in public, but they don't have a "right to not be looked at in public".
> You might dismiss that there is any inherent risk to total strangers knowing intimate details about you, but I personally think the risk of this is a "specific harm".
It would be interesting to discuss the merits of this idea. Call center employees are often heavily restricted in their access to user data for the precise reason that specific harms -- stalking, fraud, etc. -- actually occur.
Neither real life or the internet are anonymous. We live with other people. But Google and Meta in particular have an amazing 15 year track record of basically never leaking user data. Various national governments have been much worse in this regard.
Maybe there's something more mundane and relatively benign. Employment or benefits withheld because of your tendency to procrastinate and watch 80s action films. Your grand niece is canceled because you held views considered problematic by her generation.
Your only argument against this seems to be that it's unlikely. Perhaps, but that's argument from personal incredulity, not an argument that it won't happen. I would love for you to walk me through a rock solid argument that it cannot possibly happen.
Or, you know, we could establish a legal framework and social convention now whereby you can demand data about you and your dependents be collected only with your informed consent and deleted at will, just to not have to ever need to cross that bridge.
Also all the data is out there and me and my family in a million databases. Just like in the 80s with the yellow books.
EDIT: Well, this was certainly wrong. I'm leaving this up as a testament to not double-checking my assumptions.
1) CA created their own data with quizzes on FB that people filled out and gave to CA. Even if you banned ad tracking sending people surveys and quizzes is still legal. The FB network only made the quizzes more viral.
2) The CA data was 100% useless for ad targeting and had no impact on the Trump campaigns (any professional advertisers can tell you this, it's not controversial). The big election interference impact was Russia leaking the DNC emails and other hacked stuff to string along the Hillary emails newsline.
Email, YouTube, calendar, maps are all incredibly useful services we are lucky to have.
There needs to be a line or safeguard as well as an option to pay a reasonable price for these free services to keep your data safe. YouTube is unfairly overpriced for the ad free option as are most of these free services.
The option to pay today’s kingpin isn’t any recompense.
Just publicly fund the services that are useful to people. If "government" (i.e. us) can pay for a square for people to meet at, why not "digital spaces"?
And if someone's thinking "but government will use this data to surveil people!" - this ship has sailed, they have access to everything that's not e2ee, and even that's not guaranteed.
Government is practically the only body that can be expected to follow laws and act with people's best interest in mind. Some governments even do, just need a non-dystopian one...
And yes, there's commercial space in government/local authority-operated places. That's fine, just make sure to boot those that decide to install the equivalent of cameras and microphones on their storefront.
And the relied on VC money before that. It wasn't self-sustaining financially.
Have you checked OpenStreetMaps? It may lag behind Google or Apple for things like shop opening hours, but I'd choose it 11 out of 10 times over anything else when going hiking in the mountains. Feels like every stone is marked.
YouTube? This one is a tough call. It was generating losses for a decade, maybe a decade and a half. Perhaps it should've been a publicly funded service.
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None of which require advertising.
To you. To others, it's one of the most important.
> but are unable to produce specific harms Google and Meta ad tracking creates.
I think that some harms have been articulated repeatedly. And I would argue that just being under constant surveillance is, itself, a harm.
But, really, this is irrelevant in terms of the principle involved. Even if it were 100% harmless, that doesn't mean anything at all in terms of the fact that we should all have the ability to live our lives without having someone constantly spying on us. Human rights don't stop being rights in the absence of particularlized, articulable harms.
> I would argue that just being under constant surveillance is, itself, a harm.
> There are many benefits to society from effective advertising.
It's not difficult for me to imagine abuses that could possibly occur given constant surveillance similar to how it's not difficult for me to imagine benefits that could possibly arise with targeted advertising.
But since we're not imagining and are instead providing examples: what are some actual benefits to targeted advertising? What benefit(s) should I expect to see from this targeting and where can I go to see this benefit?
1) you will still get ads, it's just lowest common denominator teeth whitening and weight loss that anybody can buy.
2) it would be much harder to subsidize entertainment that relies on ads.
3) New and emerging businesses rely on ads much more than category leaders to be heard of. Worse ads means a more powerful incumbent advantage.
With constant surveillance:
1) individuals are incentivized to avoid expressing themselves in ways which their overseers dislike, especially if an expression draws punitive measures;
2) a particularly vulnerable person could be worried about being extorted with information that's discovered about them causing some pervasive increase in stress;
3) otherwise innocuous information about a person might indicate a Bad Thing which is only considered Bad well after the fact but might still be used against them in some social setting.
Its only really important to a very small minority of the population. The rest of the people say they want privacy, but have absolutely zero clue on what that actually implies and take active steps to worsen their privacy in lieu of using the latest smartphone or smartphone app.
This argument is absolutely a No True Scotsman. Just because they don't Truly Want privacy doesn't mean they're not expressing that they want privacy.
For example, if you do something so benign as use an Iphone, you don't care about privacy. Monitor all the network traffic that iPhone sends back to apple if you want to see why. Apple absolutely tracks all the stuff that you do on your device. Thats not privacy.
I have learned the exact opposite. That people's actions are often their unwanted expressions of what they abhor and truly do not want in their soul. Take any addict for an example.
Guess it all depends on how you see the mind-body and your deeper knowledge of human psychology.
You do seem to delight in the "stupid masses" perspective. But maybe that hides your compassion - perhaps compassion that most people's relation to technology is one of victimhood, learned helplessness in the face of colossal free-for-all cargo-cult of exploitation, dressed up as "choice" and backed by the total failure of the rule of law to protect them.
Anyway, just something we might consider before pronouncing on "what people 'care' about".
I don't think people ordinarily make that connection. Many came from a time when the Internet was solely an expression of generosity. The thing about "culture" is that it carries on even after the facts have changed. You're right that today (2023) access to 'free stuff' is a tacit trade. People pay for free stuff by allowing themselves to be abused.
But nobody ever made that bargain explicit. It was never announced, I guess sometime around 2000, that the rules had changed.
We've had two decades of false "choice" based on a fundamental misunderstanding backed up by a conspiracy of deceit.
> that is all worth more to them than privacy
I absolutely don't believe people make this value judgement. If they truly knew what they were getting for what they are giving, Google, Amazon, Apple and Meta would cease to exist overnight.
It is therefore of paramount importance that the "Myth of the Internet" continues and that all attempts to educate and provide new kinds of digital literacy are opposed by incumbent power.
Would the following statement be you, in 1980? "Climate change is one of the least important issues of our day. The few people who care about it are unable to produce specific harms burning coal and oil creates."
(Downvoted for the inflammatory mouth foam comment, FYI.)
If you were in China, would you feel comfortable clicking on a pro-democracy ad running on Meta? Wouldn't just the fact that Meta determined you were a good candidate for that ad bother you?
If all that data couldn't lead to real harm, then Google and Meta would have no problem handing it over to whatever authority wants it.
The answer is clearly yes. Therefore users should have control over the data that a company collects about them and their activities.
My data is my own data. Someone using it, along with dark art individual ad targeting methods to influence my preferences, is also the loss of my dignity as a human being. All humans deserve to be free of such coercive manipulation.
The fact that big economic firms are the ones doing this, is doubly problematic because our "democratic"-capitalistic systems are to a fairly high degree one-dollar-one-vote systems.