For those advocating for more awareness of the loss of privacy, some more precision would be helpful. What Facebook does is not the same as a “surveillance com

For those advocating for more awareness of the loss of privacy, some more precision would be helpful. What Facebook does is not the same as a “surveillance company”. To throw out the term, with the obvious negative connotations, might attract attention, but muddies clear understanding of the dynamic flows of networked information that we are part of, and the incentive structures of the entities involved. I’m saying, just getting a clear understanding of what is happening is hard enough, never mind determining the possible consequences of various paths of action. There are a lot of unexpected, emergent properties of such a complicated system as the global internet, which has billions of autonomous agents as fundamental components. A prime example is the current examination of the influence of the “Russian Trolls” in the 2016 election. I doubt many people foresaw the current controversy around this subject. I cant think of any parallels to the phenomenon. Knee jerk reactions about such complicated systems, which from people influenced by the “hacker” ethos tend to the anti-corporate, anti-government point of view, severely misrepresent the threat environment that a common citizen confronts. From my point of view, the biggest threat to an individual is from criminal activity. People like to rag on Equifax for the security breach, but I don’t come across similar screeds against the actual perpetrators of the breach. The phenomenon of these large scale hacks of personal information is an unintended property of the current business, consumer, and governmental conduct. A “surveillance company” is a whole different category of threat.