Tech companies are profiling us from before birth

Re:Tech companies are profiling us from before birth by yuliyp on Tuesday January 19, 2021 @01:10AM (#25830539)

What can Eric Schmidt do differently? Let's say Google suddenly made it their #1 priority to make sure to never ever collect profiles about minors. Would that make the advice any less useful? They still have competitors from all around the world who may be less scrupulous than them making that advice still useful.

The problem is not individual bad people or bad companies. Take out the ones that exist now and a sea of new adtech startups will take their place.

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Re:Tech companies are profiling us from before birth by nnnnnande on Tuesday January 19, 2021 @01:21AM (#25830591)

This argument keeps coming up in similar discussions and I don’t really understand it.

Can you not imagine a scenario where we didn’t leave everything in the hands of a completely unregulated market?

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Re:Tech companies are profiling us from before birth by yuliyp on Tuesday January 19, 2021 @04:10AM (#25831417)

I struggle to see the type of regulation regime that could work effectively to prevent such profiles from being created (the data collection would move overseas and then later be re-sold as contact lists, or as audiences, etc.).

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Re:Tech companies are profiling us from before birth by Catsandkites on Tuesday January 19, 2021 @04:23AM (#25831511)

Isn't that a cop out argument? Just make it outright illegal and fine heavily per violation. You have profile information that a user didn't explicitly give you? $10k fine, each.

We have (kinda) world wide copyright laws. We have world wide drug laws. We have world wide sea and war laws. Why don't we have world wide privacy laws?

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Re:Tech companies are profiling us from before birth by yuliyp on Tuesday January 19, 2021 @04:43AM (#25831643)

> We have (kinda) world wide copyright laws.

... which get flouted all the time

> We have world wide drug laws.

... And the war on drugs has been a huge success.

> Why don't we have world wide privacy laws?

The Internet makes trying to enforce world wide privacy laws much harder than physical laws: anyone in the world can reach you and collect data about you.

> Just make it outright illegal and fine heavily per violation. You have profile information that a user didn't explicitly give you? $10k fine, each.

How do you propose to discover violations? Self-reporting won't ever happen. If you then propose to give draconian sanctions to trying to cover up such issues, congratulations, you've killed the ability of people to build anything and share it with the world.

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Re:Tech companies are profiling us from before birth by jeffreygoesto on Tuesday January 19, 2021 @01:52AM (#25830726)

> They still have competitors from all around the world who may be less scrupulous

Is robbing ok, because if you don't do it, someone else might?

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Re:Tech companies are profiling us from before birth by colejohnson66 on Tuesday January 19, 2021 @02:46AM (#25830949)

No, but knowing how to avoid it doesn’t make you one yourself.

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Re:Tech companies are profiling us from before birth by bryanrasmussen on Tuesday January 19, 2021 @03:20AM (#25831115)

No, but if you are a robber and suggest to people who complain about being robbed by you about how to reduce the problems associated with being robbed in the future it makes you sort of a hypocrite.

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Re:Tech companies are profiling us from before birth by plater on Tuesday January 19, 2021 @03:17AM (#25831101)

A lot of people use Google so it would of course make a huge difference if Google would stop collecting profiles.

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Re:Tech companies are profiling us from before birth by tasogare on Tuesday January 19, 2021 @01:37AM (#25830659)

> They still have competitors from all around the world who may be less scrupulous

Not really. European Union services are more regulated towards user rights (GDPR) and services from other big countries are usually targeted towards domestic or regional market (typically East-Asian apps for example).

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