"They already have your data"

I think some people believe that this is a single event; like they get your email and that’s it. They don’t realize or care that it is a constant ongoing collection of any and all possible information that is held by a company whose motive is profit. These companies are associating ip addresses with devices and activities all the time. Turns out the older your data the less it is worth. Stop when you can- even if it’s a slow process. Privacy is a human right

For many people it's easier to not care... they don't want to bother with long term consequences of their behaviors.

I simply ask them if they would be OK with a company taking money out their bank account.

Your data is valuable. Why give it away for free?

They may already have your data today but as soon as you can cut off pipelines that data starts getting stale.

For anyone who seems uninterested, ask if they'd like to be arrested for murder simply because they biked past a place every day.

For anyone looking for great talking points about this issue, I highly recommend "Taking Control of Your Personal Data" by prof. Jennifer Golbeck, published by The Teaching Company, ISBN:978-1629978390, likely available at your local library as a DVD or streaming.

That's why you never say data. They've heard it all before. Call them a cuck. They're fucking your phone and you're left to watch, anti-libre software.

If it's done and dusted because they already have your data then why are they constantly trying to get more?

Why don't you send nudes to your ex? they've already seen you naked before

It’s like this. Your front door is left open and while, magically, no one can touch or take anything in your house, strangers are allowed to enter at will and eyeball everything, see all your bills, your kids stuff, your laundry, dirty and clean, etc. How would that ever be ok? And yet we say this is ok electronically every day.

But why should we do anything to help future generations not be victimized? /s

The biggest lie in internet is "I've Read and accept PP and TOS· and the biggest joke that all PP begins with "Your Privacy is very important for us"

I got into a long discussion with friends at work who were saying it’s silly to worry about protecting my SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBER and getting upset at companies for leaking it because “if it’s gonna get out it’s gonna.” Like…WHAT. How goddamn okay are you people with fighting to prove you’re you and not the person who stole your identity? The fuck. For real.

If they can send me over the second half of my thesis I would appreciate it enormously! 😀

The analytics tools that I am personally uncomfortable with involve dynamic, changing forms of data. I run GPSLogger on my phone (without a SIM card) and continuously log the GPS data to a text file. This data is then synced to my computer when WiFi is available. I can display this data on a map using gpx-viewer, and show very detailed tracking data of myself.

I have explored this map with some friends/family. They get to see a time-stamped movie of my life - my trips to work, to the shop, when I go out, if I go on a trip, etc. The data displayed in this manner is somewhat intimate, personal information. Anyone I have shown this to has said that they would not be so comfortable with such a map of their lives existing... Well, if they are carrying a active phone with a SIM card, it does.

To think that a company like Google can own such a map for a very large number of people makes me uncomfortable. On top of that, each of those map trajectories can be associated with an individual and their personality... They have the ability to pick out specific trajectories on the basis of the political ideologies or shopping behaviors of the personas behind them. This is extreme. I am of the opinion that the convenience afforded by a these technologies does not justify the allocation of that super-power to the companies that enable the technology.

A few years ago Facebook enabled a "Graph search" feature. This allowed users to create search queries such as"Friends of friends of X who like the page "X" and went to school near Z". That tool seemed super cool on the surface, but it quickly became obvious how something like that could be easily exploited. Later on in Snowden's book I learned about XKeyscore from the NSA, which is like an extra-powerful no-consent-needed graph search that is available to some people. This is not just targeted ads.

I guess that what I am trying to convey is... For me, making the privacy-conscious choice is about not contributing to the ecosystem of very concrete tools that give super-powers to groups of people that may not have my best interest in mind. In my mind it is something very tangible and concrete, and I find many of those convenience tradeoffs to be clearly worth it.

Calling defeat before even trying is not only not grounded by facts - it's playing right into their hands (their = data exchange companies and nodes in that network)

Yeh, it's not like virginity, the organisations chasing this data don't live entirely off of new additions to their databases, the data is valuable to them when it's a constant flow so if you are interested in guarding that data and stopping it from being shared too widely then there's never a point at which it's entirely too late. It is worth noting that it's near impossible to maintain the type of privacy you might have expected maybe in the 90s, early 2000s but, if you succeeded in reducing how much data you give away even to some limited extent then you are successfully starving those that seek that data of something valuable. Information about you that's years old is probably not worth very much. It all feeds in to the machinery of this surveillance economy so I'm sure it's useful to some extent, but that machinery seems to be endlessly thirsty so it obviously needs a continuous supply.

And furthermore - the companies in question are true megacorps, ie evey bit of additional power/money they get (and for the matter of this pov: you give them) goes to absolutely the shorties practices and abuses ever.

It's a moral thing - I protect my data for the same reason I recycle or consider my (indirect*) carbon footprint.

(*indirect bcs more like which companies or people I support)

With your data you support misinformation, deregulation lobbying, (any) government shitty things, ad culture, anything to protect the stock market as-is or their stock falls, dogshit approach to keeping their respective monology over their market, ... and their size and reach allows them to just be bigger than a lot of things like municipalities, even smol countries, the quid-pro-quo aint in the peoples favor.

I simplified example (bcs someone else already made it happen) - imagine, if Google autonomous cars go on sale, suddenly railways projects disappear around you.

a good point. while I appreciate all the usual parables to explain the issue, to me it's quite simple. namely, me and the evildoers have a fundamental disagreement on the concept of "whose shit is my shit?" the moment their actions indicate it's theirs, I am in active resistance mode.

The problem is not that the beastly corporations are doing something beastly again. The problem is that we allow these beastly corporations to exist.

Bots, bots everywhere

I feel like this still slightly misses the problem. I couldn't give less of a shit whether they do or don't make money from my data, I care that they are tracking so many things for that purpose that I can be identified and many lifestyle habits are visible, which is a problem when the data ends up with someone who wants to use it to spy on me. Which probably has never targeted me specifically, but my data is almost certainly in a tool capable of this. Because this happens frequently.

Of course this happens because they want to make money from it and sell it, but even if they only want it to idk customize my feed to make me like their website more and it never leaves their server, I'd still have to worry about data breaches. Or just someone else taking over and deciding that selling it is great, actually.

And even though I have decided that I personally don't really care enough to deal with the downsides for quality of life, that doesn't mean I don't want this to stop via legal means.

If people knew what the MS G. H. O. S. T. team has on them, everyone would be horrified. If you use a Windows PC, they have everything you do on it. Worse if you use Edge. I'm pretty sure we could scare the shit out of anyone if you could show them this data. Think about it, if you asked anyone you knew if you could look at their entire browsing history, they probably wouldn't let you. Then ask them if you could look at their entire browsing history that they thought has been deleted going back like a decade. That's the type of data this team has. You can't even find a whole lot about what the team does, but it's pretty insane.