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The Move to Reclaim Privacy


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Silicon Valley’s social-media giants have remade the world as their walled garden.

Michael Brendan Dougherty

June 18, 2019

It at least can feel like you’re being spied on by Silicon Valley. Sometimes the ads that are served to us on our phones have a spooky quality that makes it seem like we are being tracked and even heard by advertisers, though the latter is hotly denied and may be infeasible. This weekend, my wife, the kids, and I spent time at my in-laws’ for Father’s Day celebrations. My children played on a little toy roller coaster for outdoors that their grandmother had bought for them. The next day, Amazon advertised the same product to us. We know Amazon can see the connection between my in-laws’ household and our own. It knows we have kids who are the right age to play. But was it actually serving us this ad based on a good guess from our location data and my in-laws’ purchase history that we might have enjoyed this toy?

Late on Sunday night, we were drinking a bottle of Argentine wine. For some reason, it made me think of an Australian wine, and I asked my wife if she would like to go back and live there as she did for just three months in 2006. Even though she lived then in the central business district of Sidney, she said she would prefer Melbourne. Within an hour, Facebook showed her a viral article about how Melbourne is the happiest city. Very likely it was a coincidence, but it didn’t feel that way.

(Snip)

Just as it would not console me that nuclear waste was deposited in the environment by a private firm, it is no consolation to me that Facebook is a privately held company. There are no real opt-outs. Facebook and Google’s snooping pixels operate across nearly all news sites, most shopping sites, and beyond. The companies are willing to copy or buy publicly available data on me even if I stopped using them, which is hard to do anyway, as these platforms are often insinuated into communities. My child’s kindergarten has a private Facebook group, and it is considered good manners to participate there.

We have been warned by Silicon Valley’s critics that if you aren’t paying for the product, you are the product. Fine. We aren’t paying money for the surveillance society that Silicon Valley has created, but what is the cost to our society at large?

 

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