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0 pointsRaidion4y ago0 comments

I'm undecided on this topic, but playing devil's advocate: Does the fact that this knowledge exists, and only in the hands of some of the largest (and most pervasive) tech companies in the world, make this information 'safer', or does it mean that it's a 'force multiplier' that increases the risk that this information will be used a) to enable anti-competitive behavior or b) be co-opted by authoritarian governments to suppress dissent.

I personally think that if I give this data to a company, and they keep it "safe" and only to support features that are beneficial to me, that's totally OK, but I wouldn't like companies reselling my mobility data to health insurers (without aggregation or cohorting) to give me a 100% customized insurance rate, regardless of how beneficial that would be.

Data that's used to distill people down to a number and value them precisely seems to have a potential to enforce systematic inequalities and further improve the lives of "haves" at the cost of "have nots".

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kbsspl4y ago

Safer in what sense ? What would be your take on government tolerance to the existence of such data ? Someone from the clandestine teams would always want to utilise it ? How well could the businesses resist.

Anti competitive behavior, I would think comes automatically with such massive centralisation. What's scary is the ability to mass incite riots, using knowledge of the most susceptible audience to fake news and pushing it out incendiary posts to exactly that audience. India has faced multiple such incidents already. Deliberate ? Maybe in the sense of affinity algorithms.

With the backdrop of the Stanford experiment, and a host of other biases giving almost tribal warrior behavior, should such affinity data be allowed for collection ?

My apologies if this sounds drastic, but data collection generates micro nukes, generated based on turning individuals into an array of microcrucibles.

9wzYQbTYsAIc4y ago

Or on the flip side of that question: is it safer in the hands of the user, to be shared as desired, by explicitly opting in, or would it be safer in the hands of a corporate entity?

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