Needing to wear gas masks outside sounds like a pretty bad, tangible harm caused by a lack of pollution regulation.
Do you have any examples of similar tangible harm caused by lack of regulation on data collection?
Do you have any examples of similar tangible harm caused by lack of regulation on data collection?
People facing criminal charges for helping people in Texas learn about what options for managing their own reproductive health and bodies.
Is there an actual case where data described in the article was used for anything like what you're suggesting? The actual cases involve people reporting each other (a man reporting a woman he is dating for example).
Sounds to me like blaming the acid rain on the acid detectors
That sounds like a good reason for any women in Texas to avoid dating any men in Texas.
Having worked on this stuff, I can tell you that the data relevant to extremist rabbit holes is not what the FTC is talking about. Facebook learns enough from which posts you click on to know which extremist content to suggest (and then they intentionally do not suggest it)
I'm sick of events like the Boar's Head listeria outbreak killing 10 people happening with regularity now. Last year it was eye drops causing blindness. The companies don't care beyond the lawsuits they'll face, who cares if people die as long as their profits go up?
I'm sick of oil companies lying about the environmental harms they cause. Their profits are going up, so why should they care about climate change or the tainted groundwater their fracking causes?
I'm sick of seeing ads and billboards for corporations everywhere I go. I'm sick of being tracked because corporations can make x% more money with my data than they can without it. Installing uBlock Origin is easy, but we now have facial recognition systems with physical cameras in the real world. Can't do anything about those unless I just never leave my home.
I'm sick of people defending this behavior by asking "what tangible harm have you experienced?". The tangible harm is that I'm fucking tired. I'm tired of living in a society that requires expending so much mental energy just to exist.
I should be able to just trust (within reason, of course) that a $1,000 mattress will work for X years without needing to research whether the company is decent or known to be awful. I should be able to buy chocolate from the grocery store without needing to research whether the corporation (or any of its 24 parents and subsidiaries) used slave labor to produce it. I shouldn't need to worry about bottled water being stolen from aquifers by corporations that will simply move on after destroying the communities that depend on that water.
I vote, because it's all I can do, but that accomplishes nothing because we're stuck in a two-party system that won't let me vote for a candidate far enough left to actually fix things. Instead we continue to maintain the status quo, because corporations have more money and political power than civilians.
I'm well aware that this reads like an overdramatic manifesto. I'm just sick of everything feeling like it's getting worse all the time, and it seems pretty causally linked to the rise of corporations. Is it too much to ask that I be able to live without them invading _every single aspect of my life_? I don't think it is, but I think we're too far gone at this point for it to ever change.
No, it reads like you are reading my mind. Well said, especially the point that this is _every single aspect_ not just an infraction here and there.
100 years ago well before the invention of so-called surveillance capitalism, people were making soft drinks out of radium, and inhaling asbestos.
Many things are better since then. Some new things are probably worse, but every reasonable measure of human welfare suggests we are better off than we were previously.
Something some subset of us are worried about right now, whether it’s WiFi or 5G or Covid vaccines, will turn out to have had horrible consequences and you can’t really fault the rest of us that we didn’t listen to the crazies.
Just embrace panglossian optimism because the alternative is to just be angry and exhausted and indignant all the time and then you’re no fun at parties.
It's hard not to be angry and exhausted when you have to be a chemical engineer just to know what's even safe to eat.
So tired of people making excuses so that some billionaire can buy another yacht. Can we finally actually start investing in people and putting people first instead of corporations.
There’s a spike in teenager suicides, girls in particular. The phenomenon is well researched, it correlates with popularity of social media among teenagers. I believe that’s causation not just correlation, because social media didn’t became popular everywhere at once, they did gradually for different countries/languages, the teenager suicides spike follows.
Restricting data collection will fix that by dismantling the business model. Will be harder for tech companies to convert screen time into profits. Will even flip the motivation developing addictive apps: the more time users will spend there the more bandwidth they consume i.e. profits will turn into costs. Which is good for most people, except employees and stock owners of social media companies.
P.S. Personally, I prefer more radical approach: total ban of advertisements on the internets. Many cities did it for billboards, I don’t see why we shouldn’t do the same online.
I used data and ran experiments to measure and mitigate teen well being and harm at Instagram. I was not on the team responsible for this, but I worked on organic ranking and was responsible for understanding and measuring the impact of these things. I can say with certainty nobody cares more about teen well being than Meta. It's their future, and the success Instagram over Snapchat is essentially completely due to better positive interventions for well being. We measured this carefully with RCTs and had more data than anyone on the planet.
Overall Instagram is net good for the majority of teens across a wide variety of well being metrics, and net negative for a small percentage. Meta spends hundreds of millions trying to fix those latter, rarer cases.
You’re describing the status quo with online ads still legal. Amazon has 37.6% share of e-commerce; small manufacturers can’t compete. Google hosts 79% of videos viewed over the internets, and it abuses small creators really bad, with no ways to appeal or contact humans.
One of the reasons how these corporations became that powerful was unrestricted and legal digital surveillance. Another reason, anti-monopoly regulators asleep at their job allowing big tech companies to easily acquire competitors (e.g. Google was competing with YouTube for a year or so with “Google Video” product, failed, then acquired the competitor).
> net good for the majority of teens across a wide variety of well being metrics, and net negative for a small percentage
Many researchers who don’t work for FB were warning for years. Couple years ago some of that internal research was leaked, here’s a copy-paste “Thirty-two percent of teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse” https://archive.is/qBpaq#selection-915.1-915.113 I would not call 32% “a small percentage”.
Another thing, “negative for just a small percentage” is a poor defense. Even if it’s indeed tiny, it still doesn’t mean the business model should be legal. Imagine a lottery where 0.1% people win $1M, 1% people win $10k, 10% people win $1k, 89.9% don’t win or lose anything, and 0.01% lose their life – don’t you think a business model like that should be illegal?
For identity theft you need things like names, addresses, SSN, W2 income, etc