Posed as a more general question: In what ways can a company that handles the information flow of lawmakers (personal info, browsing habits, software updates, etc) can influence their acting by psychological backdoors?
108 karma · joined June 28, 2019
Id' say it's weirder still. A lot of people are well aware, and some even spout the wildest speculations about data usage, but if you actually go beyond shallow comments and suggest action (preemptive, legislative, etc) you are often met with a general "well, you care too much" attitude.
I get it, there's a lot of effort to be put in just to understand these matters, let alone remedy them.
Oh boy, that is putting it so naively.
The tricky part with "status for sale" is projecting some semblance of legitimacy. Specially among more tech savy and piraty communities (eg gaming), if you are paying extra for a free service and making a big deal about it with flair, you are just a fool.
They did a great job in integrating technical perks with flair in a continum; from audio quality, through animations and banners, to vanity URLs. And the boost system creates a ladder with different steps. And it only worked because of how discerning their users are (for contrast, some people are plainly oblivious to media degradation in places like whatsapp).
They knew very well their market and how to package legitimate status to them.
Remember when the Flappy Bird guy removed the game from the store because it was too addictive for his liking? It goes to show how the addictiveness of tech can easily be accidental. And then people complained that he did. Even when a creator says "please, stop, this is harmful" it will go unheard. So putting all the blame on evil corporate decisions is an incomplete picture, but it sells better I guess.
>And what they contained weren't glowing lines of code: Instead, Neil could see login screens.
I laughed at the thought of A/B testing new names of fundamental forces across different demographics.
Remember that nowadays people call soundless videos "GIFs", browsers curtail web adresses, and companies report leak passwords as being encrypted when they were actually hashed.
You'd still have yourself to blame if you naively believe everyone, but is it legal to present evidence obtained in bad faith? Can you blatantly lie and say the recording is automatically deleted after a minute, and still present it in a court of law?
Their first entry is "OK you hackers out there – you confounded us for a little while – but gamil is back!".
I see comments like this all too often. It makes it sound like textbooks were not supposed to be updated anyways. I fear people expect science to "settle".
Your social credit goes down, of course
Not in the least
It risks becoming a regulatory hell too for small developers to navigate. If regulation is weak, it risks becoming some pointless step in the way (a minor point in an EULA, or cookies-like popup) that people would ignore anyways. One way or the other, it's easy to spin as a feature: "Our VR set has a social focus (eg. we post your daily usage). For this, login in to you account is necessity". There. Now not only you need to log in, you are also publicly shamed for your usage just for them to save face.
Sadly, it boils down to human decency to make a human product.
Self-describing like that says a lot about a person. How is that unhelpful? What's the problem with simplicity? It was an opening statement for a long description about her personality, how could it have been more nuanced?
As a kid I used it as a way of analyzing the ramification of singular ideas, or understanding the complex phenomenons that interplay in technology. Eg, I would break down how a computer works (from the plug to the screen) to Benjamin Franklin, who would appreciate why you'd want to arrange silicon to make the thinking for you.
In adulthood they've quietly settled into the occasional "Man, I wish Kepler could play Kerbal Space Program".