[mvpu]

The key here is "double-blind encryption" - assuming they got that right, neither can see exactly what I am buying, so I'm good. Bigger point: I'd be ok with any company tracking my activities _as long as_ one of two conditions are met: a) it benefits me (and me only), or b) it benefits them _but_ they cannot identify me.

[Skunkleton]

The privacy aspects are important, but it is also worth considering the impact this sort of stuff has on society. We like to think of ourselves as semi-immune to advertisement (and manipulation), but we really aren't. The 2016 presidential election proved that. Putting more and more data into the hands of Google and others just gives them more power over the public at large. Are we OK with that? Is the discussion even really happening?

[GuB-42]

I think it is obvious we are not immune to advertisement, that's why advertisement exists in the first place.

For the election, politics is 100% advertisement. Candidates have no legal obligation to keep their promises (and that's a good thing). An election won by something that isn't advertisement is not democratic.

Now for the 2016 presidential election specifically, the fact that Trump won despite having most of the Silicon Valley and a major part of the online world against him shows that "Google and others" are not that powerful compared to the traditional players.

[Skunkleton]

SV was against Trump, but also provided the tools that Trump used to win.

[leereeves]

I'd say the 2016 election proved how hard we are to manipulate. Hillary lost despite spending more and having nearly the entire media (with only a few exceptions like Fox) on her side.

[rcMgD2BwE72F]

Really? Have you ever heard of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Analytica?

[leereeves]

Hard to find detailed info about them, but what I've found says they had a staff of 40 and a budget of about ten million dollars.

A fraction of a fraction of the 2 billion dollars the Hillary camp spent trying to manipulate the election.

CA is the Clinton camp's boogeyman, much as Correct the Record was for Sanders fans and George Soros is for Trump supporters.

[aslkdjaslkdj1]

Hillary received far more negative coverage across the media than Trump did.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2017/08/...

>A December report from Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy delivered some sobering news for all those investigative reporters who may have supposed that their Trump exclusives were changing the world: None of them were breaking from the pack. “Clinton’s controversies got more attention than Trump’s (19 percent versus 15 percent) and were more focused,” noted study author Thomas E. Patterson. “Trump wallowed in a cascade of separate controversies. Clinton’s badgering had a laser-like focus. She was alleged to be scandal-prone. Clinton’s alleged scandals accounted for 16 percent of her coverage—four times the amount of press attention paid to Trump’s treatment of women and sixteen times the amount of news coverage given to Clinton’s most heavily covered policy position.”

[leereeves]

The actual report is here:

https://shorensteincenter.org/news-coverage-2016-general-ele...

It notes that:

> Trump’s coverage during the general election was more negative than Clinton’s

Positive coverage of Trump was during the primaries, which is what the Clinton camp wanted, calling him a Pied Piper:

> We need to be elevating the Pied Piper candidates so that they are leaders of the pack and tell the press to [take] them seriously.

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/11/hillary-clin...

[village-idiot]

It's hard to say that the media was on her side when they gave billions worth of free coverage to Trump. They also gave her email scandals equal weighting compared to Trump admitting to sexual assault and directly asking a foreign government to hack his opponent on live television.

[leereeves]

That was negative coverage of Trump. Perhaps what 2016 proved is that there really is no such thing as bad publicity.

[village-idiot]

They not only covered his rallies without commentary, they would regularly post up hours of video waiting for the rally to start.

Make no mistake, the media recognized very quickly that Trump drew viewers. There’s a damn good reason why CNN is posting record profits.

[leereeves]

As Bernard Cohen reportedly said, the press may not be successful much of the time in telling people what to think, but it is stunningly successful in telling its readers what to think about.

Seems to be true in this case. They covered Trump, which made him the person people think about.

They told people to hate Trump. The electorate didn't listen.

Back to the original question, does that mean we're easily manipulated?

[zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC]

(a) is underspecified. Benefits you according to whose values? If it's someone else's values, then I would object. If it is your own values, then whether it benefits you really becomes secondary, because what matters is that they need your consent. Whether you give consent based on what benefits you is not a primary concern, though presumably you would.

(b) seems to me like an expression of a naive view of personal identity that makes a binary distinction between anonymity and non-anonymity that doesn't exist in reality in any meaningful sense. Does manipulation against your interests become a non-problem when the manipulator doesn't know the name in your passport? Does it become a non-problem when the manipulator's tools are too imprecise to pick out you specifically, so they apply the same strategy to you and one other person, yielding only a 50% success rate? Does it become a non-problem when they lump you in with three other people? With four? Ten? A hundred? A million?

All of this is about power. Just because power is exercised indirectly or somewhat imprecisely doesn't make it categorically different from someone influencing specifically you, just as poisoning rivers and lakes isn't categorically different from poisoning your food on your plate. It's just a scheme for laundering the power to make it less obvious, and if you allow that, that's what people will do. People who want power don't care how they get it, all they care about is that they get it, so if you tell them that you are OK with being manipulated indirectly, then that's what they will do.

[jessedhillon]

The defining feature of a conspiracy theory is that a large number of likely unrelated activities are either part of the conspiracy, or explained by the theory.

[zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC]

The defining feature of an aircraft is that it has wings.

Why are we talking about this?