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> Personalized advertising is built around an obvious violation of human dignity How? Does a village grocer, who knows you like chocolates, and points out a n

> Personalized advertising is built around an obvious violation of human dignity How? Does a village grocer, who knows you like chocolates, and points out a new brand of chocolates violate your dignity? What is the philosophical difference between this and an algo doing it?

salawat 3y ago
Scale, violation of locality, and Third Party Doctrine.
vlovich123 3y ago
> What is the philosophical difference between this and an algo doing it? For one, my village grocer isn’t chatting with my travel agent to correlate my income bracket to then price discriminate more effectively. Another big one is scale to gather accurate information on billions of people and then create even more intricate targeting mechanisms. The gathering of disparate datum from different sources (often in a sketchy manner) is a huge difference. Scale is actually the biggest though and changes lots of things. As a simple example? burning a little bit of whale oil for your night light? No problem. Every human in Europe doing it? Whale’s go extinct. Burning a little bit of coal for your steam engine? No problem. Everyone burning coal at a massive scale in your area? Acid rain, cancer, etc etc. Burning gasoline in your car? Not a problem. Everyone burning huge amounts of gasoline for every facet of running society? Global warming. Algo’s let you scale “personalization” to crazy scales and advertising is the toxic byproduct of funding the internet.
- scarface_74 3y ago
  > For one, my village grocer isn’t chatting with my travel agent to correlate my income bracket to then price discriminate more effectively. If you use credit cards at both the credit card company definitely can correlate your spending patterns and send you relevant offers
  - justinclift 3y ago
    Isn't that whataboutism?
    - scarface_74 3y ago
      It’s a flawed analogy. If you are worried about being tracked and surveilled, there are much larger things to worry about than an ad tech company masquerading as a search engine. You should be worried about a government that wants to record every thing you do eight hours a day when you are at work. If you ever say to a coworker over an internal Slack “let’s talk about this over lunch”, you are automatically assumed guilty of…trying to maintain an illegal monopoly over…ad tech??? And it’s easy just not to go to Google.com if you don’t like their practices. You don’t need the government for that
      - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
        > a government that wants to record every thing you do eight hours a day when you are at work This would be concerning. > ever say to a coworker over an internal Slack “let’s talk about this over lunch”, you are automatically assumed guilty This isn’t happening.
        scarface_74 3y ago
        It actually is. With Google being sued, if you start talking to a coworker and then say “let’s talk about this <on a none work recorded communication channel>, you may very well be questioned about what you wanted to talk about. The government is forcing Google to retain all internal messaging communications.
        Eisenstein 3y ago
        Your libertarian take disregards that Google is only answerable to its shareholders and uses money as a primary motivator while the government is answerable to the people it governs and has public good as its primary motivator.
jqpabc123 3y ago
By my actions, I implicitly "opted in" to revealing one of my preferences to the shop owner. I did *not* "opt in" to allowing the shop owner to follow me everywhere I go. In the online world, Google follows you almost everywhere --- without any "opt in". See the philosophical difference?
lsedgwick 3y ago
This is a common failure mode tech people get into in debates: finding an extreme example as an analogy. There's lots of obvious differences of context and differences of degree which get swept over by a very abstract kind of stripped-bare framework, "what's the essential philosophical difference here?" If someone can't see those differences it's almost pointless trying to enumerate them because honestly it feels like a disingenuous debate trick (my apologies if I'm wrong in that accusation). You have an extremely wealthy corporation incentivized to collect massive amounts of very personal data about every part of you and you desires and psychology, incentivized and well-able to collect it in hidden and powerful ways across the web and build deep learning models of your psychology and desires, and store them in a place where it's possible for nefarious actors and governments to either legally or illegally access and use that information for unknown purposes. If you object to this characterization, fine, start with the objection, but it's an obvious characterization which I've presented, and it's obvious that this is what people are concerned about! Starting the conversation with "it's no different, philosophically, from your grocer knowing your love of chocolate" is such a non-starter only because it seems so disingenuous, like, how could you not see how your interlocutor sees it differently? It just presents so clean and abstract a little simplification, though, so it's handy for winning point in a debate setting.
- Wowfunhappy 3y ago
  > This is a common failure mode tech people get into in debates: finding an extreme example as an analogy. I don't agree with GP but I want to defend the analogy, which I found perfectly fair. Analogies help us understand the world and uncover internal contradictions in our thinking. I thought vlovich123's sibling comment did a great job responding the analogy on its merits (making some of the same points you did).

salawat 3y ago

Scale, violation of locality, and Third Party Doctrine.

vlovich123 3y ago

> What is the philosophical difference between this and an algo doing it? For one, my village grocer isn’t chatting with my travel agent to correlate my income bracket to then price discriminate more effectively. Another big one is scale to gather accurate information on billions of people and then create even more intricate targeting mechanisms. The gathering of disparate datum from different sources (often in a sketchy manner) is a huge difference. Scale is actually the biggest though and changes lots of things. As a simple example? burning a little bit of whale oil for your night light? No problem. Every human in Europe doing it? Whale’s go extinct. Burning a little bit of coal for your steam engine? No problem. Everyone burning coal at a massive scale in your area? Acid rain, cancer, etc etc. Burning gasoline in your car? Not a problem. Everyone burning huge amounts of gasoline for every facet of running society? Global warming. Algo’s let you scale “personalization” to crazy scales and advertising is the toxic byproduct of funding the internet.

scarface_74 3y ago
> For one, my village grocer isn’t chatting with my travel agent to correlate my income bracket to then price discriminate more effectively. If you use credit cards at both the credit card company definitely can correlate your spending patterns and send you relevant offers
- justinclift 3y ago
  Isn't that whataboutism?
  - scarface_74 3y ago
    It’s a flawed analogy. If you are worried about being tracked and surveilled, there are much larger things to worry about than an ad tech company masquerading as a search engine. You should be worried about a government that wants to record every thing you do eight hours a day when you are at work. If you ever say to a coworker over an internal Slack “let’s talk about this over lunch”, you are automatically assumed guilty of…trying to maintain an illegal monopoly over…ad tech??? And it’s easy just not to go to Google.com if you don’t like their practices. You don’t need the government for that
    - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
      > a government that wants to record every thing you do eight hours a day when you are at work This would be concerning. > ever say to a coworker over an internal Slack “let’s talk about this over lunch”, you are automatically assumed guilty This isn’t happening.
      - scarface_74 3y ago
        It actually is. With Google being sued, if you start talking to a coworker and then say “let’s talk about this <on a none work recorded communication channel>, you may very well be questioned about what you wanted to talk about. The government is forcing Google to retain all internal messaging communications.
        Eisenstein 3y ago
        Your libertarian take disregards that Google is only answerable to its shareholders and uses money as a primary motivator while the government is answerable to the people it governs and has public good as its primary motivator.

jqpabc123 3y ago

By my actions, I implicitly "opted in" to revealing one of my preferences to the shop owner. I did *not* "opt in" to allowing the shop owner to follow me everywhere I go. In the online world, Google follows you almost everywhere --- without any "opt in". See the philosophical difference?

lsedgwick 3y ago

This is a common failure mode tech people get into in debates: finding an extreme example as an analogy. There's lots of obvious differences of context and differences of degree which get swept over by a very abstract kind of stripped-bare framework, "what's the essential philosophical difference here?" If someone can't see those differences it's almost pointless trying to enumerate them because honestly it feels like a disingenuous debate trick (my apologies if I'm wrong in that accusation). You have an extremely wealthy corporation incentivized to collect massive amounts of very personal data about every part of you and you desires and psychology, incentivized and well-able to collect it in hidden and powerful ways across the web and build deep learning models of your psychology and desires, and store them in a place where it's possible for nefarious actors and governments to either legally or illegally access and use that information for unknown purposes. If you object to this characterization, fine, start with the objection, but it's an obvious characterization which I've presented, and it's obvious that this is what people are concerned about! Starting the conversation with "it's no different, philosophically, from your grocer knowing your love of chocolate" is such a non-starter only because it seems so disingenuous, like, how could you not see how your interlocutor sees it differently? It just presents so clean and abstract a little simplification, though, so it's handy for winning point in a debate setting.

Wowfunhappy 3y ago
> This is a common failure mode tech people get into in debates: finding an extreme example as an analogy. I don't agree with GP but I want to defend the analogy, which I found perfectly fair. Analogies help us understand the world and uncover internal contradictions in our thinking. I thought vlovich123's sibling comment did a great job responding the analogy on its merits (making some of the same points you did).