It’s very convenient and easy to use and also ore polished even free. What if I sell all my privacy to them? What will happen at the end?
Depends on what you mean by “in the end”, you are not going to hell if that is what you are worried about.
You might not need or want privacy, so it might not make a difference for you.
Privacy is not only about YOU, it’s about how it affects us as a society, and the right to privacy helps protect the freedoms of everyone, not just you.
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At the end you are leaving yourself to the mercy of Big Tech that you “sell” out to. This is a question of trust. The problem is, if they have a lot on you, they control all this data and can do whatever they want with it, and they always have their interests in priority, not yours, and these interests are absolutely not guaranteed to always match yours.
Moreover, Big Tech already has extensive history of numerous mishandling of user’s data, which certainly doesn’t help in developing trust for them.
Even the wording that you use — “sell”. You do, consciously or not, understand, that there is a trade going on. You understand that you are the product. Doesn’t it bother you any bit?
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They (kind of) rot your brain. These services often come with algorithms that aren’t designed to maximise your time, but are instead designed to keep you using their service for as long as possible, in order to see more ads. This means that an algorithm smarter than basically every human is slowly reducing your attention span to maximise profit, and these losses spill into the real world.
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They weaken your capacity for free thought. These algorithms are designed to feed you content that will keep YOU happy, not content that you should be seeing/went onto the platform to see. This means that echo chambers end up being created, and you end up becoming more radicalised. Don’t try and deny this is happening by saying you’re more headstrong, because the algorithm is smarter than you. It can predict what you are thinking (to some degree) in real time and use that to select the perfect piece of content to show you that you will swallow without any second thought (and has done that before).
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You give up your rights. You might not have something to hide (or maybe you do) but using techniques like geofencing warrants, it’s entirely possible for police to suspect and target you for things you didn’t do. Usually, you would be protected against this because the police wouldn’t have that much data, but big tech just gives it away to law enforcement, making it way harder to just “stay out” of trouble. There’s also no guarantee that the footprint generated by these services isn’t abused by someone who could (in the future) want to hurt you, either for personal reasons or because of your race/identity (in areas with communal violence)
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We all make mistakes. I’m no longer a 14 year old, but I’ve expressed some pretty controversial (and not pleasant) views as a 14 year old. In a world where I used more mainstream big tech services, all of those opinions would be linked to my real name and face, which could be found by employers and other places performing background checks. Simple solution, right? Don’t post anything dumb? I was 14, and like most other teenagers, I said and did stupid shit that shouldn’t have to haunt me for the rest of my life. Sure, maybe you live in a free country where you’re not ashamed to have those views. However, political and social landscapes change all of the time, and what you may think to be a moderate and fair view today might have been clouded by racism/bigotry you didn’t see. Maybe the laws change regarding this stuff and you could get in trouble. Maybe you cracked a type of joke that won’t be acceptable in the future. Whatever it is, why expose yourself for no good reason?
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Big Tech services just suck ass in general. They’re full of ads, slow to load, hard to customise, and there’s usually no good reason to use them. Protonmail/disroot is just nicer than gmail regardless of the privacy benefits. Firefox with an adblocker just leads to a better browsing experience than chrome. Using newpipe (no ads!) is just more convenient than watching 2 stupid ads in a row for a 3 minute video. Linux distros (with GNOME) just look better than windows, while not coming with 300 bloat apps I’ll never use in my life. Plus, it’s easier to update and install things on.
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How is your social credit score?
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Is there anything in life you have to give them everything and keep giving for the rest of your… Ah yes a relationship. It’s a bad marriage where you know your getting cheated on. You could be getting everything you want free somewhere else. But this one won your heart because of refined looks and accessibility. So is everyone else getting it and the entire planet has intimate knowledge of your relationship. Well documented by your efforts.
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Why Do I Care So Much About Privacy? - YouTube - watch that for some consequences that have happened due to giving all of your data to Big Tech.
Also, since Big Tech shares your data with everyone: your data could be used to influence your credit score, health insurance rates, car insurance, heck even your college admissions. Could be used to influence your background checks for jobs.
Look at the social credit system that China has. In China, the government obtains data using cameras. In the US, the government obtains people’s data through Big Tech and PRISM programs.
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I just have one question for you:
Do you think it’s wise to have a permanent record of everything you ever looked at, visited, been to (physically), posted, shared, wrote, said, commented, reacted to, liked, who you spoke to, followed, unfollowed, bought, sold, downloaded, uploaded and all of your photos …?
Decide for yourself.
(note that I named just what FB is storing …)
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Something I’d like to add to your post for OP, consider who is viewing your permanent record. Advertisers? Data Brokers? Governments? Colleges? Employers? Banks/Loans? Insurance Agencies? Think about how all of these agencies can use your data against you, or to make your life miserable.
I don’t want an employer/college to decide my acceptance based on what goes on in my Gmail, or what I be doing on Youtube.
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If you ‘sell your privacy’ to them, than you give up control over how your data is used. Nobody can tell you how it may be used in the future, or all the ways it is being exploited right now, because once they’ve collected the data, we don’t have control over or insight into how it is used, and we have no gaurantees about the future. What we can know is some but not all of the ways that your personal data is currently being exploited.
- Influencing your behavior and manipulating you, two common examples:
- Targeted advertising: using knowledge about you, your psychology, and your behaviors, fears, hopes, self image, to get you to buy things you wouldn’t have otherwise.
- Political propaganda and micro-targeting. Same as targeted advertising except the goal is to influence your politics, voting patterns, likelihood of voting, etc. An example of this would be the Cambridge Analytica scandal of 2016.
- Feeding toxic algorithms, the more information you give about yourself and your behaviors to big tech (especially social media) companies, the more you help them to manipulate you. I don’t mean manipulate in some sinister, conspiratorial way, I mean social algorithms have one goal, to capture as much of your attention as possible for as long as possible, more often than not the way they keep that attention is manipulative and toxic and at odds with having a healthy life. Things that make you feel angry, righteous, superior, correct, victimized, or outraged keep our attention longer.
- skewing your awareness of reality one way that algorithms keep your attention is by reflecting back to you what you want to hear. An algorithm is generally indifferent to what is accurate or constructive or healthy. Algorithms will often just reflect back to you what they know or think you want to hear. This has the effect of creating an invisible bubble or echo chamber, in a way that can give people a really skewed image of reality, what’s widely believed, or what’s popular. If we are constantly fed news articles and social media content that reflects and reinforces our point of view, it skews our realities.
- Lack of privacy creates a chilling affect on freedom of expression and open dialogue. Many studies have shown that when people understand what they say or write is not private or is being recorded/monitored. Apart from the obvious personal benefits of freedom of expression, its something that is extremely important for society and for democracy.
- Training AI, etc
- Unintended consequences. If you put all of your eggs into a single big-tech basket, you are completely dependent on them and vulnerable to their decisions. Recall the guy who’s Google account was terminated and who was reported to the police for CSAM after he sent a medically relevant photo of his child to the child’s pediatrician. Police investigated, and not only found no wrongdoing but actually went as far as trying to help the guy regain access to his account and telling Google the guy was cleared of wrongdoing, Google inexplicably refused to reverse the ban even when the police got involved. This guys account had all his photos, emails, etc over more than a decade, he lost all of that after a single mistake by Google.
But the main point I want to reinforce, is that the above examples are not the point. Those are just a few examples of ways that we know with certainty our data and privacy is being exploited today but once you hand over control you have no control over how that data gets used in the future. Google’s (as an example) privacy policy is meant to be difficult to understand but one place where it is quite clear is that there are very few limitations on how they may use your data, its like a blank check.
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Barring the potential that this forun could be subject to Honey potting , as much as any forum… *Im no voltaire…i value and appreciate your advocacy for the cause of using big tech… if our favorite alphabet boys , out doing church planting, as they go around evangelizing, infiltrating mutinizing , and commandeering… and playing that wonderful technique of discredit dividing amongst forums what an old beautiful trick… Michael Brennan has a nice book on that in 2019 or 20…
As well as not just the China social credit score system … you know …big tech would never reverse engineered telemetry on your browser history to put child sexual abuse material CSAM, and/or other allibyinh factors to ensure “that they get the case for domestic terrorism” made “so that they can have that wonderful see I told you so effect”?
No. No… they would never do that just trust the government and trust Google and trust Microsoft and whatever you do you don’t look into the body of ownership of Facebook and Google and look at the 1930s and 40’s of europe…and wonder why that happened…nah…just trust trust trust… ya won’t go hell…Perhaps write a song about it, march to the beat of their drum… like treblinka’s nickname… “the road to heaven”
So there are no honeypotters here , tryin to go potty…they would never do that ? I mean you know everything’s okay… you can’t blame a blind man for not seein? … you simply can’t blame a blindee for when they walk out across the street and a car hits, ( and the hero guy who tried to save him either)? some people call that a useful idiot , some people call it an accident , some people call it manufactured planned crisis…etc…
let me go check my gmail and facebook o get my "endorphin likes " high… and look at the latest deep fake AI that is put another innocent soul on CSAM, for a blackmailed forced false confession… so I can give the world the courtesy of a workaround under the guise of “see i told you so… we’re (big bro) is keepin ya safe”
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