The road to hell is built by ignoring the rule of law to go after whoever is "bad" in the moment.
There's an ancient legal principle called "nulla poena sina legal", which means "no punishment without a law". It's the foundation of all justice.
Here's a classic quote from A Man for all Seasons that helps explain:
Roper: So now you’d give the Devil benefit of law?
More: Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
Roper: I’d cut down every law in England to do that!
More: Oh? And, when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you – where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country’s planted thick with laws from coast to coast – man’s laws, not God’s – and, if you cut them down – and you’re just the man to do it – d’you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake.
Is there something nefarious if society legislates that a (upon closer examination) certain practices that were previously granted tacit or explicit approval are actually undesirable on a forward going basis?
No, of course not. But you have to articulate, in detail, what your new prohibitions are. You can't just declare people or organizations bad and punish them on the basis of their being bad without explaining what, specifically, is the conduct you're prohibiting going forward.
Forming a consensus (imho this can easily span the traditional political spectrum as it affects literally everybody - its not frequently you get to see the two extremes agree on something) and moving towards a new framework that will sketch "what good looks like" is entirely possible and would come not a moment too early.
The stakes are really high. This is a struggle for democracy, but also for the shape of the future economy. There are many sectors: medical, insurance, finance, education that are looking with disbelief at what is going on. if the political signal is that the Faustian pact of surveillance capitalism is irreversible the ensuing race to the bottom will be the end...
From my point of view, the elite consensus is that there should be some body of "responsible" people that decides what opinions the general public is allowed to express to a broad audience. Any idea control of this kind is totally unacceptable no matter what form it takes.
I don't think the issue of controlling information flow (which is a political hot potato) has much to do with the legitimacy or not of this business model. E.g., Newspapers are obviously controlling flow, may have biases from sponsors, advertisers etc but they do not create user profiles by collecting all the private data they can get access to, they do not modify news shown based on profiles and (in any democracy) there is a wide variety of them and you can always choose which one to read.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Age-Surveillance-Capitalism-Future-Fr...
This is a defining issue for how digital society is going to be organized and you obviously don't care to inform yourself sufficiently about what is happening (=hence cannot parse what the policy recommendation "ban this business model" means)
What I'm gathering from this conversation is that you have an emotional reaction to Facebook but haven't done the mental homework necessary to identify what specifically Facebook is doing wrong and what specific rules you would impose on social media platforms going forward.
1. She described the first diagram of a home-automation device with 2 nodes, the device and the device owner. She made the case that in that schematic, the owner's privacy, autonomy, agency is respected. She made the contrast that Nest requires thousands of agreements w/r/t data collected.
I understood this to mean she prefers something like this model, no 3rd party interaction. This is impossible if the vast majority of Nest users (as an example) cannot program Nest to deliver temperature, on/off switches to their phone. You can see the problem, the world is increasingly software driven and despite the "everyone should learn to code" homily, this is not so and doesn't look like it's going to be so in our future.
As a corollary to (1), I wonder if this is an inherent attribute of the software which we write to day. If we are to write software for a device which we will never interact with again, or have very few opportunity to interact with it for repair purposes (eg, software sent to the moon or Mars), it would be a different kind of software written with a different maintenance model. We build remote capabilities into devices (eg Nest) because we ship an MVP, first to market, and we build the reach-back into it to fix it afterward. Its first purpose is not to collect data, I don't think. The data collection mechanisms and purposes accreted over time.
2. She segued into the creation of the mobile phone as the next step in creating the predictive product, after the click-through ads. "Let us give you this device, maybe a smartphone ..." Who is this "us"? The smartphone was an iterative product with an inflection point. Personal organizers, navigation systems, existed before the smartphone and did not find market viability (Newton, Palm, Garmin), not the way the smartphone did. The smartphone is what it is because it fulfilled consumers' needs and customers demanded it. This line of deduction seems backward.
3. She said "predictive products" (I forget the exact words she used, things that predicts human actions) should not exist. Even the interviewer said that's a radical prescription! Humans have been doing this, wanted to do this forever. We want to use what we know to "nudge" behaviors in a certain direction, there's actually a thing in behavioral economic called "nudging", nudge people to invest in 401K, eat their veg, not fall into addiction and crime. I'm not sure how she proposes to do away with this. She will say I'm committing a category error, by conflating the predictive nudge with capitalism. I'm not sure how that can be decoupled, because as a society, capitalism is how we allocate values, and money is a proxy for value. I'm not saying the allocation is always correctly coupled or aligned but if a behavior is valuable, then the nudge toward that behavior is valuable and the information that enables the delivery of the nudge is valuable.
That's my immediate reaction as I listened, the book will have a more nuanced discussion I'm sure. I am willing to be persuaded but I'm forever skeptical of social scientists' conclusions about the workings, intents, and outcomes of tech decisions.
In each of these instances there are fairly draconian regulations about what is allowed, both in terms of 1) data collection protocols 2) admissible predictive models 3) application scope - what can one do with the outcomes and 4) accountability / disclosure to the impacted individuals.
When she says "predictive products" (meaning behavioral based targeted advertising) should not exist (I think) she essentially says that the collateral damage of the practice far exceeds any benefits generated. Obviously not in monetary terms in the current market context, but in broader welfare terms.
Who redefined "Terms and norms"? Who declared that privacy is dead? The problem really is that people have normalized a practice (surveillance, compilation of human behavioral profiles, classification, trading of such profiles, material impact on people's life based on such data and their algorithmic interpretation) that is historically the hallmark of oppression. This is not normal, not if we live in democratic, well functioning societies as we are led to believe. The cambridge-analytica episode is just the tip of the iceberg of what will happen if politicians and markets keep legitimizing this business model.
Why place this bomb under society? Is there any service being offered that is not reproducible otherwise? Its just some freaking databases and servers and messages after all. What the world is waiting for is for the gargantuan mea-culpa of silicon valley and the amoral capital that financed this.
This is a litmus test of whether there is anything left of the "Western" project, because of oppressive and unaccountable regimes there are plenty.