[pasta]

Because a machine has much more capabilities than one salesperson.

The salesperson doesn't know in what shops you have been before.

The salesperson might also not know you talked to his colleague the day before.

This is about trust and privacy. You can't trust what they do with your data.

[794CD01]

So if the salesman has an eidetic memory it becomes unethical? How about just an above-average one?

[iamnothere]

Your reply is disingenuous. The problem is not that abuse is not possible in a human-driven system. Of course some gifted salespeople have incredible memories, hypnotic powers of persuasion, and so on. However, you must consider the following:

1) These people are rare in the general population, and demand for their time is likely to be incredibly high. Therefore, they cannot be deployed everywhere, unlike machines.

2) When confronted with a human being in a sales scenario, people have a chance to be on guard against potential manipulative behavior. When the sales scenario becomes ubiquitous and invisible, it is much harder for people to avoid being taken advantage of.

3) Ethics are not so absolute. Something that is only mildly bad at an individual level can have terrible results when thousands are doing it. (Littering, for instance, or illegal hunting/fishing.) This is known as a social trap, and it leads to negative outcomes for everyone involved.

[794CD01]

>1) These people are rare in the general population, and demand for their time is likely to be incredibly high. Therefore, they cannot be deployed everywhere, unlike machines.

A temporary problem solved by natural selection, technological augmentation, and increasing incentives. Perfect performers in any profession are hard to come by. Ambitious people still strive to get there.

>2) When confronted with a human being in a sales scenario, people have a chance to be on guard against potential manipulative behavior. When the sales scenario becomes ubiquitous and invisible, it is much harder for people to avoid being taken advantage of.

Because people don't understand technology or sales. In your reality, people should be on guard all the time because sales and marketing were already continuous, even before hidden cameras. In actual reality, most people don't care that much about being sold to as long as the sale itself it not abusive.

> 3) Ethics are not so absolute. Something that is only mildly bad at an individual level can have terrible results when thousands are doing it. (Littering, for instance, or illegal hunting/fishing.) This is known as a social trap, and it leads to negative outcomes for everyone involved.

Sure, but that omits the necessary step of justifying this behavior as being either mildly bad on an individual level or terrible on a mass scale, much less both. It is neither.

Also, I would add item 0: advances in technology mean that surveillance devices will only become smaller, cheaper, and more connected over time. The future you fear so much is, in fact, inevitable.

[iamnothere]

You are applying binary "all or nothing" logic to the real world, which contains many more shades of grey.

It is true that technology (both social and digital) continues to progress, and that the genie can't be put back in the bottle once it escapes. However, you don't have to put it back in the bottle. Speed limits don't stop speeding, and laws against murder don't stop homicide. The legal and regulatory system exists not to fully prevent understand behavior, but rather to reduce it to a manageable level.

In short: I agree with one part of your premise. Technology will continue to evolve and will continue to challenge human society in this area. Unlike you, however, I don't believe that we have to roll over and accept the implications and consequences of unregulated privacy invasions, neuromarketing and whatnot.

[794CD01]

I don't think that either, because I correctly recognize that in public, you do not have privacy, either de jure or de facto. Especially if you're not even wearing a burqa, which would today at least give you de jure privacy because it demonstrates intent.

I'm sure that in the future, we will also create cheaply available opaque faraday cages that you can roll around in if you wish. And that most people will not care to do so.

[Retra]

You do have privacy in public. Both the de jure "reasonable expectation of privacy" and the de facto privacies of anonymity, free association, and predictable rules of social engagement.

[ashark]

Eidetic memory and follows you everywhere and can transfer all those memories perfectly to any number of other people? Yeah. It's like super-stalking and it's obviously horrible.

[794CD01]

Humans will get there too.

Stalking per se is mostly only illegal because it becomes harassment and bothers the victim. This kind of monitoring is entirely unobtrusive. As the response to the original tweet illustrates, most people aren't even aware that it is happening.

[ashark]

The information is being used to conduct asymmetric psychological warfare. The notion that it's harmless even if never outright abused where we define abuse as use for other than its intended purpose, is false.

Being subjected to constant sensory input and trickery from dozens of teams of experts on consumer psychology is bad enough when they haven't also been stalking and recording your every move.

Caveat emptor becomes an absurd position when the power imbalance is so great. Massive data collection and mining needs to be reigned in. The fact that it's not obvious people seeking to trick you by any means necessary are recording you everywhere you go does not make it OK, at all. Surveillance capitalism is way, way over the line, has been for some time, and just keeps going farther. That they're good at keeping you from realizing you're under surveillance is no defense whatsoever.

[794CD01]

Complaining about warfare that is asymmetrical solely due to the incompetence of one side does not elict any sympathy from me.

Consumers do try to aggregate data for the equivalent of "massive data collection and mining". Most just don't care to pay for something that is not wholly controlled by a storefront. Generally, producers are more likely to understand the ROI.