Comment by g-b-r
2 years ago
If with that you mean that users should be aware of the risks ok, if that they should accept them as inevitable no.
What's funded by tracking as much as possible is the current perverse part of internet, it definitely wasn't always like that and doesn't need to be.
I hope that that perspective comes from someone that hasn't lived anything before Facebook.
I'm not saying things shouldn't change, just that the reality we live in right now is that using the internet means you are tracked. Of course we shouldn't just accept that and not push back, and of course we should build things like the internet we had before social media "became the internet".
Being aware of the tracking and risks means people can make efforts to reduce the tracking, but it's almost becoming impossible to use the internet if you don't AGREE to the tracking in many cases, such as websites that won't risk GDPR violations and chooses to deny access to people blocking cookies entirely.
People who remember the old internet want it back, people who grew up with social media don't know what they're missing, and there's not much we can do to convince people to care about changing the DNA of the internet so that it's no longer perversely gobbling up all data.
This requires legislation, and a court system that upholds the law.
In the US, the courts just decided there's no right to privacy (despite what the 4th amendment says) as part of rolling back Roe v. Wade.
So, the path forward is to vote in legislators that respect basic human rights, followed by court packing (or just impeaching the judges that have been publicly accepting bribes and failing to recuse themselves on cases where they have a clear conflict of interest).
Since the above is supported by way more than 50% of the US population, the main obstacles are gerrymandering and ending the currently common practice of appointing blatently corrupt judges to state supreme courts (and also restoring recently stripped powers to state governors, since they're elected via simple majority).
Exactly, and all of that is hard and slow. We live in the now, with the internet tracking our every move by current design. Pretending it isn't tracking us doesn't mean it actually isn't.
People are generally keeping themselves monitored as they use the internet. It's a panopticon with more steps. So it's no surprise governments are using the plaintext of anything they can find to track people.
And if people don't care about that because they are more focused on their pet political issue, it will never change, and silently get worse.