> That’s because dossiers on billions of people hold the power to wreak almost unimaginable harm, and yet, each dossier brings in just a few dollars a year. For commercial surveillance to be cost effective, it has to socialize all the risks associated with mass surveillance and privatize all the gains.
> There’s an old-fashioned word for this: corruption. In corrupt systems, a few bad actors cost everyone else billions in order to bring in millions – the savings a factory can realize from dumping pollution in the water supply are much smaller than the costs we all bear from being poisoned by effluent. But the costs are widely diffused while the gains are tightly concentrated, so the beneficiaries of corruption can always outspend their victims to stay clear.
Spot on. Google's in exactly the same boat, it's just that they provide a few services which are legitimately useful (Search, Gmail), so they're targeted less right now.
The fix is not complicated. I have no issue with my search data/post viewing history providing me better results or better ads.
The real damaging data to people and society at large is a different set of data. It's the publicly visible counts next to every thought and utterance reinforcing misguided beliefs and behaviour up and down the food chain constantly. Any experienced shrink, psycologist or educator, marketing/PR expert knows applying the right amount of feedback at the right time is critical to how people process info.
Remove/delay/reduce the visibility of like counts/view counts/upvotes/retweet counts that are displayed and the world will be a different place overnight.
>I have no issue with my search data/post viewing history providing me better results or better ads. The real damaging data to people and society at large is a different set of data.
Hmm, I disagree. It seems to me that both sources of data are dangerous. Yes, showing "You have 10 likes" is bad for users as social media companies iterate their way towards addiction but your search data is a toxic asset beyond just showing ads. Let's say google leaked everyone's search history tomorrow. How many marriages are going to be ruined? How many politicians are going to resign? How many future politicians will decide to never run? How many firings and never-hirings will there be based on that history?
People should be able to live normal lives without being surveilled - by governments or corporations.
I think that this is the solution. Remove the count and who of the likes. You can still show the fact that someone liked it for some stickiness but you remove race to post only to generate likes but rather to share a point of view.
I didn't make that bargain, but I think the real problem these days is that it doesn't matter if you made it or not. All it takes is one weak link in the chain and suddenly you're under surveillance from a company you had no intention of being involved with.
I don't, for example, use GMail but if I communicate with people who do then my mail falls under Google surveillance. I don't use Google Drive but if I do business with a company that does then some of my data has been forked over to Google and I'm unlikely to ever know about it. I don't use Facebook but if I appear in a photo that someone else uploads and annotates then Facebook has a photo ID of me without my say-so.
It's difficult to stay clear of surveillance companies when you're constantly being undermined by the unintentional (or, perhaps more precisely, unthinking) actions of even just a few people. My data's being bought and sold every day and there is no way I can control that, opt out of it, or even get a list of companies who have my information or what they're doing with it.
If this is the information age and if information has value, then my information is my asset and I want control of it. Without the ability for a person to assert sovereignty over their own data, how can there be a balance of power between the individual and large organizations seeking to exploit everyone's data?
A Faustian bargain implies that we knew the price. Facebook actively misled (and continues to mislead) us about what we were giving up to use its service.
I always get downvoted for FB criticism, perhaps by their employees, but I have evidence for what I just said: Zuck's many, many, many public apologies.
"How does one get out of a Faustian Bargain, anyway?"
Well, Goethes Faust got away pretty well, beeing gods favourite .. and a grammar exploit in the bargain.
(the bargain was, Mephistopheles serves him, until he says some specific words (Verweile doch, du bist so schön) ... and in the end Faust says, now I feel like I could say "Verweile doch..."
Mephistopheles thinks thats it, summons his demons, to prepare for it. Faust dies, beeing old ... but since god was the all powerful judge and Faust his favourite, ... well that was enough to save his soul. And the demons had to go away accomplishing nothing)
So any lessons for the real world?
I don't see any...
edit:
maybe to give more context: Faust made the deal, because he was not content, mainly about the limitations about understanding the world, but also in general. And the words of the bargain mean something like, now I am content. So Mephistos part was to make him content, or even too full of this world. But it is somewhat complicated, beeing Goethe.. but worth a read, at least in german. Don't know, if the translations are good enough, because much of the greatness of the book, is the powerful language and verses, which at least I could never translate adequately.
This is what's scary. The ugly part is just starting, because we haven't even gotten to the point where their AI systems have super-human intelligence and can use all of your "whole-life/everything you've ever done" data against you.
How bad is this going to be in 20 years? And does anyone really think Google and Facebook will "self-regulate" sufficiently on this, without extreme outside pressure?
Legislation. Vote for politicians who care about these things (increasingly many do, especially the younger ones). Or stand up and run on a platform of providing a safer internet for all of us, free from the kind of tracking that we take for granted.
I agree it may not be easy. But we desperately need more tech-savvy politicians in these technological times.
So after a long article about Facebook, the first comment is about Google.
If Tesla kills a driver, it's Tesla and Waymo.
If Facebook is selling your data, it's Facebook and Google.
Why don't we stop pretending and just say we all hate Google, irrespective of who is actually at fault? That will save us trouble of having to find any evidence proving our claims.
The article is about the dangers of large companies tracking users to such a high degree that it's dangerous for us, profitable for them. Facebook is an example. Google is also an example. Personally I'm more worried about Google because they have all my e-mails and everything my phone does. I don't have Facebook anymore.
It's not about hating Google, it's about recognizing the power and ubiquity they have, and how for many in HN, it dwarfs Facebook in terms of potential personal impact.
Yeah. He is right.
Anyway, thank you. I couldn't read an article so long to communicate so little, so I just went into the comments here. Thanks again.
While I am also concerned about the growing depth of surveillance, there hasn't been any _real_ evidence that Cambridge Analytica's methods were effective (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Analytica#Assessment...). That they were mostly ineffective seems to me the more reasonable null hypothesis. Why assume these shady micro-targeting campaigns are such a big deal in the face of the huge, multidimensional propaganda wars that are political campaigns?
Without the presumption that the micro-targeting is super effective, nothing looks like it's on fire.
The article specifically claims that Cambridge Analytica's techniques _didn't_ sway opinion, merely that they allowed them to locate specific voters. The wikipedia section you linked says much the same:
> Research discussed by Brendan Nyhan of Dartmouth College showed that it is extremely hard to alter voters' preferences, because many likely voters are already committed partisans; as a result, it is easier to simply mobilize partisan voters.
Yup, you don't need to change peoples' minds to affect election outcomes, you just need to encourage the right people to vote. Send messages about hot-button issues to people who are already likely to be enraged by them, and you'll get more of them turning out to the polls.
A friend of mine volunteered on the Clinton campaign in the months before the election. The strategy wasn't to knock on random doors and convince people to vote for Hillary, it was to find people who are already likely to lean left (but maybe aren't likely voters), and remind them of the upcoming election and where to vote, etc. Online ads take the same approach, just subconsciously.
Finding swing voters is what a lot of these companies really want. I worked at a company about six or seven years ago that had a Conservative pollster as a client who badly wanted to identify the swing voter. They told us they didn’t care about anyone else because those people were going to vote with their team regardless. So they wanted to find the people they could sway.
And how did they want us to locate them? Through Facebook.
I think Doctorow's analysis makes more sense than the typical rhetoric about Facebook and CA. But I still default to thinking that CA was largely ineffective. How many "latent klansmen" were there unaware that Trump was more their candidate than Clinton? Trump's stances were completely public, hugely well-known. What more did CA provide? I just don't really buy it. (Political advertising is very ineffective from what I've read and I just need some reason to expect CA to be more successful.)
I'm worried about the surveillance system for other reasons, like finding targets for censorship, discrimination, and hatred.
that doesnt explain anything though, it just kicks the can a bit further down. He's not clear whether the problem is facebook, the fact that majority of voters are gullible idiots, or democracy itself?
I didn't mean to imply a stance about whether they were swaying opinion vs galvanizing extremists vs discouraging their opposition. All of those I would consider "being effective". It's just that the only people who seem to claim CA was effective are journalists sensationalizing the scandal, and CA themselves.
>It’s as though Mark Zuckerberg woke up one morning and realized that the oily rags he’d been accumulating in his garage could be refined for an extremely low-grade, low-value crude oil. No one would pay very much for this oil, but there were a lot of oily rags, and provided no one asked him to pay for the inevitable horrific fires that would result from filling the world’s garages with oily rags, he could turn a tidy profit.
Given the number of trackers that my ad-blocker blocked while reading this, isn't this article, Locusmag.com, and Cory Doctorow himself sprinkling just a little more oil on the pile of rags?
Thank you for this link.
Thanks GP also, for pointing out the irony that an article discussing our digital society's deep dependence on advertising is itself hosted on a space that has to rely on advertising to stay afloat (and thereby engages in precisely the sort of pernicious tracking that the article is dissecting).
That's a tricky one. At this point, there are very few media outlets that haven't made a deal with the de^H^H ad and social media networks. As a result, any freelance writer, even one who is also a privacy advocate, has to make a choice between avoiding any involvement of their work in surveillance capitalism, and getting paid and having their work be read.
I have a hard time faulting Doctorow for choosing to be relevant.
I read nothing in that article that hints at any government violence in Hungary, so I don't get why you even bring this up.
Sure, there's lots of innuendo about how the EU is trying to teach a lesson about democracy and human rights to a reluctant Hungary.
The thing is, if we have to choose among Orbán and Jüncker the leader with the most democratic legitimacy, then Orbán wins hands down.
Hardly anyone in the EU voted for Jüncker, except for a few Luxemburgers. Hardly anyone knew what the program of his party, the EPP, was at the time of the election.
Orbán on the other hand enjoys a huge amount of support from the Hungarians. You may disagree with his viewpoints, but that doesn't make his leadership any less democratic.
He is careful not to follow the example of Western Europe with its disastrous policies of mass immigration and - as a result - islamisation. This viewpoint is shared with all governments in Eastern Europe and - at last - a growing number of people in Western Europe.
He tries to raise awareness about the Soros-funded no-borders NGOs, which are an attempt from outside the country to make the Hungarian press and politicians talk and behave a certain way. The article in the Independent tries to paint this as anti-Semitism, but in another article they admit that even Israel disagrees with this viewpoint: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/george-soros...
The only reason the unelected leaders of the EU put pressure on Orbán is because he poses a threat to their power. Of course they use words like "human rights" and "democracy" to cover their real motivations. Look at the non-reaction of the EU when the Spanish Rajoy government locked up Catalonian political prisoners (by the way, do you know of any polical prisoners in Hungary?). Why didn't they defend democracy and human rights at that time? The reason is that the current EU leaders see the Catalonian independence movement as a threat to their power.
While I want to agree with this, it's hard to argue that Facebook and Google "privatize all the gains." If you added up all of the economic value that google's zero-dollar-cost products provide globally (even ignoring Facebook which IMO has a much more dubious net value), that's going to be a pretty big number.
> What are "risks associated with mass surveillance"?
Like the article says, when a company has access to detailed personal information about lots and lots of people, many bad things can happen:
* That information can be stolen by hackers and then used for identity theft or social engineering to gain access to private accounts. Think about how to reset your bank password your bank asks you questions like "where did you meet your first significant other?" Then consider how that event is probably on your Facebook feed.
* Companies like Cambridge Analytica can buy "ads" that are precisely targeted using that data to persuade certain groups of people to show up or not show up at polls and influence elections in non-Democratic ways.
Don't know how much you use FB but I highly recommend it. When I got rid of mine, all I lost was status updates from people who weren't really my friends to begin with. Your close friends will stick by you and your social life will grow richer, with more face-to-face meetings. Quitting Facebook is great.
My issue with deleting Facebook is that a lot of services depend on it for authentication and friend/contact discovery. I wish there were an open standard for a social graph.
I’d like to, but it’s a valuable way to get my ideas out to friends and family and to have discussions.
It’s more valuable and more personal than, say, a blog, because:
* my post + all the comments show up in the same UI where people go to see dumb videos or cute photos of friends’ families
* I can share a link or thought, and have more follow up with these friends and family, because they know me on a personal level, and know that the conversation is limited to people who at least somewhat know me, rather than all manner of internet trolls.
They trust me more than random other person on the Internet who might share the exact same information... just like I trust them more than random people on the internet.
If Facebook is going to keep a shadow profile on me anyway, I want to get a little something out of it. Whether they should be allowed to keep the shadow profile on me or not, though, is a different question altogether. And I think only legislation could decide that effectively.
>I’d like to, but it’s a valuable way to get my ideas out to friends and family and to have discussions.
My friends and family aren't interested in most the stuff I'm interested in. I'll call and text them, talk to them about our lives. I'll post my interests in places where people who share them can consume.
I mostly just felt paralyzed by the platform. Not wanting to put personal info because it would be used to build a profile on me, and not wanting to interact with a lot of media because it would then use that as an excuse to promote it to my friends and family.
Yeah, you'll wait till it's too late. Just freaking quit. You'll find how to reach those that matter to you anyway. And those contacts will be more meaningful, because you're not on FB, where communications have degenerated to less than authentic.
I can confirm, deleting FB was a good thing overall, but YMMV.
I was largely using it as an event planner, but found that I could just subscribe via email lists or other ways for the venues I cared about keeping up with.
It also helps that I don't know a majority of my outer circle's daily status updates and when I see them at mutual engagements like birthday parties or house warmings, I'm more interested in talking to them and catching up.
The tech community have become bad actors, and a lot of apologism and hand-waving happens here.
At the moment they are just trading on the reputation of early pioneers who at least professed some ethics and commitment to public good to pretend they are part of the same group.
They continue to posture on public discussions while implementing dark patterns and surveillance as a matter of course in their workplace. This is the fact, the tech community led by SV have sold out and they know it. Their main priority is pretending its not happening or diminishing the consequences.
If there is a backlash it will be well deserved as these people are selling out the rest of the world for profit, greed and personal gain.
I read the first half of this. I can't decide if I think Doctorow is dancing around the more important idea that goes unsaid, or if this really is the best way to present it so people will accept it.
Everyone is a whole lot more susceptible to propaganda than anyone admits. Doctorow presents this as Klansman getting the message that Trump is their guy. Mao, Goebbels and any other obvious-baddies are perfect for making the point. By pretending like it doesn't happen TO YOU, you'll accept that it can possibly happen to humans (that are not you).
But it happens to everybody, all the time.
The only propaganda we notice is the stuff that is so far from targeting us we see it's comically incongruity. But propaganda isn't meant for the hard sell. Propaganda doesn't change your mind. Propaganda gets you to cross the threshold and do something you were already positioned to do, by giving you meaning for doing it.
Agreed, and in an earlier comment I intimated that Doctorow doesn’t really object to propaganda, he just objects to other people’s propaganda. (And his objection in fact contains some propaganda itself.)
I kinda got that impression as I was reading it, but had hoped I was wrong.
There is a line of criticism I see often that goes something like this "$thing is convincing people $bad_idea." (Sorry for the vague way of presenting this, but I can't abstract it more clearly.)
I take that criticism and see the natural next step as reducing the amount of influence that $thing has over people in specific, and in general give them the tools to evaluate unfounded ideas and manipulation. I find this conclusion blindingly obvious, and is where I depart from would-be political allies who conclude with the same obviousness: "lets re-engineer $thing to manipulatively spread $good_idea."
> Propaganda doesn't change your mind, it gets you to cross the threshold and do something you were already positioned to do, by giving you meaning for doing it.
Read the rest of the article, it kinda goes there.
Propaganda also acts by wearing you down, shaping your perceptions over time, and influencing so many people around you that you lose sight of where “real” is on the first place. Sometimes propaganda only seeks to demoralize you or disengage you.
> Propaganda also acts by wearing you down, shaping your perceptions over time, and influencing so many people around you that you lose sight of where “real” is on the first place.
Essentially, gaslighting you. Gaslighting the whole society, in fact.
Readit News
> There’s an old-fashioned word for this: corruption. In corrupt systems, a few bad actors cost everyone else billions in order to bring in millions – the savings a factory can realize from dumping pollution in the water supply are much smaller than the costs we all bear from being poisoned by effluent. But the costs are widely diffused while the gains are tightly concentrated, so the beneficiaries of corruption can always outspend their victims to stay clear.
Spot on. Google's in exactly the same boat, it's just that they provide a few services which are legitimately useful (Search, Gmail), so they're targeted less right now.
How we will get out of this, I have no idea...
The real damaging data to people and society at large is a different set of data. It's the publicly visible counts next to every thought and utterance reinforcing misguided beliefs and behaviour up and down the food chain constantly. Any experienced shrink, psycologist or educator, marketing/PR expert knows applying the right amount of feedback at the right time is critical to how people process info.
Remove/delay/reduce the visibility of like counts/view counts/upvotes/retweet counts that are displayed and the world will be a different place overnight.
Hmm, I disagree. It seems to me that both sources of data are dangerous. Yes, showing "You have 10 likes" is bad for users as social media companies iterate their way towards addiction but your search data is a toxic asset beyond just showing ads. Let's say google leaked everyone's search history tomorrow. How many marriages are going to be ruined? How many politicians are going to resign? How many future politicians will decide to never run? How many firings and never-hirings will there be based on that history?
People should be able to live normal lives without being surveilled - by governments or corporations.
How does one get out of a Faustian Bargain, anyway?
I didn't make that bargain, but I think the real problem these days is that it doesn't matter if you made it or not. All it takes is one weak link in the chain and suddenly you're under surveillance from a company you had no intention of being involved with.
I don't, for example, use GMail but if I communicate with people who do then my mail falls under Google surveillance. I don't use Google Drive but if I do business with a company that does then some of my data has been forked over to Google and I'm unlikely to ever know about it. I don't use Facebook but if I appear in a photo that someone else uploads and annotates then Facebook has a photo ID of me without my say-so.
It's difficult to stay clear of surveillance companies when you're constantly being undermined by the unintentional (or, perhaps more precisely, unthinking) actions of even just a few people. My data's being bought and sold every day and there is no way I can control that, opt out of it, or even get a list of companies who have my information or what they're doing with it.
If this is the information age and if information has value, then my information is my asset and I want control of it. Without the ability for a person to assert sovereignty over their own data, how can there be a balance of power between the individual and large organizations seeking to exploit everyone's data?
I always get downvoted for FB criticism, perhaps by their employees, but I have evidence for what I just said: Zuck's many, many, many public apologies.
Well, Goethes Faust got away pretty well, beeing gods favourite .. and a grammar exploit in the bargain.
(the bargain was, Mephistopheles serves him, until he says some specific words (Verweile doch, du bist so schön) ... and in the end Faust says, now I feel like I could say "Verweile doch..." Mephistopheles thinks thats it, summons his demons, to prepare for it. Faust dies, beeing old ... but since god was the all powerful judge and Faust his favourite, ... well that was enough to save his soul. And the demons had to go away accomplishing nothing)
So any lessons for the real world? I don't see any...
edit: maybe to give more context: Faust made the deal, because he was not content, mainly about the limitations about understanding the world, but also in general. And the words of the bargain mean something like, now I am content. So Mephistos part was to make him content, or even too full of this world. But it is somewhat complicated, beeing Goethe.. but worth a read, at least in german. Don't know, if the translations are good enough, because much of the greatness of the book, is the powerful language and verses, which at least I could never translate adequately.
This is what's scary. The ugly part is just starting, because we haven't even gotten to the point where their AI systems have super-human intelligence and can use all of your "whole-life/everything you've ever done" data against you.
How bad is this going to be in 20 years? And does anyone really think Google and Facebook will "self-regulate" sufficiently on this, without extreme outside pressure?
Sure, DDG is not quite there, but for most of my queries it's just fine.
Having "deleted" my Facebook account some four years ago was a real liberator, though.
I agree it may not be easy. But we desperately need more tech-savvy politicians in these technological times.
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If Tesla kills a driver, it's Tesla and Waymo.
If Facebook is selling your data, it's Facebook and Google.
Why don't we stop pretending and just say we all hate Google, irrespective of who is actually at fault? That will save us trouble of having to find any evidence proving our claims.
It's not about hating Google, it's about recognizing the power and ubiquity they have, and how for many in HN, it dwarfs Facebook in terms of potential personal impact.
Without the presumption that the micro-targeting is super effective, nothing looks like it's on fire.
> Research discussed by Brendan Nyhan of Dartmouth College showed that it is extremely hard to alter voters' preferences, because many likely voters are already committed partisans; as a result, it is easier to simply mobilize partisan voters.
A friend of mine volunteered on the Clinton campaign in the months before the election. The strategy wasn't to knock on random doors and convince people to vote for Hillary, it was to find people who are already likely to lean left (but maybe aren't likely voters), and remind them of the upcoming election and where to vote, etc. Online ads take the same approach, just subconsciously.
And how did they want us to locate them? Through Facebook.
I'm worried about the surveillance system for other reasons, like finding targets for censorship, discrimination, and hatred.
Given the number of trackers that my ad-blocker blocked while reading this, isn't this article, Locusmag.com, and Cory Doctorow himself sprinkling just a little more oil on the pile of rags?
Don't forget to smash that share button!
I just looked, and this is mirrored on his blog[1], and it appears to have very little or no tracking set up. Feel free to read it there.
https://craphound.com/news/2018/07/02/mark-zuckerberg-and-hi...
I have a hard time faulting Doctorow for choosing to be relevant.
I wonder what Viktor Orbán has done according to Doctorow to be put in the same ballpark as Erdogan.
From https://turkeypurge.com/ :
Turkey’s post-coup crackdown: 151,967 dismissed / 140,452 detained / 79,774 arrested / 3,003 schools, dormitories and universities shut down / 5,822 academics lost jobs / 4,463 judges, prosecutors dismissed / 189 media outlets shut down / 319 journalists arrested
since July 15, 2016 / as of June 25, 2018
It's not quite so advanced in violence as Turkey, but it's definitely along the same path.
Sure, there's lots of innuendo about how the EU is trying to teach a lesson about democracy and human rights to a reluctant Hungary.
The thing is, if we have to choose among Orbán and Jüncker the leader with the most democratic legitimacy, then Orbán wins hands down.
Hardly anyone in the EU voted for Jüncker, except for a few Luxemburgers. Hardly anyone knew what the program of his party, the EPP, was at the time of the election.
Orbán on the other hand enjoys a huge amount of support from the Hungarians. You may disagree with his viewpoints, but that doesn't make his leadership any less democratic.
He is careful not to follow the example of Western Europe with its disastrous policies of mass immigration and - as a result - islamisation. This viewpoint is shared with all governments in Eastern Europe and - at last - a growing number of people in Western Europe.
He tries to raise awareness about the Soros-funded no-borders NGOs, which are an attempt from outside the country to make the Hungarian press and politicians talk and behave a certain way. The article in the Independent tries to paint this as anti-Semitism, but in another article they admit that even Israel disagrees with this viewpoint: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/george-soros...
The only reason the unelected leaders of the EU put pressure on Orbán is because he poses a threat to their power. Of course they use words like "human rights" and "democracy" to cover their real motivations. Look at the non-reaction of the EU when the Spanish Rajoy government locked up Catalonian political prisoners (by the way, do you know of any polical prisoners in Hungary?). Why didn't they defend democracy and human rights at that time? The reason is that the current EU leaders see the Catalonian independence movement as a threat to their power.
But he and his cronies have pocketed a lot of EU money, that's for sure.
That's the biggest insight of the article. That's exactly what the likes of Facebook and Google (and telecoms, and data brokers, etc) are doing.
When a for-profit company ("commercial") gathers large, detailed dossiers of millions of people ("surveillance").
For example, if you use Twitter, go to https://twitter.com/settings/your_twitter_data and look at the stuff under "Interests and ads data". That's the tip of the iceberg.
> What are "risks associated with mass surveillance"?
Like the article says, when a company has access to detailed personal information about lots and lots of people, many bad things can happen:
* That information can be stolen by hackers and then used for identity theft or social engineering to gain access to private accounts. Think about how to reset your bank password your bank asks you questions like "where did you meet your first significant other?" Then consider how that event is probably on your Facebook feed.
* Companies like Cambridge Analytica can buy "ads" that are precisely targeted using that data to persuade certain groups of people to show up or not show up at polls and influence elections in non-Democratic ways.
Etc.
Any organization with massive surveillance data that lacks beneficent leaders may harm people.
Q: How do I permanently delete my account? A: https://www.facebook.com/help/224562897555674
It’s more valuable and more personal than, say, a blog, because: * my post + all the comments show up in the same UI where people go to see dumb videos or cute photos of friends’ families * I can share a link or thought, and have more follow up with these friends and family, because they know me on a personal level, and know that the conversation is limited to people who at least somewhat know me, rather than all manner of internet trolls.
They trust me more than random other person on the Internet who might share the exact same information... just like I trust them more than random people on the internet.
If Facebook is going to keep a shadow profile on me anyway, I want to get a little something out of it. Whether they should be allowed to keep the shadow profile on me or not, though, is a different question altogether. And I think only legislation could decide that effectively.
My friends and family aren't interested in most the stuff I'm interested in. I'll call and text them, talk to them about our lives. I'll post my interests in places where people who share them can consume.
I mostly just felt paralyzed by the platform. Not wanting to put personal info because it would be used to build a profile on me, and not wanting to interact with a lot of media because it would then use that as an excuse to promote it to my friends and family.
I was largely using it as an event planner, but found that I could just subscribe via email lists or other ways for the venues I cared about keeping up with.
It also helps that I don't know a majority of my outer circle's daily status updates and when I see them at mutual engagements like birthday parties or house warmings, I'm more interested in talking to them and catching up.
At the moment they are just trading on the reputation of early pioneers who at least professed some ethics and commitment to public good to pretend they are part of the same group.
They continue to posture on public discussions while implementing dark patterns and surveillance as a matter of course in their workplace. This is the fact, the tech community led by SV have sold out and they know it. Their main priority is pretending its not happening or diminishing the consequences.
If there is a backlash it will be well deserved as these people are selling out the rest of the world for profit, greed and personal gain.
"Everybody wants to believe they are a good person, if you try to convince them otherwise they will attack you and refuse to listen" - tmpz22
Everyone is a whole lot more susceptible to propaganda than anyone admits. Doctorow presents this as Klansman getting the message that Trump is their guy. Mao, Goebbels and any other obvious-baddies are perfect for making the point. By pretending like it doesn't happen TO YOU, you'll accept that it can possibly happen to humans (that are not you).
But it happens to everybody, all the time.
The only propaganda we notice is the stuff that is so far from targeting us we see it's comically incongruity. But propaganda isn't meant for the hard sell. Propaganda doesn't change your mind. Propaganda gets you to cross the threshold and do something you were already positioned to do, by giving you meaning for doing it.
There is a line of criticism I see often that goes something like this "$thing is convincing people $bad_idea." (Sorry for the vague way of presenting this, but I can't abstract it more clearly.)
I take that criticism and see the natural next step as reducing the amount of influence that $thing has over people in specific, and in general give them the tools to evaluate unfounded ideas and manipulation. I find this conclusion blindingly obvious, and is where I depart from would-be political allies who conclude with the same obviousness: "lets re-engineer $thing to manipulatively spread $good_idea."
Read the rest of the article, it kinda goes there.
Don’t underestimate it.
Essentially, gaslighting you. Gaslighting the whole society, in fact.