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That invasive advertising surveillance must happen — or we wont be able to afford to stay in touch with each other — is a very common argument, but not a convin

That invasive advertising surveillance must happen — or we wont be able to afford to stay in touch with each other — is a very common argument, but not a convincing one to me. This was zucc’s argument to Congress for extracting as much personal data as possible from people. Surely there must be a middle ground between an app that people enjoy using being worth $570B and employing 25,000 experts to tweak it slightly, and being worth less than nothing after server costs. I agree with you that should a decentralized social media app take off, it’s likely to be less profitable, but I dont think that necessarily means that no-one wants to work on it, that no-one wants to use it, or that it won’t exist.

gaius 8y ago
That invasive advertising surveillance must happen — or we wont be able to afford to stay in touch with each other — is a very common argument Just yesterday a Google spokesmodel talked about “balancing user privacy against business needs” https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/06/29/california_data_privacy_law/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/06/29/california_data_pri... But making profits is not a human right!
- sorokod 8y ago
  Corporations are people too and profit is the oxygen they need.
  - gaius 8y ago
    Balance compliance with the law against desire to make profits, is the accurate translation. Pure Silicon Valley.
  - rusk 8y ago
    Yeah I love seeing corporations have their liberty curtailed in jail when they break the law. /s
- brainwad 8y ago
  The products wouldn't exist if they didn't make a profit. So really, it's balancing user privacy against user desire for the product to exist.
ff317 8y ago
Don't assume the cost of the infrastructure for privacy-invasive advertising is free, or that it's just automatically easy to do such things once you're offering some other user-facing service. Acquiring, storing, correlating, and sharing all of that user data is very expensive in architectural terms. It will vary by business model, but I would imagine anywhere from 20-80% of operating costs go out the window if you architect your systems to only offer the services users actually wanted.

gaius 8y ago

That invasive advertising surveillance must happen — or we wont be able to afford to stay in touch with each other — is a very common argument Just yesterday a Google spokesmodel talked about “balancing user privacy against business needs” https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/06/29/california_data_privacy_law/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/06/29/california_data_pri... But making profits is not a human right!

sorokod 8y ago
Corporations are people too and profit is the oxygen they need.
- gaius 8y ago
  Balance compliance with the law against desire to make profits, is the accurate translation. Pure Silicon Valley.
- rusk 8y ago
  Yeah I love seeing corporations have their liberty curtailed in jail when they break the law. /s
brainwad 8y ago
The products wouldn't exist if they didn't make a profit. So really, it's balancing user privacy against user desire for the product to exist.

ff317 8y ago

Don't assume the cost of the infrastructure for privacy-invasive advertising is free, or that it's just automatically easy to do such things once you're offering some other user-facing service. Acquiring, storing, correlating, and sharing all of that user data is very expensive in architectural terms. It will vary by business model, but I would imagine anywhere from 20-80% of operating costs go out the window if you architect your systems to only offer the services users actually wanted.