Against the whole industry that is big data, AI etc.
I am appalled at how poor the data hygiene is where people have not shared any damn thing with AI.
And that is because people across the board in those industries started introducing AI agents, AI and sharing data with data miners without ever asking anyone (patients, students etc), but slowly “normalizing” the notion that if you use anything from email to a few Internet message boards privately, nothing is private.
Iow essentially any digital use at all is a free for all and expecting to get away with blaming the victim (ie the person whose data is mined).
I see this all the time. As if common expectations of decency were somehow people being “suckers” and not getting some 20-25 years ago that “data is oil”.
This is on companies like Google, Facebook, OpenAi etc and anyone who colluded with them in hospital and university administrations.
It is not the fault of people who never even used anything more than email or message boards. That was me 14 years ago and once I started noticing how ott this is, it was hard to go back to casual acceptance of it.
I had assumed that these things are of no interest to anyone. I get the basic model of the web but companies like DuckDuckGo manage without being intrusive and predatory. And some of these probably should only be state service or non-profit, as heretic as that might seem to any populace that doesn’t see itself as the property of those with any power or access or money
I never used social media and the only bot I have ever used is an obscure British bot.
This is not the way to rollout ubiquitous computing if that is the umbrella term. If data was oil, consider climate change here once the less meek citizenry or visitors find out and put it together. I myself have been angry about this increasing encroachment for 14 maybe 15 years now.
Appalachiablue is quite right about private equity. These economies are increasingly encroaching into spaces none of us ever thought to protect. They do it with the same muscular contempt for common sense morons of privacy and decency, for informed consent and any conception of IRB (in what is definitely a large scale human science experiment) that was not cobbled together in a back alley.
The push seems to be to legitimise the notion that it is never anyone’s job to make connections like many tech critics like Yasha Levine ot Ed Zitron do. And to never be anything but bone lazy and predatory and parasitic while blaming the stupidity of the humans who are increasingly carcasses as Shoshana Zuboff put it or mere waste products if nor “usable” and herdable.
The implicit message I see is that it is entirely up to the person existing in this shit milieu to not be a nuisance to these data miners, AI “researchers” and any shrinks or other professionals who jumped to exploit trends and fads in data mining and AI without asking what their own responsibilities are.
That is completely self-serving. It is not the fault of people who simply use the net or by now exist.
And the better educated or better informed who find out or know have an obligation to the broader public. And it’s a constant ransomware threat.
Strict data privacy protections were and remain the job of people higher up in these food chains nor patients, students or employees. YOYO has gone on for too long.
People accepted it with resignation because where that would end up going was less clear.
Now with physical AI and streams and street traffic manipulation all with no discussion of these things with the broader public, it has become too ott to accept. All with a slew of garbage cottage industries spawning from the original nuisance.
I don’t really understand many of those concepts much myself, but I do understand that it is exploitation. And that it is time or push back.
I don’t have use for the type of litigation that Ellen Pao was attempting, but I do for what lawyers like Alec Karakatsanis or Lina Khan would back.
This is about civil rights and women’s rights and labor and environmental protections and more than a joke notion of being a citizen who can participate as they choose to in what affects their own home or street.
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