> If they are criminal why would you use them?
People don’t give money to scammers because they know their scammers.
It’s the same with privacy issues, people who don’t know what’s happening can’t make informed choices.
People don’t give money to scammers because they know their scammers.
It’s the same with privacy issues, people who don’t know what’s happening can’t make informed choices.
it's really distasteful how privacy advocates always assume that everybody who doesn't feel the same way they do is uninformed. the average person has a basic understanding that companies keep track of them online. everybody who's spent more than five minutes online without an adblocker understands retargeting.
it's not that people don't understand, it's that they don't care. telling people they're not informed enough to make their own decisions isn't going to convince them to start caring about the issue you care about.
"Facebook listening to people" wouldn't be noteworthy if people weren't creeped out by it.
These consent banners are a false sense of privacy. People who “dont know” are most likely just going to give consent anyway. It’s the same thing as TOS consent.
Then you would only see those popups if either your browser or the website didn't support or wasn't sending those headers for whatever reason.
We have and had a standardized way of indicating consent. They just decided to ignore it.
They are also a set of dark patterns. They annoy you so you just click OK, they make it sound like if you want to opt out you're the unreasonable one, and they hide the options as best they can. Sometimes they hide them entirely.
If they weren't intent on tracking and reselling that data, they wouldn't need to ask. They don't need to have these dialogues, that is their choice.
Which aren't compliant with the GDPR, the regulation they're pretending to comply with. The problem is enforcement has been severely lacking and the regulators are useless at handling complaints even when you do waste hours submitting one.
Surely then, the average person is much more informed!
most people i've discussed the topic with misunderstand how much they're being tracked, but assume that they are being tracked more than they actually are, not less. and they're totally okay with that.
> and they're totally okay with that
No. In my experience they are very much not ok with it at all but have absolutely no idea what to do about it. I know what I'm doing with computers and I have difficulty figuring out all the different ways info can leak and how to plug those holes. In many cases you can't plug those holes without opting out of various services entirely. We badly need regulation preventing this stuff because in practice you can't vote with your feet or your wallet.
Even people like my parents - who have been using computers in some capacity since the late 90s but don’t work in anything related to computing - had no idea that Verizon was selling their browsing data despite being account holders who ‘agreed’ to the T&C and received e-mails warning them that it was going to start doing so.
The problem with pervasive user tracking and surveillance capitalism is that is impossible to be informed. No user has any idea what happens to their data once it gets collected by a 3rd party, and there is zero way for them to know who has it now, how accurate that data is, or how it will be leveraged against them.
Increasingly the data being taken from us in secret is used in far reaching ways. It's not just about what ad gets pushed at us, but it's how much we pay for things, how long you wait on hold, what a company will tell you their policies are, what jobs you are offered, etc.
While you might find it distasteful, I can tell you that you yourself don't understand what data has been collected about you, who has it now, or what impacts it will have on your life and your future. You can't make an informed choice about what services to use because you aren't even allowed to know what the costs are, or will be. Jjust like how nobody who uses ubereats had any idea that data was being secretly collected by tiktoc or what it will be used for.