Indeed. I take the same stance with regard to Facebook and others. If you don't want them to sell your data, stop willingly giving them your data.
> nobody owes you one, but these companies accrue the astronomical benefits of massive network effects and are changing the ecology of our society
I don't dispute the massive impact of social media on society, but ultimately that is the collective responsibility of society, not private platforms that arbitrarily become targets based on their popularity. Why aren't we trying to regulate myspace or livejournal? What is the arbitrary DAU metric that demands someone's website must be regulated? If the site suffers from PR or technical issues that drop the DAU numbers, do they automatically regain the ability to operate their site however they like? Society needs to grapple with the reality that these websites have no real power over us. The next big platform that people will complain is censoring them doesn't even exist yet.
"willingly" implies "willfully" and even "wittingly" and near-zero of the people Facebook tracks actually understand the depth of tracking or even a hint of it.
Facebook is abusively invasive, and no amount of appeals to user choice changes that. Victim-blaming is a real thing and a real problem.
> "willingly" implies "willfully" and even "wittingly" and near-zero of the people Facebook tracks actually understand the depth of tracking or even a hint of it.
They don't understand the full depth, but they know enough to understand that Facebook is violating their privacy in ways that they don't understand. They know that Facebook is unhealthy and insecure. Anyone with any political leaning has a lot to say about the ills of Facebook. People pretty much get the idea that Facebook is a bad actor.
> Facebook is abusively invasive, and no amount of appeals to user choice changes that
It's not an appeal to user choice, it's an appeal to basic property rights. If I buy a bunch of servers and throw them up on the internet I can do whatever I want with them, it's not my fault if you choose to access my servers, at my expense, and litter it with your own personal data. Of course Facebook is abusive, but there's literally zero reason you are obligated to use Facebook. ...it's an app, just uninstall it.
The same general sense of a problem can be said for people eating meat, driving cars, buying plastic disposables, sending kids to schools that focus on test-prep instead of life skills… we live in a society full of ills and many or most of the people have some vague sense of it.
Are people supposed to all become individual experts about the problems and learn the best ways to opt out of each and every aspect of unhealthy parts of our culture? Why people do what they do and how things work overall are much more complex than simple quips you're making. No comment the size of what we're typing can get at much of the complexity here.
Your whole "no obligation" argument is just so simplistic and dismissive. Facebook actively pushes people to use it using every method they can think of from subsidizing access fees in much of the world that is late to the internet to using every addictive psychological trick anyone has discovered.
This has nothing to do with property rights. That's just non sequitur. That argument is as reasonable as saying that Facebook is just a bunch of math, since that's all programs are, and then arguing something about how math can't hurt anyone or some similar nonsense.
Indeed. I take the same stance with regard to Facebook and others. If you don't want them to sell your data, stop willingly giving them your data.
> nobody owes you one, but these companies accrue the astronomical benefits of massive network effects and are changing the ecology of our society
I don't dispute the massive impact of social media on society, but ultimately that is the collective responsibility of society, not private platforms that arbitrarily become targets based on their popularity. Why aren't we trying to regulate myspace or livejournal? What is the arbitrary DAU metric that demands someone's website must be regulated? If the site suffers from PR or technical issues that drop the DAU numbers, do they automatically regain the ability to operate their site however they like? Society needs to grapple with the reality that these websites have no real power over us. The next big platform that people will complain is censoring them doesn't even exist yet.