- Joined
- Mar 3, 2018
- Messages
- 1,713
Scandals from social media companies and tech giants seem to make the headlines every day, and stories of data breaches or serious vulnerabilities follow right behind them. The publicity is prompting lots of talk about the value of privacy, but a recent article from NBC highlights a critical point in that argument: data is not the same thing as privacy. A smartphone that spies on its owner may represent a breach of privacy, for example, but Aza Raskin points out that tech company don't even need to cross that line to send creepy ads. He says "isn't it more creepy that they can predict what you're talking about without listening in? It's this little model of you. You are super predictable to these platforms. It’s about persuasion and prediction, not privacy." In other words, maybe consumers should be less worried about how tech companies are breaching their privacy, at instead take a closer look at just what predictive models and applications they're building with the mountain of data they already have.
"Privacy as we normally think of it doesn’t matter," said Aza Raskin, co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology. "What these companies are doing is building little models, little avatars, little voodoo dolls of you. Your doll sits in the cloud, and they'll throw 100,000 videos at it to see what's effective to get you to stick around, or what ad with what messaging is uniquely good at getting you to do something."
"Privacy as we normally think of it doesn’t matter," said Aza Raskin, co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology. "What these companies are doing is building little models, little avatars, little voodoo dolls of you. Your doll sits in the cloud, and they'll throw 100,000 videos at it to see what's effective to get you to stick around, or what ad with what messaging is uniquely good at getting you to do something."