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> "we didn't share your relationship status with them. We matched you to them because of the relationship status" Which I'm sure is acurate, that's how adverti

> "we didn't share your relationship status with them. We matched you to them because of the relationship status" Which I'm sure is acurate, that's how advertising targeting normally works. Some years ago I read an essay about how the words we have limit the kind of phenomena we think about. I think the example at the time was about piracy and "stealing". Before computers existed it was impossible to make exact copies of something at zero cost. Therefore, stealing was morally wrong because if you take one of something, the person you took it from will have one less of that something. With computers the situation is less obvious. If you make a copy of something (say a movie) A) you're not really taking one copy of a movie from them; instead you created a copy of a movie for yourself, B) it's not clear that you're damaging their revenues either, as not all people who make copies of movies would've bought the movies in the absense of the possibility of making copies. Probably a more acurate picture is something in the middle, but the point here was that anti-piracy lobbies knowingly conflated "making copies" with "stealing". We entered the computer era without a morally charged word to describe an activity that used to be impossible, and instead they used one that misrepresents the new situation of things. I think when it comes to privacy we're in a similar situation. Pre-computers, "privacy" meant that (phrase A) "people won't know attributes of you", and that is absolutely equivalent to (phrase B) "people (in this case advertisers) aren't able to take actions that depend on attributes of you". Post-computers the two phrases are not equivalent: Facebook didn't tell advertisers attributes of you, but it gave them the possibility to make decisions which depend on attributes of you. Conveniently, Facebook understands privacy to mean the former. I suspect the reason for why Facebook got away with it for so long is that we don't have two words that differenciate between the two phrases. We need to once and for all decide if we want the word "privacy" to mean phrase A, phrase B, or phrase A AND phrase B. To be absolutely clear, I'm not saying "advertisers can only target you, they aren't being given your data, and therefore all is good". The only thing I'm saying is that the word "privacy" is lacking in a post-computers world.

perpetualpatzer 9y ago
> "Before computers existed it was impossible to make exact copies of something at zero cost. Therefore, stealing was morally wrong because if you take one of something, the person you took it from will have one less of that something." I know this wasn't your main point, but I think it's worth rethinking the basis of your (or possibly, just this essay's) view on copyright. A "copyright" is so named because it is precisely the right to prevent other people from making copies. When it originated (in the 1700s), its goal was to prevent the copying of books, even though copying--then and now--did not deprive the owner of their own access to the work. What has changed is not the invention of a new fundamental concept (making a thing like another thing), but the ease with which this can be done by the unscrupulous. If you really liked a poem in 1720, wanted to be able to read it, but didn't want to buy a copy, you could get it by copying it word-for-word from someone else's version. The effect on the author was no different from copying a friend's MP3 file. The only difference is it feels like "a smaller act," so it can't be "a big deal."
- fwdpropaganda 9y ago
  Ok, so it's not that we went from non-zero cost to zero cost, but instead that cost of copy is a continuum and the lower we went the more prevalent it became.

perpetualpatzer 9y ago

> "Before computers existed it was impossible to make exact copies of something at zero cost. Therefore, stealing was morally wrong because if you take one of something, the person you took it from will have one less of that something." I know this wasn't your main point, but I think it's worth rethinking the basis of your (or possibly, just this essay's) view on copyright. A "copyright" is so named because it is precisely the right to prevent other people from making copies. When it originated (in the 1700s), its goal was to prevent the copying of books, even though copying--then and now--did not deprive the owner of their own access to the work. What has changed is not the invention of a new fundamental concept (making a thing like another thing), but the ease with which this can be done by the unscrupulous. If you really liked a poem in 1720, wanted to be able to read it, but didn't want to buy a copy, you could get it by copying it word-for-word from someone else's version. The effect on the author was no different from copying a friend's MP3 file. The only difference is it feels like "a smaller act," so it can't be "a big deal."

fwdpropaganda 9y ago
Ok, so it's not that we went from non-zero cost to zero cost, but instead that cost of copy is a continuum and the lower we went the more prevalent it became.