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by mellowdream
2366 days ago
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I actually do share many of the author's thoughts on how maddening it can be to collect specific pieces of data that seemingly should be collectable but aren't because of some stupid reasons xyz. To play devil's advocate, though - Is it really malice, or just that people rarely think about these particular use cases in the first place? It seems like a lot of the things and products mentioned here, if released by an independent dev or small team, could similarly be overlooked. I can't imagine most of the engineers I know (and I suppose especially not rich megacorps) to really ever consider the .01% of people (the kind of demographic you'd find on HN, I guess) saving ALL browsing history across browsers according to some universal standard or LinkedIn statistics or YouTube text history. OT-ish:
I can see how this would be relevant for most people living well enough, say, like middle-upper class America, who can afford these technologies and to care about the multitude of examples presented, but is there a conversation about how much data we should or need to be collecting (to say nothing of handing off to 3rd parties) at all in the first place? I've always felt that relying and interacting with less technology (or at least making efforts within reason to) was better for my own quality of life (less tracking, less worrying about posting regrettable stuff, sticking to basic principles like "move more, eat less" instead of obsessively counting stuff on my old MyFitnessPal and Fitbit) - surely I'm not alone? |
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This is a valid point, I kind of admit these are sort of first-world problems. But my main motivation for raising this issues in the first place is to learn better, process information more effeciently, have better memory, and this is something I wish to use to work, learn and reason about things that really matter, like climate change or solving poverty, etc.
Regarding tracking less -- I guess people are different, I do know people who are happy to just stick to 'move more, eat less'. For me personally such maintenance is boring, and looking at stuff like workout/sleep data etc really motivates me to learn more about it and keep going. I really hate going for another run but at least I'll have a datapoint after it!
I feel like the actually stressful bit is having to think about tracking. If it was done automatically and you didn't have to think about it, then why not? You'd always find people who are obsessed about doing (or not doing) things even without counting I guess.