Comment on FTC Says Social Media Platforms Engage in 'Vast Surveillance' of Users
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 1 week agoEh, most do care, they just don’t do anything about it. My siblings and brothers don’t like that companies like Google and Facebook harvest so much data, yet they continue using them.
So whether people care isn’t a particularly interesting question, I’m more interested in what people are willing to do about it. Will they change what services they use? Would they change who they vote for (if a party actually prioritized privacy)? How much are they willing to pay to not have data harvested? And so on. Those are interesting questions.
sentientity@lemm.ee 1 week ago
Disagree. I think everyone deserves a reasonable degree of privacy and interoperability and choice as a protected right, within the markets and services we already have.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
I agree with that as well, I just don’t think the average person puts that at the top of their voting priorities, and as such, the major candidates don’t say anything about privacy when running for office.
sentientity@lemm.ee 1 week ago
I feel like positioning the ‘average person’ as always disengaged or never doing enough reads more like an attempt to define in/out groups than a genuine effort to actually do anything about the problem.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
Understanding the average person (or rather, the mode of the population on a given topic) helps to craft a strategy. If the average person doesn’t prioritize privacy, the solution probably isn’t to run a big campaign around a privacy bill, but to attack the issue of privacy at the fringes on things the average person does care about (e.g. right to repair for farmers, cars, and consumer devices; even abortion). You can point to privacy as being the main, underlying theme here, but focus the energy on things that actually have a chance of success.