I only used manipulation in reference to psychology. And there I meant it quite literally. Most recently an internal memo at Facebook indicated something litera

I only used manipulation in reference to psychology. And there I meant it quite literally. Most recently an internal memo at Facebook indicated something literally described as a "psychological trick" to get teen users to use the platform. It relied on actively micro-targeting and misleading teens. Real classy stuff. The word I used for general market targeting was exploitation. And no, in general the mere presence of stores is not exploiting individuals. However, if I see there is a large alcoholics anonymous group at a location and decide to build a liquor store right there because of that, this would certainly be exploiting individuals. But we need not just stick with moral platitudes. The issue is not the morality, in my opinion, but the active targeting of individuals. Want to advertise deals on nails beside a hammer display? Sure, makes sense. Want to try to turn as large of swaths of the internet as possible into data collection nodes to try to siphon off each and every detail of individuals, trade these details among companies to build even greater profile collections, and then micro-target as finely as possible while appealing to everything you know your profile indicates drives this individual's decisions? I consider this exploitative. I'd say everything is then a sliding scale in between, but we're already far enough to the extreme end that it's not especially far off to assign many of the major American tech companies to what should be the hyperbolic extreme end of that scale. ------- EDIT: Coincidentally enough, somebody just shared this [1] link. It's extremely related to this very line of discussion. Though again it relies on moral platitudes in that targeting children is somehow the heinous act. No, that may be particularly heinous but the fundamental problem is the way they actively target everybody. This is a quite demented industry we've created. [1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17750959 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17750959