Privacy – Dickens of a Blog

Remember when Snopes would dig up “No, Facebook ain’t going to charge you, silly!” debunks every few years? Presumably to fish ad clicks from that elderly aunt scared she’s going to lose access to her favorite local knitting group.

What Snopes failed to disclose, there, is that the call was coming from inside the house.

The new proposal would offer European users two choices: continue using free versions of Instagram and Facebook with personalized ads, or pay for ad-free subscriptions. The changes would not affect Meta app users in other countries, including the U.S.

Now, you could argue — if you are a sycophant who thinks giving billionaires your personal data is a fair deal just so you can continue to doom-scroll instead of taking up useful hobbies and getting more sleep — that giving up personal data for “advertisements” is easy. And free.

And you might say even, “Sure, they will sell it to law enforcement to carry out mass surveillance on an unprecedented scale, but the doom-scrolling, Doug. You want me to just like…live with myself?”

But in their desperate push to devour more data to justify eco-crashing data centers being fast-tracked around the world, Meta has starting telling the same content creators that justify the existence of their entire site that…well…

Got to love it when Meta tells its users that their data is worth €5.99 – €7.99 [I’ve seen two different values, quoted] per month. That much, huh?

Sounds like a great backbone for a really big lawsuit to recoup all the stolen value from content creator’s hard work currently being funneled into AI-training machines.

from the NPR article, Your data is everywhere. The government is buying it without a warrant:

A whole industry of data brokers buys up vast quantities of electronic information from cell phone apps and web browsers and sells it to advertisers who use that data to target ads. The same industry also sells that data, including bulk cell phone location data, to police departments and federal government agencies in ways that can reveal intimate details about Americans without a warrant.

Now, privacy advocates say that the best chance for Congress to close the well-known loophole around the Fourth Amendment that allows for that sort of governmental snooping is coming up in just a few weeks.

That’s when Congress is expected to take up reauthorization of what is known as Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which is set to expire on April 20.

After a 2015 change to the law, federal agencies are not supposed to collect data on U.S. citizens in bulk. But some found a workaround to requesting warrants by simply buying the data instead.

I’m actually neither shocked nor awed. Pikachu face can stay in the desk drawer. There are funnier uses for the meme. This is why I get so frustrated by conspiracy theorists. The real world changing conspiracies tend to happen in the open but are discredited by the same media and enterprises complicit in their existence [but not, you know, actually hidden].

Best bit is that AI-companies owned by the Algorithm Class is the real clear winner, here. They get paid to digest the human experience en masse to better train their LLMs by selling the data to entities that treat this data as different from protected data despite being the same data.

I have no precise takeaway here or anything to add besides to say that if our data is worth billions to someone, it should be worth [collectively] billions to us. The same way that if information wins war then information should be considered protected by the second amendment.

We’ve entered into a strange new horizon where companies revel in increasing the cost of doing business with them by, with very little choice, forcing a lot of us to give up vital aspects of our own liberty [namely the ownership of our own identity].

“If you are not paying for it, you are not the customer,” is dead, long live:

“You are now never the ONLY customer.“

The Algorithm Class demands a Commodity Class, and we be it.