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It's less the targeted ads and more the collection & concentration of all this personal data in a single place. There are lots of ways it can be misused if a ma
by Nextgrid 4y ago
It's less the targeted ads and more the collection & concentration of all this personal data in a single place. There are lots of ways it can be misused if a malicious actor (or the government) gets their hands on it.
So it's not that "targeted ads" are bad by themselves, it's that they justify an industrial-scale spyware operation, which other malicious attackers could potentially co-opt to do their bidding.
- phendrenad2 4y agoOkay so, the chances that someone will suffer as a result of targeted ads is INCREDIBLY small, and yet it's somehow become completely acceptable to use the word "unsafe" as a shorthand for this extremely slim possibility.
- Nextgrid 4y agoWell it's incredibly small until there's a breach. The problem with security is that as a defender you need to win all the time, while the attackers only need to win once. So it's just a matter of time before something happens.
- phendrenad2 4y agoIf the "matter of time" is a billion years, then I think we're fine. So my guess is that it's a billion years. Do you have evidence to the contrary? It's only a "matter of time" before every human on earth is simultaneously struck by lightning while being eaten by a shark. But the odds are so astronomically low that it's probably never happened. Since this thread is getting very long, I'll go ahead and say that the icloud hack of 2014 was targeted at celebrities (normal users didn't have their data leaked), and things like the equifax hack were things that a normal user has no way to opt out of anyway.