They also own real estate under Choice Properties.

2 decades ago, I was working in city summer camps. Every time there was a smog alert, we had to keep all the kids inside. Every time there was a heat alert, they weren’t allowed to run around.

So on the glorious days with heat and smog alerts, you’re supposed to somehow plan fun for 10-15 kids from 9-4 without running or going outside. There were not enough classrooms to keep all the kids in arts and crafts. Also, no running in the gym. Do this for days in a row.

I don’t miss that job.

Okay I’ll bite. I work in product management for capitalist software companies. Every single software product you use has trackers built in unless if you’re hardcore FOSS.

Even if the company has no interest in selling your data, it’s still really hard to learn about user behaviours in the real world in order to figure out what to build next. Many of these trackers are UX tools, much more than selling your data tools. My previous employer fully anonymized and aggregated usage data, but we can’t necessarily say the same for other companies.

These trackers are the industry default and honestly, I don’t know where we’d be without them. We use them to measure the success of what we build and to look for surprises/opportunities.

On that note, for products and websites that I like, I sometimes intentionally turn off my ad and privacy blockers for them (as long as it’s not intrusive). It’s hard to do our work without that data.

Say you can justify each piece of data collected via a UX element. Someone said in the comments: low battery, charger ad. Where do you draw the line between data for the product vs data for profit? You don’t. It’s all embedded in the idea of “the product”.

This is a company that sells ads AND data. They collect everything. Consumers don’t seem to care. Tiktok is still popular. People see this post and will still download Threads.

It’s important for people to understand the industry justification behind data collection and why it’s so widespread across the industry so we can have this conversation about what “too much data” actually means. Serving me relevant ads like places near me for food? I guess that’s a feature. A face aging app that we train to feed a military database of faces to track down deserters? Not so much.

Don’t they have partnership agreements and secondary products that repackages their data as insights? (I’m thinking Cambridge Analytica.) It’s not a direct sale, per se.

Repackaged data in the form of other products is one way to do it.

Thanks for taking the time to educate me (and any passing readers.)

The city already has programs in place to reduce and write off property tax bills from people who are struggling.

Income is a poor measure of wealth.

Because it looks cool on a map! Or something like that.

I’m in Canada, where the tech giants just blocked all Canadian media outlets due to new media profit sharing legislation.

I get my news from:

• Nora Loreto’s daily news podcast
• Mastodon #cdnpoli #onpoli #topoli
• Direct from CBC, Toronto Star
• Lemmy
• What my friend group shares on Discord.

I haven’t been as invested in news lately, but this looks a little promising: https://dailycanada.ca/ It’s an rss feed from all media outlets in Canada.