> The business incentives keep the surveillance ticking over, Choudhary explained. "Surveilling and predicting human behaviour is the new economy," she said. "It also means more effective tyranny, an increasingly inescapable prison for the human race."
I agree with him in principle but in practice this is simply not working. People at large have been getting better and better at outright ignoring every ad they see, the pervasiveness of ad-blocking technology has never been higher, it seems like every item from the ad company's lately is highlighting that viewership and engagement is plummeting at a record pace.
I'm not saying this isn't a fight we need to win, but it seems we're winning it pretty well. We still need to work on the privacy end of things (I think that will be coming in a big way fairly soon) but in terms of advertisements controlling people? With such a high amount of said people blocking and ignoring, I find it very hard to believe. Even if their targeting is better, the fact that people can so effectively ignore ads that are targeted to their exact behaviors makes it seem unlikely.
Does it matter if people ignore ads? These are not broadcast ads like radio or television. They analyze behavior and encourage an architecture that exactly suits the needs of government surveillance.
And I'm not confident users will win the ad blocking war. There are easy ways to permanently defeat ad blockers, but the industry hasn't embraced them yet because the current system works well enough. E.g., ad code can be served from the same server with no identifying CSS classes or ids. Or with WebAssembly the web could turn into black box binaries.
Further, there's fundamentally no way to defeat behavioral tracking, because it can be done when people merely use a website.
That's true but (the way I read it anyway) the author is contending that advertisements themselves would be used to shape public opinion which, while true, I think the effects are dwindling because people are becoming more aware of that.
Additionally, I wouldn't say behavioral tracking is implicitly always nefarious. Speaking as an app developer the analytics we get from users is 100% anonymous and not used for anything more evil than just helping us design and improve software. Usage data like that is gold to us because most people don't leave/send feedback, especially the ones we really want to hear from, i.e. the ones who stopped using it.
I think we need more regulation in the web industry in terms of how we're allowed to collect data, how we must store it, and have serious penalties for those who break those laws.
I think the idea is that a small number of corporations will have a complete knowledge of the lives and psychology of their users, be able to influence their behavior even without display ads, and be able to predict all of their behavior. Additionally, the government will piggyback on all of this technology too.
I don't think any of this is inherently nefarious. Hopefully with policy reforms and additional privacy preserving technologies, we will avert the future Moglen warns of.
Also, TPTB don't really need to control or surveil everyone. Surveillance and control of the "radical" 5% who have a chance to push society in the "wrong" direction is enough.
Even that though only works once, usually. Once a reader spots that something is sponsored content, they don't trust the source anymore and will treat everything that source posts with an eye of suspicion (which, IMHO is a good thing anyway).
I remember awhile back when someone posted that piece about what it's like to be a Youtuber on here, the author specifically mentioned that doing any kind of sponsored content was like playing Russian roulette with her subscriber count/engagement.
If you see ads, they have subconscious effects even if your conscious mind ignores them.
Then there's the curation problem of sites like reddit and facebook. People curating information streams, or developing algorithms to curate information, think they're doing the right thing by eliminating bad content, but by doing so they introduce bias into the information stream, and that bias might be just as pernicious.
Curation bias is the flip side of the very low signal to noise ratio and general information overload we face today. I don't see how you can solve one without hurting the other. Picking stories at random isn't a solution either, because those stories serve another important purpose (sometimes more important than the actual content) - they are social objects, shared things people can talk about. Culture is lots of people experiencing the same stuff, so that they can relate to it in conversations.
As have intellectual echo chambers. Everyone says they're open to opposing views but very few people want their opinions challenged. Everyone really wants a hugbox, Facebook just figured out how to give everyone on the planet a hugbox.
> Moglen proposed deploying "freedom boxes" at every street corner—cheap hardware running free software, deployed everywhere, that encrypt everything, anonymise everything, and blind the service providers to our activity.
b/c the last mile is the priciest part of a telco's network. Unless the telcos are forced to do it, it has zero odds of happening.
Also, let's not forget privacy as we know it is a distinctly modern idea. The "right to privacy" was coined with the advent of cameras in the 1890s:
The main new thing today is the ubiquity of the public sphere owing to IT. Inadvertently ending up on a picture in the late 19th century was a rather trivial intrusion of privacy; the same picture posted on FB today instantly makes it available to anyone with an internet connection. Not saying privacy has little to no merit, but nothing short of a full-blown societal rethink is going to make taking and sharing those pictures stop - a piece of hardware just won't help.
Also, let's not forget privacy as we know it is a distinctly modern idea.
Well, yes. But that's not because the phenomenon is new, but because detailed personal logging is new. Privacy used to be a natural right: no one could possibly know what you did last summer unless you told them or they were there with you. It only started to be an issue when we started following people around and preserving that data.
It was an issue long before that, hence the laws related to it.
Privacy never was a "natural" thing until the 19th century. Sex in private yes, there's plenty of evidence for that. But that's about it.
By the end of the 19th century, it became an issue - indeed a right - owing to people preserving data around because cameras became a thing.
And as pointed out in my post, the main novelty today is the ubiquitous access by _everyone_ - it's no longer local to your immediate circle of contacts, it's basically publicly available information.
If privacy is a distinctly modern idea invented in the 1890's what was the purpose of window curtains before then? Certainly they couldn't have been there to protect an idea that's probably older than language and likely has actual biological basis. I assume also that humans only started to have sex in private in the 1890s according to your theory as it wouldn't have been even possible to conceive of privacy before the idea of privacy existed?
The idea that privacy is something new is absolutely absurd and laughable.
In earlier ages, there were few windows owing to architectural and building technique related constraints. If anything the window taxes reeked of "oh shoot, these guys are rich and can afford modern construction techniques." Your home with plenty of light flowing in is in fact quite modern.
> The machine does not treat us as human beings with minds and free will, Moglen continuted, but as "stimulus and response correlations" to be sorted and sold as "mineable human attention."
That is how people seem to act, if you weight by the volume of their speech on the internet. Since the 90's, the internet has gone from a place of intellectual wonder and discovery to a mob scene of the lowest common denominator, where "telling it like it is" is seen as the highest virtue. It's the realization of the metaphor about distributing a piano to every classroom without providing funds for instruction. ("Chopsticks culture.") Is this the end of the world? No. Human beings will create more culture, and it will eventually become as refined and rarefied as anything that came out of a 19th century salon or 15th century patronage.
The main new thing today is the ubiquity of the public sphere owing to IT. Inadvertently ending up on a picture in the late 19th century was a rather trivial intrusion of privacy; the same picture posted on FB today instantly makes it available to anyone with an internet connection.
It's a pity for common people that the depredations of corporations with DRM has demonized it. As horrible as it is when used by companies, it would be a tremendous boon if it could be used by individuals to protect themselves against companies. Just as secrecy of individual information is privacy, and good for individuals and society, and the opposite of that for companies (openness) is also good for society, so it is with cryptographically auditable trusted execution on the behalf of individuals vs. companies. There is an asymmetry that makes it horrible in one direction and great in another.
History of fences on Wikipedia talks about it dating back to at least feudal times when discussing property rights and boundaries. Obviously much farther back when discussing defensive use cases (Hadrian's Wall and The Great Wall being two massive examples I can think of quickly).
Would be nice, but I think you're underestimating the costs here. Pulling dark fiber to a location and lightening it up is expensive but it's nowhere near the cost related to connecting it to every home around the venue. If memory serves, 80% of a telco network's costs were the last mile ~15 years ago, and I can't imagine the economics have changed that much.
That makes me think that a proper Wifi setup might be a better way to go. The term 'mesh network' comes to mind, but that tends to connote "utopic ideas" in my head...
Most of the people I know are growing more and more irritated by Facebook and other social media. Many have stopped using it and deleted their profiles. And these are not "tech" people but ordinary adults and teens.
I think people are quite perceptive when a service changes from being truly useful, as Facebook was in its early days, to being an intrusive pain in the ass as it is now. They may not all jump ship right away because people have different tolerances for this stuff. But from what I see, people are more aware of what's going on than Mr. Moglen is giving them credit for.
I always wonder when I see this anecdote that people are leaving Facebook, closing profiles etc. I've never been a very active Facebook user, but I also don't see myself ever closing my account. On the whole, I don't use much of the feature set but it is still useful every now and then.
is there a reason to close the account, rather than just log off when you're not using it? I feel like AB+ and Ghostery do a fine job keeping the tracking down, and the service itself is pretty benign when used casually. Am I missing something?
Facebook: The less you use it, the mentally healthier you tend to be. I guess my parents were right after all back in the 80's: computer interaction is a vice.
I don't know. It seems even when people are irritated by a product they still keep using it. See TV or political parties. People don't like them but they are still reluctant to do something different.
More and more people will adopt ad blocking, script controls, and of course, use a proxy, VPN, or otherwise anonymize their traffic. More and more people are (and are going to be) encrypting their traffic.
I agree with him in principle but in practice this is simply not working. People at large have been getting better and better at outright ignoring every ad they see, the pervasiveness of ad-blocking technology has never been higher, it seems like every item from the ad company's lately is highlighting that viewership and engagement is plummeting at a record pace.
I'm not saying this isn't a fight we need to win, but it seems we're winning it pretty well. We still need to work on the privacy end of things (I think that will be coming in a big way fairly soon) but in terms of advertisements controlling people? With such a high amount of said people blocking and ignoring, I find it very hard to believe. Even if their targeting is better, the fact that people can so effectively ignore ads that are targeted to their exact behaviors makes it seem unlikely.