The most important thing I've read lately: "Surveillance pricing"

[intrepidity]

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/05/your-price-named/#privacy-first-again

Please take the time to read the whole thing. The author (Cory Doctorow) does a masterful job of weaving this story together to deliver the (spoiler alert!) punchline excerpted below. It's hard to think of an issue that is more important or relevant today.

Some people are upset because they think Facebook made Grampy into a Qanon. Others, because they think Insta gave their kid anorexia. Some think Tiktok is brainwashing millennials into quoting Osama bin Laden. Some are upset because the cops use Google location data to round up Black Lives Matter protesters, or Jan 6 insurrectionists. Some are angry about deepfake porn. Some are angry because Black people are targeted with ads for overpriced loans or colleges.

And some people are angry because surveillance feeds surveillance pricing. The thing is, whatever else all these people are angry about, they're all angry about surveillance. Are you angry that ad-tech is stealing a 51% share of news revenue? You're actually angry about surveillance. Are you angry that "AI" is being used to automatically reject resumes on racial, age or gender grounds? You're actually angry about surveillance.

There's a very useful analogy here to the history of the ecology movement. As James Boyle has long said, before the term "ecology" came along, there were people who cared about a lot of issues that seemed unconnected. You care about owls, I care about the ozone layer. What's the connection between charismatic nocturnal avians and the gaseous composition of the upper atmosphere? The term ecology took a thousand issues and welded them together into one movement.

That's what's on the horizon for privacy. The US hasn't had a new federal consumer privacy law since 1988, when Congress acted to ban video-store clerks from telling the newspapers what VHS cassettes you were renting.

We are desperately overdue for a new consumer privacy law, but every time this comes up, the pro-surveillance coalition defeats the effort. but as people who care about conspiratorialism, kids' mental health, spying by foreign adversaries, phishing and fraud, and surveillance pricing all come together, they will be an unbeatable coalition.

HT to erronis who alerted me to this article
https://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=19016660

[LearnedHand]

1. Doctorow is amazing

He is a co-founder of Electronic Freedom Foundation and the creator of the "enshittification" concept. It's well worth subscribing to his listserv!.

[crud]

2. just went through app hell trying to order a sandwich

my family is having a little get together for my birthday and they sent me a link to order my sandwich. It was complicated and confusing and I have been working with computers since 1989. The apps seem to be designed mainly to collect your information and up-sell or corral you into making an order of their choice and not yours. It really is frustrating that this could be made a lot easier to navigate and may even be beneficial to the customer, but that isn't what they want. They want your money and data, the data being much more valuable than your money.

[erronis]

3. And facebook is the biggest enshittifier of all, with Xitter, etc. twitching right behind.

In the not-only app space, Google, Apple, Microsoft are the leaders of putting their data needs over your privacy and expectations.