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Many fundamental rights that everyone can agree on today used to be rare in the past, so I'm not sure that use this perspective is the right thing to do.

shrimp_emoji 3y ago
Water! Freedom from slavery! Internet! Progressing ethically as a civilization is nice.
edgyquant 3y ago
It is. You can’t just argue for something you want as it being a human right when it’s something most people aren’t that concerns with. It makes people not take you or what you’re arguing seriously
- BaseballPhysics 3y ago
  Except people absolutely are concerned with privacy, if you ask the questions the right way. The problem is that surveillance capitalism shares a lot of properties with pollution: the effects are typically hidden or ephemeral; the cost to individuals is low while the cost to society is high; and people have largely become complacent if not resigned to the status quo. And so a) most people don't understand the sheer extent of surveillance capitalism, and b) they don't understand how they're affected by it. I can't count the number of times I've seen shocked faces when I explained how companies like Acxiom and Experian work. And they've been around for decades! But they operate in the shadows, out of view, and so people simply do not understand how much of their private lives are bought and sold to the highest bidder. If they understood that--and I mean truly understood it--I suspect the conversation around these topics would be very different indeed. Meanwhile, large portions of the tech community have a financial motive to want to downplay these issues. "Oh pfft, privacy, so antiquated," they say as they draw down a 300k FAANG salary funded by the harvesting and selling of private information. And so what's the predominant narrative? Well, the people who are in the best position to understand these issues have a financial incentive to protect the status quo, while everyone else doesn't understand them well enough to form an opinion, and thus the former dominates the discourse.
  - robertlagrant 3y ago
    The same is true of state surveillance, except the state has the right to do way more directly bad things to you.
    - BaseballPhysics 3y ago
      Sure. Both are bad. But it's not the state that's created massive, unaccountable, opaque, private marketplaces that incentivize these behaviours.
      - robertlagrant 3y ago
        It's true that it does massive unaccountable opaque surveillance without the need of a buyer (other than the taxes of the people it surveils ). But the state definitely allows this information to be bought and sold, as the state is ultimately responsible for safeguarding its citizens from itself, other states, and from private entities.
- uoaei 3y ago
  You keep saying "people" but you seem only to mean "me"

shrimp_emoji 3y ago

Water! Freedom from slavery! Internet! Progressing ethically as a civilization is nice.

edgyquant 3y ago

It is. You can’t just argue for something you want as it being a human right when it’s something most people aren’t that concerns with. It makes people not take you or what you’re arguing seriously

BaseballPhysics 3y ago
Except people absolutely are concerned with privacy, if you ask the questions the right way. The problem is that surveillance capitalism shares a lot of properties with pollution: the effects are typically hidden or ephemeral; the cost to individuals is low while the cost to society is high; and people have largely become complacent if not resigned to the status quo. And so a) most people don't understand the sheer extent of surveillance capitalism, and b) they don't understand how they're affected by it. I can't count the number of times I've seen shocked faces when I explained how companies like Acxiom and Experian work. And they've been around for decades! But they operate in the shadows, out of view, and so people simply do not understand how much of their private lives are bought and sold to the highest bidder. If they understood that--and I mean truly understood it--I suspect the conversation around these topics would be very different indeed. Meanwhile, large portions of the tech community have a financial motive to want to downplay these issues. "Oh pfft, privacy, so antiquated," they say as they draw down a 300k FAANG salary funded by the harvesting and selling of private information. And so what's the predominant narrative? Well, the people who are in the best position to understand these issues have a financial incentive to protect the status quo, while everyone else doesn't understand them well enough to form an opinion, and thus the former dominates the discourse.
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  The same is true of state surveillance, except the state has the right to do way more directly bad things to you.
  - BaseballPhysics 3y ago
    Sure. Both are bad. But it's not the state that's created massive, unaccountable, opaque, private marketplaces that incentivize these behaviours.
    - robertlagrant 3y ago
      It's true that it does massive unaccountable opaque surveillance without the need of a buyer (other than the taxes of the people it surveils ). But the state definitely allows this information to be bought and sold, as the state is ultimately responsible for safeguarding its citizens from itself, other states, and from private entities.
uoaei 3y ago
You keep saying "people" but you seem only to mean "me"