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SoylentNews is people

posted by cmn32480 on Wednesday May 13 2015, @10:37AM   Printer-friendly
from the we-await-the-shitstorm dept.

I'm about to give up.

On the one hand, I see countless people get loyalty cards and enjoy discounts on their purchases. They connect with friends on Facebook and Twitter. They use apps on android or apple smartphones to give them turn-by-turn directions, find out where their friends are, or find places of interest. Their e-mail is "in the cloud" where they can get to it from multiple places. They use services like dropbox to share files. They get their news on-line and read e-books. I could go on and on.

On the other hand, I see opportunities for tracking and profiling in every one of those activities. So much so that it seems like one would be under constant observation and surveillance. We are just data points to be sliced and diced and marketed to — a society of consumers rather than customers.

So, I've got a major "ick factor" knowing about these practices and yet I'm hard-pressed to explain any negative consequences to otherwise intelligent people. "I don't do anything that's THAT interesting." "I've done nothing wrong, so I don't worry about it." "I like getting the bonuses and discounts."

Yet, I see companies expend great amounts of money implementing tracking mechanisms such as cookies, super-cookies, clear gifs, as well as huge databases of purchases, travels, and interests. I don't believe they are doing this for purely philanthropic reasons.

In no particular order, I include these for consideration:

I use a variety of Addons while browsing the web using Pale Moon: a custom HOSTS file, Self-Destructing Cookies, Ad-Block Plus, Ghostery, NoScript, Better Privacy, Flashblock, and Ref Control. I have a firewall and use anti-virus products. "In real life" I prefer to use cash over charge cards for my purchases. I have no loyalty cards.

What say you Soylentils? Am I being unreasonably paranoid? Or not paranoid enough? What dangers, really, are there? Why not sign up for all those loyalty cards and social apps? What privacy protections do YOU use?

 
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  • (Score: 2) by gidds on Wednesday May 13 2015, @02:09PM

    by gidds (589) on Wednesday May 13 2015, @02:09PM (#182378)

    I'm hard-pressed to explain any negative consequences to otherwise intelligent people.

    Me too.  I think the problem is that it's too abstract — people don't see how it relates to to their real lives.  (And when you do invent some scenario, it often sounds so extreme that they don't believe it could ever happen to them.)

    Maybe the way round this is to come up with examples — ordinary people (who we can relate to) who got caught up (through no fault of their own) in a situation where the pervasive tracking and monitoring made things much worse.

    …but I don't know of any, so I'm appealing to Soylentils to come up with some :-)

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  • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Wednesday May 13 2015, @07:42PM

    by kaszz (4211) on Wednesday May 13 2015, @07:42PM (#182572) Journal

    Or you could just conclude that most people lack the cognitive capacity to figure these things out and make the connections.