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"When Capitol Hill screws up, tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis get killed. When Wall Street screws up, the country is plunged into recession and poor famil

by 3xblah 8y ago

"When Capitol Hill screws up, tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis get killed. When Wall Street screws up, the country is plunged into recession and poor families lose their homes. When Silicon Valley screws up, people who want a pointless Wi-Fi enabled juicer get a pointless Wi-Fi enabled juicer. Which by all accounts makes pretty good juice." When Silicon Valley succeeds consumers get mass surveillance of the minutiae of their lives. Contrary to the author's statement, there is a point to the Wi-Fi enabled juicer. For one, it can continuously gather data and can transfer it over a network to an organization that can use it strategically/monetize it.

cm2012 8y ago
The most common outcome of this terrifying mass surveillance is people are shown ads more relevant to them. Most people are rationally fine with this. The government doesn't need ad cookies to track you.
- deogeo 8y ago
  s/people are shown ads more relevant to them/people are better manipulated by ads Plus the information and therefore power asymmetry between people and corporations increases. Imagine a business-to-business 'analytics' service to identify or predict insider threats such as whistleblowers or labor organizers. Background checks already get help from the private sector - this is just the logical next step. I'm sure they'll think of many more uses, if they haven't already.
- 3xblah 8y ago
  The objective of the comment was not to compare outcomes. I am not sure we even know the eventual purpose or outcome of surveillance because we are still in the nascent stages - it is very much a work in progress. The objective of the comment was to address the author's deceptive use of the term "pointless".
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- throwaway_9168 8y ago
  The "most common outcome" is probably a superficial way to analyze this. Considering all this surveillance is being done in a pretty underhanded way (else why so many dark UX patterns?), and it is basically impossible to get the full picture (are FB, Google, Amazon, LinkedIn etc going to allow audits of the data they collect?), and companies cannot stop lying to their advertisers (e.g. fake video views), to governments (the lie that FB + Whatsapp data cannot be mapped to each other), to people (getting children to click on innocuous looking buttons and charging them money), I think the need of the hour is a wildly speculative analysis of all possible worst case scenarios. Also, have you noticed the general "oh, what can we do now? It is too late" response to a lot of outrageous things because we didn't see what was coming? More correctly, we refused to consider worst case scenarios? For example, if people knew Facebook was calling outright theft as "friendly fraud", what would have happened to their IPO? Would advertisers have been willing to trust FB with their money? Would the governments be OK with allowing them to acquire whatever company they wanted? Why is there such a long lag between the occurrence of an event and the time when it comes to light? When companies have this kind of a track record, the last thing you want to do is to look at the most common outcome and decide "Oh, everything is fine".
- dalore 8y ago
  That's not the only thing about mass surveillance by corporate entities. Say an investment firm gets a hold of people's shopping habits and see they aren't shopping at BigBox store as much, so they can short that investment.

by 3xblah 8y ago

cm2012 8y ago

The most common outcome of this terrifying mass surveillance is people are shown ads more relevant to them. Most people are rationally fine with this. The government doesn't need ad cookies to track you.

deogeo 8y ago
s/people are shown ads more relevant to them/people are better manipulated by ads Plus the information and therefore power asymmetry between people and corporations increases. Imagine a business-to-business 'analytics' service to identify or predict insider threats such as whistleblowers or labor organizers. Background checks already get help from the private sector - this is just the logical next step. I'm sure they'll think of many more uses, if they haven't already.
3xblah 8y ago
The objective of the comment was not to compare outcomes. I am not sure we even know the eventual purpose or outcome of surveillance because we are still in the nascent stages - it is very much a work in progress. The objective of the comment was to address the author's deceptive use of the term "pointless".
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
throwaway_9168 8y ago
The "most common outcome" is probably a superficial way to analyze this. Considering all this surveillance is being done in a pretty underhanded way (else why so many dark UX patterns?), and it is basically impossible to get the full picture (are FB, Google, Amazon, LinkedIn etc going to allow audits of the data they collect?), and companies cannot stop lying to their advertisers (e.g. fake video views), to governments (the lie that FB + Whatsapp data cannot be mapped to each other), to people (getting children to click on innocuous looking buttons and charging them money), I think the need of the hour is a wildly speculative analysis of all possible worst case scenarios. Also, have you noticed the general "oh, what can we do now? It is too late" response to a lot of outrageous things because we didn't see what was coming? More correctly, we refused to consider worst case scenarios? For example, if people knew Facebook was calling outright theft as "friendly fraud", what would have happened to their IPO? Would advertisers have been willing to trust FB with their money? Would the governments be OK with allowing them to acquire whatever company they wanted? Why is there such a long lag between the occurrence of an event and the time when it comes to light? When companies have this kind of a track record, the last thing you want to do is to look at the most common outcome and decide "Oh, everything is fine".
dalore 8y ago
That's not the only thing about mass surveillance by corporate entities. Say an investment firm gets a hold of people's shopping habits and see they aren't shopping at BigBox store as much, so they can short that investment.