… give them money.
This point though. Do you pay for the content you consume? If not, you contribute to creators gravitating towards advertisement to pay rent with their work.
I hope you understand that services you also pay for are also selling your data.
Use patreon, liberapay, and open collective to pay the creator directly, then aggressively block ads. Thats what I do.
The point is to give creators money, not advertisers
The point is, you’re an exception.
Cororations found out long ago that most people value a couple bucks a month more than they value a 1-3 minute chunk of their time a few times an hour while they’re being entertained.
Listen, pay me a dollar and I’ll show you a cool mind trick.
Oh, you dont have/want to spend a dollar? Or you’re skeptical of the trick? Well, you could just listen to me hum a tune for a few seconds and then I’ll show you the trick. In fact, you don’t even have to listen, just let me hum a tune in your presence. Just for a few seconds. Then I’ll show the trick anyway.
Sound better? Cool.
Hmmm Hmm Hmmmm Hmm
That wasn’t so bad.
Ready for the cool trick?
You already missed it. That was the trick. Be sure to smash the bell and hit subscribe.
Hmm maybe I’m just desensitized, but what are they going to do with that information? Going to try and sell me stupid shit?
Sell it to people who will manipulate you and your family. Even subtle changes could shape the direction of your life. Or, they could say people with your preferences are in a certain area and fund some other area instead. Could be anything. The less data they have, the better.
Edit: gave->have
“could be anything”, “subtle changes”
I still don’t see cause for anything other than concern
The advertising company you mentioned is Cambridge Analytica, right? If so, and not something else, I’d like to add this shit has come to light and exploded in 2018. We have to wonder how many others went dark after that and what shit they have come up with since then, in these 5 years.
Have health insurance?
Big into drinking, lots of bars and going to liquor stores whilst your mobile phone is with you and some apps have location access permissions?
Don’t be surprised if your health insurance goes up on account of being in a higher risk group…
(It’s not exactly hard to cross your location with store locations and it’s probably already done generally to try and determine your consumer habits)
And this is just a mild, mild example. Stuff to do with people’s sex life can have far more entertaining effects, especially in a highly moralistic country (like the US) or if cheating on a spouse.
Think about it this way: if you don’t jump through hops to make it hard to track your location, there is a record, forever of every place you go to with your phone and how long you stay there (and repeat visits with long stays would signal a pattern) as well as of everything you’re interested in enough to look it up and/or visit it on the Internet and it’s all crossed. Further, if you have email via one of the big providers such as Google, every email you sent, received or even just drafted but never sent is tracked.
Why do you think Google started pretty much forcing people to give them their phone number for the Google account that, for example, goes with their Google Mail?! It allows them to link all that sweet information and match it to a single individual.
And this is before we go into crossing data with the kind of physical life data on you: the insurance company records, car onership and rental, financial information and transactions, even public transport use (for those which use modern touch-in touch-out cards).
Right now in the US? Not much outside of try to sell you stupid shit.
But the capability in the data is there for an authoritarian regime to do quite a lot to you as a result of the information.
So you know - if there was any pending threat of a narcissistic psychopath upending the government you might be concerned over what insights into individual mindsets can be accomplished with the data available…
why is this so normalized? every time some guy who knowingly does evil things and comes up and say that their work was evil like and now everyone should praise them… removed STFU, you aren’t revealing anything that’s not public knowledge.
“I spied on billions of people, I would avoid my ex company”
“I previously worked at amazon and made millions, now you should avoid it”
“I got rich by exploiting you, now that i’m out and doing other things, avoid my last company”
“I worked at <social media company> and oversaw pushing violent narratives in developing countries, I wouldn’t touch it with a 10 feet pole”
No Shit Sherlock!!
I worked in a non-decision making ITS adjacent capacity between banks and lawyers during the 2008 downturn. I knew full well our company was contracting with awful banks but I got the job while unemployed for several months when there wasn’t any jobs. People don’t always have a realistic choice in the matter, I was poor and it was entry level $35k cubicle gruntwork. Nothing I did couldn’t be replaced by any idiot with basic MS office skills in a 10 minute interview. Me taking the high road would have just fucked up my life for no reason. I left as soon as the job market recovered.
Anyway, I pulled all of my money out of Wells Fargo and tell anyone who will listen to do the same, out of the 30 big banks we worked with they were leaps and bounds more willfully incompetent then all of the others combined. I don’t claim to be a good person, I just do what I do like anyone else, I think you’re looking at this situation far to ideologically. In corrupt systems we are all complicit on all ends, there is no moral high ground other than starving to death and refusing the system entirely which is nonsense. Nearly all corporations are actively doing evil and a large portion of non-profits are only marginally better.
I agree with this and yet this seems really contrived
I built software around 2010-2014 around harvesting visitor data.
Shit was scary back then with how much we could predict. We were already laser targeting customers and people. I can only imagine what they’re doing now.
This was before the whole “big data” push when companies were cross-referencing data sources from other harvesters.
oh rly? then why, after i’ve used facebook daily for 15 years, does it thin my interests include “foot” and and actors ive never heard of? why does google, after about that same amount of usage plus me owning many androids and having an even deeper entanglement with it than with facebook, think i’m the opposite sex (!) and imagine countless interest for me that i don’t have, just like facebook?
iv yet to see any of these companies being very accurate about me.
Sounds like you’re not the only person using your devices, including network and router. And even if you are, if you live with others and not on a VPN you’re very likely sharing an open IP with people of different tastes as well as gender. I get my spouse’s YouTube recommendations all the time, even when not signed in and on a totally different machine, because to YouTube it’s all coming from the same IP.
It’s not a huge mystery.
ah, i am sharing the router and network. i hadn’t considered that, and i’ve wondered and wondered how such inaccurate info commanded so much money and uproar. thanks!
