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by criddell 2091 days ago
I think you're right about the attitude among techies - especially those around San Francisco - and I think that's part of the reason why our reputation is in decline. A lot of America sees us as a bunch of creeps spying on everything they do and they aren't wrong about that.

Video records are a special class of data covered by the Video Privacy Protection Act. The tangible cost is the risk that your viewing history would be used to attack you. It happened before and that's what spurred the creation of that act.
2 comments
anoncareer0212 2091 days ago
To put it more plainly: Americans love tech and trust it, and not so oddly, in reverse order of how _tech people_ appreciate the companies.

Look at these ratings, theyre in direct contradiction with your guess of what they are as well as your thesis: Amazon and Google both have above 90% trust, Apple has 81%.

I've meditated on them a lot, and came to the conclusion there's a lot of class issues in tech spaces, and a borderline condescending paternal instinct towards users. Over 90% of people know their information isn't being 'sold'

https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/2/21144680/verge-tech-survey...

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criddell 2091 days ago
I'm assuming you put sold in quotation marks because you are being generous and are really talking about disclosure in a broad sense.

Maybe those 90% haven't read stories like this one (which is about Facebook):

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-46618582

Or maybe they've never heard of a data broker? To be clear, I don't think Google sells user data, but do they share it with anybody like Facebook has a history of doing? That I'm not clear about. I think they may share it with other Alphabet companies. I think they do buy data from brokers.

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scarface74 2091 days ago
And that law has no effect on Google. Google doesn’t sell data to advertisers. It sells access to you. Meaning they aren’t going to send advertisers a list of 20-35 year olds who like action movies. Advertisers are going to ask Google to target their advertisements to that demographic.
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criddell 2091 days ago
I'm not 100% sure, but I think there are also data retention limits and opt-out requirements as part of that act. Some states have stricter rules as well.
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scarface74 2091 days ago
There is an opt out. The only retention policy is that records must be destroyed within one year after the account is terminated.

https://epic.org/privacy/vppa/

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