If you don't mind me asking what is so important about privacy?
What harm does public data have to you? Couldn’t one just ignore the ads? You can’t see anyone watching you, is public data good for public records? (I’m just curious). I know this sounds weird but is public data good for historical preservation and knowledge increasing the importance of the individual? And does public data lead to better products?
Let’s flip it. Why do people want data on you? why are people willing to pay for it? or governments deploy threats of fines (backed up by men with guns) or men with guns in order to force it’s collection on you?
private companies feel like they can make money with it, that they can make you do things that are profitable (buy something you wouldn’t, vote a certain way, decide against insuring you etc). Are you cleverer than teams of academics? I’m not.
Governments want it to enhance control. Sometimes that control can be benevolent but it’s still control. Often it’s not benevolent, selective enforcement of unjust laws against political opponents etc.
I essentially just thinking about what the intention is behind something. What are Facebook’s intentions? Are they to connect you with your friends, and improve your life? No. Their intention is keep you stuck too their platform, and sharing marketable details of your life.
You walk onto a car lot. Is your first thought “hey, this guy is super friendly! He just wants to spend time with me” not, his intention is to get you into the most expensive car he can.
The shift from “You have nothing to hide if you aren’t doing anything illegal” to “It is illegal to criticize us. We will keep an eye on you to make sure you don’t.” can happen a lot faster than people want to realize.
You may have nothing to hide, but you have everything to protect.
Hypothetical: if everyone has access to your data and habits it is trivial to modify that data to frame you for nefarious activities. In other words, why the fuck would you want every rando to be searching in your underwear drawer?
Because I find it unsettling on a personal level when my wife and I, in the privacy of our home away from the world have a conversation where we make a joke about buying a banjo, and then every day for the next three weeks everywhere I go is flooded with targeted banjo ads. Verbal conversations, away from everything but our phones and computers.
Because I find it unsettling when I go to a site I have never gone to before and it greets me with my name and already knows where I live with the shipping details even though I clicked "I do not consent" on every data pop-up that I've seen in the past five years.
Because people are selling that data, my data, data about myself, and I get none of that profit and it was done without my consent or knowledge.
Because a company having my information should be something I need to personally allow, not something I need to ask and beg them not to obtain.
Because I can think of very few, if any, benevolent purposes of using that data, but there is a legion of malevolent reasons for it, and of the ones I have seen, all of them fall into this category.
All this being said, I should not need to have a reason. The onus should not rest with the individual to prove that they deserve undisturbed privacy, it should rest with the institutions that want this information; that it is a requirement to obtain this information for valid reasons and not frivolous ones, or ones rooted in greed or ideology. Like a search warrant for example.
There’s plenty of reasons not to try and keep things private! It is a lot easier for comments on Lemmy, for example, to be public, rather than trying to make the discussion threads private among some set of authorized participants.
And if I am rating movies on Netflix, I really do want them to take my ratings and put them in a big machine learning pile to try and find me better movies. That’s the point of rating the things.
But there’s a big difference between me actually sharing information with people so they can do good, and people trying to collect information about me without my permission so that they can make money, or, worse, try to manipulate me later.
And even if the data is not in itself all that worthy of secrecy, and I might be willing to share it, someone else deciding for me that they get to follow me around and see what I am up to or what I like, without actually asking or without genuinely expecting that I might say no, is… not how consent works.
Also, some of the point of this is that one cannot in fact genuinely ignore advertisements. At the very least they constitute a cognitive load, where it is harder to do or see things because the advertisements are in the way. They can also hammer brand names and desired associations into people’s heads, to ensure that most people know that e.g. X Brand Soda is the “luxury” soda. And of course in aggregate they cause people to buy things. Each person might choose to buy the thing of their own apparently free will, but running the ad will cause more people to make that decision than would otherwise.
Where they are most dangerous is when advertisements try and create problems, rather than just offering products. A sign that says “We sell Coke” is fine. Three commercials a day asking if you are guilty of “old-shoeing”, the social faux pas of having old shoes, look at this man being laughed at for it, etc. are dangerous, even if they never try to sell a product.
These kinds of marketing campaigns are that much more effective if they can be targeted at the people who are the easiest to convince that made up problems are real. And while one’s general personality is not exactly a secret, we also don’t want scammers like this going around making lists of the particularly gullible.
Edit: if you think I’m a communist because of my name username look very closely at my profile picture and tell me you think I’m serious
Did you know countries like Russia and China have better privacy protections for their citizens (at least when it comes to protections against their corporations, not their government of course), and just buy information on US citizens from US corporations for many of their human research needs?
Look at Cambridge Analyticas involvement in swinging the 2016 US election if you want an example of how much damage information can do when used in psyops
I always found the C6ISR acronym in warfare to be interesting. R is reconnaissance, S is surveillance, I is intelligence, and the 6 C’s are Command and Control, Communications, Computers, Cyber, and finally Combat
You can predict when conflicts are about to rise with social media information. Frustration can be measured by looking at social circles. Consider Romeo and Juliet, they like each other, but everyone around them hates everyone else in the opposing party. Because Romeo and Juliet interact with each other positively, that means groups that don’t like each other are going to interact and human nature wants to resolve this frustration. This type of graph theory is used in the middle east to predict conflicts.
Do you remember the protest where BLM protesters were ran over by a truck? Russia organized the protest for both left and right wing parties. They got intelligence through surveillance. They got surveillance by just buying your info from American corps.
Look very closely at my profile picture, read my profile name very carefully, and feel like a dumbass for missing a very simple joke. If you understand that joke, I don’t think you would seriously believe I’m a communist - not like someone believing In an economic policy different from your beliefs should get your prepubescent testicles in a twist, but if it helps calm you down, I have partial ownership of a business I helped start, so you could consider me a capitalist to some degree.
How is your last sentence even remotely a diss? You went from suggesting I live in my mom’s basement to suggesting I share the property I own and to automate the last shred of manual labor that might be available for your useless ass (which I’m literally capable of doing).
Target once used small amounts of shopping data to accurately predict women were pregnant before they themselves knew.
A Nebraska PD got data from Facebook to prove a woman had an abortion recently and prosecuted her.
you don’t know what will become illegal
So, even small amounts of data can predict lots of things about your life. The government has a track record of using that data to prosecute you. And you cannot trust the Government will always align with your morals (assuming it even does right now).
And that doesn’t even consider other entities & organizations in the world.
What if an insurance company wants uses public data about you to deny you coverage? What if someone is searching for people in the area with ideal houses to rob and you’re on vacation? What if they use a deepfake of a loved one to scam you? Steal your identity and ruin your credit? What if they make and sell deepfake porn made of you or a loved one? What if they create meticulously engineered political psyop campaigns hand-tailored to exploit your psychology? What if this list of “what ifs” could go on nearly forever, and some “what ifs” aren’t even things we’re capable of knowing about?
Because that last one is absolutely true, all the rest of those are true for someone, and at least one of them is probably true for you already.
Ok, but what if you don’t care?..well someone else in your life does. And even if they have impeccable data privacy habits, if enough of their friends and family don’t, then they’re just a single missing puzzle piece, and everyone can still see their shape.
Not to mention, you contribute to a pool of data that’s used to perform these kinds of analyses on society at large, meaning you contribute in some part to each and every instance of malicious data use towards anyone, anywhere.
I would add to your list, what if the company with that job offer you applied to asks for your consent to do a background check on you (they do) and then they pay other company that specializes in tracking all your information (these companies exist)?.
Companies fill the space now with their hideous brands, waging the same frenzied battle as the jungle species in order to appropriate the public space and attention with images and words, like animals with their screams and piss’
No offence, but I don’t know how people are still asking this question with the amount of large scale data breaches that are happening these days. People are having all their money, maybe even their entire identity, stolen by criminals who have access to their data via these breaches. Just recently an Australian woman was ordered by US courts to pay Adidas and the NBA $1.2 million because criminals gained access to her PayPal account through a data breach and used it to commit fraud.
Privacy isn’t just some abstract idea - there can be real world consequences for those who trust governments and companies with large amounts of their personal data. That’s why so many of us look to limit our digital attack surface by opting out of data collection and/or choosing privacy respecting alternatives where possible.
But to be clear, it isn’t solely about direct harm right now. Personally I believe everyone should have the right to privacy both online and offline, so I choose not to assist governments and corporations that seek to erode that right. This point doesn’t get made much, because normies don’t understand why something is important unless you can directly show it impacting their life, but it is arguably more important than any of the direct harm stuff. Even if the realistic threat to me is minimal, I will still continue to advocate for privacy because I believe it is the right thing to do.
In my mind that kind of post comes at best from completely naive people that confuse social media with Google to ask basic questions, and at worst someone with malicious intent to make it look like this is an open question that does not have a clear answer yet (while, as you mentioned, it totally does).
For the most part I think it’s the former. Maybe I’m wrong but I don’t think the privacy movement has some sort of troll counter-movement like you see with the “carnivores” targeting veganism, for example. People don’t intentionally seek out privacy related stuff just to shill for big tech and try to get a reaction, or concern troll to cause confusion and mistrust. They are just genuinely ignorant, though it’s still baffling every time a post like this pops up.
You know how women (and some doctors) had problems in the US because the states were getting information on whether they had, were thinking of having, or were having conversations about having an abortion?
You know how there was a possibility (or maybe that really happened, I don’t remember) that the state governments could be aquiring information from women’s period tracking apps and acquiring their behavioral patterns to find out if they were planning on having an abortion?
Well, I’m not a woman, but I am disabled. After I got fired from my job because I couldn’t perform anymore thanks to my disability, (there was no discrimination, I literally could not do my job because of my disability) I applied for disability payment.
I was rejected.
After that, I tried to look for other jobs, but for some strange reason, I couldn’t find a job ANYWHERE in the US. They never called back after telling me they would do a background check on me. I applied for about 70+ companies, I got background checks on 20+.
That didn’t happen before I applied for the disability payments, and as an immigrant that was below the poverty line I wasn’t someone that could put up a fight… Against whom? The companies? The government? I didn’t even know if the fact that I applied for the disability payments was the problem.
At the end, I was able to find a job in a call center working from home. But it took me 8 months for that.
takes off tinfoil hat
It’s a double edged sword, youcan make better products and a better experience for some things, but some people/companies think of other people, especially minorities, disabled, and probably women, as liabilities, and they don’t really want that.
This is why I rather have privacy, the ads are just annoying asf, but the things I said are just 2 examples of why privacy is important.
Hopefully I make sense, and sorry for any grammatical mistakes, English is not my first language.
Add comment