"Just because there is now a multi-billion-dollar industry based on the abject betrayal of our privacy doesn’t mean the sociopaths who built it have any right whatsoever to continue getting away with it"
Great post!
https://daringfireball.net/2020/09/online_privacy_real_world_privacy
@sorin
Consider the new ad-tracking privacy protection feature in iOS 14.
The tracking industry, led by Facebook, is up in arms about it —
apparently such that Apple might delay enforcing it for a few more
months, according to this report today by Alex Heath for The
Information (paywalled, alas — here’s MacRumors’s summary).
Heath's report closes thus:
Branch CEO Alex Austin, whose company specializes in
measuring the effectiveness of ads in mobile apps, called
Apple's proposed change to IDFA “unworkable for the app
ecosystem.”
“Apple’s move has gone too far, disproportionately
disrupting a vibrant app ecosystem by throwing the baby
out with the bathwater,” he told The Information.
The entitlement of these fuckers is just off the charts. They have zero
right, none, to the tracking they've been getting away with. We, as a
society, have implicitly accepted it because we never really noticed it.
You, the user, have no way of seeing it happen. Our brains are
naturally attuned to detect and viscerally reject, with outrage and
alarm, real-world intrusions into our privacy. Real-world marketers
could never get away with tracking us like online marketers do.
@Sandra @kensanata sharing things publicly is a true choice to give up privacy; that's different than the intrusive tracking across the web and into the real world that large tech/media/ad companies do
My fedi host isn't tracking me outside what it needs to do to function, and it's clear about what that is
Is it perfect? No. Is it massively better than Facebook/Twitter/Google/etc? Yes. Utopian fallacies are hostile to progress
@Sandra @kensanata I understood. I'm saying that indexing posts you make in public is an extremely different scale of privacy risk than the kind of tracking that ad/tech/social companies do.
On fedi, the tracking is limited to what you share on fedi unless your host is malicious/compromised. You know exactly what it's possible to track, and you can exercise control of it fairly easily: your posts and your profile and your fedi network. Mainstream networks track a huge percentage of your activity even away from those networks, even if you don't have an account, and it's not always possible to know what they know about you
It's "nosy neighbors" vs "secret police" levels of privacy risk.
@markosaric
> Or imagine if you found out that public billboards were taking photos of people who glance at them
Eh dutch railways (NS) billboards had/have cameras in them that are checking if you're looking https://tweakers.net/nieuws/129181/ap-gaat-ns-vragen-stellen-over-reclameschermen-met-cameras-op-stations.html using this https://quividi.com/products-services/ wikipedia lists some other organizations doing similar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audience_measurement#New_media
Looks like it's _basically_ pretty limited in the Netherlands https://tweakers.net/nieuws/140231/ap-observeren-voorbijgangers-met-camera-in-reclamezuil-vergt-vaak-toestemming.html
@markosaric real world marketers do track us like online marketing does.
try buying anything without visa or mastercard.
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