| How about by manipulating your facebook news feed and exposing you to a carefully selected series of images and headlines to sway your opinion on political topics without you even realizing. How about identifying which youtubers your children are impressionable to, and then approaching them to push unhealthy food products? How about using your porn browsing habits and location history to figure out when you start cheating on your significant other, how about offering you divorce lawyers before you even realize you need one. How about figuring out when you become isolated and lonely by looking at changes in the volume of texts and phone calls and IMs you exchange, and then selling that primarily to dating and sex chat websites. Ever wondered why these websites are silently deploying anti-adblock functionality rather than trying to bring the matter through the legal system? Because if it ever became a legal case and they were made to disclose how they use the data, there'd be a fucking uproar. This is exactly what happened in the EU and that's why advertisers had their balls cut off in that region. So now they've opted to support the destruction of net neutrality and bolster DRM laws so they can shoehorn advertisements and anti-adblock under DRM instead. People need to get 100% clear on something: there are very smart people getting paid very generous salaries whose job is to find ways to distort and manipulate laws and public perception to prevent consumers from asserting their rights against having their behavior manipulated. I don't think it's an understatement to say that these groups are a major threat to the wellbeing of the people, right up there with war and climate change. Ajit Pai is a textbook example of this pattern. He's not stupid, he's not an asshole. He's a smart person who has been tasked with a goal that goes against the public good. And he's done a good job at that task. |
"General Data Protection Regulation" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regula...
The sad truth: nobody cares. There won't be an uproar. There are/were countless blog entries on how your data is abused, and nobody cares. _Oh, look, a site where I can showcase my vanity and have followers like some kind of celebrity!_ - this is the reality.
I'd love to make people realize how bad it is. I'd really want to know where are the people who donated enough to the Mozilla foundation to supports a 2-page ad in the New York Times in print for Firefox back in 2004. I'd really like to know what makes people listen, but I honesty have no idea.