Slashdot Mirror
Report: Internet Users Feel Powerless To Protect Their Privacy From Corporations
Mark Wilson writes: A paper produced by a team at the University of Pennsylvania confirms something many people have probably thought true for some time: the notion that internet users are unhappy with the way their privacy is undermined by advertisers and online companies, yet feel there is nothing they can do about it. While marketing companies like to present an image of customers who are happy to hand over personal information in return for certain benefits, the truth is rather different. Rather than dedicating time and energy to trying to stop personal data from being exploited, people are instead taking it on the chin and accepting it as part and parcel of modern, online life. It's just the way things are.
Herman Munster at 1313 Mockingbird Lane is probably less than pleased with me though.
Everybody expect free services. Nobody want to pay for anything, and they all expect privacy. Maybe it's time to wake up. Facebook, Google, Amazon or Apple are not charities, they are for-profit companies. They must find way to monetize their users' data. At the same time, Facebook probably wouldn't have been if it had been paywall'ed.
If you want to preserve your privacy, then DON'T PUT PICTURES OF YOUR COCK ONLINE!
Why would they feel powerless... When they are already essentially willingly giving out their personal information on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other social media services...
Internet users by the hundreds of millions give all their personal communications to online ad companies, including Google and Facebook. They have cheerfully gone from running their own mail programs to using Gmail or Ymail for everything. They gladly blab the private details of their lives, with photos, to Facebook and Twitter. They kept visiting signs once banner ads started... and then ran javascript from ad companies. They fall all over themselves every time there's a new service that vacuums up all their data, when there's no reason for that data to leave their own computer.
Sorry, internet users, but fuck you. The internet didn't used to be like this. You are the ones who supported turning the fucking thing from a true peer to peer network into a centralized, data-mined clusterfuck of overcommercialization and profiling. I don't want to hear how you don't like it. You made all the choices that led here.
OK, to be fair: not every last one of you. But enough that those who didn't were a rounding error and could be ignored.
"How?"
Realize that the Internet is not the web. Install an ad/tracking blocker. Avoid, or delete your accounts on Facebook/Google/Apple/"social media". Pay for a domain(s), and use different email addresses for different accounts. Use a VPN. Regularly clear cookies in your browser. Vote for politicians who "get it," and truly understand the Internet, surveillance and privacy.
Donate to the the EFF.
There's more, which is left as an exercise for the reader.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
That sounds like the first part of that twelve step bullshit.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
But you don't have to use Facebook... ...to be tracked.
You know all those "share via social media" buttons you see everywhere? Do you think they just exist to make it easy for users to repost content? No, they're for tracking anyone and everyone who goes to those sites (i.e., all) who don't have the trackers filtered through the likes of PrivacyBadger and ad-blockers.
And the ratio of users that use those is minuscule enough that the users of the blockers themselves (like me) can be tracked via browser fingerprinting ridiculously easily anyway.
The general population is powerless against the corporations unless they simply give up entirely and go dark. What a nifty fucking choice, eh?
Get down off your high-horse, Lord Farquaad.
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BMO
I'm gonna summon APK, but blocking Facebook's tracking (and Google's, which is even more pervasive) is not difficult, at least for now. If hosts files and privacy-enhanced DNS servers are too much to ask, there are browser plugins. You mentioned some. My point is that the people who feel so powerless now are exactly the ones who got us into this mess, because they were and are so complacent about every invasion into their privacy if they can only avoid learning anything about anything. If people treated shoes like they treat computers, most people would have to buy shoes with Velcro fasteners because they wouldn't even consider learning how to tie a shoe.
Yes willingly, nobody has a fucking gun to your head to use this stuff, lack of willpower in a toy store is not "oppression".There's no trickery in any of this, you voluntarily (and often eagerly) sign up for a service and pay for what you use in either dollars, eyeballs, rabbit skins, whatever. Bitching about the privacy costs of of a FB account is like bitching about the electricity bill while sitting in an air-conditioned room, it will always be modded up because people hate paying bills.
Of course government spying is a whole different ball of wax, nobody signed up for that!
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Your use of the word "sheep" is the problem.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
These methods are not effective, and ultimately they are doomed. The reasons are obvious:
1) Their incentive to track us is stronger than our incentive to resist.
2) Not enough people will do these things, so tracking will continue to be profitable, hence will continue to be done.
3) You have no moral nor legal right to privacy when engaging in business transactions.
4) Their lobbyists are better funded than yours.
You can create some friction by resisting, but mostly the only one feeling the heat will be you. Tracking is part of how the world works now. It is one of the many aspects of reality that we just have to accept. You can no more stop tracking than you can stop scientific progress or force a Republican to be reasonable.