Unpopular Opinion
Welcome to the Unpopular Opinion community!
How voting works:
Vote the opposite of the norm.
If you agree that the opinion is unpopular give it an arrow up. If it's something that's widely accepted, give it an arrow down.
Guidelines:
Tag your post, if possible (not required)
- If your post is a "General" unpopular opinion, start the subject with [GENERAL].
- If it is a Lemmy-specific unpopular opinion, start it with [LEMMY].
Rules:
1. NO POLITICS
Politics is everywhere. Let's make this about [general] and [lemmy] - specific topics, and keep politics out of it.
2. Be civil.
Disagreements happen, but that doesn’t provide the right to personally attack others. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Please also refrain from gatekeeping others' opinions.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Shitposts and memes are allowed but...
Only until they prove to be a problem. They can and will be removed at moderator discretion.
5. No trolling.
This shouldn't need an explanation. If your post or comment is made just to get a rise with no real value, it will be removed. You do this too often, you will get a vacation to touch grass, away from this community for 1 or more days. Repeat offenses will result in a perma-ban.
6. Defend your opinion
This is a bit of a mix of rules 4 and 5 to help foster higher quality posts. You are expected to defend your unpopular opinion in the post body. We don't expect a whole manifesto (please, no manifestos), but you should at least provide some details as to why you hold the position you do.
Instance-wide rules always apply. https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/
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As one of the privacy zealots on the internet, I'd gladly pay for services if it avoids advertisements. But I should get a choice in who gets my information.
As things are now, I'm not in control of any of it unless I fight tooth and nail to retain it, and even then I can only limit what they have access to. Facebook tracks my browsing habits and builds an advertisement profile based on it even though I explicitly deleted my accounts almost 10 years ago.
And this information isn't just kept by Facebook. They have the right to sell it to anyone, including the government. Who needs a warrant when your local PD can just pay a data broker and get access to your GPS logs? After all, you consented to that website's EULA that said they can sell that data to any other entity.
People who don't care about data privacy don't understand how much you can learn about someone just from 'anonymized metadata'.
If it was a person wanting to know that much about you, you'd call the cops for stalking. But because it's a multimillion dollar company with a profit motive, it's suddenly okay?
That choice is called not using their service.
Exactly.
Some of us know.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_profile
Turns out, that isn't enough.
EDIT
See also: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-target-figured-out-a-teen-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-father-did/
Indirect information is not a choice we have offline, either.
So shadow profiles come from either
Seems like the problem here is information voluntarily given to someone & shared, ie, 2nd-hand information. Unless the information is sensitive (government ID, payment information, medical records, etc), can we reasonably expect society not to pick up information about us from our social network?
We can choose not to directly divulge our information, but even offline we never had serious expectations that others won't disclose nonsensitive information they know about us or seen us do. Unless the information is legally protected offline, we never had a choice to control that offline, so we're not owed that online, either.
That raises a fundamental question to me:
Are companies required to get permission to get data from people?
Because currently, they sure seem to think they need permission, except when it suits the company's interests (IE gathering data from people who explicitly reject their services and choose not to use them).
And while I understand that not everything is private, we have laws against gathering public data about people but only if you're just one person. Stalking is a crime, unless you're Facebook apparently.
That's not why. The reason is nothing you wrote about fits the legal definition of stalking. A typical legal definition
An element of the definition (circumstance) is sorely missing in your claims.
Stalking has less to do with information & more to do with (legal definition of) harassment. Simply gathering public data about someone isn't a crime. Expectations of privacy in public are nonexistent. Your premise is dubious.