Don't like how Facebook runs its data collection on you whether you have an account or not? Tough. There's no, and will never be, a town hall for Facebook.
Don't like how the county runs its health services departments? Well, you can show up at county council meetings, you can get involved politically, you can vote, etc.
Fundamental difference.
But if you live in a larger state like California, you have much less say in the federal government on a per capita basis than someone who lives in Rhode Island between the Senste (2 senators per state regardless of population) and the electoral college, not to mention gerrymandering.
You have to consider what you're trusting them to do.
I trust organizations to act in my interest so long as our interests align. It is the difference between allies and friends.
Yes, "accountable". Quotes here because voter suppression, disenfrachisment and aggressive gerrymandering are all things that really make me wonder about the substance of accountability ala plebiscite.
And no, I am not throwing out any babies or bathwater here.
Browsers can block that quite easily.
> and affecting the society you live in
And people are becoming more aware of how that happens, and developing tools to control and expose that, and at the end of the day people can choose to use it or not.
> At least the government is accountable through elections.
Not particularly, no.
I feel far, far more enfranchised in my ability to choose what voluntary associations I form. I know I'm not the only one.
How? That's not possible. Facebook knows where you are and what you're doing, etc, without you even having a computer or smartphone at all. Your friends or their friends will already upload your address, phone number, contact info, etc.
When you go out in public and you get caught in the background of someone else's photo, that you might not even know is being taken? They might post that to FB or Instagram, and then boom, FB gets another data point to analyze and find out where you go and what your habits are.
"Browsers" can't block what Facebook does to track users, not even close. That would be a trillion-dollar-invention.
> And people are becoming more aware of how that happens,
Are they? I don't think they are. I think people are grossly misinformed about how the data is collected.
> and developing tools to control and expose that
Who is? I know of no serious efforts to meaningfully reduce the data FB is able to collect.
> and at the end of the day people can choose to use it or not.
No they cannot. None of these services or companies are opt-in. You have profiles with them long before you sign up. You are being manipulated and studied and watched and you have no choice about it.
Perhaps over a certain size, companies should be somehow required to provide the public some amount of voting power on their board, absent a financial interest in the company’s results.
Choose not to do business with them. Advocate that others not do business with them. Encourage employees to leave or change things. Work with companies you can influence to avoid doing business with them. Create competition, whether as a business or as a new technology that obsoletes theirs. There are many, many things you can do that have far more likelihood of enacting meaningful change, and that have nothing to do with being a shareholder.
The likelihood of success in such methods depends heavily on the ability to get others to agree with you and take action.
This has no effect whatsoever. You can try but it won't matter. You make money for Facebook and Google even if you spend every waking hour trying not to do so. Your very existence - that you have opinions, ideas, that you go places, spend money, etc- is sufficient for these businesses to choose to do "business" with you without your knowledge. They'll take things you thought were yours and then use that to sell ads to other companies.
> Advocate that others not do business with them.
Again, this won't matter one bit. This kind of change takes decades to propagate throughout society, way slower than is necessary to avoid damage done.
> ...
> The likelihood of success in such methods depends heavily on the ability to get others to agree with you and take action.
So none of your ideas will work. The 'markets' are broken when looking at long-term financial gain through sustainable growth and consumer choice. Do not look to broken-since-inception-on-purpose "models" to dictate how you think a modern economy should function.
Your dismissal is not a counterargument. These approaches have worked in the past, multiple times, with many different companies, to enact change. They may or may not work every time. And on the flip side, in some cases not everyone will agree that they should work. Your position of what should happen to these companies is not necessarily a universal position.
Oh sorry, I didn't mean to dismiss. I was trying to say that if your conclusion/mechanism to enact change depends on the success of convincing individual people do take action, it is unlikely to succeed for these reasons:
- People converse slowly, especially on awkward topics like privacy. Opinions change slowly.
- Propaganda and willingness of huge corporations to try to alter public opinion is huge, growing and already very intense. There is little historical analogue for it because so much power is concentrated so tightly now, with tools that completely change the balance of power (like AI, big data analytics, etc).
> They may or may not work every time.
Right. But we only have 1 shot at this and it needs to work. Our systems have already failed and our society is suffering because of it. Our government is not stable, our emotions are proudly directly manipulated by corporations, and we are hurting because of it.
We must regulate because we cannot afford future losses of this magnitude.
And yet you're suggesting government regulation that moves more quickly, which implies that the government shouldn't wait that conversation and consensus to happen. (Leaving aside whether the government should do it even if people do support it, it certainly seems even worse to do it if there isn't such a consensus.)
> But we only have 1 shot at this and it needs to work.
You are presuming agreement with your premise. And you are furthermore presuming that the resulting regulation will work, and will not cause worse damage. (And where does "only have one shot at this" come from, here?)
"The government should exert control over one of the most popular communications mediums" is a terrifying proposition, with the potential to support a huge amount of damage. I don't think it's a given that that damage would be less than the problem it's trying to solve.
That's right. If the government waits for a consensus, it will never arrive. No action will be taken and society will crumble.
> (Leaving aside whether the government should do it even if people do support it, it certainly seems even worse to do it if there isn't such a consensus.)
Why does it seem worse? The entire premise of not having a full democracy is that sometimes the people are not capable of determining what will help the country prosper in 20-50 years. We elect a body of smart people to help set these courses. It seems obvious and built-in to the system that the government must occasionally pass unpopular legislation.
> You are presuming agreement with your premise.
This is all past-tense though. All of this has already happened, is fact now, and so I feel 100% comfortable stating things that agree with history, as fact that agrees with my points. We have already lost our democracy and a lack of regulation is very clearly at fault, both in electoral law and in tech regulation.
> And you are furthermore presuming that the resulting regulation will work, and will not cause worse damage
I will happily invite studies on this. But there is significant work already that shows that power corrupts, that greed has no end, that we live in a tragedy of the commons where unrestricted markets do not produce optimal outputs for the population.
> I don't think it's a given that that damage would be less than the problem it's trying to solve.
Given the absolutely immense damage that has already occurred, I disagree. I think it is a given that regulation would solve far more problems than it would 'cause'.
I didn't say "unanimous", I said "consensus".
> as fact that agrees with my points.
You are jumping from a set of events that took place to presuming what specific action should occur in response. The former are facts, the latter requires actual arguments and support.
> there is significant work already that shows that power corrupts
On that we agree. Which leads me to entirely different conclusions.
I don't especially want to pursue this further; I don't think any new arguments are likely to arise.