9 ms·

How Big Tech Built the Iron Cage

107 points by mindgam3 8y ago

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
malvosenior 8y ago
Completely absent from this narrative is a discussion about the immense value people get out of these technologies and what people like the author propose as a replacement. The internet and "tech giants" have given us the ability to put our thoughts out to a global audience, stay in touch with friends and family around the globe (for free). Take and store a near infinite number of photographs. Order a car to your front door and have the destination chosen before hand without having to negotiate with your driver... Tech is awesome, life is good. Yes the East Coast old media companies hate that they've lost their gatekeeping power but plenty of us would see that as yet another benefit of tech empowerment. The cost? You give up some privacy. Only no one cares about that. Most people don't have anything to hide from advertisers. Most of this personalization tech doesn't even work. I've literally never seen an ad so enticing that I've clicked on it. Normal people love their technology and the "issues" outlined in this piece and the book it's discussing are those of the old money elite and their loss of power, not those of the masses who are more empowered by tech than ever before.
- jimmy1 8y ago
  > Only no one cares about that. I really wish people would stop saying this. It is a completely idiotic statement. There are hundreds of people throughout history that quite literally gave their lives for privacy, as recent as one generation ago. Complacency and the silent majority does not equate to "no one cares about that" otherwise, you wouldn't have so many privacy centers and advocacy groups throughout the country. > Most people don't have anything to hide from advertisers. "'I've Got Nothing to Hide' and Other Misunderstandings Of Privacy" https://scholarship.law.gwu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1159&context=faculty_publications https://scholarship.law.gwu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=... It's a good read, and I hope it convinces you otherwise that privacy is as important as ever, even in lieu of fallacious "nothing to hide" arguments. From the paper, the easiest way to debunk the "nothing to hide" argument is to ask easy questions. "I've got nothing to hide." "OK, so why do you have curtains or blinds in your home?" "OK you have nothing to hide, so can I see your past credit card statements?" If we all have nothing to hide, why don't those interested in our private lives show us theirs? It's the ole "Show me yours and I’ll show you mine" adage.
  - malvosenior 8y ago
    My point is that there is no proposed alternative. Why is there no privacy focused Facebook or Google? The answer is that privacy is not valuable enough to most people to endure the switching costs and alternative solutions don't even exist. So the discussion then comes down to going offline all together (which no one will do) or as this OP asks for: more regulation. Only that further slows down the pace of innovation and further entrenches the large players due to regulatory capture. The article you post is a perfect example of why privacy doesn't matter. Do you think the average FB user will wade through that then erase their account? No. They want the value they get out of FB and nowhere in the counter argument is any suggestion of alternatives.
    - uabstraction 8y ago
      > Why is there no privacy focused Facebook or Google? The tongue-in-cheek answer to this is that they all eventually get bought by Facebook or Google. Anything that poses a threat to Facebook or Google will fold for the right price, as a simple matter of serving the fiduciary interest of the investors. The only platforms which can hold out are the ones explicitly designed to resist centralization. They have no pitch to make to investors, no funds for promotion, but the technology is there. Mastodon and Matrix are proof. The technology is dead simple. Facebook, Reddit and Twitter are nothing but glorified shiny message boards. WhatsApp, Discord, and Skype are nothing but glorified shiny VoIP apps. The only thing that makes them special is the branding
      - nilskidoo 8y ago
        I'd go even further and say that the larger platforms are anti-privacy by design, because their core purpose has always been concerned with data collection. I think the large online social networks are in the same vein fundamentally rightwing, because profiting from the efforts of others has nothing whatsoever to do with leftism. IRL, if you want privacy, you avoid groups. I don't see why the digital realm should be viewed any differently. So there's a duality with social networkers, in that they may want privacy for themselves, yet a large reason for being on those platforms is to learn about everyone else. From a safe distance.
- g45y45 8y ago
  I care about privacy very deeply. I care more about privacy than the 'immense value' that garbage like facebook provides the world. The 'anything to hide' argument is an authoritarian call, and a way to devalue personal agency wrt privacy. No, I have nothing to share. Your attitude disgusts me. Wake up and see what damage you and your employers are thrusting upon humanity!
  - malvosenior 8y ago
    > I care more about privacy than the 'immense value' that garbage like facebook provides the world Then you are in the minority. If there was a mass of people like you then someone could build an alternative and you could use it. That mass doesn't exist though. Most people don't see FB as "garbage" and until you recognize that, then you have a minority opinion (totally ok!) just don't expect billion dollar products to cater to your view.
    - g45y45 8y ago
      Of course I am in the minority. The majority of people on this planet have neither the education, interest or intelligence to understand the cage that is being constructed around them. Are you in the blissful, ignorant majority that cannot see what is actually going on here?
      - enitihas 8y ago
        Well if we go by your narrative then the world is anyways doomed. Since majority of the planet has no education, interest, or intelligence to understand anything complicated, their votes are not going to vote for solving problems which are important, but irrelevant to them. IMHO, unless your cause is important to the masses, it is doomed. You should probably think how can you help the blissful, ignorant majority to understand your perspective from their point of view to achieve your cause.
        g45y45 8y ago
        I agree -- we are doomed. I have no cause. I stopped believing in democracy a long time ago. I have zero interest in helping others to understand my perspective, best we can hope for is to slow down the tech parasites from harvesting their digital souls.
- return0 8y ago
  if this wasn't true there wouldn't be tech giants
- deogeo 8y ago
  > You give up some privacy. Only no one cares about that. Until they want to bring to light government or employer abuses, or organize a union.
- xorand 8y ago
  >Completely absent from this narrative is a discussion about the immense value people get out of these technologies and what people like the author propose as a replacement. Because today on HN were two postings about Sci-Hub and Elbakian, why not compare Sci-Hub and Google Scholar (or Google Books). Both of immense value for many many people. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19558118 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19558118 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19550282 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19550282
- 50656E6973 8y ago
  >The cost? You give up some privacy. Only no one cares about that. Most people don't have anything to hide from advertisers. SSN, PII/PCI, medical history, personal secrets, naked photos etc...? Identity theft is at an all time high, and it's only getting easier. >Most of this personalization tech doesn't even work. I've literally never seen an ad so enticing that I've clicked on it. Then why are they among the most successful business models in the world?
  - smokeAndMirr0rs 8y ago
    A. I've literally never seen an ad so enticing that I've clicked on it. Q. Then why are they among the most successful business models in the world? Perception management. It's a big lie that takes the dare to seem so big it obviously must be true. So, think about it another way. Think about how large of an industry pornography is. But, is pornography really a form of "entertainment" and more importantly, is it one that people actually spend disposable income on? No one, and I mean NO ONE, pays for pornography on the internet. People barely pay for music, and they had to be chased to the ends of the earth before that tide hinted at changing. So then, what is the pornography "industry" reeeealllly? The largest, legalized cluster of elite prostitution rings in the world, operating in plain sight. As a corollary, if advertising only moves the revenue needle to the tune of roughly 10% or less of the normal operations for any given business, what must advertising really be? A means to rationalize operating costs as business expenses, when you're trying to cook the books and hide money for tax purposes, and feed into a corrupt system of payola and favors. A way to conceal exorbitant spending, such that it doesn't appear as part of income or profits. A way to burn cash the way you want, before the government knows it exists, and keep it behind the corporate veil, distributed in the business world for as long as possible, so that someone else takes the tax hit instead of you.
- WallWextra 8y ago
  I agree. At the very least, there should be some dialogue on whether the trade off is worth it. I lean towards yes, most people think we can get the privacy back without giving up the advantages. I'm not sure how, but I'd be interested.
- bill_rr 8y ago
  >> The internet and "tech giants" have given us the ability to put our thoughts out to a global audience, stay in touch with friends and family around the globe (for free). Take and store a near infinite number of photographs. Order a car to your front door and have the destination chosen before hand without having to negotiate with your driver... I realize that I'm an outlier here, but after each and every one of these examples, I thought - so what?!
- hakfoo 8y ago
  There's value, but we need to discuss marginal value and cost. We shouldn't be asking "is Facebook as a whole worth its creepiness" in a vaccuum, it's "is the difference between Facebook and other platforms worth the difference in creepiness?" Everything most consumers use Facebook for (photo/video sharing, chat/messaging, micro-blogging, discussion groups, event management) can be done by other services as well if not better. These days, they might be under different umbrellas, but it's basically the side features of a Yahoo-style portal circa 2002. Features they had no trouble delivering without making undeletable shadow profiles of your garage bandmates, snarfling every bit of data off your Nokia 3310, and selling your political leanings to the Yeltsin administration. The quality of the services aren't the draw. It sure as hell isn't the convoluted user interface and the constant rearranging of things designed to undermine any sense of control you had. The appeal is mostly "but all my friends are there and I can't convince Aunt Bobette to change to Mastodon." And that problem can be solved with federation and SSO initiatives.
holoduke 8y ago
The most shocking of this all is that these big tech companies are communicating in a way you see in dictorial countries. There is hardly any dialog possible. Disputes are ignored. the right to a fair dialog and the principle of an adversarial process is completely ignored by these giants. And that is quite a bad thing. We see it now happening quite often with smaller but also bigger companies. Sooner or later even individuals will get to face the strong negative influence these companies can give. For many centuries we killed each other to fight for proper humane rights. Individuals but also companies. And now some kind of new virtual world is created where local laws are completely ignored. Not good!!!
- return0 8y ago
  > a way you see in dictorial countries. It's not easy to relocate to another country. It's trivial to switch to using some other tech product. and corporations don't pretend or even have to pretend they are some sort of republics.
  - uabstraction 8y ago
    Nonsense. In many cases, vendor lock-in and the network effect present a substantial hurtle to living free of these companies. Sure you can quit Facebook, but they'll still build an internal profile about you. You can also tell your mobile carrier to go f* themselves and get a ham radio - but unless all of your friends and colleagues do the same thing you'll just be talking to Major Tom up in his tin can. Freeing yourself from the grasp of these companies is hard enough for the tech savvy. For laymen it is virtually impossible.
    - brycesbeard 8y ago
      If you quit using Facebook, what does it matter if they have some bits about you?
      - cmorgan31 8y ago
        I suppose the general fear is that we are the product and we don’t know what we are being sold for or to whom. If they are so sophisticated they can infer behavioral patterns after you quit by using your still existing network of friends who didn’t quit then it’s a pretty useful bit of profiling technology with buyers. The only part that ever really mattered is how they monetize the product, us. It’s an unspoken agreement for using a service which has no transparent monetary cost.
xorand 8y ago
Zuboff theory that Google and alike live from the metadata exhaust, not from the data itself, explains the lack of respect for the valuable data contributed by the users. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/jit.2015.5 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/jit.2015.5
- Kalium 8y ago
  I've always found that the key realization is that on the whole things aren't "valuable data". Very few data points are actually valuable. We call it valuable data to feel good about it and indignant about howe we're treated. Coming face-to-face with the possibility that our individual data is worth essentially nothing is uncomfortable.
  - RickS 8y ago
    Individually, mostly valueless. But in aggregate, the emergent patterns are hugely valuable. Just as a litterer is fractionally culpable for worsening the earth, our data is fractionally responsible for the wealth of these companies, and for the same reason shouldn't be dismissed as worthless.
    - Kalium 8y ago
      The flaw in the analogy being that litter builds up additively. User data is more like a square law effect. You're completely right, of course. One user's data isn't worthless and should never be dismissed. Yet in financial and practical terms its value far closer to zero than to any useful unit of account.
  - xorand 8y ago
    Curiously, I don't remember Google or Facebook ads saying: "join us! we shall delete or hide your data. remember we are a private company, not a public forum" back then when they were not rich.
EGreg 8y ago
We need better software alternatives, not regulation. That’s how we beat IE, and that’s how we beat AOL, Britannica and so on and so forth. The problem is a lot deeper: https://qbix.com/blog https://qbix.com/blog
- kevingadd 8y ago
  Part of what undid IE was literally antitrust regulation...
  - EGreg 8y ago
    What about AOL?
ilaksh 8y ago
The core issue with governance that arises regardless of paradigm, in my opinion, is over-centralization. Now it seems that we have technology behemoths superceding government and centralizing control of our economies. I like to call them "technopolies". They are successful largely because they are so all-encompassing over particular areas. The problem is that they are private profit driven entities and so the playing field, though large, is not fair, and core functions lack competition. Eventually all-encompassing decentralized public technology platforms should be able to supercede the technopolies. This way we can have systems that operate holistically in a way with majority networks but without the private centralization of control. That is not to say that it is going to be easy. But it's the only viable paradigm that could replace the Iron Cage.
- bill_rr 8y ago
  So do you think it's more about breaking down the (centralized) big dogs or supporting the (decentralized) smaller startups. This Iron Cage is full-on dystopia. I really can't believe we're letting it happen!
  - ilaksh 8y ago
    I think we need to promote startups and companies in general that are built on public decentralized protocols. Breaking up monopolies without having the public platforms available could just lead to other technopolies popping up to replace the old ones.
peterwwillis 8y ago
These tongue-lashings of big tech are getting a tad ridiculous. Yes, how could we possibly have known that they were doing the things they said they were doing? How shocking, this surveillance regime, that took all the data we gave them, and then blatantly invaded our privacy, by reading it! This is like an oil company spilling billions of barrels of oil into a sensitive habitat, and then the predictably excoriating hyperbolic complaints and disclaims of surprise. Oh, how could they extract that oil from the ocean floor, from the thousands of oil platforms that we've known have existed for decades! But in fact, we know they're there, and we know what the consequences are. So we go on social media and read these posts about how terrible the spill is, and cry-emoji over the birds covered in oil. And then we go fill up with 87 octane.
- bill_rr 8y ago
  Did you read the article? No judgment if you didn't - just genuinely curious. Over the course of the last decade (I got a flip phone in high school, smartphone in college, facebook my freshman year, instagram right after college) I feel pretty confident saying, "I didn't know." I don't think it's embarrassing and I don't think I'm alone. It's a big, complicated problem. BTW I went to Stanford and worked in startups. I think I'm a bright, open-minded, curious person. To your second point: How do you recommend that we respond to environmental degradation? Or should we all look away? I'm fully off social media and smartphones. On a day to day basis, I'm not being listened to and watched, at least as far as I know. I try to "vote with my behavior" so to speak, but it's tough. I'm concerned, for example, that not having a LinkedIn account is slowing down my career.
bookofjoe 8y ago
I wonder if Shoshana Zuboff will be able to resist the 7-to-8-figure offers she's already received and will continue to receive from Facebook et al.
chrisbrandow 8y ago
I wish that these critiques grappled with the ways that so many of the services that we now resent were truly embraced by many because they seemed magical when they appeared.

107 points by mindgam3 8y ago

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

Completely absent from this narrative is a discussion about the immense value people get out of these technologies and what people like the author propose as a replacement. The internet and "tech giants" have given us the ability to put our thoughts out to a global audience, stay in touch with friends and family around the globe (for free). Take and store a near infinite number of photographs. Order a car to your front door and have the destination chosen before hand without having to negotiate with your driver... Tech is awesome, life is good. Yes the East Coast old media companies hate that they've lost their gatekeeping power but plenty of us would see that as yet another benefit of tech empowerment. The cost? You give up some privacy. Only no one cares about that. Most people don't have anything to hide from advertisers. Most of this personalization tech doesn't even work. I've literally never seen an ad so enticing that I've clicked on it. Normal people love their technology and the "issues" outlined in this piece and the book it's discussing are those of the old money elite and their loss of power, not those of the masses who are more empowered by tech than ever before.

jimmy1 8y ago
> Only no one cares about that. I really wish people would stop saying this. It is a completely idiotic statement. There are hundreds of people throughout history that quite literally gave their lives for privacy, as recent as one generation ago. Complacency and the silent majority does not equate to "no one cares about that" otherwise, you wouldn't have so many privacy centers and advocacy groups throughout the country. > Most people don't have anything to hide from advertisers. "'I've Got Nothing to Hide' and Other Misunderstandings Of Privacy" https://scholarship.law.gwu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1159&context=faculty_publications https://scholarship.law.gwu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=... It's a good read, and I hope it convinces you otherwise that privacy is as important as ever, even in lieu of fallacious "nothing to hide" arguments. From the paper, the easiest way to debunk the "nothing to hide" argument is to ask easy questions. "I've got nothing to hide." "OK, so why do you have curtains or blinds in your home?" "OK you have nothing to hide, so can I see your past credit card statements?" If we all have nothing to hide, why don't those interested in our private lives show us theirs? It's the ole "Show me yours and I’ll show you mine" adage.
- malvosenior 8y ago
  My point is that there is no proposed alternative. Why is there no privacy focused Facebook or Google? The answer is that privacy is not valuable enough to most people to endure the switching costs and alternative solutions don't even exist. So the discussion then comes down to going offline all together (which no one will do) or as this OP asks for: more regulation. Only that further slows down the pace of innovation and further entrenches the large players due to regulatory capture. The article you post is a perfect example of why privacy doesn't matter. Do you think the average FB user will wade through that then erase their account? No. They want the value they get out of FB and nowhere in the counter argument is any suggestion of alternatives.
  - uabstraction 8y ago
    > Why is there no privacy focused Facebook or Google? The tongue-in-cheek answer to this is that they all eventually get bought by Facebook or Google. Anything that poses a threat to Facebook or Google will fold for the right price, as a simple matter of serving the fiduciary interest of the investors. The only platforms which can hold out are the ones explicitly designed to resist centralization. They have no pitch to make to investors, no funds for promotion, but the technology is there. Mastodon and Matrix are proof. The technology is dead simple. Facebook, Reddit and Twitter are nothing but glorified shiny message boards. WhatsApp, Discord, and Skype are nothing but glorified shiny VoIP apps. The only thing that makes them special is the branding
    - nilskidoo 8y ago
      I'd go even further and say that the larger platforms are anti-privacy by design, because their core purpose has always been concerned with data collection. I think the large online social networks are in the same vein fundamentally rightwing, because profiting from the efforts of others has nothing whatsoever to do with leftism. IRL, if you want privacy, you avoid groups. I don't see why the digital realm should be viewed any differently. So there's a duality with social networkers, in that they may want privacy for themselves, yet a large reason for being on those platforms is to learn about everyone else. From a safe distance.
g45y45 8y ago
I care about privacy very deeply. I care more about privacy than the 'immense value' that garbage like facebook provides the world. The 'anything to hide' argument is an authoritarian call, and a way to devalue personal agency wrt privacy. No, I have nothing to share. Your attitude disgusts me. Wake up and see what damage you and your employers are thrusting upon humanity!
- malvosenior 8y ago
  > I care more about privacy than the 'immense value' that garbage like facebook provides the world Then you are in the minority. If there was a mass of people like you then someone could build an alternative and you could use it. That mass doesn't exist though. Most people don't see FB as "garbage" and until you recognize that, then you have a minority opinion (totally ok!) just don't expect billion dollar products to cater to your view.
  - g45y45 8y ago
    Of course I am in the minority. The majority of people on this planet have neither the education, interest or intelligence to understand the cage that is being constructed around them. Are you in the blissful, ignorant majority that cannot see what is actually going on here?
    - enitihas 8y ago
      Well if we go by your narrative then the world is anyways doomed. Since majority of the planet has no education, interest, or intelligence to understand anything complicated, their votes are not going to vote for solving problems which are important, but irrelevant to them. IMHO, unless your cause is important to the masses, it is doomed. You should probably think how can you help the blissful, ignorant majority to understand your perspective from their point of view to achieve your cause.
      - g45y45 8y ago
        I agree -- we are doomed. I have no cause. I stopped believing in democracy a long time ago. I have zero interest in helping others to understand my perspective, best we can hope for is to slow down the tech parasites from harvesting their digital souls.
return0 8y ago
if this wasn't true there wouldn't be tech giants
deogeo 8y ago
> You give up some privacy. Only no one cares about that. Until they want to bring to light government or employer abuses, or organize a union.
xorand 8y ago
>Completely absent from this narrative is a discussion about the immense value people get out of these technologies and what people like the author propose as a replacement. Because today on HN were two postings about Sci-Hub and Elbakian, why not compare Sci-Hub and Google Scholar (or Google Books). Both of immense value for many many people. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19558118 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19558118 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19550282 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19550282
50656E6973 8y ago
>The cost? You give up some privacy. Only no one cares about that. Most people don't have anything to hide from advertisers. SSN, PII/PCI, medical history, personal secrets, naked photos etc...? Identity theft is at an all time high, and it's only getting easier. >Most of this personalization tech doesn't even work. I've literally never seen an ad so enticing that I've clicked on it. Then why are they among the most successful business models in the world?
- smokeAndMirr0rs 8y ago
  A. I've literally never seen an ad so enticing that I've clicked on it. Q. Then why are they among the most successful business models in the world? Perception management. It's a big lie that takes the dare to seem so big it obviously must be true. So, think about it another way. Think about how large of an industry pornography is. But, is pornography really a form of "entertainment" and more importantly, is it one that people actually spend disposable income on? No one, and I mean NO ONE, pays for pornography on the internet. People barely pay for music, and they had to be chased to the ends of the earth before that tide hinted at changing. So then, what is the pornography "industry" reeeealllly? The largest, legalized cluster of elite prostitution rings in the world, operating in plain sight. As a corollary, if advertising only moves the revenue needle to the tune of roughly 10% or less of the normal operations for any given business, what must advertising really be? A means to rationalize operating costs as business expenses, when you're trying to cook the books and hide money for tax purposes, and feed into a corrupt system of payola and favors. A way to conceal exorbitant spending, such that it doesn't appear as part of income or profits. A way to burn cash the way you want, before the government knows it exists, and keep it behind the corporate veil, distributed in the business world for as long as possible, so that someone else takes the tax hit instead of you.
WallWextra 8y ago
I agree. At the very least, there should be some dialogue on whether the trade off is worth it. I lean towards yes, most people think we can get the privacy back without giving up the advantages. I'm not sure how, but I'd be interested.
bill_rr 8y ago
>> The internet and "tech giants" have given us the ability to put our thoughts out to a global audience, stay in touch with friends and family around the globe (for free). Take and store a near infinite number of photographs. Order a car to your front door and have the destination chosen before hand without having to negotiate with your driver... I realize that I'm an outlier here, but after each and every one of these examples, I thought - so what?!
hakfoo 8y ago
There's value, but we need to discuss marginal value and cost. We shouldn't be asking "is Facebook as a whole worth its creepiness" in a vaccuum, it's "is the difference between Facebook and other platforms worth the difference in creepiness?" Everything most consumers use Facebook for (photo/video sharing, chat/messaging, micro-blogging, discussion groups, event management) can be done by other services as well if not better. These days, they might be under different umbrellas, but it's basically the side features of a Yahoo-style portal circa 2002. Features they had no trouble delivering without making undeletable shadow profiles of your garage bandmates, snarfling every bit of data off your Nokia 3310, and selling your political leanings to the Yeltsin administration. The quality of the services aren't the draw. It sure as hell isn't the convoluted user interface and the constant rearranging of things designed to undermine any sense of control you had. The appeal is mostly "but all my friends are there and I can't convince Aunt Bobette to change to Mastodon." And that problem can be solved with federation and SSO initiatives.

holoduke 8y ago

The most shocking of this all is that these big tech companies are communicating in a way you see in dictorial countries. There is hardly any dialog possible. Disputes are ignored. the right to a fair dialog and the principle of an adversarial process is completely ignored by these giants. And that is quite a bad thing. We see it now happening quite often with smaller but also bigger companies. Sooner or later even individuals will get to face the strong negative influence these companies can give. For many centuries we killed each other to fight for proper humane rights. Individuals but also companies. And now some kind of new virtual world is created where local laws are completely ignored. Not good!!!

return0 8y ago
> a way you see in dictorial countries. It's not easy to relocate to another country. It's trivial to switch to using some other tech product. and corporations don't pretend or even have to pretend they are some sort of republics.
- uabstraction 8y ago
  Nonsense. In many cases, vendor lock-in and the network effect present a substantial hurtle to living free of these companies. Sure you can quit Facebook, but they'll still build an internal profile about you. You can also tell your mobile carrier to go f* themselves and get a ham radio - but unless all of your friends and colleagues do the same thing you'll just be talking to Major Tom up in his tin can. Freeing yourself from the grasp of these companies is hard enough for the tech savvy. For laymen it is virtually impossible.
  - brycesbeard 8y ago
    If you quit using Facebook, what does it matter if they have some bits about you?
    - cmorgan31 8y ago
      I suppose the general fear is that we are the product and we don’t know what we are being sold for or to whom. If they are so sophisticated they can infer behavioral patterns after you quit by using your still existing network of friends who didn’t quit then it’s a pretty useful bit of profiling technology with buyers. The only part that ever really mattered is how they monetize the product, us. It’s an unspoken agreement for using a service which has no transparent monetary cost.

xorand 8y ago

Zuboff theory that Google and alike live from the metadata exhaust, not from the data itself, explains the lack of respect for the valuable data contributed by the users. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/jit.2015.5 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/jit.2015.5

Kalium 8y ago
I've always found that the key realization is that on the whole things aren't "valuable data". Very few data points are actually valuable. We call it valuable data to feel good about it and indignant about howe we're treated. Coming face-to-face with the possibility that our individual data is worth essentially nothing is uncomfortable.
- RickS 8y ago
  Individually, mostly valueless. But in aggregate, the emergent patterns are hugely valuable. Just as a litterer is fractionally culpable for worsening the earth, our data is fractionally responsible for the wealth of these companies, and for the same reason shouldn't be dismissed as worthless.
  - Kalium 8y ago
    The flaw in the analogy being that litter builds up additively. User data is more like a square law effect. You're completely right, of course. One user's data isn't worthless and should never be dismissed. Yet in financial and practical terms its value far closer to zero than to any useful unit of account.
- xorand 8y ago
  Curiously, I don't remember Google or Facebook ads saying: "join us! we shall delete or hide your data. remember we are a private company, not a public forum" back then when they were not rich.

EGreg 8y ago

We need better software alternatives, not regulation. That’s how we beat IE, and that’s how we beat AOL, Britannica and so on and so forth. The problem is a lot deeper: https://qbix.com/blog https://qbix.com/blog

kevingadd 8y ago
Part of what undid IE was literally antitrust regulation...
- EGreg 8y ago
  What about AOL?

ilaksh 8y ago

The core issue with governance that arises regardless of paradigm, in my opinion, is over-centralization. Now it seems that we have technology behemoths superceding government and centralizing control of our economies. I like to call them "technopolies". They are successful largely because they are so all-encompassing over particular areas. The problem is that they are private profit driven entities and so the playing field, though large, is not fair, and core functions lack competition. Eventually all-encompassing decentralized public technology platforms should be able to supercede the technopolies. This way we can have systems that operate holistically in a way with majority networks but without the private centralization of control. That is not to say that it is going to be easy. But it's the only viable paradigm that could replace the Iron Cage.

bill_rr 8y ago
So do you think it's more about breaking down the (centralized) big dogs or supporting the (decentralized) smaller startups. This Iron Cage is full-on dystopia. I really can't believe we're letting it happen!
- ilaksh 8y ago
  I think we need to promote startups and companies in general that are built on public decentralized protocols. Breaking up monopolies without having the public platforms available could just lead to other technopolies popping up to replace the old ones.

peterwwillis 8y ago

These tongue-lashings of big tech are getting a tad ridiculous. Yes, how could we possibly have known that they were doing the things they said they were doing? How shocking, this surveillance regime, that took all the data we gave them, and then blatantly invaded our privacy, by reading it! This is like an oil company spilling billions of barrels of oil into a sensitive habitat, and then the predictably excoriating hyperbolic complaints and disclaims of surprise. Oh, how could they extract that oil from the ocean floor, from the thousands of oil platforms that we've known have existed for decades! But in fact, we know they're there, and we know what the consequences are. So we go on social media and read these posts about how terrible the spill is, and cry-emoji over the birds covered in oil. And then we go fill up with 87 octane.

bill_rr 8y ago
Did you read the article? No judgment if you didn't - just genuinely curious. Over the course of the last decade (I got a flip phone in high school, smartphone in college, facebook my freshman year, instagram right after college) I feel pretty confident saying, "I didn't know." I don't think it's embarrassing and I don't think I'm alone. It's a big, complicated problem. BTW I went to Stanford and worked in startups. I think I'm a bright, open-minded, curious person. To your second point: How do you recommend that we respond to environmental degradation? Or should we all look away? I'm fully off social media and smartphones. On a day to day basis, I'm not being listened to and watched, at least as far as I know. I try to "vote with my behavior" so to speak, but it's tough. I'm concerned, for example, that not having a LinkedIn account is slowing down my career.

bookofjoe 8y ago

I wonder if Shoshana Zuboff will be able to resist the 7-to-8-figure offers she's already received and will continue to receive from Facebook et al.

chrisbrandow 8y ago

I wish that these critiques grappled with the ways that so many of the services that we now resent were truly embraced by many because they seemed magical when they appeared.