|
> If you are selling advertising (influencing) access to a population through heightened metrics and more ability to target amenable customers, there are many useful things you can learn and correlate through things like delay before click-through, where the mouse pointer hovers, and so on. This is done on a massive scale and it's extremely revealing, allowing for deep and fascinating connections into the human subconscious. Counterpoint: no it isn't and no it doesn't. All of these models presume that they can infer what has the user's primary focus, when in fact users are distracted by all sorts of things that are not connected to the computer in front of their face. This is all just the daily sturm and drang to sell to marketing departments, which is Facebook's real business model (lying to advertisers [1]). > This… changes the conditions under which democracy is practiced, and under which anti-democracy can be consistently maintained. It's a technology that is easily wielded by just plain old humans that are no smarter than the 'masses' to be manipulated. I'm all for the presumption of the worst when it comes to tech corporations, but some consideration of likely outcomes based on historical trends is prudent. The fact is the only corporations who have a vested interest in what you're saying here are military contractors, and they are content to charge the DoD, FAA, CIA, etc $10k per line of custom code to run on their Access 2000 databases and IBM AIX systems. At the end of the day, there's more money in lying to the Ford/GM marketing departments than there is trying to organize a fake coup for Elon Musk in Bolivia. After all, if they were willing to pay for the lithium, they'd just pay for it. The whole point is trying to get it on the cheap. Car marketing departments, on the other hand? They'll pay, and pay a lot. 1. https://www.google.com/search?&q=facebook+lies+to+advertiser... |