I'm starting to become convinced that a significant portion of internet users in 2023 not only tolerate data mining, but have some kind of Stockholm-Syndrome-induced personal data exhibitionism fetish.
I miss the era when the internet was just broadband desktop users, with none of the people who exclusively access it via smartphone.
Dear god it's not even the data mining that I find disturbing. It's the blatant manipulation, the locked/closed spaces that can't be searched or linked to, the deliberate cultivation of outrage or other engagement hacks, crappy moderation, etc. etc.
I got put in Facebook jail for a month for posting an "indecent photo" which was just a picture of my son at the beach in his bathing suit that some algorithm misidentified... when I appealed, they punished me even harder; but when I report actual neo-NAZI content, death threats, disturbing content, illegal sales on marketplace... reports rejected.
I miss the fantasy we had about the web in 90s. How naive we were.
Did it ever occur to you that maybe your one-day-adult son would object to Facebook having a bunch of his biometric data (facial recognition, etc) without his consent?
I miss the era when the internet was just broadband desktop users, with none of the people who exclusively access it via smartphone.