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The real truth is that strong privacy laws would cause economic harm to flagship corporations. That would have a ripple effect on the economy as those corporati

The real truth is that strong privacy laws would cause economic harm to flagship corporations. That would have a ripple effect on the economy as those corporations are responsible for thousands of high-paying jobs. The elected representatives know that people care more about the economy (specifically what's in their wallets) than about privacy.

Retric 2y ago
Privacy has minimal overall economic impact because of the zero sum nature of advertising. Specific companies get harmed, but advertisers don’t suddenly have less money if advertising is less targeted. Net result that money is simply going to support different jobs. Similarly with more/less efficient advertising consumers have just as much money so total spending stays the same, so the only change is which companies capture it.
- zooq_ai 2y ago
  This is clueless understanding of economics (and very prevalent in HN) Economics 101 : There is no fixed pie of $$$$. $$ (as in wealth, productivity) can absolutely disappear from the economy or grow from nothing.
  - Retric 2y ago
    The economy grows or shrinks with productivity but advertising specifically is zero sum. Coke vs Pepsi makes a great deal of difference to those specific companies and little else. If anything it’s slightly negative due to inefficiency because the winner isn’t the best product.
    - zooq_ai 2y ago
      [flagged]
      - codedokode 2y ago
        > cost of acquiring a customer > cost of serving a customer For a successful and popular product the cost of acquiring a customer is low. Heavy investments in advertising are needed for unpopular, overpriced products that naturally have a low demand. For example, almost everything that I buy I bought not because of advertising but based on the comparison of product price and quality.
      - mjhay 2y ago
        You're ignoring the fact that a customer buying from a business incurs an opportunity cost from other things they could have spent money on (or invested). In addition, it merely shifts the money. If someone is thinking about getting Subway, but sees a McDonald's ad and goes there instead, that helps McDonald's but hurts Subway.
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      - JohnFen 2y ago
        And yet, somehow, businesses thrived even back when massively spying on people wasn't a thing they could do.
      - vundercind 2y ago
        Rivalrous advertising spending between two megacorps everyone already knows is zero-sum. You’re spending money just because the other guy increased spending, and market share stays the same. But you can’t not spend or you might lose market share. Now you’re both spending more to achieve the same result. [edit] zero sum in terms of the market-share game—the size of the pie stays the same, you’re just adjusting who gets how much. Negative sum for the overall game in the case that total spending increases.
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
    - glitchc 2y ago
      Advertising is not zero-sum. It is a money multiplier. To illustrate this, we start from the position that a new business creates net new value in the economy (on top of existing value). This is an economic maxim that must be true otherwise our GDP would never grow from 1770 standards. Now, the new business has to allocate a percentage of its budget to advertising. It doesn't have a choice in the matter: 1) In a competitive market, not advertising places it at a competitive disadvantage to its rivals who are advertising. 2) In a non-competitive market, not advertising leads to a smaller overall market and a weaker position (loss of market cap and easier to disrupt). Once the new business start advertising, other businesses become aware of it and either (a) choose to enter the market themselves, or (b) invest in advertising targeted at blocking/reducing this new market. Both cases result in more money spent on advertising. That's the multiplier effect.
      - Retric 2y ago
        > Advertising is not zero-sum. It is a money multiplier. You misunderstand zero sum here. Gas stations can’t grow total gas sales making the selling of gas zero sum, but they very much provide a useful function in aggregate. Advertising is going to exist with and without tracking individual users, the difference is simply relative value of undifferentiated content. Selling camping supplies on an outdoor website is targeting, but linking user’s history allows anyone to get a cut of premium revenue even if it’s lowest common denominator crap. But remove tracking of users and specialty content like local news becomes a lot more valuable and clickbait far less, a major public good. > we start from the position that a new business creates net new value in the economy (on top of existing value). This is an economic maxim that must be true otherwise our GDP would never grow from 1770 standards. I understand the point you are trying to make but existing companies also evolve their offerings over time. Nintendo in 1889 wasn’t selling video games.
        glitchc 2y ago
        I think you missed the forest for the trees. I will make it very clear. The advertising business is a growth vector. It grows with the size of the economy. Singular industries may rise and fall (ex. ads for riding crops) but in aggregate, advertising always continues to grow. Zero sum means explicitly that the total pie stays the same, which advertising is not. It forces the pie to grow. And that's for a straightforward reason, because advertising is an arms race. A company can't afford to drop out, can't afford to fall behind. > Advertising is going to exist with and without tracking individual users, the difference is simply relative value of undifferentiated content. So what you mean to say is that targeted advertising is the same as mass advertising, that there's no benefit, perceived or otherwise, of targeting users. Well, I'm afraid you're very wrong. Both buyers and sellers of advertising love targeted advertising. For buyers, it makes the most efficient use of their budget allocation, and for sellers, it allows them to to take maximum advantage of user self-segmentation. The analogy of indiscriminate bombing being superseded by precision munitions is an apt one. There's no going back at this point. Regulations will only distort the market further. The platforms will make the fines the cost of doing business, and pass them onto the buyers. The buyers, in turn, will pass that cost along to consumers in the form of higher prices. Every company will continue to pay for advertising because they can't afford not to. And so it will continue. All the fines will do is concentrate more wealth into the platforms and the government. And that's exactly what's happening in the EU with advent of GDPR.
  - treyd 2y ago
    In advertising it can often be true in a sense though. A very illustrative example of this when regulations tightening advertising for cigarettes were introduced, cigarette companies started reporting more profits because they all collectively stopped advertising at the same time and got to pocket the money they would have spent on it. The pool of cigarette smokers isn't/wasn't growing that much, so all the advertising was really doing was trying to take consumers away from their competitors and the net effect was 0. To be fair, then they started investing in vape companies and things might have changed. I don't think that's a good thing, although vapes are probably less harmful than cigarettes.
23B1 2y ago
This is an interesting argument I've heard from various quarters but have never seen any evidentiary material supporting it. Do you have any reliable sources that explore this correlation?
- zooq_ai 2y ago
  Yeah, just ask your favorite merchant how much it hurt their business and how many business shut down or lay off people due to Apple Tracking ban
  - nottorp 2y ago
    merchant or ad peddler?
  - scarface_74 2y ago
    There was no tracking ban. Apple gave consumers a choice of being tracked and 90% said “no”
DarkNova6 2y ago
Or perhaps it forces those companies to focus on products instead of exploiting their market position.
soco 2y ago
Is this a trickle-down style of argument? Or that corporations are holy? Or that they always have the job takers interests at heart? Or that the elected representatives are elected by the 16% who don't want stronger privacy laws? I'm confused.
- AnimalMuppet 2y ago
  I think the argument is that people say they care about privacy, but they really care about money. Online privacy laws will cost at least some people some money, and those people vote too. And their representatives know they vote.
  - bilbo0s 2y ago
    I believe you're correct. At the same time, we allowed the problem of economic harm to grow worse by not dealing decisively with the problem of online privacy from the outset. For this same reason, an argument could be made that ripping the bandaid off now would be less painful than in the future. (And I'm not blind to the amount of pain this would cause. I realize that what I'm advocating would decimate our own industry.) Then on the other hand there's the argument, that has apparently found the most resonance, that letting online privacy whither on the vine is the logical way to go. Good or bad, these privacy invasions are funding a sizeable chunk of the economy. I can see people thinking it's nonsensical to get rid of 10% of the nation's jobs. Especially when it's the exact 10% of jobs likely to pay the most. I'm a privacy advocate, so I fall on the "burn it down" side. But I do understand the other side of the argument. I just think right now, at about 10-12% of the economy, decimation of the tech industry is survivable. If we wait, it could be 20-30% of the economy, at that point, pro-privacy actions would effectively be completely off the table.
    - soco 2y ago
      So you think over 10% of the economy is working on the advertisement industry? Isn't that number at least a little bit hyped up? I also cannot imagine how we, lacking targeted advertising, would eat less or buy less.
- 2y ago
repelsteeltje 2y ago
That sounds like flagship corporations have a horrible business model if employees are highly-payed to invade privacy. I'm sure, those companies have enough smart people to figure out some way to create high-paying jobs that do not rely on invasion of privacy. [Added] ...if only they were incentivized to do so
- seydor 2y ago
  One could say that Norway's flagship corporation has a horrible business model. The Norwegians have never held a referendum whether they should stop drilling , but they are so environmentally conscious that it's not unlikely. Should Norway stop drilling and let its sovereign fund collapse (along with the value of many global companies where it invests)? Is there any State that is purely moral?
  - eru 2y ago
    I see what you are trying to say, but I'm not quite sure why Norway's sovereign fund would collapse just because the Norwegians would stop adding more money to the fund? And why would the companies they invest in collapse? The companies in the S&P500 don't collapse, when I stop making regular new payments into my retirement fund.
    - benterix 2y ago
      I noticed this post was downvoted. Could anyone explain why? The fund is enormous so the question is pertinent.
      - jemmyw 2y ago
        Because the question didn't make sense. The fund wouldn't collapse if they stop adding oil funds to it, it will continue to exist as an investment. That's actually the point of it, to continue once the oil is gone.
    - Workaccount2 2y ago
      It would not collapse, but the inflows to the fund would. However, it would still likely provide for decades at least. Norway distributes the returns from the fund, not the fund money itself.
nonrandomstring 2y ago
This argument may well have some truth, but it shrinks the debate to individual choices about "money in my wallet" versus "privacy". Increasingly the debate is moving to national security. We hear that the US government has lost trust in Microsoft. In the UK the choice of GCHQ to use AWS has caused consternation. A much more complex and nuanced landscape is emerging. Two of the links in the Techdirt article reference national security issues. National security and economic welfare of citizens are not separate. Private profit of a few global surveillance and data trading companies creates a problem that affects more than individual rights. So even if one ignores ethics and rights and takes a purely economic perspective, one has to ask whether the damage to a nation caused by big-tech surveillance companies outweighs their net benefit to the economy.
- glitchc 2y ago
  I agree with this. I don't know if we have easy solutions left to tackle this pernicious problem. But legislating privacy definitely won't work the way people think it will. In the past, boom and bust cycles, while causing major hardship for regular folks, would also wipe out most incumbents and monopolies, effectively resetting the economy. Modern monetary policy is designed to minimize economic shock, so that option is off the table, and has been for some time now.
codedokode 2y ago
Privacy of majority of population is more important than income of a bunch of corrupt SV engineers, isn't it?
- bilbo0s 2y ago
  Problem is it actually decimate the engineers in Nebraska, South Carolina, and Texas as well. Oh! And don't forget the youtubers and content creators in Montana, Indiana, and Kansas. And on and on and on. It's not as straightforward as people think, and it reaches a whole lot further than people realize. I'm a privacy activist and have studied the issue, but I still fall on the "more privacy needed" side of the fence. Likely because I'm very much in the "burn it all down" faction of privacy advocates. However, I do understand what I'm up against. There are a lot of people who are either on the other side presently, or will be on the other side as soon as they realize their pay checks will go away as the effects of closing privacy loopholes ripple through the economy. We have to be clear eyed here, and prepared for enormous opposition to these ideas when these issues become better understood. Which is why I say we should act now. It's like Andor said, "There will never be fewer guards than there are today." As more people gain understanding of the financial impacts, the number of people on the other side will grow.
croes 2y ago
Safety laws, anti-child labor laws, environmental laws, worker protection laws all could cause economic harm to flag ship corporations.
speed_spread 2y ago
As parasitic as the advertising business is, the "legitimate" commercial surveillance activities provides a nice cover for other types of surveillance, obfuscating the operations of state actors who can run their own programs or tap commercial networks to just buy whatever data they want.
benterix 2y ago
> The real truth is that strong privacy laws would cause economic harm to flagship corporations. The real truth is that flagship corporations think this will happen. They seem to believe that tracking users is the only way to deliver ads efficiently. It's not, and there are other ways to do that, such as displaying tags in environments devoted to a given topic. But this would imply a change, and why change if you can bribe congresspeople?
- latexr 2y ago
  > > The real truth is that strong privacy laws would cause economic harm to flagship corporations. > The real truth is that flagship corporations think this will happen. The real truth is that flagship corporations want everyone else to believe this will happen. They want to do whatever they feel like unopposed, and what better way to accomplish that than making everyone think what’s best for themselves is to let the company do exactly what it wants.
latexr 2y ago
> The real truth is that strong privacy laws would cause economic harm to flagship corporations. Won’t somebody please think of the ~~children~~ corporations! > That would have a ripple effect on the economy as those corporations are responsible for thousands of high-paying jobs. Bullshit. This is the argument for “trickle-down economics” and if there’s anything the past decades have proven is that when the people at the top get more money, they keep more of it for themselves.
dauertewigkeit 2y ago
Not just flagship corporations either. Our modern economies rely heavily on luxury consumerism which is heavily driven by advertising and marketing.
Mistletoe 2y ago
I think you are close but not quite. The real problem is that tech giants rule the SP500 now and Congress all have portfolios laced to the gills with stocks. My only hope is that eventually the rich realize they make more money betting on the market going down than up, the stock market does mean reversion, and we break up the obvious tech monopolies that are causing the dystopia we all find ourselves living in right now. https://www.currentmarketvaluation.com/models/s&p500-mean-reversion.php https://www.currentmarketvaluation.com/models/s&p500-mean-re...
- scarface_74 2y ago
  And then we “break up Google” so we have a Google Search company, a Google YouTube company, A Google Chrome company and instead of one company having all of your data to target you, now multiple companies are sharing data between them… But more to the point, which tech company has a monopoly at all and which one is based on structural issues and not network effects and how do you propose to break them up? Better question is where is the consumer benefit of breaking up any of them and how would you slice them?
Workaccount2 2y ago
The real real truth is that most consumers are totally content with the current state of things, and spend virtually zero time worrying about online privacy (yes, people exist outside tech bubbles). If google pushed to a privacy subscription model, where you could pay for google services and have all your privacy protected, people would get mad and tell google to "bring back the free stuff!". I'm surprised people here don't see this as plainly true. Consumers _love_ the ad-supported internet, as evidenced by the incredible success of ad-supported vs subscription supported services. What people actually want is "Privacy protection yet the internet stays the same". Which is akin to "$50 minimum wage but society stays the same". Purely naive idealistic thinking.
- dns_snek 2y ago
  > Consumers _love_ the ad-supported internet, as evidenced by the incredible success of ad-supported vs subscription supported services. Consumers also love the lottery and casinos, even though they both have a negative ROI. Consumers think they're getting something for free, but the bill for their "free service" comes the next time they go to the store and pay $10 more, spread over dozens of items they buy every month, to pay for marginal cost of advertising. The price is hidden so well that our lizard brains don't connect the two, that's what makes the entire scheme so effective, but it definitely isn't "free".
misterbishop 2y ago
ultimately we have to overthrow capitalism via a revolutionary workers party.
danaris 2y ago
This is sheer scaremongering. "If you dare to assert your right to privacy, thousands of people will lose their jobs!" It relies on several layers of propaganda, and has no more basis in reality than trickle-down economics.
1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago
"flagship corporations" If there are corporations that are the world's largest by headcount or by capitalisation, i.e., "flagship" corporations, and these entities are dependent on online surveillance and online ad sales to operate in their present capacity, then certainly privacy regulation is likely going to affect them. One could argue such regulation is targeting them, i.e., the harm they do, specifically. As a result of regulation these entities might no longer be able to maintain their position as "flagship" corporations. Other corporations that are not dependant on surveillance and ad sales for 90+% of their revenue may again become the "flagship" corporations, as they were prior to the 2010s. The current online surveillance and online ad sales-based "flagship" coporations have only held their "flagship" positions for a relatively short time period. Arguably, the general absence of regulation governing their privacy-violating behaviour, which remarkably is the core of their "business model", has provided a competitive advantage vis-a-vis other corporations in more regulated industries. One could argue privacy regulation might effectively level the playing field.

Retric 2y ago

Privacy has minimal overall economic impact because of the zero sum nature of advertising. Specific companies get harmed, but advertisers don’t suddenly have less money if advertising is less targeted. Net result that money is simply going to support different jobs. Similarly with more/less efficient advertising consumers have just as much money so total spending stays the same, so the only change is which companies capture it.

zooq_ai 2y ago
This is clueless understanding of economics (and very prevalent in HN) Economics 101 : There is no fixed pie of $$$$. $$ (as in wealth, productivity) can absolutely disappear from the economy or grow from nothing.
- Retric 2y ago
  The economy grows or shrinks with productivity but advertising specifically is zero sum. Coke vs Pepsi makes a great deal of difference to those specific companies and little else. If anything it’s slightly negative due to inefficiency because the winner isn’t the best product.
  - zooq_ai 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - codedokode 2y ago
      > cost of acquiring a customer > cost of serving a customer For a successful and popular product the cost of acquiring a customer is low. Heavy investments in advertising are needed for unpopular, overpriced products that naturally have a low demand. For example, almost everything that I buy I bought not because of advertising but based on the comparison of product price and quality.
    - mjhay 2y ago
      You're ignoring the fact that a customer buying from a business incurs an opportunity cost from other things they could have spent money on (or invested). In addition, it merely shifts the money. If someone is thinking about getting Subway, but sees a McDonald's ad and goes there instead, that helps McDonald's but hurts Subway.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - JohnFen 2y ago
      And yet, somehow, businesses thrived even back when massively spying on people wasn't a thing they could do.
    - vundercind 2y ago
      Rivalrous advertising spending between two megacorps everyone already knows is zero-sum. You’re spending money just because the other guy increased spending, and market share stays the same. But you can’t not spend or you might lose market share. Now you’re both spending more to achieve the same result. [edit] zero sum in terms of the market-share game—the size of the pie stays the same, you’re just adjusting who gets how much. Negative sum for the overall game in the case that total spending increases.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  - glitchc 2y ago
    Advertising is not zero-sum. It is a money multiplier. To illustrate this, we start from the position that a new business creates net new value in the economy (on top of existing value). This is an economic maxim that must be true otherwise our GDP would never grow from 1770 standards. Now, the new business has to allocate a percentage of its budget to advertising. It doesn't have a choice in the matter: 1) In a competitive market, not advertising places it at a competitive disadvantage to its rivals who are advertising. 2) In a non-competitive market, not advertising leads to a smaller overall market and a weaker position (loss of market cap and easier to disrupt). Once the new business start advertising, other businesses become aware of it and either (a) choose to enter the market themselves, or (b) invest in advertising targeted at blocking/reducing this new market. Both cases result in more money spent on advertising. That's the multiplier effect.
    - Retric 2y ago
      > Advertising is not zero-sum. It is a money multiplier. You misunderstand zero sum here. Gas stations can’t grow total gas sales making the selling of gas zero sum, but they very much provide a useful function in aggregate. Advertising is going to exist with and without tracking individual users, the difference is simply relative value of undifferentiated content. Selling camping supplies on an outdoor website is targeting, but linking user’s history allows anyone to get a cut of premium revenue even if it’s lowest common denominator crap. But remove tracking of users and specialty content like local news becomes a lot more valuable and clickbait far less, a major public good. > we start from the position that a new business creates net new value in the economy (on top of existing value). This is an economic maxim that must be true otherwise our GDP would never grow from 1770 standards. I understand the point you are trying to make but existing companies also evolve their offerings over time. Nintendo in 1889 wasn’t selling video games.
      - glitchc 2y ago
        I think you missed the forest for the trees. I will make it very clear. The advertising business is a growth vector. It grows with the size of the economy. Singular industries may rise and fall (ex. ads for riding crops) but in aggregate, advertising always continues to grow. Zero sum means explicitly that the total pie stays the same, which advertising is not. It forces the pie to grow. And that's for a straightforward reason, because advertising is an arms race. A company can't afford to drop out, can't afford to fall behind. > Advertising is going to exist with and without tracking individual users, the difference is simply relative value of undifferentiated content. So what you mean to say is that targeted advertising is the same as mass advertising, that there's no benefit, perceived or otherwise, of targeting users. Well, I'm afraid you're very wrong. Both buyers and sellers of advertising love targeted advertising. For buyers, it makes the most efficient use of their budget allocation, and for sellers, it allows them to to take maximum advantage of user self-segmentation. The analogy of indiscriminate bombing being superseded by precision munitions is an apt one. There's no going back at this point. Regulations will only distort the market further. The platforms will make the fines the cost of doing business, and pass them onto the buyers. The buyers, in turn, will pass that cost along to consumers in the form of higher prices. Every company will continue to pay for advertising because they can't afford not to. And so it will continue. All the fines will do is concentrate more wealth into the platforms and the government. And that's exactly what's happening in the EU with advent of GDPR.
- treyd 2y ago
  In advertising it can often be true in a sense though. A very illustrative example of this when regulations tightening advertising for cigarettes were introduced, cigarette companies started reporting more profits because they all collectively stopped advertising at the same time and got to pocket the money they would have spent on it. The pool of cigarette smokers isn't/wasn't growing that much, so all the advertising was really doing was trying to take consumers away from their competitors and the net effect was 0. To be fair, then they started investing in vape companies and things might have changed. I don't think that's a good thing, although vapes are probably less harmful than cigarettes.

23B1 2y ago

This is an interesting argument I've heard from various quarters but have never seen any evidentiary material supporting it. Do you have any reliable sources that explore this correlation?

zooq_ai 2y ago
Yeah, just ask your favorite merchant how much it hurt their business and how many business shut down or lay off people due to Apple Tracking ban
- nottorp 2y ago
  merchant or ad peddler?
- scarface_74 2y ago
  There was no tracking ban. Apple gave consumers a choice of being tracked and 90% said “no”

DarkNova6 2y ago

Or perhaps it forces those companies to focus on products instead of exploiting their market position.

soco 2y ago

Is this a trickle-down style of argument? Or that corporations are holy? Or that they always have the job takers interests at heart? Or that the elected representatives are elected by the 16% who don't want stronger privacy laws? I'm confused.

AnimalMuppet 2y ago
I think the argument is that people say they care about privacy, but they really care about money. Online privacy laws will cost at least some people some money, and those people vote too. And their representatives know they vote.
- bilbo0s 2y ago
  I believe you're correct. At the same time, we allowed the problem of economic harm to grow worse by not dealing decisively with the problem of online privacy from the outset. For this same reason, an argument could be made that ripping the bandaid off now would be less painful than in the future. (And I'm not blind to the amount of pain this would cause. I realize that what I'm advocating would decimate our own industry.) Then on the other hand there's the argument, that has apparently found the most resonance, that letting online privacy whither on the vine is the logical way to go. Good or bad, these privacy invasions are funding a sizeable chunk of the economy. I can see people thinking it's nonsensical to get rid of 10% of the nation's jobs. Especially when it's the exact 10% of jobs likely to pay the most. I'm a privacy advocate, so I fall on the "burn it down" side. But I do understand the other side of the argument. I just think right now, at about 10-12% of the economy, decimation of the tech industry is survivable. If we wait, it could be 20-30% of the economy, at that point, pro-privacy actions would effectively be completely off the table.
  - soco 2y ago
    So you think over 10% of the economy is working on the advertisement industry? Isn't that number at least a little bit hyped up? I also cannot imagine how we, lacking targeted advertising, would eat less or buy less.
2y ago

repelsteeltje 2y ago

That sounds like flagship corporations have a horrible business model if employees are highly-payed to invade privacy. I'm sure, those companies have enough smart people to figure out some way to create high-paying jobs that do not rely on invasion of privacy. [Added] ...if only they were incentivized to do so

seydor 2y ago
One could say that Norway's flagship corporation has a horrible business model. The Norwegians have never held a referendum whether they should stop drilling , but they are so environmentally conscious that it's not unlikely. Should Norway stop drilling and let its sovereign fund collapse (along with the value of many global companies where it invests)? Is there any State that is purely moral?
- eru 2y ago
  I see what you are trying to say, but I'm not quite sure why Norway's sovereign fund would collapse just because the Norwegians would stop adding more money to the fund? And why would the companies they invest in collapse? The companies in the S&P500 don't collapse, when I stop making regular new payments into my retirement fund.
  - benterix 2y ago
    I noticed this post was downvoted. Could anyone explain why? The fund is enormous so the question is pertinent.
    - jemmyw 2y ago
      Because the question didn't make sense. The fund wouldn't collapse if they stop adding oil funds to it, it will continue to exist as an investment. That's actually the point of it, to continue once the oil is gone.
  - Workaccount2 2y ago
    It would not collapse, but the inflows to the fund would. However, it would still likely provide for decades at least. Norway distributes the returns from the fund, not the fund money itself.

nonrandomstring 2y ago

This argument may well have some truth, but it shrinks the debate to individual choices about "money in my wallet" versus "privacy". Increasingly the debate is moving to national security. We hear that the US government has lost trust in Microsoft. In the UK the choice of GCHQ to use AWS has caused consternation. A much more complex and nuanced landscape is emerging. Two of the links in the Techdirt article reference national security issues. National security and economic welfare of citizens are not separate. Private profit of a few global surveillance and data trading companies creates a problem that affects more than individual rights. So even if one ignores ethics and rights and takes a purely economic perspective, one has to ask whether the damage to a nation caused by big-tech surveillance companies outweighs their net benefit to the economy.

glitchc 2y ago
I agree with this. I don't know if we have easy solutions left to tackle this pernicious problem. But legislating privacy definitely won't work the way people think it will. In the past, boom and bust cycles, while causing major hardship for regular folks, would also wipe out most incumbents and monopolies, effectively resetting the economy. Modern monetary policy is designed to minimize economic shock, so that option is off the table, and has been for some time now.

codedokode 2y ago

Privacy of majority of population is more important than income of a bunch of corrupt SV engineers, isn't it?

bilbo0s 2y ago
Problem is it actually decimate the engineers in Nebraska, South Carolina, and Texas as well. Oh! And don't forget the youtubers and content creators in Montana, Indiana, and Kansas. And on and on and on. It's not as straightforward as people think, and it reaches a whole lot further than people realize. I'm a privacy activist and have studied the issue, but I still fall on the "more privacy needed" side of the fence. Likely because I'm very much in the "burn it all down" faction of privacy advocates. However, I do understand what I'm up against. There are a lot of people who are either on the other side presently, or will be on the other side as soon as they realize their pay checks will go away as the effects of closing privacy loopholes ripple through the economy. We have to be clear eyed here, and prepared for enormous opposition to these ideas when these issues become better understood. Which is why I say we should act now. It's like Andor said, "There will never be fewer guards than there are today." As more people gain understanding of the financial impacts, the number of people on the other side will grow.

croes 2y ago

Safety laws, anti-child labor laws, environmental laws, worker protection laws all could cause economic harm to flag ship corporations.

speed_spread 2y ago

As parasitic as the advertising business is, the "legitimate" commercial surveillance activities provides a nice cover for other types of surveillance, obfuscating the operations of state actors who can run their own programs or tap commercial networks to just buy whatever data they want.

benterix 2y ago

> The real truth is that strong privacy laws would cause economic harm to flagship corporations. The real truth is that flagship corporations think this will happen. They seem to believe that tracking users is the only way to deliver ads efficiently. It's not, and there are other ways to do that, such as displaying tags in environments devoted to a given topic. But this would imply a change, and why change if you can bribe congresspeople?

latexr 2y ago
> > The real truth is that strong privacy laws would cause economic harm to flagship corporations. > The real truth is that flagship corporations think this will happen. The real truth is that flagship corporations want everyone else to believe this will happen. They want to do whatever they feel like unopposed, and what better way to accomplish that than making everyone think what’s best for themselves is to let the company do exactly what it wants.

latexr 2y ago

> The real truth is that strong privacy laws would cause economic harm to flagship corporations. Won’t somebody please think of the ~~children~~ corporations! > That would have a ripple effect on the economy as those corporations are responsible for thousands of high-paying jobs. Bullshit. This is the argument for “trickle-down economics” and if there’s anything the past decades have proven is that when the people at the top get more money, they keep more of it for themselves.

dauertewigkeit 2y ago

Not just flagship corporations either. Our modern economies rely heavily on luxury consumerism which is heavily driven by advertising and marketing.

Mistletoe 2y ago

I think you are close but not quite. The real problem is that tech giants rule the SP500 now and Congress all have portfolios laced to the gills with stocks. My only hope is that eventually the rich realize they make more money betting on the market going down than up, the stock market does mean reversion, and we break up the obvious tech monopolies that are causing the dystopia we all find ourselves living in right now. https://www.currentmarketvaluation.com/models/s&p500-mean-reversion.php https://www.currentmarketvaluation.com/models/s&p500-mean-re...

scarface_74 2y ago
And then we “break up Google” so we have a Google Search company, a Google YouTube company, A Google Chrome company and instead of one company having all of your data to target you, now multiple companies are sharing data between them… But more to the point, which tech company has a monopoly at all and which one is based on structural issues and not network effects and how do you propose to break them up? Better question is where is the consumer benefit of breaking up any of them and how would you slice them?

Workaccount2 2y ago

The real real truth is that most consumers are totally content with the current state of things, and spend virtually zero time worrying about online privacy (yes, people exist outside tech bubbles). If google pushed to a privacy subscription model, where you could pay for google services and have all your privacy protected, people would get mad and tell google to "bring back the free stuff!". I'm surprised people here don't see this as plainly true. Consumers _love_ the ad-supported internet, as evidenced by the incredible success of ad-supported vs subscription supported services. What people actually want is "Privacy protection yet the internet stays the same". Which is akin to "$50 minimum wage but society stays the same". Purely naive idealistic thinking.

dns_snek 2y ago
> Consumers _love_ the ad-supported internet, as evidenced by the incredible success of ad-supported vs subscription supported services. Consumers also love the lottery and casinos, even though they both have a negative ROI. Consumers think they're getting something for free, but the bill for their "free service" comes the next time they go to the store and pay $10 more, spread over dozens of items they buy every month, to pay for marginal cost of advertising. The price is hidden so well that our lizard brains don't connect the two, that's what makes the entire scheme so effective, but it definitely isn't "free".

misterbishop 2y ago

ultimately we have to overthrow capitalism via a revolutionary workers party.

danaris 2y ago

This is sheer scaremongering. "If you dare to assert your right to privacy, thousands of people will lose their jobs!" It relies on several layers of propaganda, and has no more basis in reality than trickle-down economics.

1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago

"flagship corporations" If there are corporations that are the world's largest by headcount or by capitalisation, i.e., "flagship" corporations, and these entities are dependent on online surveillance and online ad sales to operate in their present capacity, then certainly privacy regulation is likely going to affect them. One could argue such regulation is targeting them, i.e., the harm they do, specifically. As a result of regulation these entities might no longer be able to maintain their position as "flagship" corporations. Other corporations that are not dependant on surveillance and ad sales for 90+% of their revenue may again become the "flagship" corporations, as they were prior to the 2010s. The current online surveillance and online ad sales-based "flagship" coporations have only held their "flagship" positions for a relatively short time period. Arguably, the general absence of regulation governing their privacy-violating behaviour, which remarkably is the core of their "business model", has provided a competitive advantage vis-a-vis other corporations in more regulated industries. One could argue privacy regulation might effectively level the playing field.