A longstanding conspiracy is the tale of how Facebook is listening in on your conversations, but the way it is actually serving you ads is much more unsettling.

A longstanding conspiracy is the tale of how Facebook is listening in on your conversations, but the way it is actually serving you ads is much more unsettling.

  • multiplewolves@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    15 days ago

    Why go for the hypothetical future intrusion instead of the current, factual intrusions, you know?

    ¿Porqué no los dos?

    I am the one who brought up the case in the first place because it is truly alarming in and of itself. I’m surprised it doesn’t come up more. It seems to me that the pervasion of voice-activated assistants, like cross-site tracking that led the way to fingerprinting, should be paid more heed, both as a problem now and as a gateway to potentially more egregious violations of privacy later. Don’t doubt that the fears could materialize.

    But fair enough! I think we agree far more than we diverge here.

    • MudMan@fedia.io
      0·
      15 days ago

      Well, ostensibly because one is a real issue you can do something about now and the other one is not.

      And by focusing on the paranoia about imagined future transgressions it both implicitly normalizes the current functionality and paints the pushback to the current implementation as some hyperbolic, out-of-touch maximalist thing. You can call it the PETA paradox, maybe.

      • multiplewolves@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        15 days ago

        I don’t think seeing a logical progression or escalation is normalizing current state. It wasn’t, as you put it earlier, “working as intended”. But anyone observing corporate behavior over decades can see that today’s accident or unpopular innovation can be tomorrow’s status quo unless it gets enough pushback.

        We haven’t heard about the transgressions that are being committed by corporations right now because they haven’t been caught yet. What’s considered legal is, and we clearly agree on this point, already well beyond the pale.

        Everyone should be objecting to violations of privacy, both the ones we can prove and anything hypothetical that could occur. It is not worthless to object preemptively to something that hasn’t happened yet.

        If there had been significant, detailed information available about TSA scanners prior to their implementation, for example, the outcry might have halted their use, or at least delayed it. Anyone who described how those work in theoretical terms prior to their implementation would have been labeled “hyperbolic” and “out of touch” prior to the reality of that tech. They’re truly invasive. Anything that’s seemingly out of reach technologically with current solutions could well be around the corner.

        Anyway, we’re going in circles. I’ve been trying to end this conversation implicitly without success, so on to explicitly: thank you for the discourse and have a good night/day.

        • MudMan@fedia.io
          0·
          15 days ago

          See, there you go, lost me completely now. “We should be preemptively pissed off about imaginary offenses because you just KNOW these people will eventually get there” is not how we should run our brains, let alone our regulations.

          And now I’m skeptical about not just your hypothetical objections but about all of them. That’s the type of process I find counterproductive.

          Anyway, all good with me in the agree to disagree front. Have a nice one yourself.