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> Google and Facebook’s business models depend deeply on being able to track information that consumers are increasingly unhappy to share I see no evidence tha
by quotemstr 5y ago
> Google and Facebook’s business models depend deeply on being able to track information that consumers are increasingly unhappy to share
I see no evidence that regular people are particularly unhappy with sharing their information. While it's true that on the internet there's a loud privacy activist movement that's grown over the past few years, I don't think this movement reflects the true preferences of the silent majority. I think it's a self-serving moral panic.
Users benefit from the services that their information funds. It would be a mistake to incinerate trillions of dollars of institutional value on the say-so of a few strident and unrepresentative activist voices.
- nojito 5y ago>I see no evidence that regular people are particularly unhappy with sharing their information. There's actually a pretty cool graph from Google from the court docs that says the opposite. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E2f1tSEWYAAVHGY?format=jpg&name=large https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E2f1tSEWYAAVHGY?format=jpg&name=...
- joshuamorton 5y agoThat graph didn't have a scale. It could be that 97% of users disabled the feature, or less than 1%. You just don't know.
- nojito 5y agoIf the scale didn't matter, Google would not have called it a "Problem"
- joshuamorton 5y agoI think what it comes down to is that a small number of people coughs be "a problem", while still not being evidence that the median regular person or whatever cares.
- swader999 5y ago75 million in the USA that voted for the Red team saw close up the stifling censorship and deplatforming. Awareness is growing but I do agree behavior will be slow to change.
- JCM9 5y agoA key point if the article is that consumer sentiment is shifting, Google knows it, and isn’t happy about that.
- croes 5y agoBecause most users do not know what consequences their data can have. The whole business is completely opaque. A few years ago, it turned out that Apple users were shown higher prices in online shops just because they had used an Apple browser. I doubt they were happy about it, but as long as they didn't know, they had seen no problem in sharing this information.
- anoncake 5y ago> I see no evidence that regular people are particularly unhappy with sharing their information. Then why trick Google and Facebook them into doing that instead of making it opt-in?