| I think this is really a main point and not discussed enough. I absolutely do not think the average user has an idea about the implications of that. I have to say Google has been mildly better in that way with their Oauth system but it really struck me one day when signing up for a passive service with my Google account — they for some reason requested unlimited access to read, write/send, and delete my emails from my account. Needless to say I backed away. I work in the field and know what this really means. I still get tripped up. The average person doesn’t 1) give it the time to consider what it means, they just want it to work 2) even if they read the request they don’t understand what it’s actually saying they are doing(data harvesting) and 3) they have little idea of the scope of implications. “Oh it’s just a stupid farming game” but don’t realize the massive trade and profiling going on behind all of it. The Facebook fiasco is the first time in recent memory where people have been reminded that their data is being taken and not only that — it’s being traded, bought, sold, compiled, refined and worse. I watched an old 60 Minutes episode yesterday on Amazon circa 1999. Bezos was showing the reporter the recommendation engine. The reporter was clearly shook when it recommended a short list of books he’d actually bought recently outside of Amazon based on a couple of purchases on the platform. In 1999. They collected about a GB a day then. I guess people got used to the idea of generally benign profiling, and the questioning stopped after a while. |