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Your attitude includes an implicit "trust the smart people." But the smart people are proving again and again that they are not worthy of our trust. They find

by tomc1985 10y ago

Your attitude includes an implicit "trust the smart people." But the smart people are proving again and again that they are not worthy of our trust. They find bigger and better and stealthier ways to learn about us so they can influence and move against us in the future. Why should we trust anyone who sees us as a product?

rabino 10y ago
You lost me on how you went from "They find bigger and better and stealthier ways to learn about us" (which I agree with) to "move against us in the future". Care to elaborate?
- tomc1985 10y ago
  Facebook wants to take over your social life. Yelp wants to take over your decision-making over where to eat. Google wants to take over everything that generates marketing data. These stupid fitness trackers want to take over your workout routine. Hell there was even a connected vibrator that transmitted data to the mothership about users' masturbatory habits! They're collecting this data now to use it against us later. It is influence to them. Think about Yelp, or Netflix's recommendation engine -- both are very subtle influence devices that can funnel your unspent dollars into the hands of whomever they want, provided they show you the right combination of words and pictures to make you agree with them. Features like recommendation engines slowly build trust with societies of users, acclimating them to into accepting the recommenders' recommendations with less critical thought than before. Then, once you've surrendered your free will, the recommendations become bigger. The service makes a grab for more of your life data. Soon, many will have deferred a good chunk of their life's decisions to recommenders (because real thinking is hard!) and, broadly speaking, individual taste will congeal even more into a single, bland, profit-driven thing. (I do believe we are already partway through this transition already, and the worst is yet to come) Facebook et al are like drug dealers. First hit's free... and after that you're addicted
- tomc1985 10y ago
  Or to put it a bit more shortly, extreme data collection is a trojan horse, for a brave new world where individual taste, free will, and unpredictability are nearly completely quantified.

rabino 10y ago

You lost me on how you went from "They find bigger and better and stealthier ways to learn about us" (which I agree with) to "move against us in the future". Care to elaborate?

tomc1985 10y ago
Facebook wants to take over your social life. Yelp wants to take over your decision-making over where to eat. Google wants to take over everything that generates marketing data. These stupid fitness trackers want to take over your workout routine. Hell there was even a connected vibrator that transmitted data to the mothership about users' masturbatory habits! They're collecting this data now to use it against us later. It is influence to them. Think about Yelp, or Netflix's recommendation engine -- both are very subtle influence devices that can funnel your unspent dollars into the hands of whomever they want, provided they show you the right combination of words and pictures to make you agree with them. Features like recommendation engines slowly build trust with societies of users, acclimating them to into accepting the recommenders' recommendations with less critical thought than before. Then, once you've surrendered your free will, the recommendations become bigger. The service makes a grab for more of your life data. Soon, many will have deferred a good chunk of their life's decisions to recommenders (because real thinking is hard!) and, broadly speaking, individual taste will congeal even more into a single, bland, profit-driven thing. (I do believe we are already partway through this transition already, and the worst is yet to come) Facebook et al are like drug dealers. First hit's free... and after that you're addicted
tomc1985 10y ago
Or to put it a bit more shortly, extreme data collection is a trojan horse, for a brave new world where individual taste, free will, and unpredictability are nearly completely quantified.