Comment by like_any_other
1 day ago
> an advertising profile
It's going to be so easy to determine who you voted for, given a record of every TV show and news programme you've watched, to 90% accuracy. Or to determine if you'd be a "corporate culture fit" when you're next looking for a job. Or an apartment. Or to find whether anything matching the hash of some trade secret documents was displayed on your TV (or ever connected to it [1]) - the "advertising" firm will be forced to hand over documents on you through lawsuit discovery and the wonderful 3rd party doctrine.
Have you been watching media associated with "woke subversion"? "Islamic extremism"? "Far-right hate"? "Incitement to subversion of state power" [2]?
They're not building an advertising profile. They're building a profile. Ads are just the most common known use-case at the moment. But the profile will remain long after ads become the least of your concerns. Consider how such a profile would have been used during the cultural revolution.
If the government required you to submit a record of every book you read or own, people would rightly freak out. How is this any different?
[1] LG Smart TVs log USB filenames and viewing info to LG servers - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvgyvk2djk4o
The difference with the book example is that having to hand over a list of books is tangible whereas technological profiling is extremely subtle and abstract in comparison. As IT professionals it's of course easy to see the ways that this kind of stuff can be abused, whereas the probability that someone outside of the industry or otherwise not interested in computers to be "woke" enough about the digital panopticon is diminishingly rare.
And there's of course also Sinclair's law, so even people who should know better might be either willingly ignorant or just not care if it means that they can maintain their quality of life, moral bankruptcy be damned. Similar arguments can be raised for example with the anthropogenic climate catastrophe or other abhorrent phenomena where there's a big chasm in the knowledge between laymen vs experts.
It is exceedingly difficult to convince someone that something is a problem unless said problem is staring the person in the face.