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I think you're under-appreciating how unsympathetic and narcissistic this argument is. If you're suggesting that the original response didn't take into account

• samwillis 5y ago
  I'm not asking for the status quo to continue and didn't intend my comment to imply that. I purposely started my original comment suggesting I was ignoring the ethics in order to concentrating on the wider economic impact of changes such as that implemented by Apple. The other comment threads on this post are doing a good job of debating the ethics, I'm just trying to ensure people have in mind the wider impact when they debate these changes. Personally I think the privacy invasive advertising is long overdue heavy regulation and I look forward to it both as a person and particularly as a parent. I fully support Apples change and hope the rest of the industry follow. We have always tried to minimise our usage of privacy invasive advertising (we actually barely use Facebook narrow targeting tools and have avoided targeted remarking as I personally hate being chased around the internet by ads for something I have looked at), and will continue to do so.
• mindslight 5y ago
  Do you know what happens when small businesses go out of business? Large too-big-to-fail conglomerates step in with their cookie-cutter milquetoast experiences, paying workers minimum wage and centralizing wealth away from the communities in which they operate. And they most certainly deploy surveillance technologies to better herd their customer base. Believe it or not, you can simultaneously care about commercial surveillance ("advertising") and the plight of small businesses despite those small businesses patronizing the surveillance economy. If you still can't bring yourself to care about two conflicting things, then ignore the last paragraph in OP's original comment and read the first two as a narrative indicating a temporary economic trend for Faceboot, rather than prematurely celebrating the surveillance industry's demise.
  • boh 5y ago
    > you can simultaneously care about commercial surveillance ("advertising") and the plight of small businesses despite those small businesses also patronizing the surveillance economy If you define caring as expressing passive concern in comment boards, I guess you can. If a small business depends on a surveillance infrastructure and removing the infrastructure negatively impacts the business, then you can't equally "care" about both at the same time--a choice must be made. Whether it's destroying energy jobs to lower carbon emissions or lowering the sales of an independent seller to diminish advertising reach, a choice must be made. Society pays a greater price diminishing its civil liberties than compromising the sale of consumer goods.
    • mindslight 5y ago
      > If you define caring as expressing passive concern in comment boards No, caring describes one's personal thought process, which may then be reflected on comment boards and elsewhere. I can believe that oil extraction needs to be reduced to mitigate climate change, and even more fundamentally that the amount of work in general should decrease so the productivity gains of technology accrue to wider society, while still lamenting specific losses of jobs creating individual suffering as workers lose their existing purpose and become less able to support themselves. In fact I'd say the tendency to turn off such empathy in favor of simplistic one-sided narratives is the root of our political polarization. > If a small business depends on a surveillance infrastructure and removing the infrastructure negatively impacts the business The more plausible explanation is that small business revenue has gone down due to the pandemic (as widely covered), which has caused them to spend less on advertising (a straightforward way of budgeting is as a fixed percentage of profit/revenue), which has cut Faceboot's revenue. Faceboot is then blaming this downturn on increased privacy, hoping to garner some sympathy while distracting from a fundamental downturn in their market. As I said, you're prematurely celebrating the surveillance industry's demise by buying into its own narrative. The advertising industry has a history of painting anything that might reduce their invasiveness as an existential threat, and yet the leeches are still here and drinking as much blood as ever.
• random314 5y ago
  He might be a restaurant owner who is trying to get the word out locally. He is not an agent of a parasitical industry. Folks in this forum have worked for banks, oil companies, tech suppliers to militaries and what not. Trying to act morally superior to a small business owner trying to stay in the black because you dislike Facebook is absolutely ridiculous. If you dislike Facebook, just log out and delete your account.