this post was submitted on 27 Jan 2024
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It's been that way for a long time. It's kinda bizarre that when it's slimy marketing company that wants the data to use to manipulate people into buys shit its all 'sign me up!"
But if the NSA looks at the exact same data in the interests of national security suddenly it's "wait no.... my privacyyyyyyyyy."
The old argument of "if you aren't doing anything illegal, there's nothing to worry about" wasn't valid in the past because it meant sacrificing privacy which is something that had value. But now that argument is valid because people signed over their privacy for a small discount or whatever. You already have marketing people, the slimiest people on the planet, poring over that data and trading it around with other companies. So people obviously have no issue with creepy people looking at their data. It's almost like putting personal information on billboard and getting upset that a government employee happened to glance at that billboard while driving by.
If you put data on the market where anyone that pays a small fee can look at it, don't be surprised if the NSA pays the fee to to take a peak. We can be certain that agencies in Russia, China and whatever other country wants to have it has gotten it, so the NSA is going to at least want to know what they know.
Well, some things are stochastic in daily life, but pretty coherent over long periods. In 00s lots of people were enthusiastic over that data harvesting etc creating us a new future. As something which will make the future interesting, even if dangerous.
Well, here it is. Nothing interesting, but the dangers are exactly as expected. As it always happens.
Yeah there needed to be privacy laws passed back then. It's going to very difficult to do now because there's so much money involved. Personally I think 90% of the "data-driven economy" is bullshit and we'd be better off without it. But when Google, Facebook, etc. are saying "if you pass this law, we will lay of X% of our workforce" it's difficult to to do, even though those companies will likely lay off those workers regardless.
Sometimes I think of an alternate reality where Al Gore was president back then. He invented the internet! Yeah, I know that thing was just GOP disinformation, but he did actually care about technology. Maybe technology growth could've gone down a better path. Instead we got Dubya and a war in Iraq.