people were shocked that banks are businesses trying to maximize profits like any other business.
Because every ad they see talks about how respectable and responsible they are. Like I said above, they’ve spent billions trying to cultivate this level of obliviousness in their customers.
Still even if people are so ignorant that they are unaware of privacy issues, they have chosen to be willfully ignorant, because this issue has been talked about non stop for decades. For nothing to sieve in at some point, you have to be a special kind of willfully ignorant.
In our sphere, sure. But most people don’t live in our sphere. Most people don’t mainline tech news and privacy updates. A lot of “normal people” (i.e. people you meet dropping your kids off at school, or in line at the supermarket, or on a bus) would have trouble telling you the name of the company that made the phone they stare at for seventeen hours a day. Some of the smartest, most world-aware people I know couldn’t tell you the difference between “encrypted” and “password-protected.” The stuff that breaks through into the mainstream are the huge breaches, but the problem is always spun to be the hackers, or one guy in the IT department who did something wrong, or whatever, not the fact that they’re even collecting all of this data in the first place.
And this isn’t willful ignorance, it’s just not something they think applies to them. Maybe they bought the “if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear” line, but more likely they just don’t actively think about it at all. Like how, if you live inland, you probably rarely worry about tsunamis; they’re simply a reality, and they probably vaguely know about the danger, but they’re a fact of nature, there’s nothing they can do to change it, and it’s not a risk they face personally. That doesn’t make them willfully ignorant, it just means they think it’s something that really only matters to spies or whoever.
Even people that are very low information on technology, know that the Internet is a source of potential surveillance, and having your info on the internet in any form is a potential for being surveilled.
But usually only in the abstract. “Oh, as long as I just look for the lock in the top left of the browser, I’m ok.” They think the threat comes from hackers and foreign governments, not companies that make the funny cat meme service.
Everybody knows that all the big IT companies are trying to gather as much information as they can. And Amazon is right at the top among them.
No, I think you’re wrong about that, and I think that’s because–again–these companies have spent billions trying to convince people that they aren’t. Even in the rare cases that they do, they have completely the wrong idea about what the threat really is; think about those memes that go around from time to time saying “I hereby declare that Facebook doesn’t own my photos!” or whatever. Zuck doesn’t want their photos, he wants to be able to lock them and their friends in, he wants their personal data, and he wants exclusive, 24/7 access to their eyes so that he can cram personalized ads into them.
And Amazon? If people have anything against Amazon, it’s probably just “oh, they’re trying to put mom & pop companies out of business!” (Which, in fairness, they are also doing). Do you think the average person knows that they even own Ring and Roomba and AWS? I would submit that a surprisingly large chunk of the population probably doesn’t even know that they own Alexa.
Not because they’re ignorant, just because (1) it doesn’t matter to them, and (2) they’ve been aggressively propagandized to not care.
WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.works 50 minutes ago
you are largely overestimating the capabilities of the average consumer. most don’t even know on a surface level how the internet works, and what dangers it poses.