How do you make illegal monitoring access to services? Because at the core this is what tracking is based on.
Even if you trickled tracking down to IP addresses and time of usage only you could still have a very useful database of users across services.
Oh and by the way, tracking was not invented by Internet companies, all payment systems and credit cards have been doing tracking for ages before that and selling their data to third parties.
Oh yeah, I strongly agree those need to be stopped to. We keep hand wringing over all these leaks and such and "oh gee how to we improve security?", when the clear solution is to not allow it in the first place. That way a leak doesn't become some lame civil matter, but "oh, you had this plainly-illegal-to-collect info? Looks like your business is over" (which would be a rare occurrence, if it were actually that risky to do it, since it'd be hard to keep such collection secret given how many people would be involved and so how many potential whistle blowers there would be, and how large a "paper" trail is necessarily involved in mass-scale data collection, making it extremely easy to investigate and prove)
You really don’t think companies would figure out a way around any such “illegality” or just use it anti competitively as is being done throughout the EU with its ham-handed policies?
I find this kind of defeatism entirely baffling. Regulating corporations is hard so we shouldn't try? This is a lot less complicated than many sorts of regulation we attempt. Just give up on all of it, it's pointless? Where's the bottom on this line of thought?
The same spirit was what kept slavery viable for so long. They said abolishing slavery wasn’t practical. Many had conflicting interests, as do many here.
There is nothing illegal about what is going on now, and nothing which should be illegal about what is going on. In this context, "regulating" simply means making a behavior we didn't see coming illegal.
It's a short-sighted, unimaginative, and blatantly violent way to solve a problem which stems entirely from the consumer public, not from big bad corporations. It will be used by major corps as an anti-competitive weapon against smaller up-start competition - an outcome we should expect from all such attempts at "regulating" the tech oligarchy.
> There is nothing illegal about what is going on now, and nothing which should be illegal about what is going on. In this context, "regulating" simply means making a behavior we didn't see coming illegal.
When we don't like they way corporate-driven markets (so... all of them, really) are developing we should attempt to change things until they develop a way we like, where "we" is any interest group. If we're not harnessing the activity of companies to the collective good, why let our democratic states charter them in the first place?
Your argument would be much better served if you didn't use words like disgusting and violent to describe the ideas(s) presented by the other poster. Frankly, it sounds like you're more interested in escalating this into an idealogical flame war than participating in a civilized discussion.
There's nothing inherently violent about a democratically elected government regulating the commercial activities of corporations according to the wishes of its people.
Companies are creations of the state. We should do with them what we think most valuable and likely to create the best environment. This may, and probably does, include permitting them a wide variety of liberties and privileges.
> > democratic states
> Speak for yourself buddy. I live in a Constitutional Republic, not a democracy.
FYI the colloquial usage of "democratic" or "democracy" is also the way actual political scientists use it when dealing in generalities of this sort, so splitting this straw is not some I'm-better-educated-on-this-than-you "gotcha", and signals the opposite of what you're intending.
When there are entities constantly spamming [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor's_New_Clothes
in a mad raving way on all channels, at full treble, exploiting privacy and advertising falshoods for the benefit of the few, and the bullshit jobs of the masses, while trashing the cultural, mental AND physical environment, then I'm all for denying them that possibilty.
They can fuck off and go die somewhere, i won't miss them.
> nothing which should be illegal about what is going on.
I think that collecting data about people without their informed consent should absolutely be illegal, for exactly the same reasons that it's illegal for companies to install surveillance equipment in your home without consent.
We are the ones that enable the tech oligarchy. We are, therefore, surrendering to them right now. My suggestion is to use our brains and not rely on the useless and frivolous "services" these tech oligarchy participants provide. We give them their power.
If one builds something better, people will use it.
The challenge is that it's actually quite hard to build something better. Centralization has huge advantages of common-goal, ability to curtail and exclude antagonistic actors, and decreased barriers to flow of resources.
I think the lack of alternatives to Facebook has a lot less to do with "evil" practices Facebook undertakes and a lot more to do with Facebook actually building a good tool that's easy to use for most people. Alternatives haven't hit that level of simplicity.
