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The strongest incentives for surveillance are actually in the private sector: the need for internal KPIs, selling data, targeted advertising, product and sales
by api 3y ago
The strongest incentives for surveillance are actually in the private sector: the need for internal KPIs, selling data, targeted advertising, product and sales funnel optimization, and now AI training data.
The government pushes surveillance too but in my experience it’s the secondary driver, at least in the US. Might be different in other countries.
I’m really pessimistic about privacy online given that every single incentive both public and private encourages maximum privacy invasion and centralization. I mean every single incentive. It’s almost impossible to resist.
We might have a chance if end users cared enough to pay for privacy and avoid things that invade it, but very few do. Most people care about convenience, features, and cost, and that’s it. Nothing else matters.
- int_19h 3y agoIt's not that people don't care about privacy tbh. But they do indeed care about convenience, so when they're presented with the artificially created choice of corporate surveillance hell vs privacy-enabling options that are by and large put together by a few enthusiasts with meager resources, it's no surprise what the end result is. But make no mistake - we could, as a society, invest heavily in developing privacy-first platforms and software, and have it all. I can't even say that we choose not to; it's more that representative democracy is not particularly representative in practice, and mostly works as a form of veto.
- TheDong 3y agoI don't think the choice is "surveillance vs privacy", but rather "free-with-ads" vs "paid-with-privacy" People choose to watch youtube with ads rather than pay for youtube premium without ads. People buy the kindle with ads on the lockscreen over paying $20 or whatever more for an ad-free one. When given the choice of a $3 app store app with no ads vs an identical free one with ads, users pick the ads. Picking ads is effectively the same as choosing a lower price (free) over privacy, and people seem to consistently pick in this direction. Because of that, I don't think it's fair to say that users aren't actually making any choice here. Users are choosing free services over privacy.
- int_19h 3y agoPeople pick ads, it is true. They do not explicitly pick "track you everywhere to build a hyper-accurate profile of you that can then push precisely tuned ads at you", though. That part is buried in the EULAs.
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- slavik81 3y agoYou cannot buy privacy with a credit card. You tie your identity to an account when you pay for it. Ads are orthogonal to privacy. We've had privacy-preserving ads in physical newspapers for hundreds of years. There is no reasonable way for a normal person to consistently choose privacy these days.
- CatWChainsaw 3y agoI have never heard of an ad-free lockscreen on Kindle and I pay for Kindle Unlimited. So I have to pay even more to get ad-free, if that's even possible. And I'm sure that's just for Kindle. Need to cough up a few more dollars for ad-free Prime Video. And ad-free shopping on Amazon. And that's just one service. Can't wait to hear what I'd need to spend for the same if I used Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and a Quest even though Meta owns all of them. And I can just imagine the hellscape Microsoft will create when you have to pay a subscription fee to use Windows 12 Home With Ads, as your baseline option. The average American isn't exactly awash in cash to spend on privacy, you know.
- api 3y agoIt's not an artificially created choice. It's a market created choice. People won't pay for software, so the privacy-enabling options are put together by a few volunteers with no funding. We are not talking about a lot of money in most cases. I usually compare it to coffee shops. People will pay $10 at a coffee shop for a latte and a snack, but they refuse to pay even $5 for a software app or game that they might use every day.
- int_19h 3y agoIt doesn't have to be left to the market. Given the current state of affairs wrt market oligopolization, especially in tech, it probably shouldn't be, at least not for the kind of basic software and protocols that the majority of people use daily.