No. This needs to be criminalized. Not liking a good or service is one thing. Having things done to you or your information without consent for the purpose of spying on you is stalking with extra steps. Many of these companies still deprive you of your privacy even without using their services by developing shadow profiles on you.
>people who don’t know what’s happening can’t make informed choices.
it's really distasteful how privacy advocates always assume that everybody who doesn't feel the same way they do is uninformed. the average person has a basic understanding that companies keep track of them online. everybody who's spent more than five minutes online without an adblocker understands retargeting.
it's not that people don't understand, it's that they don't care. telling people they're not informed enough to make their own decisions isn't going to convince them to start caring about the issue you care about.
> everybody who's spent more than five minutes online without an adblocker understands retargeting.
I think you’re being absurdly generous here. I think there are way more people online who have no idea what this sentence even means than people who understand it. Like 99:1 ‘way more’. I can’t think of a single person I know who doesn’t work in the computer field who would understand that without being explicitly told. It simply isn’t something your average person ever even thinks about.
Even people like my parents - who have been using computers in some capacity since the late 90s but don’t work in anything related to computing - had no idea that Verizon was selling their browsing data despite being account holders who ‘agreed’ to the T&C and received e-mails warning them that it was going to start doing so.
Yes, everyone knows. That's why there are people in this thread and others like it, on a website catering to highly technical people, who are surprised at how deep the tracking goes and what it is used for.
Surely then, the average person is much more informed!
i encourage you to talk to an "average person" about this some time. check with your parents to see how much they assume they're being tracked online.
most people i've discussed the topic with misunderstand how much they're being tracked, but assume that they are being tracked more than they actually are, not less. and they're totally okay with that.
The fact that people suspect Facebook of outright listening to them (even when that's not the case) suggest people aren't fully aware of what data is collected, how it is used and how it can be misused.
"Facebook listening to people" wouldn't be noteworthy if people weren't creeped out by it.
Please, no more annoying popups asking me if i want to accept cookies or be tracked. I am in the ‘do not care’ camp and i just want to be able to visit sites without having to click accept every time.
These consent banners are a false sense of privacy. People who “dont know” are most likely just going to give consent anyway. It’s the same thing as TOS consent.
People give consent all the time when it is still bad for them. It is a moral question in the end, the same way, we can say people consent to selling their body for sex, but have made it illegal, or say people consent to gambling knowing the odds put them at a disadvantage every single bet, or how people consent to credit card debt at insane rates not knowing just how much they are being taken advantage of. Consent matters, but in the end it's what we all believe should be tolerated from an ethical standpoint. Personally I see many issues with data collection and data sharing, even if not malicious, but that give the opportunity to be abused by others with a grudge or agenda I might not support. Not just banking information, but location data, purchasing history, and more. I'm not saying every has enemies out there but if anyone wanted to cause harm with that information they could.
> it's really distasteful how privacy advocates always assume that everybody who doesn't feel the same way they do is uninformed
The problem with pervasive user tracking and surveillance capitalism is that is impossible to be informed. No user has any idea what happens to their data once it gets collected by a 3rd party, and there is zero way for them to know who has it now, how accurate that data is, or how it will be leveraged against them.
Increasingly the data being taken from us in secret is used in far reaching ways. It's not just about what ad gets pushed at us, but it's how much we pay for things, how long you wait on hold, what a company will tell you their policies are, what jobs you are offered, etc.
While you might find it distasteful, I can tell you that you yourself don't understand what data has been collected about you, who has it now, or what impacts it will have on your life and your future. You can't make an informed choice about what services to use because you aren't even allowed to know what the costs are, or will be. Jjust like how nobody who uses ubereats had any idea that data was being secretly collected by tiktoc or what it will be used for.
> Neither of these companies will create a shell profile if you never visit them.
Citation? I bet TikTok will create shadow profiles for anyone who browses the web (and sure, somewhere in the 89 zillion line small print for whatever tools they offer to small time webmasters will be a carefully phrased line about how it might occasionally send small amounts of visitor information to them) just like Google does.
Which collects data on you and creates a profile. Whether it's currently used to increment an impression counter doesn't mean it can't be used for something more nefarious down the line.
Collecting data about what you did is not necessarily spying. If a game keeps tracks of my wins. That's not spying even though it's collecting data on what I did.
It's not just about telling if an ad has been seen, but what a user does on your site after clicking on the ad. Do they immediately bounce? Do they buy something?
You want to be able to see that you are actually getting a positive return from the money you are spending on ads.
Given the, uh, highly variable, quality of government legislation wrt the internet I am seriously skeptical they'd do more good than harm if they tried.
Then again we as an industry and/or community don't seem to be doing too well either.
> This is how you get a legal code like America's, where a cop and prosecutor can put almost anyone in jail with the flimsiest excuse.
Then how come America, with its strict procedural safeguards, has that legal environment where people now feel unsafe even talking to cops, whereas many European countries with a more common-sense, less rules-lawyery approach (like the big fines handed out to a lot of privacy-violating tech companies lately) have a much friendlier culture with fewer obvious abuses?
Usually what I find is that the American companies/people usually try to follow the "bare" letter of the law, where Europeans need to follow the spirit, as this is how it is "usually" enforced.
And while the former might let you get away with "one weird trick" the latter usually leaves more margin to interpretation which can be both a blessing and a curse.
If only it was that easy. The supermarket near me has a "data collection" notice about some tracking BS and to ask an associate for details and to opt-out (yes, as if the minimum-wage teenager would know anything about it, and how would the opt-out even work).
Your list of companies is too short. Throw out the market leaders who spend on brand and cheat somewhere else in the chain and look for a smaller company.
The best bypass for this process is to cut Ubereats entirely out of the picture and call the local restaurant directly to place your order. Ubereats in this case is a third party so what difference does it make? None of you start to think about it.
Because Uber Eats provides me some service that I value and I am happy for them to be part of the process as a result.
TikTok, Facebook, Google, etc following me around provides me no value on the other hand - in fact, I have no account with any and would not see their ads even if I wanted to, so it's technically in their best interest to not waste processing power on stalking me.
Not handing your data to companies will result in poor data and bad decisions on their end, which is bad for them and the customers.
What's super idiotic in all this is that the "data companies bad" is often spread by the very companies which would rather have data themselves than their competitors.