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"They love it" but they often aren't given the choice, nor are they fully aware of the consequences (I expect many would choose not to accept if the findings in

"They love it" but they often aren't given the choice, nor are they fully aware of the consequences (I expect many would choose not to accept if the findings in this paper were presented to them in a clear understandable way). The average person barely knows what a server is. They install e.g. WhatsApp on their phone, they are likely to think that the app on their phone is doing the work of telling them who else is on WhatsApp. They are not likely to think that their contact list is being scraped and uploaded and stored on someone else's computer in a warehouse, and then profiled for advertising purposes and then exposed to strangers via an API. The average person may love the convenience, but the average person does not understand how it is implemented or the consequences of using such a service (as described in this paper).

AshamedCaptain 6y ago
In my experience, even after having made fully sure that they understand the risks involved, "the average person" will happily switch back to a walled garden IM platform the moment the next stupid feature comes in. Last time it was the (I think Whatsapp?) feature that allows, when replying to a message with an attached picture, to highlight a portion of the attached picture. That's it. There was no network effect at this point whasoever. This pseudo-feature was enough for an adult person to decide to switch back to Whatsapp and fuck my and everyone's privacy. THEN the network effect kicks in in favor of Whatsapp, because of course Whatsapp is a walled garden, so everyone is forced to switch to Whatsapp. I have seen this already happen several times network-wide and I will see it happen again. Non-walled garden IM networks are just set-up to lose.