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> hey if you let these companies spy on you then.... Then you'll suffer multiple digital, and eventually physical harms; - You'll lose money on bandwidth that

> hey if you let these companies spy on you then.... Then you'll suffer multiple digital, and eventually physical harms; - You'll lose money on bandwidth that's robbed from you - you'll lose access to goods and services on the basis of calculated prejudice - you risk identity theft, impersonation, having loans taken out in your name... - you'll be exposed to manipulation, targeted disinformation - you'll experience increased targeted attacks like phishing - friends, relatives, spouse and others close to you will also be targeted - your time will be wasted dealing with more spam and nuisance - you will lose CPU, memory and battery life as the concrete resources of your devices are given over to the advertising burden - you will eventually suffer tangible harms, loss of employment, impacted credit score, loss of medical access... Sure, it needs more words to explain. Not quite so punchy and succinct as the real deal. But digital cancer caused by these companies' products can well be explained to the average "consumer" if they just stuck an ugly picture on the carton of a destitute homeless guy and the message "Surveillance capitalism can ruin your life".

shadowgovt 4y ago
Most of these claims do not hold water. What does it mean to have bandwidth "robbed" from me? What do I care if my gigabytes-of-RAM multi-core CPU is burning some cycles? Have those cycles also been "stolen" by, like, articles I don't want to read or useless comments? Is there more identity theft risk from targeted ads than, say, the LastPass breach? Google, in particular, keeps that data deeply vaulted and protected. Am I really exposed to meaningfully targeted disinfo relative to self-sorting by watching Fox News? What about meaningfully-targeted info, like Facebook making it easy to find my elected representatives because they know my address? Do we have evidence of correlation between targeted ads and phishing? Most phishing I'm aware of just uses big popular names and the law of averages... You don't need targeted info on a consumer to guess they use Amazon. I worry that bans based on this shaky ground would look more like Prohibition than asbestos bans.
- nonrandomstring 4y ago
  Your principle objection is that you don't care. Is this what argument looks like in 2023? It doesn't leave much left to work with.
  - shadowgovt 4y ago
    If there's no harm, there's no reason to curtail someone's freedom. It's hard to support an argument that we should change the law if the harm isn't proven, and "someone directed my computer to use more CPU cycles than it otherwise would (after I voluntarily accessed their server)" isn't a story of self-evident harm. (And that's leaving out the unsupported strong assertions that "you will eventually suffer tangible harms, loss of employment, impacted credit score, loss of medical access," which... What? Loss of employment because companies spy on me? That screams "lack of causality." As an employed tech worker in the United States, I operate under the assumption that my employer has access to my corporate inbox. Is your assertion that I could be fired for something I say there [in which case the harm is I said something damaging to my company, not that my company knows about it] or some other mechanism?).
    - nonrandomstring 4y ago
      > It's hard to support an argument that we should change the law if the harm isn't proven But it is, shadowgvt my friend please dig deeper. It absolutely is! Over and again in multiple quality peer reviewed studies and analyses by prominent security engineers and psychologists... This "big tech = bad" thing isn't just some matter of sloppy marginal opinion. It's tediously mainstream thinking now. The only real question is what to do about it. We both know that's not easy. But at this point attacking the premise just seems like a waste of time. A fair place to start is here, with the "ledger of harms" [1] https://ledger.humanetech.com/ https://ledger.humanetech.com/

shadowgovt 4y ago

Most of these claims do not hold water. What does it mean to have bandwidth "robbed" from me? What do I care if my gigabytes-of-RAM multi-core CPU is burning some cycles? Have those cycles also been "stolen" by, like, articles I don't want to read or useless comments? Is there more identity theft risk from targeted ads than, say, the LastPass breach? Google, in particular, keeps that data deeply vaulted and protected. Am I really exposed to meaningfully targeted disinfo relative to self-sorting by watching Fox News? What about meaningfully-targeted info, like Facebook making it easy to find my elected representatives because they know my address? Do we have evidence of correlation between targeted ads and phishing? Most phishing I'm aware of just uses big popular names and the law of averages... You don't need targeted info on a consumer to guess they use Amazon. I worry that bans based on this shaky ground would look more like Prohibition than asbestos bans.

nonrandomstring 4y ago
Your principle objection is that you don't care. Is this what argument looks like in 2023? It doesn't leave much left to work with.
- shadowgovt 4y ago
  If there's no harm, there's no reason to curtail someone's freedom. It's hard to support an argument that we should change the law if the harm isn't proven, and "someone directed my computer to use more CPU cycles than it otherwise would (after I voluntarily accessed their server)" isn't a story of self-evident harm. (And that's leaving out the unsupported strong assertions that "you will eventually suffer tangible harms, loss of employment, impacted credit score, loss of medical access," which... What? Loss of employment because companies spy on me? That screams "lack of causality." As an employed tech worker in the United States, I operate under the assumption that my employer has access to my corporate inbox. Is your assertion that I could be fired for something I say there [in which case the harm is I said something damaging to my company, not that my company knows about it] or some other mechanism?).
  - nonrandomstring 4y ago
    > It's hard to support an argument that we should change the law if the harm isn't proven But it is, shadowgvt my friend please dig deeper. It absolutely is! Over and again in multiple quality peer reviewed studies and analyses by prominent security engineers and psychologists... This "big tech = bad" thing isn't just some matter of sloppy marginal opinion. It's tediously mainstream thinking now. The only real question is what to do about it. We both know that's not easy. But at this point attacking the premise just seems like a waste of time. A fair place to start is here, with the "ledger of harms" [1] https://ledger.humanetech.com/ https://ledger.humanetech.com/