Comment by ToucanLoucan
1 month ago
This turned into a hell of a rant, I apologize but I'm still kind of proud of it.
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We made surveillance capitalism the default method of financing every free-at-point-of-use service on mobile devices before we understood what that meant, and people now have zero perception of the worth of mobile-based software. People happily pay for desktop software but the decades of everything on a phone being free by default despite the economics of that making no sense have made it borderline impossible to sell software to people for their phones.
At the same time government has been completely asleep at the fucking wheel with regard to any regulation to protect consumers. Consumers shouldn't have to know the "tradeoffs" of free software, they shouldn't need to vet vendors of software on app stores for privacy policies. People should be protected by default. This "informed consumer" garbage is why we can't get anything done in a regulatory sense because these companies will make the argument that users consented when talking to any layperson user of MyFitnessPal will have you understand they really did not within 5 goddamn minutes.
Could people read terms of service? Yes. Do they? No, because people have shit to do and nobody aside of an activist or someone with an interest in it is going to read 110 pages of terms of service each from the 50 services they're currently using and it's unreasonable to suggest that they should, and that's JUST the reading, even if they read it, do they understand it? Because most people according to a stat I saw recently about the United States read at about a sixth grade level, which is going to be a struggle to get through any legal document. And 4% apparently are completely illiterate.
I don't mean to rant here but this pisses me off so much. Our entire society is constructed around a set of assumptions about people who are at least some level of educated, with decent english literacy, who have the time and energy to dedicate to managing these various things, and yeah, if you're that theoretical person, you can probably do quite well for yourself in the United States. But what if you aren't?
What if you're one of the millions who have to work three fucking jobs to survive and don't have time to read the terms of service for twitter, and just want to relax? What if you're illiterate? What if you're disabled in some way that impedes your ability to read, or your ability to understand what data harvesting is or means? Does your inability to meet the standard I've outlined above just mean you're fodder for the scummy business alliance, ready to be taken advantage of at every single turn by everyone who can, because it's more profitable that way even if it means you will be broke, exposed, and/or otherwise exploited at every single turn and probably have a pretty miserable life?
I am long tired of living in a society that is clearly, bluntly, at every turn designed for companies to live and thrive in and not people. I'm tired of people being hung out to dry because "freedom." Nobody needs or wants the freedom to be recklessly and hopelessly exploited to the ends of the goddamn earth, and I'm sick of pretending there's no way for us to know that difference.
/rant
> I don't mean to rant here but this pisses me off so much. Our entire society is constructed around a set of assumptions about people who are at least some level of educated, with decent english literacy, who have the time and energy to dedicate to managing these various things, and yeah, if you're that theoretical person, you can probably do quite well for yourself in the United States. But what if you aren't?
Not to be overly cynical, but I believe this is a feature, not a bug. I don't believe it's isolated to any one political ideology though. The system seems to rely on a perpetual underclass, and if you are slightly outside the norm or deficient, the system tends to use you as mulch for the uber wealthy's private jet funds.
I know it goes beyond cell phones, but as someone who agrees with you and has the means and know-how, I find opting out through personal choice impossible. If you don't carry a cell phone, how do your loved ones reach you in an emergency? etc., so the only real way to win is through regulation. And the laws and enforcement won't change anytime soon for the reasons you mention. Super frustrating.
One solution is dumb phones! It's an idea I've been toying with but haven't committed to yet.
I think it could work. You can call, text (probably hard, I remember those swipe-out keyboards) so you should be good in an emergency. But that's it - the rest you do on your desktop, where you have far greater control over the software you use and far less data available (no location, no photos, etc).
The trouble is there's some gaps. If you want decent pictures, you'll need a camera. If you want to do something simple like check your email, it's a whole thing.
I think the trouble spreads further than that. In so many cases mobile phones have become the defacto tool for people that it's functionally impossible to survive without them.
I recently graduated college and by my senior year a lot of college functionality was done over phones (and phones only, no desktop or browser options). This ranged from ordering food at an official campus store, to requesting an advisior meeting or basic administrative functionality (tracking financial aid, filing a course exemption request). Granted, for the last you still could do it via other methods like email or an in person visit, but it was heavily deincentivized. Even the LMS switched to something that was designed as mobile forward.
The other thing I've noticed is that some countries like India effectively run on the phone and a dumb phone doesn't cut it for any business deals or even purchases. It's all done on the phone. You use your phone to order groceries, pay for them, and then track the delivery.
I'm actually flying now and things like TSA digital ID and CBP's MPC make it such a massive QoL difference that I think you'd be hard pressed to find people who'd willing go back.
> asleep at the fucking wheel with regard to any regulation to protect consumers
cursing aside, you are doing them a favor by saying "they are asleep" .. it is not that simple; misaligned incentives for decision makers is a polite phrase
I mean, with regard to tech in specific I think it's a bit of both? Every time anything to do with technology hits the congress and ends up on C-SPAN it is always so fucking embarassing. It's like watching grandma and grandpa try and riddle out a new Smart TV's remote, except there's way more of them, and a subset of them are proud they don't understand a fucking thing about what they're talking about.
If you want to be in the U.S. diplomatic corps you have to pass the foreign service exam. The same requirements should apply to running for national office. That would at least set a literacy baseline. It'll never happen though.
Long and winding but you make cogent points. Shit pisses me off too. Already a couple 'but, but... they consented to this when they installed it!' comments here. Those types know not what kind of corporate misbehavior they enable, nay are complicit in.
To add to your points:
> Could people read terms of service…
Even if they do read licences and such, companies have a vested interest in making them as complicated, obtuse and self-serving that you have close to no recourse. It’s weasel-worded to the nth degree. They also change them largely at their leisure, and if the new terms are bad, again, there’s often very little you can do.
“If consumers don’t like it, they wouldn’t buy it” is the other lie that’s successfully kept itself alive. Consumers are kept time and spare-resource poor, and are largely presented with a predefined set of options to choose from that the companies at play feel like presenting us with. Rarely is there an _actual_ varied choice. Only the illusion. Combine that with scenarios in other industries like enterprise sales where the “customer” is an exec and the user just gets lumped with some garbage software.
It’s interesting that American neoliberalism perpetuates this thinking of staunch independence, an unrealistic notion that every man fully defends and stands for their own interests. It seems to espouse creating the terrifying Hobbesian “”natural state””… any notion of collective defense by default, as outlined here, is rejected as “idealistic socialism/paternal states”… even that phrase, “paternal”, being used as a pejorative says so much about the American psyche (I still blame Cold War-era anti-communist propaganda for lobotomizing America’s society thinking capabilities).
That’s really the key difference between US and European thinking on privacy. Europe was slow but always thought it was fucked up. Americans don’t seem to grasp why they should care or understand how perverse their blindsight is.
Good rant. The dominant global ideology is neoliberalism AKA free market economics, which has regulatory laxness as its bedrock. That's why fixing this basic shit is an uphill slog, rather than common sense.
Neoliberals look at GDP rising and have faith that the world is good. It's time to call these folks out for what they are: dogmatic zealots.
GDP is a crappy measure of a nation's wealth.
It's a passable measure of the financial class's wealth, which is not the same thing at all.
The use of GDP as the headline number in demagoguery is a psyop