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But lets also add, that so many of them will gladly believe everything an ad financed company tells them, just to have a bit of convenience and just so that they do not have to go against any network effect. All that, while people tell them, that they are being spied on. All that, while there is one personal data scandal after the other. Many people are severly uninformed or have closed themselves off to information, that could disturb their comfort with FB and the likes (ha, pun not intended, but it works!). Many people are computer illiterates, addicted to their "drug of choice" and kept in place via network effect of "all their friends and family being on FB/WA/whatever" and they too are part of the problem, increasing the network effect. I've had discussion with people, where I told them, that FB had the biggest personal data scandal in history (financially, in terms of what they had to pay), and that there is a new thing happening every month or so. Still these people do not want their way of being addicted shaken and continue regardlessly, dragging others down with them. I am sometimes at a loss what I can tell them, how I can explain to them what is happening. Telling them, that FB is running on ads, which are tailored to them, by spying on their behavior and mining that data. Nope, message not understood. |
You are so right, I can't argue against that. It's the same psychology and social dynamics as why people continue to smoke or use harmful street drugs while seeing the people around them dying or getting sick, and being told every day that it's harmful.
I tried to make as clear, and sensitively as I could in Digital Vegan [1] why I think some digital technologies are a major public health issue, and that we are in the same territory as with tobacco 50 years ago.
One problem is that unlike heroin and tobacco, where the sickness of the victims is a net burden on governments, consumer capitalism, being a form of proxy mass-surveillance, traps governments in an uneasy "see no evil" alliance, if not outright support for digital harms.
Another is that digital harms can be remote, deferred in time and place, thus difficult to connect causally. As with many diseases or pollutants we are still in the early stages of understanding the effects of damage to privacy.
[1] https://digitalvegan.net