All of those examples are primarily damage done pre 80s
The "organic" social stuff that helped Trump 2016 (leaked Democrat emails, etc) had nothing to do with privacy or ads.
More than 87M people were profiled, and more than 3M people were targeted by Cambridge Analytica in 11 key states during the election to feed them the content that would swing their indecision towards Trump based on their psychological profile and preferences.
Trump paid for that, and Michigan and Pennsylvania and New Hampshire were all very close.
To boldly state that CA had no impact on US elections, Brexit and I don't remember which South American election when the people involved in it literally sold it and used previous results as evidence seems a bit of a stretch.
I might be wrong, but there's no clear way of knowing unless votes were not anonymous.
The CA thing is the same level of stupid. The targeting would just be senselessly bad based on CA's methodology.
Airbnb is also a boon for travellers looking to stay cheap, and a boon for property owners to cash in on underutilized real estate.
The "harm" that has been cited to have been caused by them are only the incumbents that do not move with the market or times.
Glance at it and she looks like a renter or typical youth of a city with tourism but poor purchasing power/ social mobility, but stare a bit longer and relax your focus and she becomes an incumbent who doesn't move with the market or times
Now that the harm is done (speculation on housing priced out teachers and low income workers, old, niche stores turned into tourist traps), we finally have regulation. A bit too late. But at least the mayor is adding 20k housing units (+20%), driving the price down and making speculators eat a fat loss.
Uber was regulated much faster so it's impact have mostly been positive, unless you've been raped by a predator as they used to not check their drivers.
You have to regulate ahead of time, even if it's soft and toothless in the beginning. Check the EU proposal to regulate AI, it seems really, really soft.
It would take about twenty seconds with Google, to come up with hundreds of examples. Some, better than others.
Basically, if there's no rule saying I can't do it, then I should do it, until rules are developed to stop it; regardless of the morality or danger.
I suspect that one way to make people more careful, is to make future rules and regulations retroactive.
For example, if I had developed a fintech product that was a legal ponzi scheme, or a downloader that is a legal way of accessing copyrighted material, because of loopholes, and those loopholes are closed, after the fact (happens all the time), then, if the new remedies can be applied to the "legal" implementations that were in effect before the closing of the loopholes, I suspect that it would make the "loopholer" a wee bit more cautious.
But that won't happen. There's way too many ways that it could go off the rails.
So people will keep on bending, folding, spindling, and mutilating, until they are stopped by a steel door, slamming down in front of them.
I strongly suspect that a lot of companies are set up to harvest as much as possible, before the door slams, so they can reap the benefits.
and there's moral implications about applying new rules retroactively. What you do today that is completely legal, should not be punished tomorrow even if it was decided in the future that it is illegal. Otherwise, there would be a chilling effect on innovation.
Suddenly, we owe ten years of back taxes, with penalties.
It’s not feasible to do this.
But there are plenty if people –many on this very forum, I suspect– that know what they are doing is highly immoral, and will likely get shut down, but … MONEY … so they do it for as long as they can gt away with it.
it's because the gov't is not incentivized properly. I think they should be pressured to keep up. This isn't an argument to "pre-regulate", because incompetence at the gov't can be fixed!
> Once the bullet has left the gun, it can't be stuffed back in.
But once many people start shooting guns willy-nilly, you start regulating guns. But not before.
I used to be, but some of the modern crop of CEOs has taken the wind out of that. They have done tremendous damage, very quickly, and the regulation has been unable to keep up, until severe damage has already been done.
Once the bullet has left the gun, it can't be stuffed back in.