Surveillance capitalism is a term that comes up...

Surveillance capitalism is a term that comes up a fair amount in the nonfiction reading that I do. It's often described as a company harvesting data about you and then selling it to the highest bidder. While there's a sliver of truth there, it's unfortunately far more complex, and it feels like this complexity is at the heart of why we feel so stuck in our current situation." "" "I'm currently reading Stolen Focus by Johann Hari, and he has a fantastic analogy for how these businesses build up profiles of users to target them with advertisements. He talks about a voodoo doll that is ever more realistic the more data you provide, and while I love the analogy conceptually, it has a crucial flaw." "" "In these systems, the voodoo doll representation is only understandable by a machine. There is no human-readable version of this, which is where the complexity comes in. While it's creepy to think of Facebook having a realistic avatar of you that it can test ads against, in reality, it's just a bunch of numbers and booleans in a massive dataset tied to your user ID, nothing more visual than that. " "" "With that in mind, solutions not often discussed become more evident, which are more realistic than suggesting Facebook change its entire business model from advertising to subscriptions. Limits on data acquisition and targeting specificity, combined with more user control over the data that's been collected, could have a significant impact. The great thing is there are signs that this kind of regulation is on the horizon, with GDPR in Europe a key example that, while not perfect, moves things in the right direction #bendevtip

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Original post on LinkedIn