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Re:Whistleblower to Congress: Facebook products harm kids an... by JumpCrisscross on Tuesday October 05, 2021 @12:24PM (#28761573)
> customers WANT companies to be able to track everything about them

Customers want free shit. American culture remains prickly to being tracked.

Re:Whistleblower to Congress: Facebook products harm kids an... by teawrecks on Tuesday October 05, 2021 @12:32PM (#28761718)
Right, the "free shit" part is when they profit from the data behind your back. THAT is the part that should be illegal.

But it should be a perfectly valid business model for me to pay someone to (for example) watch everything I do and everything my body does, and give me personalized health advice, as long as they keep my data under lock and key for only my and their proprietary analysis algorithm's "eyes" to ever see.

It's not the "tracking all your info" that is bad, it's that they legitimately believe that it's their info to do with as they please.

Re:Whistleblower to Congress: Facebook products harm kids an... by handrous on Tuesday October 05, 2021 @01:00PM (#28762134)
Notably, it's not even clear how much less "free shit" we'd get without spying-funded "free" services ruling the Web landscape. Those services don't just compete with paid alternatives, they compete with actually free. I think it's likely open protocols and open source software would see a surge of interests from users and developers working on them if they didn't have hundreds-of-developers paid teams with advertising budgets competing with them and giving their work away "for free" (with spying). Now, I hesitate to guess how much this factor would make up for the loss, but the amount of free shit we'd lose by outlawing spying-based advertising is surely less, by some amount, than 100% of what it currently funds.