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What are the arguments against letting user data be collected?
It's obviously bad when "real" data like full names and credit card info leaks, but most data companies collect is probably email address and some anonymous things like which buttons and when the user clicked.
Nevertheless, such data collection, tracking and telemetry is considered quite bad among power users. I don't support those practices either. But I'm struggling to consolidate my arguments agaist data collection. The one I'm confident about is effects on performance and battery life on mobile devices, but why else it's bad I'm not sure.
What are your arguments? Why is it bad when a company X knows what anonymous user Y did and made money on that info? What's the good response to anyone who asks why I'm doing the "privacy things"?
All this data is collected because it allows companies to manipulate your thinking in to buying more and more useless junk as well as getting you addicted to their social media platforms using the same psychological weapons gambling companies use.
Advertising is a cancer on society
Without ads the computer you used to post this wouldntcexist, yo.
Marketer here - there are some decent arguments against data collection but this aint one of em.
We certainly had computers before ads on computers. Without ads and marketing getting involved my computer would likely be built to last longer, include less spyware and be less proprietary.
What do you mean by that?
Our society is built on the back of capitalism, which is powered by marketing. Marketing itself has not fundamentally changed in about 50-75 years. Ads are what power society.
Marketing has changed a lot. Old ads used to show the product, why it was good and what the price was. Modern adverts are made to create desire. Take a look at an apple advert, they don't say anything about what its function is or what is better about it. The latest ad on tv is just a bunch of spinning phones in the air with emotional music playing. They have converted a functional device in to a fashion product because it means they can get people to constantly buy the latest one to keep up with trends.
Interesting point! I disagree. In most cases, marketing hasnt changed, but the market hss.
When it comes to marketing, youve got two angles you can throw: logical, or emotional, appeal. Which approach you use depends on quite a few things, including everything from the product itself to its competition to who its being sold to. Power tools and the like are logically marketed, while luxury products are emotionally marketed.
Previously (pre-internet) there were a few reasons why you saw the logical side more:
logic based sales works better on men, and men had more buying power.
companies could continually and substantially innovate at a rapid pace, making the logical sell easier.
most information wasnt readily available at a glance, so even logical sales were in most causes founded in emotions (and trust).
But despite that, emotional manipulation was still a fundamental part of marketing. It showed itself in things like brand loyalty and perceived value, both hallmarks of, to use your own example, Apple products, today.
The only difference between mainstream marketing today and 45 years ago is how specifically it can be targeted, and how the customer now perceives it. Information is readily available now, and brand loyalty has disappeared. In the face of these two factors, companies are doing the only thing they can when the market already knows the features and price: appealing to emotion.
I dont agree with your argument either. A lot of ads in the past were really about creating desire, hitting a specific emotion that you were meant to attach with a product. I think Mad Men did a good job of pointing that out. Here are a few examples:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpWlYZzJ9iY (Carl's Jr - Kate Upton)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJX05mJ8tz4 (Jaguar commercial)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bdk0A-FyoCE (Mcdonalds commercial)
Here is an example of Mr Clean in 1995, here you can see how the advert really has not changed much. It isn't comparing it another version, but still is showing functionality.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0YtvArizyQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ah9JZ5wARFY
Maybe what this tells us is that it really depends on the product and what they are trying to sell.
Beyond that, why do computers need capitalism to exist?
This is maybe getting past the point because a product existing isn't really an argument for a certain mode of production, as we could organize the way we produce the same things an infinite number of different ways...but even saying "capitalism is responsible for computers" is a bit of a headscratcher. A whole lot of computing history took place in capitalist nations, yes, but not being driven by market forces or even being developed for commercial uses. I don't mean to suggest that these were "pure" or overreach with this point, but the military initiatives and university work that got electronic computers off the ground could've happened in similar forms regardless of economic system.
A perfect market is--at least in part--one where there are so many companies that they force each other into to being efficient and entirely consumer focused--the implication being that if they are not, they get replaced. This perfect market is a big part of the ideal image of a capitalist market.
Without marketing it would be much harder for a small and new--presumably more efficient--company to begin challenging the established players.
But also it's inevitable. Let's imagine a scenario where tomorrow we abolish all advertising, and relegate all product discovery to a phone book style directory. Well almost over night you would get a rush for the desirable positions, experts on naming, and weird and wacky stuff with letter arraignment--anything to get the edge, there is simply too much money on the line to do anything else.
My point being even if you try eliminate it; it would spring up within whatever confines you implement.
Why? how do you think a new company begins, where do they get customers/users? How do you think uber, paypal, amazon, anything founded in the last 20 years began. Sure they had a great idea, but that doesn't mean squat if no one found out about it, and you can't look it up in a directory because well, no one knew they needed these things.
Anyway that's a bit of a tangent.
My argument is marketing is necessary for a capitalist market, like how oil is to an engine. But also it's just part of the phenomenon of a market, it's the language used to communicate between a company and the consumer, impossible to go without, just deciding on a colour is part of this communication.
I'm not arguing that marketing is awesome and lets have more of it, in fact I would love much less of it.
This 99% invisible podcast might be of interest. It's about São Paulo in Brazil, which removed all outdoor advertising following the clean city law (wikipedia) in 2006.
A perfect market simply can not exist without the customer knowing all the details beforehand. When I take a look at a device, how will I know how long it will last? How will I know how long it will get updates for? How will I know to what tolerances the device was built to?
What does marketing have to do with any of this?
I'm an engineer. In my work, the salespeople are usually the biggest obstacle to gaining any information about a product. Marketing and advertisement are literally the last place anyone would rely on to gain information about a product. Datasheets and CAD are always hidden behind some fucking contact page where I have to wait half an hour for a sales engineer to follow up. Meanwhile, websites like McMaster and Misumi are becoming powerhouses due to their approach of hiding salespeople away from the consumer. It's much more expedient to just expose the information publicly and rely on customers to seek it out.
I don't see ads for any of these products. When I want something, I research it. Most of my employer's vendor relationships were formed at trade shows (not in my inbox). If a market relies on an informed public, it seems incredibly inefficient to broadcast information to the public regardless of their purchasing patterns or interests.
One might point out that collecting information about the public allows advertisers to narrow down their audience (which is the subject of this thread). That sounds nice in theory except it relies on violating the privacy of the customers. The endpoint of this trajectory is a hellworld of targeted misinformation, more deviously crafted than any human could possibly have a chance against. It's all being carried in that direction "on the back of capitalism".
If nobosy knows about it, it wont get sold. Even something as simple as word of mouth is organic marketing. How could it function without it?
They would however stop buying things they don't need because they would not look it up unless they needed it.
Would that be such a bad thing? :/
Are price listings marketing? Cause capitalism is conceivable without it. It is marketing that is powered by capitalism.
I'm not saying marketing is not useful though, I just think you're statement went too far.
Computers would certainly exist - they're too useful not to. But the world wide web as it is today? Probably not. Many blogs, news sites, and services are financed by ads.
The idea of paying for things online has only recently (in the last ten years) become much easier and more universal. I remember having to send a money order to buy a Runescape premium membership.
You're right about this part: "as it is today". Does that necessarily mean we wouldn't have come up with a holistically better overall alternative?
There's really no way to say. But I will say that I don't think business could have thrived as well online if ads weren't available as a monetization model from the start.
"Real data" is not just names and credit card info. Email addresses and things that seem anonymous, or that have allegedly been anonymized, can be used to create a profile, and identify the user, and track them.
And that data will eventually be sold, or leaked, and used by entities even less scrupulous than corps.
And, in any case, I don't want companies to collect that data. Nothing more than that is needed to "justify" doing the "privacy thing".
If only that were true. But even if it was, in isolation that sort of "benign" data and metadata collection may seem relatively harmless, however combined into massive datasets with all the other data available out there (acquired from companies, e.g. ISPs, or publicly available sources, e.g. social media sites, or even from more illicit sources, e.g. data breaches), it suddenly becomes anything but benign, harmless or even anonymous anymore.
Big Data companies would not be able to charge corporations, political parties, police agencies and governments the amount they do for access to their datasets and analytics suites if they didn't provide any valuable insights into behavior, predictive capabilities or allow for specific demographic targeting. Nor would intelligence agencies like the NSA, CSIS, GRU, etc. be collecting similar data in the vast quantities they are if it was valueless to them in fulfilling their missions.
I think Maciej Ceglowski's Strata+Hadoop keynote, which was mentioned in the Tildes announcement blog post, sums up my feelings on Data collection. I would highly recommend watching the video of the presentation or reading it since I suspect it might change your perspective a bit:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GAXLHM-1Psk
https://idlewords.com/talks/haunted_by_data.htm
Also worth watching is the other presentation mentioned in the Tildes announcement:
https://www.ted.com/talks/zeynep_tufekci_we_re_building_a_dystopia_just_to_make_people_click_on_ads
And another I would add to the recommended watch list is "Big data: why should you care?" from The Guardian:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji18sDbWI_k
It isn't just "things like which buttons and when the user clicked," they're collecting everything they possibly can. Just go and request Google to send you the data they've collected on you for example - you'll most likely be sent files over 150 gigs in total (ymmv). And that's bad because with enough data they can pretty much know everything about you - what you look like, who your friends are, where your home/work/gym is, how much you work out, what your hobbies are, how much do you talk to your parents etcetc. It's comparable to giving a key to your whole psychology and the manipulative potential is huge. The worst thing is that if you know a person enough, you can manipulate them without them ever knowing. Tbf, they aren't able to use the data that effectively just yet, but after a few years it's going to be hell on earth with all these meticulous targeted advertisements.
I want to offer a different point of view and say that one of the bigger problems of unrestrained data harvesting is that it creates a vicious cycle of devaluation, which I'd describe as follows:
Rinse and repeat until you get to the current day, where every single data point which can possibly be tracked is and still it's value is tanking continuously. Online advertising is a good indication of how bad it is getting: despite Google having some of the most sophisticated targeting and being able to deliver ads to billions the people hosting the ads can barely make a living off of it.
I won't ask "So what?", but many people will. What's the direct harm from Facebook having shadow profiles? This can lead to more targeted ads and then more spending from user, but in other hand, the money is spent on more relevant things the user wouldn't know about if ads weren't targeted based on shadow profiles.
I see other, bigger concerns in other comments though.
Facebook doesn't have those long metal tentacles to threaten and direct me even if they know many things about me, also I use adblock. But I understand, someone else without adblock can be shown political ads and manipulated to vote differently from their original will, but for whom people behind the ads or Facebook itself want them to. Thanks
One particular thing that is often overlooked is that the pay-by-eyeballs approach is a form of payment that is involuntary---I look at something, and that something earns money because I did look at it, regardless of whether I find it worthy of anything it potentially receives some money. Say I skim an article and hate it, or watch a far-right video to analyse it or just see what the fuss is about; I have just involuntarily supported something that is contrary to my views. (edit to expand just a bit:) I'd rather expressly buy things. When I look at a billboard walking by it, nobody's paid nothing just because I looked at it, because nobody deserves to be paid nothing. A lot of data collection and data mining is used to design and implement this sort of economy.
Apart from that, what I could've said has been said by others. That stuff is not hypothetical BTW, see e.g. Cambridge Analytica as a theoretical example, and the Maciej Cegłowski video that @cfabbro linked (20min) for a nice humorous theoretical pondering on the subject (he did that talk at a big data conference, which I can not appreciate enough, great move; his Website Obesity Crisis talk and other stuff is great too).
This is a legit concern but it's a bit different from the data collection problem. Imagine some kind of DuckDuckGoTube where no data is collected and everyone sees the same feed, same ads. Still, duckducktubers would get money for those non targeted ads they enabled in their uploaded videos, whenever someone watches them.
Not really that different in that it is one of the driving forces for excessive data collection: ads are becoming more and more invasive because ad sellers are trying hard to figure out what an impression is and discerning that from skimming, looking around, or a tab sitting at the background. They track the movement of the mouse, whether the tab is in the foreground, scrolling behaviour and other stuff to make sure that the interaction is an impression, i.e. that the ad has somehow been effective.
Also, a lot of data collection is for figuring out what to put before eyeballs: recommendations. What you watch or read or buy or whatnot are collected and crunched, together with whatever the publishers or sellers think they figured out that you seem to be likely to buy---from viewing the details to a product to probably hovering your pointer on it or just not scrolling past for a while---to figure out what to recommend to you and what to put in ad boxes and what to spam your email inbox with.
Most of data collection is done in the name of this sort of causes that are justifiable in an amoral context. The glowing big vulnerabilities are created by the fact that the collection of such data is not regulated, its security is not ensured, and malicious use is not effectively disallowed. It may seem that regulations and laws could help, but it is essentially impossible to securely store this data in a way that is not in conflict with purely commercial interests. Therefore, however benign the reasons to collect data might be, collection and storage of personal data may never be safe. Thus, it should be treated as a critical thing. We've had many Chernobyls in this industry, and yet nothing is done because it is not people literally falling apart.
The point of ad business and of selling user data is to make people pay indirectly for things they'd rather not pay. And if that sort of economy perished today, lots and lots of data collection would vanish overnight. That commercial websites are trying to optimise for users is a huge lie. All data is collected either for ads or for govt opression, or a combination of the two.
On a grand scheme of things, many could ask, "So what?". Additional items an internet user buys purely because of targeted ads are likely to be somehow not really necessary, but the user still did a conscious choice and satisfied their desire, whatever its source, genuineness and duration are. Yeah it's worse for environment when industries produce those extra items. But why else is this bad?
Legit points of harm from data collection, like proneness to political manipulation, remain legit, but this particular point about harm by induced additional spending seems to be linked with anticonsumerism.
I think I already made it clear, but: if it was not for this kind of reasons, there would be way less incentives to collect data.
Nowadays it's probably way easier to start a business, so more people do that, so each business world get a smaller share of the market, not enough money for owners for living. Companies increase size of the market by stimulating users with targeted ads to buy more than before.
Regardless of if the market was too small, data collection became possible after all, so when someone started using it, the rest have to follow or they lose competition
If your only choice is to lower my standards so that it's possible to compete, maybe we should be talking about aggressively regulating the space. The US needs something along the lines of the GDPR to severely restrict use of user data.
"I need to lower my standards to compete" is not an ethically satisfying argument IMO.
Lowering standards universally broadens opportunities while hurting senses of good morality of those who want to adhere to their standards.
If I was morally more loose in doing the same kind of business as you I'd lower my standards to outcompete you, then you'd be frustrated because losing and not wanting to lower your standards as well to stop that loss, and you'd want regulators to make me stop lowering those standards. Thanks for illuminating the problem
I don't see what you are trying to do with this topic TBH. Playing the devil's advocate or something?
If we consider people who run data collecting websites for profit devils, then yes. They are also people, they have some opposite goals from user, and leaving them out of the picture could indicate forming of a user oriented echo chamber (or maybe not). I'm convinced echo chambers are detrimental to finding out the truth, and trying to oppose the thread possibly gravitating to one.
I simply do not want to be manipulated by any company or government. You might think that you make your own decisions and that those are based on purely your own opinions. Often times they are not, without you even knowing.
The data may be used to manipulate votes in an election for example. Or change the opinions of the masses with targeted propaganda, just think of the possibility's of someone like Hitler would have had if this technology would have been available to him.
There is a reason why data is more expensive then oil. It can be used for less harmful objectives like targeted ads, but it may also be a deadly tool if it ends up in the wrong hands. And we all know that that happens sooner or later. We even see it happening in places like China right now as we speak. I think its very frightening.
If candidate 1 de facto increases their votes by exploiting user data on social media, why wouldn't their opponent candidate 2 have done the same to "pull the blanket"? Is that typically because of two major candidates in most cases one is politically and morally more inclined to using such methods of influence than the other?
It's not about the candidates marketing against each other, as mush as the influence of the platforms themselves. Facebook could easily sway people to whichever candidate fits their company's agenda. Nudging people to vote this way makes it even easier to manipulate next time around. This doesn't really paint a picture of a democracy, since major tech companies would have a lot of power. Sure, legislation could stop them from manipulating votes, but considering the fact that legislators barely understand tech and that tech companies are very adept at finding loopholes, it could be a long and rough road in preventing these companies from manipulating votes. Now what about manipulating behavior in a larger sense. Should legislators have to specify exactly what behaviors tech companies can and cannot manipulate? It would be much easier to ban data collection all together, and slowly allow advertising that has been shown to be safe.