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Comment by mlevental | Hacker News Reader

no one is forcing anyone to buy shit. i'm on the internet all day browsing all sorts of sites and all of these companies are completely powerless wrt to me. you know why? because i haven't bought anything except underwear from amazon and groceries from my local supermarket in about 9 months.

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I'm glad to hear that you aren't influenced by these tech giants, but the problem is that most people are. When these tech companies can greatly influence elections and popular opinion, we should question their morals and decide how much personal data they should be able to access.

I understand your point, but people are volunteering to give up this information. At some point, grandma has to learn to stop calling the psychic hotline.

Explaining to grandma that she’s wasting money calling a premium rate number is relatively easy, and if she ignores you, the impact to society is minimal.

How do you explain to grandma that publishing photos of her grandkids is to the detriment to society as a whole?

Does grandma brag in front of the tax collectors about how much her children are making? Does grandma rat out the grandkids partying too hard to their parents? Grandma isn't stupid, grandma can keep secrets, but no one explained to her that Facebook isn't a benevolent entity. Her perception of Facebook is a cozy digital dining room where she can talk to the friends and family that don't have time to visit anymore.

I think it's important to remember that Facebook provides a service people really want, which makes it hard to convince them to mistrust it.

Is it OK for a business to collect and sell their customers' personal information if their customers didn't knowingly agree to it? These tech companies are hiding their intentions in the fine print and it's clear that their users don't understand what their personal data is used for. We can't expect the average person to spend 10 minutes [0] reading and trying to understand the legalese on every app or website they sign up for.

Most countries have consumer protection laws to protect the rights of customers and stop deceptive business practices. When a significant portion of a company's customers feel deceived, it's easy to see that the company is not being honest to their customers.

[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/03/readi...

Your point is moot, if advertising had absolutely no effect on customers, then it would not be profitable to use it and the industry would not exist.

In fairness certain types of advertising have very little roi but continues to be used because of past association or the network effect.

That's your behavior in commerce, sure. How were your political and social views nudged?

Advertising is also for services and websites and political campaigns, universities, clubs, schools and charities not just consumer goods. Many of these actors benefit from having targeted advertising, just because you are not buying consumer goods does not mean a profile of your online activity is not being created and sold to advertisers used by these various groups.

Oh, yeah? I bet you think you picked the brands you bought, too.

brands of what? milk? eggs? cheesy crackers?

An anecdote is not data.

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