Imagine that you were trying to quit smoking and your electronic secretary kept updating you on the cheapest place to find your favorite cigarettes? With no way to tell it not to do that.
The cigarette company analogy also includes the "secondhand smoke"-style problem: Even if I don't personally use their services, I'm still exposed to the problem indirectly with gmail/GA/etc.
I thought about it further and lean towards agreement.
You know what makes it such a subjective question? The cigarette supplier sells a substance with an addictive chemical inside of it. Notifications are not a substance, the drug response is your own chemical (dopamine). Still an interesting question though.
It’s gotten so ridiculous I’ve started to see jobs… fully remote… that say will refuse to hire you if you use any nicotine products, explicitly including quitting aids like gums and patches.
You're not wrong, you're just an asshole. A funny one, though.
The story is relevant, however, because we expect companies to protect personal and financial data even for people who are so profoundly foolish as to act against their own interest by patronizing them.
We accept that the tobacco companies sell an addictive product that causes cancer and COPD, among other diseases, but heaven help them if they should leak some customer data.
This is rather like Mrs. Lincoln complaining that she didn't get to see the end of the play.
I agree that the analogy isn’t valid. Only because information technologies today are a lot worse than tobacco. Unlike apps, tobacco does not have a team of PHDs constantly reformulating itself to draw in those people who have found a way out of it, and ensuring that the ones already addicted remain.
Little rings of gunpowder in the paper to make it act like a fuse, that's nothing.
At one point tobacco companies developed non-addictive cigarettes and kept it a secret.
Source: A long time back a friend of mine's brother was part of a faux-jury assembled by tobacco company lawyers to do like a focus group to research how real juries in some real trial might think/feel. They revealed all kinds of stuff to these folks. They made them sign NDAs, of course, but he told us everything anyway. That was one of the things I remember: they made non-addictive cigs and kept it a secret.
This actually is a very valid argument. Cigarettes actually provide value to the user. Yes, there are negatives, but the user typically knows those and decides the upside is worth the risk.
Do people know the risks of being profiled by ad companies? I am not sure most people can even begin to understand the associated risk. The few attempts to show people what companies know about you were shut down pretty hard.
According to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, I am merely an provider and the liability rests with the employee who "posted" the cigarettes with me.
If you asked any of the CEOs from those companies banning ChatGPT we're in for a glorious AI-shaped future, until it comes to them. It doesn't really inspire any confidence.
Can you imagine if Marlboro or Philip Morris forbade their employees from smoking for health reasons?
And all the while machine learning engineers explicitly work to make them more addictive. At least tobacco companies didn't have a monopoly on information and they still held on to plausible deniability for as long as possible. This a serious problem that also affects our capacity to solve the problem.
These companies hire psychologists in droves to make their products more addictive. There are certainly ways to combat their manipulation techniques, but let's not pretend this is some neutral product and try to pin the blame on the users. Cigarette companies used the same tactic and it hasn't gotten any less repellant.
Reminds me of anti smoking ads. Every time I see one of those I feel the urge to go to the corner store to buy a pack. Something about those preachy ads annoys the living hell out of me.
Edit: should preface I’m a former smoker and I loved smoking. Problem is, smoking didn’t love me and I had to quit if I wanted to continue with my gym hobby xD
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