I'd say people understand very well the implications of a photo. If all there was to a photo is showing "the shell that you won in the genetic lottery" there would hardly be a point in photography.
I disagree with your assessment. It's part acceptance, part different priorities, and part ignorance.
Some people understand what is being gathered and simply accept that as a worthwhile exchange for free stuff. Maybe even a beneficial one (ads are more relevant).
Some people just care about different things than you do. Maybe they're very self-conscious about their image and not particularly concerned about their shopping habits being known.
And some just aren't aware of the potential for abuse that exists with modern data collection. They think we're still at the early stage, where a company is just trying to figure out which brand of beer to stock, and unaware of modern elaborate profile building and the amount of creepy targeting and manipulation they make possible.
I think that’s partly our experience, and partly our generic heritage — an ‘attractive’ face is one where the effect of the emotional affect correlated with reproductive success.
And I think pop-culture locked room mystery crime shows like Sherlock and Jonathan Creek would be written very differently if the puzzle solving character was supposed to represent the norm rather than the exception.
All sounds very profound. But a photo shows so much more : it shows how fit you are, if you look healthy and happy. It also shows how you treat yourself and how you feel about yourself.
I am very aware of this as I changed quite a bit over the last years and these effects can't be understated.
My point is, all those little bits of data that are being collected all the time, by almost every website and program you use, leak all of this and much more. It doesn't "feel" like you're revealing anything important, and yet a full visibility into a week of your browsing history will tell me an order of magnitude more about you than a random photo ever could. A year's worth of your digital footprint will tell me more than your whole photo album. Etc.
(And the worst thing is, when you make and share your photos digitally, companies get both.)
- Most people have little clue about how reality works;
- Companies thriving on people's data do their best to perpetuate that state of things;
- I don't blame people from being ignorant about practical implications of complex topics at the intersection of mathematics and philosophy; I blame companies for exploiting that lack of understanding.
I blame governments for not protecting the weak.
Businesses always exploit their up front investments in knowledge (and equipment) to get money from customers. The problem is when they're allowed to conceal and actively mislead the public about that knowledge in order to maintain their monopoly on that knowledge. Even worse, since there's absolutely no competitive advantage in defecting, it becomes a natural cartel.
A functional government would carefully classify and explain all the elements of the problem, then determine how to regulate it through democratic processes.
The problem starts with the fact there's never been a clear right to privacy in the US. Instead it's just a phrase and a weird set of principles stitched together from ancient court decisions about celebrities. The US benefits from its freedom of speech baseline being enshrined in the constitution rather than being a patchwork (like in the UK for example.) The right to privacy should be that clear as well.
A faceless computer, doing it in the background environment outside of your perception unless you really dig in under the hood triggers none of that. It's the same reason why most humans are not anxious about the footprints they leave in the sand on the beach, because it feels about the same.
A lot of the rich and powerful understand this dynamic well, and use environmental stonewalling to say no to people vs. a direct human interaction.
Today on BBC Radio there was a discussion about racism on the big technology platforms (after the England/Italy match last night), and how their human moderators were overwhelmed. Someone whose name I missed said "I don't think it should be too hard for a computer to look at the monkey emoji and decide if it's being used in an inappropriate context". It was like hearing the "research team and five years" XKCD in real life.
> "Photos just show the shell that you won in the genetic lottery."
Tell that to the teacher who lost her job for posting a vacation photo including her holding alcohol, in 2009: https://www.good.is/articles/facebook-and-privacy-fired-for-...
I'll tell you that a photo of my son flailing out of a blanket is a deeply personal memory of a hilarious and touching moment.
That he has an electronic device is so incredibly irrelevant it's hard to put into words.
> Photos? Photos just show the shell that you won in the genetic lottery.
No, they show a moment.
If you were right, people would care about all photos being shared or none. But that's not what happens - people care about some far more than others.
People don't understand how technology works. More than that - because it's not really about computers. Most people don't understand how reality works. What is information. How reasoning works. What can you infer from observations.
They feel (and sometimes, in some places, really think) that a picture is like a piece of their soul. But it isn't. It's just a hash of their phenotype, useful mostly to check if it matches to a person (or another picture of them). It's mostly irrelevant.
The soul - that leaks out in all the rest of your digital footprint. The sites you visit, the articles you read, the things you look at when scrolling. The ads you click, the ads you ignore, the products you buy, the products you only check out but don't add to your cart. The messages you send. The posts you comment on. Where you comment on them from, and on what device. How long did you own it, how many other devices do you own, how do your habits differ between those devices. Who you "befriend" or follow on-line, who follows you. Etc.
All these things add up to who you are. Taken together, they give a comprehensive look at both your personality and your life circumstances. Photos? Photos just show the shell that you won in the genetic lottery.