Comment by doctorpangloss
Comment by doctorpangloss 7 hours ago
There isn’t a single intellectually honest harm associated with the majority of app telemetry and for almost all ad data collection. Like go ahead and name one.
Once you say some vague demographic and bodily autonomy stuff: you know, if you’re going to invoke “voters,” I’ve got bad news for you. Some kinds of hate are popular. So you can’t pick and choose what popular stuff is good or what popular stuff is bad. It has to be by some objective criteria.
Anyway, I disagree with your assessment of the popular position anyway. I don’t think there is really that much cognitive dissonance among voters at all. People are sort of right to not care. The FTC’s position is really unpopular, when framed in the intellectually honest way as it is in the EU, “here is the price of the web service if you opt out of ads and targeting.”
You also have to decide if ad prices should go up or down, and think deeply: do you want a world where ad inventory is expensive? It is an escape valve for very powerful networks. Your favorite political causes like reducing fossil fuel use and bodily autonomy benefit from paid traffic all the same as selling junk. The young beloved members of Congress innovate in paid Meta campaign traffic. And maybe you run a startup or work for one, and you want to compete against the vast portfolio of products the network owners now sell. There’s a little bit of a chance with paid traffic but none if you expect to play by organic content creation rules: it’s the same thing, but you are transferring money via meaningless labor of making viral content instead of focusing on your cause or business. And anyway, TikTok could always choose to not show your video for any reason.
The intellectual framework against ad telemetry is really, really weak. The FTC saying it doesn’t change that.
> There isn’t a single intellectually honest harm associated with the majority of app telemetry and for almost all ad data collection. Like go ahead and name one.
You’ve already signaled that you’re ready and willing to dismiss any of the many obvious reasons why this is bad. But let’s flip it. What intellectually honest reason do you have for why it would be wrong if I’m watching you while you sleep? If I inventory your house while you’re away, and sell this information to the highest bidder? No bad intentions of course on my part, these things are just my harmless hobby and how I put bread on the table.
In my experience literally everyone who argues that we don’t really have a need for privacy, or that concerns about it are paranoid or that there’s no “real” threat.. well those people still want their own privacy, they just don’t respect anyone else’s.
More to the point though, no one needs to give you an “intellectually honest” reason that they don’t want to be spied on, and they don’t need to demonstrate bad intentions or realistic capabilities of the adversary, etc. If someone threatens to shoot you, charges won’t be dropped because the person doesn’t have a gun. The threat is extremely problematic and damaging in itself, regardless of how we rank that persons ability to follow through with their stated intent.