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You would if you held views or had elements of your personal life exposed that were contrary to mainstream thought. Complete data about a person is all that's n

You would if you held views or had elements of your personal life exposed that were contrary to mainstream thought. Complete data about a person is all that's needed to create the most pervasive fascist society that the world has ever seen. And all it takes is us saying we value the convenience of having our data shared. Sure Google has mostly benign reasons for wanting this data, but putting it in a big warehouse means it's a juicy target for anyone who wants to oppress you for any reason. There's a reason the secret police in the USSR had records about everyone. Because the only way to really effectively guarantee compliance is to ensure that you know exactly what the subject is doing at all hours of the day, even when they think they're in private. The shitty thing about this is there's effectively no way to opt out. Just being alive in this time is enough for these companies to gather an unbelievably creepy amount of information about you.

shadowgovt 7y ago
Exposure of private data is counter to surveillance capitalism. The "capitalism" part is scarcity of aggregated data without value to be gained for data exchange; the company knows something about a person that other companies don't, and that has competitive value. It's not "surveillance capitalism" to collect and then publish a pile of damaging data on a person; it's just sloppy, and makes people less inclined to do business with the company that screwed up (on average). I trust Google specifically with my data because Google has some real good incentives to keep it private. Fascism is fascism, and I find it interesting (in a cognitive-dissonance sense) how many of my European peers are leery of data collection by a Google but are extremely comfortable with their respective governments running universal healthcare systems. Aren't those governments one fascist dictator away from all that centralized government health data being used to drive a mass extermination? It sounds a lot like people's real disagreement is on choice of master of the data, not whether data aggregation has utility to them.
- deleted 7y ago
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- jschwartzi 7y ago
  The PHI you're speaking of is something that doctors generally don't sell. That's pretty different from what Google wants to do with the data.

shadowgovt 7y ago

Exposure of private data is counter to surveillance capitalism. The "capitalism" part is scarcity of aggregated data without value to be gained for data exchange; the company knows something about a person that other companies don't, and that has competitive value. It's not "surveillance capitalism" to collect and then publish a pile of damaging data on a person; it's just sloppy, and makes people less inclined to do business with the company that screwed up (on average). I trust Google specifically with my data because Google has some real good incentives to keep it private. Fascism is fascism, and I find it interesting (in a cognitive-dissonance sense) how many of my European peers are leery of data collection by a Google but are extremely comfortable with their respective governments running universal healthcare systems. Aren't those governments one fascist dictator away from all that centralized government health data being used to drive a mass extermination? It sounds a lot like people's real disagreement is on choice of master of the data, not whether data aggregation has utility to them.

deleted 7y ago
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jschwartzi 7y ago
The PHI you're speaking of is something that doctors generally don't sell. That's pretty different from what Google wants to do with the data.