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Serious question: have you met many normal internet users? At risk of being too blunt, "normal" people don't give a shit about privacy. I'm not talking about pe

Serious question: have you met many normal internet users? At risk of being too blunt, "normal" people don't give a shit about privacy. I'm not talking about people that hang out here, or on some irc channel, or pretty much any other tech website. I'm talking about the hundreds of millions of people whose primary internet activities are facebook, google searches, media consumption, and online email, in that order. These people are "normal", by number. Only some of these people are aware of privacy enough to set their facebook profile off of public, and 99% of them never look into any privacy settings past that. If you're privacy-conscious enough to worry about this, you probably don't even have a facebook profile (or at least don't have it installed on your phone), and that by itself puts you squarely outside of normal. Most people don't care. I'm sorry.

carapace 9y ago
I have, and you are correct, and still missing the point. We don't have the right to invade their privacy despite their apathy. That's what you and the other "level-headed" fella are normalizing: the idea that somehow being "a tech company" makes it okay for us to perform mass surveillance and manipulation on our fellow human beings. It's not okay. It's not okay if the people are ignorant of it, and it's still not okay even if they are just apathetic about it. There should be a big ol' OPT IN button for tracking, right up front. If the user doesn't deliberately turn it on (and no fair offering incentives) then they don't get tracked. (We are going to do it anyway, because they are literally too stupid to manage themselves, and they are too stupid to stop us.) I'm actually in favor of total surveillance (I wrote a whole blog post a few years back about how it's the "perfection of Democracy".[1]) What I'm against is the idea that it's fine to "trick" people into being scanned and tracked w/o their knowledge and explicit consent. What we are witnessing is the formation of a split between Morlocks and Eloi. There's a de facto privileged group that benefits from the massive asymmetry in the data collection and analysis machinery, and the "normal people" who now form a digital peasantry and must be content with what we give them. Maybe this is the way it has to be. [1] http://firequery.blogspot.com/2013/10/total-surveillance-is-perfection-of.html http://firequery.blogspot.com/2013/10/total-surveillance-is-...

carapace 9y ago

I have, and you are correct, and still missing the point. We don't have the right to invade their privacy despite their apathy. That's what you and the other "level-headed" fella are normalizing: the idea that somehow being "a tech company" makes it okay for us to perform mass surveillance and manipulation on our fellow human beings. It's not okay. It's not okay if the people are ignorant of it, and it's still not okay even if they are just apathetic about it. There should be a big ol' OPT IN button for tracking, right up front. If the user doesn't deliberately turn it on (and no fair offering incentives) then they don't get tracked. (We are going to do it anyway, because they are literally too stupid to manage themselves, and they are too stupid to stop us.) I'm actually in favor of total surveillance (I wrote a whole blog post a few years back about how it's the "perfection of Democracy".[1]) What I'm against is the idea that it's fine to "trick" people into being scanned and tracked w/o their knowledge and explicit consent. What we are witnessing is the formation of a split between Morlocks and Eloi. There's a de facto privileged group that benefits from the massive asymmetry in the data collection and analysis machinery, and the "normal people" who now form a digital peasantry and must be content with what we give them. Maybe this is the way it has to be. [1] http://firequery.blogspot.com/2013/10/total-surveillance-is-perfection-of.html http://firequery.blogspot.com/2013/10/total-surveillance-is-...