>> Fox, with help from six-strikes monitoring company Dtecnet, asked Google to remove a link
> They're essentially using false claims to issue DMCA take downs.
No they are not. They are not invoking the DMCA. They are asking their friend Google to suppress the information without filing a formal DMCA complaint, and Google is choosing to comply of their own free will. Google does not require the majors to file formal DMCA complaints, which is why there is no penalty for them under law, and why it is so hard to get false accusations cleared.
This is not the law being abused, this is Google siding with their fellow oligarchs in Hollywood, against the public interest.
not only to avoid France's notoriously onerous labor laws but also because it would have been impossible, or simply too expensive, to import them officially.
I took the same approach when I opened a bar that offered drinks for half the price of the competition. I couldn't afford to buy my booze officially, so instead I was knocking over liquor stores. It's the only way I could make my business model work, which completely justifies it.
I don't think that phrase means what you think it means. The term "witch hunt" is usually used when the threat being hunted is a phantasm, whipped up from irrational fear and mob mentality. These threats are real and the mob is less aware of them than would be healthy. There is malware spreading. Microsoft is reading your supposedly encrypted comms. These witches really do walk among us. And to the extent that this culture of corporate surveillance is establishing a precedent that will affect future generations more than us; they really are preying on our children.
How is this news? The price for free IM is that they read your messages and sell the info they gather to advertisers.
At least one way it is news is that it is verifiable empirical evidence that can be shown to the huge portion of people who still think, "Oh, sure, you and your tin-foil hat. Maybe it is possible, but they aren't reading my communications. They can't be monitoring everyone."
Autopilot is a good thing to have in planes, and we should have it in cars.
I like the notion, and it's a great frame of reference for consideration. One major distinction between planes and cars: When a plane is on autopilot in a relatively sparse chunk of sky, the time between sensor warning and twisted burning wreckage is tens of seconds to minutes. Most of the time in an ordinary flight plan the plane can wander hundreds of feet without a problem. On a typical chunk of sparsely populated two lane highway, however, If your car's autopilot travels twenty feet out of its lane -- things get exciting very quickly.
Moreover, most airplanes are like long-haul trucks -- they spend most of their miles in transit between heavy traffic areas. A major chunk of American automotive miles are spent with other vehicles within a few dozen feet.
No, 1774. Much like picking a date when we entered Vietnam, you have to pick a year when the official government of this chunk of the North American contentinent -- now called The United States -- went too far and lost its just sovereignty. 1774 isn't a bad choice (though admittedly some more hotheaded than I would pick an earlier year).
we couldn't have won that war without a professional army, the French Navy, and French money to pay for it all.
They couldn't have won it without the American people.
And yet most of their successful attacks are IEDs.
Military technology is changed. As a weapon today the rifle is where the sword was in 1860-65. It's useful militarily in certain tactical situations, but basing your entire tyranny-prevention policy on rifles...
Let me finish that sentence for you, "...would be stupid." You use a handgun to fight your way back to your long gun. You use a long gun to harrass the enemy while you produce IEDs. As you note, the Taliban has fought us to a standstill with that approach.
The reason we keep the long guns around is so we can -- and this goes without saying, but god forbid it ever actually happens -- hold out long enough to get the rest of the operation live.
Their backup weapon is better then anything currently street-legal in the US (fully auto AKs are not street legal).
The arms in the hands of private citizens in the US are extremely effective -- far more so than the typical Russian surplus crap in Afghanistan. Automatic fire is rarely a practical use of ammo, and even three round burst is a minimally helpful luxury. If you wanted to, you could convert an AK-47 with simple hand tools and a few minutes effort. Automatic rifles are legal with an appropriate license, and you can shoot them at my local rifle range.
GPUs are no longer cost efficient for mining bitcoins, in terms of marginal electricity cost(1). Therefore, it cannot be cost efficient for a person to run the bitcoin mining software on their home machine. Given that it cannot be a cost efficient use of the user's electricity, it is not possible for the user to be engaging in an informed, consensual transaction(2)(3). Transactions without informed consent are market distortions, reduce GDP in the long run, and are not ethical.
1. That may not be strictly true, right now, with the sudden rise in bitcoin price and the lag in bringing new specialized hardware online, but any such brief market distortin resulting in cost efficiency will be optimized away quickly.
2. Except for the possibility that the transaction cost of the user directly paying the software provider is enough to make it inefficient to pay directly, but still efficient to pay for more electricity (a transaction that is already happening, so the transaction cost is sunk) and give the discounted proceeds to the software provider.
3. Or if the user also gets satisfaction from the very act of running the bitcoin mining client, because he or she believes it is worth the personal cost for the social good of helping to process bitcoin transactions.
could cost the U.S. treasury as much as $12 billion.
It's all in how you spin it, isn't it?
Flash: Duopolists willing to pay government $12 billion to extend duopoly. "Duopoly rents sure are nice!" says duopolist CEO, "We'd be happy to give the government a taste of the action." Film at eleven.
But it's the deliberate use of the compound in improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and acts of terror such as the Oklahoma City bombing that gives rise to even greater cause for concern.
Why? If the number of people dying from industrial accidents is greater than the number dying from terrorism, shouldn't we be focusing on the greater threat to human life? Particularly given that the explosion in Texas looks like it was caused, at least in part, by lax regulatory compliance.
The only reason I can see for terrorism being worse is that it terrifies us. But the rational solution for that is, colloquially, to grow a pair. Stop saying things like "terrorism is a greater cause for concern" when it is not. Be rational, and help the public to be rational -- stop adding to the emotionalistic, irrational fear of terrorism.
The reason-for-being of terrorism is asymmetric warfare. That only works if a society offers the asymmetric, panicky response that terrorism is meant to induce. Stop contributing to that by claiming that a statistically smaller threat is a greater concern.
I'm curious about what they mean by "power to change the balance of power between individuals and large bureaucracies in much the same way the Internet did in the past".
The Internet improves the ability of the people to speak back and organise themselves. Perhaps personal drones will allow the people to shoot back, with missiles?
Yes, and monitor troop movements, etc. Here's the key to that being an unambiguous good thing, though: Think "Libya," not "United States."
Then think, "Oh yeah, and that's one of the founding principles of the United States, too, because we had to do it once and decided we would never relinquish that responsibility."
Now, whether missiles should be readily available, or if we should limit the rapidly deployable threat to the modern equivalent of hammering ploughshares into swords may be a fine question. But we need, at least, to keep the building blocks in the hands of the farmers for such a civil defense to remain practical.
If you're not in the United States, or some other nation in which the citizens are the sovereigns, or if you simply prefer to be a subject, well, you probably won't agree with their philosophy. Even so, I figure you can understand how some people might feel that way, though, right?
Silk Road's creator, who calls himself the Dread Pirate Roberts, broke his usual media silence
Yegads, man! You're going to scare the horses. Your usual media silence is a wise practice. The general public doesn't know you exist, and doesn't know you use Bitcoins. Those are good things. The first rule of drug dealing is you do not talk about drug dealing. Just 'cuz I don't use your service doesn't mean I want to see more scrutiny aimed at you, or at Bitcoin.
1. It strongly encourages everyone to stuff their money in the mattress rather than spend it. This may seem like a great idea, but without people buying stuff, nobody is needed to make stuff, which means people lose their jobs, so they buy even less, and so on.
While this is true in the context of deflation, as you intended, it bears some qualification that reckless consumption can be as harmful to the economy in the long run as mattress stuffing. Consumption without satisfaction of wants is the basis for entrenched low consumer confidence, and when promoted as a panacea policy can be a cause of persistently high deficits.
I mention this not to be contrary -- your point is well made -- but because I think the American policy perspective tends to be that consumption stimulus is the answer to every problem. While it is a fine solution to short run lulls, it can be detrimental when it becomes a calcified policy position.
The BSD license says, "I will not use copyright to impose regulatory monopoly restrictions on you, but you can incorporate my work in a derivative work which imposes regulatory monopoly restrictions on others."
The GPL says, "I will use the regulatory monopoly restriction of copyright in the narrowest way that prohibits the use of my work in any greater exercise of monopoly restrictions on others."
The BSD license uses your copyright to maximize the freedom of primary recipients of your work. The GPL uses your copyright to maximize the freedom of secondary recipients of your work. Claiming that one is objectively more free betrays a lack of comprehension.
Seems like Google is going for hardware-only revenue on this one.
That conclusion is not supported by the fact that Google does not allow advertising on Google Glass. Google Glass is not exclusively an output device, it is also a sensor array. The data collected by the sensor array would be very valuable to Google's surveillance and analytics programs. Whether Google will store, use, or distribute any of the data collected by the Google Glass sensors has not, as far as I know, been addressed.
Generally speaking, Google seems to have a very solid understanding that it is inexpensive to store data and a significant opportunity cost to discard it.
While it may be true that currency can be too volatile, Cyprus would disagree that a fixed value is ideal. Cyprus is on the Euro, whose value is based on something more stable than Cypriot econmics (ie: the economics of the entire EU). The debt in Cyprus got too big to be supported by the modest production of the island nation.
That is a bad thing in itself, and governments should not let such things happen, but what happened next is worse. Normally a country would devalue its currency in this situation. That's bad, because it generally leads to further devaluation of the currency, and in extreme cases can lead to hyperinflation. But when the currency can't be devalued, and the country doesn't have the money to service its debt, things get really unpleasant.
have you thought for one second... to stop using google?
Sounds good. OK, quick: Link ten major websites that don't have embedded Google tracking code (including javascript embeds from Google, Google Analytics, Google APIs, Google Code, GStatic, etc). You'll be able to find ten, I'm sure, but it won't be the first ten you try.
it might be annoying, it might creep people out..but really i just see it as a thing that one might have to deal with in a free and open society
Having your picture taken in the background on occasion is a very different thing from having it taken pervasively and handed over to a handful of private companies, and to the government agencies that get privileged access (whether compulsory or voluntary).
It is not your freedom to take photographs that I challenge. It is that the users will be granting privileged access to pervasive surveillance to a small number of corporations and a large number of government agencies, that most who will be doing it do not understand the consequences, and that they have not given most of their subjects the opportunity of informed consent.
Knowing that your picture might get taken is not a cause for concern any more than is getting bumped into on the sidewalk. Getting elbowed repeatedly everywhere you go, or having pervasive surveillance footage of you uploaded to a privately owned and government accessible database, is.
we can balance the scales by ensuring that we have two-way transparency between the powerful and the powerless.
It tends to balance the scales between some of the powerful and the powerless in some cases. It also creates a new data stream that increases the imbalance of power in other cases. Google, through its government transparency reporting project, has shown that it often gives privileged information access to government agencies. Even if Google and its partners are benevolent and infallible, those agencies will have greater access to the surveillance and metadata that is gathered by these devices than will the powerless. That surveillance and metadata will include a wealth of information about people other than the wearer; many of whom will not have been granted the opportunity of informed consent to the surveillance.
The author points out, rightly, that surveillance cameras are already everywhere,
There is a simple defence against this sort of thing. It's called thinking.
Indeed, and it is an ongoing arms race. The rate at which we spread the word that people need to raise their defenses is inversely proportional to how much these new tactics distort our society and economy. Hence my post.
found that sensitive personal characteristics about people can be accurately inferred from information in the public domain.
I've done this stuff, for both ad targeting and music targeting, and I understand the math. Knowing whether you are gay is just the tip of the iceberg.
From the data it can be inferred whether you believe Bradley Manning was justified, whether you think it is treason for a politician to support warrantless surveillance, and whether you believe the "four boxes" epigram is relevant in the current context.
It can be inferred how you react to various turns of phrase, which ways of presenting an idea will ring with you, and therefore how to present a story to you, such that you will be likely to repeat the sound bites on one side of the issue or the other.
They can do this, with an automated system, for hundreds of millions of people -- as can anyone who pays them enough for the data or analysis. It is not a difference in type from what has gone by the name of PR, spin, or handling; but rather a difference of speed, pervasiveness, precision targeting, and potency. It puts more power to distort human perception of reality in the hands of fewer people than ever before -- by orders of magnitude.
The data, once gathered, will remain, and will be packaged and sold, and cracked and siezed, until long after you are dead -- barring some very serious and extremely disruptive counteractivity. It is getting worse every day, and the cost of correcting it is growing exponentially.
Most people don't know it is happening, and most of those who do don't seem to grasp the consequences.
Slashdot Mirror
>> Fox, with help from six-strikes monitoring company Dtecnet, asked Google to remove a link
> They're essentially using false claims to issue DMCA take downs.
No they are not. They are not invoking the DMCA. They are asking their friend Google to suppress the information without filing a formal DMCA complaint, and Google is choosing to comply of their own free will. Google does not require the majors to file formal DMCA complaints, which is why there is no penalty for them under law, and why it is so hard to get false accusations cleared.
This is not the law being abused, this is Google siding with their fellow oligarchs in Hollywood, against the public interest.
not only to avoid France's notoriously onerous labor laws but also because it would have been impossible, or simply too expensive, to import them officially.
I took the same approach when I opened a bar that offered drinks for half the price of the competition. I couldn't afford to buy my booze officially, so instead I was knocking over liquor stores. It's the only way I could make my business model work, which completely justifies it.
Looks like people are on a witch hunt here.
I don't think that phrase means what you think it means. The term "witch hunt" is usually used when the threat being hunted is a phantasm, whipped up from irrational fear and mob mentality. These threats are real and the mob is less aware of them than would be healthy. There is malware spreading. Microsoft is reading your supposedly encrypted comms. These witches really do walk among us. And to the extent that this culture of corporate surveillance is establishing a precedent that will affect future generations more than us; they really are preying on our children.
How is this news? The price for free IM is that they read your messages and sell the info they gather to advertisers.
At least one way it is news is that it is verifiable empirical evidence that can be shown to the huge portion of people who still think, "Oh, sure, you and your tin-foil hat. Maybe it is possible, but they aren't reading my communications. They can't be monitoring everyone."
Autopilot is a good thing to have in planes, and we should have it in cars.
I like the notion, and it's a great frame of reference for consideration. One major distinction between planes and cars: When a plane is on autopilot in a relatively sparse chunk of sky, the time between sensor warning and twisted burning wreckage is tens of seconds to minutes. Most of the time in an ordinary flight plan the plane can wander hundreds of feet without a problem. On a typical chunk of sparsely populated two lane highway, however, If your car's autopilot travels twenty feet out of its lane -- things get exciting very quickly.
Moreover, most airplanes are like long-haul trucks -- they spend most of their miles in transit between heavy traffic areas. A major chunk of American automotive miles are spent with other vehicles within a few dozen feet.
Do you mean 1776?
No, 1774. Much like picking a date when we entered Vietnam, you have to pick a year when the official government of this chunk of the North American contentinent -- now called The United States -- went too far and lost its just sovereignty. 1774 isn't a bad choice (though admittedly some more hotheaded than I would pick an earlier year).
we couldn't have won that war without a professional army, the French Navy, and French money to pay for it all.
They couldn't have won it without the American people.
And yet most of their successful attacks are IEDs.
Military technology is changed. As a weapon today the rifle is where the sword was in 1860-65. It's useful militarily in certain tactical situations, but basing your entire tyranny-prevention policy on rifles...
Let me finish that sentence for you, "...would be stupid." You use a handgun to fight your way back to your long gun. You use a long gun to harrass the enemy while you produce IEDs. As you note, the Taliban has fought us to a standstill with that approach.
The reason we keep the long guns around is so we can -- and this goes without saying, but god forbid it ever actually happens -- hold out long enough to get the rest of the operation live.
Their backup weapon is better then anything currently street-legal in the US (fully auto AKs are not street legal).
The arms in the hands of private citizens in the US are extremely effective -- far more so than the typical Russian surplus crap in Afghanistan. Automatic fire is rarely a practical use of ammo, and even three round burst is a minimally helpful luxury. If you wanted to, you could convert an AK-47 with simple hand tools and a few minutes effort. Automatic rifles are legal with an appropriate license, and you can shoot them at my local rifle range.
When in US history has the government been taken over by rogue elements?
1774
In these cases did an Armed Citizenry actually stop said rogue elements?
Yes
GPUs are no longer cost efficient for mining bitcoins, in terms of marginal electricity cost(1). Therefore, it cannot be cost efficient for a person to run the bitcoin mining software on their home machine. Given that it cannot be a cost efficient use of the user's electricity, it is not possible for the user to be engaging in an informed, consensual transaction(2)(3). Transactions without informed consent are market distortions, reduce GDP in the long run, and are not ethical.
1. That may not be strictly true, right now, with the sudden rise in bitcoin price and the lag in bringing new specialized hardware online, but any such brief market distortin resulting in cost efficiency will be optimized away quickly.
2. Except for the possibility that the transaction cost of the user directly paying the software provider is enough to make it inefficient to pay directly, but still efficient to pay for more electricity (a transaction that is already happening, so the transaction cost is sunk) and give the discounted proceeds to the software provider.
3. Or if the user also gets satisfaction from the very act of running the bitcoin mining client, because he or she believes it is worth the personal cost for the social good of helping to process bitcoin transactions.
We could even call it the laches rule.
Nice! I've heard of laches before but didn't know what it meant. I will leave this page more knowledgeable than when I arrived. Thanks!
could cost the U.S. treasury as much as $12 billion.
It's all in how you spin it, isn't it?
Flash: Duopolists willing to pay government $12 billion to extend duopoly. "Duopoly rents sure are nice!" says duopolist CEO, "We'd be happy to give the government a taste of the action." Film at eleven.
But it's the deliberate use of the compound in improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and acts of terror such as the Oklahoma City bombing that gives rise to even greater cause for concern.
Why? If the number of people dying from industrial accidents is greater than the number dying from terrorism, shouldn't we be focusing on the greater threat to human life? Particularly given that the explosion in Texas looks like it was caused, at least in part, by lax regulatory compliance.
The only reason I can see for terrorism being worse is that it terrifies us. But the rational solution for that is, colloquially, to grow a pair. Stop saying things like "terrorism is a greater cause for concern" when it is not. Be rational, and help the public to be rational -- stop adding to the emotionalistic, irrational fear of terrorism.
The reason-for-being of terrorism is asymmetric warfare. That only works if a society offers the asymmetric, panicky response that terrorism is meant to induce. Stop contributing to that by claiming that a statistically smaller threat is a greater concern.
Outstanding post. Well presented and covers an important aspect that is often overlooked. Thank you!
I'm curious about what they mean by "power to change the balance of power between individuals and large bureaucracies in much the same way the Internet did in the past".
The Internet improves the ability of the people to speak back and organise themselves. Perhaps personal drones will allow the people to shoot back, with missiles?
Yes, and monitor troop movements, etc. Here's the key to that being an unambiguous good thing, though: Think "Libya," not "United States."
Then think, "Oh yeah, and that's one of the founding principles of the United States, too, because we had to do it once and decided we would never relinquish that responsibility."
Now, whether missiles should be readily available, or if we should limit the rapidly deployable threat to the modern equivalent of hammering ploughshares into swords may be a fine question. But we need, at least, to keep the building blocks in the hands of the farmers for such a civil defense to remain practical.
If you're not in the United States, or some other nation in which the citizens are the sovereigns, or if you simply prefer to be a subject, well, you probably won't agree with their philosophy. Even so, I figure you can understand how some people might feel that way, though, right?
Silk Road's creator, who calls himself the Dread Pirate Roberts, broke his usual media silence
Yegads, man! You're going to scare the horses. Your usual media silence is a wise practice. The general public doesn't know you exist, and doesn't know you use Bitcoins. Those are good things. The first rule of drug dealing is you do not talk about drug dealing. Just 'cuz I don't use your service doesn't mean I want to see more scrutiny aimed at you, or at Bitcoin.
You GPLers
I am not so. I have released code under GPL, LGPL, ASL, MIT and proprietary.
Excellent post -- very well argued.
One minor issue:
1. It strongly encourages everyone to stuff their money in the mattress rather than spend it. This may seem like a great idea, but without people buying stuff, nobody is needed to make stuff, which means people lose their jobs, so they buy even less, and so on.
While this is true in the context of deflation, as you intended, it bears some qualification that reckless consumption can be as harmful to the economy in the long run as mattress stuffing. Consumption without satisfaction of wants is the basis for entrenched low consumer confidence, and when promoted as a panacea policy can be a cause of persistently high deficits.
I mention this not to be contrary -- your point is well made -- but because I think the American policy perspective tends to be that consumption stimulus is the answer to every problem. While it is a fine solution to short run lulls, it can be detrimental when it becomes a calcified policy position.
So you're saying the GPL giving up liberty to purchase safety? :p
More like using a gun to shoot a guy on a killing spree.
BSD license is truly in the spirit of freedom.
The BSD license says, "I will not use copyright to impose regulatory monopoly restrictions on you, but you can incorporate my work in a derivative work which imposes regulatory monopoly restrictions on others."
The GPL says, "I will use the regulatory monopoly restriction of copyright in the narrowest way that prohibits the use of my work in any greater exercise of monopoly restrictions on others."
The BSD license uses your copyright to maximize the freedom of primary recipients of your work. The GPL uses your copyright to maximize the freedom of secondary recipients of your work. Claiming that one is objectively more free betrays a lack of comprehension.
Seems like Google is going for hardware-only revenue on this one.
That conclusion is not supported by the fact that Google does not allow advertising on Google Glass. Google Glass is not exclusively an output device, it is also a sensor array. The data collected by the sensor array would be very valuable to Google's surveillance and analytics programs. Whether Google will store, use, or distribute any of the data collected by the Google Glass sensors has not, as far as I know, been addressed.
Generally speaking, Google seems to have a very solid understanding that it is inexpensive to store data and a significant opportunity cost to discard it.
"Money is most optimal when it is fixed in value"
While it may be true that currency can be too volatile, Cyprus would disagree that a fixed value is ideal. Cyprus is on the Euro, whose value is based on something more stable than Cypriot econmics (ie: the economics of the entire EU). The debt in Cyprus got too big to be supported by the modest production of the island nation.
That is a bad thing in itself, and governments should not let such things happen, but what happened next is worse. Normally a country would devalue its currency in this situation. That's bad, because it generally leads to further devaluation of the currency, and in extreme cases can lead to hyperinflation. But when the currency can't be devalued, and the country doesn't have the money to service its debt, things get really unpleasant.
In the end, the EU wound up bailing Cyprus out, but things were getting really nasty. The Economist has a good article.
have you thought for one second... to stop using google?
Sounds good. OK, quick: Link ten major websites that don't have embedded Google tracking code (including javascript embeds from Google, Google Analytics, Google APIs, Google Code, GStatic, etc). You'll be able to find ten, I'm sure, but it won't be the first ten you try.
it might be annoying, it might creep people out ..but really i just see it as a thing that one might have to deal with in a free and open society
Having your picture taken in the background on occasion is a very different thing from having it taken pervasively and handed over to a handful of private companies, and to the government agencies that get privileged access (whether compulsory or voluntary).
It is not your freedom to take photographs that I challenge. It is that the users will be granting privileged access to pervasive surveillance to a small number of corporations and a large number of government agencies, that most who will be doing it do not understand the consequences, and that they have not given most of their subjects the opportunity of informed consent.
Knowing that your picture might get taken is not a cause for concern any more than is getting bumped into on the sidewalk. Getting elbowed repeatedly everywhere you go, or having pervasive surveillance footage of you uploaded to a privately owned and government accessible database, is.
we can balance the scales by ensuring that we have two-way transparency between the powerful and the powerless.
It tends to balance the scales between some of the powerful and the powerless in some cases. It also creates a new data stream that increases the imbalance of power in other cases. Google, through its government transparency reporting project, has shown that it often gives privileged information access to government agencies. Even if Google and its partners are benevolent and infallible, those agencies will have greater access to the surveillance and metadata that is gathered by these devices than will the powerless. That surveillance and metadata will include a wealth of information about people other than the wearer; many of whom will not have been granted the opportunity of informed consent to the surveillance.
The author points out, rightly, that surveillance cameras are already everywhere,
Cockroaches and rats are even more commonplace.
There is a simple defence against this sort of thing. It's called thinking.
Indeed, and it is an ongoing arms race. The rate at which we spread the word that people need to raise their defenses is inversely proportional to how much these new tactics distort our society and economy. Hence my post.
found that sensitive personal characteristics about people can be accurately inferred from information in the public domain.
I've done this stuff, for both ad targeting and music targeting, and I understand the math. Knowing whether you are gay is just the tip of the iceberg.
From the data it can be inferred whether you believe Bradley Manning was justified, whether you think it is treason for a politician to support warrantless surveillance, and whether you believe the "four boxes" epigram is relevant in the current context.
It can be inferred how you react to various turns of phrase, which ways of presenting an idea will ring with you, and therefore how to present a story to you, such that you will be likely to repeat the sound bites on one side of the issue or the other.
They can do this, with an automated system, for hundreds of millions of people -- as can anyone who pays them enough for the data or analysis. It is not a difference in type from what has gone by the name of PR, spin, or handling; but rather a difference of speed, pervasiveness, precision targeting, and potency. It puts more power to distort human perception of reality in the hands of fewer people than ever before -- by orders of magnitude.
The data, once gathered, will remain, and will be packaged and sold, and cracked and siezed, until long after you are dead -- barring some very serious and extremely disruptive counteractivity. It is getting worse every day, and the cost of correcting it is growing exponentially.
Most people don't know it is happening, and most of those who do don't seem to grasp the consequences.