And this ability is currently asymmetric. While Big Tech and Big Govt knows nearly everything about everybody, ordinary citizens are denied data and transparency. And even if the data may be hypothetically available, its scale precludes analysis by anyone except highly funded groups.
Lack of privacy does translate to enormous soft power. It doesn't have to result in death, although the potential is there for that too. Democracy and individual liberty become meaningless except on paper.
I'm not sure that's what we want, in exchange for a few conveniences in the palm of our hands.
Is there any evidence that Big Tech and Big Government are actually controlling people by tagging them in some database (which no human actually inspects) as being interested in hiking gear and cookie recipes? Give me a break.
What you've described isn't a concrete harm, but an emotion --- specifically, fear. Lots of fears are baseless. So is this one. We shouldn't organize society around the baseless fears of tiny vocal minorities.
It should be, flatly, illegal to collect that sort of data about people without a business need to do so, and illegal to use it for any other purpose, transfer it to any other entity without the same restrictions on its use, et c., when it's needed (like: credit card companies and banks obviously need to know where & when you spend money, but they shouldn't be able to use those data for anything else at all—no aggregating and re-selling to others, no mining spending trends for investment intelligence, no targeting ads at you based on it, none of that).
No, companies do not mind control people on an individual level, but what they do has all the traditional effects of monopolies/oligopolies that are not democratically controlled by the people affected but a handful of rich executives.
I'm not even going to go to the "advertising controls people" dialog tree. If it's not obvious why having the power of putting anything you want in front of billions of people is powerful, then I don't think there's a discussion worth having.
There it is. It's not about tracking per se. It's really about control over advertising and information dissemination more broadly.
Motte: preserving user privacy by blocking cookies
Bailey: let's tightly control who can put messages in front of the general public
You are framing this as if I am somehow advocating censorship towards people, yet I am advocating the opposite position. Executives shouldn't be given a such huge powers of data mining and information distribution and ability shut powerless opposition and competition out. This is about preserving equal voice to all people, and preventing juggernauts from squashing it.
"No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Declaration_of_Human...
Why isn't this Article at the forefront of any and all conversation re: privacy?
Now some nations may have decide to take some of the principles in this declaration and turn them into laws. But you will find that there is great variance in the human rights laws today even between, say, Canada and the U.S., or Mexico and Japan.
The fact of the matter is human rights are a social construct and they very much differ on what society your are in and what that society has decided are the rights it will observe. Looking around, we find very different definitions and intepretations of rights all around the world.
>Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence.
>There shall be no interference by a public authority with the exercise of this right except such as is in accordance with the law and is necessary in a democratic society in the interests of national security, public safety or the economic well-being of the country, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others."
and Articles 7 and 8 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union[1]
>Everyone has the right to respect for his or her private and family life, home and communications.
and
>1. Everyone has the right to the protection of personal data concerning him or her.
>2. Such data must be processed fairly for specified purposes and on the basis of the consent of the person concerned or some other legitimate basis laid down by law. Everyone has the right of access to data which has been collected concerning him or her, and the right to have it rectified.
>3. Compliance with these rules shall be subject to control by an independent authority.
Both of these documents are legally binding (the former on all member states of the Council of Europe,[2] and the latter on the EU and its member states)
[0] https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/European_Convention_for_the_P...
There are a lot of angry people in this thread stating what they want, but none have offered an argument for why we should structure society around their whims. Sorry, but "you shouldn't be able to collect information" isn't an argument. It's a wish. Nobody is under any obligation to indulge the wishes of random strangers.
> Sorry, but "you shouldn't be able to collect information" isn't an argument.
How about "private entities shouldn't be able to collect my information without my explicit consent".
> It's a wish. Nobody is under any obligation to indulge the wishes of random strangers.
Yours included.
If the information is public, no consent is needed.
Privacy is about trusting someone with private information and expecting they will not do anything with it that you would not approve of.
Keeping a diary or a phone contact list would be forbidden under a strict reading of that rule. Even remembering the name of a person you met at a party would be forbidden unless you ask for explicit consent first. "Hey, Joe. Great to meet you. Mind if I make a mental note connecting your face to your name?" Real people don't think like this.
We all have a natural freedom to record facts we perceive in the world around them. Taken to its logical conclusion, privacy advocacy is about mandatory forgetting. No, thanks.
PII is very valuable to advertisers (or to adtech as I recently learned[2]) as it allows them to target individuals based on interest. Beyond the fact that I don't enjoy being forced into complicitness to being manipulated into purchasing a product, I strongly object to having a profile in some mega-corp's database that has my personal information I didn't agree to share with them, for them to disect, analyze and sell in perpetuity, and to wonder how future advancements in adtech might use this data in less benign ways than today.
At the very least, I would like a share of the profits they're making from me. Facebook and Google should be paying users to use their products, or everyone on the internet rather, but I don't think their shareholders would like that very much.
[1]: https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-uploaded-1-5-millio...
The kind of question can only be asked by someone who has never been abused by a domestic partner, never been on the wrong end of debt collectors, the law, disgruntled employees, doxxers, or other real and persistent threats that are enabled by the data collection and aggregation that is the foundation of interest targeting.
All this noise about cookie privacy, fingerprinting, FLoC, tracking, etc. --- what are the actual harms that make these things bad? Has anyone in the real world ever experienced a concrete harm arising from interest targeting? Doubtful.
The EU privacy regime imposes a heavy regulatory burden in exchange for nothing. Information is a non-rivalrous good. Further limiting its dissemination will increase friction all over the internet, impose new transaction costs on previously free interactions, and make the whole network less useful for everyone. And for what? Assuaging the paranoia of a tiny fragile and vocal minority of privacy activists? Sorry, but that's not worth breaking the internet.