| The majority of people seem to have immediate -scoped concerns I suppose. Most of the really scary big data possibilities seems more like political issues than data issues, the data is just something they could use to do the things people are worried about. It's not great, but it's competing for mind share with a lot of other possibile horrors people are afraid of and people are rather fatigued. The more subtle stuff they're already doing seems like it would be a problem with even the most basic data. The biggest issue I see is personalized content which causes fights, hate, wasted time, and all that, because the algorithms want you to engage with it as much as possible, and it shits on real journalism by giving all the attention to clickbaits. I suspect every time I've responded to such clickbaits might be more problematic than all the data they get from all my smart devices in a year... Protecting one's privacy because of societal harm is a worthy thing but also a pretty big effort and I sure don't have a solution, or even any confident prediction of how big the problem is or where it's coming from... But I probably won't truly be worried unless one of those horrid encryption bans gets close to passing. |
Well, like you write, aggregated data is already being used to influence populations which makes it immediate. An hypothetical hacker is not.
> Most of the really scary big data possibilities seems more like political issues than data issues, the data is just something they could use to do the things people are worried about.
I don't follow. Not giving away the data removes the need for politics. Crime is illegal nevertheless it exists because it is possible to commit.
> It's not great, but it's competing for mind share with a lot of other possibile horrors people are afraid of and people are rather fatigued.
Not everyone shares the same concerns and nobody likes problems, that doesn't' mean they should be accepted.
> The more subtle stuff they're already doing seems like it would be a problem with even the most basic data.
All the more reason not to give them more. The personalized hate content is a direct consequence of big data aggregation.
All in all, seems like more of an issue than a possible compromise of a FOSS project.