That certainly is the devil’s side. Unfortunately too many firms have affixed phony halos and then exfiltrated the People‘a personal data. Opt-in is the only way the People will be able to choose whom they trust.
There's something very wrong about some random company being able to collect lots of data about you where the only way to stop it is to _somehow_ know about the company and opt out _after_ it collects that data.
Many private sector companies handle data that the general public probably shouldn’t. Extending special protections to the state that are not allowed to private employers is ridiculous and unsafe.
Companies like credit bureaus or banks or the telcos or airlines or hospitals are effectively arms of the state at this point. You don’t get to opt out of the oligarchy with consumer choice.
Firstly, as others have pointed out, these companies collect information on people who have never opted in.
Secondly, they purposely set up a walled garden such that you can't see some things unless you make an account. Like say, the thousands of businesses with no website but only a Facebook presence. Or reading political discourse directly from politicians on Twitter. Or, as is very often noted, the easiest place to get support from companies seems to be on social media.
The latter isn't really easy to solve. One can say who cares, don't join then. But it can put you at certain disadvantages.
I scorn this good/evil narrative. It's all economics and politics. Companies are not out there to "be good", whatever their marketing and PR tells you. Companies make money and these companies finally found a way to make money from our attention and personal data.
Until they are regulated, they will proceed doing so with little regard to our privacy and mental health. GDPR is looking good.
Very true! yet lots of companies still (try to) hide behind it. My recent experience was with Sonos. They heavily track you without opt-in/explicit consent and hide behind legitimate interest.
I don’t think that trusting a corporation is any good either. Imagine the alternate scenario where the government is benevolent and has no interest in surveilling its citizens. Companies in this case still have an incentive to gather as much data as they can from their customers because the ability to manipulate people into patronizing their products is a competitive edge.
Wow, can't really trust anyone nowadays. I feel like its a losing battle that privacy conscious people are fighting. It feels like every single company is edging towards this dystopian future.
Kind of sad when you need a private company to give your citizens the basic privacy they want (doubly so when you have to simply trust said company that the partners they are working with are honest). Maybe the US's privacy laws need a 21st Century make over?
I don't mean to discourage governments and groups trying to do what they can in regulating business. But surely privacy is a software feature not a corporate policy.
Relying on others to not use the information at there disposal seems destined to fail.
Almost everyone I know willingly puts themselves under corporate surveillance (credit card?, cell phone?, license plates on car?, web browser?, cable tv?, netflix?, shopper rewards and discounts?).
Still, everyone should be able to decide which corporate 'masters' they trust. For instance, Netflix may be surveying my watching habits, but I trust them more than Google and Amazon. They can only collect a small subset of data (viewing habits) and it least they get the majority of their income out of subscriptions. Over time, I have started making more principled choices of who I want to give my data and who not.
I don't think it is fair to ask that because I share data with Netflix, I should also be willing to share data with Google or Amazon when I visit you.
Unfortunately, this is only going to get worse. For example, there are a lot of cloud connected cameras with exploitable vulnerabilities. My parents had such a camera and I asked them to cover or disconnect it when I visit them.
Or legislate these things have to be opt-in. I remember when politeness dictated you ask someone before even taking their photo.
I think the companies collecting personal information assume they have more entitlement to it they they actually do, and are on the wrong side of the law - especially when breaches like this result in real damage. I'd like to see a few really harsh class action lawsuits bite them in the ass and leave behind bad enough scars that other firms begin to see personal data as a liability not as asset.
So what's the deal? Any company that makes users opt out of diagnostic data is just as bad as the companies whose entire business model is predicated around collecting as much data as possible about you and selling it to people whose sole ambition is to manipulate you? Are these two things really equally bad? We can't acknowledge that one of those is considerably more in favor of privacy than the other--they must both be labeled "NOT PRIVACY" with all nuance eliminated? Is that where we are in our discourse?
It’s really impossible to allow surveillance capitalism for only some to knowingly opt in. The way Google, Facebook and others are built to vacuum up everything they can get puts those of us who care about our privacy in a losing situation.
For example when your therapist emails you from their Gmail account to set appointments, now Google knows you see a therapist. I never signed up to give that information to Google. Pay your bill your credit card, now Mastercard knows you see a therapist.
There needs to be some reasonable expectation of privacy written into law and a reasonable limit to how data can be captured and used.
Its only a matter of time before the wrong people get their hands on all the data that big tech has been unscrupulously mining for years now. An authoritarian's wet dream.
Im typically a minimal regulation kind of guy but these orgs have consistently demonstrated that without some sort of effective privacy regulation, modern tech companies simply do not have enough incentive to self-regulate with respect to data collection. Laymen are too ignorant to demand better from the modern data cartel.
Individual decisions might make sense for individuals, although it's obvious that the level of tracking is now so deep that most people do not understand what is going on and they would be shocked if they knew how they could be taken advantage of.
Collectively it's untenable for a single for-profit entity to hold highly personal information on billions of people from all over the world and have a direct, immediate communication channel open to them. These companies have immense power and they need to be brought under control.
People should be able to opt in to what they want, but as far as I’m concerned if a company can only exist by subjecting me to constant surveillance it doesn’t need to exist.
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