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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.
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!
Somebody correct me if I'm wrong but I use Firefox with the following add-ons: AdBlock (no whitelist), Better Privacy, Google Analytics Opt Out, HTTPS-Everywhere, Noscript, Privacy Badger and Self-Destructing Cookies.
How are we supposed to know what add-ons you use?
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
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
Willingly? Hardly. But it gets increasingly hard to avoid these things.
By now you have companies that check your FB account. And if you don't have one and they can't find anything about you, they won't even consider you. Because, hey, if you don't have FB, you probably have to hide something, and we don't want you!
It's also getting increasingly hard to sign up for anything without FB because companies offload the work of holding an account for you to FB or other such "services".
And it's getting worse.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
My local grocery store once explained to me why they didn't use a discount card, they already recognized me as I walked through the door, and knew the receipt was mine because I was the only one going though three packages of Vanilla Oreos per week. See, when big stores exist in lightly populated areas, the manager knows who the good customers are. My father and I had a good idea what prices were going to lower two weeks ahead because we saw the sale prices at the printing and database companies we worked for, and were sure our store had the deepest discounts in the chain.
BTW, former next door neighbors... the two of you were on the cover of a magazine there the last time I visited that store... with a story that can't possibly be true!
Is the article implying that there IS a way to protect our privacy? How?
(1) Hack the company's servers
(2) Delete the data they have collected
(3) Hope the do not detect the intrusion before their rolling backups overwrite their pervious backups which include your data
(4) ???
(5) Profit!
Not that this is really recommended; they are bigger than you, legally speaking.
If you want to preserve your privacy, then DON'T PUT PICTURES OF YOUR COCK ONLINE!
As we discovered in the John Oliver interview with Edward Snowden, it's the NSA's job to put pictures of your cock online, not yours!
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.
--
BMO
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.
I'd pay money for a Facebook or GMail that didn't sell/give my info to others. I can probably solve the second by running my own mail server, but I don't have the knowledge yet.
But, of course, if someone were to try to make Cashbook, they'd end up having the community split between themselves and Facebook. And who knows, Facebook might sue over a patent.