Businesses have been collecting, selling, and reusing personal data for decades; Google and Facebook only made the process more visible via better ad targeting
Google and Facebook are easy scapegoats, but companies have been collecting, selling, and reusing your personal data for decades … Tweets: @patrickmoorhead , @william_partin , @ibogost , @markbartholo , @mikarv , @iethics , @adriennelaf , @ibogost , and @antoniocasilli Tweets: Patrick Moorhead / @patrickmoorhead : Very good article on the history of consumer data collection. Not a Facebook apology piece, which is good, but outlines how other companies have been doing this for 50 years. http://twitter.com/... Will Partin / @william_partin : i like and agree with this piece, but there's something missing - what made certain data “personal” in the first place? data is made, not given, so you can't say “it's my data” the way you can say “it's my body.” http://twitter.com/... Ian Bogost / @ibogost : Everything you do has been recorded, munged, and spat back at you. It has been for a long time, and it's not going to stop. The age of privacy nihilism is here, and it's time to face the dark hollow of its pervasive void. http://www.theatlantic.com/... Mark Bartholomew / @markbartholo : A rollicking read: “the opponent in the data-privacy invasion is not a comic-book enemy of fixed form, one that can be cornered, compromised, and defeated. Instead it's a hazy murk, a chilling, Lovecraftian murmur that can't be seen, let alone touched, let alone vanquished.” http://twitter.com/... Michael Veale / @mikarv : Nope. While it's hard to stop data collection with certainty by yourself, we can (and in Europe especially, are) create a legal system which says what firms can and cannot do with data, and the prerequisites they need to ensure to process data from markets, trackers or sensors. http://twitter.com/... Internet Ethics / @iethics : Or it's time to treat indiscriminate data collection in the way we've treated other kinds of practices that led to pervasive harm? Regulation did manage to curb other “common business practices”—why not these? http://twitter.com/... Adrienne LaFrance / @adriennelaf : “Now a batch of computer dorks know everything you say, do, dream, and desire—even the stuff you're too ashamed to admit to yourself. Data brokering used to be a somewhat disgraceful, shadowy business. Now it's mainstream.” http://www.theatlantic.com/... Ian Bogost / @ibogost : “Processed foods look wholesome compared to your processed data, scattered to the winds of a thousand databases.” I wrote about the personal privacy wars, and how you lost them, and why Google and Facebook only scratch the surface of why. http://www.theatlantic.com/... Casilli / @antoniocasilli : Privacy Nihilism is such a powerful concept. I appreciate enormously @ibogost's analytical finesse and his argumentation skills. Yet, I don't share his negativity. Seen from Europe, the personal-data #privacy war is far from over, let alone lost. http://twitter.com/...