If someone went back in time to tell people that this new internet thing was going to lead to the US having more surveillance than East Germany or the Soviet Union, there would have been laws passed and systems designed from the start to prevent it from happening. The fact that it didn't happen this way, and our culture's privacy norms have been destroyed as a consequence, is more reason to act to prevent further damage, not a reason to just give up.
Sure, but if you had phrased the question more fairly and said "Should it be ok for a company to give you free services in exchange for tracking everywhere you go?" I think almost everyone would have said yes.
> If someone went back in time to tell people that this new internet thing was going to lead to the US having more surveillance than East Germany or the Soviet Union, there would have been laws passed and systems designed from the start to prevent it from happening. The fact that it didn't happen this way, and our culture's privacy norms have been destroyed as a consequence, is more reason to act to prevent further damage, not a reason to just give up.
My intuition here is the same as yours. That this is a bad thing. That privacy matters in an intrinsic sense, not an operational sense. But i'm not so sure that's really true anymore. The privacy ship has sailed off into the sunset for a while now, and at least to me, the harms don't seem that substantial. All that data is mostly used to give me ads that are more targeted to what I might want to see anyway. There certainly could be lurking latent risks about, but it's a little hard to see exactly what they are.
Then you should add shadow profiling, data banks linking together data of dozens of different companies, politically targeted advertisement that pretends to be from human users.
Yes the free market is nice and all, still the internet is a hell of a creepy place. It is undeniable that the reason this was allowed (comparing to direct mail advertisement for example) is that it was always believed to be impossible.
Most people don't understand the risks and how badly mass surveillance done by Google / Facebook / etc can be abused. So akin to situation with tobacco industry someone have to educate them about this.
This is totally dodging the issue.
Would they pay instead of allowing that collection?
Given the choice of "pay for this service", "stop using this service", "give up your data", even with a full understanding of the risks and the extent of this data, the general public has shown time and time again they will take the last option.
People do not like to pay for things.
I see way too many arguments about privacy that doesn't seem to grasp that the core of today's tech industry is built around this fact.
People will pay 5$ for 50 cents of coffee beans and enough sugar to drown a fly a day, but they will never pay 5$ a month to access nearly the entirety of mankind's collective knowledge at their fingertips in milliseconds in the form of a search index spending millions of dollars a year to index it all.
I pay a lot more than $5/month for Internet service.
I recall people were talking about turning back to piracy in response to the fragmentation of streaming services.
Disney plus will cost around 7 dollars a month, Netflix costs 13, HBO costs 15. This is about 23, 45, and 50 cents per day respectively.
Yet this change was enough to cause some people to angrily proclaim that they'll go back to illegally downloading movies and tv shows.
Look at music, this seems solved there.
edit: typos
That's nonsense.
Nobody can make an informed decision because nobody knows exactly what data Google collects or exactly how it's used.
And unless you've actually run a survey you can't even speculate about whether people are okay with it or not. If your claim was true, why would this law even exist? You're okay with it, but privacy is a highly personal issue.
How is this an argument against the law? It doesn't make it illegal to share data but requires that users can opt out. If said large majority is fine with surveillance, I guess Silicon Valley can relax.
"Hey, I want to use your free service but I want to go ahead and opt out of the part that enables it to be free" You don't see a problem with that?
It would be like if there were a restaurant that gave free food in exchange for filling out surveys (data collection). So you eat the free meal and then "opt out" of doing the survey.
in this case, NOPE
This is simply not true. When informed about it, a clear majority of people would prefer not to be surveilled, and are uncomfortable with unknown third parties having profiles on them, ads following them around the internet, etc.
The fact that these people continue to use these services anyway (even after being informed) is not a sign that they are 'fine' with it. It is because they have no choice. Even as an engineer, I've found it unfeasibly difficult to avoid being surveilled while continuing to live a normal life. For most people it's a non-starter. They have no choice.
Freedom to choose is essential to a free market. Regulation, done well, can increase market freedom.
At least I know where my data is. Have you ever read a GDPR popup partner list? Do the people you mention understand how gmail business model works?
Because if you were to run a survey over the general population the large majority is fine not having to pay for gmail, google search, maps and other "free" services while some data may be collected doing so while a much smaller percentage thinks it's OK to sell their organs for that?