Inspired by a question I saw a while back, is it possible to make my data/online presence useless/undesirable to companies to purchase?
Inspired by a question I saw a while back, is it possible to make my data/online presence useless/undesirable to companies to purchase?
In the 1960s Alka Seltzer was in poor shape financially, they came up with a new slogan “Plop Plop, Fizz Fizz” because although 1 tablet was generally considered to be a sufficient dose, 2 is more. Its more effective and it sells twice as many.
In the 1920sa meat packing company wanted to sell more bacon, so they hired Edward Bernays a marketing exec. He asked his agencies doctor if a heartier breakfast could make people healthier, when he said yes the asked him to write to 5000 other physicians 4500 of them agreed in principal that yes, a more substantial breakfast of which bacon could be a part could make people overall healthier. The marketing company leveraged peoples trust of doctors to pound them full of salt and saturated fat.
People all of a sudden love to act like manipulating people came along with Facebook and we were in some fantastic consumer utopia before. Nope. Its just more of the same shit, just new vectors.
Strawman. Where did I claim advertising wasn’t previously manipulative? I never made those claims. I’m concerned with the scale and effectiveness provided by these data pools. Don’t equate misleading marketing campaigns with the level of scale and effectiveness this offers. Again, see the Cambridge Analytica scandal for reference. It’s been proven that they can control a large demographic to sway an election. The means and effectiveness have never before been seen, and were made entirely possible by data collection. That’s the reason the data is so valuable, and that’s the reason so many resources are being poured into it. Eventually they will be able to use it to set opinion and control the majority of society.
I think we are talking about our “Data” very differently. When I say “fuck it, they can have mine” I mean the crumbs they can pick apart from someone who takes the most basic data privacy protections and who doesnt go on facebook filling out surveys and literally volunteering their information away. That demographic is their wet dream and they out number people who do understand this stuff by orders of magnitude. Im just not using TOR and HTML scraping to deny giving them so much as a single tracking cookie while hiding behind over 9000 proxies.
I use Firefox with most of the tracking protections turned on, I clear my cookies and cache. I dont fill out surveys or join mailing lists to get access to exclusive offers and I dont like or share every last thing I see on social media. But I still have facebook because I like marketplace and I still use google for searches because its handy and yeah I do turn on “private browsing” for porn.
I’m aware of what they are doing and can do with mass data collection, the real problem as I see it is that people like you and I who do understand are shockingly outnumbered by people who actively give them more than they could ever use, people who honestly beleive they couldnt be manipulated by what the algorithms feed them. Those people have been manipulated by basic psychology tricks since long before data collection and Analytica on social media.
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