Recent searches
Search options
Scott Gilmore has a point when he says we can blame ourselves for Facebook and Cambridge Analytica: https://snabeltann.no/media/gvOOwmqpIXPzOvj6xLA
We all know the vulnerable feeling of placing too much trust in an Internet service. We all know that much of the Internet effectively operates on an honour system. It was designed that way, after all. Locking it down would be too inconvenient and place too many constraints on it. Zuckerberg knows that, and the IT industry knows it too.
@thor I would agree if all consumers shared the same technical knowledge I have. But I can't expect my grandma to know FB's business model and how easy it is to be tracked online, because 1) it's not obvious and 2) FB markets itself as something other than a data mining operation.
"It's our fault too" only works if we consented to be surveilled with full awareness. But most people just think they're talking to friends for free on this neat new thing called the internet.
@matt You don't need to be a tech to understand that there is no such thing as a free lunch. You don't need to be a tech to understand that electronic services keep records. Nor do you need to be a tech to suspect that you're seeing suspiciously personal ads because the service is monitoring those records. Grandma might not understand AI, but she could piece together that a "person" must be picking her ads.
@matt As a Facebook user, it's also fairly obvious that others can see what you're doing, because Facebook makes sure to tell you that your friend liked that controversial Facebook page, so it figures that it's telling your friends what you like too. Granted, you might need to be equipped with some ability to reason logically in order to reach these conclusions, and maybe granny isn't too sharp. It then becomes a question of how much we should protect people against their own stupidity.
@matt Computers aren't new. Businesses have been using them for over half a century. People are aware that phone companies keep records of phone calls, and that phone calls can be intercepted. It's not hard to apply that analogy to the Internet. Even without tech knowledge, it's still reasonable to assume that companies collect statistics. Also, don't users of tech have a responsibility to stay informed about it? Shall we all continue to pretend that it's still the 20th century?
@thor I agree this should all be common knowledge, and it'd be nice if it was. It's just not the reality, and for many people who aren't grandma. It's the same reason we still have warning labels on cigarettes and people are going to keep getting killed by a Tesla feature named "Autopilot" that still needs humans to pay attention to the road. Most consumer education happens from the product itself, so if the marketing is misleading, people will end up being misled and uneducated.
@thor And the problem is that there's a difference between seeing what your friends like within the service (something you can easily observe) and being tracked across the entire web, every time you click "Like" somewhere or login via Facebook or see an invisible tracking pixel. One is observable, expected, and easy to reason about. The other is invisible, unexpected, and requires external education (I couldn't plainly reason that FB knows my income because they buy offline data about me).