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The comment I would have to the author is this -- it is all well and good to demonstrate how difficult it is to opt out of marketing surveillance. Great. Comple
by mark242 4y ago
The comment I would have to the author is this -- it is all well and good to demonstrate how difficult it is to opt out of marketing surveillance. Great. Completely on board. The question is, how did this make your experience of the park any better? Other than personal gratification of "yay this awkward face paint is stopping cameras from recognizing me", what is it, exactly, that you got that the other 50,000+ people in the park didn't get?
Because the completely opposite argument is much more compelling to the general public. Download this app, turn on your location data, and you get notifications for a little personal guided tour. Attach your payment information and you can mobile order food for a quick pickup and save time that you can spend going on the rides. Add your party contacts and you can set up fast-passes to jump the lines for your entire party all at once, again saving you time.
If the idea of opting out (which again, great, admirable, etc) doesn't come with a clear benefit, nobody will do it, and the paper attached gets into Howard-Hughes-level of data paranoia.
- cyberlyra 4y agoOP here: This is what the article in Public Books is all about. A lot of the "benefits" the Park presents are made up, manufactured conveniences, accompanied by manufactured inconveniences that make it hard for others to resist. The Park makes people feel like they've get a lot of benefit out of playing along, while the park actually benefits from convincing people so easily to relinquish any control over their personal information. We should think more about whether a convenience or "benefit" on offer--a few dollars off, a few minutes shaved--is a lure designed to get us to sign our data away for their profit. What did I get out of it? Personal data autonomy.
- mark242 4y agoThat is just fundamentally not true. Disneyland in particular has had a steady, growing problem over the past 15-20 years, accelerated recently with the rise of photo-sharing-sites like Instagram, where they are fighting a balance between keeping the parks accessible and affordable, while also trying to limit overall attendance. A family who books a vacation for a couple of days at Disneyland will struggle to see and experience everything that they want, for the simple reason that there are 50,000+ people (on quiet days!) all trying to do the same things. This isn't manufactured or made up. It is a real inconvenience, and one that existed before smartphones and mass data tracking. The real solution is in eliminating the annual pass program (and raising the ire of the millions of Southern California locals who go to the park on the regular) but that's for another conversation. "A few minutes shaved" is absolutely a tangible benefit, 100%, especially for a family who has paid thousands of dollars to travel, stay, and visit the park. "the app was a necessity, a non-negotiable" - that "non-negotiable" is because compared to the experience even four years ago, pre-app, your day does allow for more experiences, and I suspect you felt that while breezing through the Space Mountain line. Look, I do not work for Disney. Disney does not need me to "shill" for them. But "personal data autonomy" is not enough of a real, tangible benefit to the average person, especially compared to the real conveniences of even the slightest opt-in. It does not take a massive data surveillance program to know that our family are Star Wars fans. We literally do not care if the app is more likely to recommend we go on Star Tours more often. We do care that we're able to go on Star Tours without an hourlong wait.
- mixmastamyk 4y agoIf it was a pure benefit, they wouldn't need to force you.
- JohnFen 4y ago> "personal data autonomy" is not enough of a real, tangible benefit to the average person But you aren't responding to the average person. You're responding to the author of the article.