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Hypothetically, some businesses should not exist. For instance, although a children's-heroin-selling business might be in great demand and turn a huge profit, such a business is not in the best interests of society. Simply optimizing the delivery of things people want is not sufficient to make a good business. "Heavy equipment rental for people under the influence of narcotics" is similar. Without getting into a discussion of social good, or what's moral or not, we can all agree that at times people are willing to make trades for which they themselves would find stupid at other times. Once data is captured it never goes away. As time passes and as it aggregates with other similar data, it actually becomes much more valuable. So, continuing along, hypothetically, what are you going to do if capturing personal data in exchange for "free" services is not a business that should exist? I understand that right now you're engaged in a long and drawn-out split-the-baby campaign, where you try to assure privacy advocates of your intentions and that's there some magic sauce involving algorithms that will solve everything, but what if that is not the case? What if your business model is built on harming people by encouraging them to make trades for personal information where, once we all figure out what we're doing, none of us would agree to fifty years from now? How will you know? Will you tell us? Do you already know? What are your plans? If you truly want to respect privacy and are on the side of people living their lives without being constantly examined like lab rats and having every piece of their existence recorded for any hacker to see forevermore, what are your plans for knowing that it's not working out? What's your tripwire, your exit plan? Because frankly, if you don't have one of those, then this is all just a PR exercise, right? You've already decided that you win, you just haven't figured the details out yet. You can restate the question several different ways, but it all boils down to "How do we know you're serious about this?" Because so far it just looks like a bunch of the usual public relations BS. |