I agree with him in principle but in practice this is simply not working. People at large have been getting better and better at outright ignoring every ad they see, the pervasiveness of ad-blocking technology has never been higher, it seems like every item from the ad company's lately is highlighting that viewership and engagement is plummeting at a record pace.
I'm not saying this isn't a fight we need to win, but it seems we're winning it pretty well. We still need to work on the privacy end of things (I think that will be coming in a big way fairly soon) but in terms of advertisements controlling people? With such a high amount of said people blocking and ignoring, I find it very hard to believe. Even if their targeting is better, the fact that people can so effectively ignore ads that are targeted to their exact behaviors makes it seem unlikely.
And I'm not confident users will win the ad blocking war. There are easy ways to permanently defeat ad blockers, but the industry hasn't embraced them yet because the current system works well enough. E.g., ad code can be served from the same server with no identifying CSS classes or ids. Or with WebAssembly the web could turn into black box binaries.
Further, there's fundamentally no way to defeat behavioral tracking, because it can be done when people merely use a website.
Additionally, I wouldn't say behavioral tracking is implicitly always nefarious. Speaking as an app developer the analytics we get from users is 100% anonymous and not used for anything more evil than just helping us design and improve software. Usage data like that is gold to us because most people don't leave/send feedback, especially the ones we really want to hear from, i.e. the ones who stopped using it.
I think we need more regulation in the web industry in terms of how we're allowed to collect data, how we must store it, and have serious penalties for those who break those laws.
But it's not about adverts controlling people, but the same infrastructure that serves adverts is also very effective for surveillance.
I remember awhile back when someone posted that piece about what it's like to be a Youtuber on here, the author specifically mentioned that doing any kind of sponsored content was like playing Russian roulette with her subscriber count/engagement.
Then there's the curation problem of sites like reddit and facebook. People curating information streams, or developing algorithms to curate information, think they're doing the right thing by eliminating bad content, but by doing so they introduce bias into the information stream, and that bias might be just as pernicious.
Yes, so what? This has been the nature of advertising since long before the internet was involved.
> Moglen proposed deploying "freedom boxes" at every street corner—cheap hardware running free software, deployed everywhere, that encrypt everything, anonymise everything, and blind the service providers to our activity.
b/c the last mile is the priciest part of a telco's network. Unless the telcos are forced to do it, it has zero odds of happening.
Also, let's not forget privacy as we know it is a distinctly modern idea. The "right to privacy" was coined with the advent of cameras in the 1890s:
https://medium.com/the-ferenstein-wire/the-birth-and-death-o...
The main new thing today is the ubiquity of the public sphere owing to IT. Inadvertently ending up on a picture in the late 19th century was a rather trivial intrusion of privacy; the same picture posted on FB today instantly makes it available to anyone with an internet connection. Not saying privacy has little to no merit, but nothing short of a full-blown societal rethink is going to make taking and sharing those pictures stop - a piece of hardware just won't help.
Well, yes. But that's not because the phenomenon is new, but because detailed personal logging is new. Privacy used to be a natural right: no one could possibly know what you did last summer unless you told them or they were there with you. It only started to be an issue when we started following people around and preserving that data.
Privacy never was a "natural" thing until the 19th century. Sex in private yes, there's plenty of evidence for that. But that's about it.
By the end of the 19th century, it became an issue - indeed a right - owing to people preserving data around because cameras became a thing.
And as pointed out in my post, the main novelty today is the ubiquitous access by _everyone_ - it's no longer local to your immediate circle of contacts, it's basically publicly available information.
The idea that privacy is something new is absolutely absurd and laughable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Window_tax
In earlier ages, there were few windows owing to architectural and building technique related constraints. If anything the window taxes reeked of "oh shoot, these guys are rich and can afford modern construction techniques." Your home with plenty of light flowing in is in fact quite modern.
Draught exclusion and insulation from convection.
> The machine does not treat us as human beings with minds and free will, Moglen continuted, but as "stimulus and response correlations" to be sorted and sold as "mineable human attention."
That is how people seem to act, if you weight by the volume of their speech on the internet. Since the 90's, the internet has gone from a place of intellectual wonder and discovery to a mob scene of the lowest common denominator, where "telling it like it is" is seen as the highest virtue. It's the realization of the metaphor about distributing a piano to every classroom without providing funds for instruction. ("Chopsticks culture.") Is this the end of the world? No. Human beings will create more culture, and it will eventually become as refined and rarefied as anything that came out of a 19th century salon or 15th century patronage.
The main new thing today is the ubiquity of the public sphere owing to IT. Inadvertently ending up on a picture in the late 19th century was a rather trivial intrusion of privacy; the same picture posted on FB today instantly makes it available to anyone with an internet connection.
It's a pity for common people that the depredations of corporations with DRM has demonized it. As horrible as it is when used by companies, it would be a tremendous boon if it could be used by individuals to protect themselves against companies. Just as secrecy of individual information is privacy, and good for individuals and society, and the opposite of that for companies (openness) is also good for society, so it is with cryptographically auditable trusted execution on the behalf of individuals vs. companies. There is an asymmetry that makes it horrible in one direction and great in another.
Well, no. Fences existed since caveman times.
^ mostly, yes, you can find exceptions even back in pre-history.
I think you are assuming the telcos will do it. Why not individuals? Why not small companies? Back in the 90s there were a ton of small ISPs?
It doesn't all have to be ComcastWarnerGoogleMegacorp...
Most of the people I know are growing more and more irritated by Facebook and other social media. Many have stopped using it and deleted their profiles. And these are not "tech" people but ordinary adults and teens.
I think people are quite perceptive when a service changes from being truly useful, as Facebook was in its early days, to being an intrusive pain in the ass as it is now. They may not all jump ship right away because people have different tolerances for this stuff. But from what I see, people are more aware of what's going on than Mr. Moglen is giving them credit for.
is there a reason to close the account, rather than just log off when you're not using it? I feel like AB+ and Ghostery do a fine job keeping the tracking down, and the service itself is pretty benign when used casually. Am I missing something?
Probably not. Treat it like LinkedIn: Log in on those occasional times you need to use it.
The hive creature(s) will be cool, though. Little gods.
Maybe, behind his proposed barricades, little enclaves of individuals will survive, for a while.
This is not a one-way street.
Heh
