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by jungturk 339 days ago
Is it an option for your simple store to not collect data about subjects without their consent? Seems like an easy win.

Your choice to use frameworks subsidized by surveillance capitalism doesn't need to preclude my ability to agree to participate does it?

Maybe a handy notification when I visit your store asking if I agree to participate would be a happy compromise?

1 comments

You know it's possible to make good reasoned points without cramming in "<psuedo-marxist buzzword> capitalism" into a sentence for absolutely no reason.

All I want is to not be forced to irritate my customers about something that nobody cares about. It doesn't have to be complicated. It is how the internet was for all of its existence until a few years ago.

There's nothing marxist(?) about the industry of surveillance capitalism. Its just a regular segment of data-driven advertising and marketing optimization that instruments our technology and observes user behavior (typically without users' knowledge or consent). There's no value judgement there - its literally just surveillance and capitalism put together to achieve some goals - usually advertising optimization but sometimes not.

And it happens to subsidize the tools you'd like to you use.

Whether you as a simple shopkeeper are aware of that or not doesn't change the equation or make anything buzzwordy.

I understand all of that. Everyone understands this. Nobody believes that websites aren't collecting our information.

None of that means that I should be FORCED to annoy my users with something that none of them read and none of them want to see.

It's like forcing me to click a "Accept" button every time I start my car saying I understand that my car is going to be recorded by the dash cams of other cars and traffic towers, probably there are cameras in billboards that will see me, oh and my phone's GPS is watching me, etc. etc. Nobody gives a shit.