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by kylevedder
1395 days ago
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And you think that complaining about tech companies, companies owned by share holders who have no particular obligation to satiate the complaints of non-shareholders, is a more rational strategy to achieve the outcomes you want? Let's be intellectually honest here; the only actual threat to tracking ads as a business is governmental legislation, something which we've already seen occur with the implementation of GDPR in the EU and the US. It's pretty obvious privacy advocates have enough teeth to impact the legislature if they're able to ram those bills though, so I wholesale reject the argument that privacy is a niche complaint and you're powerless to create change in the government. |
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No, I don't. I was pointing out that your claim that individuals can effect political change is broadly incorrect. That doesn't imply that the alternative (direct petitioning of companies) is effective.
Attempting political change probably _is_ a more rational strategy than petitioning tech companies. As an individual, neither seems powerful.
> Let's be intellectually honest here; the only actual threat to tracking ads as a business is governmental legislation
No disagreement here!
> I wholesale reject the argument that privacy is a niche complaint and you're powerless to create change in the government.
To be clear, these are two separate claims. Privacy might or might not be a niche complaint - I feel that it is (given how little my non-technical friends care about it), but I'm purely working off anecdata, and I concede that GDPR (and the slew of other Privacy regulations following in its wake) are datapoints that contradict me. The other claim - that individuals are powerless to effect political change - remains undisproven to me. In particular, I reject the position that _individual_ privacy advocates were responsible for GDPR. It's large groups like the EFF (as a sibling commenter pointed out) that cause governments to take notice, not individuals.