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by mastratton3 2016 days ago
I don't know - on the other side of the coin imagine if no data was collected. It would be near impossible for companies to do any sort of troubleshooting or QA.

Taking it a step further, it'd also be significantly more difficult for them to understand their audience and users... which could actually make the experience worse for those users.

Even in the more nefarious case of ad-tech, I'd personally prefer more relevant ads than generic non-relevant ones.

I'm not saying all data collection is fine and well intentioned, but I also don't think it is necessarily as zero-sum as people think.

I do think when data gets licensed or shared w/ 3rd parties it should be more clear how it gets used.
3 comments
iamacyborg 2016 days ago
> Even in the more nefarious case of ad-tech, I'd personally prefer more relevant ads than generic non-relevant ones.

We don't need surveillance infrastructure to achieve this. Advertisers can simply place their ads on pages that are relevant to their audience.

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grawprog 2016 days ago
>Even in the more nefarious case of ad-tech, I'd personally prefer more relevant ads than generic non-relevant ones.

Personally, i'm the opposite. Every time I see an obviously targetted ad based on something i've done, watched, said in a text conversation, my emails, etc. It creeps me the hell out.

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selfhoster11 2016 days ago
> I don't know - on the other side of the coin imagine if no data was collected. It would be near impossible for companies to do any sort of troubleshooting or QA.

Good. Companies got by in the pre-internet era by running supervised QA tests with customers in person, or using special devices modified to allow surveillance. There's no reason why this cannot be brought back.

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richarme 2016 days ago
Nokia phones used to have a feature called "AutoSMS" which would silently send back crash reports and various usage metrics. Of course this feature was never included in production releases, only for field/user testing. After product launch, feedback was gathered by surveys and crash reports from service centers. Obviously phones have always had the capability to send covert data, but back then it would have been utterly unacceptable. How times & business models have changed :(
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