..Okay, here's where I have problems with what you're saying:
You're not going to eliminate racism by hiding it.
While as a stand-alone statement this is true (racism is like cockroaches, after all; it prefers existing away from the light -- at least until they feel they have 'strength in numbers') this does not mean that anyone, individual or especially a business of any kind, should CATER TO IT/THEM -- not unless they want to be 'guilty by association'. By catering to it/them (by selling them ads) that is precisely what Google did -- and they implicitly admitted their guilt in this case by deleting everything once they were called out on it.
You can find perfectly legal porn sites and the like and they can advertise.
You cannot conflate pornography with racism and porn websites with selling advertising space to racists/racist organzations or anyone who wants to leverage racism to promote their business. Two totally different things.
I'm a big proponent of people being accepting and part of that is being accepting of people who I think have horrible world view points.
Sure. I'm all for 'freedom of speech'. HOWEVER: 'Freedom of Speech' does not mean 'freedom to say whatever the hell you want and suffer no consequences from the Court of Public Opinion. Racism is NASTY and should NOT be tolerated. Sure, let them 'out' themselves all they like -- then we know who they are so it can be made crystal-clear to them that their attitudes and opinions have no place in modern society.
As long as it doesn't harm me people can do what they like
So, in other words, you in actuality stand for nothing except yourself? I think you'd better clarify yourself on that point, because otherwise I'd have to say that your self-centered and apathetic attitude is, to put it mildly, disappointing.
There's a big difference between 'personalized service' (especially when what enables that is that who's providing the 'service' has a semi-personal relationship with you, as you say) and the illusion of knowing you, courtesy of Big Data collecting information on you and generally being nosy and violating your privacy. One is comfy and nice, the other is distinctly uncomfortable and creepy.
People do not want advertising. They do not want 'targeted' advertising, either. Find a different business model, marketers, we don't want the one you keep pushing.
I don't know anyone who uses a 'service' like that, and I sure wouldn't ever have someone I don't know picking out my groceries for me. I'm not even sure I'd trust someone I do know to do that. Especially produce and meat.
Have these people ever been in a convenience store, or do they have such horribly crippling social anxiety disorder that they never go outside where there might be (shocking!!!) PEOPLE they would have to interact with?
I'll fill in the gaps for them: There is an order of magnitude, at least more items available in the typical convenience store than their vending machine (and that's what it is, a vending machine!) can hold -- and all that includes refrigerated and frozen items. All they're doing is re-inventing the vending machine. This is not revolutionary, this is not ground-breaking, this is not innovative in any way, and this is one of the most clueless things I've heard of. There will always be a need for 'mom and pop' convenience stores, and 7-11, and what-have-you. Do they really think that they're going to put all of these out of business? Do they really think they're going to convince every gas station in the country (on the planet?) to dump their convenience store side of the business for an overblown vending machine? Clueless, clueless, clueless. And what's even worse: anything you bought from it would be tracked because you're essentially using plastic to buy it. More marketing data for them to sell on the back end! The hell with that, and the hell with these clueless idiots.
..is to get too many people involved in it.
47% of the people alive on the planet today have access to the internet -- call it 3.3 billion people.
I'd say that's more than enough to ruin the Internet, sooner or later. Which is what we're seeing here today.
You think maybe Equifax is exemplar of all the other credit reporting agencies? I think they might be. I think there needs to be some corporate nutsacks put on the congressional anvil, with liberal application of the judicial sledgehammer over this, to ALL of them. It's bad enough that jackass businesses like Facebook and Google and ISPs are invading our privacy, but companies like these credit reporting agencies MUST BE ABOVE REPROACH AT ALL TIMES OR THEY ARE WORSE THAN USELESS. It is totally, completely unacceptable that this happened at all and it has to STOP.
Let's be honest: unless you're sending and receiving email only from a whitelist of addresses, and encrypted end-to-end, email is not safe at all. Nevermind malware, clickbait, spoofing, phishing, and so on, unless you're doing as per above anything you send or receive can be compromised.
Of course what I'm saying is not that 'email is bad'; what I'm really saying is: the Internet, in general, has been so thoroughly compromised, that you can't trust it at all anymore. That's the world we've allowed to become reality, and I don't even know if it can be fixed.
Well then goodie I guess I'll start a betting pool as to which thing is going to be the extinction-level event that kills the human race and maybe everything else on this planet: climate change, breaking the food chain irrepairably, religious zealots/extremism, or jackasses tossing nuclear weapons around.
I agree with everything you're saying. But here's the real problem: You need to change Hearts and Minds on a universal scale to really make these things happen, and you can't legislate changes to Hearts and Minds. It's been tried, and we've seen that it failed miserably; all the 'equal rights initiatives' that have existed for the last 50 years accomplished nothing other than driving racism, sexism, bigotry, and other flavors of irrational hatred underground, and now with someone like Trump in the Whitehouse, who has emboldened various hate groups, they're all coming out of the woodwork now. Sadly, it may take hundreds of years, or maybe thousands of years of human biological evolution before we somehow overcome whatever flaw it is in our brains that creates these sorts of attitudes.
Remember USENET? Remember how they always used to say, that if you posted something on USENET, it was immortal? There'd always be a copy of it somewhere? That's the sort of problem we're faced with on a subject like this: other than evolving out of it, you'd have to erase ideas like racism, sexism, bigotry, discrimination, etc, from every living human mind, every printed page, every information storage system, and so on, SIMULTANEOUSLY, to stamp it out completely. It's impossible.
..and you know what? I really don't even give a shit anymore. I got enough to worry about day-to-day without continually arguing with morons who INSIST that it couldn't possibly be their SUV and burning coal in power plants that's causing it, among other things. I've only got about another 30 or so years of life left; I'll be long DEAD by the time it's so bad that it can't be stopped, and you can't live with it anymore unless you move to the Arctic or Antarctica, so screw all of you deniers. I'll keep saying that it's our fault this is happening, but YOUR KIDS and GRANDKIDS are the ones who will suffer. Act accordingly. Oh, memo to you Dominionists: Jesus Chirst was just a MAN, there are no GODS of any kind, you're all DELUDED, I know what your plans and agenda are, and I hope you all get shot in the head for your trouble. Humans need to evolve past all this superstitious nonsense like religion and gods and ghosts and other nonsense. Seriously just get over it already.
That's what this tells me to do: completely ignore all online reviews, since you can't trust any of them. As a result I'm less likely to buy any given product. Good job, marketing jackasses. Enjoy shooting yourselves in the foot.
I agree, and as I said elsewhere, we should not be wasting time 'replacing' bees with little robots, we need to determine HOW bee colonies are dying, and PUT A STOP TO IT!
This is stupid. Instead of replacing bees with shitty little robots, we need to stop doing things that are killing bees! Doesn't everyone understand that bee colonies dying off is a symptom of something bigger?
Nope. Car doesn't have it, and I physically disabled it (shorted GPS antenna to ground) in the $50 flip phone I use -- which isn't even turned on most of the time anyway (so no cell tower triangulation anyway).
Email people? Some machine in a datacenter is scanning that mail to target adds to you. Have an add blocker? Your own mail server? Good. Does your recipient?
Any important communications with people I know are done IN PERSON ONLY. Email is just drivel basically. Adblocker? NoScipt? Yes. All the time.
Text and calls?
Again: Nothing important, ever. Important things are done IN PERSON ONLY.
Have a membership card for cvs, costco or your local supermarket, credit/debit, paypal?
Nope to all the above. I pay for things in CASH, ONLY. The exception is utility bills, and given time I'll find a way to pay those in cash or equivalent too.
There's always a way to get to you. Throw your gadgets away and go live in the forest. It's the only way.
LOL I guarantee you I have a fraction of your digital footprint, but be a coward and accept the Establishments' member up your arse if that's what you want, but stop telling people to give up like you did, coward.
There's obviously no point in continuing this discussion because you're clearly a human-caused climate change denier, probably Republican, and therefore anything I say goes in one ear and out the other. Replies will be ignored.
How does any of that invalidate anything I had to say?
The things that are creating too much CO2 are also creating other noxious things that are bad to breathe. We're better off finding better replacements for them. Again: How does it really hurt anyone, or not make sense, to PLAY IT SAFE with the ONE PLANET we have to live on?
I find no valid reasons not to stop burning fossil fuels as soon as we can manage it. Laziness is not a valid reason, by the way.
I get that for FREE whenever I want: call, email, text, or (shocking!!!) VISIT people I know. Fuck Facebook, fuck Zuckerberg, and fuck so-called 'social media'.
First you have to convince, or at least discredit, the climate-change deniers, so that there won't be constant roadblocks to trying to do something about it.
Seriously, aside from the Dominionists, who literally want to destroy the Earth (because they think that'll bring Jesus back) I don't understand the logic (or lack thereof) behind the deniers, and never will I guess. When you have ONE of something (the Earth) and screwing it up beyond saving means you all DIE, then why is it so damned hard to play it safe? Things that pollute the air are what climatologists are saying is behind global warming. Things that pollute the air are not good for humans in any event; so how is it not a no-brainer to do things to reduce to eliminate those sources of pollution? Seriously.
Facebook goes out of it's way to datamine you, track you, surveil you, and otherwise monetize you to death, and you're really not getting anything of value in return.
By now all that information has likely been copied a bunch of times, sent off to who knows where, and/or has been sold off to the highest bidder(s). Even if they determine who did the hack, the chances of the information being contained is essentially zero, especially considering the hack was done at least a month ago. It's all in the wind now and nothing will get it all back. It'll be months, or maybe years, before we find out the real extent of the damage.
Why? Because this isn't Facebook or Twitter or some social media company that is datamining your cat picture posts and the inconsequential conversations you have with people for purposes of targeting ads at you; this is YOUR IDENTITY BEING STOLEN, EN MASSE, by who-knows-what criminal organization, and likely that information is being sold to the highest bidder(s) even as we speak. Your entire life could be RUINED, PERMANENTLY, depending on how that information is used. For all you or anyone else knows, it could be used for anything from draining your bank accounts, to taking out loans and credit cards in your name, to invading your house to rob or kill or kidnap you and your family. THAT'S why. Don't even bother saying "Oh, I haven't got anything to steal, and I'm not worth any money, so who would bother?", either. For all you know, your wife or daughter(s) look like they'd fetch a good price on the human trafficking market, they come and kill you, take them. Any number of nightmare scenarios, depending on who gets their hands on what.
Well, that's all just FUD you're spreading
GUESS WHAT? THAT'S THE POINT THIS SHIT IS REACHING NOW!
Slashdot Mirror
You're not going to eliminate racism by hiding it.
While as a stand-alone statement this is true (racism is like cockroaches, after all; it prefers existing away from the light -- at least until they feel they have 'strength in numbers') this does not mean that anyone, individual or especially a business of any kind, should CATER TO IT/THEM -- not unless they want to be 'guilty by association'. By catering to it/them (by selling them ads) that is precisely what Google did -- and they implicitly admitted their guilt in this case by deleting everything once they were called out on it.
You can find perfectly legal porn sites and the like and they can advertise.
You cannot conflate pornography with racism and porn websites with selling advertising space to racists/racist organzations or anyone who wants to leverage racism to promote their business. Two totally different things.
I'm a big proponent of people being accepting and part of that is being accepting of people who I think have horrible world view points.
Sure. I'm all for 'freedom of speech'. HOWEVER: 'Freedom of Speech' does not mean 'freedom to say whatever the hell you want and suffer no consequences from the Court of Public Opinion. Racism is NASTY and should NOT be tolerated. Sure, let them 'out' themselves all they like -- then we know who they are so it can be made crystal-clear to them that their attitudes and opinions have no place in modern society.
As long as it doesn't harm me people can do what they like
So, in other words, you in actuality stand for nothing except yourself? I think you'd better clarify yourself on that point, because otherwise I'd have to say that your self-centered and apathetic attitude is, to put it mildly, disappointing.
There's a big difference between 'personalized service' (especially when what enables that is that who's providing the 'service' has a semi-personal relationship with you, as you say) and the illusion of knowing you, courtesy of Big Data collecting information on you and generally being nosy and violating your privacy. One is comfy and nice, the other is distinctly uncomfortable and creepy.
That's what this article sounds like.
If the tool is using you: then I pity you, you've lost too much of yourself along the way.
People do not want advertising. They do not want 'targeted' advertising, either. Find a different business model, marketers, we don't want the one you keep pushing.
I don't know anyone who uses a 'service' like that, and I sure wouldn't ever have someone I don't know picking out my groceries for me. I'm not even sure I'd trust someone I do know to do that. Especially produce and meat.
Have these people ever been in a convenience store, or do they have such horribly crippling social anxiety disorder that they never go outside where there might be (shocking!!!) PEOPLE they would have to interact with?
I'll fill in the gaps for them: There is an order of magnitude, at least more items available in the typical convenience store than their vending machine (and that's what it is, a vending machine!) can hold -- and all that includes refrigerated and frozen items. All they're doing is re-inventing the vending machine. This is not revolutionary, this is not ground-breaking, this is not innovative in any way, and this is one of the most clueless things I've heard of. There will always be a need for 'mom and pop' convenience stores, and 7-11, and what-have-you. Do they really think that they're going to put all of these out of business? Do they really think they're going to convince every gas station in the country (on the planet?) to dump their convenience store side of the business for an overblown vending machine? Clueless, clueless, clueless. And what's even worse: anything you bought from it would be tracked because you're essentially using plastic to buy it. More marketing data for them to sell on the back end! The hell with that, and the hell with these clueless idiots.
..is to get too many people involved in it.
47% of the people alive on the planet today have access to the internet -- call it 3.3 billion people.
I'd say that's more than enough to ruin the Internet, sooner or later. Which is what we're seeing here today.
You think maybe Equifax is exemplar of all the other credit reporting agencies? I think they might be. I think there needs to be some corporate nutsacks put on the congressional anvil, with liberal application of the judicial sledgehammer over this, to ALL of them. It's bad enough that jackass businesses like Facebook and Google and ISPs are invading our privacy, but companies like these credit reporting agencies MUST BE ABOVE REPROACH AT ALL TIMES OR THEY ARE WORSE THAN USELESS. It is totally, completely unacceptable that this happened at all and it has to STOP.
Let's be honest: unless you're sending and receiving email only from a whitelist of addresses, and encrypted end-to-end, email is not safe at all. Nevermind malware, clickbait, spoofing, phishing, and so on, unless you're doing as per above anything you send or receive can be compromised.
Of course what I'm saying is not that 'email is bad'; what I'm really saying is: the Internet, in general, has been so thoroughly compromised, that you can't trust it at all anymore. That's the world we've allowed to become reality, and I don't even know if it can be fixed.
Well then someone needs to tell the jackasses at Monsanto and Bayer and whoever else that there's no profit in KILLING THE ENTIRE PLANET.
Well then goodie I guess I'll start a betting pool as to which thing is going to be the extinction-level event that kills the human race and maybe everything else on this planet: climate change, breaking the food chain irrepairably, religious zealots/extremism, or jackasses tossing nuclear weapons around.
I agree with everything you're saying. But here's the real problem: You need to change Hearts and Minds on a universal scale to really make these things happen, and you can't legislate changes to Hearts and Minds. It's been tried, and we've seen that it failed miserably; all the 'equal rights initiatives' that have existed for the last 50 years accomplished nothing other than driving racism, sexism, bigotry, and other flavors of irrational hatred underground, and now with someone like Trump in the Whitehouse, who has emboldened various hate groups, they're all coming out of the woodwork now. Sadly, it may take hundreds of years, or maybe thousands of years of human biological evolution before we somehow overcome whatever flaw it is in our brains that creates these sorts of attitudes.
Remember USENET? Remember how they always used to say, that if you posted something on USENET, it was immortal? There'd always be a copy of it somewhere? That's the sort of problem we're faced with on a subject like this: other than evolving out of it, you'd have to erase ideas like racism, sexism, bigotry, discrimination, etc, from every living human mind, every printed page, every information storage system, and so on, SIMULTANEOUSLY, to stamp it out completely. It's impossible.
..and you know what? I really don't even give a shit anymore. I got enough to worry about day-to-day without continually arguing with morons who INSIST that it couldn't possibly be their SUV and burning coal in power plants that's causing it, among other things. I've only got about another 30 or so years of life left; I'll be long DEAD by the time it's so bad that it can't be stopped, and you can't live with it anymore unless you move to the Arctic or Antarctica, so screw all of you deniers. I'll keep saying that it's our fault this is happening, but YOUR KIDS and GRANDKIDS are the ones who will suffer. Act accordingly. Oh, memo to you Dominionists: Jesus Chirst was just a MAN, there are no GODS of any kind, you're all DELUDED, I know what your plans and agenda are, and I hope you all get shot in the head for your trouble. Humans need to evolve past all this superstitious nonsense like religion and gods and ghosts and other nonsense. Seriously just get over it already.
/rant
That's what this tells me to do: completely ignore all online reviews, since you can't trust any of them. As a result I'm less likely to buy any given product. Good job, marketing jackasses. Enjoy shooting yourselves in the foot.
I agree, and as I said elsewhere, we should not be wasting time 'replacing' bees with little robots, we need to determine HOW bee colonies are dying, and PUT A STOP TO IT!
This is stupid. Instead of replacing bees with shitty little robots, we need to stop doing things that are killing bees! Doesn't everyone understand that bee colonies dying off is a symptom of something bigger?
Do you use a gps on your car or phone?
Nope. Car doesn't have it, and I physically disabled it (shorted GPS antenna to ground) in the $50 flip phone I use -- which isn't even turned on most of the time anyway (so no cell tower triangulation anyway).
Email people? Some machine in a datacenter is scanning that mail to target adds to you. Have an add blocker? Your own mail server? Good. Does your recipient?
Any important communications with people I know are done IN PERSON ONLY. Email is just drivel basically. Adblocker? NoScipt? Yes. All the time.
Text and calls?
Again: Nothing important, ever. Important things are done IN PERSON ONLY.
Have a membership card for cvs, costco or your local supermarket, credit/debit, paypal?
Nope to all the above. I pay for things in CASH, ONLY. The exception is utility bills, and given time I'll find a way to pay those in cash or equivalent too.
There's always a way to get to you. Throw your gadgets away and go live in the forest. It's the only way.
LOL I guarantee you I have a fraction of your digital footprint, but be a coward and accept the Establishments' member up your arse if that's what you want, but stop telling people to give up like you did, coward.
There's obviously no point in continuing this discussion because you're clearly a human-caused climate change denier, probably Republican, and therefore anything I say goes in one ear and out the other. Replies will be ignored.
How does any of that invalidate anything I had to say?
The things that are creating too much CO2 are also creating other noxious things that are bad to breathe. We're better off finding better replacements for them.
Again: How does it really hurt anyone, or not make sense, to PLAY IT SAFE with the ONE PLANET we have to live on?
I find no valid reasons not to stop burning fossil fuels as soon as we can manage it. Laziness is not a valid reason, by the way.
I get that for FREE whenever I want: call, email, text, or (shocking!!!) VISIT people I know. Fuck Facebook, fuck Zuckerberg, and fuck so-called 'social media'.
First you have to convince, or at least discredit, the climate-change deniers, so that there won't be constant roadblocks to trying to do something about it.
Seriously, aside from the Dominionists, who literally want to destroy the Earth (because they think that'll bring Jesus back) I don't understand the logic (or lack thereof) behind the deniers, and never will I guess. When you have ONE of something (the Earth) and screwing it up beyond saving means you all DIE, then why is it so damned hard to play it safe? Things that pollute the air are what climatologists are saying is behind global warming. Things that pollute the air are not good for humans in any event; so how is it not a no-brainer to do things to reduce to eliminate those sources of pollution? Seriously.
Facebook goes out of it's way to datamine you, track you, surveil you, and otherwise monetize you to death, and you're really not getting anything of value in return.
By now all that information has likely been copied a bunch of times, sent off to who knows where, and/or has been sold off to the highest bidder(s). Even if they determine who did the hack, the chances of the information being contained is essentially zero, especially considering the hack was done at least a month ago. It's all in the wind now and nothing will get it all back. It'll be months, or maybe years, before we find out the real extent of the damage.
Well, that's all just FUD you're spreading
GUESS WHAT? THAT'S THE POINT THIS SHIT IS REACHING NOW!
It's not like we haven't all read pretty much the same thing several times from regular news sources.